Green

Our Green Office

Last week in the checkout lane of SoMa Whole Foods there was a plastic bin of chapsticks with a big cardboard sign that said “STOP GLOBAL WARMING” as though to suggest that buying a chapstick would actually stop global warming. 

Chapstick or hybrid car, it’s convenient to think we can buy our way to being green, or saving the Earth, or saving the human race, rather than actually changing our behavior. 

When we must buy something, however, it is absolutely crucial that we look for the green alternative. 

For LG’s office, the green alternative often comes from The Green Office, a “sustainable office products” distributor headquartered right here in San Francisco.  Pictured is the latest order of printer paper, 100% post-consumer recycled content, of course.  We don’t use much paper, but I purchased in bulk to reduce fuel for shipping. 

Click here to order some Aspen 100 of your own

Paper is just the beginning.  Scissors with recycled plastic handles, recycled post-its, recycled pencils, and so on.  Even when there isn’t a truly green alternative (rubber bands?) I feel good supporting their business.  On the other hand, I collect a lot of rubber bands from parts and supplies we receive, so I don’t have to buy many, and that is the real goal.

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LG Clean and Green Certified

San Francisco is a famously green city (green-minded perhaps?) so it’s no surprise it was one of the first with an environmental program for auto shops.  Called Clean and Green it mandates compliance with hazardous materials and OSHA regs, pushes industry best practices and technology changes, and gives you an audience with the mother of toxics information, SF DPH’s own Virginia St. Jean.

Last winter, before LG had a space, or a logo, or a phone number, I called Virginia for a lunch date.  (We had to go dutch to keep it legit.) Over coconut soup we discussed the nefarious toxins used daily in shops—aerosols, parts washers, antifreeze, etcetera—and some flagrant local polluters ushering them into the air, soil, and water.  She counseled on all the local resources for environmental efforts.  She shared her near-encyclopedic memory of suppliers and retailers with updated methods and materials with lowered health and environmental hazards. 

In short, we hit it off.

Today, on Halloween, Virginia and her staff members (pictured left to right: Ilana Gauss, Virginia, and Sarah Rodriguez) came by for the final “Clean and Green” inspection for Luscious Garage.  While humoring our selection of costume gear, they reviewed our MSDS binder (very thin) and the necessary OSHA training for LG staff.  I demonstrated our parts washer that uses biodiesel for solvent and our multi-faceted recycling system. Pictured also is our oil caddy for re-refined oil and reusable sprayer (filled with compressed air) for a water/acetone mix that replaces so-called “brake clean”.

They’re not sure we can find a private recycling company to handle all our wastes, but I’m not giving up. (Zero-waste baby!)

After five years of good work, the Clean and Green program is an old-timer.  Surrounding cities of the Bay Area have adopted a bona fide Green Business Program for automotive. Ilana tells me SF won’t have one until the middle of next year.  While C&G remains the best tool to attack toxics, leadership on water and energy conservation will have to wait. At least on the government level.

I am extraordinarily grateful to Virgina and the SF Department of Public Health for their good work, and for helping us certify as “Clean and Green.” But Luscious Garage isn’t motivated by certificates or recognition.  And we are certainly not satisfied with being called “Clean and Green” or simply “Green.” Satisfaction will come when our environmental impact is completely eliminated.

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After Oil Radio

Recommended by one of our customers, “After Oil” is a recent radio program produced by the College of Engineering at Purdue University (which recently aired on KQED):

After Oil Website, with a link to audio files

Hosted by Barbara Bogaev, this is a grounded, intelligent, engaging 51 minutes to sharpen your perspective on America’s oil dependence, the impending threat of peaking supply, and the search for solutions.

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SF GREEN CAB in the HOUSE

Green is a great movement; you can help yourself and everyone else at the same time.  This fact resonated yesterday when Thomas from SF Green Cab returned my solicitation to service his hybrid fleet.  This is not a charity case.  Taxi is all business, green or no.  We need to keep their cars on the road—efficiently and economically— and he is willing to pay: so he can rely on his fleet with confidence, to protect his manufacturers’ warranty, and to know his cars are not compromising all his green efforts when they take a break in the shop.

I approached SF Green Cab because, at bottom, they supported hybrids.  But I support green business as well, with equal emphasis on “green” and “business”.  You cannot be green and price gouge, because you effectively punish people for doing the right thing.  This applies to all LG services, for individuals and fleets.  We are priced to support environmental consciousness.

Beyond price, doing the right thing ultimately comes down to service.  Two weeks ago, after seeing SF Green Cabs around town, I arranged for them to give me a ride to the airport at the crack of dawn.  Anyone who’s called for a cab in this town can appreciate this leap of faith; SFGC did not disappoint.  Prompt and capable of hauling all of my crap with the efficiency of an 07 Civic Hybrid, the driver Beyen not only got me there, he charmed me with his knowledge and appreciation of the technology onboard his car.  He is a believer.

For more on SF Green Cab, check out their website, read the glowing reviews on Yelp!, or, better yet, call them for a ride: 415-626-GREEN

Welcome Thomas, Beyen, Mark, and the rest of the SF Green Cab family to Luscious Garage.  Here’s to a prosperous future making people happy, pushing the status quo, and doing right by the environment.

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Not Crude

The collusion between auto and oil goes beyond fuel; it permeates every corner of the machine, from the rubber wiper blades to the nylon safety belts.  Much of the car is recyclable, a fact readily cited by manufacturers in environmental forums.  How much is actually recycled depends widely on the waste stream.  A fraction of the new car is built from post-consumer recycled product (though it is getting better).  In short, today’s car is unsustainable.

Lubrication is but one aspect of the car’s oil dependence, but it’s one that we can’t easily forget, exactly because we’re reminded to “change the oil” every several thousand miles.  The motoring public—with its poor retention of technical details—has been brow-beaten into an oil-change routine every three thousand miles.  For new cars, this is excessive, but less frequent changes still entail oil consumption, something the hybrid owner may rue to accept.

The fabulous news is that oil changes need not require new oil.  Well, it depends on how you define “new” exactly.  As it turns out, when oil becomes “used” it is not actually the oil that degrades, but the additives and modifiers imbedded within.  “Refining” oil is what distills it out of crude, but the process includes the additive package as well. 

If you’ve ever encountered crude oil, you know how absolutely nasty it is.  In fact it bears little resemblance to the motor oil we pour in the engine (except that it’s oily).  Crude is exactly that—crude.  It stinks something awful, it’s dirty, and it needs a lot of work to turn into all the things we use it for. 

Enter re-refined oil.  Presumably not long after it became illegal to pour used oil into a hole in the ground, the “waste” oil that drained out of engines was recaptured and hauled away by an oil “recycler”.  From conversations with former collegues and shop owners, it appears the process was more “reuse” than recycle, where a stationary engine (or less sensitive machine) would inherit the lubricant and churn away none-the-wiser.  Eventually these recyclers learned that the waste oil still had chemical value and could be re-refined (reincarnated, if you will) back to new oil.  If you think about it, waste oil, however used, is cleaner than crude oil and retains the same molecular strength.

There is a longstanding prejudice about re-refined oil in the auto industry because of the original practice of simply reusing waste oil in other engines.  “Recycling” meant running it through a sock and nothing more.  But rerefined oil is different; I’m told that there is no test, no inspection under a microscope, no way to differentiate fresh, new oil that has come from a crude source versus rerefined oil from waste.  For me, once this prejudice was dismissed, I was determined to get rerefined oil, locally and in bulk, for Luscious Garage, and in the grades used in most hybrid engines.  This came true today with the help of Coast Oil and Golden Gate Petroleum.  We now offer 100% rerefined oil that meets the ILSAC GF-4 standard (the highest standard for all manufacturers) in both 5W30 and 5W20 grades, in bulk, for our oil changes.  We do not offer virgin alternatives except when the engine calls for a different grade (the Insight requires 0W20, for instance).  Though it makes perfect sense, I should also clarify that this oil is no more expensive than the virgin-sourced variety.

Therefore, even though the engine continues to burn fossil fuel, its oil-based lubricants can be sustainable. 

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