Tag Archives: pollution

Fungus could clean up polluting plastics

Nature’s got a way, brothers (and sisters)… not only could we start using fungus as a building material, but it looks like we could use the stuff to leech Bisphenol A – the nasty compound in polycarbonate plastics – from waste materials, keeping it out of the ecosystem at large.

Of course, there’s no telling what might happen to mycelia fed a continuous diet of toxic chemicals. Perhaps it’ll get hungry, and start eating plastics we’re not yet ready to throw away…

Biofueled car might have been a senseless waste of chocolate

chocolate-carIt’s not quite the “chocolate-fueled car” that the headline from the indispensable PhysOrg.com promises. What we have instead may be close enough — a car its makers claim can reach 145 miles per hour,

powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers….

The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers….

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car’s size, weight, and performance.

[Image: Never Eat Purple Chocolate by i’m george]

Best way to clean up the environment? Make everyone richer.

800px-Earth_flag_PD

John Tierney at the New York Times has a couple of predictions for Earth Day:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

Tierney acknowledges that that second prediction may be hard to believe with concerns about U.S. carbon emissions and increasing emissions from India and China as they get richer, but he backs it up with data:

By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

“Once you have lots of high-rises filled with computers operating all the time, the energy delivered has to be very clean and compact,” said Mr. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller. “The long-term trend is toward natural gas and nuclear power, or conceivably solar power. If the energy system is left to its own devices, most of the carbon will be out of it by 2060 or 2070.”

Tierney says the U.S. and other Western countries seem to be near the top of the curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the downward slope. He points out that the amount of carbon emitted by the average American has been fairly flat for twenty years now, and per capita carbon emissions are declining in some other Western countries. Increasing forest land, also a by-product of increasing wealth and better agricultural technology, helps take more carbon out of the atmosphere in richer countries, too, whereas in poor countries, deforestation runs rampant as people seek fuel and farmland.

By this argument, tough restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from developing countries could actually harm the environment by slowing their economic growth and delaying the point at which they top the curve and reach downward slope.

Tierney finishes with this:

While some American environmentalists hope that the combination of the economic crisis and a new president can start an era of energy austerity and green power, Mr. Ausubel says they’re hoping against history.

Over the past century, he says, nothing has drastically altered the long-term trends in the way Americans produce or use energy — not the Great Depression, not the world wars, not the energy crisis of the 1970s or the grand programs to produce alternative energy.

“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Mr. Ausubel says. That doesn’t make for a rousing speech on Earth Day. But in the long run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution.

(Image: Unofficial Earth Day Flag, Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]Earth Day, environment, pollution, economy, energy[/tags]

Better living through chemistry? Indian river water contains 21 pharmaceuticals

assorted pharmaceuticalsThe world is full of ironies. Many people can’t afford or get access to the drugs they need to make themselves well; meanwhile, others get more drugs than they need or want, whether they like it or not. In Pantacheru (near Hyderabad in India), recent samples of river water showed concentrations of an antibiotic high enough “to treat everyone living in Sweden for a work week”.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India’s poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

Good old MSNBC… just in case the plight of the Indians didn’t move you, they reminded you of the drug-resistant nasties that you might encounter in your own country. This is the nasty underbelly of globalisation; industrial production moves to where it can be done most cheaply, regardless of what corners get cut in the process. Outta sight, outta mind, right? [via BLDGBLOG; image by Amanda M Hatfield]

Exhaust fumes are lightning magnets

rural lightning strikeChalk another item up on the list of environmental effects caused by car exhaust fumes – they increase the likelihood of lightning strikes.

“In the south-eastern states [of the US], lightning strikes increased with pollution by as much as 25 per cent during the working week. The moist, muggy air in this region creates low-lying clouds with plenty of space to rise and generate the charge needed for an afternoon thunderstorm.

Surprisingly, the effect was not strongest within big cities with high pollution, but in the suburbs and rural areas surrounding them… “

Now there’s a tenuous techno-thriller plot device just waiting to be used… I wonder if a big enough car-generated lightning storm could deflect an incoming NEO? Call Bruce Willis! [story via BLDGBLOG; image by M0i et c’est tout]