Natural gas is inexpensive, seemingly plentiful and much cleaner-burning when used as an alternative to diesel fuel in transportation fleets, so it makes sense that Waste Management is converting its entire North American fleet to run on compressed natural gas. The company announced this week it has added 25 new CNG waste collection trucks to its fleet in Ottawa. About 80 per cent of all new trucks purchased by the company now run on compressed natural gas. To accommodate this fleet conversion, Waste Management has been increasing the number of fuelling stations it has to support the fleet. Currently it operates 17 of these stations across North America, but that number is expected to expand to 50 by the end of this year. Overall, the company has more than 1,400 CNG trucks in its fleet, including 100 added to its fleet in Vancouver last year. While this represents only 3.5 per cent of the entire fleet, conversion is happening at a healthy clip. It should be noted that Waste Management is also using route optimization software to reduce driving time and all trucks are programmed to turn off automatically after five minutes of idling. These are all solid initiatives that will help reduce emissions, but also reduce company costs.

From a greenhouse-gas perspective, the emission reductions aren’t massive — up to 25 per cent reduction — but the real gains here are in the reduction of smog-causing pollutants. Nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter are reduced by 90 per cent. Over time, it leaves open the possibility of using renewable natural gas, sourced from landfill gas and municipal wastewater biogas, to displace its fossil fuel cousin. The city of Surrey, B.C., is already heading in this direction. It now requires that natural gas-powered trucks be used for its municipal waste collection, a service being performed by BFI Canada, which has purchased 75 trucks that run on CNG. At the same time, it is launching an organics collection program for Surrey’s 470,000 residents and businesses that will see the household waste converted into biogas that will be cleaned, conditioned and used in BFI trucks. Surrey hopes the new biogas facility will begin operation in 2014.

Toronto was supposed to head in this direction as well, but from what I understand the plan has unraveled under the administration of Mayor Rob Ford.

My Clean Break column this week looks at a small company in Toronto called TowerLabs that helps get green building technologies tested and ultimately embraced by major condo and tower developers, a notoriously conservative bunch at the best of times. The company is a spinoff of condo developer Tridel, and so far its efforts at matching up tower builders with new cleantech startups is showing strong results.

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By Tyler Hamilton

Technologies abound, many of them developed in Ontario, with promise to reduce the amount of energy consumption in buildings, particularly the big energy-hogging towers that dot our urban and increasingly suburban landscapes.

But the companies that construct these giant towers are notoriously conservative, as are the banks that fund them, so cracking into this massive market hasn’t been easy for newcomers.

Jamie James is trying to break down some walls. As a sustainability adviser to Canadian condo builder Tridel for nearly 10 years, James helped build an internal R&D program that tested out the performance of new energy-efficiency technologies for buildings.

In 2010, with Tridel’s blessing and support, he decided to “externalize” the program and expand it to other tower builders, with the goal of speeding up the time it takes to get new green building technologies to the larger marketplace.

Along this path, James found a partner in MaRS Discovery District, which donated office space. The non-profit social venture TowerLabs was born.

“I go to cleantech innovators who are targeting the real estate sector with the proposition that I can get you into the buildings and working with potential customers,” James explains.

TowerLabs acts as relationship maker and project manager, helping to get the technology installed and its performance measured in both real-world and test scenarios. “To go into a building and have real-live demos can go a long way toward showing that something is viable,” he says.

The approach is already paying off for Vancouver-based dPoint Technologies, which has developed a new type of air ventilation system that dramatically reduces the need to heat or cool fresh intake air, depending on the season.

Some rooftop ventilation systems found on condo buildings will take fresh air from the outside, heat it (if in the winter), and blow it through the inside of the building via a network of ducts. The air flows into the hallway of each floor and, moving through the gap at the bottom of doors, enters each condo suite.

Stale warm air, meanwhile, is expelled through the bathroom fans of individual suites. When that warm air is ejected, so is the energy within it.

The dPoint system, or Energy Recovery Ventilator, takes a very different approach. Rather than have fresh air come from a central ventilation system on a rooftop, each condo unit has its own individual air intake and exhaust box.

As warm, stale inside air is exhausted the dPoint system instantly recovers and transfers the heat to the incoming flow of fresh air. It does this using a special polymer membrane that also filters out impurities and transfers humidity between the two air flows as they move in opposite directions.

“This is really a dramatic shift in the way a building breathes,” says James, adding that the dPoint technology passed the “sniff test” and is gaining traction after a few initial tests with Tridel.

With TowerLabs’ help, about 740 dPoint systems are now being installed in two Tridel condo towers in Scarborough.

“If all goes well, dPoint go from being a near total unknown in the market less than 18 months ago to being a specification for the largest condo builder in Toronto,” James says. “So that’s kind of proving out the approach we’re taking.”

Tridel continues to play a key role, but TowerLabs is hoping to bring on other builders. It also plans to test out technologies at the tower being built as part of the expansion at MaRS.

Another technology being put to the test is a new type of variable speed motor used in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems from Toronto-based start-up InMotive.

To push warm and cool air around requires fans, and the motors that power those fans often only operate in two modes: completely on, and completely off. One way of saving energy is to swap out those motors with variable speed versions that can slow down or speed up based on air flow demands.

What InMotive has designed it was it calls a mechatronic variable speed drive that is more efficient and requires less maintenance than conventional variable-speed motor designs. TowerLabs helped the company get its first prototype tested in a high-rise building.

“The goal was to prove that the concept worked, and they achieved that,” says James, adding that more tests are planned as the product evolves.

TowerLabs also has Tridel testing out a solar co-generation system, which supplies electricity through photovoltaic panels and harvests solar heat at the same time.

“Once you get the innovation in there you can really change its fate overnight,” he says.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

Here’s my take on the EU aviation carbon tax that is causing a stink with major world airline carriers:

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Tyler Hamilton

My family flew to North Carolina during the holiday to visit relatives and, being aware of new baggage fees, we made every effort to pack lightly.

Of two adults and two children we had only one item to check in. Not bad. But it still meant paying $25 to get the bag to Charlotte and another $25 to get it back home. Had we each checked just one bag for our one-week trip, it would have cost the family $200.

I point this out because I’m perplexed by Air Canada’s strong opposition to the European Union’s new aviation carbon tax, which went into effect Jan. 1.

The airline — as well as other members of the National Airlines Council of Canada — has no problem arbitrarily adding $50 to the price of a 2,500-kilometre round trip to the United States.

But it won’t tolerate the European Union slapping on a carbon tax that would only add $1.45 to a $500 round-trip ticket between Toronto and Frankfurt, Germany, a journey that covers five times the distance.

How did I come to $1.45? Anyone can calculate the impact on any trip to Europe. Just go to the website of the International Civil Aviation Organization at and click on the carbon calculator link at the bottom-left of the screen. Or click here.

A round trip between Toronto and Frankfurt generates 922 kilograms of carbon emissions per person. Per tonne, the price of carbon emissions on the European market is about $10.50, so the price for 922 kilograms would be $9.68.

But that’s not what airlines would initially have to pay per passenger. Under the new European aviation tax scheme, airlines still get a free pass for 85 per cent of their emissions. With the tax only applying to the remaining 15 per cent, that works out to $1.45 that will surely be passed along to consumers.

As industry observer Bill Hemmings said, “Commercially it’s a non-event.” Airlines arbitrarily change online flight prices on a minute-by-minute basis by much larger amounts.

Yet Air Canada and its fellow airlines in Canada, the United States, China, India, Russia and Japan insist on demonizing the fee and amplifying talk of trade wars and unproven claims of job destruction. It doesn’t matter that the European Union Court of Justice ruled recently that the new tax does not contravene international law.

“This ruling by no means settles this matter,” George Petsikas, president of Canada’s airline council, said defiantly after the European court ruling.

Those opposed to the EU’s actions argue that the matter of emissions reductions in the global aviation industry is best addressed through a “coherent, multilateral framework” via the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The solution, they feel, is to create yet another international initiative that likely will lead to more delay and inaction on pressing climate matters.

Been there, done that. What’s admirable about the EU approach is that it’s about more action and less talk. Understandably, it’s tired of waiting for the rest of the world to get its act together.

The aviation sector accounts for 3 per cent of global emissions, but both its share of global emissions and its absolute contribution are expected to grow under a do-nothing scenario that isn’t sustainable.

To be fair, the industry hasn’t been idle. Fuel efficiency has improved by 16 per cent between 2001 and 2008, according to the International Air Transport Association. Since 1990, major Canadian airlines have improved fuel efficiency by 31 per cent.

But it’s not enough, and there’s a whole lot more that can be done. A sector-specific carbon tax that grows gradually and includes more countries over time will accelerate innovation and give the most fuel-efficient airlines an edge over competitors.

As airline fleets are renewed there will be greater incentive to embrace more efficient engine technology and light-weight materials, such as carbon fibre, in the design of new aircraft.

The air transport association estimates the industry will spend $1.5 trillion on new aircraft by 2020, resulting in more than a quarter of the global fleet being replaced. It’s important to make sure new aircraft are built and purchased with fuel-efficiency top of mind.

Airlines will also be more motivated to use renewable jet fuel products in old and new aircraft to offset their carbon footprints. There’s tremendous promise with respect to carbon-neutral jet fuels derived from algae, wood waste, inedible plants such as camelina, and even industrial waste gases.

One advantage is that aviation is a relatively easy market to target. There are fewer than 2,000 airports around the world that serve as major fuelling hubs for airplanes, so the required infrastructure changes to accommodate renewable jet fuel are quite manageable. Contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of fuelling stations that service cars worldwide.

Jet fuel also represents less than 8 per cent of global demand for oil products, so it’s not as daunting as tackling the market for consumer vehicles, which consume more than 40 per cent of oil supply.

The industry says it is already going down this innovation path. That only makes the EU carbon tax even more benign. The EU, meanwhile, has said that any airline headquartered in a country with similar emission-reduction policies would be exempt from the EU tax.

So what, exactly, is the fuss all about? It’s about the rest of the world not liking Europe taking the lead and telling it what to do, and even though it’s clear that we need to do it.

It certainly isn’t about the financial interests of travellers, who have been and will continue to be penalized much more by arbitrary fees designed to pad the bottom line.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. tyler@cleanbreak.ca

I touched on this McKinsey report earlier, but my most recent Clean Break column delves a  bit deeper into the consultancy’s analysis of commodity trends past and future, and how this will impact the way corporations operate.

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Tyler Hamilton

Has the global economy entered a long period of persistently high, volatile commodity prices?

That’s a question asked recently by international consultancy McKinsey & Co., which analyzed a century of data and found that the trend – for at least the next 20 years – doesn’t look good.

The previous 100 years told a different story. Since 1910, it found that the average combined price (inflation-adjusted) of food, agricultural raw materials, metals and energy reached its lowest historical level in the late 1990s.

Sure, there were big dips during the post-World War I depression and the Great Depression a decade later. But major technological advancements in areas such as exploration, extraction and cultivation allowed us during prosperous times to satisfy the demands of a growing global population, while keeping commodity prices at record lows.

“This ability to access progressively cheaper resources underpinned a 20-fold expansion of the world economy,” according to McKinsey’s analysis.

But that same analysis shows that the past decade has bucked a century-long trend. The commodity price decline achieved over the previous 90 years has, in just eight years, been completely wiped out, says McKinsey. Pre-WWI peak prices were surpassed in 2010, and all of this is happening during extremely trying economic times.

Shouldn’t commodity prices, like during past recessions and depressions, be falling?

Not this time around, the consultancy says. “Our analysis suggests that they will remain high and volatile for at least the next 20 years if current trends hold — barring a major macroeconomic shock — as global resource markets oscillate in response to surging global demand and inelastic supplies.”

There are many reasons why this time is different. Our world population surpassed seven billion in 2010 and of that, three billion will join the ranks of middle-class consumer over the next two decades, putting immense stress on those natural resources that give us energy, food, metals and fresh water.

McKinsey, which says we are entering a new era for commodities, throws out a few sobering stats: by 2030 the global vehicle fleet will double, per-capita calorie intake in India will jump 20 per cent, and Chinese consumption of meat — production of which is energy- and water-intensive — will rise 60 per cent.

Technology, no doubt, will continue to help us boost the supply of the commodities we have come to depend on, but the concern is that it can’t do it fast enough to meet rapidly growing demand.

Meanwhile, attempts to do so will require more expensive approaches and access to more remote locations — for example, drilling for oil in the Arctic — adding cost and putting more pressure on the fragile ecosystems we depend on.

On the issue of environment, there’s also the parallel need to rein in carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic changes to the climate by the end of this century. In other words, what we’re faced with today is unprecedented, and it will require an unprecedented response.

Of interest is that some corporations are already responding, and in doing so are positioning themselves as leaders of their respective packs over the long run.

A recent Harvard Business School study that tracked the performance of 180 corporations over nearly two decades found that the most progressive companies with respect to sustainability policies and practices outperformed their peers.

A big part of this is about resource-productivity. As commodity prices increase those companies that can best minimize waste and be most efficient with the consumption of energy and water are also the ones that will be most competitive.

In addition to cutting costs and reducing their exposure to volatile commodity prices, they’ll reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions and avoid paying future prices placed on carbon.

McKinsey says the future will be all about “squeezing greater productivity” from natural resources. “Better resource productivity could single-handedly meet more than 20 per cent of forecast 2030 demand for energy, steel, water and land,” it estimates.

This bodes well for the many clean technology companies I have written about in this column over the years.

Never has there been a greater need for technologies that can help us, for example, reuse scarce water resources, reduce the carbon footprint of the products we consume and services we use, and turn what has traditionally been considered waste into valuable products or sources of energy.

These may be trying economic times, but the companies that test drive and ultimately embrace these technologies will be much better off in the long run. There will be short-term risks, but they must be measured against the longer term risks of not acting.

This is something investors may want to keep in mind as we enter 2012.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. Contact him at tyler@cleanbreak.ca