Too often, the business community and the Environmental Protection Agency seem to be at odds. But recently, the EPA has earned praise from a variety of business groups for recognizing energy recycling as a good way to cut greenhouse emissions.

EPA’s recently issued guidance for greenhouse gas emissions permits makes energy efficiency the centerpiece of its compliance options. It recognizes combined heat and power (CHP) and waste heat recovery as Best Available Control Technologies (BACT), which will allow industrial plants to employ energy recycling techniques as a way to satisfy EPA’s permitting requirements.

Word is getting out that energy recycling is key to revitalizing American manufacturing. Just look at this new op-ed in Crain’s Cleveland Business by prominent Ohio businessman Lonnie Coleman.

Coleman explains that energy efficiency is critical to lowering manufacturing costs and strengthening our industrial sector. He explains how all that heat you see coming out of the smokestacks at industrial facilities is really wasted energy that can be recycled into useful electricity.

Toronto Star columnist Tyler Hamilton does a great job of explaining energy recycling. He writes about how he teaches schoolchildren about energy by putting a steaming cup of coffee under a windmill-like device. The steam from the coffee moves the device — a form of a Stirling engine — and it gains speed and momentum, powered only by the heat rising from the cup. The demonstration shows how heat can be harnessed and put to work.

He goes on to write that while we can’t power the world with coffee, “clearly we don’t give enough consideration to the problem of waste heat.”

A growing coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups has rallied together to support investment tax credits for combined heat and power and energy recycling projects. The Alliance for Industrial Efficiency sent letters to the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee, urging them to include an industrial energy efficiency provision in their final tax packages.

Since I last wrote about this effort, the coalition has grown to 122, and now includes such new notables as the United Steelworkers, The Pew Environment Group and ArcelorMittal.

Why are organizations with such varied interests uniting on this issue? Because energy recycling dramatically improves industrial energy efficiency, and therefore increases manufacturing competitiveness and creates jobs — all while reducing pollution.

…policy wonks, news junkies, energy experts, students, and, well, everybody.

RED has launched a completely redesigned newsroom that we hope will serve as a hub for all the news that’s fit to print on energy recycling.

With everything from brainy policy papers to short videos to news features from prominent media outlets, it’s the place to go for anyone interested in recycled energy and cogeneration.