From Kansas to China, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops...
In the past few years, Kohler Co. has moved to green up its product line and now boasts that nearly every model of faucet it produces is water-saving, earning the Environmental Protection Agency WaterSense label.
....The company has revamped its product design process so that "everything takes place through the lens of sustainability," Judd said.
The controversial practice of carbon offsetting, via which U.S. polluters send money overseas in exchange for promised—and often pretend—pollution reductions elsewhere, came under fire today in a new report published by Friends of the Earth.
Offsets are a centerpiece of the energy bill that passed the House of Representatives in June, and they may be included in soon-to-be-introduced legislation in the Senate. The report explains how offsets work and concludes that they are a flawed approach to combating global warming. A Dangerous Distraction: Why Offsets Are a Mistake the U.S. Cannot Afford to Make
HARD NOSE FACT - Renewable energy needs to become a lot more renewable –
This reality emerged at the Financial Times Energy Conference in London this week.
Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, and more unpredictable, the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources, attendees heard.
Read more here via newscientist.com (Original link from the theoildrum)
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2009 — Millions of homes in rural areas of Far Eastern countries are heated by charcoal burned on small, hibachi-style portable grills. Scientists in Japan are now reporting development of an improved "biomass charcoal combustion heater" that they say could open a new era in sustainable and ultra-high efficiency home heating.
Their study was published in ACS' Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a bi-weekly journal.
In the study, Amit Suri, Masayuki Horio and colleagues note that about 67 percent of Japan is covered with forests, with that biomass the nation's most abundant renewable energy source. Wider use of biomass could tap that sustainable source of fuel and by their calculations cut annual carbon dioxide emissions by 4.46 million tons.
Using waste biomass charcoal, their heater recorded a thermal efficiency of 60-81 percent, compared to an efficiency of 46-54 percent of current biomass stoves in Turkey and the U.S.
"The charcoal combustion heater developed in the present work, with its fast startup, high efficiency, and possible automated control, would open a new era of massive but small-scale biomass utilization for a sustainable society," the authors say.
*The research in this press release is from a copyrighted publication, and stories must credit the journal by name or the American Chemical Society. News media may obtain a full text of this report ("Development of Biomass Charcoal Combustion Heater for Household Utilization") in ACS' Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research by downloading the full text article at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ie8006243.
Link source the oildrum HT
Biochar is mostly inert, and is known to stay in the soil for thousands of years. It is also not subjected to the risk of being blown down in a hurricane, or cut down, or otherwise placed in a process for a more rapid return of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
As a sequestration technology, biochar is simple, easy, and proven. Although sequestration alone might be enough of a reason to consider biochar, the benefits of biochar in agriculture are really the reason this solution is gaining momentum quickly. The use of biochar has been shown to increase water retention, microbial activity, uptake of minerals by plants, as well as continued deposition of healthy soil. Two new organizations have emerged that highlight the multi-faceted solution of biochar.
The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) has emerged as the center for biochar research and development. The IBI:
"Provides a platform for the international exchange of information and activities in support of biochar research, development, demonstration and commercialization. It advocates biochar as a strategy to:* improve the Earth's soils;
* help mitigate the anthropogenic greenhouse effect by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering atmospheric carbon in a stable soil carbon pool; and
* improve water quality by retaining agrochemicals.The IBI also promotes:
*sustainable co-production of clean energy and other bio-based products as part of the biochar process;
* efficient biomass utilization in developing country agriculture; and
* cost-effective utilization of urban, agricultural and forest co products."
Biochar begins to answer problems surrounding biodiversity, water purity, deforestation, hunger, and poverty. As we recognize the 'services' healthy soil can provide biochar continues to gain value as a strategy to mitigate many of these issues at the same time.
Read more at treehugger
Hydrogen car problem: While hydrogen has been lauded as the "energy of the future," this is NOT a short term reality.... Hydrogen is not a great energy carrier. It has a relatively low energy density, it's difficult and dangerous to transport, and finding a way to store it in vehicles has proven difficult (ranges of only 100 miles). The refueling infrastructure is also non-existent.
Even more to the point, we haven't yet established a renewable source of energy to produce hydrogen.
Possible solution: Weighing less than one pound, the square piece of shiny steel houses an array of microchannels containing patented catalytic sites. Each microtube helps convert a continuous stream of hydrogen from fuels like gasoline, diesel, vegetable oil, biodiesel, propane, natural gas, even the glycerol byproduct from biodiesel manufacturing.
Reducing the cost of hydrogen generation: "The smaller system size, reduced catalyst volume, and more efficient process that is realized with InnovaTek's technology represents another significant step in moving the hydrogen economy from science to commercial reality," he said.
While InnovTtek's reactor can run on a variety of non-renewable hydrocarbon sources they, like the potentially revolutionary Coskata Biofuels, are expressly interested in sustainable power, even to the point of preferring biodiesel in their test runs. Innovatek also said that biodiesel just plain works better: it contains fewer impurities and reforms at lower temperatures than petrodiesel.
Taking all this into consideration, Innovatek's reactor could revolutionize the energy and transportation infrastructure of the country.
Source gas2.org
Find out more about hydrogen fuel problems and solutions at: HybridHype
While California is heralded as a world leader in addressing climate change, An analysis by O'Hare and Alexander Farrell, U.C. Berkeley professor of energy and resources, showed that on account of land-use changes stimulated by greater use of ethanol in motor fuel, "the carbon intensity of California's gasoline" already has risen between 3 percent and 33 percent.
Want to know more about Stephen William Hawking
Born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees, was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honor in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Stephen Hawking - Life in the Universe
High-minded words, to be sure. And they will likely rankle Wal-Mart's many detractors, for whom the words "Wal-Mart" and "sustainability," used together, are simply discordant. The doubters are not irrational. For years, Wal-Mart has been an aggressive, sometimes arrogant, leviathan, seemingly out of touch with progressive social and environmental ideas and ideals. In its single-minded pursuit for growth and dominance, it played rough -- with competitors, communities, suppliers, politicians, and anyone who got in its way, notably (or especially) activists. How can this sudden embrace of sustainability be anything other than a cynical ploy?
I'm pretty sure that it's not. In recent months, Wal-Mart has put itself out there in ways that few other companies have done. It is spreading the green gospel to its 1.3 million employees, teaching them how to live greener lives. It is inviting activists into its offices, and commanding suppliers to meet new, green goals, and parading its CEO in front of audiences and the press to talk the sustainability talk.
To the extent the cynics are right, it's that Wal-Mart's mission is to sell more stuff to more people in the pursuit of profitability and growth, an arguably unsustainable proposition. And that's a problem.
But along the way, the behemoth from Bentonville stands to move hundreds, perhaps thousands of suppliers toward a more sustainable path, and help to fuel consumer demand for things organic, nontoxic, and efficient, among other attributes. And, perhaps, engender everyday environmental habits among the citizenry in ways that even the most committed environmental activists have failed to do.
As Scott put it last week:
It's a messy affair, this sustainability thing. And Wal-Mart has made more than its share of the mess. But maybe, just maybe, that same company, in its dogged pursuit of productivity and profits, can create more than its share of the solution, too.
quotes from Prince Charles- "The simple fact is that combating deforestation is likely to be one of the quickest and most cost-effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions" -"Wood can be the perfect sustainable material; it sucks up CO2 and once cut, it holds it for the life of the building." a reader writes: " I was going through the feed today and noticed a story that made me think about the other. I don't believe that there is any contradiction here. HRH is talking about the burning of forests, particularly the rainforest, to clear land for agriculture (including palm oil plantations) or to use as fuel. There is also rainforest habitat loss due to illegal logging of exotic woods for architectural uses.
The architecture and construction we show on TreeHugger (and the wood construction we promote) is built from sustainably harvested forests, usually close to the location of construction. Our favorite woods are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) who say "In many forests around the world, logging still contributes to habitat destruction, water pollution, displacement of indigenous peoples, and violence against people who work in the forest and the wildlife that dwells there. Many consumers of wood and paper, and many forest products companies believe that the link between logging and these negative impacts can be broken, and that forests can be managed and protected at the same time. Forest Stewardship Council certification is one way to improve the practice of forestry."
TreeHugger suggests that one should Choose their wood wisely, and avoid phony industry-run certification schemes.
Pick the right wood and use it wisely and there are few better, greener building materials.
A raft of new studies reveal European and American multibillion dollar support for biofuels is unsustainable, environmentally destructive and much more about subsidising agri-business corporations than combating global warming.
Not only do most forms of biofuel production do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, growing biofuel crops uses up precious water resources, increasing the size and extent of dead zones in the oceans, boosting use of toxic pesticides and deforestation in tropical countries, such studies say.
And biofuel, powered by billions of dollars in government subsidies, will drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020, predicts the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
"Fuel made from food is a dumb idea to put it succinctly," says Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development's Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Biofuel production in the U.S. and Europe is just another way of subsidising big agri-business corporations, Steenblik told IPS.
"It's (biofuel) also a distraction from dealing with the real problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," he asserts.
Making fuel out of corn, soy, oilseeds and sugar crops is also incredibly expensive, Steenblik and his co-authors document in two new reports on the U.S. and the European Union that are part of a series titled 'Biofuels at What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel'.
Their analysis shows that by 2006 government support for biofuels had reached 11 billion dollars a year for Organisation of Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) countries. More than 90 percent of those subsidies came from the European Union and the U.S.
These subsidies will likely climb to 13-15 billion dollars this year the report estimates. "More subsidies are coming as the biofuel industry expands," says Steenblik.
"Governments rarely phase out subsidies," laments Steenblik. "We're hoping that countries will come to their senses in the next few years."
Read more from http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/20/4700/
Sustainability is here to stay. It is not a fad, it is not a marketing ploy. . . . It is in fact a part of what all of us are going to be doing with our businesses from here on out. It is not about higher margins and higher prices. It is about the elimination of waste. It is about making our businesses more effective. It is about transferring those benefits on to the consumer. And it is about taking chemicals and things we know aren't good for the environment and finding alternatives to those chemicals so we make products safer.