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Articles by Mike Casey

Mike Casey is the president and founder of Tigercomm, a leading U.S. cleantech PR firm with offices in Arlington, Va. and San Francisco, Calif.

Featured Article

Recently, our dog chewed up our 10-years-old family compost bin. The new, metal bin we purchased came with “degradable” (e.g., not “BIOdegradable”) bags by a company called Norpro. The Norpro bags claim to be safe to throw into your compost pile, where they degrade. But degrade into what exactly? Won’t the bag simply break down into small plastic particles that then contaminate the compost, which in turn we use to fertilize the vegetables we eventually eat? Or are we missing something here?

So, we contacted Norpro to see what we could find out. First, we called the company’s customer service line (877-879-1360), and were told that we needed to contact their corporate number (800-722-0202). We called them at that number and asked the same question. We were told that they weren’t able to answer the question, and that we should email their sales department.

Before we did that, we checked Norpro’s website, where the company presents its bags as being “[m]ade of 100% degradable and compostable material” and “[e]ndorsed by ISAB and OPI” (note: there’s no indication on the Norpro website what ISAB and OPI might be, exactly). We then emailed the company, told them our unde... Read more

All Articles

  • Oops: Gas Industry Study on Industry “Economics” Omits Costs of Water Contamination

    Despite spending massively to position itself as “clean,” the natural gas industry has a serious pollution problem it doesn’t want getting more public and regulatory attention. Not only is the industry’s climate disruption footprint potentially heavierthan coal, the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) practice the current gas boom depends on is contaminating our water supplies. The industry wants you […]

  • Can Obama go back to political base(ics)?

    An Obama 2012 rally in Chicago in April.Photo: Barack ObamaCross-posted from the Great Energy Challenge blog. President Obama made a smart move this month by putting the Keystone XL pipeline project into the deep freeze. It had been poor politics for him — and it would have been even worse policy for the country, especially when you consider […]

  • Solar Industry Executives Talk About Massive Solar Jobs Growth

    In mid-October, my Tigercomm colleague Mark Sokolove and I took Scaling Green’s Communicating Energy lecture series on the road to the Solar Power International 2011 (SPI) conference and trade show in Dallas, Texas. With so many articulate, knowledgeable, clean energy thought leaders and company representatives in attendance, the opportunity to interview several of these folks on the state of the solar […]

  • Mr. Morriss gets acquainted with Irish Confetti

    Merriam-Webster: Irish Confetti – “A rock or brick used as a missile.” We recently wrote about professional clean energy critic Andrew Morriss being schooled by Center for American Progress’s Kate Gordon before a friendly crowd at the fossil industry-funded CATO Institute. Back in April, Mr. Morriss couldn’t answer Ms. Gordon’s inconvenient points about the huge government welfare checks […]