Paul Relis

FILL ’ER UP: Paul Relis gasses up his vehicle with biogas, an ultra-renewable form of liquid energy. He says the South Coast could “easily” generate 10,000 gallons of diesel equivalent daily from household waste.

My environmental education in Sweden began on a wet, drab, cold evening in Gotenborg when I stepped into my room at the Scandic Hotel centrally located in this port city that is Sweden’s industrial heart. I was there to investigate Sweden’s world-leading use of waste to produce renewable energy. Tired after the long flight from Los Angeles, I lay down on my bed and flipped on the television. I was greeted on the screen by a short program highlighting the environmental features of my hotel room: water-saving plumbing fixtures, furnishings made from natural fibers and other materials so that they are 95% recyclable. Everything in that room was designed and engineered to a level I have not seen anywhere except in Japan. Experientially, it just felt healthier than any hotel I’ve stayed in. The delicious morning breakfast buffet featuring all organic foods made my stay all the better. Ruminating over breakfast I thought, what if Santa Barbara’s hospitality sector could emulate, at least to some degree, what Scandic Hotels is doing?

(It wasn’t until the end of my trip, over a meeting with Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert, founder of the The Natural Step, that I learned that Scandic Hotel chain had incorporated Natural Step’s principals for sustainable business operations throughout this large hotel chain. Scandic Hotels has recently won both the Hospitality Award, Paris for the Best Program for Social Responsibility, and the Sustainability Award in the European Hotel Design Awards, London.)

One of my meetings in Gotenborg was with the Volvo Group, at its world headquarters. Volvo is moving aggressively to develop trucks, buses, and heavy equipment that can utilize a wide range of biofuels from renewable resources. The fuels considered most promising are dimethyl ether (DME), biodiesel, and methane from biogas, which is made from organic waste—anything from leaves to manures. Volvo has an operating hybrid truck still in the development stage and plans to begin rolling out vehicles that can run on a variety of biofuels starting in 2009.

Volvo trucks’ renewable energy focus was prompted, in part, by the powerful head of Gotenborg's town council, Goran Johansson. A legendary politician in Sweden of the old friendly persuasion mold, Johansson told me that he had a “conversation” with the Chairman of Volvo and told him that he wanted all of Gotenborg's buses and trucks to be running on biofuels. Soon. If Volvo couldn’t supply bio-fueled trucks and buses he would have to go elsewhere in Europe for them. Johansson’s insistence on bio-fueled vehicles combined with Volvo’s technical prowess quickly transformed tension into creative action. It appears that Volvo will most certainly be a world leader in utilizing biofuels in all its products -- a demonstration of what can happen when politics and business interact in productive ways.

I asked Mr. Johanssen to reflect on what he would most like to see happen for his city and his country as he nears the end of his long and storied political career. He replied, without hesitation, that he would like to see the development of an ultra high speed train between Gotenborg and Stockholm. Johanssen said that an ultra high speed train would reduce the time it takes to travel between the two cities by one hour, so the 300 mile trip, one way, could be accomplished in a total of two hours instead of the three hours it now takes. Johanssen observed that ultra high speed trains now operating in Southern France have made travel so fast and efficient that highly polluting commuter air travel in France has been sharply reduced.

As I listened to Johanssen speak with great energy about this prospect I thought, what American politician have you heard in recent memory make fast, efficient, and environmentally benign transportation their highest priority? As I was traveling the next day on the “clunker” 120-miles-per-hour train to Stockholm in quiet comfort I couldn’t help but think how small-minded our political vision in California has become. This state built the most comprehensive highway system in the world in the 1950s and 60s, the largest public university system in the world, and one of the world’s largest engineering feats, the California Aqueduct 36. Yet it has not managed to build a single high-speed train linking any of its metropolitan areas to help relieve its massive congestion and provide quality transportation for its 36 million people. As Sweden’s winter landscape passed by my window I wondered if we should invite Goran Johansson to come to California and tell us how to do it?

I visited three biogas plants, serving Gotenborg, Boras, and Vanersborg, the latter two cities each about the size of Santa Barbara. Biogas is the product of the anaerobic digestion of biodegradable materials such as food waste, paper, manures, and agricultural wastes--producing a methane-rich gas that can be burned to produce energy or further cleaned up to substitute for fossil-fuel based natural gas or liquid fuels. According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the country has 34 upgrading plants for biogas vehicle use, more than any other country in the world. The estimated potential for biogas production in the country is more than ten times the current production.

The biogas plants I visited receive waste that is collected from households. After removing recyclables as we do, Swedes put their “organic” waste into one bag and their non-recyclable waste in another. The organic bag is green and the non-organic bag is bright orange. The trucks that collect these bags dump them onto a conveyor belt and they pass through a system of optical scanners. The optical scanners are automated eyes that can read the color of the bags. An arm is automatically activated to separate the bags by color and send them along the process on separate conveyor belts.

The green bags go into a complex system of devices that prepare the organic materials in the form of a slurry—and remove the plastic bags. The slurry is pumped into a bio-digester. The organic material is transformed in the digester into methane gas and C02. The methane is cleaned and compressed into natural gas for use as transportation fuel. The residual organic material becomes liquid fertilizer and soil amendment for agricultural use.

One of the plants has been operating now for about eight years. Sweden will be developing many such plants in the coming years, to fully exploit the potential of its biodegradable waste stream to create natural gas and liquid fuels. Stockholm, population 785,000, plans for all its buses, and its refuse and recycling trucks, to be running on biogas by 2012. Gotenborg is looking to applications of biogas for shipping and use by airlines.

As I was walking through the biogas plants I couldn’t help but think about our continued dependence on crude landfills to handle about half of our solid waste in California. Los Angeles County is planning to send 12,000 tons of its solid waste per day by train and by truck to a remote desert landfill site more than 200 miles away. A dedicated garbage train and up to 160 trucks will be needed on a daily basis to transport the waste. Los Angeles plans to launch this garbage behemoth in a few years, at about the same time that Sweden will have utilized 90% of its solid wastes as recyclables and bioenergy to serve it manufacturing and energy needs. Fortunately there is some hope that we may yet learn the lessons that Sweden appears to have mastered. Santa Barbara, the City of Los Angeles, and a few other California local governments are in the process of evaluating technologies that could do what is being done in Sweden. God speed!

While in Stockholm I visited the new town within the city called Hammarby by-the-sea. Built on an old brownfield area of wharfs and docks, Harrmarby will comprise 11,000 apartments, 25,000 residents and 35,000 workplaces when it is fully built out. Already, biogas is used to partly heat the buildings and for cooking. The buildings have solar-powered hot water and electricity. (Stockholm is at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska.) The buildings use 40 percent less water than conventional buildings of comparable size. Solid waste and recyclables from the multi-storied residential buildings are transported by an underground vacuum system to storage containers, eliminating the need for individual trash and recycling containers. In this totally articulated, environmentally designed city within a city, I realized just how boldly and decisively a municipality could act to change the course of its resource use and the quality of life of its citizens.

At Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency, one of my last meetings in Sweden, I learned that the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament, has set a goal that Sweden as country will in this generation, create a “society in which all of the country’s major environmental problems have been solved.” Like all of us, I have heard many political platitudes in my day and at first I took this statement with a healthy whiff of cynicism. But as I sat listening to a highly competent presentation of environmental objectives, I reflected on what I had seen over the previous days and thought maybe, just maybe, the Swedes will do it! They seem to be infected by the kind of can-do spirit that we once had in such abundance.

And with that thought I felt a bit of envy and nostalgia--envy that there is a country with such high environmental aspirations, and nostalgia for a time, not that long ago when I thought California capable of equally high ideals aspirations and the pragmatism to realize them.

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