The Future of Water & Waste

Technology allows us to achieve great things – so many goods are made affordable, for example, by mass production. But when mass production is not responsibly planned out and regulated, trash starts piling up.

Oslo, where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage, is forced to import garbage to supply its waste-to-energy incinerating plants.

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This is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. It even has designs on the American market.

“I’d like to take some from the United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”

A hybrid farmland grass, developed by a team of UK researchers, could help reduce flooding by cutting the volume of run-off reaching rivers, a study suggests.

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A team of plant and soil scientists said tests showed the new cultivar reduced run-off by 51%, compared with a variety widely used to feed livestock.

They added that rapid growth and well developed root systems meant that more moisture was retained within the soil rather than running into river systems.

The findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

The novel grass is a hybrid of perennial ryegrass (Lollium perenne) - which is widely planted by farmers for grazing livestock - and meadow fescue (Festuca pratensis), which has environmental stress-resistant characteristics.

Scientists reveal new insights into how the Gulf of Mexico's natural processes degraded oil-related compounds after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

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New details have emerged about "self-cleaning" effects in the Gulf of Mexico witnessed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Researchers reporting at the American Chemical Society conference revealed details of a cascade of micro-organisms that spring into action to degrade oil.

Research has also outlined how chemical "dispersants" used in clean-up efforts actually frustrate these processes.

However, the long-term effects of the weeks of oil exposure remain unknown.

And concern was expressed about the ultimate resilience of the Gulf.

Terry Hazen of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been studying oil-degrading microbes in greater and greater detail since the disaster, even discovering some that had never been seen before.

They can break down the long-chain carbon-based "alkane" molecules present in oil - and in isolated conditions will even move towards oil.

"They're really oil-seeking missiles," he told the meeting.

GEORGIA TECH / PURDUE (US) — Fabricating new plant-based solar cells on cellulose nanocrystal substrates means that they’re recyclable in water.

The researchers report that the organic solar cells reach a power conversion efficiency of 2.7 percent, an unprecedented figure for cells on substrates derived from renewable raw materials.

The cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates on which the solar cells are fabricated are optically transparent, which lets light pass through them before being absorbed by a very thin layer of an organic semiconductor.

During the recycling process, the solar cells are simply immersed in water at room temperature. Within minutes, the CNC substrate dissolves and the solar cell can be separated easily into its major components.

Professor Bernard Kippelen of Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering led the study and says his team’s project opens the door for a truly recyclable, sustainable, and renewable solar cell technology.

“The development and performance of organic substrates in solar technology continues to improve, providing engineers with a good indication of future applications,” says Kippelen, who is also the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE).

“But organic solar cells must be recyclable. Otherwise we are simply solving one problem, less dependence on fossil fuels, while creating another, a technology that produces energy from renewable sources but is not disposable at the end of its lifecycle.”

The 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival stank. It wasn’t the bands that were the problem.

It wasn’t the bands that were the problem. Earlier that year, Austin had laid sod in Zilker Park, home of the annual fall festival, after years of dust problems, including one gritty festival infamously known as the “dust bowl.” In keeping with the city’s environmentally friendly ways, Austin used a locally made compost called Dillo Dirt when laying the new grass. But a day of heavy rain and tens of thousands of festivalgoers turned Zilker’s lush lawn into a mud pit. Dads toting Texas-orange camping chairs, hipsters decked out in impractical vintage, and college students in bikinis and rain boots all shared the same traumatized, confused expression as they waded into the chocolate-pudding-like sludge: What is that smell? The park was ripe with the scent of human waste.

The culprit? The Dillo Dirt, a compost whose central component is highly treated human waste, known in waste-management circles as biosolids. In cities across the United States, biosolids are being used to achieve greater civic efficiency while reducing costs. But concerns over regulation and health effects and a general uneasiness with our bowel movements—sterilized or not—are providing fodder for punny poop headlines in newspapers large and small.

Humans have been using their own waste as fertilizer for eons, but many Americans remain squeamish about taking the trend to a Portlandia level of green dedication. Nowadays, when you flush the toilet, your waste flows through a multipart system that ultimately discharges treated water into waterways and has standards for how to deal with the leftovers, known as sewage sludge. Until the mid-20th century, cities often dumped raw or partially treated waste directly into nearby rivers, lakes, or oceans. (The 1972 Clean Water Act eliminated most freshwater dumping, but ocean dumping wasn’t outlawed until 1988.) Cities then faced the dilemma of what to do with the 7.18 million tons of sewage sludge produced annually in the United States.

U. VIRGINIA (US) — A ceramic tablet infused with silver or copper nanoparticles can disinfect water for up to six months.

Called MadiDrop, the tablets are being developed for use in communities in South Africa that have little to no access to water.

PureMadi, a nonprofit University of Virginia organization, invented the tablet and has established a water filter factory in Limpopo province, South Africa, employing local workers. The factory has produced several hundred flowerpot-like water filters that utilize the same technology as the tablets to purify water.

California’s snowpack, which supplies water to more than 25 million people and almost one million acres of farmland, is measured monthly in the winter.

A worker dismantles electronic waste in Guiyu, southern China. Over 100,000 people are employed there to recycle discarded computers and other gadgets Source:...

Mark Tran: Costa Rican academics are pioneering the growth of crops on freshwater lakes as a way of addressing food shortages

Many of the world's aquifers are being pumped dry to support unsustainable agriculture.

Our technology can get us to space, but once there, we still aren’t too flexible. Earth orbit is clogged with debris because we simply don't have an easy way to clean it up.

E-waste is a growing toxic nightmare. And it’s not just a problem in developing countries.

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AMERICANS replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone. Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones? The answer isn’t pretty.

In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry.

Indeed, most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and children. The World Health Organization reports that even a low level of exposure to lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which can be found in old phones) can cause irreversible neurological damage and threaten the development of a child.

Just a few weeks ago, I flew into India to join other new media specialists and journalists with the International Reporting Project to examine issues of ...

(Credit: iStockphoto) Another innovative feature has been added to the world’s first practical “artificial leaf,” making the device even more suitable-

Another innovative feature has been added to the world’s first practical “artificial leaf,” making the device even more suitable for providing people in developing countries and remote areas with electricity, scientists reported here today.

It gives the leaf the ability to self-heal damage that occurs during production of energy.

Daniel G. Nocera, Ph.D., described the advance during the “Kavli Foundation Innovations in Chemistry Lecture” at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Nocera explained that the “leaf” — a catalyst-coated wafer of silicon — mimics the ability of real leaves to produce energy from sunlight and water. Dropped into a jar of water and exposed to sunlight, catalysts in the device break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. Those gases bubble up and can be collected and used as fuel to produce electricity in fuel cells.

Self-healing

“Surprisingly, some of the catalysts we’ve developed for use in the artificial leaf device actually heal themselves,” Nocera said. “They are a kind of ‘living catalyst.’ This is an important innovation that eases one of the concerns about initial use of the leaf in developing countries and other remote areas.”

Nocera, who is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University, explained that the artificial leaf likely would find its first uses in providing “personalized” electricity to individual homes in areas that lack traditional electric power generating stations and electric transmission lines.

Less than one quart of drinking water, for instance, would be enough to provide about 100 watts of electricity 24 hours a day. Earlier versions of the leaf required pure water, because bacteria eventually formed biofilms on the leaf’s surface, shutting down production.

However, the new self-healing featire “enables the artificial leaf to run on the impure, bacteria-contaminated water found in nature,” Nocera said. “We figured out a way to tweak the conditions so that part of the catalyst falls apart, denying bacteria the smooth surface needed to form a biofilm. Then the catalyst can heal and re-assemble.”

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More people in India have access to cellphones than to basic sanitation. Meanwhile, more than 7,000 villages in the northwestern part of the country suffer drinking water shortages as the water table in this breadbasket region continues to drop. And the same story can be told all over the world, according to participants of a water conference at Columbia University on March 28.

This may be the “Blue Marble” with 70 percent of the planet’s surface covered in watery oceans, but the abundance is primarily made up of saltwater. Freshwater that’s clean enough for people to drink and plentiful enough to grow crops and other vital human activities is in increasingly short supply.

In the U.S., agriculture, industry and people combine to use more water than flows in the nation’s rivers. The difference is pulled up from beneath surface of the earth. “We depend on ground water, it’s going away,” noted economist Jeff Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, which convened the State of the Planet: Water conference. “This is a new geologic era where humanity has taken over key [planetary] drivers: the water cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle.”

The obvious solution, at least to economists, is: if water has become a scarce good then it needs an appropriate price to properly allocate it. Water engineer John Briscoe of Harvard University noted that Australian farmers survived the recent crippling drought—which resulted in a 70 percent reduction in water flow in the Murray-Darling river basin—because of a water trading system that shifted water use from low-value, high-water use crops like rice to cities that needed the H2O more. “This is Econ 101 at work,” he said.

Rivers pay no mind to political boundaries. If unimpeded by dams and diversions, they flow naturally from mountain headwaters to the sea, crossing borders both within and between countries as if political maps did not exist.

f the world is to meet growing food, energy, and consumer demands over the coming years while sustaining the ecosystems that support life on the planet, we will need to think more like watersheds and less like states or nations.  Only in this way can we get more benefit out of every drop of Earth’s finite water.

As a river flows toward the sea, it can generate hydroelectric power in its upper reaches, irrigate crops in the valleys, supply drinking water to cities and towns, and sustain recreation and fisheries from headwaters to the coastal zones. But we can only optimize the benefits that rivers provide if we work together – and across borders – to secure and share them.

This is not easy to do.  It requires both a new mindset about water and a quantum leap in cooperation, the theme of this year’s World Water Day.

Worldwide there are now 276 river basins encompassing two or more countries.  Europe’s Danube is shared by eighteen nations, Africa’s Nile by eleven, Asia’s Indus by five, and North America’s Colorado by two.

Rarely are there treaties that set out how the flows of these international rivers should be shared by all the parties in the basin.  A 1959 treaty between Egypt and Sudan, for example, divvies up the entire flow of the Nile, but doesn’t allot any water to the other basin countries – including Ethiopia, which contributes 84 percent of the Nile’s total flow.  Far from solving water disputes, such a treaty can fuel them.

A new version of Aqueduct provides companies and governments with a free global water-risk mapping tool that can help them plan around falling water supplies

3D printers are getting cooler every day, but there’s one component integral to 3D printing that normally gets overlooked – that is, until you have to pay for it.

As many 3D hobbyists have no doubt discovered, the one time cost of the printer can be quickly dwarfed by feeding it spool after spool of raw plastic. At $40 or more per spool, an avid hobbyist can see his or her enthusiasm rapidly diminished.

Maybe Filabot won’t revolutionize how 3D printing is done, but how often it is done.

Filabot is a 3D plastic extrusion system that takes all kinds of recyclable plastic – milk jugs, soda, detergent and shampoo bottles – and turns them into raw material for 3D printing creativity. Launched as a Kickstarter campaign, Filabot raised three times its $10,000 goal. Its creator, Tyler McNaney, plans on launching in the near future.

Not only will your household recyclables now appear as treasure troves of cheap and virtually endless supply of 3D printing plastic, all those projects that didn’t print right, cracked, or just didn’t turn out the way you thought it would can now be given a second chance at greatness.

The way Filabot works is pretty straightforward. It’s fed pieces of plastic up to 4 inches in diameter, which are then ground down to smaller pieces and are squeezed through a heated barrel that melts the plastic down. The molten plastic is then extruded out through interchangeable nozzles – 3mm or 1.75mm in diameter – to produce the plastic filament. The filament is then shaped to the right size for printing as it is pressed between a pair of grooved barrels. Finally, a cutter corrects any shape irregularities that might’ve made it past the barrels.

New national drinking water rules are expected to lead to fewer pathogens flowing out of the tap

The water coming out of your tap is safe, but there may still be some common contaminants.