This Device Pulls Water Out of Desert Air: A New Water Harvester Can Extract Water From Extremely Dry Air Using Only Solar Energy

Installing the water harvester (UC Berkeley)

by Emily Matchar, Smithsonian.com: 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-device-pulls-water-out-of-desert-air-180969398/

Droughts have been making headlines across the world in recent years, from the California water crisis to Cape Town’s severe water shortage, and research suggests 25 percent of the globe could eventually be left in permanent drought due to climate change. But what if you could simply pull water from the air?

That’s the premise of a new technology developed by University of California, Berkeley researchers. It’s a water harvester that can extract water from the air, even in extremely dry climates, using no energy other than ambient sunlight.

The key to the water harvester is a new class of materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These MOFs are solid but porous materials with enormous surface areas—an MOF the size of sugar cube can have the internal surface area as big as many football fields. This means they can absorb gases and liquids, and then release them quickly when heat is added.

“Certain MOFs as we showed here have an extraordinary ability to suck in water vapor from the atmosphere, but then at the same time do not hold on to the water molecules inside their pores too tightly so that it is easy to get the water out,” says Omar Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley, who led the research.

The researchers tested the harvester in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert town with a high of 40 percent humidity at night and 8 percent humidity during the day. Based on the trials using a zironium-based MOF, the researchers believe that the harvester could ultimately extract about 3 ounces of water per pound of MOF per day.

The harvester itself is a box inside a box. The inner box contains a bed of MOFs. The outer box is a two-foot transparent plastic cube. At night, the researchers left the top off the outer box to let air flow past the MOFs. In the day, they put the top back on so the box would be heated by the sun. The heat would pull the water out of the MOFs, where it would condense on the inner walls of the plastic cube before dripping to the bottom, where it could be collected.

“The most important aspect of this technology is that it is completely energy-passive,” says Eugene Kapustin, a Berkeley graduate student who worked on the research.

That is to say, it needs no energy besides the sun, making it environmentally friendly and accessible to people in places with limited electricity. The results of the trials were published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances.

The team needs to conduct more trials on the current models to figure out which factors, such as device size and where the MOF is placed within the device, most affect how much water can be harvested. They also hope to learn more about how specific climate conditions affect water yield. The next trial is planned for late summer in Death Valley, where the nighttime humidity can be as low as 25 percent.

image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/MQZyGQ7RZ_sZqpjHgdZsu9zGJyk=/1024x596/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/1e/e9/1ee9eabf-f492-4102-a593-6fde846e9d41/mof303crystals750.jpg

Microscope image of crystals of an MOF (UC Berkeley)

Yaghi has also developed a new aluminum-based MOF he says is 150 times cheaper and can capture twice as much water as the current MOFs. He and his team are designing a new water harvester that actively pulls air into the MOFs at high speed, thus delivering a much larger volume of water.

The team is now partnering with industry to test harvesters on an industrial scale. They also continue to search for newer, better and cheaper MOFs.

“I am very happy to see that more and more researchers around the world are joining our efforts in this regard,” Yaghi says.

The idea of sucking water out of the atmosphere is not new, says Eric Hoek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and editor of the journal npj Clean Water. It’s long been noted that when you run an air conditioner, water drips out—this is because the machine is cooling the air to the dew point, the temperature at which the air is saturated with water vapor and condensation occurs.

But creating water harvesters based on cooling technology is incredibly energy intense. In very dry climates, the dew point is below zero. Cooling the air to that temperature at any large scale is unfeasible.

“The real innovation [of Yaghi’s research] is a materials innovation,” Hoek says. “These materials [the MOFs] pull water out and more easily give it up.”

But the concept is challenging to scale, Hoek cautions, as the amount of water produced per square inch of harvester is relatively low, and thus a large harvester would potentially take up a huge amount of land.

“But maybe for a household or village scale it could be a very interesting way for someone off the grid to get fresh water,” Hoek says.

Yaghi imagines exactly that: a future where everyone without easy access to fresh water has a harvester in their yard.

“My vision is to achieve ‘personalized water,’ where people in water stressed regions have a device at home running on ambient solar, delivering the water that satisfies the basic needs of the individuals,” he says. “More than one third of the population in the world lives in water-stressed regions or is suffering from lack of clean water. The potential implications of this technology in transforming people’s lives and improving the global public health conditions are tremendous.”



Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-device-pulls-water-out-of-desert-air-180969398/#wcAVi3rVISdBXEqJ.99

Sustainable Oil From Algae: The Technology is Ready, But What About the Politics?

Worlds largest algae farm (Steve Back (used with permission)

by Bojan Tamburic, University of Technology, Sydney and Arunima Malik, University of Sydney, The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/sustainable-oil-from-algae-the-technology-is-ready-but-what-about-the-politics-44969

Ultimately, all of the oil we use to power our modern lives comes from living creatures such as algae - albeit ones that lived 3.5 billion years ago, before gradually morphing into fossil fuel.

But when we talk about algae biofuel, we mean the green, renewable and sustainable version, rather than traditional fossil crude oil. The main requirements for making algae biofuel are: lots of sunlight, plenty of space, and easy access to the sea. Australia is an algae gardener’s paradise.

To scale up any new technology, we need to consider not just whether we can make it, but also whether it is worth doing. Unfortunately, this involves rather dry concepts like productivity, efficiency, energy balance, and supply chain dynamics. These are critical to the development of business models for new technologies, but sadly they don’t translate easily into language that politicians are interested in.

In the absence of a benevolent billionaire, the private sector is unlikely to take on the risks involved in bringing these emerging technologies to scale. This means that some form of government support is critical. With renewable energy investment growing ever more politically contentious, what are the incentives for spending scarce taxpayer dollars on something like this?

Growth industry?

In our recent study, we put algae biofuels under the cost-benefit microscope, to assess the viability of developing a full-scale algae biofuel industry in Australia.

We used a technique called hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA), which aims to evaluate all of the effects throughout the myriad supply chains of an industry - even one as huge and complicated as the oil industry. The results are striking: a large-scale algae biofuel production facility would create almost 13,000 new jobs and A$4 billion worth of economic stimulus in Australia.

It would generate a total economic stimulus of 77 cents for every dollar invested, compared with just 13 cents in the dollar for traditional crude oil exploration and extraction (see table 1 in our paper). Commercial algae biofuel production is now a challenge of scale. The prize is phenomenal.

Algae ponds covering an area the size of Sydney could satisfy the entire crude oil demand of Australia, which would do wonders for both sustainability and security of supply - currently, 82% of crude oil is imported (see table 2 here).

We know that large-scale algae cultivation is achievable. The largest algae facility in the world is at Hutt Lagoon in Western Australia, where 740 hectares of algae ponds are used to produce the food supplement beta-carotene.

Meanwhile, the US federal government has been backing various large-scale algae projects, including Sapphire Energy’s expansion plans in New Mexico. However, the technological risks are significant, which is where hybrid LCA comes in.

Crunching the numbers

We used hybrid LCA to established a hypothetical case for assessing the viability of algae biofuel production in Australia. First, we identified a rural region in WA with the attributes needed to sustain an algae biofuel industry.

Next, we used cloud computing to develop a hybrid LCA model for this region. For the first time, we integrated multi-regional economic input-output data for Australia with engineering process data on algae biofuels.

This allowed us to quantify comprehensively the employment, economic stimulus, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of the algae biofuel supply chain, not just at the site itself, but throughout the supply chain.

Our analysis shows that algae biofuel facilities would create local rural jobs, while also activating sectors of the broader economy associated with equipment, trade and business services. Then there is the environmental benefit: our study shows that the combustion of 1 tonne of algae oil instead of traditional crude oil would prevent the emission of 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Investing in algae biofuel production is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable, and will provide a much-needed stimulus to the economy while creating much-needed quality jobs in rural areas. Surely every politician would be persuaded by at least something on this list.

Bojan Tamburic is Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Technology, Sydney.
Arunima Malik is PhD candidate at University of Sydney.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Solar and Battery Storage Already Cheaper Than Grid Power in Australia

Photovoltaic System, "Country-home" style (Wikipedia)

by Giles Parkinson, Renew Economy: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/solar-and-battery-storage-already-cheaper-than-grid-power-in-australia-66169

Australian consumers can already install significant amounts of rooftop solar and battery storage at a cost that is cheaper than electricity from the grid, and the uptake of these two technologies is likely to be “unstoppable.”

This forecast came from Kobad Bhavnagri, the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Australia, while outlining the reasons for the groups bullish forecasts, which predict 33GWh of battery storage and 37GW of solar PV in Australia by 2040.

“Solar and battery storage is simply unstoppable,” Bhavnagri said. He used this graph below to illustrate why.



Retail prices will continue to grow, but even if they remain flat, rooftop solar PV can already provide power to consumers in homes at well below the price of electricity.

Adding one kilowatt-hour of battery storage raises that cost slightly, but is still well below the cost of the grid-sourced power. Even 5kWh of battery storage can be installed and still costs are below that of the grid (these examples are taken in Queensland, with a 4kW rooftop solar system. A different  version of this graph, showing the costs in payback terms, is included in this story on how battery storage prices are already falling in Australia).

“Storage technologies as well as PV will be able to provide costumers with electricity at a cheaper cost than the grid,” Bhavnagri says. “And as storage gets cheaper even larger amounts of storage will be able to supply consumers at a cheaper cost to the grid. On economic fundamentals this technology is unstoppable.”

Bhavnagri and many others, including Hazelwood coal generator owner Engie and a study by the CSIRO, believe that 50% of all electricity demand will be supplied “behind the meter” by 2040.

Not that Bhavnagri is urging consumers to quit the grid altogether. He says this would not be rational. “We will still need the grid for different purposes,” he said, including for  back up capacity, support services, for the “Google operated” systems of appliances. “Grid and other companies have role in providing those services.”

But it will put huge pressure on networks to adapt their business models, and the way they operate the grid, and will almost inevitably result in a write-down of the grid’s value, which has been inflated by over-investment in recent years.

“The business model of the networks has to change. They have got to sell services instead of kilowatt-hours,” Bhavnagri said. “Much of what they built is redundant, resulting in excess capacity, and networks are overcharging and not delivering a commodity or service that is valuable to consumers.”

Solar Power Will Soon be as Cheap as Coal

Thanks to this wafer-thin technology (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

by Phil McKenna, Quartz: http://qz.com/386261/solar-power-will-soon-be-as-cheap-as-coal/

This post originally appeared at Ensia.

Inside a sprawling single-story office building in Bedford, Massachusetts, in a secret room known as the Growth Hall, the future of solar power is cooking at more than 2,500 °F. 

Behind closed doors and downturned blinds, custom-built ovens with ambitious names like “Fearless” and “Intrepid” are helping to perfect a new technique of making silicon wafers, the workhorse of today’s solar panels. If all goes well, the new method could cut the cost of solar power by more than 20% in the next few years.

“This humble wafer will allow solar to be as cheap as coal and will drastically change the way we consume energy,” says Frank van Mierlo, CEO of 1366 Technologies, the company behind the new method of wafer fabrication.

Secret rooms or not, these are exciting times in the world of renewable energy. Thanks to technological advances and a ramp-up in production over the decade, grid parity - the point at which sources of renewable energy such as solar and wind cost the same as electricity derived from burning fossil fuels - is quickly approaching.

In some cases it has already been achieved, and additional innovations waiting in the wings hold huge promise for driving costs even lower, ushering in an entirely new era for renewables. 

Solar surprise

In Jan. 2015, Saudi Arabian company ACWA Power surprised industry analysts when it won a bid to build a 200-megawatt solar power plant in Dubai that will be able to produce electricity for 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The price was less than the cost of electricity from natural gas or coal power plants, a first for a solar installation. Electricity from new natural gas and coal plants would cost an estimated 6.4 cents and 9.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, respectively, according to the US Energy Information Agency.

Technological advances, including photovoltaics that can convert higher percentages of sunlight into energy, have made solar panels more efficient. At the same time economies of scale have driven down their costs.

For much of the early 2000s, the price of a solar panel or module hovered around $4 per watt. At the time Martin Green, one of the world’s leading photovoltaic researchers, calculated the cost of every component, including the polycrystalline silicon ingots used in making silicon wafers, the protective glass on the outside of the module, and the silver used in the module’s wiring.

Green famously declared that so long as we rely on crystalline silicon for solar power, the price would likely never drop below $1/watt.

The future, Green and nearly everyone else in the field believed, was with thin films, solar modules that relied on materials other than silicon that required a fraction of the raw materials.

Then, from 2007 to 2014, the price of crystalline silicon modules dropped from $4 per watt to $0.50 per watt, all but ending the development of thin films.

The dramatic reduction in cost came from a wide number of incremental gains, says Mark Barineau, a solar analyst with Lux Research. Factors include a new, low-cost process for making polycrystalline silicon; thinner silicon wafers; thinner wires on the front of the module that block less sunlight and use less silver; less-expensive plastics instead of glass; and greater automation in manufacturing.

“There is a tenth of a percent of an efficiency gain here and cost reductions there that have added up to make solar very competitive,” Barineau says. 

25 cents per watt

“Getting below $1 [per watt] has exceeded my expectations,” Green says. “But now, I think it can get even lower.”

One likely candidate to get it there is 1366’s new method of wafer fabrication. The silicon wafers behind today’s solar panels are cut from large ingots of polycrystalline silicon.

The process is extremely inefficient, turning as much as half of the initial ingot into sawdust. 1366 takes a different approach, melting the silicon in specially built ovens and recasting it into thin wafers for less than half the cost per wafer or a 20% drop in the overall cost of a crystalline silicon module. 1366 hopes to begin mass production in 2016, according to van Mierlo.

Meanwhile, thin films, once thought to be the future of solar power, then crushed by low-cost crystalline silicon, could experience a renaissance. The recent record-setting low-cost bid for solar power in Dubai harnesses thin-film cadmium telluride solar modules made by US manufacturer First Solar.

The company not only hung on as the vast majority of thin film companies folded, but has consistently produced some of the least expensive modules by increasing the efficiency of their solar cells while scaling up production. The company now says it can manufacture solar modules for less than 40 cents per watt and anticipates further price reductions in coming years.

Ten years from now we could easily see the cost of solar modules dropping to 25 cents per watt, or roughly half their current cost, Green says. To reduce costs beyond that, the conversion efficiency of sunlight into electricity will have to increase substantially. To get there, other semiconducting materials will have to be stacked on top of existing solar cells to convert a wider spectrum of sunlight into electricity.

“If you can stack something on top of a silicon wafer it will be pretty much unbeatable,” Green says. Green and colleagues set a record for crystalline silicon solar module efficiency at 22.9% in 1996 that still holds today. Green doubts the efficiency of crystalline silicon alone will ever get much higher. With cell stacking, however, he says “the sky is the limit.” 

A matter of size

While solar power is just starting to reach grid parity, wind energy is already there. In 2014, the average worldwide price of onshore wind energy was the same as electricity from natural gas, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

As with solar, the credit goes to technological advances and volume increases. For wind, however, innovation has mainly been a matter of size. From 1981 to 2015 the average length of a wind turbine rotor blade has increased more than sixfold, from 9 meters to 60 meters, as the cost of wind energy has dropped by a factor of 10.

“Increasing the rotor size means you are capturing more energy, and that is the single most import driver in reducing the cost of wind energy,” says D. Todd Griffith of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Griffith recently oversaw the design and testing of several 100-meter-long blade models at Sandia. His group didn’t actually build the blades, but created detailed designs that they subsequently tested in computer models.

When the project started in 2009, the biggest blades in commercial operation were 60 meters long. Griffith and his colleagues wanted to see how far they could push the trend of ever-increasing blades before they ran into material limitations.

Their first design was an all-fiberglass blade that used a similar shape and materials as those found in relatively smaller commercial blades at the time. The result was a prohibitively heavy 126-ton blade that was so thin and long it would be susceptible to vibration in strong winds and gravitational strain.

The group made two subsequent designs employing stronger, lighter carbon fiber and a blade shape that was flat-backed instead of sharp-edged. The resulting 100-meter blade design was 60% lighter than the initial model.

Since the project began in 2009 the largest blades used in commercial offshore wind turbines have grown from 60 meters to roughly 80 meters with larger commercial prototypes now under development. “I fully expect to see 100 meter blades and beyond,” Griffith says.

As blades grow longer, the towers that elevate them are getting taller to catch more consistent, higher speed wind. And as towers grow taller, transportation costs are growing increasingly expensive. To counter the increased costs GE recently debuted a “space frame” tower, a steel lattice tower wrapped in fabric.

The new towers use roughly 30% less steel than conventional tube towers of the same height and can be delivered entirely in standard-size shipping containers for on-site assembly. The company recently received a $3.7 million grant from the US Department of Energy to develop similar space frame blades. 

Offshore innovation

Like crystalline silicon solar panels, however, existing wind technology will eventually run up against material limits. Another innovation on the horizon for wind is related instead to location. Wind farms are moving offshore in pursuit of greater wind resources and less land use conflict.

The farther offshore they go, the deeper the water, making the current method of fixing turbines to the seafloor prohibitively expensive. If the industry moves instead to floating support structures, today’s top-heavy wind turbine design will likely prove too unwieldy.

One potential solution is a vertical axis turbine, one where the main rotor shaft is set vertically, like a merry go round, rather than horizontally like a conventional wind turbine. The generator for such a turbine could be placed at sea level, giving the device a much lower center of gravity.

“There is a very good chance that some other type of turbine technology, very well vertical axis, will be the most cost effective in deep water,” Griffith says.

The past decade has yielded remarkable innovations in solar and wind technology, bringing improvements in efficiency and cost that in some cases have exceeded the most optimistic expectations. What the coming decade will bring remains unclear, but if history is any guide, the future of renewables looks extremely positive.

Scientists Discover How to Turn Toxic Trash Into Solar Panels: Lead From Old Car Batteries can be Recycled to Create Renewable Energy

(Photo: Armend Nimani/Getty Images)

by David Kirby, Take Part: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/08/19/scientists-turn-toxic-trash-solar-panels

David Kirby has been a professional journalist for 25 years. His third book, Death at Seaworld, was published in 2012. full bio 

 

Researchers at MIT have announced a novel technology to recycle lead from discarded car batteries and fashion it into long-lasting solar panels.

That means that after your old car battery dies, it may one day find new life, creating enough clean, renewable energy to power 30 households while also helping to reduce lead pollution. Exposure to lead has been shown to cause cognitive and behavioral problems in children.

Professors and graduate students at the university published their findings in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. They described how recent advances in solar technology allow for the use of a lead-based substance called perovskite to make solar cells.

“Amazingly, because the perovskite photovoltaic material takes the form of a thin film just half a micrometer thick, the team’s analysis shows that the lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households,” MIT said in a statement about the discovery.

The lead-based cells are nearly as efficient as silicon-based cells used commercially today, the authors said, and recycled lead is just as effective as newly smelted lead. “Cells made from perovskite have an efficiency of 19 to 20 percent,” said Po-Yen Chen, a graduate student of chemical engineering, who coauthored the paper.

Standard silicon-based cells have an efficiency ranging from 20 to 25 percent, Chen said. Using car batteries as a source of lead for the panels benefits the environment in at least three ways: It recycles the neurotoxic heavy metal and keeps it out of landfills, it reduces the need for mining and smelting, and it creates sustainable, nonpolluting energy.

Environmental contamination from car-battery lead is a “global pollutant” that is especially acute in the developing world,” according to the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit group that works to clean up highly polluted sites where children are most at risk.

Used car batteries are shipped to cities in the developing world. “Recycling and smelting operations are usually conducted in the open air, in densely populated urban areas, and often with few (if any) pollution controls [that] release lead contaminated compounds into the local environment in critical quantities,” the Blacksmith Institute stated on its website.

In the United States, car batteries are the primary source of lead pollution, according to a study conducted in 2003 by the Michigan-based Ecology Center and the Environmental Defense Fund.

The report found that the North American automobile industry contributes to the release or transfer of more than 300 million pounds of lead annually due to mining, smelting, manufacturing, recycling, and disposal, as well as normal vehicle use.

More than 200 million lead-acid batteries could be retired in the near future as automakers switch to new technologies, Chen said.

“When the perovskite cells came out three years ago, we saw they were made of lead, and we got the idea to use car batteries,” said Chen. “We were thinking of how to make the cells without harvesting more lead from the environment.”

A video of the team building a prototype solar panel from a car battery can be viewed here.

“From a general perspective, the concept is very appealing,” said Bob Gibson, a spokesperson for the Solar Electric Power Association. “A big question will be in what it will take to bring this to commercial production and at a price point where it can compete with silicon” solar panels.

Two companies are trying to commercially develop the battery-to-solar-cell technology, according to Chen. “The process is much simpler compared to silicon cells, and you don’t need an expansive facility,” he noted. “The process is expected to be cheaper, so the product would be too.”

Solar Streets: New Roadways May Ditch Asphalt for Energy-Generating Sunshine Collectors

by Kristina Bravo, TakePart: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/05/18/solar-roadways

Kristina Bravo is a Los Angeles-based writer. She is a fellow at TakePart. full bio
 

As a kid in the 1960s, before most people had even heard of solar power, Scott Brusaw imagined “electric roads.” 

Almost five decades and two government-funded prototypes later, the electrical engineer from Ohio is on his way to raising $1 million to start producing solar panels for our streets and highways.

Not to power the light, mind you - to function as streets and highways. Soon you may be driving on solar panels that power the buildings you’re passing by.

“We can use [photovoltaic panels] to create roads, parking lots, tarmacs - anything under the sun,” Brusaw says. “All of the current asphalt and concrete currently soaking up the sun can be covered with our technology to turn that sunlight into clean, renewable electricity.”

The biggest challenge Brusaw faced was engineering a case to protect the fragile solar cells. He began by researching the technology used in black boxes for airplanes and ended up using thick hardened glass.

It sounds fragile, but after impact resistance and traction testing, it has proved able to handle trucks weighing several times the legal limit. A prototype solar parking lot in Sandpoint, Idaho, has been successful as well. If Brusaw’s crowdfunding campaign reaches its goal, production of the roadway panels could begin within a few months.

It may take some time to see them on highways, though. Neil Fromer, executive director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology, says installing solar power on large structures will take a lot of testing and paperwork.

“The regulatory challenges of putting solar panels on rooftops were significant over the last 20 or 30 years,” Fromer says. “It’s only an avalanche [of effort] that managed to get it really working, so doing the roads would be a big challenge.”

Electric safety concerns would also need to be addressed, he says, considering that the road is not controlled. But the end product might be well worth it.

“The tremendous amount of solar energy that hits the earth’s surface in an hour is enough to power the planet for a year,” Fromer explains. “So when you think about renewable energy in the long term, solar is a huge part of that.” Considering that pavement covers as much as half of many U.S. cities, a lot of electricity could be generated by covering it all with solar panels.

Brusaw’s project could have a huge impact - if it overcomes the many challenges to getting it out into the real world.

“I think this is pretty cool, and I don’t want to sound too pessimistic about it,” Fromer says. “It’s really just a question of integrating [solar energy] into our existing electrical system. Roads are great surfaces to try it ... technology innovation always helps.”

Scientists Turn Algae Into Crude Oil in Less Than an Hour

Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

by Smithsonian Magazine: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/12/scientists-turn-algae-into-crude-oil-in-less-than-an-hour/

Out of all the clean energy options in development, it is algae-based biofuel that most closely resembles the composition of the crude oil that gets pumped out from beneath the sea bed.

Much of what we know as petroleum was, after all, formed from these very microorganisms, through a natural heat-facilitated conversion that played out over the course of millions of years.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, have discovered a way to not only replicate, but speed up this “cooking” process to the point where a small mixture of algae and water can be turned into a kind of crude oil in less than an hour.

Besides being readily able to be refined into burnable gases like jet fuel, gasoline or diesel, the proprietary technology also generates, as a byproduct, chemical elements and minerals that can be used to produce electricity, natural gas and even fertilizer to, perhaps, grow even more algae.

It could also help usher in algae as a viable alternative; an analysis has shown that implementing this technique on a wider scale may allow companies to sell biofuel commercially for as low as two dollars a gallon.

“When it comes down to it, Americans aren’t like Europeans who tend to care more about reducing their carbon footprint,” says lead investigator Douglas C. Elliott, who’s researched alternative fuels for 40 years.

"The driving force for adopting any kind of fuel is ultimately whether it’s as cheap as the gasoline we’re using now.”

Scientists have long been intrigued by the laundry list of inherent advantages algae boasts over other energy sources.

The U.S. Department of Energy, for instance, estimates that scaling up algae fuel production to meet the country’s day-to-day oil consumption would take up about 15,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of a small state like Maryland.

In comparison, replacing just the supply of diesel produced with bio-diesel from soybeans would require setting aside half of the nation’s land mass.

Besides the potential for much higher yields, algae fuel is still cleaner than petroleum, as the marine plants devour carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Agriculturally, algae flourishes in a a wide range of habitats, from ocean territories to wastewater environment. It isn’t hazardous like nuclear fuel, and it is biodegradable, unlike solar panels and other mechanical interventions. It also doesn’t compete with food supplies and, again, is similar enough to petrol that it can be refined just the same using existing facilities.

“Ethanol from corn needs to be blended with gas and modified vegetable oil for use with diesel,” says Elliott. “But what we’re making here in converting algae is more of a direct route that doesn’t need special handling or blending.”

Or, as algae researcher Juergen Polle of Brooklyn College puts it: “We cannot fly planes with ethanol. We need oil,” he tells CBS News.

But while the infrastructure for corn-based ethanol production has expanded to the extent that most cars on the road run on gasoline blends comprised of 10 percent biofuel, the ongoing development of algae fuel has progressed ever-so glacially since the initial spark of interest in the 1980s.

Industry experts attribute this languishing to the lack of a feasible method for producing algae fuel running as high as 10 dollars a gallon, according to a report in the New York Times.

However, the promise of oil from algae was tantalizing enough that ExxonMobil, in 2009, enlisted the expertise of world renowned bioengineer Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics lab to fabricate a genetic strain of lipid-rich algae, as a means to offset the expense of cultivating and processing the substance into a commercially attractive resource.

Yet, despite investing $600 million into a considerably ambitious endeavor, the project was beset with “technical limitations,” forcing the company to concede earlier this year that algae fuel is “probably further” than 25 years away from becoming mainstream.

The hydrothermal liquefaction system that Elliott’s team developed isn’t anything new.

In fact, scientists tinkered with the technology amid an energy crisis during the 1970s as a way to gasify various forms of biomass like wood, eventually abandoning it a decade later as the price of gasoline returned to more reasonable levels.

PNNL’s lab-built version is, however, “relatively newer,” and designed simply to demonstrate how replacing cost-intensive practices like drying the algae before mixing in chemicals with a streamlined approach makes the entire process much more cost-effective across all phases.

Elliott explains, for example, that the bulk of the expenditures are spent on raising algae, which is either grown in what’s called an open-pond system, similar to natural environments, or in well-controlled conditions found in closed-loop systems.

The open-pond system isn’t too expensive to run, but it tends to yield more contaminated and unusable crops while artificial settings, where algae is farmed inside clear closed containers and fed sugar, are pricey to maintain.

“People have this slightly inaccurate idea that you can grow algae anywhere just because they’ll find it growing in places like their swimming pool, but harvesting fuel-grade algae on a massive scale is actually very challenging,” Elliott says.

“The beauty of our system is you can put in just about any kind of  algae into it, even mixed strains. You can grow as much as you can, any strain, even lower lipid types and we can turn it into crude.”

Forbes energy reporter Christopher Helman has a good description of how this particular hydrothermal liquefaction technique works:

“You start with a source of algae mixed up with water. The ideal solution is 20% algae by weight. Then you send it, continuously, down a long tube that holds the algae at 660 degrees Fahrenheit and 3,000 psi for 30 minutes while stirring it. The time in this pressure cooker breaks down the algae (or other feedstock) and reforms it into oil.
Given 100 pounds of algae feedstock, the system will yield 53 pounds of ‘bio-oil’ according to the PNNL studies. The oil is chemically very similar to light, sweet crude, with a complex mixture of light and heavy compounds, aromatics, phenolics, heterocyclics and alkanes in the C15 to C22 range.”

Operating what’s essentially an extreme pressure cooker at such a constant high temperature and stress does require a fair amount of power, though Elliott points out that they’ve built their system with heat recovery features to maximize the heat by cycling it back into the process, which should result in a significant net energy gain overall.

As a bonus, the ensuing chemical reaction leaves behind a litany of compounds, such as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, which can be used to form natural gas, while leftover minerals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium work well as fertilizer.

“It’s a way of mimicking what happens naturally over an unfathomable length of time,” he adds. “We’re just doing it much, much faster.”

Elliott’s team has licensed the technology to the Utah-based startup Genifuel Corporation, which hopes to build upon the research and eventually implement it in a larger commercialized framework.

He suggests that the technology would need to be scaled to convert roughly 608 metric tons of dry algae to crude per day to be financially sustainable.

“It’s a formidable challenge, to make a biofuel that is cost-competitive with established petroleum-based fuels,” Genifuel president James Oyler said in a statement. “This is a huge step in the right direction.”

Making Carpet from Discarded Fishing Nets

by YES! online staff, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/making-carpet-from-discarded-fishing-nets


In this video by Sustainable Brands, Miriam Turner of the firm Interface gives a 10-minute introduction on the challenge of making a business not only sustainable but also economically inclusive.

After that, you'll see a short documentary film about how Interface, through collaboration with a wide variety of organizations all around the world, created a business that harvests fishing nets from the shorelines of the Philippines and then uses the nylon they're made off to create 100 percent recycled carpeting.

Seagrass is a Huge Carbon Store, But Will Government Value It?

Seagrass Bed (Wikipedia)

by Paul Lavery

Australia is surrounded by a thin green line of seagrass meadows potentially worth A$5.4 billion on international carbon markets, and which could contribute to Australia and other nations meeting carbon emissions targets.

Whether that potential can be realised is very much dependent on the type of carbon management scheme our next government puts in place.

Most people are aware forests lock up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is a part of our carbon accounting scheme and underpins tree-planting and forest conservation schemes, giving value to this “green carbon”.

Until now, the carbon captured by marine plant systems, so-called “blue carbon”, has largely been ignored in carbon accounting.

But our new research from Edith Cowan University (published today in the journal PLOS ONE) shows that seagrass meadows, hidden beneath our oceans, lock away between four and ten times that of our forests.

Pound-for-pound, they are big hitters when it comes to snatching carbon out of the atmosphere.

We conservatively estimate that Australia’s 92,500 sq km of seagrass meadows contain more than 155 million tonnes of carbon.

At a carbon trading price of A$35 a tonne (predicted by the Federal Government for 2020) that indicates a multi-billion dollar asset that can be used for tradable carbon credits.

In addition to the carbon these meadows have already locked away, they add about another 1 million tonnes of carbon each year, with a potential value of $35 million.

So lets look at how we realise this potential value, and how the next government’s approach to carbon could affect this.

Under the past government’s policy, the price of carbon was fixed until 2014-15. After that the price would be determined by the market, in an emissions trading scheme. The estimate of A$5.4 billion is based on the past Government’s predicted carbon-trading price of A$35 a tonne in 2020.

Exactly how that would be realised remains unclear. However, mechanisms such as the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program have been used internationally to realise the value of leaving forests intact so their stored carbon is preserved.

This sort of mechanism may create enormous flow-on benefits: jobs could be created in assessment of marine carbon resources, bringing these to markets or through the creation of new marine habitats through re-vegetation schemes.

Scientists and economists in the Mediterranean region are currently working together to develop tool kits that would allow blue carbon stores to be brought to the carbon market.

In contrast, the Direct Action Policy proposed by the current opposition, appears to severely limit the potential to realise the value of blue carbon.

Under a direct action scheme, there is no value associated with not leaving the carbon in the meadow, and no penalty for disturbing that meadow and releasing the carbon into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, seagrass meadows are under serious threat from nutrient pollution and coastal development. Every square kilometre lost releases 1.6 tonnes of carbon back to the atmosphere.

One possible way that a Direct Action Policy could give value to blue carbon is by rewarding the creation of new vegetated marine habitat, in the way we pay for re-afforestation.

Unfortunately, the biggest carbon stores are found in seagrasses which are notoriously difficult to transplant or revegetate.

There will need to be a massive investment if we hope to be able to do with marine plants what we have learned to do with forests over hundreds of years.

In the short-term, conserving and valuing what we have might be the cleverer approach. If we lose the habitat it may well be a long-term loss, even if we are going to invest in transplanting.

Australia’s Coastal Carbon Biogeochemistry Cluster, a collaboration of research providers, is working to further improve our estimate of carbon stored in marine habitats and how these might change in future climate scenarios.

Meanwhile, our European colleagues continue to investigate the ways in which blue carbon can be brought to the carbon market.

Hopefully, Australia will realise that we have a valuable blue carbon resource that is worth protecting and can be done so with economic benefit, if only we are open to creative carbon trading schemes.

Paul Lavery receives funding from The CSIRO Coastal Carbon Biogeochemistry Cluster.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Next 'Black Gold' Could be Green

by Chris Greenwell, Durham University

Algae harvester made in San Jose, California (Wikipedia)

Leave a glass with nutrient-rich pond water on a sunny window sill and within a day or two it will have turned a very vibrant, verdant green.

This apparent alchemy has less to do with chemistry and more to do with biology: the green is microalgae - microscopic, free-floating, single cell, plant-like organisms.

Given water rich in fertiliser (washed off from fields) or organic waste, sunlight and carbon dioxide these organisms grow rapidly, multiplying at an astounding rate by turning the nutrients and carbon dioxide into biomass.

Importantly, algae don’t store energy as starch like most plants, but instead are full of vegetable oils - which makes them the equivalent of green gold.

Recent decades have witnessed several cycles of interest in being able to exploit these organisms.

Research has examined the use of algae for remediating waste water or nutrient-overloaded coastal seas, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or directly from industrial chimneys, in beneficial products such as proteins and antioxidants, and to produce oil and liquid fuels.

Given its indisputable virtues, why has microalgae not been put to use in these ways?

Like many great ideas, the concept is simple but the execution is complex. You might expect to find algae farms springing up everywhere, judging by some reports in the media.

But despite billions of dollars in investment from government, industry and venture capital funds, microalgae has still not been cultivated on a large scale.

Some colleagues and I looked at some of the technological hurdles to microalgae biofuel production in a 2010 paper published in the Royal Society Interface Journal.

In order to convert the oils from microalgae into biodiesel (known as fatty acid methyl esters, or FAME), the first hurdle is to separate the algae from the water.

Algae is present in water at around 0.1% of the mass, so, a tonne (1m³⁾ of water can produce 1Kg of microalgae. Evidently that means 999Kg of water must be removed.

To process enough algae to be worthwhile this has to be done rapidly, but unfortunately this is not a trivial operation. The algae are microscopic and about the same density as the water, which makes it hard to separate by conventional filtration or in a centrifuge.

Flocculation with chemicals, a common method in water treatment works, uses highly charged polymers or metals to attract the algae together so they sink. It’s effective, but adds expense and complexity.

What’s more, microalgae are about 30-40% oil content by dry weight, and the 1Kg of weight above is wet. Dried, the 1Kg of microalgae might weigh 100g, so would yield perhaps 30-40g of oil.

The oils may be extracted using solvents or pressing, and then converted to prepare biodiesel. However, the chemistry required to do this means not all the oil can be converted, further lowering the potential yield.

Genetic modification of algae could be used to improve various characteristics, such as ease of harvest, cell wall rupture, or oil yield. But the impact of a GM microalgae accidentally released into the wild needs careful consideration.

However, a major benefit of microalgae is that it can be cultivated on marginal coastal land that is not used for food crops, and can use seawater rather than fresh water. This alleviates the main ethical accusations levelled at biofuels, that they affect food production.

Algae has even been demonstrated growing while integrated into the fabric of buildings, with building fascia panels used for growing microalgae cultivated on wastewaters and carbon dioxide emissions.

Processing still represents a challenge, but advances in microfiltration and physical flocculation methods have led to significant improvements. Other means of converting microalgae oils to biodiesel have been trialed.

For example, hydrothermal liquefaction - where wet, whole microalgae biomass is heated under pressure - and pyrolysis - where whole microalgae are heated rapidly in an oxygen-free environment - are two methods that don’t need the oil to be extracted before converting to biodiesel.

The first stages of microalgae fuel development were characterised by intense hype. This has passed, and the challenges are now well understood. The path forward requires considerable improvements in economics for large-scale cultivation for biodiesel.

As such, greater success may come from integrating microalgae cultivation into waste-water treatment and carbon dioxide emission reduction programmes, where the fuel is a beneficial side effect.

Alternatively, a model that focuses on creating a high value product - health supplements, for example - with the biofuel oils as a secondary revenue stream.

So while large-scale cultivation is undoubtedly possible, methods to remove water at low cost remains a hard nut to crack. Matching algae with high cell densities and rapid growth rates with low cost water removal methods will be a big leap forward for microalgae biofuels.

But as ever, technology is but part of the challenge - the societal, political and legislative framework will also need to be in place.

Chris Greenwell does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Look to the Trees for Truly Green Technology

Woods (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

by Cris Brack, Australian National University

Green alternatives such as wind and solar may be touted as the solution to our environmental problems such as climate change, but how green are they really?

Wind and solar rely on technologically-sophisticated industries and infrastructure including rare earth batteries, highly-processed composite building materials, computer controlled switching and balancing programs and continuous maintenance.

There are natural alternatives to such technologies that are arguably “greener”. So, why aren’t we looking to make our technologies truly green?

Wind, solar … wood

Fire is probably the greatest discovery of humankind, if not the discovery that set us on the path to becoming civilised and social.

Wood still fuels the energy needs of millions in Africa, China and India. Perhaps surprisingly, it also fuels the energy needs of many thousands in Europe, Canada, the US and even Australia. Why do we in the developed word seem to have forgotten its power?

Wood fuel has numerous advantages over wind or solar. Wood can be grown right where it is needed - even along the boundaries of residential properties, around commercial enterprises or even in urban and peri-urban parks.

While it is growing, trees look good and provide a temporary home for birds and other wildlife - certainly not something that can be said for every wind farm.

A continuous supply of winter home heating can be produced by selecting relevant tree species (or group of species) and progressively planting them around a “quarter acre” residential block.

Each year, one seventh of the boundary could be planted and after seven years the owner could begin harvesting, drying, burning and replanting the oldest trees.

Changing the trees species and the harvesting rotation lengths could allow co-production of products such as honey or flowers without ultimately endangering fuel reserves. Such a system would however require some management.

Neighbourhood groups could coordinate their individual plantings and use of the trees to encourage community projects, including planting in parks, that benefit from trees at different stages of their life or allow longer life spans for selected trees.

Such a system could continue pretty much indefinitely and may rightly be classified as sustainable yield: renewable energy with very little need for unnatural elements or practises.

But somehow the use of wood as a fuel source is specifically included from a range of renewable energy and environmental improvement schemes, despite its advantages.

Timber!

The timber industry could benefit from similar rethinking. Plantations are gaining a reputation as the “green” option for the production of solid timber for use in construction or high-value products.

The management required in plantations includes ploughing, ripping, spraying and fertilising for preparation, followed by more spraying and fertilising over time. Exotic species are used to avoid losses from local pests and diseases.

This intensive management is designed to ensure that final harvest revenues don’t happen so far into the future that the “time cost of money” erodes the net profit.

While not as intensive or invasive as agriculture, and orders of magnitude less intensive than the industries associated with plastic, steel or concrete products, plantations are never-the-less more intense and less natural than native forest management.

In native forests, local or endemic species are kept even though growth is slower. Fertiliser is not applied, partially because its cost cannot be justified but also because the local species are commonly adapted to local soil fertility. Similarly, weedicide application is rare.

Producing wood products in such a forest is slower, and to produce the same amount requires a larger area. One hectare of intensively managed plantation can produce the same amount of solid wood product as 30-to-50 hectares of native eucalypt forest.

But the managed native forest will have a greater diversity of tree sizes and stages, and only relatively small areas of disturbance. The vast majority of the forest simply grows and changes in a natural way, which is orders of magnitude better for birds and animals.

There is a strong branch of forest management in Europe called “nature-based forestry” or “near natural silviculture” that attempts to make human induced disturbances during harvesting or regeneration as close to natural-like conditions as possible.

Visitors need special training to detect the difference between the human induced changes and the natural ones.

But, like high-technology systems, plantations are seen as the “green” alternative to low-technology native forest management.

Green values

The “green” alternatives market has been captured by systems that require high levels of technology, energy inputs and processing.

Is the ultimate green goal is to leave nature altogether, replacing nature-based solution with technological ones - perhaps ultimately living in space stations powered by solar cells measured in kilometres?

Machines could make our air, water and nutrients out of raw mineral stocks mined from asteroid belts without impinging on natural earth at all. A “green” but precarious future totally reliant on sophisticated technology.

To be green and natural, we must re-engage with nature. Recall battles over battery chickens.

The battle against that industry could not have commenced until the connection between the product (the egg) and the system (chickens in backyards or battery farms created by us) was re-established. Many urban children have never seen a farm or even touched a chicken.

Similarly a battle for green and natural alternatives can only be commenced once the connection between natural systems that produce goods and services are appreciated and compared with unnatural and energy demanding systems that they have been replaced by.

Cris Brack does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

“World’s Greenest Office Building” Makes Net-Zero Look Easy

by Samantha Thomas, Yes! magazine:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/world-s-greenest-office-building-makes-net-zero-look-easy

It’s a commercial office space equipped with composting toilets, rainwater showers, and a stairway designed to be so beautiful that no one ever takes the elevator.

Bullitt Center, Seattle (Ben Benschneider)

Peering down Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the Bullitt Center appears to be just another high-end commercial building - until you look up and notice the roof, which is overlaid with shiny silver photovoltaic panels that extend far beyond the building’s exterior walls.

Even in the cloudiest of cities, the panels generate all the electricity the six-story structure requires.

The building is a project of the Bullitt Foundation, which calls it “the greenest commercial building in the world.”

The foundation, which was founded in 1952, has focused since the 1990s on helping to create cities that function more like ecosystems.

Its new building provides office space for eco-conscious tenants, but also functions as a learning center that demonstrates how people and businesses can exist in harmony with nature.

The Bullitt Center was built according to a demanding green building certification program called the Living Building Challenge, which lists net zero use of energy and water among its many requirements.

The standards specified by Living Buildings far surpass those of the better-known Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program, which even at its highest level still produces buildings that harm the environment.

Jason McLennan, the founder of the program, says the goal of the Living Building Challenge is to create a structure that is in harmony with nature. “Even when buildings are promoted as 10 to 30 percent greener than the traditional code, the building is still extremely harmful to the environment.” 

A tour of the world’s greenest office building

It turns out that making a building beautiful can help to make it green.

In an effort to encourage people to take the stairs instead of the elevator, the architects of the Bullitt Center created an “irresistible stairway” encased by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow for an abundance of light and offer captivating views of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains.

Office spaces are airy and bright, so the center requires no artificial illumination even on the dreariest Seattle days. And since most of the walls are made of glass, employees can see straight through one side of the building to the other, creating a feeling of community and openness.

What do tenants think of the space? “Everybody seems to be wildly enthusiastic,” says Bullitt Foundation president and CEO, Denis Hayes.

“Psychological studies show that people perform better when they have the diorama going by outside - they are happier, healthier, take less sick leave, and are more productive.”

With no on-site parking for cars, tenants are encouraged to ride bikes to work and park them in a space the size of a three-car garage. And for those who arrive sweaty from the bike ride in, rainwater-fed showers are available on every floor.

While some developers may argue that it is too expensive to build this way, the Bullitt Center’s initial costs were only one-fifth above average for an office building of its class.

And that’s not mentioning savings from energy and water bills, which will amount to zero when measured across 12 months.

The sewage bill is also zero because the building requires no hookup to the city’s sewer system. Composting toilets produce biologically pure waste, which is mixed with King County’s compost facility to produce agricultural grade compost.

The Bullitt Foundation hopes others will replicate their building. Bankers, developers, appraisers, insurance companies and government officials are invited to visit the center to learn more about building and investing in sustainable buildings.

McLennan concludes by suggesting that the Bullitt Center demonstrates the viability of taking a stronger approach to sustainability. “Washington is the least sunny state in the United States, and this building is still able to obtain 100 percent solar,” he says.

He hopes that the Bullitt Center’s example will help to encourage others to build more enjoyable, sustainable, and affordable buildings around the world.

Samantha Thomas wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Samantha is Project Consultant for DreamChange, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a better world for future generations, by building cultural bridges between people, societies and corporations.

She is also a freelance writer, green business consultant, and eco-fashion model based in New York City.

Interested?

• Living Buildings, Living Economies, and a Living Future
  David Korten: Two ideas that bring me renewed hope that we can end our isolation from nature and from each other.
• The World’s First Living Buildings
  Once deemed too ambitious, the next generation of green building is now a reality.
• Big City Farmers Take to the Rooftops
  Space is expensive in Brooklyn, so Gotham Greens built their urban farm on a rooftop.

How to Compost in 3 Steps

by Mark Bishop, Weekend Notes: http://www.weekendnotes.com/how-to-compost/?sb=1&i=1&j=1&k=3&wemid=27154&wuid=300466&ap=3hiwQXFoXf

Steaming compost (Photo credit: SuperFantastic)

Mark is a cub writer, music lover, business guy in hibernation

Have you ever had trouble composting? Here's what works for me in Melbourne's west.

Step 1

I'm a regular kitchen scraps kind of composter.

First, I put all my vegetable scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds and tea bags (usually nothing cooked unless it's a vegetable, no meat or dairy) into a miniature rubbish bin (with lid) which I keep under the kitchen bench - not because it smells particularly, but it's not a display item.

Get one of these at the $2 shop.

Step 2

Empty the little rubbish bin into a recycled plastic compost bin with sliding 'doors' at the base (these come in handy later on to get the finished compost out without disturbing what's happening on top).

A four hundred litre compost bin like this is about $60 from a big hardware store. Locate the compost bin in a shady spot.

Keep an eye out for little burrows around your bin which means you've got visitors (usually mice). You can easily block these with bricks etc., ensuring it's just bugs and worms feasting in your bin.

Step 3

Making compost is a bit like cooking - keep your eye on things and taste as you go, or at least look as you go. Layers of vegetable scraps, dust from your vacuum cleaner, some lawn clippings and leaves will soon result in healthy, happy moist compost.

Don't put in twigs or small branches and expect them to disappear – they won't. Although, if you have a shredder of some description, you could add all sorts of plant matter, as long as you can get it fine enough to decompose readily.

To get started, I suggest some layers of moist soil, newspaper, leaves, maybe some pea straw and then get going with your vegetable scraps.

You will probably never have too many vegetable scraps but be careful not to introduce too many leaves or lawn clippings – the compost will become too dry and can overheat.

I have stone fruit trees and so I'll load up on autumn leaves and even some fruit in summer, if it has spoiled. I put citrus fruit in sparingly. I have a dog, too, but his business does not go in the compost bin - never.

We all know why we should compost - it's great garden food, less rubbish leaving your house, you feel good etc. You may not know that when you spread your compost around the garden you can get some lovely surprises like self-seeding tomato plants or pumpkins. If you put weeds in your bin expect to get some self-seeding weeds too.

My top tip? Turn over your compost - regularly. I use a gardener's shovel. You could use a garden fork. Regular turning can cure most composting problems. That - and a bit of water.

Depending on the state of my compost, I sometimes leave the lid off for a bit when it's raining.

The Victorian Government and Australian Government want you to compost too, and may even subsidise you to do it.

One More Benefit of Local Food: A Farmer Sings the Praises of Having Non-Farmers Close at Hand

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by Shannon Hayes, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/shannon-hayes/farm-drama?utm_source=wkly20120629&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=titleHayes

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

Cover via Amazon

Two nights ago my mom left a message on my voicemail:

**sigh**  Your father’s crying. One of his favorite pigs just died, the coyotes killed another lamb last night, and one of the ewes delivered a set of twins that were so huge, the second one died before we could pull it.

**sigh** I’ve been mowing all day, and I’m too damned tired to do a thing about it.**click.**

After spending a day in the full sun battling weeds, covered in scratches and sweat, so was I. I deleted the message and slammed the receiver down.

Adding to my despair was the fact that I’d spent the last four years nursing along recalcitrant blueberry bushes that looked beautiful two weeks ago. A visit to their part of the garden a few hours earlier led to my discovery that two of them were dead, two mostly dead and one was dying.

When I came inside to express panic, frustration, and woe, Bob’s ears were completely unsympathetic. One of his bee hives was swarming for the sixth time in 5 days, and he was seriously considering lighting fire to the boxes and walking away.

This is part of the beauty of our slowly de-centralizing food system ... because of the local food movement, everyone in a community is now playing a part in growing the food.

That’s farm drama. It happens every other week during the growing season, every few hours during lambing season (which is now) and haying season (which is starting). If any of us truly sought sympathy, we would be wasting time seeking it from each other, much less any other farmer.

This degree of failure is just part of the day for folks like us, and any sad stories are likely to be easily one-upped by the next farmer.

If pity is truly what we need, we seek out the non-farmers … those folks living at a safe distance from the vicissitudes of nature who will reward our tales of woe with gratifying looks of horror, hugs of sympathy, and encouraging hyperbolic platitudes complimentary of our heroic vocation: Thank heaven there are people like you in this world who can do this kind of work. The rest of us are counting on you. We owe you so much. If there is anything we can do to help, tell us.

Maybe that all sounds hokey, but that’s powerful medicine. Sometimes it is all we need to hear in order to climb up to bed, utter prayers of gratitude for all things still living, and start fresh in the morning.

This is part of the beauty of our slowly de-centralizing food system. A few years back, the industrialized food system left us farmers detached from the rest of the culture. Transport and processing systems kept us far away from the people who ate our food and depended on us.

Our relationships were more homogenous: Many farmers socialized only with other farmers, and the natural annual cycles of the work meant that many were emotionally and physically isolated from each other all at the same time. That doesn’t bode well for mental health and safety.

We talk about the benefits of a local food system because the farmer gets a fair return for their labor; because non-farmers are able to get fresh, local, more nutritious food; because our local biodiversity is improving.

But one of the best parts is that, as we localize our food, everyone grows closer to the land. Everyone becomes keenly aware of the dramatic events that play out in the course of growing supper for the table.

Not everyone may put their hands in soil or inside the birthing canal of a sheep. But because of the local food movement, everyone in a community is now playing a part in growing the food. That sure makes my days a lot easier.