In yet another sustainable step forward for NASCAR, the racing organization has just gained the first entry in its new “green” sponsor category. Liberty Tire Recycling has been tapped as the official tire recycler of the MAKE #50 Motorsports Chevy Silverado race team, in the Camping World Truck Series.

The high visibility green sponsorships are just the latest forward-thinking move for NASCAR, which is emerging as an important force in the mainstreaming of recycling, conservation, toxic chemicals reduction, renewable energy, and other key sustainability concepts.

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India’s first project aimed at recovery of barren land and its restoration through afforestation has been approved under the Clean Development Mechanism in the state of Haryana. The project will cover eight villages in the Sirsa district and will benefit hundreds of farmers.

The Forest department of the state government has entered into an official contract with the farmers of these villages wherein they will be paid through the Clean Development Mechanism for plantation of plants such as Jund, Eucalyptus, Sheesham, Beri and Dates. Farmers have already planted these and several other cash crops over a 300 hectare land.

The Forest department had provided extensive benefits to the farmers when the project was launched. The farmers are planting cash crops as well as orchards on wastelands which have not been cultivated since 1990. Incentives such as 100 percent subsidy on water tanks for irrigation and other farming equipment had been provided to farmers. The farmers are allowed to keep all the proceeds earned by selling the harvests.

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Two heavy-duty manufacturing powerhouses, Peterbilt and Eaton Corporation, have teamed up to give garbage trucks a fuel saving green twist.  This spring, Peterbilt announced its new Model 320 Hybrid which uses Eaton’s new hydraulic hybrid system to achieve up to 30% in fuel conservation, along with a consequent reduction in emissions and greatly reduced maintenance costs, too.  Now four of the sustainable behemoths are set for their first run in Michigan, in the green-minded city of Anne Arbor.

If garbage trucks seem unlikely candidates for a green makeover, consider that Caterpillar recently launched a fuel-saving diesel electric hybrid tractor, and the U.S. Army is developing fuel cells to reduce the use of petroleum fuel in its Abrams tanks. Just goes to show that significant opportunities to cut down on fossil fuels – and money – can pop up just about anywhere, and we’ve only just begun to tap the potential.

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It gets mom and pop out of the oil drilling business, and that is a good thing.

While undeveloped countries might have kids slaving over the kitchen fire melting electronics to mine them for lead – in a supposedly developed nation like this, competence should be a sine qua non in the drilling business, for all of our sakes. It is amazing that just about anyone is allowed to drill – even if they have absolutely no way to clean up a mess like just happened in the Gulf.

While it is no climate – clean energy bill as hoped, the spill bill is not bad for a straight environmental pollution prevention bill that cracks down on the lax oil and gas drilling practices that led to the catastrophic spill in the Gulf, and ongoing drilling disasters on land.

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While the fossil fuel industry continues to wreak havoc over the American landscape in pursuit of coal, oil, and natural gas, U.S. utilities have started to make a collective shift toward safer and more secure sources of energy.  Last spring, a utilities industry research group partnered up with the new Solar Technology Acceleration Center to push solar energy development forward. This week, the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) sent a group of top utility executives on a solar tour of  Japan in order to learn more about integrating solar energy into grids and communities.

You can get a blow-by-blow account of the solar tour by following @JuliaHamm on Twitter, so let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on SEPA, which is a non-profit that works to promote solar energy to the utility industry.  Naturally its board includes solar industry companies such as Kyocera, but it is also top heavy with utility industry executives.  It provides an interesting snapshot of how far utilities have come, and how far they have to go.

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The University of Florida has come up with a new tool for property owners to make significant strides in water conservation: the peanut, or at least, a distant cousin called rhizoma perennial peanut. The colorful groundcover does not bear edible goobers, but it does have lush foliage and light orange flowers.  Looks aside, it can thrive on half the water that turfgrass uses.

Perennial peanut groundcover offers another advantage over turfgrass, too.  Being a legume, it makes its own nitrogen and therefore requires very little fertilizer.  Although excess nitrogen is typically thought of as a water quality issue in commercial agriculture, according to the U.S. EPA homeowners tend about 40 million acres of turfgrass, making it the fifth largest crop in the country.

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The U.S. Army has just flipped the switch on its first wind power project, a single wind turbine at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah.  That might sound like small potatoes but it’s a giant step forward for the U.S. military, which has been cautious about wind power primarily due to concerns over radar interference.  The installation took more than five years to come to fruition, starting with an approval process in 2005.

Though the military has been reticent about wind power, it has been surging into a clean energy future on other fronts.  For the past several years it has been moving rapidly to convert its operations to other forms of renewable energy such as solar and geothermal.  That comes along with an aggressive push for energy conservation and biofuels, too, as well reducing the use of toxic chemicals and preserving habitats on Department of Defense lands.

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The emerging green economy has stimulated the growth of green jobs all over the map, and Ellwood City provides a great example of the potential that sustainable energy has for revitalizing towns across the U.S.  Located in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, Ellwood City is the home of LED specialist Appalachian Lighting Systems, Inc., which has just been selected to provide LED units for a parking deck and pick-up/dropoff area at the Pittsburgh International Airport.  The retrofit is believed to be the largest of its kind in the U.S.

Ellwood City had its boom years in the 1940’s with a population that topped 12,000. Employment centered around the steel industry, stone quarries, and coal mining.  As those jobs evaporated the city lost almost 4,000 souls by the last census in 2000.  Companies like Appalachian Lighting Systems could turn that around with new green jobs.  The company came on the scene in 2007, practically making its high efficiency LED units by hand in an Ellwood City warehouse, and it already anticipates the potential for expanding to a workforce of 400.

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As part of the U.S. military’s broad adoption of sustainability principles, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been undergoing a historic mission shift.  In the past, the Corps performed remediation as a sidebar to other projects.  Now it is now focusing its considerable resources on environmental restoration for its own sake, including an all-out push to save the marsh islands of Jamaica Bay in New York City from disappearing.

The deployment of military resources for proactive environmental restoration has already enabled the Corps and its numerous partners (including The Conservation Fund) to build up a rich store of experience in marshlands restoration, which could play a key role in helping the Gulf state coastal communities preserve their remaining marshlands,  recover from the disastrous BP oil spill, and determine the course of their economic future.

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The fire hydrant of the future will have a new mission in addition to fighting fires.  Geared up with new data collection, storage and communication equipment, fire hydrants will play a key role in efforts to conserve water in the nation’s vast, complex water systems.

Compared to its record on greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. has actually done a pretty good job of conserving water, with usage declining over the past 25 years primarily due to improvements in agricultural irrigation and the adoption of power plant cooling processes that recycle water.  However, there is plenty of room for improvement and the new hydrants are expected to enable utilities to conserve more water by detecting and responding to leaks more quickly, and help utilities to cut their carbon footprint, too.

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