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He said, “earths gases are like the greenhouse’s glass walls.” Napoleon made  him a baron because of this scientific breakthrough. A few decades later John  Tyndall in 1850 showed that when infrared radiation strikes carbon dioxide  molecules with three atoms, they start shaking and trembling and carbon  dioxide molecules flap their bonds like birds. As they flap, they give off energy in the form of more infrared radiation. Some energy goes out in space and half of it returns to the Earth as heat contributing to the greenhouse effect. In April 1896, Arrhenius explained it in the London philosophical magazine that “we are evaporating our coal mines into the air" - published during the reign of Queen Victoria. 

“It’s as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our Taste”  wrote Tyndall in“Science and Man”. 

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, as we were burning and depleting  the planet's fossil fuels, our planet has absorbed pollution and waste to a large  extent. Our oceans can absorb 1/4 of the carbon dioxide emissions that human activity generates each year and capture 90% of the excess heat and generate 50% of the oxygen. The forest absorbs and stores carbon for thousands of years earning a name of natural carbon sinks. Altogether the planet absorbs and emits hundreds of billion tons of carbon dioxide through its natural cycle, and it dwarfs humanity's contribution which is 10 times more by burning fossil fuels. Now this extra chunk of carbon dioxide has tipped out the equilibrium of what was once a balanced cycle.  

Now that we know what the greenhouse effect is and what’s causing it, it’s easy to understand the need for reducing our carbon emissions. The Biden 

administration gave an upbeat news in the form of a blueprint of decarbonization of the nation's transportation system. As the 83-page report  points out, transportation is now the largest source of greenhouse gas  emissions in the USA, responsible for 1/3 of all the emissions. Getting to net  zero, which USA has pledged to by 2050, will require more or less eliminating  these emissions. The passage of the IRA authorizing some 400 billion  dollars (about $1,200 per person in the US) on clean energy was a turning point and could produce emissions cuts as early as this year if the government can fast track implementation. Emissions are down only around 15% using 2005 as the baseline which leaves a 35% cut to be achieved in just 7 years.  

Electric school buses in Illinois can change the emissions drastically as the  current buses are the least efficient vehicles on the road because of long idling  period and diesel power contributing to poor air quality for the developing  lungs of young children.  

All this makes these buses an excellent candidate for electrification.  

Lion electric, a 900,000 square foot facility, the largest all electric U.S. plant  dedicated to medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicle production, sees only  upside in its future where it will be making 20,000 electric vehicles annually.  

At a press conference on July 19th our leaders from Illinois namely Governor  Pritzker, US senators Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth along with EV  advocates and stakeholders made an historic opening with a diesel fuel  hose (ribbon) cutting ceremony.  

Lion Electric is an innovative manufacturer of zero-emission vehicles. The  company creates, designs, and manufactures all-electric class 5 to class 8  commercial urban trucks and all-electric buses and minibuses for the school,  paratransit, and mass transit segments. Lion is a North American leader in  electric transportation and designs, builds and assembles many of its vehicles'  components, including chassis, battery packs, truck cabins and bus bodies.  Always actively seeking new and reliable technologies, Lion vehicles have  unique features that are specifically adapted to its users and their everyday needs. Lion believes that transitioning to all-electric vehicles will lead to major improvements in our society, environment, and overall quality of life.  

...According to Rewiring America, with the Inflation Reduction Act, homeowners and renters are eligible for thousands of dollars in upfront costs or tax credits for energy efficiency improvements, heat pumps, solar, electric vehicle charging, and more. 

For lower income families, starting in 2023 upfront costs are covered up to the amounts shown:

Electric Panel: $4,000

Electric Stove: $840*

Electric Wiring: $2,500

Heat Pump Water Heater: $1,750*

Heat Pump Air Conditioner/Heater: $8,000*

Heat Pump Clothes Dryer: $840*

Weatherization: $1,600

Whole Home Energy Reduction: $8,000 (up to $4,000 for higher income households)

Tax credits are available for any household (some available this year and others starting in 2023):

Battery Storage Installation: 30%

Geothermal Heating Installation: 30%

Electric Panel: $600

New Electric Vehicle: $7,500*

Used Electric Vehicle: $4,000*

Heat Pump Air Conditioner/Heater: $2,000

Heat Pump Water Heater: $2,000

Rooftop Solar Installation: 30%

*Also available to renters.

By adopting these technologies, a typical household can save around $1250 per year in energy costs.

If you want to calculate your own potential savings based on your household size and income, visit the IRA Calculator page on the Rewiring America website.

In addition to these incentives, Naperville Electric Utility and IMEA (our electricity provider) and the state of Illinois offer additional incentives, making the right choice for the planet the smart choice for your wallet. Details on how to access these incentives are found on our website. 

Considering making these energy efficient, greenhouse gas reducing, cutting edge technology upgrades in 2023, but aren’t sure where to start? Email info@sustainnaperville.org and we will share our experiences and guide you to what will have the greatest impact. It’s time to #electrifyeverything!

...Often the perception is that material goes to the facility and gets magically turned into new products. The reality is not that! The NEST Waste Team had the chance to visit the Groot material sorting facility in Elk Grove Village, and found that this is where material from our blue bins goes through an intense sorting process to create various commodity streams (large bales of one type of item each) for sale to the market.

Single stream recycling was introduced in 1990 as a lower cost alternative to dual-stream collection, meaning we didn’t have to sort our paper from everything else in the bins. It requires that once collected, our items must be sorted elsewhere in order to be recyclable. What the people at Groot don’t want to see is “wish-cycling”. Wish-cycling is when people place items in their recycling bin whose recyclability they are unsure of, and hope they will end up being recycled. Unfortunately, when unrecyclable items get into the bin, it must be physically sorted out, slowing the process, costing more, and anything that is missed by the various sorting steps and gets into the final products is considered contamination of that product.

We saw the incoming recycling material in huge piles dumped into the building from trucks coming from all over the Chicago area. Materials are placed onto a multitude of conveyors that take them through both manual and automatic sorting steps. The automatic steps were things like magnets that pick up the iron-containing metals, a visual sorter that ‘sees’ the types of plastics and uses precise puffs of air to blow them off of the conveyor belt to a bin, and a super fast robotic arm that can pick things up with a vacuum and drop them into bins. Most cardboard is pulled out by hand, and paper is blown off of the line. It was all fascinating to watch!

Here are some important recycling Don’ts we learned:

• Don’t drop the coffee cup with some coffee in the recycling bin or a jar of peanut butter with some butter clinging to it. Items should be clean and dry.

• Don’t put medical waste in the recycling bin.

• No plastic bags, dry cleaners’ garment bags or hangers, hoses, Christmas lights, or shredded paper. These items are called ‘tanglers’ since they tend to get caught up in the crevices of the sorting machinery, and must be manually cut out. This is a risk to the workers as it is dangerous to climb into the machines.

• No lithium batteries!! They are a fire hazard (can, and often do, self-ignite) and are one of the biggest problems facing the waste industry today.

• No potato chip or tortilla chips bags or mylar balloons - there is no process to re-manufacture this material currently.

And a few Dos as well:

• Please leave the caps on all containers (milk jugs, laundry soap or your water bottle for plastic), on larger ‘juice box’ type containers, and on glass jars (even if the lid material is not the same as the container.  The lids generally are too small to be sorted by machinery, and will drop through the process and end up in the landfill.  If lids are left on, they will get into the recyclable commodity bales. 

• Do recycle your glass - there is currently a strong market that is looking for recycled glass to use in road base material.  So you could soon be driving over that used pickle jar or wine bottle!

• Do recycle your pizza box if it only has a couple of grease stains (prefer no cheese and definitely no sauce). If the bottom has heavy grease stains, tear off the top and recycle that, or vice versa.

The bottom line is - we don’t have a magical recycling system. Rather, we have a hyper-disposable material world and the vast majority of packaging products won’t ever get a second chance at life if we don’t recycle. If we can recycle correctly and responsibly at our end, it will be cheaper and more effective down the recycling process chain, and help to minimize our carbon footprint in the long run.