By now, everybody knows the pitfalls of using disposable plastic bags. Happily, that means manufacturers are dreaming up better-looking (and much more environmentally friendly) alternatives for toting groceries, toys and books. Here’s a sampling:

Made from 100 percent recycled materials, the Great A&P Tea Co.’s bags feature imagery depicting seashells, fruit and animals. And they’re easy on the wallet, too: costing 99 cents at Long Island Pathmark, Waldbaum’s and A&P grocery stores. (Pictured at left.)

Dubbed the new “it bag” by Teen Vogue, this Earth-friendly Baggu tote will help reduce your carbon footprint. Available in a variety of colors and made from sturdy ripstop fabric that will carry up to 25 pounds. Sold for $8 each or $22 for a pack of three at baggubag.com. (Pictured  below)

Lightweight and waterproof, the Envirosax bag comes in a variety of unusual designs and colors, each sized just right for toting vacation souvenirs or beach gear. Costs $8.50 each or $37.95 for a pack of five at envirosax.com.

In Asia, they were used as rice and feed bags for transporting various goods. In New York, recycled totes by Gecko Traders can carry your groceries, beach gear or anything else. These durable bags are made by a fully certified Fair Trade Co-op in Cambodia. Plus, no two bags look exactly alike. The recycled totes have even been vetted by Treehugger.com, a blog dedicated to green living. They cost $35.95 at reusablebags.com (Pictured at left.)Made with 100 percent organic cotton and water-based inks, the oversize Beleaf tote can fashionably carry you through a weekend’s worth of errands but withstand the weight of bulky grocery items, too. It’s $36 at beleaf.com.

Read more about eco-friendly decorating, green celebrities and ways to reduce your carbon footprint on Newsday’s section on “green living,” newsday.com/green.

http://weblogs.newsday.com/features/home/cheap_thrills_blog/2008/04/green_shopping_the_best_of_the.html

DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.

Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.

But in the parking lot of a Superquinn Market, Ireland’s largest grocery chain, it is clear that the country is well into the post-plastic-bag era. “I used to get half a dozen with every shop. Now I’d never ever buy one,” said Cathal McKeown, 40, a civil servant carrying two large black cloth bags bearing the bright green Superquinn motto. “If I forgot these, I’d just take the cart of groceries and put them loose in the boot of the car, rather than buy a bag.”

Gerry McCartney, 50, a data processor, has also switched to cloth. “The tax is not so much, but it completely changed a very bad habit,” he said. “Now you never see plastic.”

In January almost 42 billion plastic bags were used worldwide, according to reusablebags.com; the figure increases by more than half a million bags every minute. A vast majority are not reused, ending up as waste — in landfills or as litter. Because plastic bags are light and compressible, they constitute only 2 percent of landfill, but since most are not biodegradable, they will remain there.

In a few countries, including Germany, grocers have long charged a nominal fee for plastic bags, and cloth carrier bags are common. But they are the exception.

In the past few months, several countries have announced plans to eliminate the bags. Bangladesh and some African nations have sought to ban them because they clog fragile sewerage systems, creating a health hazard. Starting this summer, China will prohibit sellers from handing out free plastic shopping bags, but the price they should charge is not specified, and there is little capacity for enforcement. Australia says it wants to end free plastic bags by the end of the year, but has not decided how.

Efforts to tax plastic bags have failed in many places because of heated opposition from manufacturers as well as from merchants, who have said a tax would be bad for business. In Britain, Los Angeles and San Francisco, proposed taxes failed to gain political approval, though San Francisco passed a ban last year. Some countries, like Italy, have settled for voluntary participation.

But there were no plastic bag makers in Ireland (most bags here came from China), and a forceful environment minister gave reluctant shopkeepers little wiggle room, making it illegal for them to pay for the bags on behalf of customers. The government collects the tax, which finances environmental enforcement and cleanup programs.

Furthermore, the environment minister told shopkeepers that if they changed from plastic to paper, he would tax those bags, too.

While paper bags, which degrade, are in some ways better for the environment, studies suggest that more greenhouse gases are released in their manufacture and transportation than in the production of plastic bags.

Today, Ireland’s retailers are great promoters of taxing the bags. “I spent many months arguing against this tax with the minister; I thought customers wouldn’t accept it,” said Senator Feargal Quinn, founder of the Superquinn chain. “But I have become a big, big enthusiast.”

Mr. Quinn is also president of EuroCommerce, a group representing six million European retailers. In that capacity, he has encouraged a plastic bag tax in other countries. But members are not buying it. “They say: ‘Oh, no, no. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be acceptable in our country,’ ” Mr. Quinn said.

As nations fail to act decisively, some environmentally conscious chains have moved in with their own policies. Whole Foods Market announced in January that its stores would no longer offer disposable plastic bags, using recycled paper or cloth instead, and many chains are starting to charge customers for plastic bags.

But such ad hoc efforts are unlikely to have the impact of a national tax. Mr. Quinn said that when his Superquinn stores tried a decade ago to charge 1 cent for plastic bags, customers rebelled. He found himself standing at the cash register buying bags for customers with change from his own pocket to prevent them from going elsewhere.

After five years of the plastic bag tax, Ireland has changed the image of cloth bags, a feat advocates hope to achieve in the United States. Vincent Cobb, the president of reusablebags.com, who founded the company four years ago to promote the issue, said: “Using cloth bags has been seen as an extreme act of a crazed environmentalist. We want it to be seen as something a smart, progressive person would carry.”

Some things worked to Ireland’s advantage. Almost all markets are part of chains that are highly computerized, with cash registers that already collect a national sales tax, so adding the bag tax involved a minimum of reprogramming, and there was little room for evasion.

The country also has a young, flexible population that has proved to be a good testing ground for innovation, from cellphone services to nonsmoking laws. Despite these favorable conditions, Ireland still ended up raising the bag tax 50 percent, after officials noted that consumption was rising slightly.

Ireland has moved on with the tax concept, proposing similar taxes on customers for A.T.M. receipts and chewing gum. (The sidewalks of Dublin are dotted with old wads.) The gum tax has been avoided for the time being because the chewing gum giant Wrigley agreed to create a public cleanup fund as an alternative. This year, the government plans to ban conventional light bulbs, making only low-energy, long-life fluorescent bulbs available.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/world/europe/02bags.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Ray Anderson built his $1 billion Georgia-based carpet business by, as he describes it, plundering the earth: using lots of fossil fuels and water, and creating mountains of carpet scraps in landfills.

Now he’s got Interface Inc.’s 4,000 employees climbing Mount Sustainability and working on Misson Zero, a multi-faceted goal to make the company environmentally neutral by 2020. Time International magazine recently named Anderson one of its “Heroes of the Environment.”

He and former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart also are co-chairing a committee that advises the University of Coloroda-Denver-based Presidential Climate Action Project, an organization of academic, political and business leaders coming up with 300 ways the next president can combat global warming.

Chief among them is a recommendation to shift federal subsidies from fossil-fuel-using industries to small businesses that are developing renewable forms of energy and other environmentally friendly technologies.

Robert Reiss, radio host of the CEO Show, recently called Anderson the global corporate leader in pushing businesses to become more environmentally responsible. Interface last year started a consulting business to market its practices to other companies.

The company says 20 percent of the materials it uses to produce carpets is either from recycled goods or is from renewable resources, and Anderson says he’d like to push that to 100 percent. The company is also trying to reduce pollution and waste in other ways, using solar power at a factory in southern California, for example.

Anderson began taking his company in a new direction, a mid-course correction as he calls it, in 1994, when he was 60 years old.

He was already an innovator. He’d started Interface in 1973 after seeing carpet tiles in England. He brought the concept to this country, where he revolutionized floor coverings for offices, airports and schools.

Interface tiles are about 20 inches by 20 inches. They can be mailed to customers in a box for do-it-yourself installation. If there’s a spill or the tiles are stained for other reasons, it’s an easier fix than replacing an entire carpet. Just pull up the tile and wash it off in the sink. If that doesn’t work, replace the piece.

“I fell in love with the idea. It just made so much sense,” said Anderson, now 73.

For the last five years, Interface has been slicing into the $11 billion U.S. residential carpet market. The hip product is popular among condo dwellers, and receives high marks from environmentalists because it can be recycled. And Flor recently teamed up with the Martha Stewart brand to reach an even wider audience.

The company’s first showroom opened in 2004 in Midtown Atlanta at Spring and 5th Streets near Georgia Tech, Anderson’s alma mater. The West Point, Ga., native arrived at Tech in 1952 with a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in industrial engineering. He got his start in textiles at Callaway Mills in West Georgia.

Anderson recently spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the transformation taking place at the company’s LaGrange factory, where most of the Flor carpet tiles are made for the residential market.

A long wall in the building’s administrative offices tells the story through photos and milestones since Anderson’s “epiphany” in 1994 when he read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken.

Q: How did the book change you?

A: It was like a spear in the chest — thunk. I had never given a single thought to what we were taking from the Earth. . . I was convicted as a plunderer of the Earth, and I’ve spent the last 13 years as a recovering plunderer.

Q: How motivated are you by concerns over global warming?

A: Climate change is a real problem. … If we do business as usual. . . by the year 2030 we will hit the [amount of greenhouse gas emissions] that scientists say is the threshold of catastrophic climate change. . . which means we have to get going now.

Q: Have any of the presidential candidates responded to your group’s climate action report published earlier this month?

A: They’re all playing it close to the vest. We don’t know who’s going to pick it up yet. … We want [climate change] to be an issue. We want voters to ask who will be the most effective about fixing this thing?

Q: Have you spoken to Georgia’s political leaders about what the state can do?

A: No. You don’t waste your time.

Q: Other carpet makers are also touting themselves as green companies and using recycled materials. What sets Interface apart?

A: We didn’t stop [with recycling materials]. We’re on to restoration. Let’s put back more than we take. Let’s do more good than harm. …. I’m quite sure we’ve moved the entire industry.

Q: Can you make a business case for your environmentalism?

A: Our cost is down, not up. [The company has saved more than $350 million since 1994 largely by reducing carpet scrap waste]. Our products are the best they’ve ever been. … Our people are just galvanized around the shared higher purpose. It’s attractive to the best people. And the good will of the marketplace has enhanced the company’s profile. We couldn’t have bought it with all the advertising dollars in the world.

Q: What does sustainability mean?

A: At Interface, it means operating our petroleum-intensive company in such a way as to take nothing from the earth that’s not naturally and rapidly renewable and do no harm to the biosphere. On the equity side, it means treating people fairly.

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2007/12/28/anderson_1230.htmlBy STACY SHELTON

By Rachel Oliver

The problem with technology is by its nature it has to be new, or at least appear so. As a result, our televisions, mobile phones and computers seem ever too frequently out of date.

So we end up replacing them, and the old machines get chucked away. The stuff that gets chucked away is known as e-waste, and it is the fastest growing source of municipal waste on Earth.

At the moment e-waste only represents 5 percent of the world’s municipal waste stream — that represents up to 50 million tons of electronic waste a year, according to Greenpeace — but that number is going to get much bigger. In Europe, e-waste levels are growing at a rate of 3 percent-5 percent a year.

In the developing world, e-waste levels are expected to triple in the next five years as consumers there step on the consumerist bandwagon and spend their newly earned money on electronic gadgets. (By 2010, Greenpeace says there will be 178 million new computer users in China and 80 million new users in India alone.)

To compound this problem, the average amount of time people are hanging on to their gadgets is in freefall. The average lifespan of computers back in 1997 was six years; in 2005 it was only two years, Greenpeace says. And it’s not just PCs that have turned into veritable throwaway items.

A recent article by the UK’s Observer newspaper found that in that country the average lifespan of a mobile phone now is just 18 months, and it calculated that Britons are dumping their phones in favor of new models at a rate of 1,700 every hour.

(The reason for discarding electronics often has nothing to do with flaws in the hardware itself, but more to do with the software that is running the machines. Microsoft’s Vista operating system has been blamed for rendering millions of computers obsolete, for example, by the fact that the machines can’t run on the new system. According to Mother Jones, as much as 95 percent of all household PCs in the UK and one-third of all laptops will need to be replaced should their users install Vista.)

Landfills are a natural destination for these discarded goods. Electronic items sitting in landfills are bad news for the environment generally, one of the more potent risks of leaving them there being they leak and infect groundwater supplies.

Around 40 percent of the heavy metals (such as lead, mercury and cadmium) found in landfills come from electronic waste, according to the Computer Take Back Campaign. Only a small amount of leakage can be hazardous, it argues, pointing out that “just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury can contaminate 20 acres of a lake, making the fish unfit to eat”.

Sending electronics to landfills are being strongly discouraged for good reason. And while consumers may have dutifully taken their machines to recyclers, in many countries in the developed world, “recycling” actually means “exporting.” Up to 80 percent of the electronics collected for recycling in the U.S., for example is sent overseas, reports AP.

The eventual destination is Asia. Around 80 percent of global e-waste ends up there, according to the Basel Action Network (BAN). And as much as 90 percent of that ends up in China, illegally (the rest goes to India and Africa), and predominantly in the Pearl River Delta region in the south of the country.

The reason: It saves money. For companies in the developed world, “it’s as much as 10 times cheaper” to export the waste to places such as India than it is to deal with it at home, reports AP, quoting U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures.

Dangerous e-waste exports

The town of Guiyu in China’s Guangdong province is, thanks to the media attention it has received over the past few years, probably the best well-known e-waste dumping ground on Earth. It has also come to epitomize the problems associated with this practice.

Guiyu literally now relies on e-waste for its income: 80 percent of its 132,000 inhabitants work in the e-waste recovery industry, according to the China Economic Review. But it’s not exactly a great arrangement. People use their hands to disassemble the machines; they extract the materials they need using health-harming methods such as open burning, which emit a variety of toxins into the air; they throw the stuff they can’t sell into the river.

Their naked exposure to toxic chemicals has resulted in the fact that around 80 percent of all children in the village now have lead poisoning, and that the level of polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants are 16,000 times higher in Guiyu than they should be, according to Green Left Weekly. (While the affect of PBDEs have not been tested on humans, PBDEs have been found to “impair attention, learning, memory, and behavior in laboratory animals at surprisingly low levels”, according to the Washington-based Environmental Working Group)

There are international laws that forbid the export of hazardous waste, including e-waste, notably The Basel Convention, which has been in force since 1992. China is a signatory to the Convention. It has also ratified it. (The only notable country that hasn’t ratified it is the United States)

There are also specific laws in the European Union which prohibit exporting e-waste to developing nations. But the developed world still manages to ship its e-waste to the developing world using labels of charitable donations and reuse programs.

India, which bans the importation of e-waste, is the latest emerging market to enter the e-waste trade. In six months alone, this year 600 tons of e-waste entered the country, reports Treehugger.com — “under the guise of charitable or re-usable materials, all duty free.”

Aside environmental and health risks, there are other arguments for fixing the e-waste trade. Electronics are full of precious metals like gold, palladium and silver, and the act of trashing them is putting a strain on supplies. And that has a notable knock-on effect: prices for them are going up.

According to the UN StEP program, which aims to standardize the recycling of e-waste globally, the price of Indium (used in more than one billion products annually, like flat-screen monitors and mobile phones) has “increased six-fold” in the last 5 years; the cost of Bismuth (used in hard disk drives) has doubled since 2005; and the price of Ruthenium (used in hard disk drives) has gone up “by a factor of seven” in less than two years.

Improving efficiency

Electronics are incredibly resource-inefficient. According to a United Nations university study, an average 24-kilograms (53-pound) desktop computer and monitor takes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels to make, StEP says. (As a point of comparison, a car only requires one to two times its weight in fossil fuels to build). It also requires 1,500 kg (3,330 pounds) of water and 22 kg (50 pounds) of chemicals. One mobile phone meanwhile, according to the Observer, requires 2 kilograms’ worth of materials such as nickel, plastics, lead, lithium, tin and mercury.

These price hikes, however, should not intimidate the electronics industry too much. The trade in information and communications technologies (ICT) yields not billions but trillions of dollars every year. In 2004 alone, quoting OECD figures, StEP says the global ICT trade made a cool $1.9 trillion, representing 7.7 percent of gross world product and 4 percent of U.S. GDP.

While the electronics industry may be able to pay higher prices, it is debatable whether the consumer will do so. Other options are workable domestic recycling programs or using less harmful materials to manufacture electronics.

Technology companies such as Sony and Dell have traditionally come under fire from environmentalists arguing that they would not implement recycling programs for their own products in the U.S. (which doesn’t oblige them to) while doing so in the EU (which does). That should change with Sony’s recent decision to open recycling centers across the U.S., where it will even accept competitors’ products for a fee.

The other option is to make electronics more eco-friendly. A U.S. study conducted by the Green Electronics Council (GEC) has recently argued that the act of consumers switching to “green computers” actually did have a significant impact on the environment, reports CSRWire.

The study looked at the impact of an industry standard known as the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which ranks IT products based on, among other things, their level of environmentally contentious materials such as mercury, lead, PVC and cadmium. During a six-month period last year, around 36.5 million EPEAT-registered desktops laptops and monitors, worldwide were sold by 21 manufacturers, representing 575 different product types.

The impact of those sales, according to GEC, was good news for the environment because it saved:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/12/03/eco.ewaste/

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070906005793&newsLang=en

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA):

What They’re Saying…

• Run-Off Harms the Chesapeake. “Despite rising food prices, it seems that nearly everyone is turning to corn-based ethanol as their choice for alternative fuel. Hidden behind these headlines, though, is an equally important but less visible cost: water pollution. Corn is a ‘leaky’ crop, losing more nitrogen per acre than most other crops. In the Washington region, much of this excess nitrogen ends up polluting the Chesapeake Bay and robbing fish, crabs and oysters of oxygen. For farmers, the demand for alternative fuels has brought much-needed, and deserved, increases in corn prices. Unfortunately, this summer’s drought will keep mid-Atlantic farmers from realizing their potential windfall, and any unused nitrogen will wash into the bay this winter.” (Tom Simpson and Daphne Pee, op-ed, “How Corn Ethanol Could Pollute the Bay,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2007 [emphasis added])
• Increased Levels of Farm Waste Are Hurting Gulf Waters. “The crop that is bringing prosperity to farmers is making it harder for commercial fishermen in Louisiana to make a living. U.S. farmers this spring planted the most acreage with corn since 1944, after demand for ethanol pushed the grain’s price to a 10-year high. That has increased the level of farm waste flowing into the Mississippi River basin, which scientists blame for creating a pocket along the Louisiana coast where shrimp and other sea life cannot survive. The Gulf of Mexico’s so-called Dead Zone is expected to cover a record 8,543 square miles, or 22,126 square kilometers, this year and stretch into waters off Texas, said Nancy Rabalais, chief scientist for a study team at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. … Corn fuels the zone because it requires more nitrogen-based fertilizer than crops like soybeans, said Eugene Turner, a Louisiana State University oceanographer. Nitrogen and other nutrients eventually reach the Gulf of Mexico, feeding microscopic organisms that deplete oxygen levels as they die and decompose on the sea floor. Shrimp and fish suffocate unless they escape. … ‘The rah-rah sort of drowns out the environmental side,’ [Rabalais] said. ‘If our federal government subsidizes more corn, they’re working against water quality.’” (Tony Cox, “Ethanol Demand Seen Harming U.S. Fishermen,” Bloomberg, July 23, 2007 [emphasis added])
• Little or No Net Savings in CO2 Emissions. “Unfortunately, what passes for mitigation and aversion of global warming often amounts to doing nothing under the guise of doing something. Take the nation’s new infatuation with ethanol. Ethanol derived from corn, as it is in the United States, is so energy intensive to produce that it provides little or no net savings in carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the diversion of corn from the food supply to government-subsidized energy production has some unintended consequences of its own, driving up feed and corn syrup prices at home and tortilla prices in Mexico. Ethanol is a boon for corn farmers. As a way to limit global warming, it’s a spectacularly inefficient bust.” (Editorial “Climate solution too hot for left to handle,” San Antonio Express-News, February 11, 2007 [emphasis added])
• All Cost, Little – If Any – Benefit. “The United States, in its quest to reduce its reliance on expensive imported oil, may soon consume as much as half its domestic corn crop for fuel production, although the economic benefits have yet to materialize. Ethanol produces one-third less energy than a gallon of gasoline at an average wholesale cost of 33 percent more, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. … All told, ethanol has cost Americans an additional $14 billion in higher food prices. … Meanwhile, the U.S. government has yet to discover whether its 51- cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy is efficiently stimulating production of the fuel. One thing the bureaucrats know for sure: It cost the U.S. Treasury $2.7 billion last year with possibly more subsidies on the way.” (John F. Wasik, op-ed, “In Ethanol Debate, Don’t Forget Realities,” Bloomberg, July 23, 2007 [emphasis added])
• Food, Other Consumer Goods Prices Are Rising. “A steak dinner, a cold beer, a tank of gas, a bowl of cornflakes. Prices on these items and others are rising, all in the quest to produce more ethanol, the corn-based product touted as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil and lessen the impact of global warming. America has embraced the promise of the renewable fuel, pouring billions of tax dollars into its development. But as Congress prepares to spend billions more for ethanol use and production, people are starting to see higher costs for a wide range of consumer goods. ”(Anna M. Tinsley, “Push for ethanol has ripple effect across economy,” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 5, 2007 [emphasis added])
• More Energy to Make Ethanol Than What’s Produced. “The big problem with ethanol is in the chemistry, said Henry Groppe, founder of Groppe, Long & Littell, an energy consulting firm in Houston. It takes more energy to make ethanol than the ethanol produces, he said. Corn must be grown, fertilized and harvested, which takes oil-powered machinery. It must be processed, refined and then shipped, which takes more oil. ‘You’re having to use as much oil to produce that gallon of ethanol as the energy that you produce from it,’ Groppe said.” (Loren Steffy, “A test tells the story of ethanol vs. gasoline,” The Houston Chronicle, March 11, 2007 [emphasis added])
• Distribution Problems. “The link is corn — impact of growing the corn and producing the ethanol, not only in greenhouse gas emissions from farm equipment, but from the trucks, ships and trains that haul the ethanol (nearly all of which comes from Midwest corn) for delivery to refineries. Because of its corrosive qualities, it can’t be shipped through pipelines.” (Editorial, “Corn, ethanol and other subsidized stupidities,” The Sacramento Bee, August 8, 2007 [emphasis added])
• Ethanol Will Not Replace Gasoline. “[C]orn ethanol will neither replace gasoline nor lower its price. It may even raise gas prices. First, at the pump, ethanol is priced according to what consumers will pay, not what it costs to make. So, according to research by Soren T. Anderson of the University of Michigan, ethanol prices follow gas prices very closely. It’s unlikely that gas will make a U-turn and start following ethanol. Second, even if a ready supply of ethanol does put a bit of downward pressure on gas prices, ethanol’s real cost is much higher than whatever we shell out at the pump. Consumers actually pay twice for this corny goodness: once when they fill up and once on April 15. In 2006, ethanol makers and sellers received subsidies of $1.87 for every gallon of gas they managed to displace, according to Doug Koplow of Earth Track, a Boston-based consultancy. Finally, even if we can stomach these nutty subsidies, illogical incentives to tempt automakers to produce ethanol-friendly cars actually increase the amount of oil we use. Blame a little-discussed loophole: In exchange for producing ethanol-ready ‘flex fuel’ vehicles, Congress lets auto manufacturers make their cars less fuel-efficient than corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards require.” (Lisa Margonelli, op-ed, “Myths About That $3.18 Per Gallon,” The Washington Post, June 3, 2007 [emphasis added]

National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA)
Bill Holbrook