Austin Sorette - Writing and Social Media Intern

Austin joined Green Alliance in August 2012 as a public relations intern. Born and raised in Concord, NH, he first moved to California to study photography at Orange Coast College. He then moved back to the Granite State to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of New Hampshire.

Austin started out writing fiction after being exposed to authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. He went on to join his high school newspaper writing for the news and music sections. Since being at UNH, he has written several publications for The New Hampshire. He has also written stories for the Franklin Pierce University newspaper and blog.

Outside of school, he is a reader, writer, avid poker player, and music enthusiast. He is also a huge fan of Seinfeld and The Simpsons.

Glacial Energy offers businesses huge energy savings

It is important to know the parameters of your energy bill. It is even more important to know how to save on the parameters of your energy bill. Glacial Energy, a proud Business Partner of the Green Alliance, is offering energy supply solutions that can save businesses up to 20% on electricity and around 40% on natural gas.

Glacial Energy will incur these savings, with no changes to outages and distribution services simply by switching to a less expensive supplier for electricity and natural gas. Have your electricity and/or gas bill analyzed by Glacial Energy to determine how to maximize your savings and issue a proposal for action.

As a partnering business of the Green Alliance, benefit from the Glacial Energy's services while saving both money and energy for your business. 

To learn more about services and savings options, visit the Glacial Energy profile or www.glacialenergysolutions.com.  

Eco-conscious business partners waste not, want not

A collaboration between two companies, each with a stalwart ecological conscience, has drastically reduced the amount of trash one produces and changed the way people think.

EcoMovement Consulting & Hauling, of Dover, has partnered with Redhook Brewing on a top-to-bottom composting program, which involves picking up Redhook’s food scraps once or twice a week and taking it — along with similar refuse from more than a dozen other Seacoast eateries — to compost farms in Freemont and Farmington, where the refuse is mixed with carbon sources and made into nutrient rich soil.

EcoMovement plans to have its own composting sites in the future, says founder Rian Bedard, noting that EcoMovement works with close to 70 businesses, schools, and other institutions in the Seacoast.

EcoMovement provides tutorials to Redhook staff members that involve teaching them how to separate real waste from items that can actually function as compost or be recycled. Workers then set up toters which, when filled, are picked up and hauled off to the farms. The two companies have been working together for a couple of years and now divert 400 to 600 pounds of refuse per week from landfills to the compost farms.

Redhook’s Cataqua Pub Manager Nick Wright notes that before partnering with EcoMovement, the pub’s waste was 100 percent trash. Since then, 90 percent that had been trash now goes into composting. “It’s a very big change, and we’re really happy that we’re able to make the move towards that,” he says.

Redhook now uses corn-based straws and plastic cups that are compostable, a change that was difficult in the very beginning, “but Rian has made it easy,” Wright says. “Getting to new cups wasn’t too bad either. I’d say for companies in other industries who want to do this, it’s not a difficult thing to do and it has a great impact.”

Green Tips: Portsmouth Atlantic Insurance

This week's Green Tips come from Jon Merwin of Portsmouth Atlantic Insurance.

1. Use soy-based inks instead of petroleum inks. They cost about the same — if not less — and are much better for the environment. For example, we buy from www.environmentfirstprint ing.com.

2. Switch over to electronic fax. Standard fax machines are a waste of paper and time. With eFax, the monthly cost to fax is not far off from standard faxing. Faxes are delivered in portable document format (.pdf) via e-mail. Check out www.srfax.com.

3. Look into bamboo office furniture. Not only is bamboo incredibly renewable, but it looks great as well. Best of all, bamboo is light. We'll never have to hire a moving company to help with an office move again! Check out www.green-furniture.com.

4. Use biodegradable plastic bags. They work just as well as standard plastic bags, and can be found in most major stores. Check out www.biobags.com for some green options.

5. Green your cleaning products. It's very easy and not much more expensive. In fact, because a little can often go a long way, green cleaning products can even end up being cheaper.

For more about Portsmouth Atlantic Insurance, visit www.portsmouthatlan ticins.com. For more green tips, visit www.greenalliance.biz or the Green Alliance blog at www.seacoastonline.com.

For Starry Brook, health care more than the sum of its words

With the recent passage of HB 351, a bill requiring that all private health insurers cover services provided by naturopathic doctors (NDs), alternative medicine in New Hampshire was dealt a game-changing hand – one that could forestall changing Granite State attitudes towards human health and well being.

Still, for Dr. Robyn Conte, ND, Director of Starry Brook Natural Medicine in Exeter, providers like hers still face their fair share of challenges and misconceptions, this despite being subject to much of the same training and academic rigor as traditional doctors.

“We’re quite often the physician of last resort,” explains Conte, who opened Starry Brook – named for the conservation that immediately neighbors it– in 2010. “A lot of times we’ll have patients who’ve seen every specialist up and down the Seacoast, but who still haven’t gotten to the root causes for whatever ails them.”

Conte believes that, more than anything, patients want to be able to talk to, and be coached by, their doctors – something that America’s increasingly taxed crop of physicians often cannot provide. Lacking the time necessary to carefully pinpoint the nature and severity of the specific condition, doctors will often prescribe medications or treatments that miss the mark.

“Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is something we see all the time, and I can’t tell you how many times we see patients whose doctors had been treating them as if they had Lyme Disease – when they didn’t,” notes Conte. “Any number of viruses or other factors could be the cause, but it takes a lot of dedication on the behalf of physicians to determine what that is.”

Motivated by her own medical school rotations, where she got a first-hand look at exactly how badly patients were being short-changed in terms of time and attention, Conte is careful to cap the number of patients she sees on a daily basis. It might not be the most lucrative approach, but it’s far and away the most effective.

“It’s sad to say, but so often there’s just no connection with the patients,” she exclaims. “Now, you can make a lot of money doing it that way, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing your job as effectively as you could be.”

Summer Mixer: A Green Party! This Wednesday, Don't Miss Out!

DOVER — As if free beer, food, ice cream, and music were not enticement enough, an August event to be held in Dover will also offer sustainability professionals an incalculable business networking opportunity in one of New Hampshire’s important LEED certified buildings.

Green Alliance is partnering for the event with The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire; and Hillary Gaynor Realtor® EcoBroker, LEED AP, an agent with the Bean Group; and the U.S. Green Building Council New Hampshire (Gaynor is the Vice Chair of USGBC NH). It will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 22, at the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, 6 Washington St., Dover.

The event — Building Green: Summer Mixer — demonstrates the reach and depth of the Green Alliance’s connections to the sustainability community. The Green Alliance is a union of local sustainable businesses promoting environmentally sound business practices and is a green co- op offering discounted green products and services to its members.

“It’s an opportunity to hobnob with people integral to the local green building industry and a chance for businesses and residents to connect on issues of sustainability in a social setting” said Green Alliance Executive Director Sarah Brown. “The Building Green Summer Mixer is an incredible networking event that will also honor green builders and buildings and all the people involved in the green industry in New Hampshire, and the Summer Mixer offers an opportunity to discover what a LEED building looks like.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, a Green Alliance Business Partner, has been awarded LEED Silver certification by the USGBC New Hampshire chapter, an organization the GA works closely with. The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire is the only museum in New Hampshire to achieve this honor, and one of only seven children’s museums in the country to be awarded silver or gold LEED certification. LEED is the USGBC’s rating system for designing and constructing the world’s greenest, most energy efficient, and high performing buildings.

The silver LEED certification signifies leadership in energy efficient design, said Children’s Museum Executive Director Justine Roberts. The certification means, among other things, that during construction the builders incorporated best practices such as energy efficiency, recycling, and air quality controls, ensuring, for example, that during construction workers had clean air to breathe. Other building elements and practices, such as installing bike racks, passive ventilation, and reusing waste products instead of dumping them, gain points that add up to LEED certification. “I think about it as a ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” Roberts said.