Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
015 Brian Crutchfield on sustainability since the 1970s
Brian Crutchfield joins Lee in studio for a discussion ranging from tobacco farming to photovoltaics and the Tennessee Valley Authority. A North Carolina native and Virginia Tech graduate, Crutchfield has seen his share of changes in the field of sustainability since the 1970s. Crutchfield shares some of the ways he has found to make real and lasting impacts in your community.
Lee Ball:
Welcome to another episode of Find Your Sustain Ability. My name is Lee Ball. Today, we have joining us Brian Crutchfield, a longtime energy advocate, and I was really interested in getting Brian on the show because of the current state of energy in the world today. Brian worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority for many years. More recently, he worked with Blue Ridge Energy as their sustainable development director. Welcome, Brian, to the show.
Brian Crutchfield:
Great to be here, Lee.
Lee Ball:
How did you first become interested in advocating for the environment?
Brian Crutchfield:
Well, I was in grad school back during the original energy crisis, '73 and '74, when there were gas lines. OPEC had cut off the supply, sort of like they just recently did. Prices were high. And not only that, you couldn't get it. It was an odd-even day kind of thing, or according to your name when you could get in line just to get gas. At the time, I was in graduate school at Virginia Tech working on a degree in city and regional planning, had a professor who really was into this type of thing and got us working with a group that was trying to bring coal back to Southwest Virginia. They were selling so much coal and shipping it out of Norfolk to Japan and other places that low income folks couldn't buy it.
We were bringing a carload back on every return empty train just for local folks. It was pretty unusual. Got into energy resources analysis at that time in '74, got my master's degree, did some work up in Washington, DC. Basically being in graduate school regarding planning, realizing that all of a sudden energy was a factor, that you couldn't necessarily predict what was happening in that field anymore. You need to start planning around energy issues, not just transportation and highways and development, because now the cost of energy was driving a lot of things, business and communities and society. That was the beginning, during the first crisis.
Lee Ball:
Going back a little before that, you grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Brian Crutchfield:
Yeah. Mount Airy, Winston-Salem area.
Lee Ball:
Mount Airy is a pretty rural environment. Was there something about your formative years that enabled an environmental ethic that just kept you connected to the land? What was it about your childhood that led to being interested in being an advocate for the environment?
Brian Crutchfield:
Well, my family had been involved in agriculture. My great-grandfather was one of the folks that actually blended Lucky Strike and had his own tobacco company in Reidsville, North Carolina. Ended up selling his company to James Buchanan Duke of American Tobacco Company. And back then, it was the old handshake kind of thing. If you'll sell me your company, I'll make sure any of your kids, their kids and grandkids will always have a job. My grandfather worked for the company. My father worked for the company. It almost seemed like I was heading in that direction to be a tobacco buyer.
But knowing all the hard work that went into growing tobacco back in those days, they really didn't use a lot of chemicals. Everything was pretty non-filter even. But it was interesting to see how agriculture was changing, so an appreciation for rural farmers and what they had to go through. My dad was a tobacco buyer. He would buy tobacco from farmers. They would show their appreciation for him and the company buying from them by bringing us country hams, things like that. Nice relationship back in those days.
Lee Ball:
I have a very similar story from my family on both sides of my family. My grandfather was a buyer.
Brian Crutchfield:
Oh, is that right?
Lee Ball:
Yeah. He was born in Roxboro. He worked for American Tobacco Company and Virginia Tobacco Company in Danville. They probably knew each other.
Brian Crutchfield:
Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure they did.
Lee Ball:
And then on my mom's side, they grew tobacco on a farm in Edgecombe County outside Rocky Mount. That's where I spent a lot of my time really just wandering the woods, and I think that had a profound impact on me growing up. You mentioned before pesticides and herbicides and fungicides before what they called the Green Revolution. Now our Green Revolution is more about energy and sustainability. Back then, it was about trying to grow food more efficiently and feed the world.
Brian Crutchfield:
Exactly.
Lee Ball:
I'm fascinated to talk about your experience in the late '70s and early '80s because of the cyclical nature of the work that we do. There are so many things that we could be doing today that you all were talking about then the late '70s and early '80s, appropriate technology, energy efficiency, community energy and community scale, energy systems and food systems. Could you speak a little bit about that experience then as a young professional and really what you think we could be learning from today with our current problems that we're needing to solve?
Brian Crutchfield:
My first job out of graduate school in '75 was working for the State Economic Opportunity Office of North Carolina in Raleigh. They were the state level of the 35 local Community Action Agencies like WAMY, Watauga, Avery, Mitchell, Yancey, Community Action. We'd received a grant from Office of Economic Opportunity, OEO, or Community Services Administration back in the '70s to do a Low-Income Weatherization Program of weather rising homes. Well, at that time, there had never been a program like that, so this was all pretty novel. How do you do it? We had a grant for labor, so we were able to hire people to do it that worked for the Community Action Agencies.
But then we had to come up with standards as to, how much do you do? What do you do? How much can you spend? What kind of impact does it have? Are we just making it airtight or tighter? Are we putting in new windows and doors? Are we putting in insulation? Back then in the '70s, just like in the '60s, a lot of the housing stock of low income folks was pretty bad. If they owned it, it was a little better, but a lot of it was renter occupied. Just designing those programs, trying to decide who got the most money, I had to come up with a formula of things like poverty rate, owner occupied, degree days of how cold and hot it is in certain areas.
A lot of the Community Action Agencies in the western part of the state got more money because we were factoring in that you need to make a house warmer in the winter, better than you need to make it cooler in the summer, because a lot of the houses in Eastern North Carolina back then did not have air conditioning, by any means. Designing that program, doing the training, we decided to buy cellulose insulation blowing machines. I had a contract with a company in Northern Virginia that oftentimes they would come down, bring the insulation to us, and we would ship back reams of newspaper.
We ended up getting into a little bit of renewables, making the wood stoves, things of that sort out of barrels, solar window units that would bring in war air on the south side of a structure. It was about that time that this group also funded by the Community Services Administration, who had funded our Low-Income Weatherization Program, was created in Butte, Montana called the National Center for Appropriate Technology. It was designed after a similar group in England called the Intermediate Technology Center that was started by E.F. Schumacher, who had written this book in the '70s called Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
He started this group that was doing village technology in places like India and Pakistan, other places. They were bringing in technology that just really didn't work. Or if it worked for a while, if it went down, you couldn't repair it. Trying to come up with ideas as to how to do better farming techniques and things of that sort. The center was located in Butte, Montana. Senator Mike Mansfield, that was sort of his parting gift as he left the Senate. He used to be head of the Senate back in those days. Nobody now remembers him. But they had a great facility, had a $3 million budget, which was big time back then, $1 million for staffing and administration, $1 million for research, and $1 million for grants.
I ended up going to work for them after a couple years with the Low-Income Weatherization Program and was their Appalachian Bio-Regional representative. I moved back up to Radford, Virginia where I'd gone to graduate school at Virginia Tech and worked Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, all that whole Appalachian Region, traveling around four days out of each week visiting folks, making presentations on the grant program, getting people to line up to do things. Did that for a few years, then moved on to Tennessee Valley Authority where I started an appropriate technology program there and also a community energy branch. And that was a lot of fun.
We had money to give away too, as long as you only did one project. You couldn't start a program that you had to consistently fund that particular thing. One of the projects we did in the community energy branch was to fund four communities to do energy assessments and energy projects. One was in Tupelo, Mississippi. One was in Norris, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville. We also had one in Alabama, and we also had one in North Carolina, Boone. At the time, Appalachian State had a program here called Earth Studies Program in a building not far from where we are right now.
They had a three-person board of directors that was the chancellor of the university at the time, John Thomas, the chairman of county commissioners, and the district manager for Blue Ridge Electric. The three of them, along with the local person that had been hired for that, Mike Epley, were doing a lot of things. They had a few faculty members here like Harvard Ayers, who was doing some things in micro hydro. They built a few micro hydro installations.
When we talk micro, we were really talking pretty small, just really a creek that's being damned up and a pipe coming out of it, going maybe a hundred yards down the hillside of a slight elevation change, and then dropping it real rapidly down to the bottom of the creek again, where you might have a small turbine of sorts, not much bigger than a lawnmower engine, that would run and generate some electricity. Those were the early days of micro hydro. Actually Appalachian State did a lot in that area in the '70s and '80s. That's also in the early '80s when the windmill was here. TVA did some work with NASA on that, as we were all over here during the dedication of that back in about 1979, '80.
Of course, the World's Fair was in Knoxville in '82 and the theme of that fair was energy. All the countries from around the world, and this is sort of the last of the Great World's Fair. After that, I think there was one more in New Orleans on water, but after that, people realized that Disney World and Epcot Center and all that pretty much had that covered and were going to do that on a permanent basis. No more need for World's Fairs. But countries like China, Australia, and others came in and showed off all their innovative energy programs and technologies. That was a lot of fun back then, watching that come in and being exposed to that.
And also working at Tennessee Valley, we got to do a lot. We brought in George McRobie, who had been E. F. Schumacher's partner at the Appropriate Technology Center and had him look at projects that we were doing at TVA right after Three Mile Island where one of the nuclear plants in Pennsylvania sort of went awry. There was a lot of money out there then after that for anything solar. TVA at the time under the leadership of Dave Freeman decided that we need to shut down a lot of this nuclear program and move toward renewables and conservation. It was a real big strategy to how can we come up with solar?
What was the solar technology at that time? Solar water heating was the most popular aspect. Wood stoves. How do you improve the technology of wood stoves with things like catalytic combustors inside the chimney of the wood stove that would burn the particulates butter than the old style? Then conservation programs, home weatherization. It was great seeing those programs being generated and how do you work. We have this one guy come in from New Mexico, Bill Yanda, who came up with the whole idea of solar greenhouses, having a greenhouse on the south side of your house where you could store the heat during the day, grow vegetables and get fresh air as well off these greenhouses.
We did programs where we actually went to a community and would build a greenhouse over a weekend. The creative days of doing things back then before the internet, before computers, based on word of mouth, based on actual experience, based on getting on the phone and calling somebody saying, "Can you send me some of those plans," as to what you were doing. TVA really had a great lead role in doing that. But like any federal agency, I was there for 10 years, went through a lot of changes. Reorganization were real popular back in the '70s and '80s.
I'd always had, as my career path, do as many local projects as you can at the state level, at the federal level, and then take that experience and try to apply it to a community where you're going to be there for the long-term. We had the opportunity with Blue Ridge Electric back in those days and Blue Ridge Energy now to help them write a job description in economic development and sustainable development. I helped them write that description. Six months later, they got it approved. Six months later, they called me asking if I knew anybody might be interested, could I help them with that.
I was thinking about it and thought, ah, good time to move back to North Carolina and work at the local level, and came here in 1988. Worked with Blue Ridge Energy for 25 years doing a variety of projects. I was sort of the only person doing that type of thing for them. It was great to be able to apply that experience in local areas with a whole variety of projects over that 25-year period.
Lee Ball:
I have a ton of questions.
Brian Crutchfield:
All right.
Lee Ball:
That was terrific. I'm going to go back to David Freeman. At the time, it seemed like we didn't have battery storage. Thinking about photovoltaic solar energy at scale was next to impossible. The focus was more decentralized at the community level, at the user level. That makes sense, focusing on energy conservation, solar thermal, and that's when we saw, I guess, the installation of a lot of these wood boilers and solar thermal like the Carolina water stoves.
Brian Crutchfield:
Exactly. You still see a few of those around.
Lee Ball:
You do see those. Another question, going back to the Center for Appropriate Technology, when you're doing that work in Southwest Virginia, you're working with homeowners, farmers, I take it, what are some of those projects? I mean, were they small solar thermal, like you said? Were they more efficient wood stoves? Just curious.
Brian Crutchfield:
Little of that. We would work with the Community Action Agency who wanted to build the solar window boxes and come up with that design and provide them funds to say build 10 of them. And then same thing with the old wood stoves that were made out of barrels, where you had a barrel that was horizontal, you'd put legs on it, get it off the ground, a front cover to it. And then where the chimney came out the back, it would then go into another barrel, and then circulate that heat from the exhaust or the smoke and gather it before it went out the final chimney out of the house. Barrels were almost like now fairly cheap to do.
It just required some welding and a good design. We came up with some designs that could be passed out and printed. Same thing with the window boxes. We had our folks up in Butte, Montana work on that and figure that type of thing out, come up with some conservation techniques. Ultimately, they end up being the agency that evaluated a lot of the weatherization programs around the country and have done that for decades. Working with Department of Agriculture and others to try to determine what's the best way to do home weatherization in a home that's in potentially pretty poor shape to begin with, what's most important.
And over time, it was not just air infiltration and weatherization, but actually replacing heating and cooling systems and even additions to houses and so forth. That program's really changed over the last 40 years when you look at it for the better.
Lee Ball:
The window boxes, were they vertical in angle like a solar thermal flat plate collector without the water lines?
Brian Crutchfield:
Exactly. You'd have a space behind, generally just almost a piece of tin or some type of metal that would store the heat, and then underneath would be an open space where air would come into it, and then at the bottom of the unit flow back over the black metal with either glass, sometimes plexiglass, but oftentimes it was just an old window or something else that would try to make it somewhat airtight.
And then as it goes into the bottom half of a window, the heat would come in at the top part, and then you would try to have colder air from the floor of the house come in. It was just a passive non-fan type activity. Even now, every now and then I'll be riding around the back roads, I'll see something like that out there on a house. It's pretty interesting to see.
Lee Ball:
I think it would blow the minds of an appraiser or a realtor trying to sell a house if they see those stick out the windows, but the functionality is really legitimate. I know they work well. Let me ask you about Chancellor John Thomas and his involvement with this committee and the Earth Studies Program. Now, this is making sense now because John Thomas used to always show up to a lot of my talks. He's always been interested in sustainability, and I think tracked it more closely than I ever realized when he was still alive. Just a really sweet man. He was a great leader for our university.
Brian Crutchfield:
Oh yeah, and he was an engineer too.
Lee Ball:
I know. That's right. He was an engineer and a lot of people don't remember that. He and others were involved with the early beginnings of the Earth Studies Program here at App State that eventually evolved into a few programs, appropriate technology and sustainable development. They kind of went different paths. What else do you remember about those early days?
Brian Crutchfield:
One of them was in agriculture. There was a guy with a program who was into French intensive gardening. They had an appropriate technology farm. You go up into Valle Crucis.
Lee Ball:
194 near Matheny, right?
Brian Crutchfield:
It was up near Matheny, and it had a house up there. Some students lived there for a while. But they had this guy, and I'm trying to think of his name. It'll come to me soon. He's still around. He taught this biointensive gardening method. You would come in and put a spade into the ground and do just one turn and then go completely through your flower bed that way. But they had a passive solar collector there made out of concrete blocks filled with sand and facing south, of course.
Just doing a lot of agriculture, in some ways much like the current Earth studies farm or whatever we want to call it out in Ashe County, because they're growing food and bringing it in and being served here in the university. When you think back on some of these programs, they've gone through lots of changes over last 40 years. But in reality, they keep current with the times.
Lee Ball:
There seems to be a common thread that they're very hands-on, grassroots, a lot of low tech appropriate technology. However, they're using high tech data analytics and some other technology that we have at our disposal now.
Brian Crutchfield:
Well, one of the projects we did at Blue Ridge Electric and provided some funding for the county was this methane collector out at the landfill. That was just 15 years ago. After they closed that landfill, there was still gas to be collected, and they were flaring it off because they didn't want it to go into the atmosphere. But it was determined that you could take that gas and run it through a generator. Now, the big landfills for places like Hickory has one, it's a big, big diesel generator, fits inside the back of a semi, like the one we have out at the Watauga County Landfill that's closed is a modified truck engine.
They were using those at coal mines in West Virginia. We decided, let's give it a try. I think they've got three small truck type engines, and they provide a little electricity that goes back on the grid. We ended up making that whole landfill area of buildings a microgrid. There's one meter as the power comes in, and we allow them to use the lines that were out there so they can circulate whatever power they generate off that generator into the rest of the buildings out there, which is not significant, but it's still unique and a great learning experience.
Lee Ball:
Yeah, exactly. It's closing the loop on a waste stream. Speaking of waste, I was reading in the materials that you sent over to me early this morning about your experience at TVA with waste reduction and recycling, and I really honed in on the fact that you're involved with inventing the convenience center. That fascinates me. I'd love for you to expand on that a little bit.
Brian Crutchfield:
Well, back in the day, and I'll just use Watauga as example, counties did not do door-to-door waste collection. Only municipalities did that. But obviously there's a lot of waste being generated out there in the houses that are around the county. Oftentimes people would have their own barrel in the backyard and take their waste out there and burn it. And of course, that's not very environmentally appropriate. The second phase past that, counties would establish what they call green box sites. They would consolidate somewhere between five and eight, maybe 10 green boxes, containers for garbage, on the side of the road, drive by, throw your garbage in there, and go on.
Well, those sites, the garbage, somebody might catch it on fire or put ashes in there that would cause a fire. They were exposed to the weather. They would rust. Vermin, rats, bears, everything got into it. There would be scavengers or dumpster divers out there, potholes, glass. You were taking your car and yourself a little risk just by disposing of garbage that way. There would be, like in Watauga County, anywhere from 30 to 50 sites like that around the county. The trucks would have to go out there and lift up the boxes, put them in the back of the garbage truck. Of course, they didn't know what was in there, so oftentimes it could already be on fire.
They'd be throwing it into the back of a $200,000 truck and have to go down the road. As the air went in, the fire gets bigger and they'd have to stop and dump the whole load on the side of the road. It was just not a good system. We came up with an idea of let's consolidate it. Let's fence it in. Let's have a person out there. Let's have certain hours of operation. Just like now, I know that Thursday morning is my garbage pickup day, and I have to get my two rolling garbage cans out to the curb. You know here's the days that it's open, here's the days that it's closed. There will be an attendant out there maybe to help elderly people to do that.
We came up with a book of different designs on how you do it and what are the best locations. Initially, there was some resistance to that. People didn't want them near their home or their neighborhood. But once they saw how clean they were, it was a welcome addition. I guess we have five or seven sites here in Watauga, and they're all fenced in. One problem we have is people who are Airbnb type folks. They'll go there. And as they're leaving town on a late evening, like a Sunday, and they'll just put their garbage out by the front gate, usually the attendant will go through that to see if they can get a name that they can send a ticket to. But for the most part, it still works very well.
Lee Ball:
This was primarily for health and safety, trying to get people to stop burning garbage, throwing it in rivers, down ravines, that sort of thing. Was TVA involved with the early days of recycling, trying to divert certain things like aluminum probably first?
Brian Crutchfield:
Yeah. Back then, you also had jails that had prisoners. They needed to help them do something. They used prisoners in a lot of small counties to do roadside pickup. And as they were doing that, they were also realizing, we've got a lot of aluminum here or glass that could be recycled. Let's come up with programs for that. We came over here and provided two grants, one to the town for recycling and one to the county for the convenience centers. Ultimately, both of them came up with very good programs that over the years have been improved dramatically, where we have curbside recycling in Boone now and a lot of recycling opportunities in the county, including the convenience centers.
Back then, we were doing a variety of programs, and when I came here initially to Watauga, they had a bond issue that had been associated with the hospital that had been finished and they got some money back. And they used this $2 million to establish a program to do bailing of garbage at the Watauga County Landfill. They built a facility with those funds and put a baler in there. This is a baler that you have a concrete floor and you move the garbage around on the floor in front of it and mix it together, and then put it on this conveyor belt that goes up and then drops it into this bin, and then a hydraulic press compacts it into a bale about the size of a table, 30 by 60 by 30, and wraps it with wires.
And then you pick the bale up that weighs somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds with a front-end loader and put it on the back of a flatbed truck. Flatbed truck goes to what is now called the balefill and stacks them up. And then you cover up the face or the top of the balefill each day and then come back and start again the next day. The landfill here, actually, I guess the last two years of its operation was a true balefill. Some law came up from the state that allowed them to get out of the landfill business and avoid a lot of future liability. As it turns out, they're just saying counties under a certain size of almost 100,000, it doesn't pay to have a landfill.
You need to do a regional landfill, and that's what we do now. We have a tipping station at the landfill. You tip it on the floor. They don't bail it, although I think that would still be a nice way to compact it. It's certainly much more efficient than running a large compactor back and forth over garbage. But I guess we're shipping our garbage either to East Tennessee or down to Caldwell County outside of Lenoir. I guess we send about five loads of garbage down there every day when the landfill was operating.
Lee Ball:
Let's talk about now and the future. I'm really interested in what you think is a very promising off-the-shelf technology that can help us with our urgent need to decarbonize, fight against climate change. Looking to the future, what do you think is emerging that might be very promising? Not that it's ever going to be a silver bullet of energy, but what are you tracking?
Brian Crutchfield:
Well, I remember when photovoltaics first came out. We used to say something by the mid-1990s, photovoltaics will be everywhere, on top of phone poles and utility lines and things of this sort. They'll be so cheap and available that they'll be everywhere. And that electricity will then become almost totally decentralized. No need for central station power plants anymore. Well, that's 25 years ago now. It didn't happen, but a lot of that technology has happened in the last 20 years. It just didn't get the push back then that it needed.
But I think if you look back at the last 40 years, every five or 10 years got a bump of some sort, an improvement in the technology, whether it was in solar panels, photovoltaic panels, or improvements in the battery storage technology. I know in the early 2000s I was working on some projects where we thought fuel cells would be the new thing, where you're taking natural gas or propane, breaking it up and turning it into hydrogen electricity and water. I think that still has some potential, but I think that's in the next 25 to 30 years. I think right now, photovoltaics, battery technology are going to be the real thing that we see.
People really like electric vehicles. The fact that they can be charged with photovoltaics, the fact that they can be a battery for the grid itself, the cars and vehicles, and the fact that photovoltaics are really coming down in price, I think all of that's tied together. I never thought that transportation would necessarily be the push that made a lot of that happen. But with privatized space exploration and rockets, a lot of stuff going on there in pipes of photovoltaics, very thin type of PV worked into roofing panels, into windows, into all types of siding, on the tops of cars, it's pretty amazing. The ROSE car that you guys have here at ASU, a very thin type of PV, not cheap, very expensive.
How do you take that technology and make it affordable? When that type of thing happens, where you buy a roofing system and PV is built into it. We've had over the last 40 years a lot of Solar Home Tours here in the county. We've gone out to look at a lot of these innovative systems. I remember somebody had what they call a standing seam roof, which is a type of metal roof with a seam that sticks up about two and a half inches. The company that sold it to them had a type of... It was actually like PV on a roll that went between the standing seam. It was pretty amazing. They were able to reduce the cost of the roof by almost half because the rest of the PV panel got tax credits at the time.
I'm not too sure that was the best use of that technology. The plastic overtime, like a lot of plastics, degrades and reduced the efficiency, but even if it had a 10 or 15 year life. It helped with the learning curve, if nothing else.
Lee Ball:
I have time for one more question. You touched on some community events like the Solar Home Tour. I know you've been very involved with the Green Drinks effort here in the high country. Could you speak to its origin and what you're doing today?
Brian Crutchfield:
Yeah. Green Drinks International is a group that said, "We're going to save our society one drink at a time." Social networking, a lot like networking on Facebook and other types of things, where a great way to meet people is oftentimes in a bar or a bar type setting where you're having drinks and you're just talking back and forth, like we are now, asking questions. What do you think about this and that? We have a group that 10 years ago we met for about a five-year period almost once a month, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday night from say 5:30 to :30 in a restaurant on an off night so that it was beneficial to them.
They oftentimes would provide the appetizers and a drink special. Oftentimes we'd have a topic, but most of the time it was all about socializing. You just came in, put on a name tag, put a little card in the fishbowl, and we'd pull out some door prizes. If you win, you come forward and tell us what you're doing that's green. We quit for about a 10-year period when I first retired, but we had a meeting here, I guess, about a year ago that ASU sponsored with your sustainability program, your Appropriate Technology program, your programs in business that were looking at sustainability and said, "How can we get more going in this area? How can we get people talking?"
I volunteered to restart Green Drinks. We've had about four meetings over the last year. We had one this week that was a little lightly attended, where we were looking at the new Tesla charging station and the new electric bus from Apple Car, the first charging station here in Watauga County at Makoto's. The owner of Makoto's 10 years ago had a Tesla, one of the first buyers of the Tesla, and put a charging station out front. He's now added a second supercharger in the back, so you can go in, have a meal, charge your Tesla. He pretty much lets you charge it for free if you were having a meal there and go on your way.
We're looking to do some more around the area where we'll look at green projects and just have people get together. We had a great one couple months ago at Booneshine. Your group here at ASU that did the ROSE electric vehicle racing car was the spotlight. We were able to walk over to your garage and see the vehicle and talk to the students who had been involved. That was great for them. We all had a good time. It really felt good. I guess we had close to 45 people there. There were just a lot of good things going on. With a local newspaper that only comes out once a week, it's hard to find out about them.
Getting people together just to socialize, talk about green. You don't have to have an alcoholic drink to participate. You'll meet some interesting people. I was surprised at some of the folks that came to that meeting we had at Booneshine I hadn't seen in 10 years or so, and they're talking about some PV projects in the community. Just a lot of interest, especially with lead certified buildings here and other things, things that people need to know more about and how do we address future topics like affordable housing and still transportation issues and waste management, food production and distribution.
There's just some great people in this community doing lots of unique things that are part and parcel of the last 40 years that I've been around Boone.
Lee Ball:
I really enjoyed the Green Drinks opportunity to, like you said, socialize and just cross pollinate and learn what's going on.
Brian Crutchfield:
Yeah, meeting new people.
Lee Ball:
Everybody's sharing information and ideas, sharing what doesn't work and what does work. Even more than that, I appreciate your being here and your time today.
Brian Crutchfield:
I'm the old green guy.
Lee Ball:
Brian Crutchfield, the old green guy, the original OG. I just really appreciate your time here today. Thank you so much.
Brian Crutchfield:
All right. Thank you, Lee.
Outro:
Find Your Sustain Ability is a production of the University Communications Department at Appalachian State. It's hosted by Appalachian's Chief Sustainability Officer Lee Ball. For more information about Appalachian State Sustainability, check out sustain.appstate.edu. For more podcasts, videos, and articles related to Appalachian State, check out today.appstate.edu.