Pressure to become a green business: new or old?

The pressure is not new, but increasing.

The conservation movement was said to get its start when Apollo 8 took a picture of the earth from outer space and it made it seem like the entire world was connected.

The conservation movement did get its start in the 1970s and that may have been one of the events that inspired it. Since then the pressure to go green has been increasing. With a change in the economy it has become more fashionable and more profitable to go green. For example the failing steel industry in Pittsburg was reborn when they started taking old steel and recycling it. Currently, it is cheaper to reuse the steel containers shipped to the US, inside of the US rather than send them back to China. One result of this is a new form of housing that uses those steel containers as its structure.

Recycling is hardly new, when I was a kid 4 decades ago I would go around construction sites collecting glass Coca Cola bottles to bring in to the store for the deposit; typically a nickel a bottle. The bottles were then returned to the Coca Cola bottler who cleaned them, refilled them and sold new soda in them.

This idea lost its popularity in the 1980s and 1990s and we had to reinvent the recycling process. Currently most Coca Cola is sold in plastic containers, containers that are cheaper than glass, don’t shatter as easily and, and meant to be disposable. Thus eliminating the need for a deposit, and increasing what ended up in our landfills; to stop that the plastic industry started recycling plastic. It has to be sorted out by type, but then it is possible to melt the old plastic down and recast it in any shape or form desired.

The 1970s say the creation of OPEC (an oil cartel) and the first energy crisis as that cartel increased the price of oil. There were gas shortages in the US and long lines at the gas pump. At one point we were only allowed to buy gas on a day determined by the last digit in our license plates and I can remember waiting in lines over a mile long to save a nickel a gallon on the price of gasoline.

Prices fell and the next time they rose Americans just accepted it, and we have continued to accept it. But, that first gasoline crisis set the stage for the demise of the standard 8 cylinder steel engine. The Japanese were the first to pioneer the use of aluminum engine blocks and they created cars with much better gas mileage. By doing this the Japanese car industry almost killed the American car industry and they got a permanent foothold in the US.

Since that time our gasoline has been cleaned up by removing the lead from it. Cars have been required to have catalytic converters to reduce the pollution produced by them and the race has been to improve the performance, reduce the weight and increase the gas mileage.

The introduction of catalytic converters reduced the amount of acid rain created and the smog in the cities. The most recent pollution control method has been to reduce the amount of sulfur in diesel so that diesel trucks won’t create so much pollution.

Electric cars have been around for a long time, but the battery technology was not good enough until recently to make electric cars practical. Even now though the battery weight is still too much and hybrids (which use an eclectic and gasoline engine) are not as efficient as we hoped they would be.

Our improvements in technology have made it easier to conserve and protect the environment and we have learned that they are far cheaper than the cost to repair or clean up the environment. For example our supply of oil is limited and most of our plastics are created out of oil so when we recycle plastic we are saving oil.

For over 3 decades the price that it costs to add solar energy to a residential home have been able to pay for themselves after five years, but it still requires a high initial investment. A few years ago Congress passed a law that electrical customers who add power to the electric grid must be paid for it by the electric companies, this has opened the door to more uses of solar energy in the home, but the solar cell is not very efficient. The latest technology used to create them is limited by the random way the cell components are laid down, scientist are working on creating nanotechnology that can lay the cell components down in a straight line thus increasing the efficiency of the solar cell from only 30% to 40% when it starts to become economical.