by Shawn Dell Joyce

Lucky for us, Santa is very kind, or we would have received a lump of coal in our stockings for being major contributors to climate change. Instead of giving us more stuff, I imagine Santa probably snuck into our houses and swapped out those incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents. He’s probably pretty peeved about the warming happening at the North Pole, and that his flying reindeer may soon join all the other Arctic creatures on the endangered species list. Indeed, we Americans have been very, very naughty.

Most of us realize that we can’t go on this way. We are running out of planet to consume, and will need 3-5 more earths to keep up our current consumption. We cannot continue to gorge ourselves at the all-you-can-eat buffet created by our fossil-fueled agricultural system. Nor can we keep adding more and more coal burning plants to feed our lust for power. Or continue driving gas-guzzling SUV’s. We have already burned through our share of the world resources and are now dipping deeply into our children’s and grandchildren’s meager allotments.

Each household has to commit to change, changing light bulbs and changing paradigms. Let’s embrace a culture built on conservation of resources instead of waste and excess. Here are a few New Year’s resolutions that will set us on the right track:

1. Go on a “low carbon” diet; Woodstock author David Gershon leads you through energy-slimming actions to lose 5,000 pounds of carbon or more. Considering the average American household has a carbon footprint of 22,000 pounds per year, there’s plenty carbon to cut. www.empowermentinstitute.net

1. Take the “100 mile diet” challenge; Eating local is the single best thing you can do to curb climate change in the Wallkill Valley. The average American fork-full of food traveled 1500 miles to reach your mouth. By eating locally, we save emissions of transporting food, livelihoods of local farmers, eat fresher, more nutritious food, and we become intimately connected to the land and the seasons. www.100milediet.org

1. Set the “zero waste” goal; Make recycling, composting, washing & reusing a common practice. Carry your own mug or reusable water container to avoid generating more petroleum-based plastics. Stash a set of tote bags in your car for shopping, and refuse to accept any disposables. www.grrn.org

1. Take the 10 percent challenge; Try spending 10 percent of your income at locally-owned businesses. Move your mortgage to a local bank or credit union, buy from consignment stores instead of chain stores, and eat at locally-owned restaurants. This keeps your money flowing locally, where it grows and multiplies as local businesses frequent other local businesses. This one act will improve your local economy, save our Main Streets, and your neighbor’s job. www.livingeconomies.org

1. Convert to renewable energy; Curb 30 percent of your family’s emissions by switching to renewable energy. If solar panels or a wind turbine are out of your price range, consider buying wind energy through your utility for about $15 per month. www.newwindenergy.com

1. Exercise your political will! We need real leadership at all levels of government willing to address climate change. It is time for creative direct actions. We can convert every light bulb in America to a compact fluorescent, but until we have a moratorium on coal burning power plants we are still contributing to global warming. www.1sky.org

1. Create Community. Be the change you want to see. Take time to know your neighbors, walk to the store and see what small businesses you could be frequenting that you didn’t even know existed. Spend precious time and energy getting involved in your community by volunteering and becoming politically active. Become deeply rooted in your community and bloom where you are planted!

Shawn Dell Joyce is a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Holiday joy can be a fleeting thing this time of year, as many people feel more like scrooge, than Tiny Tim. Behind the advertising blitz that bombards us with consumerist images of smiling, well-dressed people giving cheerfully-wrapped packages is the dark truth of depression. U.S. tops the list in depression out of 14 countries in a recent World Health Organization poll.

Much holiday malaise can be traced to a sagging economy, and holiday expectations. A parent’s group;  the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, wrote letters to 24 leading toy companies and retailers to express concern about ads aimed at kids. These parents expressed dismay that they can’t afford the pricey toys that toymakers are heavily advertising to our children, and children feel diminished when they don’t get pricey toys.

It is hard to believe that we are descended from settler’s children who rejoiced at receiving a penny and a stick of candy as their main holiday gifts. In the 1800’s, our kin earned $1,500 per year, and would have had one nice set of clothes for church, and one shabby set for daily life. We worked twice as hard for a simple diet because we had to grow most of what we ate ourselves. Over the course of two hundred years, we have grown an average of 4 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier, our houses have more than doubled in square footage, and we no longer find joy in a penny and a stick of candy.

We need to reclaim our holidays as times of family togetherness and joy, no matter what shape the economy is in. Even if you don’t celebrate the Christian holiday, or the Jewish Hanukkah, or African Kwanzaa, you can still celebrate a “Secular Sabbath,” in the words of NY Times food columnist; Mark Bittman. A secular Sabbath is a break from email, cell phones, television, and all the other distractions of modern living that keep us alienated from each other and real physical contact.

“You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families,” writes Bittman. This season, tune out the commercials, and remember that sustainable living means not filling a spiritual need with a material thing.

Shawn Dell Joyce is a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, NY. SHawn@zestororange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

It’s hard not to feel Grinch-green during the holidays because of the rampant consumerism, waste, and emissions generated by all that shopping and gift giving. Here’s a few ways to green your holidays without being a Scrooge or Grinch.

Those lovely twinkling lights can generate as much global warming pollution as about 250,000 cars, according to Union of Concerned Scientists.  That means that if you decorate your home and tree with 10 strands of 100 bulbs lit 8 hours a day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, it can cost you up to $200. Powering the same amount of LED (Light Emitting Diode) mini lights would cost less than $10. 

Why not donate all your old lights to Salvation Army, and invest in LED mini lights. Don’t balk at the higher cost of LED’s, you’ll get that money back on your electric bill. Generally, LED’s will pay for themselves in the first two years. An added benefit is there is less likelihood of fires because LED’s give off very little heat, and last up to 20 years. 

Tinsel and plastic decorations are an environmental hazard. Most are made from plastics that cannot be recycled and may photodegrade when exposed to sunlight. That means that they break down into smaller and smaller particles that get absorbed into living things and wind up in our bodies. Skip the phthalate-laden plastics and use natural materials for decorations like popcorn and berry strings, cut-paper snowflakes and real greenery.

What you put under the tree is as important as what you put on the tree. Gift wrapping paper is costly, and often used only once before winding up in a landfill. Many of the shiny parts of gift wrap are environmental hazards. Consider buying recycled gift wrap, or better yet, make your own. Paper grocery bags turned inside out make sturdy wrapping paper that can be decorated with real holly, straw, and other natural materials. Putting unwrapped gifts in reusable tote bags instead of gift bags is giving two gifts in one.

Emailing cards is the greenest way to send holiday greetings.  Homemade cards or cards printed on 100 percent recycled paper are the next best. Opt for cards with an enclosed coupon or gift certificate instead of mailing bulky gifts to far-flung relations. Bulky gifts take much more gas to deliver and generate more emissions in the process.

When entertaining for the holidays, plan seasonal menus and cook what is available locally in your area, even if it takes a little extra effort and money.  This reduces the “food miles” your ingredients travel and generates less greenhouse gases. If you are a guest, bring a bottle of local wine or a dessert from a local baker. When you buy from local food producers, you spread the wealth locally, and get an interesting story to tell at the dinner table.

Shawn Dell Joyce is a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and director of the Wallkill RIver School in Montgomery. Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce 

Nothing says Christmas quite like a wild evergreen tree decked out with sparkling lights and loaded with gift-wrapped boxes. Before you head out into the woods with your axe, consider a greener alternative.

The greenest tree is a potted Douglas Fir tree from a local nursery, that you can plant outdoors in warm weather.  Your little fir tree will clean your indoor air during the holidays, and clean carbon out of the atmosphere year round when you transplant it.  If you bought a live tree every year, and planted it in spring, you could offset your family’s carbon footprint in twenty years and create a green holiday tradition.

If you don’t have room (or the inclination) for a live tree, consider a locally grown tree. Christmas trees and greens are agricultural products that add to the economic and environmental health of your region. These trees are grown specifically for the holidays on marginal lands that wouldn’t support other crops.  Buying one of these trees stimulates your local economy, and improves the life of a local farm family.

“Go without a twinge of environmental guilt,” suggests Deborah Brown a horticulturist from University of Minnesota Extension Service. “During the seven to ten years that a Christmas tree grows, the tree provides wildlife habitat and helps hold the soil and prevent erosion,” says Brown. “Commercial tree operations plant and harvest trees every year. Each year’s harvest is quickly renewed, and tree farms never strip large portions of land for a single year’s holiday greenery.”

If you live in a place where a live tree won’t work, consider a second-hand artificial tree. Plastic trees require major amounts of petroleum to manufacture and generate tons of greenhouse gasses in the process. Plus they are generally not recyclable, and wind up in landfills. Using that second-hand tree for several years helps to lessen its environmental impact. It is usually more economical than a cut tree.

Here are a few farms that sell holiday trees in our area courtesy of Cornell Cooperative Extension:

Hoeffner Farm, 405 Goodwill Road, Montgomery

C. Rowe & Sons Farm, 113 Station Road, Campbell Hall

Christmas Tree Lane, 9 Christmas Tree Drive, Wallkill

Farm Side Acres, 280 Angola Road, Cornwall

Indigot Creek Christmas Tree Farm, Camp Stadie Road, Middletown

Manza Family Farm, 730 Route 211, Montgomery

Pierson Farm, 1448 Route 211 West, Montgomery

Pine View Farm, 575 Jackson Ave. New Windsor

Stone Oak Farm, 207 Stony Bar Road, Slate Hill

Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning newspaper columnist and director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Thanksgiving week, the major news in our country is shopping, and if retail sales will top last year. Judging from our media, you would think that Americans made the holidays specifically for shopping.  We spend an average of $856 per person on the holidays, according to the American Research Group.

Most of those hard-earned dollars will go straight to China since more than 70 percent of the goods on store shelves are from there. If we multiply that by the current U.S. population, that’s $257, 775, 794, 632 dollars leaving home for the holidays! I was surprised that shopping wasn’t an Olympic event this year considering how skilled we have become at sending our money overseas.

If you shop for the good of the economy, keep in mind that buying products made outside of your community means that your money also leaves home for the holidays. Instead, feed your local economy by making your own gifts, and buying what gifts you can’t make from local, independent stores and artisans.

On average, we spend between 20 and 40 hours shopping for holiday gifts, and waiting on long lines. You could easily make most of your holiday gifts in that time, and have the added bonus of time shared as a family. Climate writer Bill McKibben, in his excellent book; “Hundred Dollar Holiday” says; “I can remember almost every present that someone’s made for me since we started doing these Hundred Dollar Holidays. And that’s testimony in itself-I have no idea what gifts came in all those great piles under the tree in previous years. They didn’t attach themselves to particular faces, particular memories.”

Holidays should be about time well spent, not money. “Give things that are rare; time, attention, memory, whimsy,” notes McKibben. In the land where we have plenty of food, noise, gizmos, stuff, those are the things we cherish.

               Here are a few ideas for adding more joy to your household and community this holiday season:

• Spend less time shopping and make gingerbread men with your children one afternoon. Put the gingerbread men on decorative plates, and drop in on each neighbor to spread cheer.
• Pump money into the local economy by making donations to the food bank. That money will help families in your neighborhood more surely than spending it at a national chain store. Montgomery’s food bank is feeding over 100 new families this holiday season, let’s lend a neighborly hand.
• Ask young children to pick out a toy to buy and donate to one of the “toys for tots” programs.
• Have a family meeting to decide on a spending limit, and figure out what imaginative gifts you can make together. 
• This time of year is craft fair season, and most churches and community groups offer at least one. Craft fairs are great opportunities to directly support local producers and keep your holiday spending local. Dec. 4^th, 12-8pm “Handmade for the Holidays” local crafter’s bazaar at Wallkill River School, all sales directly benefit local artisans.

Shawn Dell Joyce is a sustainable artist and activist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Thanksgiving is a holiday built around food. We gather, we gorge, and sometimes acknowledge the hands of the cook, perhaps thanking the divine, but rarely do we honor the hands that feed us.

Growing the food that feeds our county is one of the most thankless and low paying jobs a person could have.  In 2002, the median net income for a US farmer was $15,848, while hired hands and migrant workers averaged around $10,000 per year.  Farming has become so unpopular that the category was recently removed from the U.S. Census, and federal prison inmates now outnumber farmers.

Migrant pickers often put in long hours, up to twelve hour days, earning about forty-five cents for each thirty-two pound bucket of tomatoes. This amount hasn’t risen in over 30 years. At that rate, workers have to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes to earn minimum wage. Most farm workers don’t get sick days, overtime, or health care. Some farmers often don’t fare much better.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we stopped putting such an emphasis on “cheap” and instead put an emphasis on “fair” maybe those hands that grow our food could afford to eat as well. Raising farm wages would have little effect on supermarket prices. Mainly because farmers and farm workers are paid only about six to nine cents out of every retail dollar spent.

If we raised farm wages by 35 percent and passed that cost to consumers, it would raise the retail price by only a few pennies according to the Center for Immigrant Studies. The total cost to consumers for all fresh produce would add up to less than $34 per year, per family. If we raised wages by 70 percent, that cost would be about $67. Divide this over 52 weekly trips to the supermarket and you’re looking at spending barely a dollar more each week. Wouldn’t you spend that much to know that people didn’t suffer to feed you?  

In January 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor informed Congress that farm workers were “a labor force in significant economic distress.” The report cited farm workers’ “low wages, sub-poverty annual earnings, (and) significant periods of un- and underemployment” adding that “agricultural worker earnings and working conditions are either stagnant or in decline.”

For agriculture to be sustainable, it must provide a living for those who work our land. Let’s honor the hands that feed us by restoring the dignity of a fair wage to farmers and farm workers.

• Buy your produce from local farms where you can meet the farm workers and see for yourself if they are treated fairly. The smaller the farm, the more likely they are to treat workers well, and often have only family members working the farm.
• Support an increase in farm workers wages by joining The Alliance for Fair Food a network of human rights, religious, student, labor, sustainable food and agriculture, environmental and grassroots organizations who work in partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
• A $35 contribution to www.Honoring the Hands.com will help provide health care to Hudson Valley, NY migrant workers and their families, plus a lovely calendar of 12 exemplary culinarians.  

Shawn Dell Joyce is a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School Montgomery. Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

I was invited to speak to our county’s Planning Board about ways to localize our economy. We first have to realize what our assets are, what resources we have that we can build on. In Orange County, we have a picturesque countryside, a rich history, a growing arts community, many small family farms, a few large scale industries, an international airport, and an underemployed population.

We also have to take notice of where our money leaks out of the local economy (called an “import leak”) and how we can plug that leak with a local source to keep our money flowing in the local economy. Two big areas are energy and food.

Lots of our local bucks go to pay for electricity and oil generated outside our community. This is a huge export leak, with a good chunk of our paychecks going to home heat, electric, gas, and fuel oil. A leak this big will need more than one plug.

–If we support large scale local power generation like Taylor Biomass, we can generate power locally that stays in the region. If we could work with Taylor, we could make it our own local utility and get a much better rate than dirty coal, or nuclear could provide. It would also generate local jobs.

–Home heating costs could be localized by creating our own local source of biofuel; pellets made from crop residues. This is already in the works, and provide local farmers a use for crop residues (press them into pellets) and local homes a source for inexpensive carbon-neutral heating. Let’s incentivize this program and encourage this local industry.

–Other home heating and power costs could be greatly reduced and localized through the PACE program (Property-Assessed Clean Energy) This national-level program encourages counties to offer low-interest rate loans through property taxes to pay for solar hot water, solar electric, energy-efficiency upgrades, and other “green” home improvements. This involves a local bank loan, local green energy provider and builders, and generates great LOCAL economic impact while lowering homeowner’s monthly bills.

Probably no other program, instituted on a county level, could have a bigger impact on reducing our monthly bills and generating local green jobs and economic impact than the PACE program. A similar program was set up in Cambridge, MA, designed to lower small businesses operating expenses by connecting them with energy efficiency auditors, local banks and local upgrade providers (insulators, contractors, etc). The money all stayed local and small businesses were more solvent.

Additionally, Orange County is part of the food shed for New York City. Much of what our farmers grow gets shipped elsewhere, meanwhile we import tons of food for our schools and restaurants from other states. It is criminal that our schools buy apples from Washington State while our apple farmers have surplus crops rotting in storage. This is a huge economic leak.

If our county mandated local schools and kitchens to order directly from local farms, even incentivized the process to level the cost difference, it would make a huge difference in the bottom line of our local farms. A way to plug this leak is set up an agent who would have local farms grow specifically for several school districts. Perhaps work with PTA’s to offer local apples as fundraisers instead of Florida citrus as well. Create salad bars as part of the school lunch program, and connect farms and schools through a county agent to make it happen. Winter Sun Farms in New Paltz already offers industrial-scale lots of frozen produce from local farms to school districts.

Other communities depend on attracting large corporations and big box stores as a way of bringing in more economic activity. This strategy has been proven to work in reverse as small independent businesses make up about half of the economic backbone of our communities. A recent study revealed that $1 earned by a local farmer had the impact of $2 on the farmer’s community because it changed hands so many times locally.

“About 42 percent of our economy is “place based” or created through small, locally-owned businesses,” notes Economist and author Michael Shuman. He estimates that we could expand this figure to 70 percent or more, by localizing some of our main expenditures. In the process, we would boost our local economy, and save money at the same time.

Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning sustainable artist and writer and director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery.

Right now many of us are planning our Thanksgiving Dinner. We have a big decision; to sit in front of a meal of imported ingredients, grown around the world in places the Pilgrims never set foot, or, skip the supermarket and source all the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner from local farms, mills and growers.

Eating local embodies the spirit of the first Thanksgiving, where Puritans and Wampanoags sat down together to share a meal that consisted mainly of shellfish, eels, wild fowl (including swans and eagles) and other local foods that they could gather or grow. When we source our foods locally, we eat in season, and celebrate what’s grown in our region. Absent from the first Thanksgiving feast were modern traditional dishes like corn on the cob (all corn was dried by that time), pumpkin pie (they had no sugar), cranberry sauce (no sweetener other than Maple syrup), and stuffing (they served pudding).

We have altered the menu over the years to the point where we rehash and serve the exact same dishes over and over. This year, have a real Thanksgiving by celebrating the local harvest and the hardworking hands that grew it. Buy your dinner ingredients from local farms, and prepare what is seasonally available in our area. Your food dollars will stay local, nourishing the farm family, farm hands, and local community. This is an act of gratitude that bolsters your local economy during tight times.

Right now, you can find turkeys that live the way nature intended, chasing bugs, scratching in the grass and frolicking in the fall leaves instead of penned up one-on-top-of another in factory farms. These turkeys will cost a little more than their supermarket counterparts because they are not mass produced, or government subsidized.

As a matter of fact, none of our small local farms are government subsidized, so when you pay a little more for local produce, it is because you are paying the full cost to grow the food at a fair rate. Large farms that wholesale to chain grocers are subsidized by our tax dollars lowering the cost of goods on the supermarket shelf. This makes non-local groceries appear cheaper than locally grown foods, but there are hidden costs that must be paid in the long run by someone else. Like the loss of soil fertility, social costs of cheap labor and environmental devastation of shipping food over thousands of miles.

This year, as you and your family gather around the Thanksgiving feast, offer a prayer of gratitude for our small farmers and farm workers. Give thanks that we still have people in our region willing to grow quality food in a market flooded with cheap imports. Support these hard-working folks by eating locally grown foods at the holiday table, and year round. Let’s reject our national food system that makes “cheap” the highest priority, at a deep cost to the environment, the farmers, and future generations, and spend a little more on quality local food and farms.

To find local Thanksgiving Dinner ingredients:

Turkeys: Norbury Farms in Middletown 342-3788

Cranberries: Blooming Hill Farms in Washingtonville 782-7310

Pies: Soons Orchards in Middletown 374-5471, Walnut Grove Farm Montgomery 313-4855

Side dishes: Hoeffner Farm, 405 Goodwill Rd., Lawrence Farm 562-4268

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

The best way to preserve idyllic vistas like our Shawangunk Ridge, is to support the small farms that pay the taxes and upkeep on those beautiful open fields. Eating locally is one of the best environmental contributions you can make to preserve scenic vistas and open space. Another one is through the Orange County Land Trust in partnership with the Wallkill River School.

The Wallkill River School is a nonprofit collective of artists that understands the importance of “eating your view.” Like their predecessors in the Hudson River School, (only more local) the artists preserve remaining farms and vistas through their paintings and activism. The Wallkill River School brings urban artists out to rural farms and open spaces to paint, and connect viscerally with the land that sustains us. This year, artists painted on Orange County Land Trust sites across the county that are preserved, and farms in danger of being developed.

This Saturday, at the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, artists are auctioning off their paintings to benefit the Orange County Land Trust and keep these important views picture-perfect for future generations. The auction art can be previewed all week, and on Saturday until 3pm. Live auction will begin then, and is conducted by Orange County Tourism director Susan Havermale Cayea. Refreshments will be served.

The sale of the artwork benefits the artist and the Land Trust, and is a great way to make a donation to the Land Trust and receive a piece of land you are preserving through a local artist.

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School combining plein air painting with environmental activism.  www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Biomass is the “ugly duckling” of renewable energy sources because it most often utilizes garbage. Garbage as a fuel source is not as glamorous as solar energy, or as eye-catching as wind turbines. Biomass is not a new idea, as Americans used it in World War II in the form of wood alcohol. China has used a simplified version of biomass in composting pits for heat and cooking. As a renewable energy source, the leading edge of research around the world is right here in Orange County; Taylor Biomass in Montgomery.

Jim Taylor is the CEO of Taylor Biomass, and a gentle, unassuming man who looks like he would be more at home in blue jeans than a suit and tie. Taylor graduated from Valley Central High School, and started a tree pruning business rather than go to college. He built his business from scratch, often enlisting the labor of his family members until he could hire more employees.

Today Taylor runs one of the most successful recycling plants in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency promotes Taylor Recycling as a model. Taylor is so successful that inquiries are pouring in from China, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and Africa. Taylor’s philosophy is to “keep waste out of the ground” (meaning landfills). He currently employs about seventy-five workers, and is very proud to say that Taylor Recycling has never had a death or disability.

Taylor’s mission in life is unfolding as Taylor Biomass; a waste recovery center that will convert 500 tons of waste into approximately 25 Megawatts of electric power, daily. That’s enough to power 25,000 homes. The primary product is a synthesis gas that is used to generate electricity. By products from this process include silica ash that could be used for concrete, and a small amount of emissions, less than 100 tons per year. This is the same amount of emissions generated by the electric and heating use of 10 average houses.

The way it works is municipal waste is trucked into the enclosed tip floor where it is sorted by machines. Recyclable materials are removed, and household hazardous waste and rubber are removed, resulting in 13% waste to landfills rather than the initial 550 tons per day. The resulting material is fed into a gasifier where it comes into contact with super hot sand and steam. No air is present so it doesn’t combust or smoke; instead the organic biomass portion of garbage is converted into a gas. The gas passes through a conditioning reactor to remove the contaminants. The cleaned gas is used to efficiently generate electricity.

Taylor points out that “the waste generated locally could be used to produce electricity to use locally.” This would eliminate the emission created by trucking the waste to Pennsylvania landfills, and lengthy power lines cutting through towns to meet power needs. Taylor could become our new local power utility company.

So what’s holding back this revolutionary garbage-to-electricity plant? Taylor is in the midst of a regulatory process which involves the Town of Montgomery, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the New York State Public Service Commission.  Taylor Biomass combines the two most regulated business permit processes into one business model, making a regulatory nightmare.

“When you’re the first, you invent the process and write the rules,” says Taylor. He’s referring to the legislative difficulties his facility has faced due to the fact that “biomass” and “gasifier” are not terms most agencies understand.

“Depending on how fast we could bring this process to fruition, Montgomery could become green powered.” Taylor explains he will pay a “host community fee.” Part of this fee would include preferred customer prices for taking in garbage from the township of Montgomery, Walden and Maybrook, and lower priced renewable energy for all municipal buildings.

The Taylor Biomass facility will not only create electricity, but also jobs. High tech jobs in particular, which is something sorely needed in Montgomery. “I’ll be creating 24 jobs for the gasifier, 50 new jobs in processing and 40 High Tech jobs in the corporate head quarters,” explains Taylor. “Orange County College graduates will be given first consideration.” Taylor is firmly committed to using local labor and materials to construct his facility, and hiring local graduates to run it.

Let’s give this local green business our full support for the good of our community and the planet.