Eco Ahead

Ahmedabad, Oct 15 (IANS) School students should be taught how to use natural resources so that they don’t run out, Ahmedabad-based Consumer Education and Research Centre (CERC) said here Wednesday.

CERC called on the government to implement the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) guidelines on ‘Education for Sustainable Consumption in Formal Education’.

“The coordinated day of action has been organised by the global consumer movement as a means of empowering consumers to make responsible decisions from a young age,” said Pritee Shah, senior director-CERC and editor of CERC-run Insight magazine.

“Educating the young generation and pushing them into action is the challenge before us today. All-round effort needs to be made to prepare education material that would appeal to this generation, and should be easily accessible. We at CERC together with GTZ (a German technical cooperation agency) are developing fun-to-read booklets, animation films and posters for the young. We hope this material make them think and act,” Shah said.

UNEP has outlined crucial social development and environmental aspects in its Education for Sustainable Consumption programme.

Washington, Oct 15 (IANS) A flexible new approach on production of alternative fuels from solid and agricultural wastes could supply a fifth of fuels required in transportation in US annually, says a new study.

The method offers a potential solution to problems that might be created by increasing production of ethanol with conventional methods, which use corn grain as a feedstock.

Boosting ethanol output with conventional methods would require additional crops and heavy fertiliser use, increasing runoff into waterways and threatening ecosystems, said a Purdue University press release.

The new concept, however, which Purdue researchers call a flexible carbon-to-liquid fuel process, would require no additional crops and use primarily wastes as the feedstock, said Fu Zhao, a Purdue assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

“This technique is more flexible than conventional methods because we can process a wider range of very different feedstocks and, at the same time, we can generate a wider range of end products - not just gasoline and diesel but ethanol and hydrogen. Or we could generate electricity directly from the gas produced,” he said.

The method also would be immune to the market fluctuations of corn and other crops and less affected by disturbances such as feedstock supply shocks and market demand changes. The method also could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50 percent compared with petroleum-derived gasoline.

The analysis suggested that it is possible to replace 15 percent to 20 percent of transportation fuels consumed daily in US with liquids derived from this flexible process. These estimates are based on the present consumption level, which is about 390 million gallons per day, he said.

These findings were presented during the VIth Global Conference on Sustainable Product Development and Life Cycle Engineering in Busan, South Korea.

London, Oct 15 (IANS) A British-designed electronic newspaper - made out of plastic and no larger than a table mat - is to hit the market next year as an alternative to, well, paper itself, according to a report Wednesday.

The new kind of newspaper has been conceived by Cambridge University scientists, who pioneered the idea of replacing silicon chips with plastic ones, and is being developed by Plastic Logic, a company based in Dresden, Germany.

“The device looks just like a table mat and it’s as light as a magazine. But onto it you can download hundreds of newspapers and - at the touch of a button - browse through them quite safely, without elbowing anyone ever again [in a crowded commuter train],” the BBC reported on its website.

The plastic microchips are produced in a top security ‘clean room’ at the Plastic Logic factory, which opened last month as the world’s first commercial-scale plastic electronics manufacturing plant.

With every part of the product - from the screen to the electronics - made of plastic, the newspaper is described by engineer Dean Baker as “very robust”.

Baker said the plastic newspaper could help address the problem of waste associated with traditional newspapers.

“There’s a huge amount of waste. We have paper being distributed all over the country which is consumed on that day and then discarded into the bin. This doesn’t need to be the case.

“All of that contact could be transmitted electronically and stored on a single e-reader, with the same visual appeal as paper,” Baker said.

The plastic newspaper is expected to hit the high streets next year, the BBC said.

Washington, Oct 17 (IANS) A collection of microbes known as Bio-Tiger that can be used for environmental clean-up and addressing energy needs has been developed by researchers.

“DOE (US Department of Energy) had originally funded us to work with our Polish counterparts to develop a microbe-based method for cleaning up oil-contaminated soils,” explained Robin Brigmon, Savannah River National Lab (SRNL) engineer.

From that lagoon, they identified microbes that could break down the oil to carbon dioxide and other non-hazardous products. “The project was a great success,” Brigmon said. “The lagoon now has been cleaned up, and deer now can be seen grazing on it.”

Recent efforts have shown that Bio-Tiger naturally produces chemicals that may have other industrial uses as well. For example, Bio-Tiger can be applied directly for cleaning up oil residues on surfaces such as concrete slabs and building foundations.

Besides environmental cleanup uses, Bio-Tiger has recently been shown to be highly effective for increasing oil recovery from oil sands without added chemicals, according to a SRNL press release.

Oil sands (tar sands) are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous material. Currently, oil sands represent about 40 percent of Canada’s oil production. Approximately 20 percent of US crude and refined products come from Canada, much of it being from tar sands.

Oil sands are mined and processed to generate oil similar to that pumped from conventional wells, but extracting oil from these sands is more complex and requires more energy than standard oil recovery.

Current methods require multiple steps including heating, mechanical mixing, and chemical additions to extract hydrocarbons from the oil sands.

There have been concerns about the environmental impact of these operations, including concerns about the amount of water used in the process, energy cost to operate the systems.

An enhanced oil recovery process using Bio-Tiger could provide a means to maximise capacity and minimise environmental impact, while remaining cost effective.