Tag: environment

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Entrepreneurs Features

From Dog Poop to Electricity

Jendell Duffner is the owner behind central Ohio-based pet waste removal company Green Scoop Pet Waste Management. Founded in 2013, they are the first business in the country to collect pet waste and turn it into energy. According to their website, over 10 million tons of dog waste end up in landfill sites across the country. The company provides residents of central Ohio with a means to lower landfill waste while also supporting alternative sources of energy production. One of Duffner’s greatest achievements is producing many jobs. Since starting the company, she has helped many families earn a living doing a job that they respect. 

Through their Pet Poo Recycling Program, the company provides buckets and supplies to interested pet owners who then fill up their bucket with pet waste and have it collected on a weekly or biweekly basis by Green Scoop Pet employees. The waste is then deposited at a bio facility which collects the methane and converts it into energy in the form of electricity and natural gas. Some of the energy is used to supply power to the processing plant while the rest is fed back to the grid. The solids left behind undergo an extensive cleaning process, removing harmful pathogens and bacteria before being sent to farmers to be used as fertilizer for their fields. 

Duffner also provides an option for cat litter recycling. The company supplies a special cat litter made from locally processed grain in a pellet form that owners can use to compost their cat’s waste and turn it into energy! 

‘I’ve Always Been Passionate About the Environment’

Image courtesy of Duffner.

While in high school, she embarked on an environmental project which led to her convincing the mayor into purchasing a wood chipper for their small town in Bucyrus, Ohio rather than burn piles of branches that fell during the ice storms. 

After college, she continued her environmental studies, receiving training in naturalism and tree identification. With each new experience, Duffer realized she wanted to do more.

She always wished to start her own environmental business but didn’t want to compete with larger franchises. She settled on pet waste recycling but needed to come up with a unique angle—something that was missing from the businesses of the time. Having a background in environmental science was a huge advantage for her as it meant that she had a solid foundation. 

Duffner’s vision was to start up a business that turned pet waste into energy. During her research, she came across two existing companies that composted pet waste and used the output to generate fuel for energy. Inspired, Duffner went about incorporating that into her business model. However, it wasn’t what she had hoped it would be. Profit margins were incredibly low and the energy required to break down the pet waste was exceptionally high, resulting in great financial setbacks for her company. 

Learning From Her Mistakes

“As a business, you need to be able to make a profit to make a difference. And you need to be able to pay people properly,” she said. To offset the high operating cost, one would need a steady stream of customers, which would mean collecting a lot of waste. “It takes a lot of knowledge to use the right ingredients and recipes to make them [pet waste] break down on a timely basis,” said Duffner. “So for it to break down, you have to have a really expensive in-vessel.” The basic equipment itself tends to cost upwards of 200,000 USD, making it not the most cost-effective model for most small businesses. One needs to also ensure that the temperature in the in-vessel is high enough—131° F or greater, to destroy harmful pathogens present in pet waste—a very precise operation that can only be achieved through commercial means and techniques. For Duffner, it meant changing her business model to better suit her requirements. 

Despite the many difficulties and financial losses, Duffner realized that she could still make a difference without having to be directly involved in the composting. “I can do what I can, still make a profit while offering a good service, and still be able to grow my business,” she said. For her, the main focus was always about providing the best possible service to customers to ensure profitability which would, in turn, allow her to provide jobs for her employees. “Make sure you’re offering a service that they value. And then you integrate things from there. That’s how you can continue to make a difference. Not by trying to completely change every aspect of things that currently work,” she said.

‘Producing Jobs Is my Biggest Joy’

Duffner’s biggest source of joy is the ability to provide jobs to people. This effort has now become the main focus of her operation. “I have employees that depend on me for paychecks,” said Duffner. “When you have an employee come up to you and say thank you, because of you, I was able to buy a dependable vehicle. Because of you, I was able to move out of my sister’s house and get my own place. Thank you so much for giving me a job. That’s what really matters.”

She advises that the best way for people to help the environment is through reusing products. If you have a lot of plastic bags or you know someone at work who is getting rid of them, ask them to save them for you. Then, you could use it to pick up dog waste or to hold your produce at the grocery store. This is a more sustainable and environmentally friendly solution to purchasing more bags.

Categories
Features The Great Outdoors

Logging and the Art of Gardening

(Paul Summers/Unsplash)

“I love trees,” said the forester. His name is Cliff Foster, and I believe him.

But how does that square with the environmentalists’ view that foresters and loggers are chain-saw-wielding tree slashers who are only a few generations away from J. R. R. Tolkien’s orcs?

My view of loggers wasn’t that extreme, especially since my second great-grandfather owned the Brown Paper Company in Berlin, New Hampshire. But I had an uncomplimentary opinion of loggers that had developed many years before.

In 2007, when my wife and our four children and I lived in the countryside of Virginia, I wrote a column called “Loggers Who Lay Waste to Beauty.” In that essay, I wrote:

The first time we saw the desolation caused by their handiwork, we were driving down a road that we had traveled many times when suddenly we turned a corner and saw a vast expanse of broken tree stumps and piles of dirt, mixed with wood chips and underbrush. It had been a beautiful stretch of woods, inhabited, I’m sure, by a variety of now displaced creatures.

Our entire family’s collective jaws dropped to the bottom of the van as we slowly drove by a scene that reminded me of a World War I no man’s land battlefield. Ugly, tragic, and desolate didn’t even begin to describe it.

You can imagine how much we gnashed our teeth after that whenever we said the word “loggers.” Ugh! Ick! We were tree lovers and tree huggers, and in fact, we still are, living now in Maine, surrounded by lovely trees. We don’t hug them anymore because of ticks, but that’s another story.

My wife and I tend to shudder in dismay whenever we drive by a section of woods that developers are clearing away for new houses. Neither of us feels very good when we hear chain saws at work. But life is complicated, and there’s always another side to every story.

I began to pay attention to the tragedy of California’s wildfires that have not only devastated millions of trees but have laid waste to the homes and lives of both animals and humans.

In an article in American Greatness, titled “Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests,” Edward Ring writes (emphasis by author):

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

Then, one day in Maine, I was talking to Cliff, who just happened to be a forester, and he mentioned “selective cutting,” a term that was new to me. I sat down with Cliff and heard him utter those magnificent words:

I love trees.

Of course, I should have known that a forester can love trees, but we don’t know what we don’t know, and that can cause tragedies in the world, including the devastation of wildfires in California. In my discussion with Cliff, I learned a great many things.

Cliff Foster has been working with trees for seventy-six years and has been a forester and forester consultant for almost that long. He started helping his father after WWII with a crosscut saw and a bucksaw. Cliff served in the Navy during the Korean War as an engineman on a destroyer escort and, in classic Navy fashion, met Ruth, his bride-to-be, at a roller skating rink in Hartford, Connecticut. He asked her if he could drive her home, and she said no. Very proper, for the era. But he persevered and married her, and now they have four grown sons.

After college, he joined the Maine Forestry Service in 1959, when he was twenty-eight. He worked his way up to the role of Southern Regional Director and then retired from the service after thirty years. During his tenure, he oversaw the planting of three million trees on three thousand acres of land.

Cliff began a forestry consulting business in 1986 called Timberstate G. Now retired, his son, Greg, manages the company, which creates forestry management plans for hundreds of private owners of timberland covering forty-thousand acres a year.

He told me that what I saw in Virginia was the result of “clear-cutting,” a practice that has been all but abandoned in Maine. It sometimes needs to be done with patches of woodland that have become diseased or have been invaded by insects that could spread. But generally, foresters in Maine use other methods.

Cliff promotes and uses a method called “selective cutting,” which involves individually selecting trees to be cut while leaving a large portion of the trees to continue their growth. It’s not done randomly. The best practice is to cut the weakest and poorest trees first, which will then be turned into pulp.

A few years later, the next round of cutting will be focused on the trees that are slightly better and larger that can be used for small planks and items like lobster traps—although now lobster traps are being made of steel.

The third level of cutting includes trees that will be turned into “saw timber”—hemlock and spruce for framing houses and high-quality pine for finish work.

One of Cliff’s methods is to let good trees grow for decades before they’re cut because big trees produce wooden planks that are wider. He showed me some piles of very wide planks on the second floor of his garage and pointed out that the highest quality planking is virtually free of knots.

A major benefit to selective cutting is that the health of the woods can be maintained. Deadwood and underbrush are removed, which promotes growth and protects the area from forest fires. I found his comments illuminating and on point:

If you have a garden, what’s one of the first things that you do in that garden after it gets growing? Weed. Pull the weeds. If you want to have a good garden, you have to get rid of the weeds. That’s what we do in the woods. It’s the same thing, essentially.

The other thing we do: to some degree, we can control the trees that come back. We’re talking about different species. It depends on the knowledge of the soil that is supporting those trees; what you can do with them.

I had never heard anyone say that forestry could be like gardening, and I loved the analogy. It’s the very opposite of what has been happening in California. Cliff had a lot to say about that and criticized the influence of organizations like the Sierra Club and the excessive regulations that grew from the environmental lobby. He stated that correct management of the California woods would have reduced underbrush, disease from insects, and ultimately fires.

In his opinion, the activists and legislators who worked to stop all cutting ended up harming far more trees than they saved from the loggers’ chain saws.

The environmentalist approach to saving trees created a terrible and tragic irony, especially to a professional woodsman like Cliff Foster, who can look at a forest and declare: “I love trees.”

Cliff Foster with a 121-year-old, 110-foot white pine tree. The tree is three feet in diameter and would fetch around $8,000 on the retail market when cut into planks. His son Greg might not cut it, because it has sentimental value. (Peter Falkenberg Brown)
Cliff Foster with his son, Greg, who is now running their Timberstate G forestry consulting business. (Peter Falkenberg Brown)
The Timberstate G sign at the entrance to a one-hundred-acre lot of timber. (Peter Falkenberg Brown)

Peter Falkenberg Brown is a writer, author, and public speaker. One of his recent books is titled “Waking Up Dead and Confused Is a Terrible Thing: Stories of Love, Life, Death, and Redemption.” He hosts a video and podcast channel called “The FalkenBrown Show” at his website peterfalkenbergbrown.com

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Features

Why Wildlife Is Returning to Eastern Kentucky

The wilds are returning to Eastern Kentucky in what could be called a triumphal environmental story. Sportsmen license fees and private funding have been the backbone of conservation and restoration efforts, and even cultural awareness is increasing. (Chris Musgrave)

The past 20-plus years of mass media reporting on the environment has been dominated by predictions of cataclysmic catastrophe and mayhem, although during my life, I’ve seen a very different story.

Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, deer were few, with no bear, coyotes, turkeys, mountain lions, bald eagles, and certainly no elk. Today, all of these species are present again. Positive things are happening. Wildlife is naturally returning and many species are rebounding with streams cleaner than they’ve been in decades.

Elk enjoying a reclaimed surface coal mine in Martin County, Ky., on Aug. 20, 2015. (Chris Musgrave)

How can this be? For years, doomsayers have warned about the end of nature if we didn’t turn the American way of life on its head; they may find it ironic that capitalism funds the successful environmental protections that we do have.

Recently, I took my family to the Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort, Kentucky. Throughout that gem, you can find the answers of how this can be.

Blight and Restoration

How did the dearth of nature come to be in the first place?

At the turn of the century, the chestnut blight in the eastern part of the country—where strong, rot-resistant chestnut trees that grew since time immemorial fell in mere decades—along with irresponsible clear-cut logging led to ancient forest floors in the mountains to be washed out. The ecology, flora and fauna, and economies tied to chestnuts were devastated. The old-growth forests are now lost except for small pockets such as in Blanton Forest in Harlan County.

(Daniel Ulrich)
(Daniel Ulrich)

At the same time, many wildlife populations crashed due to overhunting and habitat loss. The Great Depression caused remaining species such as deer, rabbits, and squirrels to be hunted for food, with no regard for conservation as people struggled to survive and feed their families. As the Depression ended and most places prospered, much of Appalachia remained impoverished.

Hunting and fishing licenses are the backbone of conservation and restoration efforts. Hunters funded the successful reestablishment of elk, to the point that we now have regular seasons for hunting.

An active coal temple in Pike County, Ky., on Aug. 10, 2011. (Chris Musgrave)
The reclaimed mine of Bell County, Ky., an Appalachian Wildlife Foundation location, on July 22, 2014. (Chris Musgrave)

Bad actors of the past made the Surface Mine Reclamation Act necessary. If you’re unfamiliar with the industry, you may be surprised to learn that reclaiming is part of the regular process, and typically leaves the land better than before it was mined. Why? Because that original land would have washed out about 100 years ago when the chestnut blight ravaged the forest (the restoration of the American chestnut is a subject for another story).

Elk enjoying a reclaimed surface coal mine in Martin County, Ky., on Aug. 20, 2015. It’s this grassland that they like. (Chris Musgrave)
(Daniel Ulrich)
(Daniel Ulrich)

Now, drainage controls are engineered, preventing washout. Native grasses are planted along with nut-bearing trees to promote wildlife. Within a few years, what started out like a scene from “Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome” is a lush paradise that supports diverse wildlife.

No better example can be found than that of the privately held Appalachian Wildlife Foundation. It’s in the final stages of building a public educational research station, located in Bell County, Kentucky, where the first mountaintop removal mining site in the United States is. People unfamiliar with the reclamation process have no idea it was mined, and the elk couldn’t care less.

Modern-day surface mining is like making sausage: The process is not pretty but the end result is great. The location of the wildlife foundation several decades ago more resembled the surface of Mars or the moon as the top of the mountain was removed of the overburden in order to reach the valuable coal seams below. When coal is too close to the surface, the ground is not stable and it’s not safe to mine underground. To access this coal, the ground above must first be removed.

(Daniel Ulrich)

It is only fitting this wildlife sanctuary was once paraded by those opposed to mining as an example of how awful mining is, because active mining is ugly. This short-sighted view ignored the big picture and the responsible and forward-thinking stewardship by the landowners. When mining was first completed and the reclamation process started, the first few years the land was home to only grasses and low brush and briers taking hold. After a few years and seasons, the soil develops as vegetation decays returning to soil. Per the requirements based on extensive research, the soil is only compacted to certain point to prevent run-off, but not so tight as to prevent trees from easily re-establishing, (early reclamation law required soil be very compacted, inadvertently thwarting vegetation, and thus wildlife returning).

Today most people wouldn’t know Boone’s Ridge was a mine, (with limited active mining still occurring). This is true of most surface mining today, as only contour mining is permitted, where the peak must remain and only the outer edge of a coal seam is mined creating a bench. This bench is filled post-mining and the mountain is returned to its original contours. Once these location are covered with significant hardwood trees, they are indistinguishable from other parts of the hillside not mined to the untrained eye.

Education Works

The many creeks and streams in the region were once clogged with decades of trash and sewage from straight pipes.

Today efforts by private volunteer groups such as PRIDE (Personal Responsibility In a Desirable Environment) remove trash from the streams every April. Over the past decades, septic tanks and new sewage treatment plants have almost ended raw sewage discharge. As a result, fish and aquatic species are flourishing, and even beavers and river otters are returning.

The Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort, Ky. (Chris Musgrave)

I currently serve on the board of the Kentucky Environmental Education Council, which has played a key part in cultural change for the last several decades by exposing Kentucky students to environmental issues and terms.

Yet another factor changing culture is simply time: The outlaw hardscrabble poacher culture borne of desperate times of the Great Depression has to a large degree died out or become too old and feeble to do much harm. Less fortunate segments of society now have social safety nets and improved infrastructure making it easier to meet basic needs unavailable in the past.

This certainly has helped remove the pressure of necessity to subsist. Most sportsmen today buy licenses and make good faith efforts to follow the seasons, limits, and regulations.

The Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort, Ky. (Chris Musgrave)

Private corporations can play a role as well, often the ones contributing to funds that make much-needed conservation efforts possible.

The Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort, Ky. (Chris Musgrave)

Having studied the history of energy and environmental law and being a sportsman myself, I’ve heard much blaming of corporations, industry, and hunters of today for the harms of the past. Education has helped dispel some of these misconceptions. And yes, we do have some real environmental problems in this world; most have root causes traceable to the desperation of poverty, corrupt systems of government, or ignorance of the harm of our actions.

For example, when the Soviet Union collapsed, desperation and anarchy nearly wiped out caviar sturgeon in Russia. Corruption happens, too. Recently, when a mine in Pike County started receiving complaints from surrounding neighbors, it turned out the federal mine inspector was accepting bribes to not enforce the law. Once discovered, it was stopped and the inspector and operator are now in jail. Ignorance of the consequences of actions factors into these environmental problems. Take the example of DDT pesticides; once the harm was discovered, regulations caught up and banned its use.

The wilds are returning to Eastern Kentucky in what could be called a triumphal environmental story. Sportsmen license fees and private funding have been the backbone of conservation and restoration efforts, and even cultural awareness is increasing. (Chris Musgrave)

I saw a wild bald eagle about seven miles from Lexington, Kentucky, just last week. Last summer, a black bear was spotted downtown near a University of Kentucky hospital. These occurrences were unthinkable 30 years ago.

Chris Musgrave is a Kentucky attorney, farmer, and policy professional in energy, environment, agriculture, education, elections, history, and government administration and affairs. He enjoys hunting, fishing, and writing music and articles for fun. He is also a board member of the Kentucky Environmental Education Council and Historic Preservation Review Boards.