Eyes & Ears: Do you speak green? Learn the language or get left behind

If you haven’t been around the eco-culture much, this dialect may be foreign to you. Those speaking it are so proficient that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. But we must in this new, ultra-environmentally conscious world, from the personal level to corporate culture.

On this cold February weekend, the Ozarks New Energy Conference brought to Gillioz Theatre and surrounding sites, including the environmentally friendly Discovery Center, plenty of environmental data and talk of changing millions of light bulbs, reducing vehicles on the roads and emissions, developing wind farms and discovering biofuel plants.

But a message of personal responsibility appeared to cut through all of the prose.

“We did it!” read www.ozarksnewenergy.org after the conference. “The Ozarks New Energy Conference was the region’s first comprehensive conference of ideas and solutions to address the energy crunch. And it was the state of Missouri’s first conference specifically exploring alternative fuels and technologies to oil, natural gas and coal and the technologies that support them.”

After some of my own digging on government, construction and design sites, here’s a handful of green buzz words to get you speaking green:

Greenhouse gases (GHG): Chemical compounds found in the Earth’s atmosphere allow sunlight to enter. When sunlight strikes the Earth’s surface, some of it is reflected back toward space as infrared radiation (heat). Greenhouse gases absorb this infrared radiation and trap the heat in the atmosphere. Over time, the amount of energy sent from the sun to the Earth’s surface should be about the same as the amount of energy radiated back into space, leaving the temperature of the Earth’s surface roughly constant.

Net-zero energy: A net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the course of a year. Net-zero energy buildings typically use renewable energy generated on site.

Construction waste management plan: A plan that diverts construction debris from landfills through conscientious plans to recycle, salvage and reuse.

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS): Provides states with a mechanism to increase renewable energy generation using a cost-effective, market-based approach. An RPS requires electric utilities to supply a specified minimum amount of customer load with electricity from eligible renewable energy sources. The goal of an RPS is to make renewable energy economically competitive with conventional forms of electric power. Missouri does not have an RPS, but it does have RPS goals.

Biomass: Organic material made from plants and animals. Biomass is a renewable energy source because trees and crops can always be planted, and waste will always exist. Some examples of biomass fuels are wood, crops and manure.

Biofuels: Liquid fuels that biomass is converted into, mostly to help meet transportation fuel needs. The two most common types of biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel.

Biosolids: Nutrient-rich organic materials resulting from the treatment of sewage sludge – the name for the solid, semisolid or liquid untreated residue generated during the treatment of domestic sewage in a treatment facility. When treated and processed under federal and state rules, biosolids can be safely recycled and applied as soil fertilizer.

Cradle-to-cradle: A concept that prescribes at the end of a product’s useful life, the product will decompose entirely with no negative environmental impact.

Cradle-to-grave: These types of products are used for a period of time and then discarded, often long before their useful life is actually complete.

Embodied energy: All the energy used to grow, extract and manufacture a product including the amount of energy needed to transport it to the jobsite and complete the installation.

Thermal comfort: The appropriate combination of temperatures, warm or cool, combined with air flow and humidity. This comfort is usually achieved through careful design and planning.

Springfield Business Journal Editor Eric Olson can be reached at eolson@sbj.net.