As the Economist wages the largest debate about bio-fuels in memory, another market opportunity appears to be showing itself in the bio production space as well. Bio plastics have been sprouting up in various applications, but a recent study puts the total market of green packaging at $43.9Billion by 2013. … [continued]
A new way to treat wood has trees back in the limelight: a hardwood’s reliability that even a rain forest mahogany tree can love.
Check out the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya® wood. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is “the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons”. At this week’s Wall Street Green Trading Summit, a panel on forestation introduced a new way of thinking about how to deal with destruction of the rain forest.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a study this week concluding that the solar industry could use many cheaper and more abundant alternatives to silicon, including iron pyrite — most commonly known as fool’s gold. [social_buttons] In total, the researchers found 23 alternative semiconductors, but only 12 are more … [continued]
A simple chemical process employed by a Cornell University and DuPont research team may pave the way to thinner, lighter and more flexible transistors and solar cells. The long term goal of the project is to use nanotubes to create an economical electronics material that is just as good as … [continued]
Hydrogen fuel cells have long been hailed as the next big thing to replace petroleum in cars, but there is one major problem: hydrogen is usually produced from fossil fuels. Fortunately, a multitude of companies are looking at alternative hydrogen sources— including sewage and dough.
A Peruvian engineer has created a device that drops the use of mercury in the gold mining process by instead using “a foam flotation process with simple gravitational techniques” to separate gold from rocks.[social_buttons] The most commonly used process in developing countries uses mercury to separate the gold from the … [continued]
In case you missed the news, the $700B bailout included tax credits for renewable energy industries. So what are the greenest bits of the bill and what does it mean for renewable energy companies? Also, where is all that glorious cash coming from? Renewable Energy Tax Credits: Solar energy gets … [continued]
Last week, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical exhibited a fuel cell-based power supply unit that is small enough to be used in an electric wheelchair. The microwave oven-sized unit, which weighs 22 kg, has an output of 300W and can run for eight hours with a 4-liter fuel tank. Hitachi exhibited a … [continued]
If you’ve been holding back from buying an iPod nano for environmental reasons, it might be time to rethink your decision. Last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the fourth generation iPod nano, which he claims is the most environmentally-friendly iPod ever built. The new nano is made with arsenic-free … [continued]
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have discovered environmentally-friendly molecule catalysts that can be used to clean up a variety of toxic substances including waste water and fuel. The catalysts, known as Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs), could replace current industrial practices used in cleaning up environmental hazards. TAMLs are made up of … [continued]
