We finally got our sign!  The 3400 block of West Clay Street is our official spot to keep litter free.  This is quite a challenge since everyone coming off the interstate onto this stretch apparently decides it’s the perfect place to throw their breakfast biscuit wrappers, plastic bags, styrofoam cups, bottles, cans, etc.  Richmond office employees please feel free to help keep this area clean whenever you’re out and about in the neighborhood.  If you’d like to be added to the volunteer roster to do a scheduled cleanup every few months, please let Carrie W. know.

This service will calculate the impact of your shipment (using the tracking number) and for just pennies per package will make an investment in renewable energy to offset that impact.

 http://www.greenshipping.com/

Here’s how it works:

Help support and promote recycling programs by learning about recycling opportunities in your community and committing to reduce your personal waste stream. Learn more and take the pledge at:

http://americarecyclesday.org/

Remember that many special recycling opportunities are available right here at Moseley, coordinated by your office’s Seeds of Green volunteers.  Here is a list of products that can be recycled at various offices:

• Plastic bags of any kind
• #5 plastics
• Used binders
• Tyvek envelopes
• Compact fluorescent bulbs
• Batteries
• Used writing instruments
• Chip bags and candy wrappers
• Used health and beauty products
• Used spread or yogurt tubs
• Small electronics and cell phones
• Plotter paper roll end caps

Not all items are accepted at every office, so if you have any questions about these special recycling programs or would like to volunteer to help manage the logistics of keeping these programs going, please ask your local Seeds of Green representative.  For unique items not listed here, remember that you can find recycling providers for all sorts of things at:

http://earth911.com/

Richmond office employees, check out the local celebration of America Recycles Day at the Keep Virginia Beautiful Event going on near Willow Lawn on 11/15 .  Services such as electronics recycling and document shredding will be available. 

http://www.keepvirginiabeautiful.org/blog/2011/11/02/kvb-hosts-richmond-recycles-day-nov-15th/

 lipstick cases, mascara tubes, eye shadow cases, shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, bronzer cases, foundation packaging, body wash containers, soap tubes, soap dispensers, lotion dispensers, saving foam tubes, powder cases, lotion bottles, chapstick tubes, lotion tubes, face soap dispensers, face soap tubes, face lotion bottles, face lotion jars, nail polish bottles, nail polish remover bottles, eyeliner cases, eyeliner pencils, eyeshadow tubes, concealer tubes, concealer sticks, lipliner pencils, hand lotion tubes, hair gel tubes, hair paste jars.

So don’t throw these items out.  Bring them in a plastic bag to Jay Yeman’s desk and help us reduce waste and earn money for charity.  Branch offices, have your Seeds of Green representative contact Jay if you would like to contribute.

Also, help support Terracycle’s mission by shopping for their unique products at http://www.terracycle.net/. 

 Preserve -  http://www.preserveproducts.com/products.html 

 I get their tooth brushes at Trader Joes, and I find it cool that I can mail them back in its postage paid package so they can recycle it.  The online price is comparable to in the store price.  I also have a colander from them that is very solid, smooth and easy to hold.

 These products are made in America, and are from recycled material.  The company has a gimme #5 recycling program, and other eco-friendly measures in place as well. 

Tony Burzese, Virginia Beach Office

Preserve Toothbrush Return Pouch

http://earth911.com/

Save yourself some hassle and a lot of paper by following these tips!

Here are some tips from the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/region1/communities/stop_spam.html) to significantly reduce the amount of direct mail you receive:

1. Register with the Mail Preference Service of the Direct Marketing Association, the largest supplier of mailing lists for commercial advertising, to remove your address from their list. Note that your registration is only valid for five years.
2. Stop credit card offers, one of the largest sources of direct mail, by making one phone call. Consumer credit reporting agencies like Trans Union, Experian and Equifax, maintain mailing lists that are often used by credit card and insurance companies to send out direct mail. Call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (1-888-567-8688) to permanently remove your name and address from their lists.
3. Every time you order something over the phone, internet, or through the mail, your name may be sold. To prevent this from happening, call or write these businesses and organizations and request a privacy designation on your name, address and phone number. Tell them that under no circumstances is your personal information to be sold. It may be helpful to make a list of all businesses that you interact with. Here are some ideas to get you started:
• Banks
• Credit card companies
• Mortgage companies
• Insurance agencies
• Magazines
• Organizations
• Frequent flyer programs
• Universities and schools that you or your children attend(ed)
• Cable companies
• Phone companies
• Long distance carriers
• Mail order companies you have done business with (If you still want to receive some catalogs from these companies–just not one every week–you can call and ask them to put you on a different mailing cycle).
4. Whenever you subscribe to a magazine, become a member of a group, apply for a credit card, etc., be sure to state that you do not want your name, address, or phone number released to anyone else for marketing, mailing, or promotional purposes.
5. Get an unpublished phone number, an unlisted number, or list your phone number without an associated address. Many companies obtain and distribute your name, phone number, and address from phone listings. Unpublished numbers cannot be sold, while unlisted numbers are often sold to other companies on a CD-ROM. If you want to remain listed, request that your name be listed without your address (most phone companies do this without charge) or have your listing published under a pseudonym.
6. Whenever you move, do not fill out the U.S. Post Office’s permanent change of address (COA) form. Instead indicate that you are temporarily changing your address, which will allow you to have your mail forwarded for up to 10 months. Permanent COA information is shared with third parties, while temporary address information is not.
7. Do not send in product warranty cards unless absolutely necessary. They usually are not required. Many of these cards are filled with questions about your personal interests and preferences and are usually sent to a different address than the company you purchased the product from. Check product registrations to see if you can opt not to receive any further mailings .
8. Contests where you fill in a little entry blank are just another way companies get your name and address. If you fill one out at a football game, for example, expect to get a catalog of football merchandise within a few months. Avoid these if you don’t want the mail.

In recent news, Verizon is stopping automatic delivery of the white pages.  However if you want to manage yellow pages and other local directory deliveries, you can register on this website and your preferences will be communicated to the appropriate companies:  http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/

Don’t have time to take all of these steps?  This service will work on reducing your direct mail for a fee:   http://www.41pounds.org/

Good luck trimming down your mailbox!

This year Earth Day fell on a Friday, and employees were reminded to shut down computers, task lamps, printers, and other desk gadgets before leaving for the weekend.  On average in 2011, we spend $43 each weekend day on plug loads in our headquarters building.  However over the April 23-24 weekend, we spent just $34 per day.  Therefore if everyone made that same effort every weekend, over the course of a year we could save about $900.  This experiment has been conducted for the past three years, and each year we calculate that about $3,000 could be saved annually if everyone made the extra shutdown effort every night.

The IT Department has made it easy to power up your computer remotely in case you do need to log in at night/over the weekend, and also to automatically turn on your computer every morning so that the startup process is complete by the time you get in to the office.   Please help save us energy and  money by shutting down every night. 

So what is going on in the clean energy market you wonder? Well one way to track the performance and the sentiment is to look at the clean energy ETF’s.  For those of you lacking the jargon, ETF stands for exchange traded funds, which is really a bundle of investments in stocks/bonds/etc. that has a particular defined investment character and differs in some ways from a mutual fund.  Usually it is less or not at all actively managed, and the fees are generally lower.  In the case of clean energy, they can be broken down into a few major categories:  Broad Clean Energy ETS’s, Wind Power, Solar Power, and Nuclear Power, and others too unique to mention, such as the clean transportation ETF for example.  The one we are focusing on here blends its energy modalities and is considered a Broad Clean energy ETF.  Later we will look at some others.

The Wilderhill Clean Energy Index is just an index, one of the earliest, going by the call letters ECO (cute).  Its ETF equivalent is PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy Portfolio that goes by the call letters PBW. According to the Wildershares website, “We apply qualitative analysis at the Quarterly rebalancing to determine Index securities, sectors and weightings.  Criteria include importance of the stock and sector to clean energy, relevance to climate change, pollution prevention, technological significance, intellectual property rights, salience to preserving biodiversity or ecological integrity or other non-financial criteria.”  The website continues, “We weight the Index sectors according to importance and technological relevance, not views about individual stocks…our emphasis is on new solutions that make ecological and economic sense.”  Blah, blah, blah, despite all egghead technicalities mixed with idealism, the WilderHill Clean Energy Index can provide a window into the movement and market sentiment behind clean energy.

Robert Wilder first developed his index as a test of the indexibility of clean energy in the late 1990’s starting out with an index based on hydrogen technologies.  Well you know what they say about hydrogen: “It has a great future and always will.”  And since I remember the discussions about hydrogen in college which was a couple years ago or more, much more, well that proverb seems to have some validity.   The focus was considerably broadened to include wind and solar, not only manufacturers but also utilities that have strengths in clean energy and other entities in the energy technology, production, and distribution pipeline.  As the cost of drilling ever deeper for increasingly sour crude rises, the costs for harvesting clean energies and improving efficiency falls with the cost of technology.  By sector PBW is invested almost half into technology, one fourth in industrials, and less than 10% each in basic materials, consumer cyclical, and utilities.

The fund began February 2005 and 90% of the funds resources are invested in common stocks.  The results over the full term are discouraging, with the fund down 7.5% since inception, but get this, in the optimism of 2007 it was up 58.35% then in the despair of 2008 it was down 70.04%, yipes!  Then in 2009 it bounced back 28.94%, and in 2010 it was down again 5.25%.  Now that we are seeing regular gas locally reaching for $4 a gallon we may also see an uptick in the value of the underlying securities and thus an increase in the ETF PBW itself like we did a few years ago.  Some previously marginal projects will get funded, creating increased demand along the technology pipeline.  In the first quarter this year PBW was up 3.2% but if rising gas prices stall the larger economy well, you know.  Hold on folks, it looks like a wild ride!