Biofuel from Whiskey

Celtic Renewables has found a way to turn a byproduct from the creation of whiskey into something even more flammable: fuel. This will greatly lower the wast from whiskey distillation while contributing to the growing field of bio-energy. Neat!

This isn’t the first time someone has thought to turn whiskey waste into energy. A handful of other distilleries, including the American bourbon producer Maker’s Mark, use anaerobic digesters to convert waste into biogas, which is then used to fuel the distilling process—a neat little closed-loop system. But Celtic Renewables’ process creates three useful substances instead of just one.

When I spoke to the company’s founder and chief scientific officer, an Irish industrial microbiologist named Martin Tangney, he excitedly ennumerated the virtues of the byproducts his process produces: As a fuel, biobutanol is 25 percent more efficient than ethanol. Acetone has all kinds of industrial uses—plus, it’s a nail-polish remover. The animal feed is rich in protein.

Read more at Mother Jones.

Work Less for a Better Life and Better Job

The ongoing recession has left a lot of people fearful that they could lose their job any second, which is quite scary. As a result people are willing to work longer hours and brave worsening conditions just so they don’t end up on the dole. This isn’t good for people and it’s bad for companies too.

The best work environment is one that embraces you as a human and lets you live, as a result of being conscious that workers are people companies perform better.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?

Read more here.

What’s in a Lot?

Here’s a challenge from Eran Ben-Joseph: name a great parking lot.

Couldn’t do it, could you? Neither could I, and neither could Ben-Joseph. In a new book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking he explores the horribleness of all that space that car drivers demand. If you look at North American cities in the 60s and 70s all you’ll see is a giant slab of pavement for automobiles instead of people. Today, those cities are dealing with the car-created destruction.

Where’s the good news in this? Well, Ben-Joseph’s book is all about finding ways to make these wastes of space practical and helpful to the areas around them. Some solutions might be to design a parking lot to serve the local community or to make these parking spots actually green.

So what can be done to make parking lots greener and better integrated into their civic surroundings? Ben-Joseph recommends a menu of ideas to improve parking lots according to their settings — which he regards as “a healthier approach to planning, rather than giving prescriptive ideas about how to design them.”

For one thing, planners might simply plant trees throughout parking lots, as the architect Renzo Piano did at Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. Low-use parking lots need not be entirely paved in asphalt, either: Miami’s Sun Life Stadium features large areas of grass lots that are environmentally better year-round.
“The whole space does not have to be designed the same way,” Ben-Joseph says. “Overflow parking can be designed differently, and not paved with asphalt.”

Lots can also incorporate green technology. Some parking spaces in Palo Alto, Calif., have charging stalls for electric vehicles. A Walmart parking lot in Worcester, Mass., has 12 wind turbines that generate clean electricity for the store. The Sierra Nevada Brewery parking lot in Chico, Calif., has solar panels built into its lattice structure.

Read more at Physorg.

Ontario Chooses to Protect Old-Growth Forest

In northern Ontario there is a region called Temagami and it is absolutely stunning as it holds Ontario’s oldest old-growth forest and is the home to a diverse wildlife. In a tradition of profiteering, some people want to destroy the area and plans were set in motion in place to permit that – until now. The province has decided to commit to protecting the area from destruction.

Check the video below to see the region:

Wolf Lake from Rob Nelson on Vimeo.

The decision is a victory for the 300-year-old red pine trees, said Ontario’s environment commissioner, Gord Miller. He said the plan would have allowed logging of the ecologically treasured trees if the mining intensified.

“The essence of the ecological dispute in that area is whether or not we should preserve the red pine old-growth system,” Miller said.

“The trees are the key issue. The government has reconsidered and that means the trees stay, which is critical in the long term.”

Read more at the Star.

India to Produce 97% Cheaper Anti-Cancer Drugs

India has announced that they will be using a specialized law to produce generic anti-cancer drugs. This will lower the price of these drugs by 97% and increase the efficiency of health care delivery in the country. It’ll also make the poor better able to survive certain cancers because treatment will be more affordable.

In the first-ever case of compulsory licencing approval, the Indian Patent Office on Monday cleared the application of Hyderabad’s Natco Pharma to sell generic drug Nexavar, used for renal and liver cancer, at Rs 8,880 (around $175) for a 120-capsule pack for a month’s therapy. Bayer offers it for over Rs 2.8 lakh (roughly $5,500) per 120 capsule. The order provides hope for patients who cannot afford these drugs.

The approval paves the way for the launch of Natco’s drug in the market, a company official told TOI, adding that it will pay a 6% royalty on net sales every quarter to Bayer. The licence will be valid till such time the drug’s patent is valid, i.e. 2020. As per the CL (compulsory licence) order, Natco is also committed to donating free supplies of the medicines to 600 patients each year.

Read more at the Times of India.

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