Hello Friends!

April is here and with it dynamic weather variations and greening all about, and of course Earth Day. Hillsides are still golden with mustard flowers and the cherry blossoms are in bloom. Grapevines and apple trees are sending out some of their first leaves. There’s also lots of greening going in SF legislation, leading the nation in goals of clean energy in the City. ECOSF is growing as well with new members and new programs.

GARDEN PARTIES THIS MONTH

ECOSF will be hosing two Garden Parties in April. On Saturday April, 28^th we will be helping Francis Scott Key Elementary school in the Sunset build some 3’x8’ planter boxes so the students can start growing some lettuce before school lets out for summer. There will be other community projects going on at the school that day as well as well as some art activities for children.

The following day, Sunday April 29^th we will be building a pond in Tori’s backyard which will be the future home of some Runner ducks, as well as grow some beneficial water plants. We will be digging the pond out, laying out the pond liner, and filling it with water, plants, and a rock border.

For more details, check out our UPCOMING EVENTS page on our website.

MORE GREEN FOR THE CITY

As if the Mayor’s office and other City agencies couldn’t offer any more green initiatives (of course there’s always more they could do), here’s a run down of some of the latest proposals and projects going on in San Francisco:

- Supervisor Tom Ammiano and State Senator Carole Migden have launched an ambitious proposal to provide San Francisco with 50% clean energy by 2017. Another first-in-the-nation approach to the environment, the plan suggests using bond money already approved by voters to install solar panels on city buildings as well as looking into wind systems and possibly geothermal. While the plan has been on the table since 2005, it has recently gone through enhancements that include a 150-megawatt wind farm. While recent details have not been posted online, check back on our MEDIA page for more information.

- Another first for San Francisco, PG&E and the San Francisco Giants will be beginning the installation of the first Photovoltaic system for a Major League Baseball stadium next month. 590 panels will provide a capacity of up to 120 kilowatts. The project should be completed in time for the July 10^th All-Star game being held at AT&T Park.

- While the Mayor’s Executive Directive 06-02, also known as the Biodiesel Initiative, which was supposed to require all city vehicles that run on diesel to run on 20% biodiesel, has not met it’s goals, there have been some achievements we can be proud about. Since September of 2006, all San Francisco International Airport shuttles, 150 vehicles, are running on the 20% minimum, as are 900 central shop vehicles, including street sweepers and Recreation and Park Dept. equipment, and some Fire Department vehicles. San Francisco uses about 8 million gallons of diesel fuel each year, and while the initiative was hoping to supply 1.6 million gallons of biodiesel, currently the city is only using about 200,000 gallons. (To read more about this and other exciting green news in the city, check out the latest Guardian Green Issue for the week of April 18-24

NEW ADDITIONS TO ECOSF WEBSITE - YOU CAN HELP!

While we can be the first to say www.eco-sf.org still has a long way to go before providing the citizens of San Francisco with all the environmental, ecological, and informative information we would like, we have added some new pages. Be sure to check out our MEDIA page with links to newspaper articles and radio programs you can download all focused on San Francisco or California environmental news. We will scour the pages of local newspapers, and media outlets to provide you with accurate and up to date attention on new policies being debated and changes that can have positive or unhealthy effects on our lives here in the City. If you find something we missed, please let us know so we can include it as well.

We also added an UPCOMING EVENTS page to keep you posted about events ECOSF will be hosting as well as other notable places, spaces, and gatherings going on in the City. If you have an event you’d like us to post, please pass it along.

Lastly, we have added a LENDING LIBRARY page where we will preview an excerpt from a book from our Lending Library. We plan on having a full list of books available for members to borrow in the next couple weeks, and each month we will highlight at least one book we feel is especially important for our community to be aware of. This month’s selection is from the Sightline Institute (formerly Northwest Envrionment Watch), and is a book entitled Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things. In it you will find well researched data on how things like shoes, cars, and computers are made and the waste and environmental damage associated with it’s manufacture, shipping, and consumption. There is also sections on food items like french fries and cola. The following is a paragraph from the chapter on computers. For the full excerpt, click here.

Computer Chips:

Though the chips weigh next to nothing, making them generated more waste than making any other part of my computer. The 400-step process of making chips and covering them with millions of microscopic electrical switches began with silica mined in Washington. Silica, or silicon dioxide, the basic ingredient of sand, is the most abundant substance in the Earth’s crust. The silica was heated with carbon in an Oregon plant to form carbon monoxide and 98% pure silicon. This silicon was heated with hydrochloric acid, then with hydrogen gas, and cooled to form a “hyper pure” silicon rod eight inches across. The crystalline rod was sliced into wafers less than a millimeter thick, and these were ground and chemically polished to a mirror like shine and trucked to the chip manufacturer in California’s Silicon Valley. The chip factory, called a wafer fab, stretched longer than two football fields and housed equipment manufactured by more than 100 companies around the world. My computer’s chips – one wafer’s worth – were made in “clean rooms,” where only one to five particles were present in each cubic foot of air and workers wore gowns, booties, and gloves to avoid contaminated the wafers. In contrast, hospital operating rooms have 10,000 to 100,000 particles per cubic foot; outside air contains 500,000 to 1 million particles. Keeping these rooms particle free required pumping the inside air through special filters that removed fine particles. But the filters did not remove solvent vapors, some of which were toxic, from the air the workers breathed.

INVITATION FOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Do you have something you’d like to tell the community about? Would you like to write an essay or piece for ECOSF’s website, or perhaps help contribute to our newsletters. Are staff of 4 is looking to grow with the help of some dedicated volunteers to lend a few hours a month working on editorials and data gathering and entry for our website and newsletter. No experience necessary, just a desire to help ECOSF spread useful information. Let us know if you’d like to participate.

As always, we thank you for your support and appreciation for our work in the community. If you have any suggestions, comments, or concerns, please let us know. Hope to see you soon!

Davin, Sam, and Tori