Auto parts city was once considered a menace in the community. But after greening up its act, it’s now earning top environmental awards — including Green Business of the Year from the Green Business League.

It may look like a junkyard, but brothers Jay and Larry Brosten hope to change your mind.

“We’ve spent too many years trying to improve our image and we’ve spent millions of dollars setting this facility up and trying to do the right thing,” said Larry Brosten. “But it’s always had the stigma of the ‘j-word’.”

The three-generation old Auto Parts City in Gurnee just got an $8 million make-over. The family’s goal is to set the green standard in auto recycling.

Good going guys! Keep up the green work! Congratulations to Auto Parts City from everyone here at GreenVehicleDisposal.com

read the entire article here

That the appliance surfers use to tap this energy is made from petroleum-based foam, polyester resins and chemically treated fiberglass has long been surfing’s quiet contradiction.

A broken board tossed in a landfill will take generations to biodegrade; the plastic fins probably never will. Even the thin strip of wood that runs down the middle to provide strength comes at an environmental cost — a minuscule yield from the raw material it’s milled from. “A ‘green surfboard’ is inherently an oxymoron at this point,” says Joey Santley, 44, a frenetic surfboard shaper and entrepreneur in San Clemente on a mission to create an environmentally friendly surfboard — or at least one with a carbon footprint that’s less titanic. “Hopefully in the future it won’t be.” In recent years, a wave of experimentation has sought to detoxify surfboards by using materials that suggest the Whole Earth catalog rather than the periodic table of elements: hemp, bamboo, kelp and silk instead of fiberglass; foam made from soy and sugar rather than polyurethane, which is composed of toluene diisocyanate, or TDI, a possible carcinogen that can be inhaled and absorbed through the skin; adhesive resins made from linseed, pine and vegetable oils. But changing the way surfboards are made has proved difficult. The few who have sought to go greener have struggled not only with finding just the right materials but also with overcoming resistance from shapers and professional surfers reluctant to fix what they don’t consider broken.

After experimenting with castor oil, sugar and corn, McMahon’s company found that blanks made with soybean oil were as strong and light as conventional foam.

Two years ago, he and a partner formed Green Foam Blanks, which makes rigid foam surfboard cores by fusing polyurethane with recycled polyurethane dust gathered from workshops that would otherwise discard it. That yields more boards per ounce of toxic polyurethane.

The company recently signed a deal with a leading maker of traditional blanks to manufacture and distribute its product in North America, Japan, Europe and Costa Rica. Still, this being a start-up, Santley is not just part-owner, he’s also the chief dust collector. Darting down a gangway between two nondescript buildings recently, he bounds up the stairs of one of the neighborhood’s numerous surfboard factories. Under a whirring cutting machine, he hits gold: a pile of white polyurethane foam shavings as light as Rocky Mountain snow. “This is like a perfect powder day,” Santley says, shoveling the stuff into a trash bag and holding it aloft. “Probably enough for about a dozen boards. And it won’t end up in the landfill.”

Hat’s off to you Joey and we hope your quest for a green surfboard is successful!

Mike Anton – read the full article

Many folks are buying carbon credits to offset their yearly air travel for business and vacations but a full service airline based in London, British Airways has unveiled plans to establish what it believes will be Europe’s first ’sustainable’ jet fuel plant

According to The Engineer, “the plant will produce aviation fuel from plasma gasification of biomass into BioSynGas which is then converted by Fischer Tropsch into biojet fuel. The facility will process all types of biomass and residue feedstock which will mainly be sourced from local waste management facilities. The process produces no waste products other than an environmentally-benign slag that can be used as construction aggregate.”

The plant is slated to be fully operational by 2014, and if successful, it will offer a way to convert 500 kilotonnes (1,102,311,310 pounds) of carbon-based material per year into 16 million gallons of jet fuel, and could potentially reduce annual carbon emissions by 145 kilotonnes (319,670,280 pounds).

The announcement of British Airlines’ plan to manufacture it’s own sustainable jet fuel comes fast on the heels of news that the U.S. Department of Defense has achieved a breakthrough that could put algae-based biofuels in use by American military aircraft much sooner than the 2016 goal.

This is great news and I hope the auto fuel industry is watching all the progress closely.

It uses reusable plastic paper that is erased and reused up to 1,000 time!  Now the printer cost over $6,000 USD right now so don’t expect to see many of these until the prices dives.

“Aggressive, top-notch facilities that understand the power of networking and education”.  That is how the Locator Executive V.P Charis Lloyd describes what it takes to be listed in the top 25 most influential recyclers list for 2009.  And our friend David Gold was voted number one, as the most influential auto recycler of 2009!

We caught up with David for a brief chat on Monday morning and when asked how it felt to be voted number one as the most influential auto recycler of 2009 he replied, “I was in shock!  I love the business and love all the great people involved in it.” “It is a huge honor and over at Standard Auto Wreckers we are committed to helping our fellow recyclers across North America and the world.”

UK Car Donation Program

Surprisingly, car donation in the UK is not nearly as big as it is in the USA.  Launched late last year, Giveacar.co.uk is the only vehicle donation program currently operating in the UK. A potential reason for this is that car owners in the UK are not offered tax breaks when they donate their vehicles.  As a result, the Giveacar model operates in a different way to those in North America. They focus on the collection and disposal of scrap cars, rather than those which can be resold for use on the roads.

The Director of the program, Tom Chance, stated that this novel approach is reaping great rewards for UK charities.  He wants to emulate the success of the USA programs like www.CharityCar.us, but do it in his own way.  The UK regulations for scrap cars are particularly stringent, and Chance takes pride from the fact that he is not only benefiting charities, but also the environment.  Because Giveacar was launched only a few months ago, it is not yet clear just how popular charitable car donation will become in the UK.  Chance however, believes he is on to a winner, and feels that he may have imported something of great significance. For more information or to make a car donation in the UK, visit www.giveacar.co.uk

Love this bench ad!

Standard Auto Wreckers suggested 10,000 Trees for the Rouge as the recipient of $10,000 in funding late last year and I noticed this awesome sign a while back and thought I would share.

Taiwan’s landmark skyscraper Taipei 101 may not be the tallest building in the world anymore but it is still trying to hold on to some of its notoriety by becoming the worlds tallest ‘green building’!  Taipei 101 applied for green building certification in October 2009 and should be certified in 18 months.

Taipei 101 spokesman Michael Liu said that the former world’s tallest building is still a masterpiece of technology. Liu said the huge steel damper inside the building that reduces swaying in high winds is a big draw to foreign tourists.

Liu said that visitors to the skyscraper’s observatory have increased by 30 percent in 2009 over the year before.  What happens if Dubai’s Burj Khalifa goes green?

Green fashion is in and the fashion show to prove it was held at Copenhagen’s Opera House — across the Danish capital from where delegates from 192 countries are gathered to hammer out an agreement aimed at stemming global warning — the display brought together 20 designers from five Nordic countries and representatives of such retailing heavyweights as H&M and Barneys.

Designers each presented two looks made from organic cottons and silks, polyesters made from recycled plastic bottles or new fabrics made from waste left over from industry and agriculture.

Never heard of Crabion? It’s made from byproducts from the crab industry. And Ingeo? It’s made out of corn scraps and can be made to mimic the smoothness of silk or the glossy sheen of PVC. Ditto, Milkfiber, which, you guessed it, is milled milk: from the powder left over from boiled milk, more precisely.