Unfill The Land Fill

After debuting the world’s first hybrid tugboat in 2009, the Port of Long Beach is partnering again with Foss Maritime Company to retrofit an existing tugboat with hybrid technology.

The ship called the Campbell Foss is a conventional dolphin tugboat assisting ships in the San Pedro Bay. It will be fitted with motor generators, batteries and control systems by Foss at one of their shipyards.  The retrofit should cut 1,340 tons of CO2 emissions and save 100,000 gallons of fuel per year.  Foss and the Port plan to introduce more hybrid tugs over the coming years and see more retrofits in the future.

The Port of Long Beach received a $1 million grant from the California Air Resources Board for the retrofit project.

via Press Release

Eco Factor: Self-reliant future cities with organic food production.

HP Skyline 2020, the online design competition asked students and professionals to collaborate and elucidate their visions and designs that would change the skyline thereby transforming the city itself has recently announced its winners. Encouraging designers to come up with fresh visual imaginations for the skyline discarding preconceived notions, competition saw over 300 entries giving a tough competition to one another. The National Winner of the competition Anto Gloren and Sayali Athale from Pune, India visualized socially connected, self-reliant future cities.

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City and the Skyline is an ecologically sustainable visual delight

It sounds like a good idea: Use electricity to compress air, stuff it in a tank and use the power expelled by the air’s release to power a vehicle. Seems like a good idea, certainly a lot easier to understand than nano-constructed cathodes on a lithium ion cell. And several companies have been actively attempting to build cars powered by conpressed air for quite some time. We at EcoGeek have been excited about them. The two biggest of these companies are MDI, a French company and Tata Motors, India’s largest car company.

But I have bad news. Today, here at EcoGeek, we are declaring the air car dead. It’s a question of physics, every conversion from one type of energy to another decreases efficiency. With battery electric vehicles, energy is converted into electricity and electricity is converted to motion. With air cars, energy is converted into electricity, electricity into compressed air and then compressed air into motion. Because of this, compressed air cars will always be less efficient than electric vehicles.

Even more problematic, no air car has ever been developed that can reach highway speeds and no air car has even been demonstrated to have a range of more than 10 kilometers. Promises were made, and with the entrance of Tata Motors to the fray, we thought there might be some truth to the claims.

But Tata’s goal of a 2008 release of an air car has, obviously, not been met. In 2009, Tata stated that the short range of the cars and issues with keeping them from freezing up (when compressed air is decompressed, temperatures drop dramatically) were proving them impractical.

So, I’m sorry my friends, we’re all going to have to be happy with the much more technologically confusing (though also much more efficient) battery electric vehicles. The good news is, with the Leaf and the Volt already hitting the road, that’s one technology that definitely isn’t vaporware.

More on the disadvantages of air cars.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a color filter that could boost the efficiency of LCDs, the power hog of all your gadgets, by more than 400 percent, and no, I didn’t add an extra zero there.

The researchers made an optical film that colors and polarizes the light that passes through an LCD, taking the place of the several layers of optical devices that typically serve the same function in an LCD.  Those multiple layers give rise to inefficiencies:  the best LCDs out today only emit eight percent of the light their backlights produce. The researchers found that the film allowed 36 percent of the light to make it through – a huge increase.

The color filter is made up of three ultra-thin layers — two layers of aluminum enclosing a layer of insulating material — and it only measures 200 nanometers thick.  The filter is etched with slits that produce different colors when illuminated by the backlight.  The slits are matched in scale to the wavelength of visible light and their length and distance apart determine the color produced.

This grating pattern is where the efficiency boost comes in.  In current LCDs, a polarizing filter absorbs half the light (the part with the wrong polarization).  The grating on the new filter doesn’t absorb the light with the wrong polarization, it instead reflects it back towards a mirror that flips some of its polarization, letting more light pass through the filter.

Researchers are trying to improve the efficiency further and are coming up with ways to mass produce the filters, like with roll-to-roll printers.

via MIT Tech Review

Archeologists say that digging through a civilization’s garbage can reveal more about peoples’ lifestyles than just about anything else. Take a minute to look through your trash — items you’re recycling as well as sending to the landfill — and learn how you can save money and the Earth’s resources at the same time.

Dryer Lint

Dryer lint represents the life of your expensive clothing being beaten and cooked out of them by an electric dryer. Save hundreds of dollars a year by drying your clothes on a clothesline instead; they’ll last much longer, and you’ll save on electricity and appliance costs, too.

Packaging

Too much packaging in your trash can be a sign that you need a smart-shopping intervention. Afterall, packaging costs money, which consumers pay for in the end. Buying in bulk and larger sizes is usually cheaper and saves resources. Sometimes shopping at “big box” stores can even be a greener choice.

The U.S. Coast Guard has set a goal of a net zero carbon footprint for housing at their Southwest Harbor Base in Maine.  The base is using solar panels, solar hot water heaters and now a wind turbine for their energy needs.  Efficiency-boosting retrofits will also be done, including new electrical systems and better insulation.

The newly-installed wind turbine sits atop a 70-foot tower and provides power to a duplex housing unit located on the base.  The upgrades and retrofits will begin in October.

The Coast Guard is looking to install wind power at other bases in Maine and around the country.  This push toward renewable energy is part of a bigger program by the Department of Defense to get 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2025.

As Capt. James McPherson of the Coast Guard said, “We want to be good stewards of the environment and we want to be careful how we spend tax payer dollars, but we also think the debate is over whether we need to go to alternative energy.”  Yes, it is.

via Inhabitat

The US Environmental Protection Agency has released its new vehicle fuel economy labels which are proposed to replace the current vehicle labels starting with the 2012 model year. The new labels provide consumers with additional information and a comparative ranking for new cars, with a comparison bar (not unlike what is now provided on appliances like refrigerators and clothes dryers) showing where the particular vehicle falls along the line from best to worst in fuel efficiency, greenhouse gasses, and other pollutants. Two alternative forms of labels (plus a third option which is not proposed for use at this time) are now open for public comment.

The new labels will help provide more useful comparison information for the increasing variety of vehicle options that are available. In addition to labels for gas and diesel vehicles, there will also now be labels for electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles, compressed natural gas vehicles, and flexible fuel vehicles. This will allow more direct comparisons between different vehicles with different kinds of fuels.

The proposed labels will still show the MPG, but will also include a fuel consumption value (which, instead of miles per gallon, is a better measure telling how many gallons of fuel per 100 miles are needed). Putting the extra information on the label is simple, and makes comparison of efficiency that much easier. But the familiar MPG number will still be there, too.

Information about greenhouse gas emissions and other exhaust pollutants would also be listed on these labels. Upstream emissions, such as the emissions from a power plant generating electricity to recharge a vehicle, would not be listed on the label, although a website with more information about these impacts would be included on the label.

The dual fuel label (for vehicles able to run on either gasoline or E85 ethanol) distills everything to a single number, rather than presenting alternatives for each fuel. Because a gallon of E85 ethanol has less energy than a gallon of gasoline, the miles per gallon number will be different.

But overall, we like the trend towards including more information on the labels. The new labels should address the gap in the current labels for dealing with ‘advanced technology vehicles’ and should help consumers evaluate the differences and the options that are now available.

EPA Press Release

via: GM-Volt.com and Treehugger

Eco Factor: Stone-walled house with mesmerizing sea view.

Designed by Greek firm Deca Architecture, the “Aloni” is a house designed as a dual response to the particular topography of the site and to the rural domestication techniques that in the past shaped the raw Cycladic Island landscape. Situated on the exotic Antiparos Island of Greek, this stunning home appears like it’s naturally camouflaged in its environment.

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Aloni: Stunning stone house naturally camouflaged with the environment

Texting while driving: Just the beginning of the distractions. (Flickr/Jason Weaver)

What high-tech feature would you want to see in your car (that’s not there now)? Autobytel.com asked that question as part of its “What’s Hot Now?” report, and the results indicate that people must get lost a lot-30 percent, by far the largest number, would like to have an in-dash GPS navigation device. Me, I can live without one.

In fact, just as cars are connecting big time, we’re electrifying them, and many of the early EVs will be kind of skimpy on personal tech, trying to increase battery life and increase range.

In the old days, the advertised list price of an entry-level car got you a really bare-bones vehicle with a “blanking plate” where the radio would have been. In England, even the heater was optional, which makes no sense in a country with perpetual “pissing down rain.” But now everybody wants cars loaded (try to find one without air conditioning) and CD players and iPod Connectivity are nearly standard. And that’s why it’s interesting that the second-most popular choice in the survey (24 percent) was “I can live without technology…”

American automakers, as well as foreign manufacturers selling in the US have a few full-size pickup trucks with diesel engines, but for years a small pickup with a diesel engine has not been available. That is set to change as Indian car maker Mahindra & Majindra has received EPA approval to sell its small pickups in the US.

The company is producing small pickups with a 2.2 liter common-rail turbo diesel engine that has 140 horsepower and gets up to 30 miles per gallon. Mahindra trucks have features including 6-speed automatic transmission, electronic stability control, traction control, active rollover mitigation, and 4 wheel ABS brakes. Although these are small pickups, the company claims a cargo capacity of 2,765 pounds (1,254 kilograms), which is greater than the cargo capacity of many other full-size pickups. The company has a two-door model, which has a 7.5 foot (2.29 meter) long cargo bed, as well as a four-door version of the pickup.

The price for the pickup is set to start around $22,000. The company expects to begin selling its trucks in the US by the end of the year, and plans to follow that with a diesel SUV in 2011 and a hybrid SUV in 2013.

via: 40mpg.org