The Job Training Incentive Program (JTIP) board approved $243,528 in funds at their October meeting, creating 46 new jobs and providing funding for the training of two additional positions.
“Sustained job growth is essential to the success of New Mexico,” said Economic Development Department Cabinet Secretary Fred Mondragón. “Both the JTIP and their associated “Step Up” program ensure that businesses have the tools necessary to meet their expansion needs.”
This month’s JTIP recipients are:
ClosedWon, LLC- Albuquerque- providing consultation and integration services for customers deploying Salesforce.com based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and related IT business systems-$18,500- 1 new job
Visible Light Solar Technologies, Inc.- Albuquerque- an intelligent solar and LED technology lighting company-$221,250- 45 jobs created
Animas Environmental Services, LLC - Farmington – an environmental engineering consulting firm that provides services to the Mountain West -$3778- used “Step Up” to train two employees
About JTIP
The Job Training Incentive Program (JTIP) reimburses qualified economic-based companies for a significant portion of training costs associated with job creation. It provides for classroom or on-the-job training, reimbursing an expanding or relocating business for 50-80 percent of a trainee’s wages for as long as six months.
To qualify, new or expanding companies must either create a product in New Mexico, or provide a non-retail service with 50 percent of the company’s customer and revenue base outside of the state. The eligible jobs must be full-time and year-round. The trainee must be a new hire to the company and have been a New Mexico resident for at least one continuous year at any time prior to being hired.
About “Step Up”
“Step Up” reimburses qualified companies in rural New Mexico 50% of the cost to provide training for existing employees, up to $2000 per employee.
For more information on JTIP, visit www.goNM.biz
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Trees for Troops has delivered more than 50,000 fresh Christmas trees grown by American farmers to military families across the nation and around the world since 2005. It is a program of the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation (CSF), a non-for-profit charity, along with support from FedEx Corp. Since its inception, citizens have expressed interest in participating in the program, but didn’t know how to do that since they didn’t farm trees or work for Fed Ex.
Now in its fifth year, Trees for Troops offers a new way for others to support the program. CSF is recruiting volunteers to coordinate locally-hosted fundraising events during Veteran’s Day week. These grassroots events, called “TweetUp4Troops,” are a great way to show support for veterans, raise money for the Trees for Troops program and have fun! Whether you organize a car wash or trivia night, sell raffle tickets or find a creative way to allow your business to support the program, all contributions raised go to support the Trees for Troops program and military families. To get involved by hosting an event in your area, visit www.TweetUp4Troops.org and fill out a Local Host Registration Form.
About Trees for Troops
Trees for Troops is the pilot program of the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation. Created in 2005, the program works with corporate sponsor FedEx to collect fresh, farm-grown Christmas trees from American farmers to distribute to military families. In the past four years, the program has delivered more than 50,000 Christmas Trees to bases around the world.
About Christmas SPIRIT Foundation
The Christmas SPIRIT Foundation is the 501(c)(3) charitable branch of the National Christmas Tree Association established to advance the spirit of Christmas for kids, families and the environment. Visit www.christmasspiritfoundation.org for more information.
Filed under: FMR, Video | Tagged: christmas, Families, Giving, Holiday, humanitarian, philanthropy, Soldiers, Troops | Leave a Comment »
Filed under: Video | Tagged: Business, Communication, CSR, Employees, Employers, Ireland, Local Markets | Leave a Comment »
Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (CCH) has opened the first of 15 high-technology power plants at its facility in Poliesti, Romania. This rollout will continue across 12 other countries, including 8 member states.
Filed under: News, Video | Tagged: Coca Cola Hellenic, Conservation, CSR, Emissions, energy, Environment, Europe, Romania, Technology | Leave a Comment »
Filed under: Video | Tagged: Community, CSR, Eco-conscious, Education, environmental, Environmentalist, Program, Training, Youth | Leave a Comment »
Residents of the city of Rizhao claim to be the first Chinese to greet the sun each day as it rises from the Yellow Sea. In fact, the city’s name is a condensed form of the Chinese phrase ri qu shien zhao, which literally means “first to get sunshine.” They also make some of the best use of the more than 100 kilowatt-hours of power the sun pours down on each square meter of Earth over the course of a sunny day.
Though Rizhao’s 3 million residents are seemingly overshadowed by nearby Qingdao—a larger city famous worldwide for its eponymous beer (you might know it as Tsingtao)—Rizhao boasts perhaps a bigger distinction: It is the first city in all of China to pledge to become carbon-neutral.
That China has surpassed the United States to become the leading emitter of greenhouse gases is no secret. The Chinese curse on the climate will have to be reckoned with, but the Chinese also have a gift to give the world: developing cheap renewable energy sources, particularly solar power. Low-cost manufacturing in China is transforming the entire array of clean energy sources, like previously expensive photovoltaic cells—and, in the process, helping to clean up the world’s energy supply.
Witness Rizhao. Rooftops in newly constructed apartment blocks as well as on the houses in the surrounding countryside are often covered in angled panels of dark tubing. The tubes soak up sunlight, using its warmth to heat water within and eliminate the need to burn fossil fuel or suck up electricity for that purpose. Such solar hot-water heaters are mandatory, and are responsible (along with all the city’s other solar efforts) for cutting energy use compared to alternatives by 348 million kilowatt-hours per year—cutting greenhouse gases at the same time. That’s enough electricity to power more than 30,000 U.S. homes for a year.
Indeed, China has become the world’s largest market for and producer of such solar hot-water devices, which have become cheaper than traditional electric or gas-fired varieties thanks to this growing demand. Companies like Himin Solar Energy Group churn out solar hot-water heaters from factories big enough to build jumbo jets; China as a whole installed 246 million square feet of solar hot-water-heater panels in 2007.
And it’s not just hot water that Rizhao gets from the sun, as evidenced by the gleaming arrays of blue-black photovoltaic cells beneath the lampposts lining the seashore of this resort town.
Rizhao has company in its use of the sun. In Jiangsu Province outside Shanghai lies China’s “Solar Valley,” which took its name from our own Silicon Valley, and which focuses on the same element. After all, silicon, a semiconductor, is an important component of both computer chips and solar cells.
Suntech, a photovoltaic company with the world’s largest production capacity and JA Solar both have facilities in Jiangsu; globally, Suntech can churn out enough panels in a year to produce—under ideal conditions—1 gigawatt of energy.
Suntech alone has given China—and the world—its first solar billionaire: Shi Zhengrong, who has built the company into a solar powerhouse since its founding, in 2001. And unlike competitors such as Q-Cells, from Germany; Sharp, from Japan; and the U.S.-based SunPower; among others, Suntech has opted not to automate its production processes.
“We’ve chosen to rely on labor for the obvious reason of cost: Labor rates are so much lower [in China],” says Steve Chadima, the U.S. spokesman for Suntech. “We can more easily crank up or down our operations depending on market demand.”
And it’s not just workers that come cheap in China: “Glass, aluminum—all those materials are less expensive in China than they are in the U.S. or Europe,” Chadima notes. “All the way around there’s low cost.”
That has led many foreign manufacturers to open operations in China or elsewhere in Asia. Evergreen Solar, for example, a Massachusetts-based company, recently opened a Chinese factory, while panel producer First Solar has built several factories capable of cranking out more than 500 megawatts’ worth of solar cells in Malaysia.
And that means, ultimately, cheap solar power. “It’s very possible to get down to something in the range of one dollar per watt to manufacture a silicon solar panel,” Chadima says, though U.S. panel prices in July were more than $4.50 per watt.
But, as an example, Chadima points to the 30-megawatt system that the power company Austin Energy is building with Suntech PV modules in Texas. Austin Energy expects to charge just 17 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity. That’s not much more than the roughly 13 cents per kilowatt-hour residential customers paid on average for electricity this past May in that state.
“In the case of solar, China has an advantage in its manufacturing capacity,” says Li Junfeng, the secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association. “It can produce large quantities of products at a relatively low cost.”
Cheap, in this case, does not mean poor quality. Suntech, for example, is considered one of the top five solar-cell producers in the world in terms of quality and has been used in projects from Germany to the United States.
“Within three to four years, we’ll be talking about the pure economic benefit of photovoltaics.”
Like its international competitors, Suntech offers a range of products, including advanced solar cells; its highly efficient, more expensive Pluto module can turn as much as 19 percent of the sunlight that falls on it into electricity. “In this case, you’ve got essentially a company known as a low-cost leader but, at the same time, introducing some of the highest technology in the world,” notes Bates Marshall of Sixtron, a Canadian company that peddles solar-cell-manufacture technology.
Across the market, however, quality can still be a concern. While some of the finest solar cells in the world come from China, there are a host of smaller companies producing even cheaper, lower-quality cells. “There are three to five name-brand module companies and maybe 160 total module manufacturers,” Marshall adds. There are “a lot of no-name panels coming out of China that have some dubious quality.”
Regardless, as soon as 2011, Marshall predicts, modules could cost as little as $1.40 apiece, which will put them in the same price range as other energy sources. “Within three to four years, we’ll be talking about the pure economic benefit of photovoltaics,” Marshall says.
And that’s just in the United States. “All the solar photovoltaics are for export with a very small share for domestic use,” CREIA’s Li notes of Chinese-made solar panels. But “Chinese companies are being optimistic about the future because the government has set all these targets for carbon-emission reduction.”
Rizhao, for its part, has a host of clean competitors—and that’s a good thing. Dezhou City, also in Shandong Province, boasts Himin’s 200,000-square-foot factory for making solar hot-water heaters as well as other solar-power manufactures. Baoding, a city in Hebei Province, offers solar, wind, and other renewable energy manufacturing. And Wuxi, in Jiangsu, is home to Suntech, among others. The Chinese government, for its part, aims to install 1.8 gigawatts of solar power nationwide by 2020—but expects to more than quadruple that goal on current progress.
Rizhao is one of just four cities worldwide to even attempt so-called carbon neutrality (the others being Arendal, Norway; Vancouver, Canada; and Växjö, Sweden), according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
To reach its goal, Rizhao will have to employ an arsenal of environmental improvements, from a so-called circular economy, in which industrial waste gets cycled back as energy, to harvesting the power offered for free by the city’s 260 days of yearly sunshine.
As a result of these efforts, Rizhao, unlike the rest of China, is using nearly a third less energy while cutting its carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent.
Solar, it seems, is rising in the east.
Top photo by Derek Brown, lower photo by Rhett A. Butler
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
A more sophisticated approach needs to be taken towards the development of biofuels if the emerging industry is to ensure it does not damage the environment, according to a major new UN report released last week.
The report, the first by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, concludes that some first-generation biofuels, such as ethanol produced from sugar cane, can deliver net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It calculates that extracting ethanol from sugar cane, as currently practiced in countries such as Brazil, can lead to emission reductions of between 70 per cent, and more than 100 per cent when the fuel is substituted for petrol.
But it also echoes previous studies that warned some biofuels are leading to net increases in carbon emissions, calculating that the use of biodiesel from palm oil plantations grown on deforested peatlands, for example, results in greenhouse gas emissions that are up to 2,000 per cent greater than those generated from fossil fuels.
In addition, the report states categorically that biofuel adoption targets in developed countries, such as the UK’s Renewable Fuel Transport Obligation, are contributing to land use changes in developing countries – a position long held by environmental groups that have argued that biofuel demand is indirectly contributing to deforestation in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.
The report estimates that globally between 118 and 508 million hectares of cropland would be needed to meet 10 per cent of worldwide transport fuel demand by 2030 if first-generation biofuels are used.
Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UN Environment Programme, argued there was a need for a more sophisticated debate on biofuel use, saying they are neither a panacea nor a pariah.
“On one level it is a debate about which energy crops to grow and where, and about the way different countries and biofuel companies promote and manage the production and conversion of plant materials for energy purposes,” he said. “On another level it is a choice about how humanity best manages its finite land bank and balances a range of competing interests in a world of six billion people, rising to more than nine billion by 2050.”
The report notes that generating electricity at local power stations using wood, straw, seed oils and other crop or waste materials “is generally more energy efficient that converting biomass to liquid fuels”. And it argues that while using abandoned land to produce energy crops is preferable to clearing virgin land for plantations, it is often more efficient still to use abandoned land for reforestation or solar power projects.
“Using abandoned or so-called waste land for biofuels might be a sensible option, but it may also have implications for biodiversity, and greenhouse gas emissions might be better cut by forestry schemes,” the report states.
Additionally, it warns that higher fuel efficiency standards and the development of alternative technologies, such as plug-in vehicles, could dramatically reduce emissions from the transport sector without the need for biofuels.
Despite its implicit criticism of the EU’s plans to increase use of biofuels, the report was welcomed by Timo Mäkelä of the European Commission, who said it would help in the design and implementation of new targets and sustainability criteria for the use of biofuels.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
A couple of weeks ago, the folks I follow on Twitter (a terrific bunch of CSR and social enterprise experts) were all abuzz about a New York Times article that told the story of a young woman from Minnesota. What was all the fuss?
Well, it turns out that this woman, 22 year-old Stephanie Smith, ate a bad hamburger – made from E.coli-laden beef – and it paralyzed her.
We’ve all heard about E.coli and the illness it causes, but Stephanie’s story was shocking in its seriousness. While her case is extreme, she’s actually just one out of tens of thousands of people who have been sickened by 16 different E.coli outbreaks in just the last three years alone.
In addition to the article, the NY Times made a 9-minute video that chronicles her story – although I wasn’t able to embed it here, you can visit their site and watch it yourself (I highly recommend it).
This story hit home for me on a few different levels.
On a professional level, I am very interested in sustainability and specifically the ways in which businesses can demonstrate their commitment to corporate citizenship through positive environmental action. Given the fact that livestock production is the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in America, I have spent quite a bit of time considering just how broken this system of production really is, as well as what can be done to reduce the industry’s environmental impact going forward.
On a personal level, however, food production is important to me because I want to be conscious of what I put in my body. Marketers know that consumers (especially those labeled “green”) are most concerned with products that go “in me, on me or around me” – and food definitely falls into this category. Thus I try to be as educated as I can about where my food comes from, and use my wallet to show support of businesses that operate in ways that align with my values.
Click here to continue reading.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Days of Radio, Lives of Drama
Silvina Sterín Pensel [2009-09-06] El Diario NY
From a community radio in the Department of Petén, Guatemala, various characters talk about sex and condoms. In another radio station in the small Nicaraguan town of Somoto, near the Honduran border, a fiery dialogue is heard between Don Guillermo, a rich land owner that recklessly exploits the land, and his son, Willy, who follows in his father’s footsteps, degrading the environment and sexually abusing girls from the area. Meanwhile, in Ecuador, in the city of Jipijapa, Manabí, those that tune in to Radio Alfaro 96.1 hear the story of a young girl overcoming the challenges of teen pregnancy, on the weekly broadcast of “Domingo 7.”
These stories are not recounted by a narrator, but rather radio soap operas, acted with passion and fervor by cast members from the community, the majority of who have no theatrical background.
“Many of these individuals are peasants or Indigenous people that live in rural areas where our partner radio stations are located,” explains Brenda Campos, 31, from her office in Manhattan. As Program Manager at PCI-Media Impact, she coordinates all the details to create the radio soap operas that broadcast messages about sex education, HIV/AIDS prevention, family planning, environmental issues and citizen participation.
The key component that enables the radio dramas to achieve their mission – changing certain behaviors of the listeners – is that the radio soap operas are entertaining. “I would say that they are 30% educational and 70% entertaining. If the product is super professional but only educational, the people will get bored and switch the channel or turn it off. We want our audience to be hooked and to keep listening,” Brenda says.
Since 1985, when PCI was founded, Entertainment Education format has been their formula and it has proven to be a successful tool to reduce the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases, motivate women to be independent and to fight for their rights, and to strengthen radio programming in the most remote villages in Latin America. “It’s amazing to see how they function with so few resources,” Brenda mentions. “In El Alto, Bolivia, in an immigrant zone of La Paz near the airport, there is a radio station with cords of PVC hanging and wire antennas; they make do with what they have.”
Brenda left Mexico City, her birthplace, seven years ago to come to New York to work as a volunteer in the Association Tepeyac. Today, Brenda travels throughout Latin America training and assisting community organizations that have been previously selected and given grants from Media Impact. “We select the organizations that best know the problems of their communities and can offer the best solutions and responses. We are not interested in designing posters that say you should get vaccinated. We are interested in sharing information, and then offering the people everything they need so they can go to the hospital to get vaccinated.”
“Simply Maria,” a Peruvian soap opera of the 1960s where a humble domestic worker is able to turn around her fate with hard work and transform herself into a successful businesswoman, was the spark that motivated the creation of PCI Media Impact. “The series shot the sales of sewing machines through the roof amongst low-income women. The soap opera motivated them to want to better themselves.” By the 70s, here in the USA, the Mexican Miguel Sabido and psychologist Albert Bandura from Stanford University analyzed the concept of using soap operas as a vehicle for social change.
Enamored with the documentaries and the power of storytelling via images, Brenda would not resist working on soap operas for television programming, but quickly explains why radio is the chosen medium. “Latin America is tainted by poverty and in many of the places where we work the people do not have televisions, but everyone has a radio at hand. That is why we insist on radio soap operas.” Alliances with NGO’s native to the established place allow the characters and dialogue of the soap operas to be a loyal reflection of the young population of the communities, the principal group we want to reach. “They are the ones that know if Bolivians dance to more cumbia or reggaeton, or whatever the trend of the moment might be amongst the adolescents.”
For now, everything takes place from the border below, but Brenda is eager to expand the programs here as well. “Once we broadcast in California a soap opera that we made in Guadalajara, where the characters dealt with the topic of how to better invest the money they received from their families working in the U.S. Many people use remittances for quinceañeras (Sweet Fifteens) or to buy the latest car, but there are ways to make the money go further, money that was earned with a lot of sweat and tears.” For now, Brenda travels the Latin American continent and is a witness to how the people listen and begin to live soap opera lives.
To view the original article in Spanish, please visit El Diario:
http://www.impre.com/eldiariony/noticias/comunidad/2009/9/6/dias-de-radi…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
