Promising new ideas in green technology

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:52:08 -0500

One of my favorite spots for interesting a new technology ideas that deal with environmental issues is EcoGeek. In the last few days alone, EcoGeek has reported on Magic Machine Sucks CO2 from the Air, Convert Your Gas Mower to Solar, Nanopaper Soaks up Oil Slicks, and First Solar Powered Speedboat.

Ever since I spun a magnet around inside a coil of wire and watched a light go on in grade school, I've been fascinated by the way electricity is generated. So I was especially interested in EcoGeek's report on Worlds Largest Tidal Turbine.

Off the coast of Ireland, history was just made. While windpower is taking off, and could soon produce as much as 20% of America's power, harnessing energy from the ocean is still in it's infancy.

But recently Marine Current Turbines successfully completed the installation of the world's first megawatt-scale tidal turbine. And now we've got the first images of the turbine installed to prove it. The 1000 ton SeaGen tidal turbine was secured to the seabed and linked with Northern Ireland's electric grid.

Another exciting idea was explained in Using Orange Waste to Clean up Lead.

Lead contamination is a huge problem in many parts of the world. From mining operations to industrial waste, it can leech into the ground water and soil, causing neurological disseases in animals and humans. Emily Dellwig of Kansas has developed a method of removing lead from soils using some squashed oranges and a battery.

Emily Dellwig, by the way, is a Kansas high school senior.

In Six Reasons Women will Love the SMaRT Sustainability Standard at In Women We Trust we learn that,

SMaRT is a standard that quantifies and puts the info into a balanced rule per se. You can't be certified as sustainable if the you're saving energy, but polluting the water, or using safe processes, but destroying forests. It also factors in social equity like child labor, a company must be transparent with its working conditions worldwide. SMaRT is like playing baseball, once you have the rules, you can play on a T-ball level or major league, but the rules and tools are the same. . . .

What SMaRT doesn't reward is greenwash. In fact, it eliminates it. SMaRT is fully transparent and in that transparency peer pressure happens and competition begins. If corporations do one thing really well, it's knowing how to compete. SMaRT just gives them the rules to play by that we all can live with and cheer.

The article gives all the details about SMaRT, but more importantly, it gives us, as consumers, important guidance abut buying smart. Or SMaRT.

There's been a lot of press lately about how growing corn to make biofuels wasn't such a great idea after all. How about using algae? In Algae Based Fuels Set to Bloom, we learn that

Algae makes oil naturally. Raw algae can be processed to make biocrude, the renewable equivalent of petroleum, and refined to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemical feedstocks for plastics and drugs. Indeed, it can be processed at existing oil refineries to make just about anything that can be made from crude oil. This is the approach being taken by startups Solix Biofuels, based in Fort Collins, CO, and LiveFuels, based in Menlo Park, CA.

Alternatively, strains of algae that produce more carbohydrates and less oil can be processed and fermented to make ethanol, with leftover proteins used for animal feed. This is one of the potential uses of algae produced by startup GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, based in Cambridge, MA. . . .

Algae can be grown in open ponds or sealed in clear tubes, and it can produce far more oil per acre than soybeans, a source of oil for biodiesel. Algae can also clean up waste by processing nitrogen from wastewater and carbon dioxide from power plants. What's more, it can be grown on marginal lands useless for ordinary crops, and it can use water from salt aquifers that is not useful for drinking or agriculture.

An all-inclusive look at everything about sustainable life can be found at World Changing. For example, The Geography of America's Carbon Footprint tells us,

The Institution [the Brookings Institution] recently released a report that quantifies the carbon footprint for the nation’s 100 largest metro areas based on fuels used by vehicles (personal and freight) and the energy used in residential buildings.“Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” shows that metro areas with ‘high density, compact development and rail transit offer more energy and carbon efficient lifestyles that their sprawling, auto-centric’ counter parts.

Or, don't attempt to breathe in Indianapolis. But Honolulu is a good place for breathing. How that is determined is explained in the article,

Also factoring into footprint size as is where the city gets its energy from (coal versus hydropower, for example), the price of that energy (when prices are lower, consumption is higher), and weather (much energy is put into air conditioning and water heating).

As the chart below shows, carbon footprints are much larger in the East and South because of these factors. Hydropower helps areas like Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue keep their carbon footprint small, as do moderate temperatures and high fossil fuel prices.

At TreeHugger, you can read about Luxim Plasma Light Bulb Kicks Some Serious LED Butt.

At 140 lumens/watt, these pill-sized plasma light bulbs by Luxim are a pretty awesome contender for "light of the future". They are almost 10 times more efficient than traditional incandescent light bulbs, twice as efficient as current high-end LEDs, and they also beat CFLs, most of which are around 50-80 lumens/watt. Only the prototype 300 lumens/watt nanocrystal-coated LEDs can hold a candle to them.

And the light from Luxim's LIFI bulb is not ugly either: color rendering index (CRI) is 91. Lifetime for a bulb is estimated at 20,000 hours, and a relatively large amount of power can be pumped through them, allowing a tiny bulb to produce 30,000+ lumens (not something LEDs can do).

TreeHugger covers everything, like World Changing, and both are great sources for reports about new green techologies.

Some green blogs in the BlogHer network that are additional resources:
- Toys Naturally
- The EcoChic
- TeensyGreen
- Green Mom Finds
- ChezArtz
- Big Green Purse

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Promising new ideas in green technology