Month: September 2011

A Book That Helps Kill Malaria

- Adam Clare

Malaria No More has a book released through The Domino Project that is a collection of essays on the state of malaria. The good news is that when you purchase a copy of this book, the money spent goes directly to campaigns that stop the spread of malaria.

The Domino Project in conjunction with Box of Crayons is working with Malaria No More to help end malaria. No More’s mission is to end malaria in Africa by 2015. A child dies every 45 seconds from malaria.

It isn’t very often that a book has the power to save a life. Yes, good books can improve lives, shape lives, even change lives. But when was the last time a book literally helped save a life? If you’re reading this page, the answer is right now.

$20 from the purchase of each copy of End Malaria will go to to Malaria No More to send a mosquito net to a family in need and to support life-saving work in the fight against malaria. That’s 100% of the Kindle sale, and most of the hard copy price ($25).

Thanks Allen!

You can buy the book through Amazon.

From Landfill to Sustainable Power Plant

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Madison, New York, has a landfill that has been sitting and rotting and essentially not doing anything productive. That’s all about to change. A new pilot test of a Spectro PowerCap Exposed Geomembrane Solar Cover system – a sheet of something close to magic that will convert the mound of trash into a mound of solar power.

The eight-acre demonstration site features a three-ply membrane that serves as both the closure system for the decommissioned landfill and the platform for an integrated 40-kilowatt Uni-Solar thin-film photovoltaic array. The technology was developed as both a long-term and final landfill closure solution. The PV system is expected to offset nearly all of the power requirements of the Madison County ARC Recycling Facility on the site for 20 to 30 years

Read more at Earth Techling.

California Bans Shark Fin Soup

- Adam Clare

There are tons of reason to ban shark fin soup, and it’s not just because it’s cruel to sharks.

“Sharks have been around for nearly 400 million years, and could be wiped out in a single human generation due to an increasing demand for their fins,” said Knights. ”Fisheries regulation on the ground has utterly failed to reduce overfishing — market approaches like this are crucial.”

Fins from up to 73 million sharks per year are used to make shark fin soup, a vastly popular Asian delicacy. Captured at sea and hauled on deck, the sharks are often still alive while their fins are sliced off. Because shark meat is not considered as valuable as shark fin, the maimed animals are tossed overboard to drown or bleed to death. The process is called shark finning, a wasteful and cruel practice still legal in much of the world.

So in this context it is great to see that shark fin soup has been banned in yet another part of the world. Some people are afraid of sharks (I blame Jaws) yet sharks are vital to a healthy and function ocean ecosystem.

A hat tip to WildAid, where you can read the rest of the article.

Subways to (Kinda) Power Themselves

- Adam Clare

Most hybrid cars capture energy excerpted while braking and use it to help refill the battery. A company that makes flywheels will be working with New York City to apply the same kinetic energy capture concept to subway cars, meaning that the subways will become an even more efficient way to travel. Every time a subway car enters a station and applies the brakes its capturing kinetic energy to get it started again.

The difference is that the power generated would reach into the megawatts. A 10-car subway train in New York’s system might require a jolt of three to four megawatts of power for 30 seconds to get up to cruising speed, according to Louis Romo, vice president of sales at Vycon. That’s enough to power 1,300 average U.S. homes.

And when one train leaves the station, another one comes in right on its heels. While delivering walloping surges in power like that to downtown stations is feasible, remote stations can experience drops in power. Train departures have to literally be staggered to accommodate the availability of power.

“Almost every rail company in the U.S. has a station where voltage sag is a problem,” said Romo.

Vycon claims it can help smooth out this problem by effectively getting the trains to act like Priuses. When drivers hit the brakes on their hybrids, the kinetic energy of the moving car gets transformed into electric power that then gets stored in the battery.

Read more at Green Tech Media.

Negative Carbon Concrete

- Adam Clare

The most popular construction material on the planet is concrete and it turns out that the way we use it is not environmentally friendly. What if we changed that?

A company has created a great concrete variation that actually beneficial for the environment as it removes excess carbon!

While it functions much like commonly used Portland cement, boasting the same level of performance and the same average cost, Novacem’s concrete mixture uses magnesium silicate instead of calcium carbonates. The slinging of chemistry jargon might make this seem complicated, but the concept is simple: the creation of magnesium carbonates from magnesium silicates absorbs carbon dioxide. In other words, the production process is carbon negative. Furthermore, the production process of Novacem’s concrete is low-energy, allowing it to be sustained on biomass fuels.

Read more at Architizer.

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