Cities are hot: Filled with skyscrapers, traffic and hot pavement, heat simmers between buildings causing the “heat island effect”. Stagnant heat is trapped in the narrow city gaps and air conditioners cooling the inside of buildings spill even more heat out the walls. Trees offering natural cooling and shade are minimal and soil that helps water evaporation (thereby cooling the area) is non existent. Replacing the trees and soil are dark streets that store heat and reach temperatures up to 70F (21C) hotter than lighter surfaces. Stifling heat is depressing (unless you’re at the beach), and the added smog and clouds that form because of it, don’t help matters either.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that “for millions of Americans living in and around cities, heat islands are of growing concern. This phenomenon describes urban and suburban temperatures that are 2 to 10°F (1 to 6°C) hotter than nearby rural areas. Elevated temperatures can impact communities by increasing peak energy demand, air conditioning costs, air pollution levels, and heat-related illness and mortality.”

Carlisle Syntec Incorported, one of the biggest single-ply membrane roofing companies, provides a product that helps cut down on the ‘heat island’ issue. If, however, energy costs need to be cut back because of heat escaping in winter climates, they have solutions for that too.

Carlisle has developed membranes for over 40 years and their popularity has increased substantially in that time: Demand exploded as early as the 1970s, during the Arab Oil Embargo when Asphalt became scarce. In the 1980’s Carlisle stretchable roofing technology accounted for 40% of the non-residential roofing market. Now, as continued in their company timeline, “Carlisle reaches out domestically from 21 manufacturing locations, 80 manufacturer and representative offices and eight regional sales offices to serve the non-residential single-ply roofing marketplace.”

Their roofing materials are developed for a variety of needs. Their thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO), is a white reflective material that, after easily being rolled over and attached to rooftops, cuts down on buildings’ cooling costs and energy usage. Logically, the reflecting material also helps cut back on the heat island effect. Cool roof products are becoming increasingly popular: in the past three years, for example, Carlisle has rolled out more than 400,000 square feet of TPO.

Carlisle specializes in a variety of roofing needs: For cooler climates, where it isn’t necessarily beneficial to reflect heat, darker heat absorbing membranes are used on rooftops. The company also designs unique skylights and a variety of roof gardens.

With the ease of application, the environmental benefit and the aesthetic appeal of these roofing systems, it won’t be a surprise if bland dark roofs are soon a thing of the past.

The great mosque of Djenne looms over one of the larger marketplaces in Mali, Africa. On the flat brown flood planes, mud walls up to 24 inches thick bear the weight of what looks like a giant sand castle. Protruding from the structure are carefully placed wooden poles and ostrich eggs adorn the tips of the spires at the mosque entrance.

A mosque has stood in the spot since the 13^th century. This is quite a feat since the incredible structure is made from nothing more than sun-baked mud bricks and mud. The original mud used for the mosque fell to the ground centuries ago and the current structure has stood in its place since 1906, but the size and overall strength of the building proves that the right mixture of sand, water, straw and gravel has immense potential as a building material.

Integrity Block has developed a modern version of the ancient mudbrick that is perfect for today’s architectural and landscape design. The company specializes in manufacturing green building alternatives and, as proudly stated on their website, “has developed the first green replacement for concrete blocks.”

The Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, is the largest mud brick building in the world.

Designing a brick takes more than just throwing a few ingredients together. It took the company two years of research and development before finding the perfect balance which allowed for easy production, and structural integrity.

Unlike the bricks used in mud huts and mosques that need annual replacement or patching up, the Integrity Block has the same strength and durability of cement.

Not only that, but the blocks are in fact a step up from the cement blocks: They are much easier to produce than traditional bricks, requiring less than half the energy of concrete production. It is also made up of 50% pre-recycled content and can generate LEED credits. The LEED (standing for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system, rates buildings at a variety of levels depending on their environmental performance. The higher a building’s rating, the easier a building is to lease or sell since this also implies that the building uses less energy for such tasks as heating, cooling and lighting. More information on specific LEED credits here.

Integrity Blocks improve a home’s temperature regulations, for example, by storing heat during the day (keeping the indoors cool) and releasing the stored heat at night. They are also excellent barriers against outdoor noise.

Sometimes it’s good to go back to the basics.

Coal, a globally used fuel source, is also the reason behind most of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. GreatPoint Energy has developed an alternative method to getting the energy from coal with reduced manufacturing cost, almost no emissions, and less complicated production steps.

Traditional methane production facilities house numerous components: First, coal is burned into syngas (a carbon monoxide and hydrogen mix) inside a gasifier at 2,500F. Other machines feed oxygen into the gasifies to facilitate the process. The resulting syngas is then placed into a reactor where it is transformed into methane. GreatPoint facilities do not require the extra step in the reactor since the whole production to create their patented “bluegas” occurs in the gasifier.

GreatPoint describes the general methanation process on their homepage: “The first step in the “bluegas” process is to feed the coal or biomass and the catalyst into the methanation reactor. Inside the reactor, pressurized steam is injected to “fluidize” the mixture and ensure constant contact between the catalyst and the carbon particles. In this environment the catalyst facilitates multiple chemical reactions between the carbon and the steam on the surface of the coal or biomass. These reactions catalyzed in a single reactor generate a mixture predominately composed of methane and CO2.” The end result of the process yields 99.5% pure methane.

More details and a diagram of the process are found here.

The catalyst is the key behind the whole process: By using a catalyst to start the coal-gasification system, the temperatures needed to burn the methane out of the coal are reduced. In fact, the natural heat released by the methanation of syngas is sufficient. This is a benefit for facilities who may want to adopt GreatPoint’s methane production process since cheaper reactor components (not needing to withstand so much heat) are no problem. An added benefit is that less expensive feedstocks like tar sands and petroleum coke produce pipeline grade methane in these unique conditions.

This low cost, clean fuel source is an environmentally friendly alternative. In fact, blugas production facilities recover almost all the contaminants and “, roughly half the carbon in the coal is captured as a pure CO2 stream suitable for sequestration,” explains GreatPoint.

The Cambridge, Massachusettes company’s most recent success story involves sealing a deal with the Datang Huayin Electric Power Company, Ltd. to build and operate a natural gas production facility in Guangdong Province, China capable of processing 1500 tons of feedstock daily. Not a bad start.

Coal is still easily accessible and incredibly cheap-especially when compared to natural gas drilling. In a 2007 in-depth article written by Technology Review, CEO Andrew Perlman is quoted saying that “We can take coal out of the ground and put it in a natural-gas pipeline for less than the cost of new natural-gas drilling and exploration activities.” Clearly, methane is an attractive fuel source. If not for the environemntal benefit, then for the price.

COAL RESERVES IN THE UNITED STATES

Approximately 1,146 million tons of coal was mined in the USA in 2007, enough to provide about 23 quadrillion BTUs, or (coincidentally) 23% of the total energy consumed in the USA in that year. One “short” (metric) ton of coal, on average, contains 20 million BTUs of energy, or nearly 6.0 megawatt-hours. This figure must be adjusted downwards when calculating actual megawatt-hours recoverable from coal due to efficiency losses. (Source: Energy Information Administration)

Up to 300 million people die from malaria every year. A female mosquito, riddled with malaria parasites, is responsible for transmitting the disease. The malaria parasites are carried in the mosquito’s saliva, which mingles with a human’s blood once they are bitten. Now in the blood stream, malaria parasites travel to the liver and multiply until they burst out of the liver cells and migrate into red blood cells. The infected individual is overrun with symptoms, ranging from, vomiting, convulsions, anemia, renal failure, tingling skin to coma and ultimately death. The waves of fever typical of malaria correlate with the parasites exploding out of the bulging infected red-blood-cells within the host’s body. This terrible disease is one of the most common in the world.

Medication does exist, but the sad irony is that the poorer countries with the highest concentration of malaria can not afford these artemisinin-based drugs. Artemisinin, the only real effective malaria medication, is derived from wormwood. Its production is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process. With this in mind, Amyris Biotechnologies set out to engineer a microorganism to produce the drug. In a sense, Amyris is now using one microbe to kill another.

MALARIA ENDEMIC COUNTRIES 2003

In most countries with endemic malaria, the disease risk is limited to certain areas.

A visit to Amyris’ homepage gives readers more of an insight to how much potential there is with biotechnology: “Amyris Biotechnologies is translating the promise of synthetic biology into solutions for real-world problems. Building on advances in molecular, cell and systems biology, we are engineering microbes capable of producing high-value compounds to address major global health and energy challenges. We are employing these living chemical factories to produce novel pharmaceuticals, renewable fuels, and specialty chemicals.”

Amyris has found a way to genetically manipulate microorganisms into producing artemisinin. Amyris succeeded in developing these living medicine factories with the help of U.C Berkeley labs, the Institute for One World Health and with a $ 42 million grant provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Amyris is not only dedicated to fighting malaria, however. Another major venture involves the “development of a fermentation process that uses custom-designed microbes to renewably produce second-generation, high-performance biofuels that are cost-effective and compatible with current automotive and distribution technologies,” explains Amyris.  These gas and diesel substitutes are produced with the same feedstocks that are used to make ethanol, such as sugar cane.

Amyris has received worldwide recognition for their innovative ideas: In 2005, Amyris Biotechnologies was named a winner at the World Technology Network. In 2008, history repeated itself when Amyris had the honor of being voted the biofuel category winner at GoingGreen 2008.

Oil drips to the ground at the neighborhood filling station-from cars and trucks passing through and from the rows of storage tanks. The spill sits on the cement innocently enough, but takes on a life of its own when rain pummels to the ground. With the force of rain, the oil snakes its way towards the storm drain and slithers towards the coast. There it joins the other pollutants that arrive by leaching into rivers flowing into the ocean. Water pollution is a huge issue: In fact, the annual global petroleum pollution alone, is comparable to the Exxon Valdez spilling 5 times over!

Water pollution comes in many forms including industrial or sewage pollution. But nonpoint source pollution (NPS)-pollution from a variety of sources-is much harder to track. In the U.S, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains that “NPS pollution is caused by rainfall or snowmelt moving over and through the ground. As the runoff moves, it picks up and carries away natural and human-made pollutants, finally depositing them into lakes, rivers, wetlands, coastal waters, and even our underground sources of drinking water.”

Vacationers who have come to find their favorite surfing spot inaccessible because of unhealthy toxicity levels in the water leave disappointed, while wells supplying water to cities are often closed due to chemical leaks into the groundwater. ABtech Industries, Inc, a technology firm focusing on solving the issue of water pollutants, has figured out a solution by developing products that absorb the many harmful pollutants that find their way to our water supplies and beaches. AbTech explains that their products are “based on polymer technologies capable of removing hydrocarbons, bacterial pathogens, sediment and other foreign elements from still (ponds, lakes and marinas) or flowing water (curbside drains, pipe outflows, rivers and oceans).”

AbTech’s Smart Sponge®, for example, fully encapsulates oil, soaking it up so effectively that it won’t leak out. A surprising fact is that the absorbed oils and pollutants don’t stay liquid once absorbed. The Sponge transforms the pollutants into a solid form which make the recycling process much simpler. The technology is ideal for use in Marinas, where boaters would discharge clean water from bilge pumps with the use of the sponge and AbTech is proud to say that the “proprietary polymer technology unique in its ability to effectively remove, absorb and retain hydrocarbons from flowing or pooled water and is the only company to combine an anti- microbial agent in a polymer-based filter to destroy bacteria at the street level.” The Smart Sponge can simply be placed at storm drain entrances to filter out the harmful bacteria and oils before they even get a chance to surprise unsuspecting beachgoers.

AbTech goes on explaining that their lab tests prove that the Smart Sponge is able to absorb up to 5 times its own weight, and will remove oil from water regardless of the amount. This means that even the thin sheen of oils floating on top of water can be absorbed without a problem.

Costing almost $1000 a piece, a Smart Sponge is a worthy investment for cleaner and healthier water. A sponge is more appealing than the complicated ultraviolet or chlorine treatments (also expensive options) and is even reusable (up to a point).

It isn’t a surprise that AbTech was named the winner of the water management category at the 2008 GoingGreen event. Even the EPA lists the Smart Sponge Technology as a Best Management Practice and it would be government money put to good use.

 Time to suck up the oil that’s spit into our waters.

T. Boone Pickens falls under a variety of descriptions depending on who you talk to: He is known as a corporate marauder to some, and an incredible businessman to others. Born in 1928 and growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, Pickens went on to found Mesa Petroleum which eventually became the largest independent oil and gas producer in the United States. He became famous for predicting the potential value of a company and buying them out to make a profit in the long run. Now, with a net worth of around 3 billion, it is hard to argue against the fact that T Boone Pickens knows an opportunity when he sees one.

Blessed with incredible foresight, it is no surprise that Pickens’ was one of the first philanthropists interested in greener fuel sources. In 1997, he formed the Pickens Fuel Corp, which advertised natural gas as the best fuel for your vehicle because of the lower pollution emitted and the fact that it is a domestic product.

His newest venture involves the PickensPlan, with the fundamental idea that petroleum is no longer a viable resource. It seems that Pickens has done a complete 180 since his earlier oil days. The PickensPlan focuses on switching to environmentally friendly resources with the goal of ultimately eliminating our dependence on foreign oil.

Pickens makes his idea clear: With regards to oil spending “America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day, I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil. On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we’re organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.”

The plan focuses on every aspect of the fuel crisis-including how it affects the U.S economy, environment and national security. The basic drive behind the plan, as with anything, is money. Right now the U.S imports 70% of the much needed oil used its citizens. PickensPlan explains that “at current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone - that’s four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.” The website goes on to explain that we might as well kiss cheap oil prices goodbye since the supply peaked in 2005 and prices are going nowhere but up. This should be enough of an incentive for most to continue reading.

The U.S has an incredible amount of wind-power at its disposal. In fact, “North Dakota alone has the potential to provide power for more than a quarter of the country,” as written on the website to prove their point. The plan is a feasible one, even if it is incredibly expensive. Global wind power would proved enough power for everyone on the planet 7 times over, and the United States’ great plains area, in the center of the country, has the highest concentration of winds in the world. A one time cost of 1trillion dollars would provide electricity for 20% of the nation through the power of wind farms. These farms would also provide for more job opportunities in rural areas where unemployment rates are known to be high, and provide homes with a clean energy from an abundant resource.

There is no question that Pickens will benefit from this plan, but one has to think whether the rest of the nation will too. More details, estimates and charts are available at PickensPlan.com

Scuttling in the crevices of every home are a variety of pests that seem to thrive on making the human inhabitants miserable. One of the most hated pests are cockroaches, which are almost impossible to eliminate. It does not matter how clean a house is; one inseminated female roach can explode into an infestation within a matter of weeks. Miniscule amounts of food, such as splattered grease, sugar that lands behind the cupboard or even glue is enough to keep the population going. Trails of ants crawling throughout the house, a single chirping cricket serenading you in the middle of the night and slugs eating up your prized garden are no fun either.

Borates have long been used as a safer alternative to highly volatile, synthetic chemical pesticides (Photo: Nisus Corporation)

Pesticides are the easiest solution, but are not a pleasant option to users concerned about their pets or the birds that make the outdoors so enjoyable. This is where the Nisus Corporation comes into play. Based in Tennessee, Nisus manufactures a variety of environmentally friendly pest control products.

Their granular bait product, sold under the name “Niban”, works unlike other pesticides because it isn’t a real poison. Compared to table salt in toxicity, Niban actually works by altering an insect’s digestive process. After insects ingest Niban, they are unable to absorb the nutrients from the delicious glue, wood or table scraps they had been feasting on before, and starve to death. Humans, pets, birds, fish and amphibians who accidentally eat some of the granules are not affected.

The main ingredient in Niban is Boron, formulated with other ingredients that attract pests. According to Nisus, “Niban poses very low impact to the environment…since boron is already found in virtually all ecosystems…as the Niban granules dissolve, the borates simply become part of the background levels of boron [which is an essential micronutrient for plants and animals].”

Just because the bait is environmentally friendly, does not make it less effective: The Niban Jug just needs a quick shake to deposit the granules on the ground while you walk the perimeter of the building. Smaller granules are available for placement inside the smaller nooks and crannies inside the home. These granules can handle up to 4 inches of rain, are not prone to mold, and don’t degrade with exposure to the sun.

The ominous sound of the shaking Niban jug , should send pests running for the hills.

On a side note: Nisus also developed termiticides made with their patented Borate solution for pre-treatment of building areas. This is a greener alternative and provides long term protection against termites.