Green Options

Unless you are a vegetarian, you probably agree that chicken is delicious. But could this fowl have a future in automobiles? According to a presentation made at the 13th Annual Green Chemical and Engineering Conference this weekend…maybe. It seems that carbonized chicken feathers can hold hydrogen quite well; better than carbon nanotubes or metal hydrides currently being tested as hydrogen carriers. Could this solve the infrastructure problems currently holding hydrogen technology back?

Where is the grid going, big or small?

I have a mini stockpile of tins in my craft room begging for attention.  In an effort to ditch all the plastic bins for greener options, I have decided to alter the tins with decorative paper so I can use them as storage for all my crafty bits.  You can use anything from Altoid tins to larger cookie or popcorn tins for this project.  Around the holidays there tends to be a lot of products packaged in tin containers.  I am going to use two tins from a pair of sunglasses and a watch.  

When it comes to altered tins, there aren’t any rules.  You can paint them, draw on them, glue stuff to them… what ever you desire.  Today I wanted to share an easy tutorial for altering tins with paper to make simple decorative storage containers.

Even though the weather is still gloomy, and there aren’t any real signs that Spring is on the way, I have started to clean and organize my house in preparation.  One of the first rooms that I tackled recently was my art room, and I realized that in one drawer I had a ton of paint brushes rolling around all willy-nilly, with no organization at all.  Some of my brushes were even getting damaged that way, and so I decided to remedy the situation.  I happened to have a pile of old clothes laying about, for my next “t-shirt rug project” so I grabbed one from the pile and decided to sew myself a t-shirt caddy.

Toys!  Toys!  Toys!  If you have kids, chances are your house is overrun with them.

Cheap plastic garbage toys gifted from well-intentioned relatives; expensive high-quality wooden eco-friendly educational pieces that are almost more works of art than toys; noisy electronic toys; toys with a million pieces that always turn up in the darndest of places (but never when you’re actually looking for them)… We concoct ingenious storage solutions, we spend our hard-earned dollars on the very latest thing, and then we hear that inevitable lament:

Mo-o-om… We’re booooooooooooooored!!!

So there you find yourself, bewilderingly surrounded by this mountain of costly yet apparently useless paraphernalia on one side, and these adorable yet apparently helpless children on the other, thinking “there has GOT to be a better way!”

Well take heart, because there is.

Today we’re joined by guest blogger Jeff Hobbs of Organize-Design-Live. Jeff specializes in home organization and interior design in Los Angeles and he is going to share some helpful thoughts with us on getting orGREENized in the New Year.

Get orGREENized in ‘09

Are your closets and drawers your worst enemies? Do you constantly misplace files at your office? Well, it’s a new year so that means we have the opportunity to make some changes, let go of the guilt about the things we didn’t do last year, and start fresh. Getting your personal space organized will result in more efficiency in just about every area of your life. . . a great place to start if you’re serious about fulfilling some of this year’s resolutions. And why not roll the resolutions of getting organized and being more environmentally friendly into one? There are so many great products on the market today, along with other creative organizational systems, that won’t break your bank or our environment.

Here are a few ideas, products, and tips to get you started…

I’ve been posting lately about the treasure of beautiful, hand-sewn vintage quilts that I found in my Mama’s house, and the shocking conditions in which they’d been stored: stuffed in a closet, stuffed in a garbage bag, with MOTHBALLS! Another that my mother had put aside for me was folded up, hung on a HANGER, and then stuffed inside a garbage bag.

The quilts were all visibly worn-looking, weak, and discolored along their fold lines. On my Nana’s friendship quilt, some of the color of the embroidery that served as the signature of the women who pieced the quilt had bled onto other parts of the quilt that they’d been shoved against for thirty years. The quilt on the hanger is in the worst shape–the plastic had stuck to it in a few spots (it’s a nine-patch my Nana made in the 1970s, out of polyester), and it didn’t really want to completely unfold anymore. I have a master’s in library science that focuses on archival management, and I sew, and y’all? I FREAKED. OUT.

The thing is, my family doesn’t hate these quilts and want them to die. The recognize that these quilts are works of art, loving legacies from women long gone from us, and records of our ancestry, and they very much want to treasure them and preserve them for future generations–they were just doing an ass job of it.

Here’s how to not be such an ass.

US Scientists have figured out a way to mass produce the nanomaterial graphene, opening the door to significant advances in the storage of hydrogen, as well as the electricity produced by solar and wind energy.

Graphene, produced by reducing graphite down to a sheet only one atom thick, is one of the strongest materials known to man. It has been shown to have huge potential for hydrogen and renewable energy storage, but up until now has been held back by a lack of supply. Now the team, based at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA, have discovered a method of producing graphene sheets in large quantities.

Scientists at Columbia University have discovered that a rock found in the Middle East can be used to soak up carbon dioxide at a rate high enough to significantly slow global warming.

The team found that when the rock, known as Peridotite, comes into contact with carbon dioxide it converts the gas into harmless minerals such as calcite. They have also worked out a way to ’supercharge’ the naturally occurring process to a million times its normal speed to grow enough of the mineral to permanently store 2 billion or more tons of carbon dioxide annually. This equates to an astonishing 7 per cent of the total global carbon emissions from human activity each year.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power.

The process, loosely based on plant photosynthesis, uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. When needed, the gases can then be re-combined in a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity whether the sun is shining or not.

According to project leader Prof. Daniel Nocera, “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years. Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now, we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

One of the biggest roadblocks to a future of renewable energy production is the ability to store such generated electricity. The current networks of power supply and storage simply have no chance of being able to provide necessary storage capacities for renewable sources such as solar and wind, given the propensity for spikes in generated electricity.

However engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have made a breakthrough in the development of a new carbon-based material that they believe might allow for at least a doubling of current electricity storage capabilities. The new structure is called grapheme, and measures in at one atom thick.