By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

The Vestas V27 225-kilowatt turbine is expected to generate an estimated 450,000 kilowatt-hours of energy a year.PORTSMOUTH — With an electric bill fast approaching $100,000 a year, the U.S. Department of Energy predicting that fossil-fuel energy costs will increase 5.3 percent annually for the rest of time and federal stimulus money available for renewable-energy projects, Rick Hodges did the math. It added up to a 225-kilowatt Vestas wind turbine.

With the installation of the nearly 100-foot-high turbine expected before the end of the year, the president of the Hodges Badge Co. anticipates Rhode Island wind soon will produce nearly all of the 45,000-square-foot facility’s electricity.

Last year, the family-owned and operated business used 451,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Hodges said he expects the soon-to-be-installed wind turbine to produce 450,000 kilowatt-hours of power a year.

The project was the result of three years’ work with another local company, Integrity Energy Group, and the turbine will be installed behind Hodges Badge’s facility on East Main Road. The 98.5-foot-high turbine will feature 47.5-foot-long blades and will reduce the facility’s carbon dioxide emissions by 435,000 pounds a year.

“Combine concerns about the environment with rising energy costs, and installing the turbine was the ideal solution — both environmentally and economically,” Hodges said.

The siting of a turbine in his company’s backyard, however, isn’t the first environmentally friendly business practice Hodges has adopted in the past decade. The company doubled the facility’s roofing insulation, which cut its energy bill in half, Hodges said. Also, the building’s several hundred electrical fixtures were fitted with energy-saving lights, a more energy-efficient hot-water heater was installed and all cardboard and office paper is recycled.

The company also looked into installing solar panels on the factory’s roof, but the cost of re-engineering the building, which was built in the 1960s, to accommodate such a system was cost prohibitive, Hodges said.

Instead, Aquidneck Island’s abundance of wind proved to be a better and more cost-effective sustainable energy source. The Hodges Badge turbine will be the fourth to be installed on the island and the third in Portsmouth. The 225-kilowatt turbine is small compared with the 660-kilowatt model at the Portsmouth Abbey School or the 1.5-megawatt turbine at Portsmouth High School.

To help offset the cost of his latest cost-saving and energy-saving project, Hodges applied for and received a $225,000 Renewable Energy Fund grant from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

“We are thrilled to support companies like Hodges Badge,” said Keith Stokes, the EDC’s executive director. “It’s such a success that they will be powered entirely by renewable energy and contribute to making Rhode Island a more green state.”

Hodges Badge also received $156,250 in federal stimulus money that was allocated by the state Office of Energy Resources. The two grants added up to the difference between paying off the nearly $900,000 cost of installing the turbine in four to five years instead of eight or nine. In fact, without at least one of these grants, Hodges said his company wouldn’t have been able to afford the turbine.

Hodges originally looked into buying a refurbished 225-kilowatt turbine, but quickly discovered that banks won’t finance them, grants aren’t available to fund them and the warranty is only a year.

The new Hodges Badge wind turbine will feature automatic shut-off at 65 mph and will have the ability to sustain winds up to 166 mph. It has an estimated life of 25 years.

Every year, Hodges Badge, which has been in business since 1920, turns 12 million yards of satin ribbon — made from wood pulp that is bought from three North American vendors, including one in Cumberland — into rosettes, flat ribbons and neck ribbons for medals. Its East Main Road facility employs 95 people and is the company’s corporate headquarters. In 1989, a second facility, in Washington, Mo., just outside of St. Louis, was opened. Today, that facility employs 50 people.

The Missouri facility doesn’t yet use any renewable energy, Hodges said, because the cost of electricity is so low — 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 18 cents in Rhode Island — that the payback is long and because Missouri hasn’t done nearly as much to promote renewable energy as the Ocean State.

The company, however, recently added 8 inches of insulation to the roof of the 9,000-square-foot Missouri plant, Hodges said.

By DAVID FISHER/ecoRI staff

Friendly Home employees Lynn Leroux, left, and Kathy Lewis immediately noticed a savings in the amount of energy and water being used. (David Fisher/ecoRI staff photos)WOONSOCKET — Faced with the failing health of a parent or relative, sometimes a family’s only option is to place a loved one in an assisted-living facility or, in more severe cases, a nursing home. This is never an easy decision.

In an industry traditionally fraught with waste of all kinds, from energy and water to food, The Friendly Home, a 126-bed nursing facility on Rhodes Avenue, is aiming to turn the tide, and in turn, make the aforementioned decision a little easier for the more ecologically minded families among us.

During the past year, the staff at Friendly Home has completely changed the way it feeds residents and cleans the facility. These changes have led to fewer risks to the health of its clients, less waste and greater satisfaction among the residents, especially when it comes to what they eat.

Historically, as with many nursing homes, the Friendly Home’s maintenance, housekeeping and food-production systems were locked in a cycle of waste. The food that was served was bland.

Every meal was prepared in advance. The meals, plate and all, were then placed on a liner, then on a “pellet” — a preheated ceramic plate that kept the food hot — covered with a plastic dome and placed on a tray that would sometimes would sit for hours on a cart before being wheeled out to the wings of the home for service. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of eating a piece of toast that hasn’t come directly from the toaster, you know this is no way to serve food.

This method of preparing meals also led to a lot of food waste. The trays were brought to the residents complete, and if the resident didn’t eat something they were served, it simply got thrown away when the tray was picked up.

Every cup of coffee or juice and every bowl of cereal were covered with a disposable plastic cover. Condiments, including salt and pepper, were served in disposable single-serve packets or in plastic soufflé cups. Sandwiches were put into wax-paper bags, and large pans of prepared food were wrapped in plastic film prior to service.

A mobile steam table and refrigerated unit are wheeled out to the wings of the home, and the residents are served a hot meal and cold beverage.Under the facility’s new food-production system, a mobile steam table and refrigerated unit are wheeled out to the wings of the home, and the residents are served a hot meal, on a hot plate directly from the steam table, and cold juices, milk and fruit are served from the refrigerator. This has led to more options for the residents — Would you like eggs or pancakes, or a little of each, for breakfast? — less food waste and a reduction in the waste stream by eliminating most of the plastic wrap, disposable covers and condiment packages used in the kitchen. The food is now fresher, and doesn’t have to sit on a cart getting soggy and stale prior to service.

The energy and water savings and reduction in waste were immediately evident to Lynn Leroux and Kathy Lewis, the home’s food service and dietary managers. The elimination of the pellets, liners, domes and trays has allowed the kitchen to run the dishwasher 170 fewer times per day, or 5,100 fewer loads per month, according to Lewis. This has amounted to a net savings on detergent and rinse agent, and remarkably less electricity, gas and water has been used. There is also a reduction in energy usage from eliminating the need to heat the pellets, which were formerly warmed in an electric heater.

The kitchen has also gone from using a mile of plastic wrap a month, to one every other month. Some of the plastic cups and lids have been completely eliminated, and the ones that haven’t been are used at a rate of one case per month, as opposed to the eight cases a month under the old system.

“Giving residents options at the point of service has greatly reduced our waste stream and energy and resource usage,” Lewis said, “but it has also led to greater resident satisfaction.”

Dan Gendron, Friendly Home’s director of maintenance and housekeeping, agree. “Not only have we increased resident satisfaction in the food department, our new maintenance and housekeeping systems have reduced the risk of cross-contamination from room to room,” he said.

Nursing homes are inherently a messy business. Most cleanups involve some type of bodily fluid. The state Department of Health has some pretty strict guidelines concerning the sanitation of these facilities.

For one, you can only mop the floors of four rooms with one bucket of disinfectant solution, but, if the first floor that you wash has been contaminated by urine, blood, vomit or feces, you’re basically dragging those contaminants through the next three rooms. This can spell trouble for elderly residents, most of whom already have compromised immune systems.

The new floor-washing system at the nursing home uses a reusable absorbent micro-fiber pad that is soaked in disinfectant. One pad is used per room, eliminating the possibility of cross-contamination from dirty mop water and/or mop heads. The manufacturer recommends that the pads be disposed of after 500 uses.

General housekeeping has radically changed at the home, as well.

Color-coded, reusable micro-fiber towels have replaced paper towels for cleaning windows, furniture and bathrooms. This color-coding also has contributed to the reduction in cross-contamination. Blue for windows, green for general cleaning and yellow for bathrooms.

All of the reusable micro-fiber towels and mop pads are laundered daily, and constitute but one load of laundry.

A new laundry system is saving money and water.The reduction in volume of waste from the laundry and bathrooms is evident. Soap and detergent dispensers in the bathrooms and laundry have been changed from employing rigid plastic containers to collapsible plastic bags in the hand soap containers, and the laundry now utilizes a relatively new technology for dispensing detergent.

A small plastic pod containing a concentrated detergent is dropped into a machine that dilutes the concentrate and creates fifteen gallons of detergent. These pods represent a fraction of the previous waste volume created by the 15-gallon rigid plastic containers.

Although the facility hasn’t reduced its waste stream to the point that it can eliminate one of its three weekly Dumpster pickups, the Dumpster is no longer overflowing between pickups.

“We used to have bags of trash piled outside of the Dumpster on pickup days,” Gendron said. “That has been completely eliminated. “(But) some of the measures haven’t worked out as well as I’d hoped. Originally, I had hoped to use more environmentally sound disinfectants and detergents, but we can’t jeopardize the health of the residents, just to be green.”

A green trend, however, seems to be catching on in the geriatric care field.

“We’ve had administrators from other nursing homes and classes from Johnson and Wales come in to check out our new system,” Gendron said. “I’ve been asked to make a few presentations about it to J&W students.”

The initial cost of instituting the new food and sanitation programs was between $35,000 and $40,000, according to Gendron. Those costs were mainly for the purchase of new equipment, and rewiring the wings to accommodate it. The sale of the old food carts, pellets and plastic trays and domes will offset that initial investment.

“When we started thinking about this program, one of our primary concerns was not putting people out of work, and we haven’t,” Gendron said. “What we have seen is a labor cost shift, not a labor savings.”

Blackstone Valley Independent Businesses

Align to Keep Customers Out of Chains

By DAVID FISHER/ecoRI staff

So, you’re trying to “green” up your life. You’ve begun taking shorter showers, turning off unnecessary lights and appliances, taking the bus to work and shopping at farmers’ markets. But where do you buy your paint? Where did you buy your last television?

Most people’s answers to those questions would likely be Home Depot and Best Buy. While these businesses certainly exist in our communities, the profits from those sales almost invariably go out of the state, and in some cases, out of the country.

The Blackstone Valley Independent Business Alliance is aiming to change that.

The alliance of small-business owners was formed about a year and a half ago, to promote buying locally produced and marketed goods. The response from local business owners has been tremendous. In the short time the alliance has been in operation, its ranks have swelled to about 160 local businesses, from general contractors, to farm stands, to hair salons.

Last Wednesday, at the first Blackstone Valley Independent Business Alliance meeting, Jeanne Budnick, president of the alliance and owner of Pepin Lumber in Woonsocket, stressed buying local products as a way to keep income in our communities. “For every dollar spent in a local store,” she said, “68 cents stays in the local economy.”

She also pointed to the tax revenue generated for the state and municipalities when your dollar is spent at an independently owned retailer or service provider, and not at a franchise or box store. In many instances, larger chain retailers skirt their state and federal taxes by having their corporate headquarters in another state or country.

The featured speakers were John Gregory, of the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, Mark Hayward, assistant director of the Rhode Island branch of the Small Business Administration, and Tom Ward, publisher of The Valley Breeze.

The alliance has started an aggressive buy-local campaign called “Keep the Green in the Valley,” and is beginning to work on implementing a discount card that can be used at participating local stores. During last year’s holiday season, the group organized a local “Shop Hop,” where if you visited five participating retailers, you received a 10 percent discount at the fifth stop.

It also has aligned itself with nationwide initiatives such as the “3/50 Project” and “10% Shift.” The 3/50 Project asks people which three independent businesses they would miss in their communities if they went out of business, and claims that if an extra $50 were spent in local businesses, by just half of the employed people in the United States, that would generate $42.6 billion in revenue that stays in our communities.

The 10% Shift is a campaign by the New England Local Business Forum that asks consumers to increase, by 10 percent, their purchases at local, independently owned businesses, thereby keeping more tax and business revenue local.

“The larger box stores, in most cases, don’t have the product knowledge or personalized service that’s available at our store,” said Nellie Chomka, owner of the Vose True Value hardware store in Woonsocket.

“Spending your money at a local store builds community ties, employs people from the community,” said her husband, Chet, “and a large part of the tax revenue in the state comes from small businesses.”

They’re both right. Small-business employees represent more than 90 percent of the workforce in Rhode Island, and in smaller stores, the staff, more often than not, have a depth of knowledge about their products that you can’t find at larger retailers.

You might assume that larger stores inherently offer better prices and quicker delivery, but Kyle Klockars, co-owner of Village Paints in North Smithfield, challenges that assumption.

“We beat Lowe’s prices on carpeting jobs every time,” he said. “We also have a quicker turnaround time on special orders because we don’t have to wait for a tractor trailer to be full before an order is shipped. Why should you have to wait for ten more people to order carpet before you can get yours?”

Don Gagnon, owner of Wicked Wisdom Web Designs and member of the alliance’s steering committee, said, “Most big businesses are willing to make money in a community, but rarely are they involved in the community further than that.”

He added that, “In a state whose population and income has remained relatively static for the last ten years, further retail development is unnecessary.”

Some employees of alliance members were in attendance. Amanda Goddard and Emilie Weiss, stylists at Creative Impressions Hair Salon in North Smithfield, both said they’ve seen an increase in business since the local purchasing campaign began.

Buying local makes sense on many levels. It fosters a sense of community and keeps money in the local economy.

For more information on the Blackstone Valley Independent Business Alliance, visit buylocalbv.org.

Rhode Island Foods Enter a New Galaxy

By DAVID FISHER/ecoRI staff

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Rick Antonelli cares about food. He cares about its safety, its quality, its nutritional value and how it is produced. He cares about the environment. Last, and certainly not least, he cares about the growth and prosperity of his company, Galaxy Nutritional Foods Inc.

Rick Antonelli The longtime Rhode Island resident and diehard Red Sox fan bought the company last May, with the assistance of Mill Road Capital, a private equity firm, and immediately began planning to move the company’s corporate headquarters from Orlando, Fla., to his home state.

That was an easy decision, at least personally, for the CEO. Antonelli lives in the Ocean State, and has children in the Rhode Island public school system. He wears his passion for Rhode Island on his sleeve, but noted that financially Rhode Island is not an easy state in which to own a business.

“Rhode Island is very, very difficult to do business in,” he said. “Had I not been a resident, had I not loved the physical beauty of this state and the fact that it’s a great place to raise children, there is no way I would have come anywhere close to this state based on a purely economic numbers situation.”

He mentioned Rhode Island’s high corporate taxes — double what the company paid in Florida — as an example.

Galaxy Foods occupies the second floor of the Falvey Cargo Underwriters building in the Quonset Industrial Park. And while the tax incentives that Falvey gets from the state are passed on to Galaxy through a somewhat lower rent — comparable to a similar facility in, say, Warwick or Cranston — state’s economic status has proved “very frustrating” for Antonelli.

In spite of some tough financial hurdles, his company has brought 30 jobs to Rhode Island, and has plans to grow the company dramatically in the coming years. The expansion already has begun, with the acquisition of BeeCeuticals, a New England-based organic body-care-product startup.

The dramatic rise in food allergies is a major concern of the company. In Antonelli’s opinion, it’s because “we’ve fooled around with nature.” He pointed to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a possible cause for these food issues, and he wishes that the GMO issue was “as big an issue in this country as it is in Europe.”

Galaxy produces a wide range of foods — mostly in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri — that cater to health-food aficionados and people with food allergies and intolerances. Many of the company’s existing products have been reformulated to include more organic ingredients.

“We want to make more products available to people who have celiac (disease) and dairy intolerances, and make them taste so good that even people without these issues will buy them,” he said. “The huge growth in this area is a plus, on the business side, and on the human side, bringing these products to people with these issues is a positive thing.”

The acquisition of BeeCeuticals has opened his eyes to the many harmful chemicals and additives, such as parabens and phthalates, used in the cosmetics industry. The European Union lists 1,500 compounds banned from use in cosmetics and body-care products; only nine of those are banned in the United States, according to Antonelli.

Galaxy also adheres to a green office agenda. The company buys $2,000 in carbon offsets every quarter. Antonelli said his company was the first in the United States to partner with carbonfund.org to offset its freight. The proceeds from these purchases go to renewable energy, reforestation and energy-efficiency projects.

Most of the company’s products are produced in facilities participating in the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Save Energy Now” program.

Also, everything that can be recycled is, including “a lot of yogurt cups” that are returned to a Whole Foods Market. Printer defaults are set to print double-sided. Lights, computers and monitors are shut off when not in use, and the use of washable bottles and mugs is encouraged.

Antonelli has been engaged in similar activities for a good part of his life. His family has been a member of the Casey Farm community supported agriculture (CSA) program, in Saunderstown, since 1996. “Not only is the CSA an incredible value,” he said, citing the member work requirement and kids’ camps at the farm, “it’s really a phenomenal experience.”

For more information, visit galaxyfoods.com.



Rhode Island Company Chases Down Wind Power Approval

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

About 400 Windspire turbines manufactured by Michigan-based Mariah Power have been erected across the country.MIDDLETOWN — Some people chase storms. Tim Hetland chases wind turbines.

It’s easier and certainly less dangerous, but it is awkward.

“Pulling into someone’s driveway, walking up to the front steps and knocking on the door so I can ask them about their wind turbine is a little unusual,” Hetland admitted. “But most people invite me for a cup of coffee, and we talk.”

Winter is the ideal time to chase wind turbines, because leaves and other vegetation can’t hide their whereabouts. And, “there’s more out there than people think,” Hetland said. Many of the ones he finds were erected during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Most are still working fine; others that have exceeded their usefulness, he has helped take down.

Hetland has discovered wind turbines in nearby Jamestown and Little Compton that he had no idea existed. The affable Middletown resident soon was knocking on the doors of these unknown Newport County neighbors to introduce himself and, more importantly, talk about their renewable energy devices.

He tags all his discoveries on Google Earth.

Hetland, a self-described “techno geek,” has been fascinated with renewable energy, especially wind and solar, for some time. He’s had solar panels on his home for 20 years and his property features a small wind turbine.

His dream is one day to be totally off the grid. For now, though, he’s concentrating on getting Rhode Island’s 39 municipalities to adopt wind ordinances. It hasn’t been easy.

“In many of these towns there is no wind ordinance, so wind turbines aren’t allowed. You have to get a special-use permit,” Hetland said. “And since there are no set rules or statutes, it makes it difficult to get permission to put up a wind turbine, and I’m not talking about ones the size of the 1.5-megawatt turbine at Portsmouth High School.”

Three years ago, Hetland, tired of installing “a lot of dirty things,” such as oil burners, left the plumbing and heating business after two decades and created Rhode Island Wind Power Inc. The two-person business on Aquidneck Avenue was founded with the idea of helping homeowners, small businesses, farmers, nurseries and schools achieve energy independence.

Bergey Wind Turbines often are used for off-grid homes, for rural electrification and to boost the performance of solar electric systems.The company also helps its clients secure rebates and tax incentives — both state and federal — and manages the wind turbine’s connection to the utility grid provider.

Rhode Island, with an average wind speed of 10 to 12 mph, is not only one of the best places in the country, but it’s also one of the best spots in world for wind power, said Charlie Roberts, the company’s vice president for sales and marketing.

Harnessing that energy, however, is not an easy process to navigate, at least when it comes to dealing with local boards and committees, according to Roberts.

“Municipalities got burned before with cell-phone towers, so few towns have passed ordinances that deal with installing wind turbines,” he said.

Charlestown and Middletown are among the few municipalities that have passed some type of wind ordinance, and they both did so recently. Hetland and Roberts are currently working with a client to get a special-use permit for a small wind turbine in Coventry.

It’s also the type of work that doesn’t pay the bills. “A lot of our work is free work,” said Roberts, a New York native. “It’s not billable.”

Their non-billable work includes attending numerous planning board and zoning board meetings and talking with state and local officials. They run into plenty of resistance.

“They think we want to do the whole landscape in megawatt turbines,” Hetland said.

Hetland understands some of the resistance — even though he downplays overstated concerns associated wind turbines, such as they ruin scenic landscapes, kill lots of birds and generate excessive amounts of electromagnetic energy — but is bewildered by the amount of effort it takes just to speak with municipal officials about siting a small wind turbine.

“We survive on electrical products,” he said. “It’s hard to go backwards; nobody’s getting rid of their microwaves. Yet, we have to fight with these people just to be heard.”

Rhode Island Wind Power specializes in wind turbines that range from 1 to 30 kilowatts, with the higher end more suitable for farms and schools. “Homeowners should stick with a turbine that is between one and fifteen kilowatts,” Roberts said. “Anything above that would be too big for most homes.”

A Raum Energy 1.5-megawatt wind turbine.There are about 150 turbines on the market, according to Roberts, but Rhode Island Wind Power has focused on four it believes often the best value — the Windspire by Mariah Power, Bergey Wind Turbines, Raum Energy and Proven Energy.

These turbines range in price from $11,000 to $22,000, fully installed, and can cost up to $100,000. These pole-mounted turbines stand 30 to 140 feet tall, depending on location, and they run “library quiet.” They all also can supply about a quarter of an average home’s energy needs, Roberts said.

“You have to be cautious of what is out there,” Hetland said. “There is a huge amount of junk out there.”

Proven Energy has installed nearly 3,000 wind turbines worldwide.Last fall, Rhode Island Wind Power sold the New England Institute of Technology, in Warwick, a 60-foot-tall, 1-kilowatt Bergey wind turbine. Another Bergey sits on Rose Island — and has been tagged on Google Earth by Hetland, although he didn’t have to knock on the island’s lighthouse door.

The company’s favorite turbine, Mariah Power’s Windspire — a propeller-free turbine that generates power when the wind blows against its vertical airfoils — was designed for urban settings.

Both Roberts and Hetland envision a row of these Windspires installed in the median of Memorial Boulevard, by Easton’s Beach in Newport, that would power the nearby streetlights.

While the company — which was incorporated only a month ago and added its second employee, Roberts, just last summer — spends most of its time trying to get officials to embrace the idea of renewable wind energy, rather than push it away, it has discovered the power of energy.

“You’d be amazed at how much electricity people can blow through,” Roberts said.

For more information, visit rhodeislandwindpower.com.