Why it’s Breakthrough: The use of fly ash in concrete to make bricks is not new, but the use of 100% fly ash to make bricks without firing in a kiln is new. In a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored project, Dr. Henry Liu found an innovative way to render such 100% flyash bricks “freeze-thaw resistant”, as judged by ASTM standard C62. This finding is a major breakthrough, as it provided a practical way to make bricks long-lasting even in cold climate. The NSF sponsored study also proved that the fly ash brick does not pollute water, air and soil, and releases less radon gas than concrete does. The brick also adsorbs mercury from the air, thereby rendering the ambient air cleaner for people to breathe.
The Story: Prior to this breakthrough, bricks made with 100% fly ash could pass only about 8 cycles of freeze-thaw, far short of the 50 cycles required to meet the brick industry’s standard. It is only through Dr. Liu’s research sponsored by NSF that this problem was solved, making fly ash brick suitable for use as building materials. Without coming up with this solution, the brick could not be used in cold climate (i.e., in regions that freeze in winter.)
In 2004 Dr. Liu received his first NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 grant aimed at solving the freeze-thaw problem of the fly ash brick. The mission was accomplished in 12 months, which enabled him to win a larger Phase II grant from NSF to develop the fly ash brick technology for commercial use. In 2008, through extensive R&D of this project, the fly ash brick technology became ready for commercial use. Ten nations, including the United States, have been licensed to use this technology. The U.S. licensee is CalStar Cement, a company located in California’s Silicon Valley. All the licensees are actively preparing to build the first fly ash brick factory in their respective countries within the next 24 months.
Being able to turn fly ash into building bricks is critical to our planet’s health. At present, in the United States alone, approximately 46 million tons of fly ash is land filled or stored in disposal ponds or mine pits, often causing groundwater pollution and creating eyesores. Only about 35% of the nation’s fly ash is recovered, most of which goes into concrete and roadbeds. This new Greenest Brick technology will significantly increase the fly ash recovery rate.
A major advantage of the Greenest Brick is that it eliminates the need for the high-temperature kilns required for clay brick production. No fossil fuel is burned to manufacture the 100% fly ash brick, nor is there any air pollution or carbon dioxide emitted thereby contributing to global warming. The compaction process used to make fly ash bricks is not only free of the usual carbons that go into firing clay bricks, but is also 10 times more energy-efficient than conventional bricks.
Many researchers in the past were concerned that fly ash products may emit mercury vapor into air, which in turn may be hazardous to health. Through a sophisticated test, the NSF project found that fly ash bricks not only emit zero mercury, they actually adsorb mercury from the ambient air, making the ambient air cleaner for people to breathe. This was pointed out in an article entitled, “Follow the Green Brick Road,” on the NSF Website, and recited as Case Study 17 in the EPA website on C2P2.
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Environmental Bricks
Wind Farms Cause Bat Lungs to Explode
The growing construction of wind turbines as generators of renewable energy poses a greater danger to bats than birds, according to a new study by Canadian researchers.
Their findings may explain why bats have accounted for 60 percent of winged animals found dead around some wind farms, exhibiting no apparent injuries.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, Erin Baerwald of the University of Calgary said she found that a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure around the spinning turbines causes the bats' lungs to burst.
The phenomenon is known as a barotrauma, which is also a constant concern to scuba divers rising from the deep.
The researchers discovered that about 90 percent of bats found dead at wind farms had suffered from internal hemorrhaging caused by the effect.
Birds have more rigid lung structure than the flying mammals, allowing those that normally don't veer away from the turbines to withstand sudden drops in air pressure.
Researcher Robert Barclay added that the slow reproductive rates of bats means that the mounting losses at wind farms could risk endangerment or extinction.
That would cause a cascading effect through the environment, which depends upon bats to eat vast quantities of insects, including many crop pests.
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Artificial Trees Can Help
A new kind of tree could cool the planet by removing a major greenhouse gas from the planet's atmosphere.
What researchers are calling artificial trees, actually towers filled with various materials that adsorb carbon dioxide from the air, could play a major role in reducing climate change -- if they prove profitable.
"This is an industry still in its infancy," said Billy Gridley of Global Research Technologies, LLC, the company creating the C02-scrubbing towers. "This will eventually rival the size of today's energy markets."
GRT's artificial tree is based on an environmentally friendly resin, originally developed by Klaus Lackner, a professor at Columbia University in New York. The alkaline resin reacts with acidic carbon dioxide, holding it in place. After one hour exposed to the air, the resin is completely saturated with CO2.
Dry resin soaks up the CO2. Adding water releases the CO2, which is then captured and stored. Drying the resin again restores its abilities, a cycle that can be repeated indefinitely.
Over 24 hours Gridley estimates an artificial tree, containing about 32,800 feet of resin, will harvest about one ton of CO2 each day.
When the first artificial tree is ready, two to three years from now, it will cost about $150 for each ton, Gridley estimates. When the technology is fully mature, the price will be as low as $20.
GRT plans to sell the purified CO2 to a range of buyers. Oil and natural gas companies are probably the biggest customers for the artificial trees. Petroleum companies pump CO2 underground to raise the pressure and force oil to the surface. Greenhouses could pump in extra C02 to help plants grow. Fizzy soda drinks and sanding auto parts also require concentrated CO2.
All of these customers currently get CO2 by truck or by pipeline, most of which originates in Texas. The advantage of the artificial trees is that they can be placed next to whatever factory needs CO2 without having to ship it in.
Another use for the artificial trees would be in the cap-and-trade carbon credit system. The idea is that companies that produce CO2 would pay another company, like GRT, to get rid of it. The most likely place to put the C02 is in the salt-lined caverns that once held oil, a process known as carbon sequestration.
Wherever the CO2 is placed, at least it is out of the atmosphere, said David Keith, a professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, who developed his own artificial, C02-catching towers years ago and is working to refine his models. Keith, GRT, and other organizations aren't trying to profit from climate change; they are looking to prevent or at least slow it.
"Nobody doubts that this is doable," said Keith. "It's a matter of doing it at cost, and right now it's still unclear how that can be done."
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Could Coffee Fuel You, and Your Car
Coffee can do more than just fuel you through an afternoon slump. It might also power your car.
That's the idea behind a new study that turned used coffee grounds into biodiesel fuel. Coffee will probably never replace petroleum, but discarded cappuccino scraps might someday help reduce our impact on the environment, say the study's authors. They imagine a day when the byproducts of your latte end up in the gas tank of your car -- with hardly any waste left behind.
"It's a very simple two-step process," said Susanta Mohapatra, a chemical engineer at the University of Nevada, Reno. "We can definitely make a big impact on our environment with fuel made out of nature."
Scientists have known for decades that coffee beans contain oil. Mohapatra and colleagues, however, were the first to analyze coffee grounds.
Used grounds usually end up in landfills, though gardeners sometimes use them as compost material. The scientists collected used grounds from Starbucks, which gives bags of grounds away as part of the company's "Grounds for your Garden" program.
To prepare the grounds for analysis, the team first dried them in an oven. They mixed the resulting powder with a combination of solvents that caused the oil to separate from the solution. They extracted the oil, saving the solvents for the next round of processing. The remains could still be used as compost, ethanol feedstock, and fuel pellets.
"We're not wasting anything," Mohaptra told Discovery News. "It's a recycling process."
The study showed that used grounds contain about 15 percent oil by weight, depending on the type of coffee. That's not too far off the proportions in soybean, rapeseed, and palm oils, which are also used as sources for biodiesel. And coffee oil is more stable than these other sources because of its high antioxidant content, found the study, which appeared in December in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Around the world, growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The scientists estimate that spent grounds could add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the global fuel supply.
Mohapatra envisions a streamlined coffee recycling system, in which the same trucks that deliver beans to Starbucks could pick up the brewed waste and head to a biodiesel plant. The plant would be close by, to save on transportation costs and emissions.
Coffee grounds appear to produce high-quality oil, granted Robert McCormick, an engineer at The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. But, he said, coffee probably won't be a practical solution to the world's energy needs.
For one thing, the country's main sources of biodiesel -- cooking oil and animal fat -- are 100 percent oil, compared to coffee's 15 percent. And even when a cafe brews a large amount of coffee, relatively few grounds are left behind. It takes 50 gallons of spent grounds to produce just 1 gallon of oil, Mohapatra said.
Still, McCormick commends the researchers for thinking outside the box about the world's energy issues.
"Anything that takes a waste product and makes a fuel out of it is really a positive," he said. "This is pretty cool."
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Plants Make Aspirin When Under the Weather
Plants make aspirin when they need an immune boost, according to new research, sending a form of the compound airborne to signal a health problem to the rest of the tree or to other trees.
The finding may help growers more readily identify plants under stress by monitoring for the airborne distress signal.
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. made the finding over a walnut tree grove in California. They used sensitive instruments to detect the organic compounds in the air over the grove at different locations, including different heights.
The researchers found levels of an unidentified compound that swamped the levels of the compounds they set out to look for.
"It was kind of a surprise to us because we weren't really looking for this product," said study lead author Thomas Karl. "We weren't sure what we were seeing to begin with."
The compound turned out to be methyl salicylate, a volatile form of salicylic acid. Salicylic acid was originally derived from willow bark and shown to have the pain- and fever-relieving effects known for aspirin. A modified form of salicylic acid, acetosalicylic acid, is now sold as the active ingredient in aspirin.
Salicylic acid is produced by plants when they are under stress like drought or attack by a fungus or insect. It travels through the plant's vascular system and activates the plant's version of an immune response.
Until the new study, nobody had detected the high values of the airborne version of salicylic acid, which the researchers believe is a way to send the stress signal farther and faster. Leaves on the stressed tree or on nearby trees can detect the methyl salicylate signal and convert it into the immune-response-triggering salicylic acid.
"It's faster to send the volatile form to the other leaves, rather than sending through the plant," Karl pointed out. "It might be a more effective way for the same tree to signal that's what's going on."
The researchers observed spikes in methyl salicylate over the walnut grove after nighttime temperatures dipped low, suggesting the plants were reacting to cold stress. The peaks were higher during a dry period, pointing to combined stress of cold nighttime temperatures and mild drought.
Although the instruments used by the researchers are rare, the team hopes that simpler methyl salicylate measurements could one day be made, giving farmers a simple way to detect the onset of a plant threat.
"Historically, when we've tried to understand whether plants were happy and healthy or experiencing drought or limited by nutrients or being attacked by insects, we have had to go out and do a lot of hard work," said David Schimel, principal investigator and CEO of the National Ecological Observatory Network in Boulder, Colo., who was not part of the study. "You have to go out and collect leaves, or put out hundreds of insect traps.
"If we could substitute for that an analytical measurement that could measure these critical compounds, it would either replace or very strongly complement these traditional measurements that are somewhat indirect," he added.
The research is also important for understanding atmospheric chemistry. Organic compounds in the atmosphere contribute to ozone and particle formation. The new finding identifies a previously overlooked contribution to the atmospheric total.
"People have realized over the years that we are still missing a fair amount of organic material that's not accounted for," Karl said. "In our research community we have almost a frenzy to find out how much we are off and how much we have accounted for."
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Robotic Fish Used in Pollution Research
According to the Daily Mail, scientists from the University of Essex in Colchester are currently working on a project that would send robotic fishes into the depths of the River Thames. Their mission? To collect data and create a 3D water pollution map. In the United States, a similar project is being conducted by the University of Washington in Seattle to monitor oil spills. Just like it, this EU-funded project costing around $4 million entails the production of robotic fishes that can act autonomously within schools.
The researchers have reportedly been able to develop "swarm intelligence techniques" that allow them to perform as a group without any human input. There will be five fishes within a school, communicating with each other via WiFi, all with built-in GPS systems. As expected, due to its purpose, each fish is fitted with sensors that can detect pollutants. In fact, different sensors can be planted on each fish to target a particular substance. Whenever one of the robots finds something in the water, it sends a signal to all the members of its school so all of them could take detailed readings of the area. A prototype of the robot could be created within the next 18 months, and the design will follow the robotic fish that's already in display over at London Aquarium.
"This might look like something straight out of science fiction [but] there are very practical reasons for choosing this form," says Rory Doyle from the BMT Engineering Group that's overseeing the project. "In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years' worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient." One of the designer's aims is for the robots to be able to last 24 hours underwater before needing recharge, but I'm hopeful they'll find a way to harness water and kinetic energy to power the fishes in the future.
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$41M Boost on Fuel Cells
The viability of fuel cells and hydrogen as a major player in the U.S. energy portfolio has been debated for nearly 20 years. But wider adoption and implementation of fuel cells may be on the horizon, thanks to a cash infusion from Uncle Sam.
On Wednesday, Steven Chu, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, announced that $41.9 million of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will go toward developing fuel cell technologies. According to a DOE statement, the money will go to "support immediate deployment of nearly 1,000 fuel cell systems for emergency backup power and material handling applications (e.g., forklifts) that have emerged as key early markets in which fuel cells can compete with conventional power technologies. Additional systems will be used to accelerate the demonstration of stationary fuel cells for combined heat and power in the larger residential and commercial markets." Details on who benefits from the package, after the jump.
Among the specific projects expected to benefit from the investment, a number of factories will get to replace the batteries in their fleets of electric forklifts to fuel cells, including a FedEx facility in Harrison, Arkansas and the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis. Also, consumer fuel cell maker MTI Micro will get $2.4 million to accelerate the development of direct methanol fuel cells for cell phones, PDAs, and laptops.
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GT All Electric Prototype Racer
Green GT, a Swiss-based auto company, today is unveiling their all-electric race car prototype at Energissima, the Swiss Show of Renewable Energy and New Technologies, according to AutoblogGreen.
The car features an FIA-spec carbon chassis, along with two water-cooled 100 kW motors that can output a stunning 1,475 lb-ft of torque at speeds up to 100 mph--and that's on the way to a top speed of 170 mph, the report said.
The prototype weighs only 1,896 pounds, a very light figure considering the two separate 30 kWh lithium-ion batteries mounted to the chassis. Meanwhile, the car features lightweight magnesium wheels, Brembo brakes, and solar Flexcells mounted on each side. If all goes well, the company plans to build 20 to 25 of these things ahead of establishing a European racing series, according to the report.
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Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees and Lilypad
Architect Vincent Callebaut called this the Lilypad, but it is also known as the Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees since the forecast for the ocean level will rise from 20 to 90 cm. This auto-sufficient amphibious city will become a reality in 2100, and is a future retreat for only 50,000 rich people though.
These fascinating inventions are incredible, and committed to cope with the changes in our environment.
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Chicago Green Bridge
Chicago is on a race to make the city a greener place with many projects under way. The eco-bridge in Monroe Harbor will serve as a recreational space for residents and visitors. The bridge is designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, and offers view of the city, rowing and sailing on calm water. It is two miles long, and connects two opposite ends of the city center, and Grant Park.
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Laptop Made of Bamboo
The Asus notebook's case is covered in bamboo, and all the plastic inside it is recyclable. There is no paint, no spray, or electroplating uses on its components, and lines with cardboard.
These laptops are scheduled to be release at the beginning of next year.
Green Boat
Meet Earthrace, a state-of-the-art speed-craft that runs on human fat, beside other biodiesel fuels. The Guardian states that Earthrace runs on 100% renewable biodiesel fuels, and has zero carbon foot-print.
Pete Bethune, a New Zealand skipper of Earthrace, underwent liposuction, and donated enough of his body fat to make 100ml of biofuel.
Green Tower in Siberia
These two views of the Green Tower are in Siberia, and designed by Foster&Partners. The tower will be made of glass to absorb as much light as possible during the winter months, and constructs with sustainable materials, which uses renewable energy sources.
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Human Power TV Remote Control
This is a TV remote control that powers by human. Japanese firm SMK Corp has invented an eco-friendly device and contributes a significance change to reduce global warming.
This device can turn the power on/off, channels surfing, and controls volume when the user pulls the trigger on the remote control.
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Ivanhoe Reservoir
In an effort to block the formation of a carcinogen, the Los Angeles Water Department and Power had dropped 400,000 plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir to protect the drinking water supply for 600,000 customers.
This invention is designed to shade the water from the sun, since sunlight presents a potential harmful mix with bromide and chlorine in this 102-year-old reservoir.
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Zero Pollution Transportation
Popular Mechanics confirmed that the Tata Motors Company will bring the first air-power cars production to the United States later in 2009 or early 2010. These cars break a 1000-mile-per-fill, and a top speed of 96 mile. The price of this car is estimated at $18,000.
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