Time to give credit where credit is due: the 2007 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards
are in, recognizing some very hard working EcoGeeks who are doing their
part to make our world a better place. Winners this year have
discovered a nanotechnology-based catalyst capable of producing
hydrogen peroxide from renewable feedstocks, a formaldehyde-free
adhesive for making wood composites, a process for synthesizing an
ingredient for polyurethane foam (used in bedding and furniture)
without petroleum oil, a green technique for prepping donor tissue for
transplant, and a new class of chemical reactions using hydrogen and
metal catalysts which minimize waste in industrial applications.

"The EPA estimates that over the past 12 years, the winners’ work has led to the elimination of over 940 million pounds of hazardous chemicals and solvents, [the use of] over 600 million gallons of water and more than 340 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

Kudos to Professors Michael Krische and Kaichang Li, and the
innovative chemists at NovaSterilis, Columbia Forest Products, Hercules
Inc., Headwaters Technology Innovation, and Cargill Inc.

via GreenBiz News

See also:
–Green One Pot Chemistry–

Dear EcoGeek,

Is it possible to recycle old CD’s or DVD’s?
Thanks,
Rob

The perpetual scourge of EcoGeekiness is obsolescence. We pay good
money for what we see as a good product, and then five years down the
line we’re surrounded by useless junk!

But I can’t help but answer this seemingly straightforward question with several different answers.

First, I’ll actually answer the question:
Yes, you can, but it’s not as simple as curbside pickup. CDs and DVDs
do contain valuable materials (CDRs even sometimes contain gold) and
there are techniques to harvest that material for reuse, but those same
materials make them too complicated for regular recycling centers.
Unfortunately, the materials aren’t expensive enough that someone will
pay for them. To recycle CDs you’ll have to ship them to a special
recycling center. Several are listed at the bottom of this post.

Continue Reading

Converting all of the world’s newspapers to paperless publishing is an excellent idea. We like it, for a lot of reasons. We’re not old-fashioned, we don’t like ink on our fingers, we want instantly searchable, zoomable, shareable newspapers that don’t kill trees.

But what are we going to do with all those newspaper boxes!  Well, somebody has answered that question as well. Just take a look at the video, and see. Just slap a 17 inch LCD in there with a cellular internet connection and bam, you’ve got yourself an instant advertisement for your newspaper.

Plus, it’s one wireless upload and credit-card transaction away from a pay-based system for digital papers. But we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

Via Engadget

When eighth graders start turning a profit in an industry, that’s when you know there’s opportunity for real growth.

A Santa Clara solar firm, CalSunTech, has a middle-schooler for a CEO, but seems to be doing well for a local firm, and it’s in the running for a California Clean Tech Open award. The company is developing concentrators to increase the efficiency per unit of silicon in photovoltaics. It’s not a new idea, but the folks who do it best do stand to make a lot of cash selling the technology. CalSunTech already has one patent on file.

Frankly, it seems unlikely that the parents aren’t involved fairly significantly. At the very least, it reminds me of crazed sports dads. Except, in Santa Clara, the dads force their children to startup companies, instead of play football. Which, for some reason, doesn’t surprise me at all.

Via CNET News Blog

–EcoGeek Newsletter–

My electricity meter is about fifty years old, and it’s likely that yours is too. Even if it’s new, it probably uses the same ancient technology as mine. Those meters were created for a world with cheap, abundant power. Well, the world has changed…so why hasn’t my electricity meter?

It turns out, that if all United States power companies were to upgrade to new electricity meters today, America would save roughly $35 billion in energy costs over twenty years and it would eliminate the need for around 625 power plants. How could something as simple as an electricity meter suck so bad?

The most significant (though not only) problem with old electricity meters is that they charge you the same amount no matter what time of day it is. Electric utilities keep a constant supply of electricity flowing out into the world in order to maximize the efficiency of the power plants. At night, electricity flies through the grid and, with no one awake to use it, it simply dissipates. Then during peak hours, all electricity produced by large power plants is used. In fact, expensive and inefficient ‘peaker plants’ have to be turned on daily to meet demand.

But none of that matters to me. Running my dryer during the day costs exactly as much as running it at night. So why should I change?

This is why the great green state of California commissioned a study three years ago, in which they switched a few thousand Californians to a new kind of electricity meter that charged higher rates at peak hours and lower rates at off-peak times.

And now, the results are in. People with programmable thermostats decreased their peak power use by as much as 10%, and no consumers in the study didn’t decrease their peak power use substantially. The Brattle Group recently got a hold of this data and they’ve done some economic analysis that knocked my socks off. Their report, which is where I got the statistics above, is shocking.

New meters that enable "dynamic pricing" programs would decrease the energy use of America by 5% minimum. If broader technology applications were put into place, such as in-home power plants, plug-in hybrid-to-grid technology and other so-called "peak shavers" we could decrease the electricity demand of America by 20% in 20 years!

On top of that, the program would eliminate the need for expensive peaker plants, reduce greenhouse emissions, and reduce or eliminate brownouts. More than that, though, i just makes sense that you’d pay more when demand is higher and supply lower. Isn’t that how economics works? Apparently not when you let the snail-paced power companies lead the charge.

Via GreenBiz and The Brattle Group

Check out the full report from: The Power of Five Percent

See Also:
–What is the Electranet–
–The EcoGeek Newsletter–
–Personal Power Plant–

A reader over at AutoblogGreen (one of my all-time favorite blogs) sent in a short essay comparing the efficiency of photovoltaics to the efficiency of biofuels. and ABG rightly saw fit to publish it.

I’m not tremendously surprised that photovoltaics won…I’m just surprised by how big the difference is.

Now biofuels are kinda like solar power. Plants capture the the sun’s light and convert it to energy. We then convert the plants into fuel, and then turn the fuel into useful power.

Photovoltaics skip a few of those steps, converting sunlight directly to power without any pesky nature getting in the way. It turns out that creating biofuel with an acre of land produces about 100 times less power than covering that same land with solar panels.

While it’s fascinating to discover, the sad fact is, it doesn’t really matter. We can hope that someday our global footprint will shrink.  But right now, it doesn’t matter how much space we take up, it only matters how much money we spend. What we really need to see is a per-unit-of-power analysis of the cost of biofuels vs. photovoltaics. It’s my guess that that analysis will make it quite obvious why no one’s replacing corn fields with solar panels.

Via AutoblogGreen