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Transcript of Soundbite: George Gray
George Gray: Well the sustainable design expo which features our P3 competition is down here on the mall. We’re here until 3:00 on Earth Day. We hope people will come by. This is an opportunity for us to demonstrate both work by EPA, by students around the country, and by some of our federal partners on ideas for sustainability. For me, the most exciting thing is seeing the smarts and the passion of our students that are going toward finding new ideas to advance environmental protection and showing that in many cases it doesn’t come at the expense of economic growth and in fact it is something that can really help us advance our economic growth. Here we have all kinds of new things. We’ve got a project that is making solar panels out of natural core fill, which is the stuff that makes plants green rather than using metallic silicon so it is using nature for our solar panels. Or one that is using, making plastics from bacteria that you can grow in waste water outside of a waste water treatment plant. All kinds of neat ideas there’s somebody here who can help you estimate how much wind power you can get on a piece of land if you’ve got it if you want to put up windmills. So we’ve got all kinds of neat ideas for helping us here and also in the developing world to live more sustainably.
Female reporter: A bunch of questions but first the most immediate one, and that is, you know it is pouring down rain today and you do have a solar panels exhibit but you also have a rain water type exhibit, is the rain sort of dampening your spirits or is it somehow helping you prove a point?
George Gray: No everybody has great spirits down here. We’re all under tents so we’re staying dry and having a chance to show some of these great ideas and many of them do involve water so it gives us a nice theme. We’ve got ways to improve water quality in developing countries we’ve got ways to improve the way that we test our water and find out more quickly its conditions so there’s lots of things here that have to do with protecting our water both the lakes and streams that we like and the water that we drink.
Female reporter: Now talk to me about the award competition and the P3.
George Gray: So P3, which stands for People, Prosperity and the Planet, is an EPA competition that encourages students from across the country to work in multidisciplinary teams and come up with great ideas for sustainable development. Its a competition, we have the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the leading scientific organization in the country, has provided judges for us and what they’ll be doing is walking through the tents today looking at the exhibits that are here and talking to the students and their facility advisors and giving us advise on the winners that will be announced tomorrow at the National Academy of Sciences.
Female reporter: I wonder also when you look at these sort of sustainable design, are we talking about things for homes, businesses, community centers, what are you focusing most on?
George Gray: You know on of the things it shows us is there are different things we can do at every level, from better choices that we can make as individuals. There are folks here looking at how you can better recycle clothing all the way up to decisions that may be made by a local municipality to a state to people who are thinking about ways that we can do things better as a country. So sustainability works at all levels and we’ve got student projects here that are addressing each of them.
Female reporter: Name a couple of those projects that really stand out for you personally.
George Gray: Well now see I have to be careful here because I don’t want to look like I am prejudging anything that we have our expert scientist judging but I’ll tell you there are lots of things that are exciting here. As I mentioned, this idea of making solar panels using natural products like chlorophyll from plants rather than using silicon. They are looking here for ways to reduce water runoff into our lakes and streams. Looking at things like pervious road surfaces so the water runs through rather than piling up on top. We’ve got people looking at ways to make bio diesel from waste grease and then they’re going to use that to power the bus supply in the town that they’re from. They’re from Key, New Hampshire. There’s ideas here for looking from improving water quality in developing countries a very important public health measure and looking at ways it can be done appropriately for that country and still provide the improved water quality that we all want.
Female reporter: An event like this, does this help position the EPA as showing itself as sort of a leader in this arena?
George Gray: I think that sustainability is clearly something that we have recognized, our administrator has said it’s the next generation of environmental protection and what we are trying to do is encourage the passion the smarts and the ingenuity that are out there in our academic community to come together to work on projects that will increase the benefits to People to the planet and again to prosperity. It is important to recognize it. I think sustainability is clearly becoming more widely recognized as something that is economical beneficial, we’re trying to encourage that too.
Female reporter: How many years have you been doing this?
George Gray: This is our 4th expo and our 4th edition of the P3 competition. And in fact we’ve had some of our past P3 winners that have gone on to come up with commercial businesses based on the ideas that they presented here. Including ideas like a desktop web application that tells you how much energy you are using in a building and it turns out when they tested it that people use less energy whenever they look up at their computer and they see what is going on so when they turn off a light switch their energy use goes down, it’s just a little reminder that makes people do things in a more sensible way. Or the Duke Smart House, what is demonstrated here it was purchased by Home Depot and Home Depot actually uses it to demonstrate some of the different products and ideas and methods that you can use to make your home more sustainable.