Category: Environment

Environmental topics, climate change, global warming, geography

Natural power for TV

A posting about telemarketing on digg reminded me how a teacher friend used to mess with the heads of cold callers, asking them obviously dumb questions.

One of the less subtle was to ask the telemarketer from British Gas, which now also offer electricity as well as natural gas to UK customers, whether he’d be able to run his TV from the gas supply.

They caller would politely tell him no, but become increasingly frustrated as my friend continued his line of enquiry embellishing his questions all the while with thermodynamic gobbledegook and nonsense about improved efficiency. He could keep them hanging on for hours…

Of course, the irony is that once we all have methane-fed fuel cells in our homes, we will indeed be running our TVs off natural gas!

Solid liquid separation

NoMix Toilet

Here’s a news item to make you flush with excitement, or at the very least, make your toes curl. According to a forthcoming report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, the Swiss are getting in a lather about a new “NoMix” toilet that does what all good chemists have been able to do for generations – separate their solids from their liquids. The new loo is an environmentally improved approach to spending a penny and could substantially reduce pollution problems and conserve water and energy, say the study’s authors.

The NoMix toilet collects urine separately from, ahem, solid matter. Although urine represents only 1% of domestic wastewater, it typically contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50% of the phosphorus in sewage.

Judit Lienert and Tove Larsen checked public attitudes toward NoMix toilets in surveys done at a Swiss school and a Swiss research institute. They found high acceptance of the toilet, with large majorities of people expressing favourable attitudes toward the toilet. That was true even though one version of the device requires men to sit to urinate.

The researchers cite the importance of involving users in the introduction of new environmental technology, especially technology that requires the kind of behavioral changes essential with NoMix toilets.

Sit a spell and read the full paper here.

Light Harvest for the World

In order to trap the energy from sunlight antenna plants construct chlorophyll groups through chemical self-assembly in a highly ordered manner. Emulating this system would not only improve our understanding of how plants function so effectively but could also lead to new materials for harvesting solar energy as an alternative to silicon-based photovoltaic devices.

Researchers have exploited long-range chemical order to creating aggregate compounds that can either trap light or transfer energy. Now, Tsutomu Ishi-i and Shuntaro Mataka of the Kurume National College of Technology and their colleagues have synthesised a new type of light harvester and by incorporating different materials into the aggregate structure they can induce energy transfer too. UV-Vis spectroscopy and other techniques were used to reveal the details of this novel group of artificial self-assembling light-harvesting compounds that will help us understand plant photosynthesis and may eventually lead to an alternative to semiconductor-based solar panels.

I offer a light report via SpectroscopyNOW

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Water waste

Water is commonly known as the universal solvent because it dissolves more substances than other compounds. But, water is commonly known as an enigmatic substance too, with many properties that seem at first glance paradoxical and others that chemists are yet to explain. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory hoped to learn more about how ions interact with mineral surfaces in water and have used X-ray studies to open the door on understanding how contaminants travel in the environment.

Ions, ranging from nutrients such as calcium to contaminants such as lead, are present in natural waters across the globe. Their transportation through the environment is often controlled by the degree of adsorption to mineral surfaces. Understanding the adsorption and desorption processes involved could lead to new ways of controlling water quality.

Get the full story here.

Fuel Cell Hydrogen Economy

Hydrogen fuel cells have been relatively neglected through insufficient support from industry and government, according to a study published today funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

‘Fuel cells are a genuine ‘clean’ technology,’ says study investigators, Chris Hendry of the Cass Business School, London, ‘But re-investment in nuclear technology is likely to squeeze out the investment necessary to make fuel cells competitive with existing energy sources and with other non-nuclear alternative energy options.’

I asked him about the true “cleanness” of fuel cells in the light of new infrastructure requirements, sourcing the requisite hydrogen and the recycling of equipment past its use by date.

“The ideal is to produce the hydrogen by electrolysis, using another renewable source,” he told Sciencebase, “Wind action in particular is intermittent – so when there’s too much generating electricity that can’t be used, it can be diverted to produce the hydrogen. Other countries can use solar for this purpose.”

But, what about sourcing that hydrogen before such technologies are fully viable?

“In the short-term, however, you’re right, the hydrogen will come from other hydrocarbons, particularly natural gas,” he adds, “This will enable fuel cells to become established using existing infrastructure, while a hydrogen infrastructure is developed.”

“In the end, the question is, which energy source has the most efficient
‘well-to-wheels’ costs, and which has also the least recycling costs?”

The study, co-written by Prof. Hendry, Dr. Paul Harborne, James Brown and Prof. Dinos Arcoumanis, gives a strong clue to one of the major obstacles to development by referring to fuel cell technology as a disruptive innovation. A disruptive innovation, if successful, eventually overturns the existing product on the market. Recent examples include the digital camera and the compact disc. Disruptive innovations are radically different from the existing dominant technology and to begin with they are often not as good. The result is two-fold. First the proponents of existing technology are likely to fear and so resist the new development. Second, because profits are unlikely to be immediate, funding can be problematic.

The automotive industry and stationary power provide examples of fuel cells as a disruptive innovation. However, while their potential is being pursued in the UK, Germany, North America and Japan, interviews with seventy companies in these countries show the UK fuel cell industry is lagging behind.

Recycling Plastics Sorted

recycling plasticPlastic waste is a mess. Disposal in landfill is the worst option but recycling post-consumer plastic waste presents a technological nightmare given the huge range of polymers used in packaging and products. A rapid, online method of identifying the different plastics in a recycling stream would provide a way to sort them and allow recycling plants to operate far more efficiently and perhaps make plastic recycling commercially viable.

A technique being investigated by Spanish researchers to this end is laser-induced plasma spectroscopy (LIPS). Jesús Anzano, María-Esther Casanova, María-Soledad Bermúdez, and Roberto-Jesús Lasheras of the Laser Analytical Spectroscopy Lab at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain, have now demonstrated that LIPS used in conjunction with a simple statistical correlation method can indeed differentiate between plastics prior to recycling.

Recycle the full story here

Field fires

As I write, an enormous black cloud of smoke and smutt has engulfed fields surrounding the Camridgeshire village of Cottenham. The fire allegedly started by a spark from working farm equipment quickly fed on the tinder-dry fields backing on to the yard and smoke has reached as far as the village High Street.

The emergency services were called with no fewer than ten engines in attendance in the last hour or two and dozens of firefighters attempting to get the flames under control in baking heat on a record-breakingly hot day in this part of the English countryside.

With many villagers living in outlying properties close to the burning fields there were serious concerns of smoke damage and even the risk of thatched residences suffering. A police helicopter continues to buzz the area presumably giving ground crews an aerial commentary of the path of the blaze.

Thankfully so far, there have been no serious casualties* and with the smoke being damped down it looks like the worst is over. For a quiet country village, there is still an awful lot of noise from police vehicles and firefighting units whailing in and out.

I am sure the local press will latch on to this fire and the souring temperatures much of England is experience of late as yet more evidence of global warming and climate change.

*Cambridge Evening News is now reporting that five firefighters were treated for heat exhausting after fighting the blaze, which engulfed 150 acres of standing crops and stubble. The paper lays the blame at the wheels of a combine harvester which generated a spark from a stone caught in its path. However, locals had reported that the fire allegedly started in the neighbouring breakdown recovery yard.

The last fire crew did not leave Cottenham until 10pm.

Keeping the lead in your pipes

The European Union has been messing with the organs in churches across the land. It wanted to extract all the lead from these instruments, but vergers, vicars and other clergymen starting with a “V” thought the EU wasn’t just extracting the Pb it was taking the P.

The UK’s Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) announced today that Pipe organs are outside the scope of an incoming EU Directive which restricts the use of hazardous substances including lead in machinery and appliances with an electrical component. DTI Minister Malcolm Wicks said today that the so-called RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) Directive
which will come into force on July 1 this year, was a serious cause for concern
among pipe organ builders because these historic instruments often contain
a small electric fan to give the lead pipes a good blow rather than relying on the organist pumping them up as was traditionally the case.

Is that enough blatant innuendo for one day, if not you can stick it in your pipe and smoke it!

Prehistoric greenhouse

cretaceous greenhouse

Looking at prehistoric climatic change may provide new insights into predicted near-future climate. New results for a greenhouse effect that occurred during the late Cretaceous some 75-90 million years ago suggest that very different mechanisms controlled the climate then and that these may be applicable in the near future, perhaps forcing a revision of received wisdom regarding climate change.

Sascha Floegel and colleagues at the IFM-GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany working with Thomas Wagner of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, have investigated the causal relationships and feedback loops between the tropics and higher latitudes and have identified a “climate kitchen” in a world with an average global temperature between five and 9 degree Celsius higher than today.

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