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Teenage boys in different parts of the world have solved two of the most difficult problems facing the environment and both projects are low-tech and affordable.

Richard O’Shea from Blarney won this year’s BT young scientist top award for his invention of a smokeless biomass-fired cooking stove.  Richard had visited Africa and seen first-hand how many people cook indoors on wood-burning stoves: 2 billion people across the world rely on burning biomass materials like wood, dung and plants to cook their food.  Every year thousands of people in the developing world who cook indoors in poorly ventilated homes die from smoke inhalation.

Richard then spent months designing a highly efficient, smokeless stove that can be built using found materials such as tin cans.   His goal is to work with charities such as Trocaire and Concern to share his invention with those who need it and can build their own.

Meanwhile, across the water in Canada, 16-year-old Daniel Burd won the Canadian Science Fair with his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel  recognized that plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means that decomposing microorganisms do exist.

Daniel immersed ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth and then isolated the most productive organisms.  The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures, Burd achieved a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an  amazing result.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured annually and an expanding Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Burd’s breakthrough is timely and now needs to be embraced by governments and industry alike.

A partnership of New Zealand companies have perfected the art of turning toilet waste-water – sewage, by any other name – into “bio-crude,” an oil substitute that can provide 15% of a town’s energy needs from its own waste.  The secret, as with all the best inventions, is mother nature: algae process the waste and, with the help of the sun, transform it into a substance that can be further processed into oil, petrol, diesel, kerosene or bitumen.

The New Zealand project’s technology is essentially a network of wastewater ponds that grow algae, fed by carbon dioxide generated from the nearby Christchurch Wastewater Treatment Plant. The algae is harvested and sent to the Solray Energy plant, where it is routed through reaction tubes under pressures of 6,000 psi and 400 degree C heat and expressed as biocrude.

The companies behind the project are New Zealand’s Solray Energy, chemical engineers Solvent Rescue and mechanical engineers Rayners. The “Algae to Oil Conversion Technology” venture is funded by both government and private sources, a combination of Solray, the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

While 15% of a community’s energy needs may not sound like a lot, the impact of taking all that waste out of the ecosystem can’t be underestimated.

According to Barry O’Leary, chief executive of IDA Ireland, Ireland has some of the best wind and wave resources in the world. “Onshore wind turbines could account for 35 per cent of our energy needs and Ireland has the highest wave energy resource in Europe,” O’Leary writes in the current issue of Heritage Outlook, the Heritage Council magazine. Add 15% waste water to 35% wind and that’s already half-way to sustainable Energy Independence – better than the Copenhagen targets!

Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.

1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too!  When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.

2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)

3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.

4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.

5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?

6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.

7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.

Canadians, Matt and Jessica Flannery, have set up the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending non-profit website, Kiva.org, to help low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world, thereby fighting global poverty.

On the Kiva.org website potential lenders can browse through profiles of low-income entrepreneurs and can loan as little as $25 to the entrepreneur(s) of their choice. The lender then receives regular updates from the Kiva.org website and can track repayments, see exactly WHO their money has gone to, WHAT they are doing with it and HOW they are making a difference.

For example, Kem in Cambodia received a small loan in order to expand her business selling water spinach. With the loan Kem and her husband bought more seeds and a motorbike cart to take the spinach to market. They were also in a position to rent another hectare of land to help increase production. As a result Kem is now planning to set up a stall at her local market which will generate even more income to enhance her family’s quality of life. To date $66 million dollars has been loaned to entrepreneurs like Kem. The money given is a loan and not a donation and repayments are made over the course of a 6 to 12 month period.

Small loans leading to a big difference!

“Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain…” What if our beloved Irish rain was actually a national energy asset? Following on from my last post about piezoelectricity generated from foot and car traffic, brilliant minds at CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, have recently developed a system that can harvest energy from falling raindrops.  “Our work could be considered as a good alternative to power systems in raining outdoor environments where solar energy is difficult to exploit,” Thomas Jager told PhysOrg.com, and he could be speaking specifically to Ireland, where, especially in winter, we can’t guarantee the sun, but can expect a healthy dose of rain.

For those of you with a technical bent, this is how it works: the scientists use a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. When a raindrop impacts the 25-micrometer-thick PVDF, the polymer starts to vibrate. Electrodes embedded in the PVDF are used to recover the electrical charges generated by the vibrations, thus converting the raindrop’s mechanical energy into electrical energy.

Slow falling, large raindrops generate the most energy because raindrops falling at high speeds often lose some energy due to splash.  The scientists haven’t yet developed the mechanism for storing this energy, but surely with developments in wind and wave power surely this can’t be far behind?

A number of other organizations are working on piezoelectric devices as well: Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy by bending zinc oxide nanowires: he wants to put it in a shoe, so as you walk you generate power. There’s also Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, who designed and used a piezoelectric boot to power his mobile phone during a hike across the Namib desert.  TEXON International is looking to raise £1m to further develop these electric shoes.

One of the beauties of piezoelectricity is that the tools involved are not beyond the reach of a clever diy inventor: while not everyone has PDVF lying around, the essence of piezoelectricity is a copper wire, that when bent produces a negative/positive charge; when the pressure on the wire is relieved, an electrical current can be detected.  So who’s up for singing in the rain?

Imagine generating electricity with every step you take; that every time you drive or cycle, energy is sent to the national grid; and that even your workout is powering the lights and heat of the gym, replacing fossil fuel – sounds great, right?  Well, piezoelectricity is here.

Piezoelectricity is basically the use of certain materials to transform kinetic energy into electricity.  I wrote in another blog about the development of piezoelectric floor tiles that turn foot traffic into electricity; now the first practical installation of this kind is in place at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Gloucester, England, where “kinetic road plates” are being used to produce 30 kW of electricity every hour. The company’s press release describes the process as a more physical process (plates are pushed down by passing cars to create rocking motions that turn generators) than a piezoelectrical one, but the broader concept of using transient motion to generate electricity is the same.

There’s no reason why this simple, cheap and sustainable type of energy conversion can’t be used in businesses and homes all over Ireland.  And genius scientists are also working on an even more Irish-friendly form of energy conversion: raindrops into electricity, in my next post!

Remember the classic sitcom “The Good Life?”  John Seymour, the man whose books inspired the series, spent the latter part of his life on his small holding in Wexford.   Despite his profound commitment to being self-sufficient and living off-grid, towards the end of his life he told Patrick Bridgeman of Positive Life that total self-sufficiency was just too difficult; what he envisioned for the future was co-sufficiency: self-reliant local communities that could work together to meet their needs and make the transition to a post-industrial society independent of fossil fuel.

To this end, the Cultivate Centre has developed a course to nurture community sustainability called “Community Powerdown – Training for Leadership, Livelihoods and Local Resilience.”  It can be taken as a weekend intensive workshop or over a ten-week period.  The Powerdown Show, made for broadcast on DCTV, is also available from Cultivate as a DVD.  We can’t all live off-grid or in eco-communities, but within the lifestyles we already enjoy we can change so much to improve our co-sufficiency - this show might just be The Good Life for the twenty-first century!

Imagine a city that is completely green - not just ecologically sound and sustainable, but literally, visibly, green as far as the eye can see?  This fantasy is becoming a reality around the world.   The movement known as vegitecture, or vegetated architecture, is taking off,  and is not just beautiful, but is also an environmentally friendly way to literally add life to a city.
The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris has an 8,600 square foot vertical garden featuring more than 170 different plant species.  The walls use a combination of sunshades, solar panels, and ventilation to catch water, making them self-sustaining ecosystems. The benefits aren’t just aesthetic — the walls reduce noise and provide natural cooling for the surrounding buildings because they soak up noise and heat, whereas concrete just reflects those things. Architects imagine people one day being able to grow and harvest food from vertical gardens.

One of the main leaders in the field is Ken Yeang, a Malaysian-born architect and writer who first designed the Tropical Skyscraper in 1992.  Examples of his visionary work can be viewed here. The technology required to create and sustain a vertical garden is rather complex, but considering it can reintroduce biodiversity to urban areas and even cut down on air conditioning and air purification costs, maybe Ireland’s urban planners could start including vertical gardens to their designs - we certainly have enough rain to water them!

According to the green US website The Good Human (which I recommend following on Twitter, for those of you tweeters out there), many neighbourhoods in the US and Canada are bringing the strength of collective bargaining to greening their homes.  More and more, neighbours are getting together and approaching green energy companies with a collective agenda.  Sometimes the community reps are able to negotiate far lower (sometimes as much as 25% less) rates for installation of solar panels.  In Colorado, the reps also found a company who were able to rent them the panels, thereby avoiding the large financial investment that installing them would have required, as well as the difficulties of maintenance.  Most of us who live in towns and cities in Ireland have access to a residents’ association, and in rural areas there are also local groups or locally elected representatives.  So if you’d like to go green but are concerned about the costs involved, don’t go it alone – see who else in your neighbourhood wants to join in - you might be surprised by the size of your new green community!

The signs of change are everywhere: not just in the economy, but also in the enormous wave of new ventures that are using cutting-edge technology, sustainable objectives and social consciousness to create a new paradigm of private enterprise for the common good.  Umair Haque, the Harvard economist, eloquently describes the collapse of the “Zombieconomy” and what he calls Capitalism 1.0 evolving into Capitalism 2.0, or constructive capitalism.  He also talks about old business models that produced good incomes and bad outcomes giving way to an “institutional revolution,” coming up from the grass-roots of society and changing the world as we know it.

In fact, once you start looking, the amount of organisations and companies trying to do the right thing for people, nature and the planet is simply overwhelming and far more than I could ever fit into one blog post.  So I’ve divided them into three categories: digital, physical and consumable.

Today I’m listing my top 10 in the digital category: ways in which with simply a click you can change the world for the better. (with thanks to Mashable)

Digital Actions for good:

1. Change your iGoogle theme to help the hungry

2. Every time you use Windows Live™ Messenger or Windows Live Hotmail®, our free webmail service, they’ll share a portion of their advertising revenue with the cause you choose from among their partner social cause organizations

3. Teach your Granny to Text: The big book of small actions to change the world is out now.
Written by children, for children it’s a technicolour ‘how to’ for doing things.  And changing things. How can you change the world?  We Are What We Do is a new kind of movement inspiring people to change the world one small action at a time.  Their philosophy is simple: small actions x lots of people = big change.  They have the 130 small things that you can do to change really big things. Pick an action, track it here, and see how it all adds up.

4. Seventy-one ways to give without opening your wallet: mostly tweeted ideas, very brief and some very good

5.  Good is - the magazine.  Subscribe and 100% of the fee supports a social action project

6. Changing the Present -  Like Bothar but even more gift ideas: roof tiles, tutoring for deaf children, books, tetanus injections, and more.

7. The Case Foundation - another giving website, but this has suggestions of things you can do as well as donations or gifts that benefit those in need.

8. World Concern - More giving again, but they also do HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa, water wells, orphans, education and help prevent child trafficking.

9. Good.ly For all you eco-bloggers, a url shortener that donates to charity for every address you shorten.  Most Irish charities aren’t signed up yet, but using it creates the potential demand so try it out.

10. Blackle is a black version of Google that consumes less wattage. Apparently, it takes 74 watts to power a white screen, but only 59 watts for a dark screen. The site aims to “save energy, one search at a time.” You can also follow it on Twitter for more simple energy-saving ideas.

Next time, I’ll list my favourite sites for consumable actions for good - or, to put it another way - Shopping!!!  And please let me know of your favourites too so we can spread the word!