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Denmark, Germany, Sweden rule Top 10 cleantech list | MNN

Karl Burkart — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:02:15 +0000

Some estimates say that cleantech will hit the $2 trillion mark by 2030. Shawn Lesser over at Sustainable World Capital looked at which countries are most likely to dominate the space. Read more >>

Visionaries who are changing your world: Majora Carter

EcoFriend Kim — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:29:20 +0000

Majora Carter, founder, Sustainable South Bronx and Majora Carter Group

First Majora Carter took on her neighborhood. Now she’s set her sights on the world. As the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, Carter greened her community by connecting what folks cared about—their kids’ health—to the pollution ravaging their air and water. This year, she left to create the Majora Carter Group. The consulting firm will help other municipalities take advantage of the tactics she honed in the South Bronx: training people who need work to shepherd in new green technologies, transforming polluted sites into lush community spaces, and generally ensuring that everyone has a stake in the clean energy economy.

Read more about Carter’s work and the efforts of a new generation of environmental justice activists in Utne Reader’s March-April issue.

Reprinted from Utne.com

Get ready for the great analog inundation

Karl Burkart — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:21:42 +0000

Photo: James Tworow/Flickr

Depending on how old and how large your TV is, your analog beast could be toting around eight pounds of lead and other heavy metals such as barium, cadmium and chromium (let’s assume four pounds per set is average). If you multiply all that lead by 100 million (the estimated number of analog TVs in current use or storage) you get a frightening figure — 200,000 tons of heavy metals that eventually need proper disposal.

The good news is that plenty of people are perfectly happy with their analogs. Only 12.6 million households (11 percent) receive OTA (over-the-air) signals. Everyone else is on cable or already has a digital set-top converter, and for those folks an analog television works just fine. As long as they keep their cable they never have to switch to a digital TV, unless of course they want hi-def.

The bad news is that a whole lot of people will be dumping their old sets. Secondhand stores like Goodwill have stopped accepting old televisions, and though most municipalities have banned cathode tube televisions, there are still plenty of ways for crafty dumpster dumpers to get rid of those unwanted sets illegally.

According to the latest government stats, over 60 million people have already requested coupons to replace their analog TV sets. Of those, 30 million have received them. Though many people will likely stash their analogs in the garage for a while, we can safely assume tens of millions of sets will be discarded in the next few months.

So for those of you about to toss your analog TV, please follow these steps:

1. If you have a Toshiba, Sharp or Panasonic set, you can bring it in free of charge to one of 280 locations nationwide. Click below to find one near you.

2. If you don’t have one of the above brands and your set is smaller than 32″ (and not a historic artifact) you can take it into Best Buy. They rock!

3. If neither of the above strategies work, check one of the recycling guides below. Earth 911 in particular has a really great local (ZIP code based) guide to recycling e-waste including TVs. In some cases, you will have to pay by weight for the disposal of your set.

Earth911
National Recycling Coalition
MyGreenElectronics

4. Avoid shady “recyclers.” We have plenty here in L.A. that park out with big trucks collecting old TVs for a small drop-off charge. Chances are they will sell your old set to an e-waste reseller who will bundle up all that lead-packed waste and ship it off to China where, most likely, it will be picked over by underage workers.

5. Make sure and read MNN’s guide to recycling e-waste.

The ‘clean coal’ nightmare begins…

Karl Burkart — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:11:30 +0000

UPDATE 6/2: Read the full post on Alternet.. made it to the front page of Digg!

Maybe it’s because I’m still reeling over the news that Obama-appointed Lisa Jackson, new head of the EPA (that ‘P’ was supposed to stand for “protection” last time I checked) approved 42 permits to permanently obliterate several dozen mountain tops in Appalachia, burying miles of rivers and streams in the process.

But I am just not all that impressed by the news of Wisconsin’s recent “success” in capturing carbon at the coal-fired power plant in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

In fact, I fear that by legitimizing the most destructive fuel on earth, we may be stepping full on into a nightmare of “clean coal” — a twisted world order in which hundreds of thousands of unnecessary human deaths and unprecedented environmental catastophe are all justified in the pursuit of “cheap” coal.

We Greenies need to learn from our past mistakes.

Remember how stoked everyone was a few years ago about the biofuel revolution? Everyone from President Clinton to Willie Nelson was praising Brazil’s transition away from oil and into “clean” biofuels.

If you want to see what the biofuel revolution has done to Brazil’s once verdant rainforests read my recent post on termite power and Vice Magazine’s sobering portrayalof life in an ethanol “work camp.”

We need to start looking at least ONE step ahead. It seems we’ve been all too content looking straight down as we march forward on the path to “sustainability” (while patting ourselves on the back no less). Meanwhile we don’t see the proverbial brick wall that is merely a few feet away.

So let me proclaim it: Carbon capture is perhaps the worst possible economic investmentwe could make right now (maybe only second to liquifying coal to replace gasoline, the folly of which cannot even be put into words).

Why would we invest billions of dollars making a limited, dirty fuel barely tolerable when, within a decade, we could entirely replace coal power with wind and solar — an investment that would pay us dividends forever since there is no mining or drilling required? Renewable fuels are free!

I don’t want to berate WE Energies. In addition to funding the Pleasant Prairie carbon capture project, they have also heavily invested in wind energy. So they have their eye on the ball and their project is truly the closest anyone has come to successfully capturing carbon dioxide at the source. You can read the report here (PDF).

But let’s get some things straight about carbon capture technology:

1. It is hella expensive!

Based on the recent project done in partnership with Alstom, a European carbon capture company, the cost of sequestering a ton of CO2 is somewhere in the ballpark of $70 per tonne! A tree can do the same job for less than $10/tonnne.

2. At best it can only sequester 90% of the carbon emitted.

3. It takes a lot of energy to actually remove the carbon.

In other words you have to burn about 25% more coal just to remove the CO2 from the coal. Can anyone say ‘more mountains?’

4. Once it’s removed you have to do something with the tons of chilled ammonia containing the CO2.

Right now there are not very many uses for CO2, unless you count soda carbonation. Burying it deep underground is an option but one which seems to make the storage of nuclear waste rather simple by comparison.

5. At best, the technology won’t be ready for pime time until 2015 (optimistically).

So basically we would be sinking billions of dollars in capital, capital that could otherwise used to ramp up smart grid or renewable energy projects. And at best, it won’t be ready for another 6 years and would be operated at a HUGE expense to both taxpayers and the environment.

The logic only works if you’re walking up a hill backwards… on a blown up mountain.

Termite power: the secret to a green energy future?

Karl Burkart — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:44:18 +0000

Photo by Diego Lafuente

Cellulose is the most abundant naturally occurring molecule on the planet, a potentially limitless feed stock for the production of fuels like ethanol and hydrogen. But unless you are a termite, breaking down cellulose into fuel is next to impossible.

Because our cellulosic ethanol technology is so primitive, the biofuel industry currently relies on crops like sugarcane and corn. Instead of using the actual fiber for fuel, the sugars are expelled and the fiber is discarded. This makes for a simple, yet costly conversion to ethanol.

The result — huge swathes of the rainforest in Brazil have been felled only to be replaced by sugarcane plantations that are allegedly even worse than the slave-run plantations of the 19th century. An article this week in Vice Magazine documents the horrendous working conditions on these plantations.

Photo by Ricardo Funari

But what if we had a machine so sophisticated, it could break down anything from a scrap of wood to a clump of dried grass? This machine would eliminate the need to grow massive and costly sugar plantations, preserve our rainforests and allow us to turn anything into fuel.

Well, in fact we do have such a machine. It’s called the termite.. or specifically the termite intestine.

Like a cow, the termite has a series of stomachs, each acting as a carefully controlled “reaction chamber” that progressively converts cellulose into fuel. Any homeowner who has dealt with a termite invasion knows the termite’s power in converting solid wood into dust.

To give you a sense of just how efficient a termite is, Andreas Brune of the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology says that if you look at the numbers, the termite can turn one single sheet of paper into 2 liters of hydrogen gas. And that is with next to zero energy input, no heat and no toxic chemical additives or byproducts.

The termite’s secret is the complex interaction of several powerful microorganisms inside its intestinal track. Researchers have travelled to the homeland of the termite, Costa Rica, to collect genetic samples and are working to crack the termite code. If they are successful a new method for converting nature’s most abundant waste product into fuel may be on the horizon.

Nature’s Spirals are the Key to Energy Efficient Design

Karl Burkart — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:29:55 +0000

The curved tip feathers of an Eagle, the spiral of a conch shell, and the geometry of a rose. It sounds much more like the stuff of poetry rather than the basis for hi-tech engineering.

But with the advent of Biomimicry, a new field in engineering and product design, the study of nature’s intricate geometries is becoming increasingly crucial in our quest to maximize the efficiency of everything from airplanes to refrigerator fans.

At the Sustainable Energy Expo I caught up with Peter Fiske of PAX Scientific, a company that uses biomimicry to create product components that use far less energy to operate simply because of their finely tuned shapes.

He has a great explanation for this… In the natural world energy = food. So the conservation of energy is just as important (if not more so) to the animal kingdom as it is to our modern civilization.

Over countless millennia, nature evolved forms that could do more with less. Finches and dolphins were never restricted by the confines of cartesian geometries and linear assembly lines.

Several things are now making it possible for us humans to break free from overly simplified forms and into the world of biomimetic design.

First, we have great precedent forms to study. And where previously it would have been next to impossible to manufacture these forms in a factory, the heavy duty computing power required to pull off computational fluid dynamics and realtime computer-rendering are now readily available.

Janine Benyus is the pioneer (bioneer) of Biomimicry and she sits on the board of PAX Scientific. Based on the number of new biomimicry-based companies being launched (she is currently working on a top secret biomimetic solar company with Paul Hawken) it looks as if we may be witnessing the beginning of a revolution in science and engineering — one that dispenses with the straight lines and dumb circles of the previous cartesian revolution and instead embraces the crazy, curvy world of Mother Nature.