Guest post by Lewis Davies

Stock up on eco-fuel for winter by recycling autumn leaves

Autumn is a spectacular season heralding the end of summer with a cascade of red, brown and golden falling leaves. Most of us appreciate nature’s beauty at this time of year, but consider the task of raking up and bagging the leaves to be a painful chore with little benefit. However, the leaves that fall from the trees in this season are a great source of carbon-neutral fuel that we can stock up on to last us through the winter.

Bagging up leaves (and other so-called “garden waste”) for the refuse collectors to take away, and pile on top of already heaving landfill sites, is a tragic and unnecessary end to their lifecycle. For those of us with a stove, cast iron or clay chiminea or firebowl we are passing up on the chance to do a little bit for the environment – and for our wallets.

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Everybody has a computer today. They’re like wristwatches or televisions. But how much does your computer use contribute to greenhouse gasses and their global warming effect? You might be surprised!

Conservative estimates rank computer usage right up there with the airline industry for its harmful effect on the atmosphere, making it responsible for up to 2% of the total problem. To put your mind at ease, that doesn’t mean your household PC is all that nasty. That figure includes all the industrial server farms, government supercomputers, and college networks. Unfortunately, there are a lot more of them than you might think. Even your average grocery store has a server room somewhere in it to run the “back office” (accounts receivable and inventory control) and “front office” (cash registers and checkout system) components of its operation.

So how much damage does your average PC do? Running one 8 hours per day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year will use 400 kilowatt hours or 180,800 grams of carbon dioxide (452 grams – just shy of a pound – per hour X 2,000 hours). That sounds like a lot but when you consider that a home PC accounts for less than ten percent of the average home’s energy bill (according to MR. Electricty AKA Michael Bluejay of Michaelbluejay.com) it’s not that big of a number in the overall picture. Your water heater, furnace, and refrigerator are much bigger carbon offenders.

But as my mother always used to say “every little bit helps.” So here are some ways to go greener and keep your high-speed digital lifestyle to which you’ve become accustomed.

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Now this is just plain cool.  When oil is spilled, like in the Gulf of Mexico in summer of 2010, various materials are used to help clean up the spill.  Specifically, a material is used that only absorbs oil, not water, making it an ideal tool for oil spills in oceans and lakes.

Sometimes called “booms”, they come in long sausage-looking shapes tied together so they can be strung around an oil spill, creating a perimeter to absorb the spilled oil.  Typically, these booms are thrown away or even burned as fuel.  Chevy has come up with a new way to deal with the leftovers.

They are being recycled and turned into the parts for Chevy Volts.  The booms are spun in a centrifuge, removing the oil and leaving the plastic core.  The plastic is then melted and formed as plastic vehicle parts.  Cool huh?

Chevy is not just using the booms for raw materials.  They also use leftover plastic packaging from their other car plants and tires from testing facilities.  Around 75% of each plastic part in this program is from the recycled material, the other 25% new.  This program will use 227 miles of dirty oil booms and divert 212,500 pounds of waste from landfills.

The ultra-green car market is really getting competitive as evidenced by this new variation on sourcing materials.  Hopefully we will see more competition in the form of new vehicles brought to the market.  As much as I appreciate having two options for totally* green cars, it would be nice to have a long list of options to choose from, and cheaper ones too.

*I don’t consider the Chevy Volt nearly as green as the Nissan Leaf

Source

Here in Vermont, the local waste management company hires day laborers to sort garbage for recyclable materials.  They work long hours and come home smelling like rotting trash.  A company named ZenRobotics has created a robot that uses an articulating arm to pick up construction waste and identify waste that can be recycled.  It picks up the material, scans it, and moves it aside.

The robot uses tactile sensors, weight measurement, 3-D scanning and spectrometer analysis to determine material type.  It then pulls the material off a conveyor belt to be recycled.  Anything left on the conveyor belt is assumed to be waste.

Currently, all construction materials are treated as waste.  However much of the material is metal or plastic, meaning it can be recycled using conventional technology.  The robot can currently detect about 50% of recyclable materials.  But imagine the possibilities as the robot learns to make more accurate decisions.  By learn, I mean be taught.  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Source

Related articles

• Trash-Sorting Robot Could Reduce Waste Going to Landfill by 50% (treehugger.com)
• Robot designed to sort trash for recycling (gizmag.com)

Guest post by Laura Philips
If you’ve got a chiminea, a fire-pit, or a wood-burning stove, you’ll know that few things really match the romance and comfort of a real fire. Stoves and chimineas are surprisingly effective heaters, and choosing recycled fuel will go a long way towards reducing your carbon footprint and producing cleaner, more eco-friendly heat. There are a variety of eco-friendly recycled fuels available these days and you can find a fuel which will not only burn cleaner and hotter than wood, but which will be a lot lighter on your wallet, too.

Sawdust Logs

One of the most readily-available and cheapest recycled fuels, these are logs or briquettes, often referred to as eco-logs, heat-logs, or chim logs, and they’re made from 100% sawdust, which is often waste sawdust sourced from sawmills. The sawdust is compressed into log shapes, so these logs don’t contain any harmful chemicals or binding agents and are perfectly safe to use around the house and garden – even for barbecues.

Since the moisture content is much lower than that of wood, sawdust logs burn at a higher heat, and release fewer particles and creosote (making them a great choice for wood stoves), and they will burn longer and give out more heat than wood, too. Since they are made from waste sawdust, you can pick these up for a surprisingly low price and simply store them in a dry place until you need them.

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The following two videos give an overview of an Earthship. Earthship biotecture is the product of forty years of research and development into completely self-sufficient housing made entirely from recycled materials.

Midsummer often prompts many of us to shear our locks and don cooler hairstyles to help us survive the heat. As I recently had my own coif chopped up and saw the heaps of hair collecting around the chair, I began to wonder if there aren’t some ways to reuse this particular resource. Here’s what I dug up…

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If you’re anything like me, the sheer amount of packaging most products come excessively sealed away in is an endless source of frustration. Even if the packaging is in some way recyclable, not all facilities accept all forms of plastic and consumers often fail to meticulously separate out all of their trash. Thankfully, some companies are looking to make more creative loops and links in the supply chain to minimize waste. Preserve is one of these up and coming innovative industries.

Preserve makes personal hygiene products, such as toothbrushes and razors, and some table and kitchen ware, out of recycled yogurt cups and other grade 5 plastics. In addition to just designing with recycled material, they make it easier to recycle their products when you’re done using them. The Preserve toothbrush is packaged in a slim pouch with a business reply label and prepaid postage. You can mail in your old toothbrush when you’re done using it and the plastic handle will be recycled into other Preserve products (nylon bristles are always new). You can even sign up on their website for a toothbrush subscription and schedule for Preserve to send you a new brush on a regular schedule.

At $2.99 you can only feel good about turning a typically disposable personal product into a cycle of reuse. Not to mention a chance to reinstate the interesting producer-customer back and forth relationship that many companies have given up in favor of expansion and disposability.

Look, I want an electric car as much as the next guy.  My commute is inside of 25 miles, like 99% of us, so distance isn’t an issue.  Neither is recharging, I live in a very progressive state with a row of electric-car charging stations at my favorite grocery store.  I just can’t swallow the price tag of a new car.  Here is one solution I found that may just be how I spend my next few weekends.

Ingredients:

1 Geo Metro

1 Electric forklift

1 Electric motor

a dash of spare parts

a smidge of random batteries

Bake for a few weekends of hard work, and voila!  The result is a medium speed, medium range, cheap-as-heck electric commuter car.  This one was built by 2 DIY’ers in Toronto to get them from point A to point B for little cash, no pollution, no noise.

It’s called: The Forkenswift!

Read more at their website.

EarthTalk® is a weekly environmental column made available to our readers from the editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I work for an office equipment company selling copiers, fax machines, computers and printers. Each year new models come out making old ones obsolete. As a result, we have loads of trade-ins with nowhere to go. What can we do with this old equipment? – Jeff P., Worcester, MA

Electronic waste, or “e-waste” as it’s called, is a growing problem in the United States and abroad, as obsolete or broken computers and other electronic equipment are taking up increasingly precious amounts of landfill space and potentially leaking hazardous substances into surrounding ecosystems.

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