CALLISON:Okay, let’s get started here. Can you explain what the Environmental Technology Verification program is?

HANSEN: The Environmental Technology Verification program was founded by the agency. We officially started, uh, in... let me start that again.

CALLISON: You said "agency."

HANSEN: Yeah. I knew that the minute I said it.

The Environmental Technology Verification program was started by the Environmental Protection agency, um, in 1995, in order to begin the process of an agency verification program. Uh, a number of people had suggested, and one of the President’s environmental technology strategies, Bridge to a Sustainable Future, required that the agency begin such a program in order to basically explain to the public the buying, the technology buying public, how environmental technologies perform, or for that matter, don’t perform.

One of the major motivations behind the program was that environmental technologies, um, had not been selling well - the new ones and the innovative ones. People had been sticking with the tried a true, the old way of doing things, and it was decided that fostering innovation was a very important thing for American industry, and it was certainly a very important thing for the environmental movement and the protection of the environment.

Uh, we have a major problem coming in the 21st century. There are going to be a huge increase in the number of people in this world, and there’s going to be a huge increase in the amount of economic activity. Those things are going to produce more pollution. More people, more economic activity, more pollution. It’s a simple equation. And therefore, having better and more innovative approaches, more cost effective approaches, is really critical in order to address the environmental problems of the 21st century.

CALLISON: Great.

HANSEN:Anyway... I know I answered a number of your questions there, but I thought I would just put it all together. You’re going to clip it anyway, right?

CALLISON: Right. Okay. Can you talk about what the criteria for a new technology is for it to be verified and what are some of the technologies that have been verified recently, or since you started?

HANSEN: ETV is a program that utilizes the market place in order to make decisions. We have now over 825 Americans, in all different fields, state people, federal people, private sector buyers of technology and private sector sellers of technology involved in 16 separate stake holder groups.

These stake holders groups basically decide the priority of the program and decide which technologies should be verified before other technologies. In other words, they set or priority scheme, um, using two basic criteria:

First criteria: is this a serious environmental problem that needs to be addressed?

And secondly: is there innovative technology out there to address it?

In other words, if we say that we’re going to verify in a specific technological area, will there be technologies that will be commercial ready?

One of the most important things about ETV to understand is that it’s not research and development. It basically is the evaluation of fully commercial ready environmental technology. We don’t support research. We are at the farthest most end of the R&D spectrum with this program. We want to tell the public exactly how technologies perform so that the public can make informed buying and selling decisions. Uh, we do not approve any technology. What we do is simply give the information to the market place so that the market place can determine how it performs.

CALLISON: When you say that one of the criteria is to - whether or not it is an environmental problem that needs to be addressed - what are some examples of environmental problems that you, that need to be addressed?

HANSEN: Um, environmental problems that are at the very top of the charts are things like drinking water systems for small communities, both in our country and all over the world. We have very sophisticated large scale systems, but there are still a lot of, a huge number of small scale systems. There are 60,000 small drinking water source in the United States alone, and around the world, and particularly in the Third World, the number is absolutely immense. Many of these people are not drinking safe water and they need to have better technology at their disposal.

Um, do you want me to just say that sentence again? Let me just see if I can remember it.

Um, many of these entities need to have better technology at their disposal. Um, no. Many technologies, many of these... uh, many of these communities need to have better technology at their disposal.

We also are looking at greenhouse gas technologies. This too, is a world wide focus for many people to determine how we can cut back on the amount of green house gas that is being released into the atmosphere. We have standard technology needs in the air and water areas.

We have declining infrastructure in many cities. Sewage treatment plants need to be updated. They could be updated using old technology or they could be updated using new technology. And so those are our customers as well.

We verify technologies in the indoor air environment because that is another whole area that... all of us are sitting in the indoor environment right now and we need to have better technologies within our homes and working places.

Um, we are particularly interested in environmental technologies that look at monitoring of pollutants. We have a program both in air monitoring, water monitoring and site characterization, which is hazardous waste site characterization, using field devices to go out and make more decisions in a contaminated area, about how much contamination is there, or where it is moving to or from, for that matter. We have been working particularly closely with the Department of Defense on that last area.

CALLISON: Great. According to your website, ETV is designed to substantially accelerate the entrance of new environmental technologies into domestic and international market place. Why, and you’ve kind of touched on that, why do you feel the need to accelerate these technologies?

HANSEN: We are hoping that better technologies, and by better, in general, I mean more efficient and more effective at the same time, will be available across the entire spectrum of the market place. Many other countries are now in the environmental technology business. United States business has a substantial competitive challenge in this area. And so clearly, part of the motivation of the support of this program, has been to support American industry in it’s development. But we feel most importantly, that the environmental movement will be benefitted, by having better, faster, cheaper technologies available.

When we started in the environmental area in the 1970s we came up with the best technologies we could as of 1970. But a lot of these things were very, very new. There are better ways to do them now and we want to whatever we can do to assist this market in growing, and to assist these new technologies in being able to penetrate the Market place.

CALLISON: In talking to you a little bit before we started here, it seems that there’s several government programs, agencies that are starting to get more involved in environmental technology, it seems like the Depart of Defense, in particular, seems like they’re really pushing wind power, solar power, that kind of stuff. Is this an area that is becoming a national priority?

HANSEN: I think that environmental technology has been a national priority for the last 25 years. However, there is an increasing need in the area, in this, uh, era of globalization, to assure that these technologies and information about these environmental technologies is readily available, because the market place has become so vast. We have to be able to communicate real facts about how technology performs, as opposed to just sort of claims by various people, that various people put forth. I think all government agencies, but particularly the Departments of Defense, the Department of Energy, EPA certainly, as a leader agency in this area, and many other agencies, are also giving higher focus to environmental technologies than they have in the past. There clearly, is also, the movement from a massive defensive infrastructure in the defense industry, into the environmental area. Many of the technologies that were developed by the Department of Defense and Energy and other federal agencies, um, have been commercialized into the private sector.

We have a lot of what we call ‘cross over’ technologies. Technologies that were developed for one purpose and then have moved into the environmental area. Many of the technologies that we verify are not innovative, in that they are not really brand new, but they are things that were used in other places that have now been moved into the environmental arena.

There’s no doubt that there is a heavy emphasis today on environmental technology for a wide variety of reasons, and there’s a very substantial need for new technology as well.

CALLISON: Can you give me some examples of these ‘cross over’ technologies?

HANSEN: Can I? Ah, yes. We’ve had a very interesting example of a ‘cross over’ technology in a portable GC mass spectrometer. This was used for things like drug interdiction. This is a very sophisticated machine that can determine what chemicals are in a particular sample of either air or water or soil. And they were used, they were started out being used in the drug interdiction area, and have now crossed over to the environmental area and hey have a massive potential, market place, because if you can take a mass spectrometer into the field and measure, real time, in the field, toxins of various types, you will be able to make decisions much faster.

If you don’t want to use that one that’s perfectly all right with me. I think everything I said was right, but I run programs, I’m not a scientist.

CALLISON: Well, it sounded good to me. Um, and that might be the type of thing that I translate into narration.... it’s always good to have examples.

Once you get these new technologies into the market place, how does once encourage the consumer to use the new one rather than what they’re familiar with?

HANSEN: EPA has been struggling with the issue of commercialization of these technologies. To date, the ETV program views its role as making this information available to the market place and then standing back and letting the market place make its own decisions. There are a lot of people who would like us to play a much stronger role in terms of commercialization, but we feel that out primary role at least, is to be the organizations that gives good scientific information to the market and then let the market take it from there.

That being said however, it’s clearly our responsibility to get that information out there and to make sure that all of these various actors in the market place know about technologies that have been verified.

So we use our stake holder group of the 825 people that I mentioned before, to do part of the job of getting that out. We have an enormous website. It’s got over 200,000 pages of information on it already and the program just started a few years ago, and we try to make that information directly available as fast as possible. As soon as we complete any report we get it up on the website, and we announce it publicly. We have a listserv. We’re trying to use the computer tools at our disposal and that certainly the market place globally, is using now, as our primary mechanism of getting the word out to people. But the word that we’re getting out is not ‘buy this or buy that,’ the word we’re getting out is ‘this performs this way and that performs that way, you make your own decision.’

CALLISON: How involved is the federal government in environmental research and development?

HANSEN: The federal government is highly involved in research and development and has been for years. I think it is some times forgotten that the Environmental Protection Agency and the whole environmental movement, is only about 30 years old at this point. And that means that there’s a tremendous amount about the environment, about what is good for the environment, about the risks in the environment, about how you solve those risks that still today, is not known. We have essentially invented a whole new realm of science over the last 30 years and 30 years is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to what science can know and what science can do.

So there’s every reason for a massive infrastructure of federal research and development in this brand new area that is crucial to all of our health and the health of our children, not to mention the ecosystem in the larger sense. So it’s very, very important that the researchers of the federal government be placed here. In the Environmental Protection Agency, we devote about 5% of all of the funds that come in to us, to implement the environmental laws of the land, to research and development. And that is a substantial amount for our agency. Many other agencies devote considerable resource to this, but I think the basic, underlying reason is that we still have a lot to learn about the environment; what’s good for it and how to fix what isn’t right about it.

CALLISON: Do you see any link between the increase of environmental technology development and the job market? And does it create jobs? Does it lose jobs? Does it just shift them around? What happens?

HANSEN: There is a private company that has estimated that there are about 1.8 million jobs that are associated in one way or another with environmental activity in this country. Environmental technology being one of the subsets of environmental activity. There’s a lot of movement, in that there’s ever increasing computerization in this field as in all others. So, in this field as in all others, jobs are shifting around. I think it’s extremely difficult in a time of globalization and a time of massive increase, of all kinds of new communications technologies and robotics and all kinds of these that used to be done by people, to say what the ultimate job impacts are going to be from having innovative technologies come along, but the bottom line is that innovative technologies are going to come along one way or an other and we hope there will be very positive impacts on job markets as well. But, it’s very difficult to say at this point.

CALLISON: That’s what everyone has been telling me.

HANSEN: I think it’s true for any field, any field.

CALLISON: This is my last question. Has the DoD experience with privatization of military research and development informed your work in any way? I mean, would maybe the cross technology, whatever you called it, the cross over technology, has it...

HANSEN: From the very beginning of our program we have been in contact with the Department of Defense. DoD has a very active environmental technology verification program of its own. It’s called the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program. And we have recently signed a partnership agreement with them. We will be working with them on a day to day basis to verify environmental technologies that are of interest to the Environmental Protection Agency and its stake holders, as well as serve the needs of the Department of Defense. So we are hoping that we will have a number of technologies that will be jointly verified by both programs together.

In terms of our general working with DoD and learning from their experience, their experience I think, is somewhat unique in that they have a specific job to do, and they themselves are working on making sure these change over technologies, where they’re appropriate, occur, and they have brought them to our attention. And we are verifying some of those cross over technologies that have been developed by DoD. But we do have this partnership and this partnership is the only partnership right now, that ETV has with any other organization.

CALLISON: Great. Those are my questions. Do you want to talk about your...

HANSEN: Ah, yeah. The information that we do put out, we do have some hard cover copies of these even though we use our web site almost exclusively for the publication and distribution of our information. But basically, this report looks like pretty much any other technology report that one would see. What is unique about it however, is that right in the very front we have what’s called an ETV joint verification statement. And this joint verification statement is between the public and private partners that we have that actually do the verification work in the field and the Environmental Protection Agency. On the work that we’re doing with the Department of Defense there will be a third logo here. But basically, very briefly, in a two or three page synopsis, tells how this technology performs. It is essentially the technology report card. And it is signed by EPA and whatever other partners we have working in the evaluation.

Many of our vendors have told us that this is a very effective tool in their marketing of environmental technologies. Basically, EPA is viewed as some what of a truth teller. And this is the mechanism through which we verify performance.

I want to say, and I want to make very clear, that if a technology does not perform very well we still put out one of these reports, and we still put out a verification statement that says how it performs. So the caviet en tour, the consumer beware, is true here. You must know what you are looking at in order to be able to make a decision. Just because a technology’s been verified doesn’t mean that it is a really good technology.

CALLISON: Okay. Great. Did you have anything else you would like to say or...

HANSEN: Um, I think the international aspects of technology verification should not be ignored. We are now in a global market, and there is no doubt that any technologies that are verified here will be looked at abroad.

We know who dials into our web site, and basically, month after month, ten to 15% of the people who come into the website to take a look at the new technologies that have been verified are people from other countries. That international aspect, I think, is a very important part of any verification program.

That was the only thing I wanted to add.

CALLISON: Actually, that makes me want to ask another question.

HANSEN: Sure.

CALLISON: Is there a way you can say why this program is important, why environmental awareness is important for the average viewer? You know, whoever is sitting on the couch flipping through... why should they care. I mean, we hear, like you just said, international relations, all of that, but it seems like the average American viewer is like ‘that’s international. That doesn’t affect me.’ So maybe, why should the average American...

HANSEN: Americans are impacted by environmental technology every day, every hour of every day. Either by their existence or their non-existence. If we have environmental technology that is good, we will have an improved environment and we will have better public health. If we are in an environment with poor technology we will have poor health and a poorer environment. It is simply one of those things that is with us at all times. We either have it or we don’t, or we’re somewhere in the continuum between good technology, bad technology producing various kinds of pollutants or mitigating against those pollutants.

So, environmental technology is something that impact you and it impact me. It’s impacting us at this very moment and it will impact us when we go home and it will impact us when we go out on the street and it will impact us in our entire lives.

Is that okay? Was that too long?

CALLISON: No, that was fine.

HANSEN: I believe that.

CALLISON: Is there anything else you feel like needs to be said? Okay. Great.