My day job is helping my buddy set up an ethanol plant. Recently I’ve been dealing with the environmental permits. Ethanol plants, like everything else humans do, pollute, and to set up a plant you have to obtain permits that specify various things that you will or will not do. These permits protect your company from environmental lawsuits regarding your pollution, but only so long as you adhere to the agreement.

From many months spent studying this and filling out these forms, perhaps I can explain Jude’s questions about the use of water in street cleaning. Automobiles are amazingly dirty things and drop off all kinds of heavy metals and stuff from friction and tires etc. The street cleaners help the environment by picking some of this debris and dust from the gutters before it becomes a more general part of the environment - air and water pollution. The debris collected goes to a landfill. They are your buddy, they are not wasting water, I think.

Finally, before I forget, to put anger in perspective, I should say that you really aren’t much of a hot head until, as a result of it, you’ve found yourself standing in a holding pen in jail (which you will find to be mostly populated by blue collar workers). At our company a guy threw a chair at the foreman during lunch. The foreman knocked him to the ground and pinned him until he calmed down. That was not enough to be fired. He was fired because a half hour later he wanted a rematch. Nobody went to jail for this.

On the coffee cup issue: Be sure that I will be watching, and testing the results.

Ha Ha! Yvette: No it was not war on just one coffee shop. It was war on about five or six major cafes on campus, a bunch of restaurants/cafeterias, and coffee/confectionary carts. Ohhhh, yes…. Quite a substantial army they can muster there.

-cvj

I last visited Los Angeles in 1971. My cousins were required to remove their vehicles from the street each week so a street washer could clean their residential neighborhood. All I could think of us the water waste. I wonder if they still clean the streets that way. L.A. and Phoenix were the most artificial places I’ve visited–both having been built on borrowed water.

this is indeed a good reaction. however, it seems to me a big part of their replies is just fog making and looks like a copy-and-paste standard writing that doesn’t have much to do with your actual inquiry? I hope you follow up on this because I have made the experience that you get an immediate and very positive reply saying ‘that’s to great you care’, and then nothing happens and everybody hopes you’ll forget about it.

To add my two European cents: in Germany it’s quite common you don’t get paper cups but you’ll get a cup (often with a logo of the university) for an additional dollar. If you bring it back, you get the dollar back. It works pretty good. At first I was suspecting too many people would take the cups away for a dollar, but very little actually do. Most of the people on campus are regulars, and the cups basically aren’t worth it (that is to say, PI cups are nicer).

Best,

B.

Really though, good job. It’s always heartening to see that things can be accomplished when one sticks to their guns.

-cvj