#Green Technology

[retrocybercore]

[pearlieprincess]

can you make green technology themed stamps please? ^_^

〰️₊⌨️⊹🦠GREEN TECHNOLOGY STAMPS📲💻

Hope u enjoy =^•_•^=

📞Free to use | Stamp Template

[reasonsforhope]

"Clothing tags, travel cards, hotel room key cards, parcel labels … a whole host of components in supply chains of everything from cars to clothes. What do they have in common? RFID tags.  

Every RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag contains a microchip and a tiny metal strip of an antenna. A cool 18bn of these are made – and disposed of – each year. And with demands for product traceability increasing, ironically in part because of concerns for the social and environmental health of the supply chain, that’s set to soar. 

And guess where most of these tags end up? Yup, landfill – adding to the burgeoning volumes of e-waste polluting our soils, rivers and skies. It’s a sorry tale, but it’s one in which two young graduates of Imperial College London and Royal College of Art are putting a great big green twist. Under the name of PulpaTronics, Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro reckon they’ve hit on a beguilingly simple sounding solution: make the tags out of paper. No plastic, no chips, no metal strips. Just paper, pure and … simple … ? Well, not quite, as we shall see. 

The apparent simplicity is achieved by some pretty cutting-edge technical innovation, aimed at stripping away both the metal antennae and the chips. If you can get rid of those, as Biro explains, you solve the e-waste problem at a stroke. But getting rid of things isn’t the typical approach to technical solutions, he adds. “I read a paper in Nature that set out how humans have a bias for solving problems through addition – by adding something new, rather than removing complexity, even if that’s the best approach.”   

And adding stuff to a world already stuffed, as it were, can create more problems than it solves. “So that became one of the guiding principles of PulpaTronics”, he says: stripping things down “to the bare minimum, where they are still functional, but have as low an environmental impact as possible”.  

...how did they achieve this magical simplification? The answer lies in lasers: these turn the paper into a conductive material, Biro explains, printing a pattern on the surface that can be ‘read’ by a scanner, rather like a QR code. It sounds like frontier technology, but it works, and PulpaTronics have patents pending to protect it. 

The resulting tag comes in two forms: in one, there is still a microchip, so that it can be read by existing scanners of the sort common within retailers, for example. The more advanced version does away with the chip altogether. This will need a different kind of scanner, currently in development, which PulpaTronics envisages issuing licences for others to manufacture. 

Crucially, the cost of both versions is significantly cheaper than existing RFID kit – making this a highly viable proposition. Then there are the carbon savings: up to 70% for the chipless version – so a no-brainer from a sustainability viewpoint too. All the same, industry interest was slow to start with but when PulpaTronics won a coveted Dezeen magazine award in late 2023, it snowballed, says So. Big brands such as UPS, DHL, Marks & Spencer and Decathlon came calling. “We were just bombarded.” Brands were fascinated by the innovation, she says, but even more by the price point, “because, like any business, they knew that green products can’t come with a premium”."

-via Positive.News, April 29, 2024

--

Note: I know it's still in the very early stages, but this is such a relief to see in the context of the environmental and human rights catastrophes associated with lithium mining and mining for rare earth metals, and the way that EVs and other green infrastructure are massively increasing the demand for those materials.

I'll take a future with paper-based, more humane alternatives for sure! Fingers crossed this keeps developing and develops well (and quickly).

[wachinyeya]

Indian IT Worker Designs New Eco-Friendly Sewage Treatment Method with the Sacred Cow as His Inspiration https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/indian-it-worker-designs-new-eco-friendly-sewage-treatment-method-with-the-sacred-cow-as-his-inspiration/

Tharun Kumar began to imagine ways to build a better sewage treatment method that could produce good quality water without chemicals.

In 2017, Kumar started ECOSTP with the chambered stomach of the cow as his “bovine inspiration.”

Typical wastewater plants use aerobic bacteria, or metabolism with oxygen, to break down sewage, but this requires the ventilation system that continually runs on energy. Regular sewage treatment also tends to use chemicals, and has the presence of a full-time employee. Kumar has eliminated almost all of these drawbacks.

At the base of the ECOSTP septic tank is a layer of cow dung that provides the bacterial workers. With the water moving via gravity, it enters the second bacterial chamber before passing into the third space which is a filter of sand and gravel. The fourth chamber lies under a garden of select vascular plants which removes suspended solids, pathogens, nitrogen, and phosphorus, the latter two going to feed the plants.

The resulting water is graded by health inspectors as good quality for toilet water and gardening applications. With the aid of a grant from the US-based Biomimicry Solutions, ECOSTP now has 325 clients across 22 states in India, and their septic tanks are unmanned and unpowered, saving thousands in running costs.

“We are proud to have reclaimed 2 billion liters of sewage so far without power or chemicals.”

ECOSTP is now seeing if it’s possible to identify anaerobic bacteria that can remove the harmful compounds of industrial effluent.

[netscapenavigator-official]

People all of a sudden asking EV and Green Tech journalists to stop bringing politics into their work in the wake of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute………

Like… have you all been living under a rock for the past decade?? I want you to point to one singular year, in the past 10+ years, across the entire fourth EV Era, where environmentalism and zero-emission vehicles haven’t been a political hot topic.

[reportsofagrandfuture]

Fully fuel-free solar oven

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Donald Trump’s upending of the global economy has raised fears that climate action could emerge as a casualty of the trade war.

In the week that has followed “liberation day”, economic experts have warned that the swathe of tariffs could trigger a global economic recession, with far-reaching consequences for investors – including those behind the green energy projects needed to meet climate goals.

Fears of a prolonged global recession have also tanked oil and gas prices, making it cheaper to pollute and more difficult to justify investment in clean alternatives such as electric vehicles and low-carbon heating to financially hard-hit households.

But chief among the concerns is Trump’s decision to level his most aggressive trade tariffs against China – the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies – which threatens to throttle green investment in the US, the world’s second-largest carbon-emitter.

The US is expected to lag farther behind the rest of the world in developing clean power technologies by cutting off its access to cheap, clean energy tech developed in China. This is a fresh blow to green energy developers in the US, still reeling from the Trump administration’s vow to roll back the Biden era’s green incentives.

Leslie Abrahams, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, said the tariffs would probably hinder the rollout of clean energy in the US and push the country to the margins of the global market.

Specifically, they are expected to drive up the price of developing clean power, because to date the US has been heavily reliant on importing clean power technologies. “And not just imports of the final goods. Even the manufacturing that we do in the United States relies on imported components,” she said.

The US government’s goal to develop its manufacturing base by opening new factories could make these components available domestically, but it is likely to take time. It will also come at considerable cost, because the materials typically imported to build these factories – cement, steel, aluminium – will be subject to tariffs too, Abrahams said.

“At the same time there are broader, global economic implications that might make it difficult to access inexpensive capital to build,” she added. Investors who had previously shown an interest in the US under the green-friendly Biden administration are likely to balk at the aggressively anti-green messages from the White House.

Abrahams said this would mean a weaker appetite for investment in rolling out green projects across the US, and in the research and development of early-stage clean technologies of the future. This is likely to have long-term implications for the US position in the global green energy market, meaning it will “cede some of our potential market share abroad”, Abrahams added.

It’s important to distinguish between the US and the rest of the world, according to Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.

“The more the US cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will get on with things and the US will be left behind. This is a tragedy for the clean energy industry in the US, but for everyone else there are opportunities,” he said.

Analysis by the climate campaign group 350.org has found that despite rising costs and falling green investment in the US, Trump’s trade war will not affect the energy transition and renewables trade globally.

One senior executive at a big European renewable energy company said developers were likely to press on with existing US projects but in future would probablyinvest in other markets.

“So we won’t be doing less, we’ll just be going somewhere else,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “There is no shortage of demand for clean energy projects globally, so we’re not scaling back our ambitions. And excluding the US could make stretched supply chains easier to manage.”

Countries likely to benefit from the fresh attention of renewable energy investors include burgeoning markets in south-east Asia, where fossil fuel reliance remains high and demand for energy is rocketing. Australia and Brazil have also emerged as countries that stand to gain.

The challenge for governments hoping to seize the opportunity provided by the US green retreat will be to assure rattled investors that they offer a safe place to invest in the climate agenda.

Although the green investment slowdown may be largely limited to the US, this still poses concerns for global climate progress, according to Marina Domingues, the head of new energies for the consultancy Rystad Energy.

“The US is a huge emitter country. So everything the US does still really matters to the global energy transition and how we account for CO2,” she said. The US is the second most polluting country in the world, behind China, which produces almost three times its carbon emissions. But the US’s green retreat comes at a time when the country was planning to substantially increase its domestic energy demand.

After years of relatively steady energy demand, Rystad predicts a 10% growth in US electricity consumption from a boom in AI datacentres alone. The economy is also likely to require more energy to power an increase in domestic manufacturing as imports from China dwindle.

In the absence of a growing energy industry, this is likely to come from fossil fuels, meaning growing climate emissions. The US is expected to make use of its abundance of shale gas, but it is planning to use more coal in the future too.

In the same week that Trump set out his tariffs, he signed four executive orders aimed at preventing the US from phasing out coal, in what climate campaigners at 350.org described as an “abuse of power”.

Anne Jellema, the group’s executive director, said: “President Trump’s latest attempt to force-feed coal to the US is a dangerous fantasy that endangers our health, our economy and our future.”

[thoughtportal]

I cannot recommend this podcast interview with Cory Docotorow enough. It's about so much more than green tech and enshittification. anyone who uses the internet should listen.

[etherealkins]

( X / X / X ) ( X / 🐍 / X ) ( X / X / X )

boombox (phighting) stimboard with themes of digital stuff and white fur.

requested by: anon | made by: crowley

[iglovequotes]

Illuminating Bacvice: Solar Flashing Floats on Safety Beach Net

[charyou-tree]

This is a BIG DEAL.

Cement production is one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions that doesn't directly involve burning fossil fuels. Sure, making cement uses a lot of energy, but theoretically that energy could come from renewable sources that don't emit CO2. Even if it did though, the process of making cement basically involves baking limestone until CO2 and water are driven out of it, creating a substance called "clinker" that is ground down into cement powder. So, making new cement from limestone always emits a lot of CO2, no matter what energy source you use.

This research basically showed that you can use old crushed up concrete waste in place of the flux that is usually used in smelting/recycling steel. Flux creates a glassy slag on top of the molten steel that captures impurities and protects the metal from oxygen while its molten hot. Using concrete as flux basically re-bakes the concrete back into clinker, which can then be used to create more cement and new concrete, while not producing any new CO2 emissions because you're basically baking the CO2 that reacted with the cement to make concrete back out of it. Its like how burning wood doesn't increase the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, because the carbon in the tree originally came from the air. Its only digging fossilized carbon out of the ground and adding it into the air that's the problem.

This is a huge step towards decarbonizing our building materials, and it doesn't involve any fancy new technologies, or speculative processes. This could be done today in steel mills that currently exist, they'd just have to switch flux sources and start saving the slag.

What a brilliant piece of industrial research!

[headsupb2b]

Renewable Energy: Powering a Sustainable Future

#Renewable #energy is the cornerstone of a sustainable future, offering a path to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal power harness the natural forces of the Earth to generate electricity without emitting harmful greenhouse gases. Unlike finite fossil fuels, these resources are abundant and renewable, ensuring long-term energy security.

The shift to renewable energy is essential not only for environmental reasons but also for economic growth. Investing in clean energy technologies creates jobs, drives innovation, and fosters energy independence. As countries worldwide set ambitious targets for carbon neutrality, the adoption of renewable energy is accelerating, with solar and wind power leading the charge.

However, challenges remain. The intermittent nature of some renewable sources, like solar and wind, requires advancements in energy storage and grid infrastructure. Despite these challenges, the future of energy is undoubtedly green. By continuing to invest in renewable energy, we can power a sustainable future that benefits both people and the planet.

Click to Check:- https://www.headsupb2b.com/renewable-energy

[mindblowingscience]

As kimchi has been drawing attention as a global healthy food trend, cabbage is one of the representative vegetables used as a main ingredient for manufacturing kimchi overseas. The annual global production of cabbage and other Brassica crops is reported to be 72 million tons, and more than 30% of them are estimated to be discarded during the manufacturing and distribution processes, causing environmental pollution as well as considerable waste disposal costs in the industry. In connection with this problem, Hae Choon Chang, President of the World Institute of Kimchi (WiKim), has announced that the institute has developed a bio-refactoring-based upcycling technology that can convert cabbage byproducts discarded as waste during the food manufacturing process into biodegradable plastics.

Continue Reading.

[netscapenavigator-official]

I just don’t see how anyone can be against decarbonizing the electricity grid.

Like, petroleum is an extremely useful chemical. I’m not even talking about fuels. I mean, petroleum has some extremely important uses in everyday items such as soaps, machinery greases, medications, etc. Petroleum is a finite chemical. One day, we will run out of it…

So like… wouldn’t it make sense if we used this very limited, very important chemical to its maximum potential while we still have it? Instead of… you know… burning it.

There is a big flaming ball of radiation in the sky that beams free energy down on this planet 24/7, and instead of trying to recapture it in the many ways it manifests… we’re just burning precious chemicals instead!

Instead of taking the free energy we’re given all day, every day… we’re burning a chemical which will be hell to replace once’s it’s gone… and we’re poisoning ourselves and flooding our homes in the process.

Like that’s so fucking stupid, man. We can recapture the suns energy via solar and wind. We can convert gravity’s passive forces into energy via hydropower. We can capture our own planet’s free radiation via geothermal. There are so many non-wasteful and gluttonous ways to power this planet, and yet… we’re still burning a chemical which we can’t directly, universally replace, while also poisoning ourselves and everything we love… just to do the same thing a spinny turbine or reverse LED can do. Wtf.