UNEP: EU wastes 99% of its high-tech metals (News)
by: Euractive, 2011-10-13 06:36:11 UTC

Recycling less than 1% of high tech metals, Europe has no moral justification to blame the Chinese for restricting their exports of rare earths, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker from the United Nations Environment Programme argued in an interview with EurActiv.com.

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Folding electric assist bike begins final push for production
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2011-10-14 14:01:45 UTC

Hoping to re-ignite what he calls the "hidden magic" of commuting by bike, Washington-born designer Gabriel Wartofsky has been working on a folding e-bike project for the last two years, and is now entering the final stages of pre-production. Prototype number one of his first- and last-mile mobility solution has been taken for hundreds of test rides leading to rider-suggested modifications and design tweaks, crowd-sourced funding has been secured, and final stage manufacturing partners are now being brought on board ahead of an initial limited availability production run in Q1 2012. .. Continue Reading Folding electric assist bike begins final push for production

Section: Urban Transport

Tags: Electric Bicycle, Folding

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kate macdowell: porcelain artifacts
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-10-15 09:33:00 UTC

sculptures characterized by human, environmental and biological emphasis, formed from porcelain. 

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The Best of Greenbuild 2011: Innovative Green Building Products of the Future
by: TreeHugger Design, 2011-10-13 17:35:00 UTC
Image credit Lloyd Alter What can one say about a show that attracts 23,000 green building professionals across the border to Toronto? It could only beGreenbuild, the grand spectacle put on by theU.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). This was its tenth year, the first outside the USA, and Toronto was sunny and warm and, I hope, welcoming. I spent three days there, taking in the lectures, exhibits and keynotes and report: Read the full story on TreeHugger

Carpooling.com, Booming In Europe, Eyes A U.S. Launch
by: fast company, 2011-10-14 18:07:58 UTC

Carpooling--going strong overseas--may be finally rev up here thanks to the domestic launch of Europe's incredibly successful ridesharing program.

Carpooling--which has has never really taken off in the U.S.--is about to get a little help from a European invasion. Carpooling.com, launched as an MBA class project in Germany six years ago, is now a continent-wide phenomenon that has cracked what it takes to get millions of people to open their doors to relative strangers: safety, convenience, and a little cash. 

"The key to the success of our site compared to others is that we want to give [people] options to [carpool] the way they like to," says Odile Beniflah, a senior product manager with Carpooling.com. "In the last 12 months, it has really become a global phenomenon. Every single country we have launched in, it's working." So far, their formula has spread to 5,000 cities and 45 countries.

Carpooling.com is relatively simple. Riders and drivers can search for each other on an online exchange. Members, whose identification is verified by the company, rate each other. Prices are suggested, but final terms are decided between passengers and drivers. Carpooling.com charges for premium features, and takes a cut from each fare.

The service is now gaining popularity in European countries that never had a carpooling culture or, in the case of Italy, never even had a word for it. German airlines are teaming up with the site to give passengers a link to their final destination.

Although carpooling in some places is just another form of public transport, the demographics still skew younger. The average Carpooling.com member is under 35, and students make up a large, if shrinking, percentage of the total number. The primary motivation is money: More than 75% of people carpool for economic reasons, says the company and most trips seem to be intra-city with the average trip covering about 125 miles.

Having conquered much of Europe, Carpooling.com is turning its attention to the U.S., although it won't release a date when it plans to land. "It is going to work in the U.S.," says Beniflah. The U.S. is known for being mobile, she argues, "and I don't think the the wealth of America is so great they don't need to save money."

Perhaps, but the number of people carpooling to work in the U.S. has dropped by half since 1980 as fuel costs fell dramatically and offices spread out into the suburbs, according to The New York Times. In 1980, the cost of a 30-mile round trip was $6.11 adjusted for inflation; today that same trip is just $3.12.

It is possible the recession, and rising oil prices, will push more Americans to share rides to work each day. There will likely be plenty of carpool competition to put them there.

UPDATE: There's at least one promising carpool startup here in the US, so far focused on the Philadelphia market, Ridaroo, with several older sites attempting to garner a national market including erideshare.com and carpoolworld.com.

Reach Michael J. Coren via Twitter or email.

[Image: Flickr user mariachily]

Austin's Power: The Texas Capital Is A Model For Clean Power Adoption
by: fast company, 2011-10-14 15:26:52 UTC

How do you get people to pay more for clean power? Look no further than Austin, where citizens are embracing renewable energy at an astounding rate.

How do you get people to use renewable energy when it’s more expensive than fossil-fueled power? 

For answers to that question, you might want to look at places with high adoption rates for renewables. Austin, for instance.

This month, Texas’s capital became the largest municipality in the country to use only renewable energy. That's 100% of all of its energy. All the city’s public buildings, including its airport and water treatment plants, are now powered using wind from West Texas. In the last nine years, Austin Energy, the city’s publicly-owned utility, has produced more renewable energy than any in the country. And, the city is well on the way to sourcing 35% of all energy from renewables by 2020.

And yet Austin's consumers sometimes pay 15 to 25% more for electricity under the utility’s Greenchoice program than other customers. And the city government has paid $9 million a year extra to make the switch (from a total of bill of about $28 million). How come they’re willing to pay such a premium?

Well, not everyone has been that willing. Some voters and businesses have decried the move, saying it adds to living costs at a time when people can't afford expensive choices. 

But Ed Clark, a spokesperson for Austin Energy, points to a long history of green activity, and the city’s high number of tech companies as supportive. “Austin has a tremendous emphasis on quality of life. There is not a single significant polluting industry in this entire community,” he says.

The utility’s introduced its first energy efficiency scheme in 1982, its green building program in 1991, and its first wind project as long ago as 1995. Businesses account for about half the power sold under the Greenchoice program, with the city government, and 13,000 residential customers making up the rest.

Just as important is how the Greenchoice program is designed. Each time Austin Energy contracts a new batch of wind energy from a generating company, it offers customers a price as a proportion of the deal-amount. They pay a fixed cost over the life of the batch, and can benefit relative to the variable cost of other types of production.

That way, customers get cost-certainty as well as a sense of price transparency. Instead of green energy costs being subsumed in the overall bill, Greenchoice customers can understand what they are paying for, and why. 

“It gives them a logical way to view renewable energy. It says 'we're trying to grow a renewable energy portfolio component and here's how you can assist. We’re not asking you to pay six dollars and we'll do a couple of panels of solar energy,’” says Clark.

“We're giving you something you can watch, and sees how it turns out. I think that has been a big difference between Austin and other cities, and why we've been able to continue to build wind power.”

Clark says although some customers have paid 25% more at the start of their contracts, the price has often evened out over time, as the price of other power has skyrocketed. Of the six batches so far, four now cost less than conventional power.

Austin Energy recently signed new agreements that will take its overall wind power use to more than 1000 MW by 2020. It also has smaller contracts for biomass and solar. But Clark says it is still necessary to balance out the intermittency of renewables with dirtier sources.

Texas has several big public renewables users. Houston and Dallas both figure in the EPA’s top-10 list of government clean power adopters.

As for Austin, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study, published in March, found that state-level renewable requirements and city-level financial commitments were both important to growing green energy programs. It also found that cities benefited from having municipally-owned utilities, and that concentrating on a city’s energy needs was a way to seed wider adoption.

Utilities in Palo Alto, Portland, Iowa, Madison (Wisconsin), and Sacramento have also driven high levels of participation in green energy programs. Hopefully, over time, other cities can learn from what the leaders are doing.

[Image: Flickr user scazon]

Virgin Atlantic Squeezing Jet Fuel Out Of Industrial Waste
by: fast company, 2011-10-14 12:01:34 UTC

Even though airlines are just starting to adopt traditional biofuels, Virgin is already ditching them for a new fuel made from the leftovers of steel manufacturing.

A number of commercial airlines have started to explore the possibility of using biofuels to both save cash and decrease emissions; Virgin Atlantic led the pack in 2008 with the first biofuel-powered test flight. As its competitors catch up, Virgin is already leaving them behind--this time, with a plan to fly commercial routes using synthetic fuel made out of industrial waste.

The airline is using technology from LanzaTech and Swedish Biofuels that captures and chemically treats industrial waste from steel mills and turns it into ethanol that can be converted into biofuel (see the video below). Virgin claims that LanzaTech's process has major potential--the technique could be retrofitted onto 65% of the world's steel mills, which could produce around 15 billion gallons of jet fuel, or 19% of the current world aviation fuel demand.

[vimeo 19173472]

LanzaTech's process is adaptable to other kinds of industrial waste, but Virgin is sticking with steel for now, simply because there is so much of it produced every year (1.4 billion tons annually). "The wholly owned and patented unique gas fermentation technology uses a microbe to convert gas (rich in CO and CO2) into fuels and chemicals," explains Joanne Foster, Senior Press Officer at Virgin Atlantic, in an email. "This microbe can utilize a range of gas streams as a carbon source and so it’s likely that there will be a range of solutions--more sustainable drop-in fuels are likely to come from a number of sources and we believe that prioritising waste streams for conversion into fuel is likely to be a sensible way to progress for the time being."

It's not that Virgin is abandoning more traditional biofuels. In fact, LanzaTech's process technically creates biofuel--it just doesn't use biomass as an input (though it could).

As Foster explains, "What's important is that 'biofuels are done well'--taking into account the full range of environmental, social and economic impacts--for example, by making sure that fuel feedstock production doesn't cause food or water to be diverted away from communities, or doesn't cause rainforests to be felled, and that total lifecycle carbon emissions really are lower than those associated with the fossil fuel alternatives." LanzaTech's process doesn't require any arable land, it grabs waste from already-occurring industrial production, and it's less carbon-intensive than traditional jet fuel. Does it get much better than that?

Virgin expects to run test flights using the fuel in the next 18 months and begin commercial operations in China by 2014, at which point the fuel should be cost-competitive with standard kerosene jet fuel.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

Seven devices and technologies that harness human power for clean energy
by: Ecofriend, 2011-10-14 04:26:49 UTC
Ankit Dahiya:

The importance of renewable energy and other green energy have been increasing day by day and we get to see new technologies been developing each day. The most popular energy which is being talked everywhere is the green energy which has become so popular that every person wants to try their hands on it and there is no sign for its stopping. The trend these days is the development of clean energy using the human power. Human power is considered to be the ultimate power that can be used to do all sorts of jobs. This clean energy that is being developed using human power is quite popular and is being used worldwide. This idea was first given and started by a novelist named Frank Herbert who used the human power to harness the energy. There are various techniques available these days to do this sort of conversion. Here we are with a list of seven devices and technologies that harness human power for clean energy.

1. Backpack Generator Harnesses Power of Walking

This is a unique and cool concept of converting the human mechanical power into clean energy. This idea was designed by Lawrence Rome and his colleagues who actually made this cool Backpack which is capable of converting the human power into energy. This compact backpack is capable of converting the mechanical power used while walking into power energy. It can produce more than 7 watts of usable power in a small walk able distance. For sure this idea is one of the best and easiest way of producing clean and green energy.

2. Nanogenerator Harvests Mechanical Energy

This nano device named Nanogenerator works similarly to an ordinary generator and converts mechanical energy into power. The shape of the Nanogenerator is rectangular and is so compact that you won’t even feel as if you are carrying anything. This compact device is capable of producing a steady flow of energy by using the basic mechanical energy of the human body. It can use ultrasonic waves to generate considerable amount of energy and also can use various sources like mechanical movement of human body including the blood flow inside the body.

3. Vibration Energy Scavenging by Tiny Generator

This compact circuit is what defines creativity and a perfect use of mechanical power. Made with cool looks and ultra slim and small sized components, this device is what can be effectively used to generate steady amount of energy. Measuring even less than a cubic centimeter, this device is capable of converting the vibration energy of human body into electrical energy. We have a plenty of vibrating organs in out body which can be effectively used to generate considerable amount of power.

4. Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED) - Wearable Rechargers

Now here is something that will drive you crazy by its cool looks and effective concept. This clean energy based suit is what every person out there would love to keep. This looks like an ordinary suit but is incorporated with elements and devices that are capable of converting the mechanical energy of human body into power. This is one of the simplest and effective ways and all you have to do is just wear it and move around enjoying your life. This will do its part of job quite easily without even letting you know.

5. Breath Powered USB Charger (And Stillsuit)

Breathing is one of the most important operation our body does every second and what could be better is this breathing operation of human beings is converted into electrical energy without any hassle. This compact device does that pretty comfortable and uses your breath operation as a source of producing electrical energy. It is provided with a USB cable that simultaneously allows you to charge up your device using your breathe process.

6. Biomechanical Energy Harvester is the Bee’s Knees

The clean energy has so many sources to be used and this one is one the most effective and simplest one. This is actually a Knee cap which can be placed on your knees quite easily. Every time you walk or run wearing them, it uses the mechanical energy of your during the walking process and converts it into considerable amount of energy. It’s like you can do your daily job and side by side keep producing clean energy which can be utilized in various daily operations.

7. Piezoelectric Zinc Oxide Nanowire Fashions for Spring

We all knew about the piezoelectric devices which are capable of producing high amount of power just by doing small operations on it. This piezoelectric material made using Zinc oxide has become a trend in the fashion and is being incorporated into shirts and the clothes we wear these days. This cool way has resulted into a new fashion statement and also is being used on a large scale. All you have to do is move around wearing these cool fashionable piezoelectric incorporated shirts and you will be able to generate electricity by making use of human mechanical power.

10 Green facts every eco conscious individual should know
by: Ecofriend, 2011-10-14 11:13:22 UTC
Radhicka S Saxena:

Our environment is showing signs if misuse and maltreatment. The effects of global warming are being felt world over and pollution is altering our natural habitat. Every product that we use daily is soused with chemicals increasing toxicity in our body and all things around us.

A huge mound of waste is degrading on our landfills. The facts about pollution and global warming will truly amaze you. A few of them have been compiled below.

1. Water conservation

Pollution is decreasing drinking water reserves with per capita availability declining by roughly 50% in the last 50 years. Water is used mostly in agriculture followed by the industrial sector. Domestic consumption stands third and in our homes largest quantity is used in toilets and to wash clothes. Also, showers take up more water than other bathing techniques. Watch leaky faucets and running taps for the staggering amount of water wastage they can cause.

2. Facts on trash

A single person generates around 4.5 pounds of trash daily. If the food waste thrown out was composted instead it can set off emissions given out by two million cars. The number of aluminum cans dumped out increased in 2000-2004. According to the clean air council, around 1 billion shopping bags are used by Americans each year and less than 1% are recycled.

3. Toxicity

Personal care, beauty, food, and cleaning products used everyday are loaded with toxic chemicals. Coming in contact with them can set off allergies, psychological abnormalities and birth defects. Toxins in household cleaners can cause air pollution and even cancer. Within 30 seconds of exposure these toxins spread to every organ in our body. Around 300 synthetic chemicals have been uncovered in a human body.

4. Air pollution

Tailpipe emissions from vehicles contribute heavily to air pollution. Air pollution is responsible for more premature deaths than car accidents. In fact, on days when air is heavily polluted it is healthier to exercise indoors. Though carbon emissions dropped world over in 2009, they went up in India and China.

5. Arctic thawing out

Arctic ice is disappearing at a fast pace, the region might have a summer without ice by 2040. The natural habitat of animals like polar bears, chipmunks, squirrels have shifted further up to combat the meltdown in temperature. Glacial ice is decreasing and summers arrive much earlier now causing a spurt in growth of flora and fauna.

6. Flowering and allergies

The increase in temperature and prolonged summer have given a boost to flowering and photosynthesis. Blooms emerging early on and in greater numbers are releasing more pollens in air. This has given rise to yet another problem – surge in allergic reactions. Due to polluted air packed with pollens, incidences of illnesses like colds, coughs, fevers, respiratory problems and other allergies have increased.

7. Sea level rising

The overall thermal expansion due to global warming and melting ice is causing the sea level to rise. Also, sea waves will increase in size and erode the coastline. Between 1961 to 2003, the sea level mounted by 1.8 mm. This rising sea level is threatening the existence of many coastal cities and island countries.

8. Electronic waste

Televisions, computers, phones, and other electronic devices thrown out of homes contribute further to world eco issues. Only around 10-20% of the electronic waste is recycled, rest is dumped carelessly. Upto 50 million metric tons can be thrown out every year and is growing by 5% annually. This e waste releases toxins, carcinogens and various other poisonous substances into our environment which can lead to health problems like bronchitis, mental retardation, cancer, neurological damage, etc.

9. Food production

With increased release of greenhouse gases, rainfall and climatic patterns around the world are changing. The monsoons will have heavier rains while summer will be hotter and drier. So, more water will be required to irrigate crops. Also, quality of soil is degrading due to deforestation and the incidence of floods, hurricanes, storms and droughts will increase. This will adversely affect farming and cultivation.

10. Rising temperature

Last two decades of the 20th century were the hottest in past 400 years. The average worldwide temperature has gone up by 0.8 Celsius. The effect is intensified in the Arctic and nearby areas; the average temperature increase in eastern Russia, western Canada and Alaska is double the global average. The U.S. experienced a long lasting heat wave in 2006 while south-eastern Europe had two in 2007. The World Meteorological Organization has reported 1998-2007 to be the warmest decade.

SageSim Launches Retrofit ROI Simulator
by: Environmental Leader, 2011-10-13 09:02:16 UTC
SageSim LLC, a provider of return on investment simulation technology, has launched a residential and commercial energy system simulator. SageSim-es is a web-based application that uses variables such as a building’s energy consumption, possible efficiency upgrades, potential investment in renewable energy and federal, state, and local economic incentives to calculate a return on investment figure and [...]