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#Green Technology
thoughtportal · 1 year
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Those emissions are also our emissions
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wachinyeya · 8 days
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reasonsforhope · 11 months
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Paywall free version! LEGALLY paywall free version, even!
“Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.
The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. But there are many questions about how to scale the product.
“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study. “This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity. Imagine having clean electricity available wherever you go.”
That could include a forest, while hiking on a mountain, in a desert, in a rural village or on the road.
The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind. Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere, Yao said.
Less humidity, though, would mean less energy could be harvested, he added. Winters, with dryer air, would produce less energy than summers.
The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair.
The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously.
“We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air,” Xiaomeng Liu, another author and a UMass engineering graduate student, said in a statement.
While one prototype only produces a small amount of energy — almost enough to power a dot of light on a big screen — because of its size, Yao said Air-gens can be stacked on top of each other, potentially with spaces of air in between. Storing the electricity is a separate issue, he added.
Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient. Doing that could be a challenge.
The scientists first must work out which material would be most efficient to use in different climates. Eventually, Yao said he hopes to develop a strategy to make the device bigger without blocking the humidity that can be captured. He also wants to figure out how to stack the devices on top of each other effectively and how to engineer the Air-gen so the same size device captures more energy.
It’s not clear how long that will take.
“Once we optimize this, you can put it anywhere,” Yao said.
It could be embedded in wall paint in a home, made at a larger scale in unused space in a city or littered throughout an office’s hard-to-get-to spaces. And because it can use nearly any material, it could extract less from the environment than other renewable forms of energy.
“The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity,” Yao said. “It’s an enormous source of clean energy. This is just the beginning in making use of that.””
-via The Washington Post, 5/26/23
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unbfacts · 3 months
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reportsofagrandfuture · 6 months
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etherealkins · 2 months
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( X / X / X ) ( X / 🐍 / X ) ( X / X / X )
boombox (phighting) stimboard with themes of digital stuff and white fur.
requested by: anon | made by: crowley
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macleod · 1 year
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From Japan to Iceland, futuristic vertical farms are starting to bloom
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Indoor farming is a new and rapidly growing trend that has significant benefits over traditional agriculture methods, including increased efficiency and sustainability. Indoor farming can also help to combat climate change by reducing the amount of greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide, methane) released into the atmosphere and reducing the need for pesticides.
There are several different ways to do indoor farming, but the most common approach is to use hydroponic systems. These systems rely on water systems rather than soil to support plant growth, creating a controlled environment for the plants to grow in efficiently. An array of sensors designed specifically for this ensure that waste is minimized and resources are recycled whenever possible. Hydroponics also allows farmers to grow crops without dealing with pests or disease outbreaks, and it requires minimal land area compared to traditional agriculture methods. Because you essentially build the farm vertically, you can use places like former factories or warehouses.
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In the Shizuoka Prefecture, a facility that’s around 20,000 square feet (0.2 hectares) grows a whopping 12,000 lettuces a day (lettuce is excellently suited for this type of farm). Farmers set up the light regime for the plants (using LEDs), as well as the temperature and humidity level, and enjoy round the year crops. Not only is the area required for the yield much lower than with conventional methods, but the water usage is also lower (10-20 times lower).
More recently, a farm in Kyoto developed by a company called Spread became a record-breaking facility that also introduced bees to pollinate its strawberries, achieving stable pollination under LED conditions and showing that there’s plenty of unexplored opportunity within vertical farms.Image credits: Spread.
Singapore is also betting on vertical farms with one farm established in 2022 producing 500 tonnes of greens each year, in addition to its previous projects. Being able to grow food directly in urban areas means you can bring it to consumers quickly and inexpensively.
Meanwhile, Iceland is taking advantage of its ability to produce cheap, sustainable energy using geothermal sources to fuel a large vertical farm. Iceland has constantly had a problem of having to import food, and Iceland has one of the most expensive food markets in the world due to this. But Andri Bjorn Gunnarsson, founder and CEO of VAXA, the company behind the vertical farm, says Iceland also has some advantages that make it suitable for vertical farming.
(Source: ZME Science, November 9th 2022)
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greentechspot · 8 months
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Mapping the Underwater World: The Role of LiDAR in Oceanography
In the quest to explore and understand the mysteries of the ocean, technology plays a pivotal role in unveiling the hidden wonders beneath the waves. Among the array of cutting-edge tools at our disposal, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has emerged as a go-to technology, enabling scientists to map the seafloor, study underwater topography, and reveal geological features that were once…
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no-bitch-i-cant · 2 months
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injuries-in-dust · 2 years
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If the doom and gloom is getting you down, try this instead.
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usaranker · 10 days
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Step into The Rike and find your muse in our selection of herbal teas, seeds, and handcrafted products. Infused with innovation and tradition, each item is a testament to sustainable agriculture and creativity. Discover how inspiration can strike with every sip of tea and turn of craftsmanship. Join The Rike in cultivating a more inspired and green future.
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wachinyeya · 2 months
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Indian IT Worker Designs New Eco-Friendly Sewage Treatment Method with the Sacred Cow as His Inspiration https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/indian-it-worker-designs-new-eco-friendly-sewage-treatment-method-with-the-sacred-cow-as-his-inspiration/
Tharun Kumar began to imagine ways to build a better sewage treatment method that could produce good quality water without chemicals.
In 2017, Kumar started ECOSTP with the chambered stomach of the cow as his “bovine inspiration.”
Typical wastewater plants use aerobic bacteria, or metabolism with oxygen, to break down sewage, but this requires the ventilation system that continually runs on energy. Regular sewage treatment also tends to use chemicals, and has the presence of a full-time employee. Kumar has eliminated almost all of these drawbacks.
At the base of the ECOSTP septic tank is a layer of cow dung that provides the bacterial workers. With the water moving via gravity, it enters the second bacterial chamber before passing into the third space which is a filter of sand and gravel. The fourth chamber lies under a garden of select vascular plants which removes suspended solids, pathogens, nitrogen, and phosphorus, the latter two going to feed the plants.
The resulting water is graded by health inspectors as good quality for toilet water and gardening applications. With the aid of a grant from the US-based Biomimicry Solutions, ECOSTP now has 325 clients across 22 states in India, and their septic tanks are unmanned and unpowered, saving thousands in running costs.
“We are proud to have reclaimed 2 billion liters of sewage so far without power or chemicals.”
ECOSTP is now seeing if it’s possible to identify anaerobic bacteria that can remove the harmful compounds of industrial effluent.
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reasonsforhope · 1 year
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"A Delhi-based engineer has designed a replacement for polystyrene packaging out of “rice stubble” the dead stalks left over after the rice season in India, millions of tons of which are burned every year.
They say wisdom oft comes from the mouths of babes, and Mr. Arpit Dhupar was at first left scratching his head when his young nephew drew a picture of the world with a grey sky.
Everything else was normal, green grass, yellow sun, white and brown mountains; why was the sky grey? It dawned on him that his nephew was drawing the sky as he saw it every year when the rice stubble was burned: grey.
“We shouldn’t live in a world where we have to explain to kids that the sky should be painted blue. It should be a given,” he told The Better India.
So he launched a new business venture called Dharaksha Ecosystems in order to tackle the rice stubble problem. Essentially, the farmers need it cleared off their land asap after harvest. Its high moisture content means it’s not useful for stove fuel, so they burn it in massive pyres.
In his factory, he turns 250 metric tons of rice stubble harvested from 100 acres of farmland in Punjab and Haryana into packaging, while paying the farmers a rate of $30 per acre for something they would usually burn.
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Dhupar originally wanted to use mushrooms to rapidly biodegrade baled stacks of rice stubble, but found that the fungus left behind a metabolite that wasn’t biodegradable—in other words, he’d have to create a waste problem to solve a waste problem.
Over time he realized that the filaments that make up the subterranean structure of the mushrooms, called mycelium, were acting as a sort of binding agent, turning the baled stubble into something durable.
“This wasn’t a waste material but could be a usable one,” said Dhupar. “Through bio-fabrication, we could use the stubble waste to create a material similar to [polystyrene], but one that was biodegradable.”
There are a lot of these sorts of sustainable packaging ideas floating around, invented by people who rarely have experience in markets and commerce. This is not the case with Dhupar’s stubble packaging.
He has already prevented over half a million pounds of polystyrene from entering landfills since launching his product, which has numerous, exceptional properties.
They sell around 20 metric tons of their product every month, making about $30.5 thousand dollars per annum, mostly by selling to glassware companies."
-via Good News Network, 3/22/23
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reportsofagrandfuture · 5 months
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geohoneylovers · 11 months
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Taking Action for a Sustainable Future: A Global Stocktake "Must Be the Tipping Point" to Limit Global Warming" TO learn more: https://blog.geohoney.com/tipping-point-towards-limiting-global-warming
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pia-fantastic · 1 year
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A major misconception in the Green, Environmentalist, Solarpunk, and adjacent movements is that Combustion Technology and other "Dirty" Technologies are necessarily damaging to our Environment.
These Technologies have become so damaging to the Environment because of their ever continually expanding Exploitative use, as a product of Capitalism.
This misconception comes from the Green movement being both a Political and Aesthetic movement. A significant part of the Green movement is imagining an Aspirational Future- in opposition to the problems of the Present and Cataclysmic Future of ongoing Climate Change.
A typical Image of a Green Future is one of whitewashed towers adorned with solar panels and geodesic domes, underneath churning wind turbines and blimps, all this broken up by corridors of green fruit bearing foliage.
Green Aesthetics aspire to a Green Future with Technology that is itself Non-Exploitative- of both Nature and Humanity, that at least appears to be Scientific, and above all "Clean".
A typical Green image of the Cataclysmic Future- the "Climate Apocalypse"- is one of thick black smog clogging up the sky, endless fields of dry cracked earth, masses of people huddled hungry sleeping outside, men in dark clothes carrying heavy guns to hold hostage the last drop of oil.
The Green imagination of the Cataclysmic Future is exaggerated reflection of the horrors of Modern Capitalism- a future in which Technology is Violent, Crude, and "Dirty".
The Cataclysmic Future is an Uncontrollable Factory of Human Suffering. The Green Future is a neatly Maintained Garden of Ecological Harmony. Our Technology then gains a mythological character of its own, it becomes a Behemoth of a deeper more powerful Nature, a Behemoth of "Human Nature" to be conquered.
This is not to say that burning Fossil Fuels doesn't create CO2 emissions that have lead to Climate Change, or that their extraction doesn't pollute local ecosystems- rather that Combustion Technology can and will continue to warm people's homes after we dismantle Capitalism, without the Exploitation.
In this myth we forget that Technology is in the hands of people, Technology is as violent as the system it is used under, and as clean as the means by which it was created. It is a mater of seizing it from the powerful.
This myth also obfuscates the ongoing nature of the Climate Crisis, that the continues to compound the stresses of Late Capitalism and Colonialism on the Global Working Class. The Factory of Human Suffering is already here, and yet it is only a Factory. It was created by people, is maintained by people, and will be destroyed by people- all we need is a Strike.
Capitalism will not survive the Climate Crisis- but we will. No one can say what the world will look like on the other side, but it wont be a Garden or a Factory- at least one that is totally in or out of our control.
We do not need any newly Invented Technology to grasp the Future, we will use whatever tools we have when we get there.
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