stafford creek prison which is out on the olympic peninsula and they received a notice from the county that they were in violation of the suspended solids regulation for how much material was suspended in the effluent flowing out of the prison and they were going to have to spend five million dollars to upgrade their sewage treatment by coincidence at the same time they had employed and implemented a composting program so they were putting all the food wast compost piles and composting in washington is difficult because it's so wet up there but they had learned how to do it and about six months later the county came back to reexamine their effluent in their sewage treatment plant and they said we don't know what you did but it's reduced by down to twenty five percent of it was what it was before it's been reduced by a factor of four and the person who ran the kitchen said she do you think that has anything to do with composting our food waste they have been putting all their food into the garbage disposal and it was going through the sewage treatment plant coming out the suspended solids so just composting their food waste save them four million dollars or defer that expense for many years and so materials flow is important and when we talk about materials flow we're going to start with gardening and composting because it's near and dear to my heart because food and and waste are neglected parts of our culture we don't really think about where do we get our food from how do we get the nutrients that are in our food what does it take and prisons as an institution have historically not thought about much at all and total vignette about that in a little while but washington is really leading the country in this regard they've been working on this for almost twenty years and in washington they started a project that they called the sustainability in prisons project and so many different facilities they're doing different ways of growing their food raising be composting their waste becoming regional composting facilities and this is stable prisons project has programs in all the prisons in washington now so that they're saving money they're reducing the waste and they're serving as a resource to the community they're not the only ones we'll talk about some others later on but there are diverse ways of composting their  windrows that can be done outdoors with long working with bulldozers or their indoor contain composting facilities they can produce composting and there are just some statistics up on the screen here that the yearly savings in washington institutional paper and turned out the use a lot of paper in prisons for toilet paper and so dan said gee can we recycle paper into toilet paper well the phrase recycled toilet paper has kind of a different ring to it and then went to a paper mill in washington and said if we give you the paper can you recycle it into toilet paper and they said well if you want to be nontoxic we can do it but we can't use chlorine to bleach it so it's going to be brown and dense and while it's kind good you know recycled toilet paper ought to be brown and so they began recycling paper into toilet paper they saved two hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars a year by recycling their toilet paper and that's how the sustainability in prisons project is funded to this day from the savings from that program in ohio the ohio state football team is very popular and when they have football games in the stadium at ohio state university they generate a lot of waste so some enterprising people said well how about if we take the waste from the football stadium and recycle it at the prison so they collect all the waste from the ohio state football games truck it over to the local prison dump it in the parking lot and the incarcerated folks sort through for the recyclables and they've achieved a ninety eight five percent recycling rate for all of the waste coming out of the ohio state stadium that means fifty nine dollars tons of waste went into the landfill in two thousand and ten when they started two thousand and thirteen they're down to five eight tons there's a prison in indiana that's a small facility for three hundred dollars people but they're down to one thirty gallon trash bag a month and it's mostly biological waste and they're begging the central office to tell them how do we get rid of that last one another thing they're doing in ohio to inspire the incarcerated people bringing science into the prisons and this is the legacy of the sustainability in prisons project which was started by a scientist at the evergreen state college which is now evergreen state university so in ohio they said well what can we do that scientific how can we how can we get incarcerated people engaged in science it turns out they have an endangered species in ohio that's eastern hellbender which is the largest salamander in north america it's like the pacific giant in the redwood forest in northern california big help anderson grow to be two or three feet long and it's one of the largest selling those might be the largest salamander in the world so they're breeding them in ohio prisons and putting them back out into the ohio river which is the only place they grow in the world because they were threatened w they were threatened with extinction and they wanted to bring science into the prison so they started this help in their breeding program in washington state they're breeding endangered checker spot butterflies they're breeding endangered grasses here in oregon they're breeding the endangered oregon spotted frog and taking it back out into the habitat to release it so there are a lot of science programs in prisons getting back to materials flow though the north carolina department correction started recycling construction materials which is a huge volume of waste going into the landfills and so they recycle materials that are make them suitable for phil and they also recycle pipe and other kinds of resources also in north carolina prison they're doing vermin composting that's not wine culture that's worms and they teach their inmates how to start worm based composting down the mississippi they grow most of the food for their prison system on site in their in their larger facilities they grow twenty three different varieties of vegetables corn soybeans we rights they have seven thousand three hundred hogs thirty six thousand chickens and the prisoners and the prisoners are a lot of learning while they learn how to do that how to where the food comes from and how to cultivate it it cost them about the same amount of money to grow their own vegetables as did buy them but they get job training and they have inmates who are occupied who are engaged idle inmates become violent yeah and people who are engaged in our learning and making themselves better people are less violent this one of my favorite examples down in the easy to use greenhouses to grow a lot of vegetables they recycle all their office material their office printers and the printer ink cartridges and that sort of thing they also use bio fuel vehicles that would that would be mules yet which they've been doing for one hundred years in the former warden of angola state prison said to me once is a model sustainable i said sure a multiplier as composting and he said well good we've been sustainable it angola for one hundred years and they still use those meals to take the farm workers from the dorms in the residences out to the fields carry the produce back to the dining hall where they prepare it and then go as a wonderful example of the sustainability oriented community because of the six thousand people who live there who are incarcerated four thousand are never going home in  degree murder which is a bar fight crime of passion automatic life sentence and so at angola they literally have four thousand people who are going to live there until they die and that makes it very effective for them to orient themselves around sustainability it's an interesting facility on one side of the prison is the river and then they have fencing around three sides they had budget cuts a while back and they didn't know what to do about guarding the perimeter so they brought down a wolf from canada and they crossbred this wolf with german shepherds and then trained them to patrol the perimeter so three sides of the prison are patrolled by wolves the th side the river they don't need to worry about because it's patrolled by alligators coming back around to the notion of materials flow cleaning compounds are a huge thing in institutions not just prisons and jails but colleges and schools and hospitals government office buildings and there's a very a ggressive movement nationwide to produce non toxic cleaning compound and in prison facilities that very important because if you have a toxic cleaning compound it becomes a weapon and also becomes a tool for committing suicide and so if you have a cleaning compound that if somebody drinks it it's not going to hurt then that safer than having something that they can use to commit suicide or harm themselves or throw it in someone's face and cause harm and so that many many departments are converting to non toxic cleaning compounds so that's about enough on material slow and talk has a lot we can do about that but let's talk a little bit about water water is a very precious resource and david brower who founded friends of the earth was very concerned about water johnson who started the nature sorry the trust for public land use to say people are not going to change their lifestyle around energy because they don't understand energy they want to flip a light switch and have it go on but they don't understand how it works but water they understand water flows downhill it's wet goes through a garden hose you can see it and so managing water is a really important resource brain barrels are not particularly cost effective but they're very useful in terms of maintaining the health of the watershed keeping the water in the watershed rather than paving all or drainage and just getting it out to the ocean as fast we can so a number of correctional institutions around the  north american area are using rain barrel stood redistribute water on site to be careful in some states particularly in the west water is very valuable commodity and they say whiskies for drinking water for fighting  and in colorado and some other areas it's illegal to trap water and recharge groundwater with it you have to allow it to run off because the people downstream have rights to that to use water but nonetheless gathering water and spreading it so that it can go back into the groundwater where it's allowable is a very useful technology how do you green roof is an interesting problem in a correctional facility because you don't exactly want to have incarcerated people out on the roof mow in the lawn but nonetheless green roofs can be very cost effective they can be very good for insulation and keeping the heating and cooling bills down in the buildings so a number of facilities such as the onondaga county correctional facility in jamesville new york are implementing green roofs one of my favorite water technologies is aqua politics and a lot of prisons and jails have programs to do hydroponics for growing vegetables in a slurry of ficon fluid but and they they may have fish growing programs but combining the two putting fish into a tank and then growing vegetables on top of the tank is a very interesting strategy in colorado they were doing that at the colorado state prison they were growing about who one million dollars ready a year worth a tell appiah which they were selling to whole foods market until some people found out and said whole foods market is employing prison labor and it was a big scandal and so they stopped selling the fish and just started grinding them up and making them fertilizer for the vegetables but they still have a really good politics program at the colorado state prison and in texas they're doing some programs and they have a green salad challenge they're challenging all correctional facilities to to provide at least one salad that's grown on site using organic principles at all the correctional facilities in texas and they can do it schools can do it w really really exciting stuff that's happening around combining water and vegetables in virginia maryland kentucky they're using an approach is called correct pack where instead of bringing janitorial chemicals in and big fifty gallon drums and then washing everything with those pretty processed chemicals they're bringing them in in little packets which are color coded and labeled in english and spanish and mixing them with water on site and that saves having to ship water across the country well and it makes it much easier for them to be labeled and sorted and stored because they mix them with water later before they use them prison they're very encouraging signs a lot of guys so let's talk a little bit about energy is one of the last topics we're going to cover it i talked about pendleton facility in indiana at pendleton they put in a boiler because they had a pallet manufacturing plant next to the prison it was actually part of the prison it was a job training program with a wooden pallet that they use for in warehouses and now bringing sacks of stuff off of trucks the liability that causes a pallet to wear out is the leading board on the pallet gets hit by the forklift and the forklift will shred that board after eight or ten uses and then they have to replace that leading edge board would waste from the pallet manufacturing plant and got eighty five percent of their hot water heat in their building heat from the biomass boiler and it was very cost effective and their motto was go green save money in in illinois they implemented biofuels program for converting their buses in their trucks in there to bio diesel and they were using the cooking oil from the kitchens in the prisons to convert diesel and create a green collar economy california of course is everybody's dream solar environment and even the prisons in california are putting huge solar installations on the top of their roofs and generating thousands of watts of power to power the prison it turns out it's more secure because of the grid goes down they can't open the electric doors in a prison oh he had turned the lights on they lose everything and so historically they've used generators but when they have solar facilities and batteries the facility becomes much more secure because of that at the juvenile facility ready in alameda county they've created solar carports out in the parking lot where they put sunshades with solar panels on top and the cars come in and people have electric cars they can park there and charge their electric car from the solar panels while they're at work all day i haven't seen it in prison but one of my favorite solar technologies i saw in phoenix when i was at the american correctional association there a few years ago they had a similar solar panel facility on top of bus benches they would have it eight feet off the ground they'd have a solar panel powering a little air conditioner the just blew down a column of cold air on people standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus and it was solar powered and very efficient another thing that many correctional facilities are doing to reduce their energy use for transportation is putting video visiting where people can go the people incarcerated can go to a kiosk and their families can go to a central location in a city near where they live rather than driving ten thousand two hundred miles to visit their person who's incarcerated they're also using this for court appearances and other kinds of hearings where they don't have to put people in buses and drive across the state in order to get to a facility now having talked about all the different parts one of the most important ways to approach greening of institutions and i've been saying for twenty five years what we need is broad sweeping fundamental transformation at the institutional level yeah i put prisons and jails but it could be schools or hospitals or office buildings many different kinds of transformation but doing everything at once has a lot of virtue yeah those environmental radicals out in eldorado kansas did everything at once they looked at their lighting their building controls their energy management system they put in variable speed motors they got a new kitchen exhaust hood they put in rooftop units for ready air conditioning and recycle everything they put in low flow toilets and water softening in the installed laundry ozone system so they didn't have to heat the water as much they spent about two million dollars they saved two hundred and forty seven thousand dollars a year on the energy another twelve thousand dollars on their non energy they calculated that their utility cost reduction was sixteen percent their total time to positive cash flow was eight years and their return on investment over ten years was twelve two percent now i don't know how your three hundred and one k is doing when it's pretty good re used  preserve the equivalent of fifteen acres of forest preventing deforestation and they're conserving maybe six thousand barrels of oil you're it's very effective to do everything at once because the savings get applied across everything that you need to do yeah i think  get beyond you know the initial capital cost it's obviously it's welfare and it turns out when you do a lot the initial capital costs are not that big an obstacle the memphis county jail is actually a prison it's a very large facility they spent millions of dollars and put ready solar hot water heating system on the top of their st building one of their buildings the payback time was eighteen months wall and they're getting eighty five percent of their hot water for free now when the other folks in memphis found out about that in memphis you know it's not thought of as an ideal solar climate it's a little more like germany but they're getting eighty five percent of their hot water at the county jail for free and that got attention around the country now some other institutions are starting to do that sort of thing as well here in oregon we have a number of examples which we'll talk more about if we have time but for example deer ridge correctional institute was designed to be a lead silver and lead is the leading energy and environmental design system put out by the u s green building council they designed the facility from the ground up when they built it to be a model sustainable communities so they're moving towards zero energy local and sustainable building materials sustainable water in other words the water goes out cleaner than it came in and indoor environmental quality and comfort and using collective wisdom and feedback within the institution to find out how we can improve by engaging the staff and the residents in ideas in developing social equity so that the time of incarceration is an opportunity to learn a more sustainable way of life so this is happening right here on earth and happening right here in oregon one of the models in the country i talked about the boulder county jail earlier and boulder county has done a lot more than just the food composting system in addition to providing all of the food for the residents for the the summer months they've done an energy star rated roof they have a one hundred kilowatt photovoltaic solar system they've changed their lighting systems they've got bond funding to do a biomass heating plant they've replaced their chiller they're using those air pairs in air handlers they have a computerized system they've also substituted ozone sanitation for the water in their laundry system so they don't have to use as much hot water they're doing everything at once and it's very effective to do that oftentimes it's helpful for the corrections institutions if the local or regional government mandates it then they have to do it and they don't have any pushback about those who are coming in here to take our guns away you know it's just it's a lot easier if they get a mandate but they'll still do it on cost effective basis the federal bureau of prisons is aspiring to do much better among the most sustainable institutions on the planet or the u s military the air force has the largest solar installations in north america because they're more secure and the army bases in the other military facilities are aspiring to be sustainable communities because they're more secure they're not dependent on the surrounding community and so prisons are taking a page out of that book and they're implementing recycling and greenhouses and alternate fuels these are plans at the federal level they have not implemented them yet so there are many things that the federal institutions aspire to do and they're talking about implementing it we'll see how that goes over the years to come but these are some of the plans that they have at the federal level i'll just talk briefly about financing because we don't have much time left it's really important to recognize that there are limited funds available so doing maintenance items st cos basis on the on life cycle of technologies and then utilizing rd party resources not going to go into the details of what a correctional facility can say but suffice it to say they can save about fifty dollars per inmate per year over the life cycle of technologies and so just by way of summing up people say how do we put the fear of god into people we don't need to put the fear of god into people we need to put the fear of china into people because china is leading us and you've heard it said that the  nd mouse gets the cheese come back to the slide for just a minute we need to be like this little guy strap on a helmet and go for great can you tell us a little bit more paul about what's happening in oregon prison yeah oregon is one of the leaders in the world so they're doing recycling they have guards in all the prisons dog programs horse programs beekeeping programs breeding endangered species green science and job training into the prisons it's a really model institution i'm very proud of the organ department corrections they do great work under the leadership of collette peters who's the secretary of corrections here in oregon it's a model department for green practices thank you so much paul i think what you've given us is a lot of inspiration how it could be a model for cities for not just an institution like a prison but for a family thank you i wanted to just say a couple things about southern oregon touch mama alliance and what we do are our purpose is bringing forth an environmentally sustainable spiritually fulfilling socially just human presence on the planet a lot of that work happens in consciousness really in our hearts and the very practical ways that you've talked about today of bringing forth these changes are just totally inspiring we have a few programs here in the community we'd like you to know about one is awakening the dreamer  symposium it's it's available online and there should be a slide on the screen to show you where you could find that answer and we offer it in the fall offer it live so watch for announcements about that we also have something called the game changer intensive next fight which is and eight week online program to look more in depth at the systems and structures that need to shift and lot of the ways you've talked about today paul shifting and but more pertinent to this conversation we have a lot of people work working on drawdown solutions and the best way to find out about what's going on in our community about working on climate solutions would be to attend one of our drawdown potlucks there on the st saturday of every month from noon to three at the bellevue and that so i can can encourage you enough to just learn more about what we can do and what people are already doing not in prison but right here in our community and paul just thank you so much you're so welcome in this special thanks to the folks that s o u for making the city a facilities available in two road valley t v and to all of our volunteer crew that put this together for us the people who put this on are all volunteers and they're very dedicated and knowledgeable technologists so grateful to all of them this is a great way to get information out to the community and just to learn about inspiring things that there is hope that we can