If the experience of one Tyrolean farm in the village of Schlitters, Austria is any indication, food waste recycling is in for a big step up. The farm just added a biogas plant to its operations, using a new design that can boost methane yields from biogas by 30%. The … [continued]
Researchers at New Mexico State University are testing a relatively inexpensive plumbing retrofit that could help buildings capture relatively clean graywater from plumbing before it hits the sewers, and reuse it onsite for outdoor watering. It’s a green four-for-one: the NMSU graywater system conserves water, relieves sewer systems of excess … [continued]
Vinegar can clean windows, kill weeds, and even cure the common cold. Now a team of scientists at the University of Leeds is studying how vinegar could clean up sites contaminated by chromium compounds discharged from old textile factories, smelters, and tanneries. As a source of chromium contamination, coal mining … [continued]
For a glimpse into the future of urban farming, take a look inside a Hell’s Kitchen high school campus, a former public school in the Bronx, or even a nearby prison on Rikers Island. Either way, you’ll see the hand of Cornell University horticulture specialist Philson Warner at work. Warner … [continued]
A new piece of thin film manufacturing equipment with the unlikely name of Viper (TM) could help bring solar energy to the masses. Viper (TM) was developed by Sencera, a North Carolina company that got its start supplying thin film hardware for manufacturing transistors and integrated circuits.
If you don’t know what DARPA is, you will soon. The Defense Advanced Research Group invented the internet back in 1969, and now it has set its sights on geoengineering a cure for global warming. What does that mean? For one thing, it means that a communications network originally designed … [continued]
For the past eight years, NOAA has been collecting data from inexpensive instruments attached to lobster pots, in a little-known program called eMOLT. Lobsters don’t have the sex appeal of NOAA’s newest recruit, the Virgin Galactic, but the information has helped in the understanding of ocean circulation in the Gulf … [continued]
First there was the Life Straw. Then there was the Aquaduct Tricycle. Now ordinary sand could provide an answer to one of the thorniest problems of the future: how to purify drinking water for the many millions of people who don’t have access to a clean, disease-free source — and … [continued]
When it comes to methane gas emissions and the impact on global warming, one’s thoughts naturally turn to the barrage of untreated manure unleashed by factory farms. Methane is also an issue for small farms, especially the growing number of start-ups with little spare cash to invest in equipment. To … [continued]
Bokashi is a ramped-up, high-speed composting method first developed in Japan. What gives it the muscle that ordinary compost lacks? Think of the difference between wine and grape juice, and that’s the key to a fine bokashi.
