Cleaning Up the Car Wash

  • At the London Road Car Wash, the first blast of soapy water is captured in a pit under the floor and used again. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Many business leaders are taking a serious look at their environmental impact. Companies from Ikea to Home Depot are following a science-based approach to sustainability called the Natural Step. Stephanie Hemphill visited one small business that’s rethinking its operations:

Transcript

Many business leaders are taking a serious look at their environmental impact. Companies from Ikea to Home Depot are following a science-based approach to sustainability called the Natural Step. Stephanie Hemphill visited one small business that’s rethinking its operations:

You probably wouldn’t think a car wash would be the kind of place that pays attention to the environment. But this one is.

It’s trying to become more sustainable — putting back what it takes away.

“What we’d like to do is, we’d like to be a closed system, a closed loop.”

Frank Nicoletti is the manager of this car wash in Duluth Minnesota.

“That’s the goal of the whole Natural Step is to be closed loop, meaning nothing goes in or out, and you just recycle the whole time. Of course, how feasible it is we don’t know. ”

Nicoletti is trained as a biologist. He’s the kind of guy who spends a lot of time watching the hawks as they migrate across the western tip of Lake Superior. It’s right across the street from the car wash.

His concern about nature is bubbling over into his business.

When a local non-profit group brought in Natural Step experts, Nicoletti and a dozen other business people signed up to learn how ecosystems work, and how they could operate their businesses more sustainably. They started looking over their operations from top to bottom to see how they could make them more earth-friendly.

One big change they’ve made at the car wash is switching to a biodegradable detergent. That’s not required by law, but it’s one of the principles of the Natural Step program — to reduce the use of man-made toxic substances.

“Everything that’s on line here is non-persistent so it breaks down in the environment.”

As cars move through the wash, the first flush of soapy water is captured in a pit the below the floor, and re-used.

The rest of the waste water is treated at the local sewage treatment plant, so grease and oil and other pollutants aren’t going into Lake Superior. Around the country, most car washes send their waste water to treatment plants, and Frank Nicoletti says it’s better for lakes and streams when people use a car wash instead of doing it on the driveway at home.

Here, the used oil from the lube operation is another part of that closed loop.

“We have two special boilers in our basement that actually recycles the oil and heats part of the building as well as heating all of the hot water.”

And the company recycles the cans and bottles they haul out of the cars they wash. They use the money from the recycled trash to give the people who work here a free lunch once a month.

“The amount of trash that comes out of these vehicles is unbelievable. We’re actually putting less trash in the garbage can now that we’re recycling, which is a great thing, and we’re also helping our guys out by giving them lunch once a month on these recycled cans.”

That’s another part of the Natural Step. It says a sustainable business will make sure its employees can meet their needs. And since they started recycling the trash from the cars, a lot of the workers are recycling at home now too.

Frank Nicoletti says he’d like to make the business fit in with nature even more — by rebuilding the roof.

“I’d love to make butterfly garden up there, and that will actually clean the air. Because the butterfly migration and the dragonfly migration through the lakeshore here is just huge. I mean, there are days when the dragonflies are going by, you can see a million — of different species.”

When they’ve finished a year’s worth of training and work, the car wash and the other businesses trying out the Natural Step approach will share their experiences with others in the community.

Frank Nicoletti says it’ll be like a pebble dropped in a pond. There’s no telling how far the ripples will go.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Potato Forks Better Than Plastic?

  • Companies are making disposable utensils from things like corn, potatoes, and sugarcane (Photo by Jessi Ziegler)

Biodegradable silverware has
popped-up in local coffee shops, fast
food joints, and even the Olympics.
But how eco-friendly are biodegradable
utensils? Kyle Norris has this report:

Transcript

Biodegradable silverware has
popped-up in local coffee shops, fast
food joints, and even the Olympics.
But how eco-friendly are biodegradable
utensils? Kyle Norris has this report:

Companies are making disposable utensils from things like corn,
potatoes, and sugarcane. And many brands label their silverware as
biodegradable.

Sarah Burkhalter is a news producer with the environmental
journalism website, Grist.org. She says making silverware from
materials other than plastic is a step in the right direction.

“But I think that the encouragement should not be for people to feel
like they can use a fork for three minutes then toss it in the compost
and be done with it. I think the emphasis needs to be on reusing your
silverware. Whether that be metal or plastic or corn.”

Burkhalter says the other tricky part is that you need to read the
manufacturer’s instructions. She says many of these utensils are only
biodegradable in special composting facilities.

Which means the utensils will not biodegrade if you toss them into a
backyard composting bin.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

A Bloomin’ Solution for Cell Phone Waste?

  • Researcher Dr. Kerry Kirwan is experimenting with a cell phone case that will biodegrade. The case contains a flower seed. As the material breaks down, the seed is allowed to germinate and become a flower. (Photo courtesy of The University of Warwick)

Researchers in England have an idea for your old mobile
phones – bury them and grow a flower. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:

Transcript

Researchers in England have an idea for your old mobile phones – bury them and grow a
flower. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:


Most people have one – if not several – cell phones they’ve outgrown. Some keep them
around for no good reason, some just throw them away, and some people actually recycle
them.


Kerry Kirwan at the University of Warwick in England wants to take that idea further.
He’s developing a biodegradable cell phone case that could be buried and would grow
into a flower when you’re ready to upgrade your phone.


“We thought it’d be a rather unique way of getting people to take responsibility of the
disposal of their mobile phones, but also, a way for moving a lot of plastic waste from the
waste stream so it didn’t have to be dealt with.”


Kirwan says he’d like to have the product on the market in a few years. He says the
phone cases would contain a wide range of flower seeds, based on what would grow best
in your climate.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

Related Links

Artist Fishes for Inspiration

  • Return of the Sturgeon, by Ladislav Hanka.

The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many recreational fishermen, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:

Transcript

The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great
Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many
recreational fisherman, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In
cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of
life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:


Ladislav Hanka asks people to take a look at life from a different angle. He does this in his art,
and he does this in real life as I found out when I asked him how old he was when he started
drawing.


“I’ll show you. (footsteps) We’re going to make a little expedition under my kitchen table. So
get on your back, slide under the table with me here, and look up, and there you see some of the
first drawings I ever did. They’re nothing. They are just chicken scratch, but it’s kind of neat.”


Now that he’s an adult, the kitchen is the only room in his house in that isn’t an art studio.


Ladislav Hanka works where you’d expect the living room to be. But there’s no sofa here. Just
lots of counter space, storage drawers, and the press he uses to print his etchings. The corner
where he sketches is cluttered with cans of colored pencils, sheets of paper, and stuff you sure
won’t find at an art supply store.


“Now here is a vat of pickled fish.”


There’s trout, pickerel, a goldfish and other slimy brown creatures in a smelly preservative. He’ll
draw them and at times even dissect them. But when the lakes and streams aren’t frozen, he puts
the bucket away and heads outside for inspiration. He spends a lot of his time hanging out along
rivers fly fishing and sketching.


“I’ll sometimes put on waders, the fishing gear, and take a sketchbook out and just wade around up
to my chest in the water and sit in the lilies on the edge with a sketchbook.”


He uses the sketches as the basis for etchings. They’re inspired by what he observes outside and
from what he learned in school when he studied zoology. Ladislav Hanka’s etchings are very
detailed, but they’re not what you’d see if you just looked outside. There’s very little, if any color,
just warm tones of black ink on creamy paper. Some are landscapes with tangles of tree roots,
dirt, and rocks. Others are underground or underwater scenes with fish, birds, and bugs,
sometimes in various stages of decay.


“It’s a 14-by-18 plate size – it’s an etching. And there’s a moon, a full moon, shining in a very dark
background, very organic sorts of textures with a feeling of some sticks and roots and unclear
exactly what it is.”


At the bottom of the image lurking in the dark quiet shadows are fish called burbots.


“There’s a skeletal element to this burbot. The head is more defined than the rest of the body. And
it’s obviously moving among the sticks and up the light source and through various little bones
and skeletons. The intent is it is something inevitable, that it has to go up to the moon. And the
interesting thing with the burbots are that they do, indeed, spawn at night. They spawn in the
middle of winter. So there’s something I find very compelling about this drama, this ancient
drama, that keeps recurring and happening every year under the ice, in the cold, and under the
moonlit night. There’s a romance about it. I keep going back to spawning cycles.”


Watching salmon spawn has become his yearly ritual. Every fall he sits on the bank of a nearby
creek to watch Great Lakes salmon spawn. Salmon return to the place where they were born to
create the next generation in the moments before they die.


“It’s a forgotten little place that I think once used to be an industrial waste sight almost. A bunch
of 55 gallon drums and tires and poison ivy and all kinds of stuff. There are the salmon coming
up stream, among the logs, and the tires, and spawning. It’s this grotesque and beautiful things all
at once. It’s a spectacle, a ballet, death dancing lightly among them and picking over them, and
there they are, trying to spawn before they die, before the energy seeps out of their system.
Eternal cycles, I guess that’s what it’s about. We’re so used to thinking as in human terms, of a
linear way of thought – you evolve, society evolves, everything goes forward in one direction.
And yet the fact is every one of us lives life much more cyclically than we really admit to
ourselves, and we are disgustingly like our parents and like their parents, and like our great-
grandparents and you repeat the stupid things you can’t stomach in your parents, and there you are
repeating the same things years later. There’s something cyclical about it, but it is also beautiful.”


But why you keep coming back to fish?


“Why do I keep coming back to fish? Well, maybe there is something in all of us that wants to
migrate upstream and return to the source – the going home business, whatever home might ever
have been.”


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

Cash to Clean-Up Polluted Lake Sediments?

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would provide 250 million dollars to help clean up the bottom of the Great Lakes. A similar bill is currently working its way through the U.S. Senate. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has this report:

Transcript

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would
provide two hundred and fifty million dollars to help clean up the bottom
of the Great Lakes. A similar bill is currently working its way through
the U.S. Senate. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has
this report:


It takes a long time for water to find its way out of most of the Great
Lakes. For instance, Lake Superior can retain its water for more than 150
years. But that means that it also takes a long time for those lakes to get
rid of pollution. Representative Vern Ehlers of Michigan says that’s why the
government needs to step in and help…


“You know once a lake is contaminated, it’s contaminated for a very long
time. And if you’ve got non-biodegradable contaminants, you’ve got a major
problem.”


Ehlers was one of the sponsors of the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which just
passed the House. If passed into law, the Act could provide money to the
EPA to assist in the clean up of polluted sediments on the lake floors.
Some scientists have linked those sediments to a variety of health problems,
including birth defects.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.