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Sustainability director David Galvin discusses Kokomo's plans PDF Print
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Special - Sustainability
Written by by Joe Klemann / Staff Writer   
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 17:48
Recently the Correspondent had the pleasure of interviewing the sustainability director of Mayor Goodnight’s Department of Development, David Galvin, and questioning him about the recent movement towards environmentally and economically sustainable systems by local government. Mr. Galvin was a graduating member of the University of International Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Galvin begins, “I’ve read about cities around the state that have Sustainability Directors. I love the one in Fort Wayne; they have a title for their person, and her name is Wendy Barrott, Director of Energy and Environmental Services. She’s my counterpart in Fort Wayne. There are only a few cities in Indiana - four or maybe five that have a position like this one. Of those four or five, I’m the only one that’s not an engineer;, all the rest are engineers. One is environmental - the guy in Bloomington. Wendy is a civil engineer. The others are civil and mechanical engineers. So I contacted Wendy and said to her, ‘your approach to this is different than mine. I’m thinking on the left side; you’re thinking on the right side.’ So, we’re creating a network to not only bring the four or five of us together but so that our city government can then go to other city governments and encourage them to train them or help them. Then, we’re a high performance government network. We’re talking with them now.”
Mr. Galvin talked about the K-Fuel biodiesel production facility recently created at Kokomo’s Waste Management Facility saying, “This modern economy everyone is talking about is really happening.”
“The Chicago Carbon Exchange […] are saying they’re sure its going to take off. There are a lot of questions to be answered. What are ‘carbon credits’ worth? How do you assign a value? […] because if it’s too expensive, you’ll just shut companies down, and that’s counterproductive to what we’re trying to do. Where is the happy medium there? Where those who are pursuing reduction in their carbon footprint don’t destroy or literally shut down those who aren’t. Does Nuclear energy get carbon credits?”
To illustrate how “behind the times” America had become and to show examples of other countries where these systems worked, Mr. Galvin related his own personal experiences overseas.
“While I was in Sweden for the winter, I took the bus., And the buses had all been just converted or bought new buses that run on what they called it ‘Biogas’ which was biodiesel. They were doing that in 98’. And then I took a train from Stockholm to the southern tip of Sweden. While I was on the train, we went through wind turbines, huge wind turbines, fields of them all over Southern Sweden, and this was in 98’. When I got to my apartment, I had a trashcan with three compartments and three bags you could buy at the grocery store. They would fit inside the compartments, so you could separate [to recycle]. They didn’t do single stream recycling back then. The big debate in Sweden then was how to recycle something called ‘Tetrapack’ because it was wax and cardboard and difficult to separate and recycle. That was the debate, not whether or not to recycle at all.”
“Brian Haley, who’s a political writer, I was telling him how everyone is ‘doom and gloom’ about the economy. At our K-Fuel there were six upstart companies that are building technologies that are totally self-sustainable and low energy, and totally based in dewatering, biomass, electrical, diesel, fuel sources. They came to Kokomo because they’d heard about what we we’re going to do. The reason why was Ted Griffin out of Griffin Environmental in Kentucky. I said, ‘you know we can’t pay for some of these things, they are [an] expensive process of 3-5 million dollars.’ He’s like ‘No, no. The reason why we’re coming up here; we’re going to do a pilot process that costs next to nothing from you from you guys, because we can pay for this thing with carbon credits and the [payment] we’re going to receive for dewatering crap and selling it. We came up here because you guys have the right attitude.’” He went on to explain that if these companies come through, it will create a diversification of the local economy.
Mr. Galvin explained the benefits of the K-Fuel process on the environment in 12 months time with only 20 percent of Diesel fuel being substituted with K-Fuel, “We will reduce our carbon output by 500 pounds, our Diesel particulate matter output by almost 400 pounds, and we’ll eliminate our Sulfur Dioxide emissions by almost 5,000 pounds.” He explained their goal is 30 percent fuel replacement. “We produce 2,200 gallons a month [of K-Fuel] and we use 10,000 gallons a month. So that’s 2,000 gallons of fuel we don’t have to pay for.”
“In the end, all these things, all these projects I’ve been talking about. They all fit under the larger concept that is the Economic and Environmental Sustainability Plan. Underneath that is what we called K.R.E.P. (Kokomo Renewable Energy Plan).”
Mr. Galvin commented on the hard work of other city employees that has helped make K.R.E.P. a reality, praising Mayor Greg Goodnight, Chris Cooper the Waste Water Management superintendent, Paul Munoz, and the City Attorney. He explained, “...It takes a certain kind of leadership too, not just to pick them up and implement them, but to figure out how to make a system out of it. That takes open-minded leadership. The Mayor is in here almost every day asking how this project or that project is coming along. He’s not a biologist or a sustainability guy, he’s is genuinely interested in it.”
David illustrated how K-Fuel brought together local government, “Literally, every department in the city worked together to figure out how to put K-Fuel into action. It wasn’t even part of the plan; it just kind of organically happened. It was necessary for the Department of Development to know what Sanitation was doing. It was absolutely necessary for Sanitation to know what Waste Water was doing. They usually don’t interact at all. The guys from the Street Department, have to communicate with the Waste Water Treatment guy to figure out how much Diesel they use. All [of] K-Fuel was also a leadership movement by the Mayor to show that we don’t have to be rocket scientists to figure this out.”
“The things that are on the board are nothing new. All these things are being done. People are making their own biodiesel, not in the same quantities we are, but they’re doing it. We’re not the only ones going to be dewatering biomass. We’re not the only one putting in vegetative roots or solar panels. Some people in Cleveland have a four megawatt turbine near downtown. We’re not doing that. The brownfields and ‘brightfield’ that’s another process and biodigesters [are another]. We’re a rarity in Indiana that we don’t have biodigesters. What is new is showing people how to tie it together so that they feed off each other. Which are not necessarily closed loop systems, because in the end they create jobs.”
“We have been in talks with a company that uses gravity to destroy trash. Weak acid reactions and gravity and the weak acid reaction is the recapture of CO2, concentrated and injected back down a 2,000 foot tube into the ground, and it hits the pulp that the municipal solid waste has been ground up into. Then it extracts the gas that is necessary for the manufacture and production of Methanol, which can be converted to a number of things: jet fuel for one, and it destroys 90 percent of our trash. The stuff that rises to the top of the tubes, is in the 10 percent we don’t destroy, is this inert material that looks like ‘cream of wheat’ to me and that material is skimmed off. Now they’re in tests to see if they can use that material as road-bed fill or an additive to concrete. Each one of these gigantic wind towers takes a million yards of concrete, each turbine. T. Boone Pickens’ idea is to build turbines all throughout the Great Plains and on. We don’t have it. China right now is consuming almost 50 percent of the world’s concrete and almost 60 percent of the world’s steel. China, just China. So, concrete can actually be scarce? I mean it’s hard to believe. You don’t think about it; you think you can just go get some dirt and some water. People don’t think about it.”
“This process, this trash to gas facility, Sandusky Biofuels, and Kokomo’s Apollo Project is here. With the Waste Water Treatment plant, we really believe we can put 1,800 solar panels on that rooftop. It will be the largest single array in Indiana, outside of Brownfields.”
When asked about his relations with other Green movements in the country, he had the following to say, “First of all, let’s stop with the ‘Green [excrement].’ he motioned to a pile of pamphlets, “Green, Green, Green! I can’t even go to that!” he commented after looking at the top of the pile, “I recycle all that trust me. What they do is take you in, and they do have brilliant ideas.”
Mr. Galvin explained an example of his frustration with the Green movement, “There are these things called curb-cuts. You cut out part of the curb so that it diverts part of the rain water instead of going into the sewer so that it flows into a rain garden. It works. I’ve seen it. I think it’s on Youtube actually. They have two roads side by side; one is developed like the one outside [of City Hall] and they have one that’s done with permeable material and rain gardens. You dump 5,000 gallons of water at the end. The one that has the regular setup ends up with 3,000 gallons at the bottom of the road, and the other side ends up with only 800 gallons. I know it works, but the problem is, so what? You still in the end have rain water going into your sewers. That can be a problem with some cities. Kokomo is actually ahead of the curve. Rain gardens and these curb cuts actually require a lot of maintenance. So that means you have to put people to work to maintain these things or hire somebody to come do it, and it’s not like you do it all at once.”
He explained the varying stories he’s heard on maintenance dates for these curb cuts and rain gardens from 5-10 years. “You talk about a green roof and everyone wants to put a green roof on everything. That’s fine, but what’ve you done? Other than saving some energy here, you’ve created some temporary jobs and reduced the electrical bill. Lets do this first; lets do the green roof here [at City Hall] and lets put some solar panels on it so we can actually put some energy back into the building, but we can also create temporary jobs. But if you include this-green roof project-in a system where you use it to bring an energy company to the table where they get to reduce their carbon footprint by a little bit and then you bring in companies to install these solar panels who are Kokomo-based labor. They’ve never installed solar panels before. So now they have a new expertise to add to their resume. Now this company can go out to Lafayette. Maybe, we show other cities how to do it. They can expand that idea. You take and you use it and promote as a means for the city to improve its economic environment. Now you’ve done something. At the same time, we effect the environment. Now that we’ve done this, we’ve created some savings and created some partnerships, and people understand more of what we’re doing, there is also the element that’s not really talked about and that’s the public relations side of it. Now we actually have some ‘swagger.’ Then we can justify putting in curb cut outs and things like that, and we can pay for it or be in a position to better afford it.”
“That’s the funny thing, all these green conferences are all over the country, and they’re almost never next door. Almost none of them provide Webinars [Web Seminars]. They always want you to fly to them. The big ‘green-thing’ is in Portland in October. Its $400 to go this thing. That’s not counting my ticket or my hotel. It’s a lot of money; we could afford it. The budgets are designed to set money aside, but the problem is it zaps all of our funds for one person to go.
So I asked the lady if she had webinars so they might do something with a webinar, but it won’t be released until a week afterwards, which is fine.”
Mr. Galvin gave the Correspondent a formula that the mayor’s office works off of for deciding if a specific system or process is worthwhile. To show the difference, it was compared to the standard formula our society works with: I = P x A x T. Which “I” represents impact of the environment and “P” is equal to population, “A” equal to income, and “T” is equal to technology. The mayor’s office and Mr. Galvin’s formula: I = P x A / S, where “S” is equal to Sustainable Systems Technology.
“That formula is something that basically says this too, that the reason why it fails - we in Kokomo don’t build cars. We build car parts for cars that run off of petroleum. So we have two other markets before us. […] A pipeline gets blown up in Iraq, gas prices go up and people have credit problems, people buy less cars, and people in Kokomo lose their jobs. So why don’t we move up from being at the bottom of the economic food chain and try to be on top of it? That’s the whole goal of the whole thing: control your economic situation, but at the same time, try to make sure people remember that manufacturing for these types of processes are not labor intensive. It's highly automated systems, robots making parts are what it’s about. Folks no longer need to work about the muscles in their arms, but the muscles in between their ears. We have to improve the education of our work force.” David Galvin revealed his desire to see a return to a capitalist model with more competition and less monopoly influence.
“When I first told the Mayor, that you could capture the CO2 off the generators that are running off of methane from our Waste Water Treatment, feed that CO2 into some algae beds, and create algae to clean up the CO2, and the algae will create oxygen as well as become biomass, he said ‘Okay, keep that to yourself for a while.’” He mentioned that Duke Energy was planning a similar program in North Carolina and that three or four major airlines have powered large jets off of Algae: Japan Airlines, Continental, Lufthansa, and Cathay Pacific.
Mr. Galvin was quick to say that he doesn’t believe that these systems are the end of our advancement and speculates that better technology will be found in the future, whether that is Fusion power or similar unimagined sources of energy. For the time being, he promotes the use of Sustainable Systems.
Mr. Galvin recommended the book “Common Wealth” by Jeffrey Sachs as reading material to help understand the growing concerns and possible solutions of a world economy. “That book should be put on every college student’s [reading list]. I don’t care if you’re taking underwater basket-weaving. It is really something.” He also recommended a website called www.TED.com as a free 24/7 web-seminar online channel, with speakers such as Bill Gates on a variety of topics from music to technology.