Greenversations

Every so often I wake up with the “The Three R’s” by Jack Johnson stuck in my head. Given where I work it’s an appropriate mantra to be bopping around to. I guess that part of my brain that runs on kids tunes doesn’t need coffee.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle…”

There are worse tunes to have on repeat in your brain, way worse! I’m grateful the catchy number exists on the less than glamorous subject of waste disposal. Perhaps it’s the warm-up to my workday. Fitting.

The concept of the three R’s has been around for a long time and the three arrows are a recognizable icon, but there’s a new kid in town and they need to make some room.

How about accomplishing all three, while making something really cool? Two weeks ago I posed a challenge to encourage readers to submit photos and accounts of an upcycled product they created. As promised, it’s time to show off your goods! Congratulations to Dennis Mijares who submitted this photo on January 31, 2012 on Flickr of purses made from plastic bags.

Upcycling is like a landfill diet, why toss what we can use? Who knew that waste could look so good? I hope these photos inspire you to give it a try, do share photos of what you create! Professionally constructed to kids crafts alike are welcome. I must admit, I’m a little disappointed I didn’t see any cardboard mantelpieces…

Talk to a friend about it and ask them if they’ve heard of the concept. Be sure to share that it’s good for us by cutting down on waste, helps spread environmental awareness and action and can even support local artisans and communities.

It’s a great idea for a community or school fundraiser, start an upcycling project and let us know how it goes!

If you haven’t Picked the 5 actions you can do for our environment where you live, get on it! Join the 4,000 likes on Facebook and the 8,222 others around the world who have made the official pledge. Share your story and inspire others to do the same!

About the author: Jeanethe Falvey writes from EPA’s Office of External Affairs and Environmental Education, as the project-lead for Pick 5 and the State of the Environment, two projects geared towards learning, sharing and gaining a greater collective connection to our environment.

by Jeanethe Falvey

Last Friday, I wrote to you all to say we would be reporting out and helping to share your ideas about the simple ways we can all help our environment. With 8,028 sign ups now around the world, I’ll first share a little international tidbit. One of the comments left last week was a kind note from ‘Lauro’ in Brazil saying that they were also doing their part.

I typed Brazil in our Map of Action and sure enough a few green spots appeared!

I encourage you to type in a country, a city, maybe your own zip code in that search bar and see where the green shows up. It’s fun to see where the action is, probably in some places you might not expect! Comment below with your most unexpected find, I’m curious to hear what surprises you. It certainly made me think about who I knew overseas that I could share Pick 5 with.

Now it’s your turn to share. This time of year is filled with holiday markets, festivities, and gatherings of friends, families, and communities. Pick 5 choice number 1 under ‘Advocacy’ encourages you to participate in an environmental festival or event. In that ribbon of thought, let’s see what you have for ideas about how to make a community festival to a small holiday party, a greener event.

While the celebrations aren’t necessarily focused on the environment, there may be elements of it that are, or could be if you speak up. Share your ideas below, whether they are original or observed! Maybe you noticed more green than ever during a recent holiday fair, or craft market. If that’s so, tell us! For those of you planning events, what are some helpful tips our readers can share about running a more successful and sustainable gathering?

Events and ideas large or small, share your stories with us. We’ll help you spread the word and the green!

About the author: Jeanethe Falvey, US. EPA Office of External Affairs. Pick 5 and State of the Environment project lead, based in rainy Boston, Massachusetts.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

By Lina Younes

Recently my daughter’s elementary school started a program to encourage students to increase their physical activities outdoors. The program entitled “Fun, Fit and Grow” is largely modeled after the First Lady’s Initiative, Let’s Move. The main objective is to promote healthy bodies and a lifetime full of fun and fitness. To be successful, the school is asking students to keep a log of their daily activities outside of the school in order to earn points for their class. Students are encouraged to elicit the participation of their family members in the program to earn additional points. Parents have to sign the log weekly to attest that the recorded hours of activities for children and family members are accurate.

It was interesting to see that the guidelines clearly state that virtual games are not allowed as a substitute for physical activities and sports. While technology is helping many to get up and move through numerous interactive games, there is no doubt that electronic gadgets are not the ideal replacement for a brisk walk outdoors.

So, what did we identify as our family outdoor activity?  Well, first, we took a family walk around the neighborhood. As our second activity, we decided to rake leaves. It was listed as one of the recommended activities and we definitely had a good supply of leaves all over the yard. So, through our joint effort, we got some exercise, clean up around the yard, and had fun.  Furthermore, eliminating the dead leaves from the lawn also has an environmental benefit.  It allows the lawn to “breathe” plus it enables sunlight, nutrients and water to revitalize the grass and their root systems.  What did we do with the raked leaves?  Well, we made a leaf pile for composting.  I say it was a win-win for all.  I guess we have our work cut out for us for next weekend.  There is still a good supply still on the trees that will need to be raked soon.

What do you do to enjoy a beautiful fall day? We would like to hear from you.

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and currently serves as acting associate director for environmental education. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

By Sophia Kelley

For the past several months (which at times have seemed like the longest months ever) a few of us in New York have been working furiously on a revolutionary idea – a blog! OK, so maybe it’s not so revolutionary, but we are thrilled to be able to announce the newest member of EPA’s blog family, Greening the Apple. As a writer with a background in journalism, I’m looking forward to participating in the less formal and more direct type of communication that blogging allows.

Our goal for this new endeavor is to increase communication, participation and engagement with everyone interested in environmental and public health issues around NYC. I’m hoping that this new forum will allow us to enter into dynamic conversations with the public, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and state and local government employees. The posts will cover topics related to urban environmental issues such as strategies for sustainable city living, healthy outdoor activities and urban escapes.

It is an often overlooked fact that behind the rules, regulations, and bureaucracy, government agencies are made up of people – real people. Greening the Apple serves to highlight the variety of interests and personalities that are represented by our diverse staff in the New York area. The blog is also a forum for new voices and perspectives to speak out regarding environmental and public health issues in and around the New York metro area. We aim to become a valuable resource for New Yorkers, commuters, tourists and anyone else interested in urban environmental issues that face cities like New York. We value your feedback and encourage you to comment, subscribe to our feed and become a vital part of our community.
Check out Greening the Apple and join the conversation!

About the author: Sophia Kelley is a public affairs specialist in New York City. She has been working and writing for EPA since 2009.

It was a snowy January day as I commuted on the metro towards the Federal Triangle station to report for my first day of my internship with the EPA. I soon realized that wearing a suit to work (even if it is your first day) in the creative work environment that is The Office of Web Communications was a bit of an oddity, especially when snow was falling. The team was quick to engage me in the ongoing work they do daily to make sure the web presence of the agency is always at its best. This work included, among other items, a much needed update of the EPA History Site, working to analyze trends in our social media outlets, and most recently working to assure the laboratory data from radiation testing on the EPA Japan Nuclear Emergency Site was available and promptly updated.

The history site renovations proved a fun and creative task, exploring ways to breathe life into a site which had been sitting idle for quite some time. Analyzing our social media outlets offered new lenses with which to view the use of social media in a business setting. While the task of filtering data for the Japan Nuclear Emergency gave me a glimpse of the great work the EPA does in times of emergencies to provide the public with all of the information in the best and most effective means possible. Not to mention that all this was happening with a looming threat of a government shutdown in which I witnessed the amount of time and effort that goes into preparations for a shutdown, which is a headache for everyone working in, or with the government.

Furthermore, through my internship with the EPA I was given the opportunity to attend a Committee on Agriculture hearing, at which Administrator Jackson testified, along with the ability to volunteer at the EPA Earth Day Event on the mall. The hearing was excellent because it allowed for me to personally experience the connection the agency shares with congress, while gaining a more in-depth knowledge of the agency itself. The EPA Earth Day Event, on the other hand, found me helping out our multimedia team creating and appearing in short “What I Want” videos. Volunteering at the EPA Earth Day Event gave me a chance to see the passion EPA employees have for the work that they do for the agency.

This past semester has proven time and time again to offer me many great possibilities to work on engaging projects with a fantastic group of people in a great agency. I would highly recommend an EPA internship, and specifically one with the great folks in the Office of Web Communications!

About the author: Ross Frei joined the EPA in January 2011. He is currently a Junior at Luther College where he is double majoring in Management and Economics with a minor in Environmental Studies. His passion for protecting the environment inspired him to spend the second semester of his junior year living in Washington D.C. interning at the EPA, while participating in the Lutheran College Washington Semester.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

We’re constantly looking for ways to make it easier for you to do what you want on our Web site, and we’re just starting a major overhaul. But epa.gov is large (500,000 pages) and complex (hundreds of smaller sites), so it’ll take time.

We’re taking small steps, though, and the first is a new home page. The main issue with the current home page is that it lacks visual and content prioritization, which makes it challenging to use.

Our design goals are straightforward: help you do what you want while sharing what we’re up to. To figure out your top tasks, we used a lot of data:

• popular search terms both here and in external search engines
• a question about top tasks in our online customer satisfaction survey
• scans that showed where people are clicking on the current home page
• surveys and focus groups that went into our information strategy

The top tasks, both across all audiences and within specific audiences, are remarkably consistent:

• learn about environmental issues
• find out what EPA is doing about an issue (this aligns well with our need to report what we’re up to)
• learn about your local community

Within the business community, an additional concern is to learn about requirements they have to follow. For parents, finding out what they can do to help and finding information for kids are also top tasks. Nothing overly surprising in these results, but it’s good to have data to confirm what we thought.

Our design approach was to greatly simplify the home page, focusing on these tasks and not trying to do everything.

New features include:

• A section linking directly to the subjects you search for most. We’ll update this section as things change.
• A new section on what you can do to protect the environment. We’ll change the contents of this section to match current efforts.
• New banner layouts that give us more flexibility to tell you what we’re doing.
• New sections showing our latest announcements and our highest-priority efforts.

We retained several elements that match your top tasks, like MyEnvironment, which lets you search for information about your community. And the tabs at the top will still be there (stay tuned for major enhancements to the content behind all of them). You’ll still be able to quickly link to our social media efforts, information about working here, and other information in the footer.

Again, this is just the first step, and we’ll adjust as we go. We’ve posted the new home page as a sneak peek, and we’d appreciate hearing your thoughts. Have we missed something big? Does it work? Are we achieving our goals? Keep in mind the complexity of our mission and our multiple audiences as you consider the new design. And remember, this is just the home page; we’re also working to improve the entire site.

I’m excited to finally be able to share the hard work of many folks here, and I look forward to hearing your suggestions for how we can do even better!

Check out the sneak peek.

About the author: Jeffrey Levy is EPA’s Director of Web Communications

Last fall, I wrote about this blog’s Twitter account, @greenversations. Since then, several folks across EPA have been trying out Twitter, with varying approaches.  Today, I got this question from Randa Williams, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s looking into best practices for businesses on Twitter:

I wonder when you will start having conversations rather than just broadcasting on twitter…Lots of EPA broadcast channels on Twitter, exceptionally few conversations. I know, engagement is more work, wondering if you had thought about expanding into this area.

It was such a good question, I thought I’d respond publicly as well as emailing her.

Randa is right: the gold standard is conversing on Twitter and other social media sites, not just broadcasting. But she’s also right that it takes resources.  Not just someone’s time, but also having the right person, who’s plugged into what’s going on around EPA and who knows how to speak to the world on EPA’s behalf.

There are also different ways to use Twitter, and we’re experimenting with most of them.  For example, we’ve done a little live tweeting, with plans to do more.  There are also different approaches to who to follow, how frequently we can commit to posting, etc.

We do have a couple of good examples of interaction for content on a smaller scale than “all of EPA:”

• @EPAregion9 – Wendy Chavez in our San Francisco office.  I think Wendy is our best tweeter at the moment.
• @EPAespanol – Lina Younes at headquarters.  Lina leads our multilingual communications task force (have you seen all the languages in the upper right corner of our home page?), and she tweets in Spanish.

While we figure out the gold standard (interaction), we’re doing what we can on what I call the tin standard (broadcasting). Given the number of followers, it seems a decent number of people appreciate even that.  Here are some of our other accounts:

• @EPAgov – our main account.  Primarily our automated news release headlines and blog posts, plus a few web updates and manual tweets.  This account combines content that’s also split into individual accounts, and is also available on normal Web pages:
  • @EPAnews – news releases (same info as shown in our newsroom)
  • @greenversations – blog (same as the blog itself)
  • @EPAweb – updates to epa.gov (same info as shown on our recent additions page)
• @EPAlive – we’re occasionally experimenting with using this for live tweeting
• @EPAowow – Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds
• @EPAairmarkets – market-based regulatory programs to improve U.S. air quality
• @EPAregion2 – regional office in New York
• @EPAregion3 – regional office in Philadelphia

We’re also working up some conventions, like starting our account names with “usepa” and using the same seal as the avatar.

Not quite in the same category, some of us are also tweeting professionally. We’re not “representing” EPA per se, but we’re using it as a professional network and information source.  For example:

• @levyj413 – this is my Twitter account, and I use it to discuss social media in government (especially EPA)
• @suzack777 – this is Suzanne Ackerman on our web team.  Suzanne uses Twitter to research projects like blogger outreach, and uses Twitter to make contacts and discuss related issues.

So thanks, Randa, for reminding me that we need to communicate more about what we’re up to.  Stay tuned for updates about our other social media efforts, too (in the meantime, join us on Facebook!).

Jeffrey Levy is EPA’s Director of Web Communications.

About the Author: Pat Childers is a Senior Advisor in the Office of Air and Radiation who has spent over 1/2 his life promoting Clean Transportation choices for the American public. Pat currently coordinates the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and the Clean Air Excellence Awards and is the proud father of two budding cyclists.

Bike to Work Day is Friday May 15, unlike many folks my decision isn’t to bike or not, its deciding which bike to ride. Some people think biking is my life. I seldom go a day with out some sort of spinning, be it mountain biking, commuting, or riding with my kids. I was named the Agency Bike Coordinator by Carol Browner fifteen years ago. I volunteer for an organization that teaches kids about the environment from the seat of a mountain bike. I met my wife through a biking buddy, and the first purchase we ever made together was a red tandem bike. I even teach a diversity class using bikes. While biking is a passion, it is not my life. However I do find that biking is a great tool, it is the swiss army knife that I use to get through my day providing me a way to solve many problems with one simple tool.

Biking is a great tool for exercise as you burn calories riding through the city or local parks. I look back at the 240 lbs that used to be me, and say it’s good to be on the other side of 200 now and I can thank biking for that.

It’s also a great tool for teaching almost anything. Need a math lesson, a bike has 3 front gears and 9 back gears…how many total gears does that provide? Please don’t say 12. How about history, sports and diversity lessons, the first African American World Champion in any sport was Major Taylor who was a cyclist at the turn of the century a hundred years ago, and Susan B Anthony said that the bike “has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world”. That’s some pretty lofty importance to place on two wheels.

On top of that, the scientific importance of bicycling from pneumatic tires to the Wright brothers developing their ideas for the airplane from their previous job building bikes, make the bike one of the most important inventions ever.

But what biking really can do best is act as a tool for low cost environmentally sound transportation. For years I rode a bike recycled from the trash and the only fuel I needed for the trip was one peanut butter banana and cheese sandwich. If you look around the community you will see cyclists of every age, sex, race and socioeconomic background all riding for different reasons-fun, health, finances, coolness factor. Whatever their reason, they are all riding and they are all helping the environment, reducing their daily footprint by increasing their daily cycling mileage so to speak. I doubt that most think about the environment, the science of biking, or as they happily spin from place to place, seeing the world from a different view than commuters stuck in traffic.

Biking isn’t my life, but it certainly has made my life better so I will join the crowd on bike to work day….if I can just figure out which bike to ride.

If you’ve Picked 5 for the Environment, this is your chance to share your stories and exchange tips with others to help you achieve your environmental goals. If you haven’t, head over there now, commit to at least 5 actions out of the 10, and come back to share (we’ll add you to our mailing list so you’ll get advance notice, too).

This is the first time we’re “opening up the lines,” but we’ll post regular items like this to help Pick 5 community members talk to each other.

Thanks for committing to helping protect the environment!

Note: to ward off advertisers using our blog as a platform, we don’t allow specific product endorsements in our comment policy. But feel free to suggest Web sites that review products, suggest types of products, and share your experiences using them.

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Happy anniversary!  We started the Greenversations blog one year ago, on Earth Day 2008.  Since then we’ve discussed Questions of the Week, looked at Science Wednesday, and followed scientists on the “Bold” research vessel.

What have you learned from the Greenversations blog?