Researchers at the University of San Diego have discovered that carbon nanotubes don’t have to be perfect to do a better job. The team of UCSD Professor Prabhakar Bandaru and grad student Mark Hoefer found that defective carbon nanotubes actually store energy more effectively than their unflawed counterparts.
The effect, which was originally studied at UCSD by grad student Jeff Nichols, rests in the creation of just the right amount of defects - enough to create additional charge sites on the nanotube, but not enough to break down its electrical conductivity. Though it’s a long way from commercialization, the breakthrough brings us one step closer to the Holy Grail of the electric car, and to the entire battery operated sustainable infrastructure of the future: a genuine quick-charging, long lasting battery.
Many of our Bayview neighbors joined us last weekend to celebrate the second anniversary of the Latona Community Garden. What used to be a smelly skanky debris-filled eyesore, is now a thriving organic community garden. The formerly blighted corner has been transformed into a warm and welcoming public space where neighbors gather, local kids play, and organic food is grown.
Several of the neighborhood kids climbing the walnut tree in the Latona Community Garden.
The video is explicit, the message is simple: You can transform lives in one of the poorest districts of India by donating a goat.
A life-changing experience in India inspired volunteer Debbie Glasband to launch a program to provide an alternative source of income for tribal people: Goats.
It certainly is the dawning of a new era in automotive technology when the tiger in your tank becomes a moldy relic of bygone ad campaigns while the humble leftovers from harvested wheat get awards for new sustainable thinking. A. Schulman, Inc.’s AgriPlas wheat straw fiber has just been named a Blue Ribbon Finalist in Environmental Innovation by the Automotive Division of the Society of Plastics Engineers, for its application in the Ford Flex crossover vehicle.
AgriPlas’s contribution to the Flex is an injection-molded storage bin and inner lid made of polypropylene and a bio-filler made of wheat straw. Though the application is modest in scope, a spokesperson for Ford’s Plastics Research division sees it as a litmus test of things to come, in terms of increasing fuel efficiency by decreasing vehicle weight.
If we need just one more reason to be convinced that the era of fossil fuels is quickly winding down, 30,000 square feet of evidence is going up right now in the suburban Detroit town of Warren, Michigan. That’s where the U.S. Army is building its new Ground System Power and Energy Laboratory (GSPEL), and it’s no accident that the site is deep in the heart of the U.S. auto industry.
The high tech GSPEL complex features eight separate laboratories, all dedicated to the development of more sustainable military vehicles and related systems: increasing energy efficiency, using more renewable resources, focusing on ready access to energy and power, and reducing environmental impacts. It’s all part of the military’s overall drive to shed fossil fuels—both foreign domestic—and focus on energy security for the 21st century.
Researcher Susan Sun of Kansas State University has an answer for all those hungry cows out there: let them eat barrels. Sun’s work on sustainable biomass adhesives has already lead to an edible barrel for cattle feed made with straw and soy adhesive. More products are on the horizon, including a new formula that improves the flowability and strength of raw bioplastic, making it easier to pour and mold.
The edible barrels replace oil drums, which cost approximately $6 per barrel to clean for re-use as feed containers in addition to the cost of the barrel. Sun’s elegant waste reduction solution relieves farmers of this expense while practically eliminating the risk of oil-contaminated feed from poorly cleaned barrels. It also eliminates waste or water pollution associated with the cleaning process, and it eliminates the cost (and carbon footprint) of returning used barrels for re-use.
Veteran solar installer Parkson Corporation is lending its expertise to a new wastewater treatment plant upgrade for the town of Berlin near the Maryland coast. When it’s finished, the new plant will almost eliminate the use of fossil fuels for drying and converting biosolids, also known as sludge, into a lightweight Class A soil amendment or sustainable fuel. The process is pushed along by a stainless steel “Electric Mole” that automaticaly mixes, aerates, and granulates the sludge as it dries.
The $16 million upgrade project is funded by ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Parkson’s Thermo-System Active Solar Sludge Drying Chambers will enable the sludge conversion process to operate under more than 90% solar power rather than using gas or oil. For disposing sludge in landfills, that translates into a significant savings in preparation and transportation costs. Even better, it makes sludge products more cost-competitive with conventional soil amendments and fossil fuels, effectively taking the “waste” out of wastewater.
The U.S. Department of the Interior reports that overall water consumption in the United States has declined in the past 25 years, even though the population has increased 30% and use by individual American households has increased. The statistics were compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey.
What’s the secret? The 25-year patterns of water consumption revealed in the DOI report provide tantalizing clues about the ability of the U.S. to sustain its legendarily consumer-centric lifestyle while stabilizing and ultimately decreasing its contribution to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gasses.
Bokashi is a centuries-old Japanese method of recycling household food waste into all-natural compost. By employing a special culture of yeast and other microorganisms, bokashi is a compact, odorless process that takes only days instead of weeks or months. Now the Bokashicycle company is breaking the process out of the kitchen and into a commercial-scale food waste recycling operation, in partnership with New Earth Farm in Hillsboro, Oregon.
New Earth Farm takes in food scraps from Bon Appetit cafeterias on the nearby Intel Hawthorn Farm campus, which provides a significant waste disposal savings compared to disposing the scraps in landfills. Waste reduction is one goal, and in an even more sustainable twist the composted soil is used to grow crops for Abundant Harvest, a local consumer-supported agriculture (CSA) store.
Researchers at Rice University have announced the discovery of a new breakthrough method for producing carbon nanotubes in bulk fluids. Rice’s new nanotube “stew” could spur the inexpensive mass production of carbon nanotube-based products, much like the plastics industry employed bulk loads of melted polymers as a cheap base for making everything from medical equipment to polyester shirts to plastic bags, and countless other things in between.
Rice’s nanotube research was sponsored in party by U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. Aside from their military application, carbon nanotubes have a practically unlimited potential for sustainable civilian products because of their strength, light weight, and electrical conductivity among other properties. Lightweight nanomaterials could boost the gas mileage in cars and airplanes, make thinner and more flexible solar cells, increase the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries (in combination with another new high tech material, graphene), and be used in artificial photosynthesis to generate hydrogen fuel.
Catch the Wind Ltd. of Virginia has just announced that its new Vindicatorlaser wind sensor has been deployed on a specialized buoy for a field test off Race Rocks Island in British Columbia. If successful, the laser sensor would be part of the world’s first buoy-based wind power assessment system, which could shave millions off the cost of assessing conditions at potential sites for offshore wind turbines.
Conventional site assessments for large scale wind farms are done through the construction of a permanent offshore tower, which can cost up to $10 million. Catch the Wind’s movable buoy-based system, called the WindSentinel, could virtually eliminate that expense and help open up sustainable offshore wind power to small communities, military bases, and other modestly scaled projects.
Researchers at the University of San Diego have discovered that carbon nanotubes don’t have to be perfect to do a better job. The team of UCSD Professor Prabhakar Bandaru and grad student Mark Hoefer found that defective carbon nanotubes actually store energy more effectively than their unflawed counterparts.
