|
 |
|
Green
Technology Interview:
Admiral Len Hering
Admiral Len Hering is the regional commander for the six states of the
southwestern United States – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico,
Colorado and Utah. He is also the Department of Defense Regional
Environmental Coordinator (DoD REC) for EPA Region 9.
In the capacity of DoD REC EPA IX, he is the lead on environmental issues
that affect more than one military service, and his efforts focus on
various regulatory matters of interest to or in support of military
installation environmental efforts.
With the
help of 3,800 staff, he is responsible for the stewardship of more than
1.5 million acres and an enormous amount of water resources.
In April 2000, he helped establish the
Federal Network for Sustainability
(FNS), a volunteer partnership between 14 western federal agencies to
share information and team on sustainable initiatives.
In this interview with Green Technology magazine he describes his
efforts to advance the practice of sustainability and the importance of
this work to the Navy and to American citizens.
Please
describe the Federal Network for Sustainability.
It's an opportunity for us to engage in and create partnerships so that we
are able to learn from each other, share experience and adapt, and are
able to comply with the requirement- and there is a requirement -
that the federal government lead in matters of sustainability.
Where does that requirement come from?
Presidential Executive Orders (E.O.), beginning with
Executive Order 13148 in April 2000 set
the requirement. The President in E.O. 13148 stated that "The head of each
Federal agency is responsible for ensuring that all necessary actions are
taken to integrate environmental accountability into agency day-to-day
decision-making and long-term planning processes." Follow on E.O.'s
strengthened the language and encouraged partnerships such as the FNS.
Sustainability is not just for the environment. It really is about the
triple-bottom line, whether it be process, or resource conservation, or
environmental protection. We need to make sure that we utilize anything
that we are in charge of for the betterment of the future.
That's a very good definition of sustainability.
It really is. It affects the bottom line in virtually everything that you
discuss. I don't mean bottom line being just money, but how you do
business when you look at the future.
People don't think of the military as a business, or bottom line
operation – or even an operation engaged in sustainability.
The Navy Region Southwest is equivalent in size to a Fortune 500 company.
I'm responsible for more than a million and a half acres of land, a half a
billion acres of water, hundreds of thousands of miles of airspace, and
billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.
Can you give a little snapshot of the job of a commander at your level?
My principal mission is to make sure that the forces that we support have
the opportunity to operate in the air-land-sea interface that I'm
responsible for maintaining. If we are not good environmental stewards of
those land/air/sea interfaces, then we will have a difficult time being
able to continue operating in the fashion that's necessary to make sure
that our forces are ready. Sustainability is the process that I put into
place here in the region to make sure that people start thinking about
what that really involves.
Can you
give an example of what this might involve?
One example is wind turbines. As wind turbine development becomes a source
of renewable energy, we need to make absolutely certain that the placement
of those wind turbines does not impact on our ability to do low-level
flights, that the placement of wind turbines allows us the opportunity to
utilize our radar systems and our helicopters and other such things in the
airspace that is so critical to our training.
If a pilot is unable to execute a mission in a training environment, it
has tremendous impact on our military readiness. Imagine going in and out
of a location using extreme low-level ingress or egress tactics for the
first time in a combat situation.
Is this the reason for the partnership?
In some ways. The more we know about each other, the more we can work with
one another to make sure we're not impacted. We are in the process of
working with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and governmental
agencies to create environmental protection areas in and around our
facilities. We can protect the environment, create habitat that is
conducive to the propagation of endangered species or protected species,
and we ensure through our partnerships that these areas are not threatened
by development. That's beneficial to all.
How is the Navy protecting habitat?
I was regional commander of the Pacific Northwest, and one of the greatest
experiences I had while I was there was camping in some of the last old
growth Sitka Spruce forest in the entire United States. The only reason
it's there is because a Navy forester developed a memorandum of agreement
with the logging companies that made it so difficult for them to forest it
that this 250-acre stand is the last old-growth in the entire 48, with
1,500 year-old trees. The one that we camped next to was a small tree when
Caesar crossed the plains of Spain in conquest of the Pyrenees.
This was just north of Everett, Washington, in a place called Jim's Creek.
We have places like that here. We're very proud of our environmental
programs that have resulted in some just incredible health and wildlife,
flora, fauna and birds. On San Nicholas Island, off the coast of Ventura,
California, pinnipeds and sea lions are now thriving. In 1973 it
took one person a day and a half to count the number of pinnipeds
that were on the island to mate. Today we do it by camera and we're
allowed to stop at 220,000. It is such an amazing event to go out there
and watch the beach line just absolutely filled with elephant seals and
California sea lions. The only reason they're there is because they're
protected by the military and the properties that we keep as a buffer.
We have significant open space on the coastal areas between Los Angeles
and San Diego County. Marine Corps Major General Michael Lehnert and I are
responsible for 44 endangered species, more than anyone else in the
southwestern US. If it weren't for the properties that we own, Orange
County and San Diego County would be one large metropolitan area along the
California coastline. We support eight endemic animal and plant species;
if it weren't for us, they would be gone.
You're an oceanographer - have you been an environmentalist for as long
as you can remember? How did you come to all this?
I have to tell you that I'm one of those folks that took the lessons of
Boy Scouting seriously. I'm an Eagle Scout, and I learned very young that
your environment is something that you should be mindful of. I had an
opportunity to see and be part of that seventies group with the crying
Indian and the changes in our environment. I took it seriously, and when I
got into the Navy I recognized that there were opportunities for us to do
things.
My mantra has always been that environmental compliance and operations are
not mutually exclusive. They just require good prior planning and an
understanding of environmental impact. If we are not responsible, then we
can't hold our children responsible, and their children beyond that. We're
supposed to leave a better world for our kids.
Could you describe some specific projects? What are some things that
really get you excited?
Have you got a couple of hours?
We recently put an RFP [request for proposal] out to encourage the use of
new technologies that insert photovoltaic into PVC roof liners. We're
looking at about a 3-megawatt installation, enough to power the entire
existing grid within our facility.
We partner with anyone who's interested in looking at new technologies.
I'm not in the business of making money; I don't "rent" my roofs. But I
certainly am willing to partner with folks who would like to be able to
utilize federal roofs for the benefit of the taxpayer.
We're into the geothermal effort; we've done surveys and know where the
geothermal plumes exist on our facilities. Now we're in the process of
going forward to do some exploratory drilling to determine the validity of
those maps. Two of them have been very encouraging to date, so we're
hoping that in the next couple of years we'll be able to have major
construction on a 300 megawatt plant in Nevada, and hopefully the same
result will occur from a very, very hopeful and very, very exciting
opportunity in El Centro in the Imperial Valley.
We're also looking at a 40-acre photovoltaic system in Fallon, a
partnership with the Bureau of Land Management that would create a
30-megawatt photovoltaic opportunity for us. We're into desalinization,
we're heavy into recycling – but don't call it recycling, I call it waste
management and commodities marketing. We divert more than 75-80 percent of
all of our waste. We make absolutely certain that we understand the
impacts, and then we actually do commodity brokering in our recycling
effort. I will do large-scale commodity brokering in order to secure top
dollar.
What does that mean exactly?
Say aluminum has to be recycled. That involves transportation,
hauling, moving, processing, cleaning up and then getting it ready for
shipment. While the price of aluminum may be 13 or 14 cents a pound, if
you have to go through all that process, what you will get from a small
company is maybe 3-5 cents a pound.
What I will do is prepare that commodity for shipment in bulk. I won't
deal in the few hundred pounds. I will deal in a couple hundred tons. So
instead of the 3 or 4 cents a pound, I will get 13 cents a pound.
I learned this first in 2000, where the bulk of my recycling effort was in
cardboard. My folks came to me - at that point I was a Captain who said,
"If we don't figure out what to do with the cardboard, we're going to have
to shut down our recycling effort because we're only being offered .5
cents a pound." We had been getting about 8 cents a pound when the market
was good.
So we did some research and found that the real cost difference was
transportation. So we made five acres available and I started stacking up
cardboard. When all was said and done, we had a shipload. We brought the
ship into port in San Diego and I loaded 150 tons of cardboard onto the
ship. We got 14 cents a pound; I paid for the entire recycling program in
one load. We took that concept and we expanded it, and today I have a
world-class recycling program throughout the region. That recycling
program provides for us opportunities to work in a myriad of different
commodities.
We strip the gold from our computer boards and we sell that. When we
demolish our buildings, we recycle the building material. We grind it down
and we use it for other things. As a matter of fact, we divert about 85
percent of our building materials. About 39,000 truckloads over the course
of the last four or five years have been diverted from the landfill,
360,000 tons of landfill materials.
Of course, the military is in a unique position to be able to do these
things.
No, everybody is. We have to change our mindset. I believe that behavior
modifications are the key to a sustainable future. It has to be managed
from a municipal perspective.
It's absolutely amazing what you can do if you just change your behavior.
By purchasing a
Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) you will consume up to 75 percent less
energy than incandescent bulbs and it lasts up to ten times longer.
You have to break away from the idea that recycling and waste management
is not a competitive market. What if you only paid for garbage service if
you put out trash that had to go to a landfill? Otherwise, the service
would be covered by recycling fees.
Water conservation is a major issue in the southwest; can you tell us a
little bit about what you're doing?
I represent a huge portion of the San Diego metro area and am one of the
largest consumers of electricity, water and [producers of] sewage. In
about 2005 I attended a briefing that alerted me to the fact that we were
in near-crisis conditions.
I directed that we start monitoring our [water] use so that we could
baseline. In 2005 we baselined our consumption and found out that we were
at about 4.2-4.3 billion gallons a year. We put a very aggressive water
conservation plan together and over the course of the last three years
we've achieved a savings of about one billion gallons, 346 million last
year alone.
We continue to work those efforts across the entire region, looking at
those places where we can make a significant impact. Astroturf and
Xeriscaping are options that should be embraced in a desert environment –
making things green for the sake of making them green is a tremendous
waste of taxpayer resources. We have partnered with colleges that are
looking for opportunities for their students and have xeriscaped hundreds
of acres throughout the entire region.
We've installed waterless urinals and replaced virtually every shower head
throughout the region. I run the largest hotel chain in Southern
California; I have 11,400 beds, so that's a lot of showers.
What about food service?
That's another place where sustainability comes into play. We've found
different ways to get our folks food. We used to have rows and rows of
huge baking ovens and steam kettles that consumed a tremendous amount of
energy, and today we prepare that same meal, literally thousands of meals
every day, at half the energy.
Are you using Energy Star equipment?
That's one of our big efforts. Over the course of the last three years,
we've changed out a couple of thousand washers, dryers, refrigerators and
other appliances. We've partnered with local power companies to replace
inefficient large-building HVAC systems. We get a check for the
differences in savings. Last year I received a check for $1.4 million from
San Diego Gas & Electric, and that money went back to the taxpayer.
In closing, how would you like the military to be operating 25 years
from now?
Completely self-sustaining, when it comes to infrastructure and support.
We have 3,000 acres of roofs on my facilities and I believe that virtually
every one of those infrastructure support elements exist with a renewable
capability. If you just change the behaviors we can be a much more
efficient and effective operation. We're even doing it in our buildings;
nothing will be built here that's not LEED Silver or better. Don't throw
anything out unless it's been used twice. We will not buy any furniture or
building materials or anything else that is not manufactured from
renewable resources or recycled materials. What we do buy we will lease
and when it's done it will be turned back in and recycled.
We're also trying to go paperless, although that's a huge wish - you
should see my desk!
Thank you.
You're welcome.
 |
