Biodiesel Beats Congestion Pricing, Biz Summit Told

(L. to r.): City Councilmember Peter Vallone Jr., Queens Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Jack Friedman, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Queens College President James L. Muyskens, Councilmember James Gennaro, and Steven Salsberg, Queens Green Business Summit master of ceremonies, vice chairman of the Council on the Environment of New York City and head of the Salsberg Group. Among the comments heard at the Queens Green Business Summit at Queens College January 23 was one that conversion to biodiesel in vehicles would be much more profitable than congestion pricing could ever have been. The comment was made during a forum on the topic of a sustainable city that included information about green roofs from Marni Horowitz, who has been in business in Long Island City for two years. She assured business owners and managers who are thinking about having green roofs installed that roots won't grow down through their ceilings; and that green roofs improve HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning). Another speaker was Brent Baker, head of Tri-State Biodiesel, which collects cooking oil from 2,500 businesses in the city. The oil ends up as fuel for all of Fresh Direct's trucks and also heats many homes in Brooklyn. Feeling good about biodiesel's future, Baker addressed the city rhetorically by saying, "We're going to save your kids' lungs."

Those in attendance also heard Anthony Mazza, a Washington-based business consultant, say that the threat of ecological suicide leaves us no choice but to turn toward the sustainable way of life. Ken Rother of the Discovery Channel, Tree Hugger and Planet Green, warned his luncheon audience not to feel too proud of having a "green" attitude, since, "We haven't begun to address climate change." They might also have heard, perhaps a little more to their amusement, that, "Green is the new gold and local is the new green," proclaimed by Steve Salsberg, Green Business Summit master of ceremonies, vice chairman of the Council on the Environment of New York City and head of the Salsberg Group. In his inaugural remarks, Salsberg said that Baby Boomers such as he must realize they have a lot of catching up to do: Generation Y, perhaps 100 million strong, is now in college and demanding changes that would rescue the city and the nation from environmental ruin. Polls taken among them reveal far less concern with such matters as Mideast wars than with the quality of the air, earth and water.

The summit comprised six hours of simultaneous classroom forums, exhibitions and a lunch. Out of it came a lot of talk about what must be done and several suggestions about how it might be done, either at large or, of course, in Queens. At one of the first forums, Erica Brabon, standing between those age groups, denounced the bottled water on the table before her, signifying a break from what was once thought healthy and progressive. Brabon, of Steven Winter Associates, which consults on building systems, reviewed a few policies for bringing office buildings in line with more sustainable lighting and temperature standards, but said if they are not mandated and kept in place, they will lapse. At the same meeting, Jamila Payne, a women's clothing entrepreneur associated with the Queens Economic Development Corporation, said that anyone working at a company dedicated to sustainability should know its mission statement by heart. Also a panelist at the meeting was Robbie Wadhams, of a Buffalo company with a telling name: Energy Curtailment Specialists.

A forum on green design moved one of its participants, Ellen Honigstock, a Brooklynbased architect, to hail the virtues of green roofs and conclude: "Green roofs rock!" Describing a green roof was the architect Julie Nelson, who designed a prize-winning one, the roof at the Queens Botanical Garden, on Main Street in Flushing. It covers the underground Helen M. Marshall Auditorium, the largest part of the garden's building. It must be compared to the roof of the visitors' lobby in the QBG building, adjacent to the auditorium, for the way each roof deals with the arrangement of water capture and current all around the garden. The building has been awarded highest, or platinum, status in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) classification.

A contrasting forum covered the topic of brownfields, sites that have to be cleared of industrial pollution before any new structures may be built on them. The city has proposed relieving the state of the cleanup duty for brownfields within the boroughs. Karen Neal Minter, an attorney, spoke of tax credits that, if granted, can benefit a developer for five taxable years if the site is properly cleared of pollution. Yale Klat, another lawyer, described the cleanup of two sites that aroused controversy on social issues but got high marks for pollution clearance: Ikea in Brooklyn's Red Hook and Greyston Bakery in Yonkers. Ikea, a "big box" furniture dealer, had multiple acres to clean, half of them under water. Greyston had an acre and a half to clean in order to expand its facilities while remaining in Yonkers. Ikea built parkland on old docking areas and has used 140,000 square feet of rooftop as green roof and other green ventures. Greyston got its acreage cleaned, built the bakery extension, hired ex-offenders, was a feature on "60 Minutes" and was selected by Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream as that company's exclusive source of brownies—thus going from brownfield to brownies.

In the forum on green jobs, Antuan Cannon, who has a Web site called Envirolution, described his work on what he calls the Win-Win Campaign, which is promoting small business energy and carbon efficiency on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It's an outreach program to interest college students in working for sustainability. It is limited to men and women 18 to 24 who learn energy auditing, sales and marketing and Web technology. The program has a total of 30 students who work in five teams monitoring resource use throughout a neighborhood. Baye Adofo-Wilson, executive director of the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District in Newark, followed Cannon. Operating out of a LEED-classified building in Newark, the first such building in New Jersey, Lincoln Park, through a group called Youthbuild, integrates strategies for sustainability and building green on current infrastructure. Following Wilson, Myles Lennon of Urban Agenda said his group works to create real demand for green jobs. New York state has $172 million earmarked for energy efficiency, but few workers are able to carry out the program. Contractors told Lennon there are few trained workers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's One Million Trees project is an example of an energy efficiency venture needing implementers, in this case climbers and pruners. Lennon said that trees in their first two years of life are in greatest need of care lest they die—but such caregivers are in short supply or in need of training.