Simanaitis Says
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BAH EPA AND TRUMP; HURRAH EDMONTON AND BEN & JERRY’S
IN ITS UTTERLY ASININE DISMANTLING of environmental protection, Trump’s EPA “Wants to Eliminate Regulation for Greenhouse Gases,” NPR, July 29, 2025. Jeff Brady reports, “The Trump administration announced its plan today to overturn a key 2009 Environmental Protection Agency finding that underpins much of the federal government’s actions to rein in climate change.”
Brady quotes Christy Goldfuss, executive director of Natural Resources Defense Council: “As Americans reel from deadly floods and heat waves, the Trump administration is trying to argue that the emissions turbocharging these disasters are not a threat. It boggles the mind and endangers the nation’s safety and welfare.”
What’s more, Maxine Joselow reports in The New York Times, July 29, 2025, “In March, the Trump administration created a novel way for companies to potentially avoid complying with environmental rules: Simply send an email to the Environmental Protection Agency and request an exemption.”
With good reason, these actions of the Trump administration have suggested a new name for the EPA established by Nixon in 1970: “The Environmental Pollution Agency.”
Bah EPA; Hurrah Others. Seeking good news, I offer two examples today from Nice News: The first identifies the world’s largest solar panel mural; the second, a means of churning ice cream waste into energy. Here are tidbits gleaned from these Nice News references.
SunRise Residential’s Solar Panel Mural. In Nice News, July 29, 2025, Marika Price Spitulski reports “Canada Is Home to the World’s Largest Solar Panel Mural: ‘A Bold Vision for the Future.’ ” She describes, “Located in Edmonton, Canada, this 12-story structure, called SunRise Residential, has been retrofitted with 34,500 square feet of building-integrated photovoltaic panels, resulting in an annual reduction of about 150 tons of carbon emissions. Starting from year five, the solar generation is projected to save owners and residents a total of around $80,000 per year, per a case study conducted by solar panel company Mitrex.”
SunRise Residential, Edmonton, Alberta. This and the following images by Mitrex via Nice News.
“The building itself,” Spitulski continues, “is an example of recycling: Previously called Capital Towers, it was erected in the ’70s in the Alberta city, but required extensive improvements for its apartments to serve as safe options for renters today. Rather than tearing it down, real estate investment trust Avenue Living gave it an eco-friendly makeover.”
Spitulski recounts, “The vivid mural is an alternative to Avenue Living’s original design, which included non-solar panels and a painted mural on fiber cement siding. Instead, Mitrex proposed using a standard rainscreen system to install the new panels, reducing maintenance costs and requirements. ‘This integration provided a dual-purpose solution, allowing the building to generate solar energy while showcasing meaningful artwork,’ the solar panel company wrote in the case study.”
“That last bit,” Spitulski observes, “is represented in the 85-foot-tall mural’s significance to the community: Titled ‘The Land We Share,’ it was designed by Indigenous artist Lance Cardinal. It honors First Nations and Chinese cultures via depictions of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac living in harmony with the seven animals that symbolize the Cree sacred grandfather teachings.”
Indigenous artist Cardinal shares his enthusiasm for the design. The video may be accessed through the Nice News article.
Ben & Jerry’s Waste Not. PBS News reporter William Brangham learns “How Ben & Jerry’s is Recycling Food Waste into Energy,” PBS News via Nice News, July 30, 2025.
Brangham recounts, “At the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream plant in St. Albans, Vermont, they can churn out over 100 million pints of ice cream a year…. But key to the whole operation is keeping those distinct flavors separate.—You don’t want to mix Chunky Monkey with Cherry Garcia.”
Jenna Evans, Ben & Jerry’s global sustainability manager notes, “When you push one flavor out with a little bit of rinse water, that extra flavor that was left over in the pipes gets pushed into a barrel that gets stored as a waste ice cream product.”
Historically, food wastes were sent to landfills, where their decomposition produced methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But if captured, methane is also an energy source: It’s a hydrocarbon, CH4.
These days, Ben & Jerry have installed a facility-adjacent anaerobic digester. It receives up to 50,000 gallons of food waste a day and produces a biogas of methane and carbon dioxide. This biogas fuels an engine driving a generator, its electricity going through a transformer and out to the grid.
“This energy,” Nice News recounts, “powers the facility and contributes an estimated 8.75 million kilowatt hours to the Vermont grid annually, in addition to diverting leftovers from landfills, lowering phosphorus pollution, and centralizing food waste management.”
“It’s a win for the planet,” Nice News observes, “without changing a thing about the ice cream recipes we all know and love.”
I agree. Wins for the planet are important these days. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
Reader Andrew J. and his wife are familiar with Edmonton’s SunRise Residential and its refurbishing. He notes that the first image of the building above is reversed.
Yes, upon closer examination I observe that Lance Cardinal’s First Nation animals appear on the right of the mural in the reversed image and on the left in the correct ones.
Andrew recalls, “My wife knows that building, in its former decrepit state, all too well from when she was doing palliative homecare and had to climb stairs to visit clients there as the elevators were out of order.”