Category Archives: Humboldt Made

HSU Grad Playing Key Role in Battle Against Styrofoam

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Can a startup headed by two twenty-somethings rid the Earth of styrofoam? It just may be happening.

Sue Van Hook, who earned Bachelor’s degrees in Botany and French and a Master’s degree in Biology from HSU,  has retired from teaching at prestigious Skidmore College and is now the Chief Mycologist at Ecovative Design, LLC. which employs about sixty people in Green Island, New York. Ian Frazier, in the May 20 edition of The New Yorker,  recounts in his article the six-year history of the company, which has attracted international attention by developing  an all-natural substitute for plastic made from tissue found in mushrooms.  It is suitable for containers and packaging now made from Styrofoam. “Ecovative’s eventual goal is to displace plastics all over the world.”

Ecovative’s founders, Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, are graduates of Rensselaer Tech’s Inventors’ Studio and its Incubator program.  They were already talking about starting a company and had won a $20,000 prize for environmental entrepreneurship from Oxford when Van Hook read about them in a local paper and called them. Skidmore became a backer of the project along with Rensselaer and Van Hook’s students became part of the effort to find a suitable growing medium and technique to produce an “artificial plastic”.

The hazards of real plastic are pretty evident by this time. Landfills, beaches and highways   are littered with Styrofoam which once was used primarily for building insulation but now, unhappily, is everywhere. Much of the trash gyre in the Pacific Ocean is styrofoam, also called “foamed polystyrene”.  As Frazier notes, “Foamed polystyrene breaks down extremely slowly, in timespans no one is sure of, and a major chemical it breaks down to is styrene, listed as a carcinogen in the 2011 toxicology report issued by the National Institutes of Health.”  The toll on wildlife has been well-established.  Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a ban on the commercial use of Styrofoam containers in NYC.

The materials produced by Ecovative will biodegrade in about a month, with no carcinogens. I highly recommend the article, along with the rest of the May 20 “Innovators issue”, and I’m sorry I can’t reprint the whole thing for you, but it’s copyrighted. You can buy it online, visit the library or just buy a subscription.  I’ve been reading The New Yorker since I was a kid and it just keeps getting better.

So why don’t we have a county-wide ban on  Styrofoam?  Could your business find a way to succeed without foamed polystyrene? And wouldn’t Sue Van Hook have been a better choice as a graduation speaker than a phonied-up impersonator of Alexander von Humboldt, who never set foot in California?? What do you think?

Plan It Green 2012- the Adaptation Conference

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You’ve probably seen these posters around town but may not have realized that there are folks right here in our community and elsewhere on the North Coast who are actively engaged in addressing the critical issues of climate change, the exhaustion of resources such as cheap oil,and the economic uncertainties in Europe, Asia and the Middle East,  all of which will affect our planet and the world in which our children will grow up.

These local activists will team with others from near (Mendocino) and far (there will be live webcasts with Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, and with Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook-from oil dependence to local resilience) to discuss their research and findings on the development of strategies and technologies that will build resiliency into our future.  In-person guests include Richard Heinberg, , leading national energy expert, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and the author of ten books including The End of Growth.

You can hear from these world-class experts and exchange ideas with many others at this year’s Plan It Green conference, the most ambitious yet. The symposiums and webcasts begin the evening of Thursday, July 19 and continue all the next day at Humboldt State. On Saturday the action moves to the Arcata Community Center, with the Annual Trade Show where over 40 exhibitors  are expected with information, goods and services related to home energy systems, building trades, transportation, food production and home furnishings and products PLUS the “Wheels of Change” auto mall featuring a variety of alternative-fuel, hybrid and electric vehicles.  The Saturday events are free and open to the public, the Conference has a TOP price of $49 which includes lunch and a 2GB thumb-drive containing the Community Resilient Toolkit, including a 120-page workbook and extensive digital resources.

There will be much more going on than we have space here so for more information and tickets visit the website   http://www.AdaptationConference.org                             This is important. Don’t miss it!

 

 

Is Calhoun’s the best barbecue sauce ever?

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Early days

 I am making no attempt whatsoever to be objective.  From the moment I discovered Calhoun’s (probably at Murphy’s) I have never purchased another brand. I’ve tried barbeque sauces all over the Carolinas and Florida, and in St. Louis, and even the mustard sauce peculiar to South Carolina, which most Californians can’t stand.

But my go-to sauce, which I always keep on hand, is Calhoun’s Original Southside Bar-B-Cue Sauce. It’s light and slightly spicy, not sticky-sweet like the Memphis style.  As Mike Ross, its creator, explains it, there is no real “Chicago Style” sauce; he had to invent it himself.

Talking to Mike Ross is a treat, especially if you love Chicago as I do. Mike grew up in what is now known as the “Historic Pullman District”. Historic it is, and you can sign up for tours which will guide you through the first model, planned industrial community in the United States, built by George Pullman as a place to produce the famous Pullman sleeping car. It was a company town, sort of like Scotia on steroids, and the scene of a violent strike in 1894.  Mike grew up grilling for family get-togethers (oh, those Chicago summer evenings!) and his sauce recipe had its beginnings there. The name “Calhoun’s” , incidentally, derives from the neighborhood’s Calhoun Street. 

Mike  worked as a correctional officer for 12 years before deciding that Chicago had become too small and a change was in order. He came to Arcata to visit his grandparents who had moved there earlier. Once he hit the tarmac and saw the green hills around, he never looked back.

Mike’s bottling machine

The business is clearly poised for expansion. Mike is travelling to Georgia to pick up a catering-size grill and smoker and looks forward to opening his own place.  Meanwhile, a distribution deal is pending with a partner in, of all places, Montreal, which has a long barbecue tradition of its own, especially with chicken.  He currently has seventeen outlets including Murphy’s Markets and Eureka Natural Foods but if the Canadian connection works out, watch for explosive growth. With all-natural ingredients, Calhoun’s may become the Redwood Coast’s next big export. Visit their website here. 

Have you tried Calhoun’s?  How do you think it stacks up next to Smokin’ Moses or whatever they use at Porter Street? Have you worked with the SBDC or AEDC? Let us hear from you!