US energy firm General Electric isn’t renowned for its charitable impulses, so there is obviously money to be made here for them.  “There is a huge potential in this. We are looking around the world to expand” says Michael Wagner, GE Energy marketing leader.  The key element is money: China is investing heavily in the growing biogas industry because it makes sense. According to the New York Times, In Europe a biogas project could pay for itself in about five years.

China has been pioneering green power generation on a smaller scale for decades, from household digesters to large-scale biogas plants at farms and waste sites.  It’s not rocket science: cow dung is put into an oxygen-free chamber where it produces a methane/carbon dioxide mix called biogas. But China’s plan for 300 million rural residents to use biogas for electricity by 2020 is impressive – the government is planning 10,000 large-scale biogas projects on livestock farms.

One big advantage is that dairy farms are already located in the rural areas where new electricity demand is cropping up, eliminating the need for expensive new infrastructure. This cuts down on dairy’s estimated 4% of world-wide greenhouse gases.  Obviously China has a lot more cows than Ireland, but the percentages still make sense: dairy farming, struggling as it is in this country, could be one way to rebuild our shattered economy – and we’d have lots of good cheese!

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.

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.

What’s a dog to do?

Well, yesterday, in spite of the rain, I took myself off, with my humans, to the new Cultivate/Eco-Unesco building, The Greenhouse, in St. Andrew Street (where Enfo used to be, opening to the public on 2nd December) for a lunchtime seminar on Carbon Tax. The humans were very interested. I was mildly interested at first and just wanted somewhere to curl up and dry out from having walked into town in torrential rain. But… I couldn’t believe my dog-ears! I had no idea how serious the situation really is. The picture for the future of planet earth, home to us all, is bleak - the rain forests torched, the polar ice caps melted, heat and dust everywhere.

…and it’s not the dogs doing it!

Look at the past few weeks in this country… has the torrential, bucketing-down rain put a smile on your face each day? I wouldn’t think so. Look at the top left photo - that’s me and the position I’ve been in for the past few weeks. There was nothing else for it but to take to the bed and stay dry. Now, take a look at my photo below before things started to get really bad. That’s me carpooling with my human wearing my happy, smiley dog-face.

What kind of world do we want to live in because from where I’m standing it’s looking like we’d better get used to the fact that endless rain might not be a passing weather phase but a permanent fixture in this country.

Our climate is changing forever, unless you do something and do it now. I’m saying this as your Best Friend and I’m hoping that we dogs won’t have to re-evaluate this age-old relationship…!

Firstly, I’ll tell you how my humans got to befriend Early and how my doggy-nose was out of joint as a result. Liz and Breda headed to America leaving me behind with our neighbours, who I love, but being left is just that, being left. I’m very green myself and didn’t want to be adding any air-miles to my karmic debt BUT I now figure, if the plane is going anyway, the plane is going, right? So me on the plane with my humans isn’t going to make any difference. I’m not even taking up a seat! So, firstly I had to deal with that, then I had to cope with being replaced by Early who they loved spending time with (she’s working on her surfing skills but, between ourselves, I just can’t see her on the waves in Lahinch, can you?) I will admit that Early is cute, just like me, and so once I got over my initial dog-envy, she and I became e-mail buddies.

Early and I chat regularly about the things that interest us; car-surfing, pond-surfing and car-pooling for humans. Like me, Early is proud to say that she never travels alone in a car. We also discuss the state of the world and what we can do about it, as mere dogs, and two things we can’t fathom about America is this: why don’t the USA have a plastic bag tax and why don’t Americans hang their clothes out to dry?! What is it in their culture that makes them act like hanging clean clothes out to dry in the fresh air is equivalent to hanging out your dirty laundry in public? Why do Americans take huge loads of washing, soaking wet, from enormous washing machines and put them in super-duper dryers? Can you imagine the carbon emissions that would be cut down if all American households were encouraged to dry their washing naturally, finishing them off in the dryer if they need to? And why would a country that size and that developed not have a plastic bag tax to encourage people to recycle their plastic bags, or just use their own shopping bags? My own humans couldn’t locate somewhere in the area that they were in that would take dry-cell batteries for recycling and had to take them home to Ireland. Couldn’t Obama listen to the dogs and start with those little things instead of just making promises to the world about America lowering carbon emissions?

Through my doggy web-network I just know in my bones that I will somehow get to connect with Bo Obama (black and white Portuguese Water Dog) in the White House to see if he can have a word in Mr. President’s ear. It’s all very well to be drinking beers on the lawn and all of that (Early filled me in on that scenario!) but sometimes something just needs to happen!

Obama, all I can say is “Yes you can-ine!”

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!

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?

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!