Researchers from Newcastle University in the U.K. have done the math, and on the surface it looks pretty grim. Every year, the U.S. flushes about 12.5 trillion gallons of energy right down the drain. They’re actually talking about potential energy, in the form of biofuels that could be recovered from … [continued]
A new Ben & Jerry’s factory in the municipality of Hellendoorn in the Netherlands is soon going to generate energy from waste products such as milk, cream, syrup, and pieces of fruit. It will use a bio-digester to do so. “Unilever, the global corporation that owns the Ben & Jerry’s brand, recently … [continued]
The idea of harvesting body heat to warm a building might be familiar if you’ve been reading up on passive house design, so here it is on a grand scale: take a train station in Sweden that sees about 250,000 travelers per day, and recycle all that body heat as … [continued]
A mere month ago, the San Antonio Water System in Texas announced that it had become the first ever U.S. municipal wastewater treatment plant to sell renewable methane biogas through a commercial natural gas pipe line. Well roll me over Beethoven if California isn’t already going to trump Texas in … [continued]
It’s a sustainable, micro-scale, low cost alternative to the gas guzzling honey wagon: a bicycle that powers a small vacuum pump for emptying cesspools, and doubles as a zero emission vehicle for trucking the sewage away. Its inventor, Cambridge University researcher Nate Sharpe, envisions his “People Powered Poo Pump” as … [continued]
Forget those conventional laptop batteries with their pesky limited lifespans. A new kind of lightweight, long lasting source of power for laptops and other portable devices is at hand, in the form of a fuel cell powered by methane. Generally speaking, methane is a fossil fuel (it’s a component of … [continued]
Leave it to larger-than-life Texas to lead the U.S. into a new energy future. While the state is most closely associated with oil, it has also been an early pioneer of wind power, and is beginning to embrace solar energy along with armloads of new green jobs. Now the San … [continued]
According to a new study of food waste in the U.S., it takes the equivalent of 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce get a year’s worth of food to the market, but about 350 million barrels of that goes down the drain in the form of wasted food. The … [continued]
Perhaps you’ve heard of siloxanes — those ubiquitous chemicals found in hair care products, make-up, deodorant, food additives, soaps, textiles, lubricants, paints – oh heck, the list goes on and on. The problem is, siloxanes end up in biogas recovered from landfills, industrial operations and sewage treatment plants. If not … [continued]
With great sewage comes great responsibility, so it’s no suprise that some of the more forward thinking cities in the U.S. are beginning to transform their wastewater treatment facilities into community resources. The latest example comes from Olympia, Washington, where a sewage treatment plant features a brand new LEED Platinum-aspiring … [continued]
