OFM Celebrates One-Year Anniversary of Solar Farm With Plans to Expand - Furniture manufacturer to house one of the largest renewable energy sites in North Carolina

http://www.ofminc.com/news.asp
 This month office and school furniture manufacturer, distributor and wholesaler OFM is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the 250-kilowatt solar farm it installed on the rooftop of its headquarters in Holly Springs, N.C. last August. The company has since been producing more energy than it uses.

“We've been very happy with the success of this initiative which has certified us as carbon neutral and a renewable energy facility,” said Abel Zalcberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of OFM. “We are now planning to install another 250-kilowatt solar farm on the rooftop of our headquarters to be completed by the end of the year making ours the largest in the state through the Progress Energy SunSense Commercial Solar PV program.”  

OFM’s solar farm at present consists of 1,042 solar panels generating 322,500 kilowatts of energy each year which is sold to Progress Energy as part of its SunSense Commercial Solar PV program. This is a new initiative inspired by the North Carolina General Assembly, which mandates Progress Energy obtain three percent of its power from renewable energy sources in 2012 and up to 12.5 percent by 2021.

To watch a video of OFM’s solar farm project that was completed last August, go to:  http://youtu.be/y85Czw1Yf-g
In a separate correspondence Abel Zalcberg notes the following-
- The total cost to install the Solar Farm was $1,480,000.

- Subsidies provided include a government grant of $420,000, 100% depreciation in the first year, 35% State Tax credits and $60,000 per year from Progress Energy for the purchase of the energy created.

- The company is not using the energy they create, it is more profitable to sell it back.

OFM, Inc. http://www.ofminc.com Press Release dated August  2, 2011

City street trees pay their way: Forest Service study finds Charleston gets good return on investment

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/aug/08/city-street-trees-pay-their-way/
The homeowners at Congress and Hagood streets didn't like the oak blocking their view of The Citadel's football stadium just down the street, so they had it cut down.

Now Tobin Stewart and Daniel Tollens have been ordered by a city court to pay $3,200 in restitution.

They're the latest to learn just how seriously the city of Charleston takes its street trees. And why not? A study by the U.S. Forest Service found that for every dollar the city spends maintaining its approximately 16,000 street trees -- trees along streets, in city parks and on other city lands -- it receives about $1.37 worth of benefits.

Trees cool buildings and sidewalks, reducing summer energy costs. They soak up stormwater, helping the city's occasionally inadequate drainage system. They remove carbon dioxide from the air. That's why no fewer than nine city employees have full-time jobs pruning, irrigating and monitoring these trees.

And while the city's urban forest is relatively young and healthy, its chief forester wants to see more diversity among its species. Live oaks, crape myrtles and controversial Sabal palms make up more than 70 percent of its trees.
...
The city of Charleston spends almost $1 million a year to tend its trees, which number about 45,000. About a third line the city's streets; the rest are found in public parks (West Ashley Park alone has about 2,000, while Hampton Park has about 1,000) and in city drainage easements and public buffer zones.

Danny Burbage started as the city's first "urban forester" in 1983, not long after local governments began responding to the Dutch elm disease, which decimated so many urban trees in the northeast.... Burbage's eight-member staff spends most of its time pruning. While trees in the woods can shed dead or dying limbs with no incident, this poses a danger when people or cars regularly pass underneath. Also, Burbage notes the pruning helps the trees stay healthier by ridding them of their struggling branches.  Unlike contractors working to prune trees for power companies, whose work often leaves unsightly notches, Burbage says when a city crew prunes a tree, it aims to do everything necessary for the health of the tree "and when they leave, it should look like they've never been there."

Of course, the tree that Burbage's department fusses over the most is the Angel Oak, the massive tree with its own park on Johns Island. Burbage inspects it monthly, and its network of lightning rods and support cables are adjusted once a year. Also, it gets an annual treatment of ground drenched insecticide to ward off pests, as well as an aerating treatment and a fresh 3-inch layer of mulch below its drip line to protect its roots from the thousands of visitors that frolic under its canopy. 

Charleston's street trees by typeOak 35%

Crape myrtle 22%
Palmetto 19%
...

How old are our trees? An ideal urban forest is made up of one-third young trees, a third maturing trees and a third large trees. Charleston's is a little out of balance, possibly because of Hurricane Hugo's toll in 1989.

Age/Size | In Charleston | Ideal
Young (less than 10 inches in diameter) | 56.1% | 33.3%
Maturing (11-36 inches) | 42.5% | 33.3%
Mature (more than 36 inches) | 1.4% | 33.3%

Wayward cars claim about four or five street trees a year, while lightening and strong winds can take others....
There's also a problem with Formosan termites, too.
...
The city's street trees have been the focus of two studies, paid in part with federal dollars.One, done in 2000, actually inventoried the number, size and type of city street trees. The second, done about five years ago, built on the first by calculating the costs and benefits of the city's known street trees.
...
The 2006 analysis -- done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Urban Forest Research -- puts a price on how much trees give back by providing shade (and lowering cooling bills), absorbing stormwater runoff and offering aesthetic benefits.

Dr. Greg McPherson, who was the center's director at the time, says, "Our research in Charleston has shown that the municipal street trees provide $717,000 in annual benefits, about $47 per tree, and only cost the city $530,000 per year to maintain. That is a huge return on your investment."

The city's trees provide intangible benefits, such as better-looking neighborhoods, stress reduction, reduced crime, and recreational opportunities, McPherson says. "If we could put a dollar value on these kinds of tree benefits, Charleston's return on investment would be a lot higher. Right now we can't, but we are working on it," he adds.
...
Ironically, Burbage's greatest worry these days is the same sort of concern that led to his job's creation a generation ago: that a Dutch elm-like disease will emerge and claim a huge number of trees here.
"We need to diversify," he says, "but because they're so iconic, it's hard to convince Charlestonians not to plant live oak trees."  But Burbage says too many live oaks will leave the city vulnerable to some future disease that attacks a single species.
...
The city plants about 250 more trees than it removes in a given year, and it prunes more than 1,700.
Still, Burbage estimates there's still room for about 10,000 more street trees. "If you drive down any street in Charleston, including the peninsula, you'll see gaps."
...
His department ultimately will use the $3,200 settlement from the illegally cut tree near the Citadel to plant more trees in that neighborhood.
Cost-benefit analysis
What it takes to maintain Charleston's street trees:
$35 — Approximate cost to maintain a street tree per year (pruning, planting, stump grinding, irrigation, administration, sidewalk and other infrastructure repairs, etc.)
$47 — Approximate value of a street tree, including:
$11 — value of its intercepting stormwater, helping the city comply with federal stormwater rules.
$8 — Value of energy saving (both electricity and natural gas) saved because of its shade.
$0.50— Value of carbon dioxide and other pollutants removed, released or avoided by trees.
$26 — Value of aesthetics, property value increase and other less tangible improvements.
$1.50 — Value of carbon dioxide sequestration and emission reductions, minus carbon dioxide released during decomposition.
... What they're worth: $42.5 million – Approximate cost of replacing Charleston's street trees (About $2,800 per tree).

By Robert Behre
The Post and Courier, Charleston SC http://www.postandcourier.com
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/aug/08/city-street-trees-pay-their-way/
August 8, 2011

A calibrated auction-conjoint valuation method: Valuing pork and eggs produced under differing animal welfare conditions

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069611000520
Abstract: This paper develops a valuation method which generates consistent and systematic estimates of people's preferences for complex multi-attribute goods by inextricably linking auction bids with conjoint ratings. The advantage of the valuation approach is that it permits the estimation of people's values for many potential goods, allows one to decompose people's values for a good into its sub-components, and permits the study of preference heterogeneity without distributional assumptions. We apply the method to an important and increasingly controversial topic: animal welfare. The method is used to determine people's preferences for eggs and pork produced from different production systems. Data from experiments conducted in three diverse U.S. locations (Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; and Wilmington, NC) indicates that people are, on average, willing to pay $0.95 more for a dozen eggs raised in an aviary, pasture system vs. a cage system, and are willing to pay $2.02 more for two-pounds of pork chops raised in a pasture system as opposed to a crate system.

by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, both of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Oklahoma State University, 411 Ag Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management via Elsevier Science Direct www.ScienceDirect.com
Volume 62, Issue 1; July, 2011; Pages 80-94
Keywords: Animal welfare; Auction; Conjoint; Discovered preference hypothesis; Willingness-to-pay

Superfund: Information on the Nature and Costs of Cleanup Activities at Three Landfills in the Gulf Coast Region

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11287r.pdf
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that one in four Americans lives within 3 miles of a contaminated site, many of which pose serious risks to human health and the environment. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) provided the federal government with authority to respond to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances and created a trust fund to provide for certain cleanup activities. Under CERCLA, EPA established the Superfund program to address the threats that contaminated sites pose. Although EPA has paid for the cleanup of many of these sites through the Superfund program, funding for these cleanups has diminished in recent years. In 2010, we reported that EPA’s estimated costs to clean up existing contaminated sites exceed the Superfund program’s current funding levels and that some sites have not received sufficient funding for cleanup to proceed in the most cost-efficient manner.  Additionally, in July 2009, we reported that EPA does not collect sufficient information on the cost of cleanup activities at Superfund sites and recommended, among other things, that EPA assess and improve the data it collects on the status and cost of cleanups.

EPA coordinates the cleanup of Superfund sites by identifying sites potentially requiring cleanup action and placing eligible sites on its National Priorities List (NPL). EPA may compel the parties responsible for contaminating these sites to clean them up, or the agency may, using resources from the trust fund established by CERCLA, conduct cleanups itself and seek reimbursement from responsible parties. In some cases, EPA may not be able to obtain reimbursement because the agency cannot identify a responsible party or the responsible party or parties may be insolvent or may no longer exist.

One category of contaminated sites—landfills and other waste disposal facilities—made up more than one-third of the 1,397 sites EPA placed on the NPL from 1983 through 2007, and EPA’s expenditures at these 511 sites totaled about $3.6 billion through fiscal year 2007.3 According to EPA, landfill sites on the NPL generally share similar characteristics and present similar threats to the environment. For example, these sites generally exhibit contamination in various media, such as soil, surface water, or groundwater, and many landfills at Superfund sites contain hazardous waste that may contaminate nearby soil or water.
Further, some have argued that landfills used for the disposal of debris created by disasters may also contain hazardous waste that could have long-term, negative environmental impacts. Consequently, concerns have been raised by various studies and environmental groups about the potential for such landfills to become Superfund sites. For instance, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a Louisiana emergency order authorized some potentially hazardous materials to be disposed of in landfills permitted to receive construction and demolition debris rather than in landfills with liners approved for such waste. Studies by a Louisiana State University research institute and an environmental engineering firm found that these categories of waste can introduce hazardous materials into landfills, increasing the likelihood of pollution.

In this context, you asked us to review issues related to the cost to clean up the Agriculture Street Landfill Superfund site, which received debris from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and other Superfund sites involving landfills in the Gulf Coast region where cleanup has been completed. Our objectives were to determine (1) what is known about the nature and costs of the cleanup activities at Superfund landfill sites and (2) the costs to clean up the Agriculture Street Landfill site and two additional selected Superfund landfill sites in the Gulf Coast region, and the key factors that influenced these costs.

To determine what is known about the nature and costs of the cleanup activities at Superfund landfill sites, we reviewed relevant statutes and EPA regulations, guidance, and studies. We also interviewed EPA officials and responsible parties’ representatives. To determine the costs to clean up the three Superfund landfill sites in the Gulf Coast region and the key factors that influenced these costs, we first obtained data from EPA’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System, and we also interviewed EPA officials to identify landfills (1) that are located within 10 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, (2) that have reached construction complete status or have been deleted from the NPL, and (3) for which cleanup cost data are available. In addition to the Agriculture Street Landfill in Louisiana, the Beulah and Taylor Road landfills in Florida met these criteria. Second, we obtained cleanup cost data from EPA and responsible parties and analyzed them to determine the total cleanup costs and the key factors that influenced those costs at each site. We also reviewed relevant documentation and interviewed EPA and responsible party officials to assess the reliability of the cleanup cost data for each site. We tried to obtain supporting explanations and documentation to verify these data but were unable to obtain complete information for all three sites. Consequently, we have varying confidence in the reliability of cost data from the three sites: while we believe that most of the data components are sufficiently reliable for the purposes of this report, we were unable to fully determine the reliability of some components of the Taylor Road Landfill cleanup cost data.

Nevertheless, because these are the only available data, we included them in our estimated cleanup costs at the site. Finally, we interviewed EPA officials and responsible parties’ representatives about the history, contamination, cleanup activities completed, and current status of each of the three landfills, and we visited each site.
...
While only limited cleanup cost data are available, we estimated that the costs to clean up three Superfund landfill sites in the Gulf Coast region—the Agriculture Street, Beulah, and Taylor Road landfill sites—ranged from about $13 million to about $55 million. This range is largely the result of differences among the sites in such factors as site geology and proximity to residential areas.
...
EPA spent about $55 million to clean up the Agriculture Street Landfill Superfund site in New Orleans, Louisiana. Because EPA found that extensive lead contamination in soil at the site posed an immediate risk to nearby residents, the agency completed most of its cleanup activities as removal actions. We estimated that these actions—which included removing contaminated playground equipment, excavating contaminated soil, placing a landfill cap, and installing clean soil—represented approximately 50 percent of EPA’s cleanup costs at the site. Available documentation shows that the remaining costs were related to litigation and community relations activities, among other things.
















We estimated that cleanup of the Beulah Landfill Superfund site near Pensacola, Florida, cost Escambia County—the responsible party for the site—about $12.5 million.13 The cleanup activities we identified included formally closing two landfill areas that lacked caps to prevent storm water from mingling with the landfill contents. According to Escambia County officials, a major component of the closure costs was the clay and synthetic material needed to adequately cap these landfill areas. Available county documents show that these cap materials cost approximately $4 million; the county spent the remaining $8.5 million on, among other things, management and oversight of the landfill closure as well as annual operations and maintenance activities.

U.S. Government Accountability Office www.GAO.gov

The Honorable James M. Inhofe, Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate

February 18, 2011