Environment

Scrubbing Smog

- Adam Clare

A Stockholm-based company have been researching catalytic cement and concrete materials. Essentially they aim to make buildings and roads actually clean the air.

This is not a new idea but the technology being researched is newly discovered nanotechnologies.

“In Rome, the Dives in Misericordia church, designed by U.S.-based architect Richard Meier, is made of self-cleaning concrete that helps keep the surface shiny white. In Japan, several modern buildings including the Marunouchi Building in downtown Tokyo, are covered with photocatalytic tiles to reduce discoloring from pollution.”

Effective Mass Transit in the Suburbs

- Fraser Birt 1 Comment

The sprawling collection of Toronto suburbs in York Region are one day away from a new option in public transit. The new VivaYork system will provide frequent, comfortable and extremely well organized bus service on the Highway 7 and Yonge St corridors, two of York’s most important and congested arteries.

The initial phase will provide Viva buses with signal priority, allowing them to jump queues of traffic at red lights. Later phases are projected to include dedicated busways, LRT’s, and even a subway stretching into York Region. (Anything is possible if gas prices stay high!) With connections to the TTC’s Young Subway line, and a connection to the Sheppard line to come, this fast and reliable service could entice drivers in the heart of York Region to leave their cars at home. Here’s hoping.

Blobject Cars

- Fraser Birt

You may see something odd crawling around the twisting, narrow streets of Cordoba, Spain. The GEM car, a small electric vehicle with a top speed of about 32kp/h, has found a useful home. Referred to as “blobjects,” the cars have the look of something out of mid-seventies sci-fi. Which is meant as a compliment.

The local Cordoba government has chipped in funding for tour operators to rent out GEM cars to tourists, much to the chagrin of local taxi drivers. The cars are fitted with GPS systems and computers that allow them to give guided tours of the city. However, there’s something that makes these cute little alternative vehicles even better: they’re powered entirely by open-source software. (It’s even made by Daimler-Chrysler, of all people!) Thank you to the BBC for the photo.

Crops that Survive!

- Cam Proctor

The fundamental ineffeciency if farming has always been that crops die at the end of season. This requires huge investments in organic matter removal, tillage, replanting and large quantaties of fertilizer, water and pesticides. The top 25 producing crops in the world are annuals but researchers at the lands institute want to change all that by switching to perrenial crops modelled after prarie grasslands. Grasslands are the most effecient self regulating ecosystems on the planet, requiring little input of materials, with incredible resilence to harms.

Researchers have been able to create stable ecosystems that requires less than 1/100 of the energy and inputs (no pesticides required the plants take care of themselves) with yields comparable to least productive farmland nowadays. The big difference being the land institute farms are sustainable the least productive farmlands exponentially require more resources and are suseptible to collapse.

Free Fuel always at arms length

- Cam Proctor

CAT is one of the first words a child learns to speak and spell and hopefully the meaning will shift from our feline friends to the new class of compressed air powered cars. Developed by Guy Negre in 2002 Guy’s fundamental shift in design moves away from distributing fossil fuels across vast distance to fuels that are arguably the most abundant, air. C.A.T. (which stands for compressed air technology) cars would be able to fill up virtiouly anywhere in the world for pennies per mile, only the cost to compress air which could be supplied by renewable energy. Within urban areas the car uses compressed air up to speeds of 50 km/h with ZERO pollution. Highway transit uses a mixture of fossil fuels and compressed air. Imagine a world where the resources are so abundant and renewable and accessible that everyone could afford a car and there is little to no pollution and most importantly wars are not fought over resources.

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