The Last Ooh Rah
By Riley Anderson
EAARTH Day and More
EAARTH Day and More
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Eaarth Day at Proctor Academy is a time where students get the opportunity to look deeper into the problems that humans are currently having to deal with, and determine how our generation will deal with them. This Eaarth Day I was fortunate enough to spend my first two sessions in Franklin doing the Franklin Falls activity with Gregor and Tom Morgan. The group visited with Todd Workman and Jenisha from PermaCity Life, which is a company that is working towards creating a new trend of community in Franklin, New Hampshire. "Our vision is to create a model for cities to become more self-reliant and to transition away from their dependence on fossil fuels with an emphasis on protecting our drinking water, creating renewable energy, ensuring local food supplies, and implementing zero waste measures. We hope to pioneer a new approach to building a collaborative and resilient downtown, turning downtown into a vibrant micro-urban centerpiece. Our movement is focused on environmentally conscious living and quality of life measures. We desire a downtown that is walkable, locally sustainable, and has a distinctive sense of place. We encourage pedestrians and expanded bicycle facilities along with car reduced transportation measures. As a homegrown city we take pride in preserving our historic storefronts and mill buildings. Creating an optimal mix of building and space uses will enable us to become an economically vibrant mixed-use commercial district" (PermaCity Life). To describe PermaCity Life is rather difficult to do, which is why it takes Todd about 45 minutes each time I go there. I am fortunate enough to be able to take part in this organization during my senior project. Today Todd and Jenisha spoke with the group and took us on what Gregor called "a maiden voyage" of walking a parcel of land to see the potential it had for a community garden and pathway. To say the least, it was a success, Todd was thrilled with what we saw. There were two layers of terracing, each containing a flat part for gardening and it was along the river where they plan to create white water rafting and tubing for the community of Franklin.
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The second activity that I had today was a short tour of the Biomass plant at Proctor Academy, little to my knowledge was how large it was. The process of burning wood chips is a very simple one, once the technology is set up correctly. The plant took about 2 million dollars to build and it was able to pay for itself during the third year of operation. There is a system of a three pass boiler which uses the wood chips at 40% saturation in order to ensure the most steam can be generated. There is a loading dock that can hold about 10 tons of wood chips which is sorted through a conveyer belt and fed into boiler and the fire box, which runs at 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. The biomass plant is able to produce about 70% of the campus's heat and with that it is much more efficient than the burning of oil. A stat given to use was the wood chips were 95% effective to the 65% of oil. The biomass plant saves the school massive amounts of money and also reduces our CO2 emissions greatly, which is what we have been studying in class the past couple weeks.
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| Paris and Katie in the chip bin PC: Myself |
"Carbon neutral is defined by google as a term used to describe the action of organizations, businesses and individuals taking action to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as each put in to it. The overall goal of carbon neutrality is to achieve a zero carbon footprint" (Google). The class discussed the possibility of our campus being a carbon neutral location, after the process of creating many equations and analyzing the data we were able to infer, from our calculations, that we are carbon neutral. However this is very challenging to calculate due to the factor of how much carbon is actually emitted by Proctor's use. The method we used to determine our carbon footprint consisted of calculating the CO2 output from our main energy sources; Electrical, Fossil Fuels, Biomass and Natural Gas. These were summed together to get a total amount of CO2 emitted from our campus over the past few years, which resulted in 1614.608 metric tons in 2014 and 1425.925 metric tons in 2015. In order to calculate how much carbon we take out of the environment we used a conservative amount of acres from our woodlot and multiplied it by the EPA average that 1 acre absorbs 1.22 metric tons of carbon. The amount of CO2 that is absorbed by the woodlands is 2805 metric tons, which resulted that we could just about double our carbon output and still be neutral, however we did not take into consideration transportation. After a conservative estimate we determined we could still be well below net zero due to the result we got about 2.66 metric tons of CO2 per week multiplied by 365 which equals 970 metric tons of CO2 emitted per year. That number is then added 1425.9 + 970 = 2395.9 metric tons of CO2 which is emitted, and our forest absorbs 2806, meaning we are better than carbon neutral from the selective data.
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| Example of Data Collected during |
Overall this has been one of my favorite Eaarth Days at Proctor due to the opportunity I have grasped to select activities that I truly care about. I think throughout watching Racing Extinction, speaking with Todd, listening to JR White Hat speak and touring the Biomass Plant that there is a lot to be positive about in this community with our efforts towards being environmentally mindful. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Todd and Jenisha at PermaCity Life and this is where my AP Environmental Career comes to an end. Thank you Alan for a great year!
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- Ri
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