Helping the Working Man

Did you see that story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's "Personal Journal" section a couple of days ago, about how companies are taking emergency measures to help their employees deal with high fuel costs?

• One company gave everyone a $50 bonus in their paychecks to offset some of the cost.
• Some companies are providing van pooling or other company-sponsored transportation.
• Some are increasing reimbursable mileage rates or providing cost-of-living raises.
• One company is subsidizing employees' cost of fuel for traveling to work.
• Another is subsidizing their cost for public transportation.
• Another negotiated a discounted membership fee for its employees at a warehouse club that sells gasoline.
• Microsoft (who else would have the resources?) leased two large office complexes that are closer to home for lots of their employees.
• And -- my personal favorite -- one company pays 100% of employees' fuel costs if they agree to wrap their cars in the company's branding (60% of the employees have taken them up on it).

Why am I telling you all this? Because high fuel prices are bad for people and bad for companies.

These companies aren't taking these measures because they've had a sudden onset of beneficence. They're doing it because they're afraid their employees will quit because it's too expensive to get there. One expert cited in the article also pointed out that financial problems are a source of stress that can make employees less productive. So companies are biting the bullet and doing what they can to help, out of their own self-interest.

Once again, I'm left scratching my head.

Once again, I have to ask, What the heck is it going to take before we recognize that the answer is right in front of us?! We can lower our fuel costs by creating our own domestic source of energy instead of importing it. By using the renewable resource represented by solid waste, we can generate our own energy, solve a nasty waste problem, and contribute to the arrest of global warming. I know it can work because it is working. In Carthage, Missouri, where a subsidiary of our company is producing and selling 20,000 gallons of renewable diesel every day to local companies who use it for boiler fuel. So what we are waiting for? For our energy policy-makers to wake up before the cost of fuel bankrupts our economy.

Divided Nation

Last week I was in Jefferson City, Missouri to meet with environmental regulators and was surprised to hear that a bill was being debated singling out the RES plant for odors in Carthage, Missouri. What a coincidence that I was able to participate in the discussions. What I found was hope and a rekindled confidence in the leadership of the State. Many of the people I met including some who were initially supporting what we believe was an unfair attack on the facility were more interested in how they could help so that more waste-to-oil facilities could be built solving three huge issues. That being waste disposal, energy production and global warming. Many comments were what a great idea to turn a burdensome liability, waste, into oil and fertilizer. We believe we have the majority of support for what we are doing in Missouri, the Show Me State. We believe that even our worst critics will come around because it is the right thing to do.



The majority of the people I spoke with get the point that we need to help industry and not chase it away. RES is selling fuel and fertilizer locally. Two large industrial entities are able to reduce energy cost while using a green fuel and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Local farmers are happy applying an organic fertilizer at a discount to chemical fertilizers, putting the wealth back into the land so it produces abundant crops.



The dedicated staff at Carthage should be commended for making this dream come true for turning waste into oil despite the exaggerated complaints and the attacks on them to keep a nuisance lawsuit alive. It is hard to believe that the nation is so divided on so many issues and a local plant that is truly amazing appears to have divided the town. We do not believe that the nation or the town are divided, but the story sure helps sell papers. You would think that even the small group of purported activist looking at the big issues facing our communities and nation would ask how to help instead of how to kill what the whole world needs; a waste to energy facility in every community.

The Ethanol Debate Heats Up

An interesting debate about corn-based ethanol and its role in the run-up on global corn prices has emerged in the last few weeks. Advocates and foes are waging battle in the popular media. BusinessWeek, for example, has articles on both sides of the issue in this week's edition. Where, not all that long ago, ethanol was being almost universally haled (by those who invested in it and those who wish they had) as the "answer" to the U.S. energy crisis, now there is a sudden chorus of naysayers decrying the impact ethanol is already having on world food stores, by diverting food crops into the energy supply chain and critics claiming that it takes more btu's to produce ethanol than ethanol saves as an alternative energy supply.

I have no doubt whatsoever that corn-as-fuel is bad energy policy but an important agricultural crop. There is no doubt that demand for ethanol has driven up the price of corn, a basic food staple, to the point of in-affordability for people around the world who depend on it for their daily caloric intake. One article quotes Patrick S. Schnable, a professor from Iowa State University -- smack in the corn-growing center of the world -- as saying, "Crops will go to the highest bidder, and we in the Western world are willing to pay more for fuel than poor people are able to pay for food."

"Of course, it's impossible to divert nearly one-quarter of the corn crop to fuel without causing prices to rise. Corn is now around $5.50 per bushel, more than double its price in 2005," BW says in a different article on page 60. (In fairness, the article also says the price increase in corn has had a "relatively small impact" on global food prices in general. Which may be true, but corn is the basis for the sudden world market in ethanol, which by the way, has done nothing to stop oil prices from reaching new record highs almost daily).

While scientists and industrialists continue to debate the relative merits of corn-based ethanol and to pursue other potential agricultural feedstocks for alternative energy, Changing World Technologies is successfully producing and selling commercial-grade oil from waste material. That's right. Waste. The stuff that companies pay to get rid of. The stuff that floats around on barges with nowhere to unload. The stuff that accumulates in places like the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, the largest garbage dump it the world, which some residents fear may be a source of local spikes in the incidence of cancer.

The waste we use at our plant in Carthage, Missouri, is mostly turkey offal (the parts unfit for human consumption) from a local food processing plant, but any carbon-based feedstock will work. Oh, and by the way, not only are we turning a low-value waste stream into a high-value energy source, we are also demonstrating the only proven-effective way to rid the food chain of BSE, the protein that causes Mad Cow Disease.

More on this later. For now, I'll keep my eye on the ethanol match. It's hard to tell whose court the ball is in, but one thing's for sure. There's no love in this game.