Going Green

All over America, a post-Katrina future is taking shape under the banner of "sustainability." Architects vie to create the most sustainable skyscrapers. The current champion in Manhattan appears to be Norman Foster's futuristic headquarters for the Hearst Corp., lit to its innermost depths by God's own high-efficiency light source, the sun. The building's "destination dispatch" elevators require passengers to enter their floor at a kiosk, where a screen directs them to a cab, grouping them to wring the last watt of efficiency from their 30-second trips. But it is expected to be challenged soon in Manhattan by a new Bank of America tower, designed by Cook & Fox, which takes "sustainability" to a point just short of growing its own food. Every drop of rain that falls on its roof will be captured for use; scraps from the cafeteria will be fermented in the building to produce methane as a supplementary fuel for a generator intended to produce more than half the building's electricity; the waste heat from the generator will both warm the offices and power a refrigeration plant to cool them.

Far away in Traverse City, Mich., a resort town four hours north of Detroit, home builder Lawrence Kinney wrestles with a different problem, people who want 6,000-square-foot vacation houses they will use only a couple of weeks a year. Outraged by the waste, he refuses to build them. His preferred size is about 1,800 square feet, 25 percent smaller than the national average; he has rediscovered the virtues of plaster walls instead of resource-intensive drywall, uses lumber harvested locally by horse-drawn teams and treats his wood with stains made from plants, not petroleum. When Jeff Martin, a program manager for Microsoft, set out to build a sustainable house near Charlotte, N.C., he specified something that looked like a house, not "a yurt, or a spaceship, or something made out of recycled cans and tires in the middle of the desert." He turned to Steven Strong, a Massachusetts-based renewable-energy consultant who says he "fell in love" with solar energy when he realized that "you could put a thin sliver of silicon, with no moving parts and no waste, in the sun and generate electricity forever." Strong designed an unobtrusive solar-cell array on the roof of Martin's conventional stucco-and-stone house to provide free electricity, and a sun-powered heater that produces so much hot water Martin can use it to wash his driveway. "We never run out," Martin boasts, "even when my wife's family comes to visit over Christmas."

The sun: sustainable energy that not even in-laws can exhaust! The same sun that for years shone uselessly on the roof of FedEx's immense Oakland airport hub, through which passes most of the company's traffic with China. Since last year, solar panels covering 81,000 square feet have been providing 80 percent of the facility's needs. The sun that also creates the wind that powers the wind turbines that Chicago--which is seeking to be known as the environmental city as well as the windy one--is building atop the Daley Center, a high-rise courthouse. But among cities, few are as sustainable as Austin, Texas, which recycles its trash so assiduously that residents generated only 0.79 tons of garbage per household last year, down from 1.14 tons in 1992. Austin's city-owned electric company estimates that "renewable" power, mostly from west Texas wind farms, will account for 6 percent of its capacity this year, nearly doubling to 11 percent by 2008. Beginning in 2001, customers were allowed to purchase wind power at a price guaranteed for 10 years. But since it was more costly than conventional power, most people who signed up did so out of conviction--until last fall, when rising natural-gas prices meant that conventional customers were pay-ing more, and suddenly the company was overwhelmed with new converts to sustainable power.

Another thing the sun does, of course, is grow plants. Agriculture is being reshaped by the growing demand for corn to produce ethanol--which can be blended with gasoline to stretch supplies, or can power on its own the growing number of "flex-fuel" cars. Four billion gallons will be produced this year, a doubling just since 2003. Dave Nelson of Belmond, Iowa, now devotes as much land to growing corn for fuel as for food--the same variety--and after the starch is extracted for fermentation, the protein left behind gets fed to his pigs, which produce manure to fertilize the fields. "Not a thing is wasted," says Nelson, who is chairman of a farmer's cooperative that runs one ethanol distillery and is building another. The problem, though, is that people and livestock eat corn, too, and some experts see a time, not too far off, when the food and fuel industries will be competing for the same resources. Biotech companies are scrambling to come up with processes for getting ethanol from cellulose--the left-behind stalks and leaves of the corn plant, or other species such as switch grass that can grow on marginal land. One can envision vast farms devoted to growing fuel transforming the Midwest.

Even Wal-Mart wants to help shape a sustainable future, and few companies are in a better position to do so. Just by wrapping four kinds of produce in a polymer derived from corn instead of oil, the company claims it can save the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline. "Right-sizing" the boxes on just one line of toys--redesigning them to be just large enough for the contents--saves $3.5 million in trucking costs each year, and (by its estimate) 5,000 trees. Overnight, the giant retailer recently became the largest purchaser of organic cotton for clothing, and it will likely have a comparable impact on organic produce as well. This is in line with CEO H. Lee Scott's goal of reducing the company's "carbon footprint" by 20 percent in seven years. If the whole country could do that, it would essentially meet the goals set by the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which the United States, to the dismay of its European allies, refuses to sign.

Wal-Mart's efforts have two big implications. One is cultural; it helps disprove the canard that environmentalists are all Hollywood stars. Admittedly, some of them are, like "Entourage" star Adrian Grenier, whose renovated home in Brooklyn will have wall insulation of recycled denim, or Ed Begley Jr., who likes to arrive at show-business parties aboard his bicycle and markets his own line of nontoxic, noncaustic, biodegradable, vegan, child-safe household cleansers. (Begley concedes that "there are some insincere people in this community" who may have latched onto the environment because Africa was already taken, but, he says, "even if you're only into this cause for a week, at least you're doing something positive for that week.") But it wasn't movie stars who snapped up 190,000 organic-cotton yoga outfits at Sam's Club outlets in 10 weeks earlier this year.