CleanTechnica

You know the drill. You flush the toilet, walk away, come back later and it’s still running.

You jiggle the handle. Hopefully that makes it stop. Maybe you take off the top of the tank and swear a little.

Or, you could install H2Orb, a toilet gadget from a California company that takes clean tech to a whole new level. Read the rest of this entry »

Necessity is the mother of invention, and real needs will grow with climate change.

The most fundamental of these is the need for fresh water.

Despite predicted long-term water stress across a wide swathe of agricultural states like California,  we will have to find ways to grow the food we need. All kinds of novel adaptations must be made, from recycling water to learning to grow food in salt water and to reusing water that we do have.

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Have you noticed how all sorts of high end resorts and hotels have started converting their chlorine pools to salt water? And it’s not just the health and hospitality industry that wants to figure out a way to purify their water without resorting to chemicals. Other industries, including the food and beverage, dairy, aquaculture and municipal drinking water providers need to ensure that the water they use contain no micro-organisms or pathogens of any kind. A company based in Israel, Atlantium has developed what may be one of the first industrial-grade solutions to water micro-organism purification without chemicals. Read the rest of this entry »

Sewage treatment plant effluent may finally get its Cinderella moment, thanks to a new process called HYBACS developed by Bluewater Bio International. Up to now, the waste water from sewage plants has been shunted aside for disposal, typically into a nearby waterway.  HYBACS transforms it into a reusable water resource, by improving the removal of nitrogen, phosphorus and other pollutants.  Bluewater Bio has won a grant from the Spanish Environment Ministry to conduct a pilot test of the technology at a treatment plant near Madrid.  If it proves successful, sewage treatment plant effluent could get a new life - and new respect for its role in a sustainable future.

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Even the most ardent environmentalists sometimes forget that color-infused fabrics are some of the biggest water users around, sucking up dozens of gallons of water for a single pound of clothing. In a resource-constrained world, that’s no longer acceptable. Colorep., a California sustainable technology company, is trying to make fabric dyeing a water-free prospect with its AirDye process, which uses air instead of water to assist dye in penetrating fiber in products like swimsuits, drapes, and t-shirts.
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A UK company has launched a new device that allows users to cut-off their water supply at the flick of a switch, drastically reducing wasteage and giving a significant boost to water conservation efforts.

Instead of scrabbling around looking for the stopcock, the new Surestop device allows users cut supply instantly, saving water loss, and consequent damage, whilst giving householders direct control over water consumption.

Now the company hopes to expand into areas crippled by drought, where water conservation is a pressing priority.

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Those yummy California lemons, avocados, oranges, pistachios or cherries on your table right now could have been very sustainably grown using solar panels.

That’s because a giant California grower has just installed 1 MW of solar power to water their 7,000 acre farm. The 6,400 solar panels power pumps to bring water up from deep wells for irrigation.

(Normally these irrigation pumps are run by fossil fuels - one of the reasons that our food is so unsustainable.)
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Just in time, too.
As climate change brings an increase in drought areas and rising sea levels we have to find a solution to soil salinity if our civilization is to survive.

Previous civilizations dependant on irrigation of dry soil have failed. The gradually increased salinity in irrigated dry soil has ended civilizations even though they solved the engineering and logistic problems of designing, building, and maintaining irrigation systems, but neglected the long-term effects of salinization.

We’ll have no choice but to learn to farm in salty water, as the next few centuries’ climate change dries up growing areas from California, Florida and the Middle East, to Africa and China and Australia - - and as seawater increasingly infiltrates crops on low-slung island nations.

So the research findings of a group of scientists from the University of Adelaide in Australia and Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK. attempting to learn to grow crops in saltwater is very good news.

The team has succeeded in keeping salt out of the leaves of the first plant species tested:
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This post was written by Paul O’Callaghan, founding CEO of the Clean Tech consultancy, O2 Environmental Inc. and lecturer on Sustainable Energy at the BC Institute of Technology.

‘Any plan to switch from gasoline to electricity or biofuels is a strategic decision to switch our dependence from foreign oil to domestic water’.

So says Dr. Michael Webber of the University of Texas at Austin in an interview with Steven Lacey on the Inside Renewable Energy Podcast this week.

Webber comments on the links between water and energy, the potential conflicts, but also about the potential opportunities which arise when you start to understand these links and realize that saving water saves energy, and saving energy saves water.
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Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem arrives in a simple form, and that’s the case with Hydro International’s Hydro Stormbloc system.  The Stormbloc modules look like nothing more than oversized milk crates but they could help some communities finally resolve chronic stormwater flooding problems that have bedeviled them for years, and harvest rainwater for recycling, to boot.

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