19-year-old Boyan Slat’s impassioned and educated opinion reminds us that youth, with its promising vital force, often taps into genius. If he is correct, Slat has designated some flair for environmental cleanup. He believes with his idea, developed for a student project in Aerospace Engineering, that it is possible the dreadful … [continued]
20 million people live in Beijing, a literally breathtaking city that has been contending with air quality so bad and “hazardous” that its urban dwellers and visitors have an altered ability to breathe. So, it is not surprising that pollution was one of the major issues at the current National … [continued]
By Peter Lehner, Executive Director of NRDC New York City, like hundreds of older cities around the country, can’t stand the rain. With so much paved area, and so little ground to soak up the water, the city’s sewer system can get overwhelmed by less than an inch of rainfall, … [continued]
Environmentalists and local residents have been casting the stinkeye on the pollution caused by natural gas fracking for a number of years, but the issue hasn’t gained much traction. The sticking point, of course, is money: there is a huge amount it to be made from exploiting newly discovered natural gas deposits.
Yes, we all know that thing about getting high from banana peels was a 1960’s hoax, but this is the real deal. A team of researchers has found that minced banana peels can clean pollution from river water, such as lead and copper. Not only that, but they can do it more quickly and efficiently than conventional chemical water treatments. Okay, so you’d probably need a ton of bananas to clean up a big site, but the discovery does have some implications for small scale uses, especially where budgets are tight.
If you’re not familiar with the practice of fracking, here’s a quick primer. Let’s say you want to get at some natural gas that’s locked in a shale deposit, and the only way you can jiggle it loose is to ram millions of gallons of chemical brine down there. If … [continued]
This is the discovery that could put the College of Wooster on the map: glass that swells like a sponge. Put together like a nano-matrix, the new glass can unfold to hold up to eight times its weight. The glass binds with gasoline and other pollutants containing volatile organic compounds … [continued]
The lowly cattail is emerging as the weapon of choice against water contamination, and perhaps even global warming. In addition to its use in large phytoremediation projects to absorb contamination from groundwater and wetlands, the cattail could also work in on a small, inexpensive scale, helping to reduce arsenic contamination … [continued]
