Cap and Trade a Success! 103 Million Americans Now Breathe Cleaner Air. NOx-reducing air towers.
Photo via Freeport LNG Well, it looks like the cap and trade is a success--since it was implemented in 2003, smog levels have gone way down, and over 100 million Americans breathe cleaner air. All thanks to a system put into action that allowed polluting companies to find market-based solutions for lowering their emissions. Their Nitrogen Oxides emissions, that is. Yup, I'm talking about the effective cap and trade that has drastically reduced NOx emissions over the last five years--though of course, it makes a strong case for a cap and trade for CO2 as well.The NOx Budget Trading Program is a cap and trade system involving 20 states and Washington DC. According the organization's annual report, the summertime NOx emissions from power plants and large industrial sources were down by 62 percent compared to year 2000 levels and 75 percent lower than in 1990. Wow, that sounds like a serious reduction! Gray Water: Safe, Legal and Permitted Water Recycling (Video)
Image credit: Huber Solutions (this is not the system shown in the video).How to Recycle Gray Water LegallyLloyd has already written about the Gray Water Guerrilla movement - a loose [thanks for the typo alert Yoshash!]
Alliance of activists dedicated to installing clandestine water recycling solutions. Yet while some innovative companies are offering gray water package units, many people are still struggling against restrictive building codes, sceptical local officials, and nervous neighbors. Luckily, there are people like Trathen Heckman in Sonoma County California who are fighting the battle for the rest of us - getting a fully permitted graywater system built in the center of suburbia. Click below the fold for an excellent video from Peak Moment TV, in which Trathen explains how his system was built, and perhaps more importantly, how he got permission to do it. To some degree, scepticism around gray water is totally understandable. Minería Urbana // ¿ Qué hacer con la Basura Electrónica ?
Imagen vía Flickr por (cc)davepatten.
Plastic Recycling Machine Churns Out Plastic Bricks From Trash - Ecofriend. Una máquina que convierte el plástico en gasolina. Mr. Fusion está aquí: inventan máquina que convierte plástico en combustible en ALT1040 (Ciencia) MIT's Seaswarm Robots Could Clean Up a Gulf-Sized Spill in a Month. We can thank MIT for adding another piece of weaponry to our future oil spill cleanup arsenal. Dubbed the Seaswarm, this autonomous 16-foot long, 7- foot wide robot features an oil-absorbing conveyor belt covered with a nanowire mesh, carefully designed to absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil all while repelling water. But as impressive as that may sound, perhaps the best feature of this new bot is the fact that it is completely autonomous.
Affixed with two square meters of solar panels, unlike traditional oil skimmers which require frequent maintenance, the Seaswarm can run at full power continuously for weeks on end. Jump ahead to see a video of this amazing robot in action. As the name implies, the Seaswarm robots are intended to be used en masse, with wireless communication and GPS ensuring that a group of robots effectively cover the entire area of a spill.
MIT's Fleet Of Solar-Powered Oil-Cleaning Robots a Solution for Gulf Spill (Video) Images via SENSEableCity MIT's Sensable City Lab directo Carlo Ratti and associate director Assaf Biderman have come up with the SeaSwarm, a robot that uses nanofibers to absorb 20 times its weight in oil, and their hope is that it can be developed into a viable solution for cleaning up the Gulf oil disaster.
The 7-foot-wide robots sport at 16-foot-long conveyor belt of paper-like nanofibers that absorb the oil, and are rotated through the machine where the oil is cleaned off. Skimming the surface of the water and powered by sunlight, the robot can continually collect oil. DEXTEROUS MANIPULATOR. Dommage que l'espace ne fasse plus rêver, car en terme de réflexion architecturale la conquête spatiale a toujours été un merveilleux laboratoire d'imaginaires constructifs.
Les géniales visions d'Archigram n'auraient notamment jamais existé sans la course à l'espace entre russes et américains (voir The Archigram Archival Project, mais aussi, de façon plus actuelle, là ). Aujourd'hui ce n'est plus dans la course à la Lune que s'invente le futur (quoique ... , voir là), mais plutôt sur cette étonnante machine flottante qu'est devenue la Station spatiale internationale avec ses nombreux modules aux formes et aux fonctions les plus variées, mais aussi - et surtout - son extraordinaire modularité constructive.
FUEZ: piedra artificial de VIDRIOS RECICLADOS y cemento bajo CO2. FUEZ es una alternativa a la piedra natural, un material innovador que se fabrica con cemento de baja emisión de CO2, 100% de vidrio reciclado, y aditivos naturales.
El cemento que se utiliza para la producción de FUEZ emite un 30% menos de carbono que el cemento tradicional tipo Portland. El vidrio reciclado, piedra, agua y el resto de ingredientes hacen que esta piedra artificial, además de ser un material ‘verde’, sea resistente y duradero. Este producto califica hasta con 5 puntos en el programa LEED americano.
Luces de exterior solares que purifican el aire. Fabricación de láminas de metal en la fábrica metalúrgica de Magnitogorsk en time-lapse. World's Biggest Machines. Strata 950 – The drilling machine that was used to save the 33 Chilean miners Chile is using a 40-ton drilling machine called Strata 950 to bore through 700 meters (2,300 feet) of rock and free the 33 trapped miners workers trapped in a collapsed copper mine.
Rescuers are using the Strata 950 to drill a 25-inch- diameter hole to the 33 trapped miners from the surface. The machine had to be disassembled into 42 trucks, which were posted out parts in shifts, since they couldn't fit them all together in the drilling area. Everyday urbanisms without architects' architectures. Popcorn is the latest tool to simulate oil spills.
As carried out by Brazilian Petrobras Oil Company last Thursday, hundreds of kilos of them were thrown away into the main affluent river of the Amazon, the Black River. Contained by 2,000 metres of floating barriers and collected by five skimmer ships, more than 30 supporting vessels took part of it. This action intended to reproduce the disastrous hypothetical spill of 800,000 litres of oil. Blood in the Mobile. To purchase the Blood in the Mobile Film, Worldwide click on the following link Blood in the Mobile is a documentary by director Frank Piasecki Poulsen.
Phones are financing war in DR Congo We love our cell phones and the selection between different models has never been bigger. But the production of phones has a dark, bloody side. The main part of minerals used to produce cell phones are coming from the mines in the Eastern DR Congo.