USA : Missouri Town Powered Fully by Wind

he town of Rock Port, in Missouri, is another of the growing number of towns and cities laying claim to be powered entirely by a renewable energy. And though the small town only boasts a population of 1,300, it is the first community in the United States to be powered entirely by wind power.

“That’s something to be very proud of, especially in a rural area like this – that we’re doing our part for the environment,” said Jim Crawford, a natural resource engineer at the University of Missouri Extension in Columbia.

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The four turbines which are powering little Rock Port are part of a greater batch of 75 turbines, which installed across three counties, are used to harvest the plentiful wind scouring the landscape. “We’re farming the wind, which is something that we have up here,” Crawford said. “The payback on a per-acre basis is generally quite good when compared to a lot of other crops, and it’s as simple as getting a cup of coffee and watching the blades spin.”

Another benefit for the community is the tax that the wind energy developer that built the turbines must pay. Wind Capital Group, based out of St. Louis, has to pay more than $1.1 million a year in country real estate taxes. “This is a unique situation because in rural areas it is quite uncommon to have this increase in taxation revenues,” said Jerry Baker, and MU Extension community development specialist.

An additional bonus is that landowners can lease part of their property to wind turbines, reaping further profits from the renewable energy source. Add on top of that the savings to rural electric companies, and at least 20 years worth of electric service (the turbines lifespan), and all up, Rock Port Missouri has hit gold – so to speak.

Source

Behind the Scenes: Even in the Desert, Plants Feel the Heat of Global Warming

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Global warming is a hot topic, and it's causing concern for scientists studying winter annuals in the Sonoran Desert.

While desert winters have become warmer and drier over the years, climate changes have pushed the arrival of winter rains later in the year, forcing winter-annual plants like the curvenut combseed (Pectocarya recurvata) to emerge later when temperatures are colder.

In 1982, Larry Venable, an ecologist at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, began a study at The Desert Laboratory on nearby Tumamoc Hill in order to investigate adaptive "bet-hedging" in plants.

Bet-hedging is an adaptive response by seeds that allows them to delay germination. The delay lets the plant attempt survival by avoiding harsh environmental periods. The germination delay can be caused by insufficient rainfall, lack of nutrients, inappropriate temperatures or any adverse condition that would affect the survival of a seed. The seeds can remain dormant for extended periods if the environment is unfavorable for germination and survival.

"No one had bothered to study real desert annuals to see what happens, and here I was, suddenly working as a plant ecologist in the middle of the desert," Venable said. "The theory involved plants that hedge against year-to-year variation in reproductive success, so I thought I'd set up some field plots and measure it."

The later arrival of Sonoran desert winter rains pushes the germination of the winter annuals later into the year and has affected the types of winter annuals that dominate the location. Researchers measure carbon and nitrogen in the plants' leaves to learn how well the various species grow at winter's lower temperatures.

"The species that we are calling, 'cold-adapted' species have high lifetime-water-use efficiency (WUE) as measured with carbon isotopes," said study author Sarah Kimball, a research associate in UA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology and a colleague of Venable's. "They also have high amounts of nitrogen in their leaves. The high nitrogen, along with instantaneous gas exchange measurements, indicate the plants have a high investment in light-gathering capacity, which indicates a greater ability to photosynthesize under low temperatures." Kimball added.

The plant's greater ability to photosynthesize translates into a greater ability to use energy from sunlight and convert it into food, improving chances for survival. Venable and his colleagues found that plants with more efficient water storage are the species prevailing in the colder environment.

Tracking the progression of germination involves studying plots of soil as small as hundredths of a square meter.

"We check for germination by going out in the field several days after a rain event and looking for seedlings," Kimball said. "When germination occurs, we use acetate sheets to map the location of each individual."

"Mapping" involves the researchers getting on their knees and identifying each individual plant in the plot. The team places acetate sheets over the plots of soil, and the researchers make marks on the sheets to identify the location of each seedling.

The researchers identify the tiny plants by using the seedlings' embryonic first leaves, known as cotyledons. While the acquisition of the data sounds simple enough it can be complicated.

"In wet years, when there is a high density of plants, the 'maps' that we make get very full, so each plot takes a long time and it can be difficult to be sure that we record every individual," Kimball said.

"Anticipating timing and insuring adequate work hours and materials are available at the right time to match the plants' growth events is difficult," Venable added.

The winter annuals are not the only vegetation affected by the climate shift occurring in the Sonoran desert. The increasingly drier climate has caused a decrease in dominant desert shrubbery as well. The lack of water available to the shrubs has caused them decrease in size so they can more efficiently utilize the amount of water that's available.

If the later arrival of winter rains continues, the germination of the winter annuals will subsequently occur later in the year, and the plant community will continuously change and favor plants that thrive in colder environments.

VIa :LiveScience

thanks to http://elblogverde.com

China Recycling Energy Corporation Wins 7-Megawatt Waste-gas Recycling Contract

China Recycling Energy Corporation, an industrial waste-to-energy solution provider, has won a contract to recycle waste gas and waste heat for China Zhonggang Binhai Enterprise in Cangzhou City, Hebei Province.

According to the contract, CREG will install a 7-Megawatt capacity electricity-generation system for Zhonggang Binhai, a nickel-iron manufacturing joint venture between China Zhonggang Group and Baosteel Group. The system will be an integral part of the facilities designed to produce 80,000 tons of nickel-iron per year. Construction is expected to be completed by July 2009.

Guangyu Wu, CEO of CREG, said that they were excited that Zhonggang Binhai has chosen CREG to build the energy-recycling system for them. He added that this system can help Zhonggang Binhai reduce CO2 emissions by more than 20,000 tons a year.

China Recycling Energy Corporation is based in Xi'an and provides environmentally friendly waste-to-energy technologies to recycle industrial byproducts for steel mills, cement factories and coke plants. Byproducts include heat, steam, pressure, and exhaust products which generate large amounts of low-cost electricity and reduce the need for power from outside sources.

Vía| ChinaCSR

image for CREG

Greenland shark meat may become new source of biofuel ?

by Staff Writers
Sisimiut, Greenland (AFP) July 20, 2009



The Greenland shark, one of the largest species of sharks, is a nuisance to fishermen and its meat is toxic to humans, but researchers now hope the flesh can be used to create a biofuel for Inuits.

Native to the cold Arctic waters, thousands of the sharks get caught and die in fishermen's nets off Greenland every year. The beasts -- which can be compared to the Great White Shark in size at seven metres (23 feet) and can weigh up to a tonne -- are thrown back into the sea.

But at the Arctic Technology Centre (ARTEK) in Sisimiut in western Greenland, researchers are experimenting with ways of using the animal's oily flesh to produce biogas out of fishing industry waste.

"I think this is an alternative where we can use the thousands of tonnes of leftovers of products from the sea, including those of the numerous sharks," says Marianne Willemoes Joergensen of ARTEK's branch at the Technical University of Denmark.

Joergensen, in charge of the pilot project based in the Uummannaq village in northwestern Greenland, says the shark meat, when mixed with macro-algae and household wastewater, could "serve as biomass for biofuel production."

"Biofuel is the best solution for this kind of organic waste, which can be used to produce electricity and heating with a carbon neutral method," she said.

Biofuel based on sharks and other sea products could supply 13 percent of energy consumption in the village of Uummannaq with its 2,450 inhabitants, according to estimates.

The project could help the many isolated villages on the vast island to become self-sufficient in terms of energy.

Joergensen plans to run tests next year at an organic waste treatment plant in a project financed by the EU in Uummannaq, using shark meat mixed with wastewater and macro-algae to create a fish mince that can be used to produce biogas.

In Uummannaq, the Greenland shark represents more than half of the waste disposed of by the local fishermen.

"Entire trawlers are sometimes full of sharks and they are caught everywhere, especially off the east and west of Greenland, to the fishermen's great dismay," says Bo Lings who used to work on a big trawler.

-- 'There are too many sharks in the nets' --

---------------------------------------------

"It's a large predator that devours fish, squid, seals and other marine life, and it also ruins the lines and nets of the halibut fishermen," adds Leif Fontaine, the head of Greenland's fishing and hunting association.

Fishing is Greenland's biggest export industry, with halibut its second-biggest product after shrimp.

The shark, which Inuits once hunted for its razor-like teeth that they used to make knives and for its liver oil that was used to light homes, has "become a problem for the environment."

"There are too many sharks in the nets and they just get thrown back," explains one of ARTEK's founders, engineer Joern Hansen.

Greenlanders usually dispose of fishing industry waste and household wastewater by throwing them into the sea.

In the Uummannaq municipality, over half of all the waste contains large amounts of fat that are suitable for producing biofuels in the future, and Hansen says that waste should be put to good use.

"All you have to do is set up installations in the fish processing centres, like in Ilulissat where the shrimp and halibut plant is partly heated by fish waste," he said.

Aksel Blytmann, a consultant at Greenland's fishing and hunting association, says the shark could turn out to be an "unexpected energy source."

He explained that Uummannaq once paid a 200-Danish-kroner (26-euro, 38-dollar) reward to fishermen for a shark heart in order to keep their numbers down. Other municipalities in the northwestern and western parts of Greenland still continue this practice, he said.

The species "swarms in the Arctic waters and is not in danger of extinction," Blytmann claimed.

But the International Union for the Conservation of Nature disagrees, as does the Danish branch of the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Anne-Marie Bjerg, a WWF specialist on ocean mammals, says the shark-for-biofuel project "is not a good idea, not at all," and wants to see other sustainable energy projects undertaken instead.

"We know very little about the Greenland shark, which lives in a limited geographic zone, the Arctic," she said.

Contrary to the fishermen's own accounts, she insisted the mammal "does not pose big problems to Greenland's fishing industry."

"We are opposed to the commercial use of marine mammals, such as the Greenland shark, which is not universal and whose population size is unknown," she said.

China, the most polluting

China is about to overtake the U.S. as the country that produces more carbon emissions, as we read the latest news via Reuters .

Carbon emissions from China increased by 10% in 2005, according to a U.S. scientist, while a study in Beijing showed an increase in fuel consumption by 9% in 2006. It is clear that China must begin to take action on the issue of lowering carbon emissions.



Carbon dioxide is produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil ... And all scientists agree that the key to global warming. In 2006 Chinese fuel consumption increased by 9.3%, equivalent to 2.4 billion tons of coal this year.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has already warned the 26 most powerful nations of China 'dethrone' the United States as the largest polluter in 2010.

For its part, China does not clarify or confirm anything, just issued a statement through his office at the National Coordination Committee on Climate Change which say they have no accurate data to confirm these studies.

Via : iol.co.za

Thanks to http://erenovable.com/

Happy Earth Day

From our hearts on this happy day we want to thank all the people who care about the planet and do everything necessary to grow in knowledge and feelings about our world ..

Always think: "The world is all we have"

It is our responsibility to care for the environment and cause humanity to take the place of the superior species on good principles, but we're the kind creeamos higher and we're not like everyone on this planet have a certain time .. Some day our race will disappear and when we do hope that the world back to what it was ..


Thanks Mikira by these words so significant that we do indeed delivered very grateful

Let us be aware, care for the world

Happy Earth Day To All !!!!!

Attn: Green Attack

Australia plans tough Great Barrier Reef shipping laws

By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney

The hull of the Shen Neng I caused serious damage to the reef

Australia is planning to subject commercial ships passing through all parts of the Great Barrier Reef to greater surveillance.

The tough new measures are intended to protect the region from pollution.

It follows the grounding of the Chinese bulk carrier, the Shen Neng I, which leaked about three tons of oil into the sea after hitting a sandbank.

The Chinese coal carrier ran aground in restricted waters around the reef earlier this month.

'Human error'

Ships sailing through southern parts of the Great Barrier Reef will be tracked by satellite and required to regularly report their movements under the new regulations.

Vessels using the reef's northern expanses are already subject to such strict monitoring.

Moves to extend the system were being drawn up before the Shen Neng 1 hit a sandbank at full speed earlier this month, causing extensive damage.

The environmental scare has added greater urgency to efforts to ensure that freighters can safely negotiate the sensitive waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

Conservationists say that greater surveillance will make a difference.

Richard Leck from WWF Australia also believes that professional navigators can prevent accidents, including the recent grounding of the Chinese bulk carrier.

"The key thing that we see is needed alongside this tracking system is to have pilots onboard every large that traverses the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage area.

"Most of the incidents that occur within the World Heritage area are due to human error.

It seems like this incident occurred due to fatigue and the only way of managing that risk is to make sure there is a pilot onboard every vessel," Mr Leck said.

Australia's plans to increase the monitoring of commercial shipping in the Great Barrier Reef need the agreement of the International Maritime Authority.

Australian police have arrested two men over the grounding of the Shen Neng 1, which was in restricted waters off the Queensland coast when its voyage came to an abrupt end.

Thanks to BBC NEWS Link

Danish eco-hotel offers pedalpower free meal

A Danish hotel is offering a free meal to any guest who is able to produce electricity for the hotel on an exercise bike attached to a generator.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen says the idea is to get people fit and reduce their carbon footprint.

Guests will have to produce at least 10 watt hours of electricity - roughly 15 minutes of cycling for someone of average fitness.

The hotel already produces renewable energy with solar panels on its facade.

Guests staying at Plaza Hotel will be given meal vouchers worth $36 (26 euros; £23) once they have produced 10 watt hours of electricity, hotel spokeswoman Frederikke Toemmergaard told the BBC News website.

"Many of our visitors are business people who enjoy going to the gym. There might be the odd person who will cycle just to get a free meal, but I don't think people will exploit the initiative overall," she added.

The bicycles will have iPhones attached to the handlebars measuring how much power is being generated for the hotel.

The plan, a world-first, will be launched on 19 April and run for a year, the hotel says. Only guests staying at the hotel will be able to take part.

Copenhagen has a long-standing cycling tradition and 36% of locals cycle to work each day, one of the highest percentages in the world, according to the website visitcopenhagen.dk

"Because Copenhagen is strongly associated with cycling, we felt the bicycle would work well as a symbol of the hotel's green profile," Ms Toemmergaard said.

US environmental website treehugger.com recently voted Copenhagen the world's best city for cyclists.

If successful, the electric bicycle meal programme will be extended to all Crowne Plaza hotels in the UK, the hotel said in statement.

Thanks to BBC NEWS Link

Electronics recycling gets new oversight

Electronic waste is heaped at a dumping site in Guiyu, China, in March 2006.By Elizabeth Dalziel, AP

A new program to certify that electronics are safely recycled launched today with the backing of environmental groups and several companies including Samsung.

The Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based non-profit group that documented how U.S. companies were dumping toxic wastes in Africa and China, said its program will ensure the proper handling and disposal of electronics. These products often contain lead and mercury that pose environmental and health risks.

BAN's program, which requires participants to use certified recyclers, will compete with a less stringent one begun in January by the Environmental Protection Agency in collaboration with U.S. manufacturers.

The EPA's R2 or Responsible Recycling, program also requires that recyclers be certified, but it allows them, under certain conditions, to export old electronics. BAN's program bars the export of toxic waste to developing countries.

"It's full of loopholes," Jim Puckett, BAN's executive director, said of the R2 program in a New York Times story.

BAN has been running a program in which about 50 recyclers promise to follow its disposal rules. Beginning today, however, recyclers will have to follow standards set by the International Organization for Standardization and their compliance will be independently audited.

Currently, BAN says only three recyclers (Newport Computer Services, Inc, Redemtech, WeRecycle) at six U.S. locations are fully certified but an additional 12 companies have applied for approval.

A bevy of environmental groups is backing its e-Stewards program, including Greenpeace USA, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.

Samsung, one of the world's largest technology companies, has agreed to recycle its electronics via the new BAN program. Also signing on are major financial institutions, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Capital One Financial.

Link

Tech helps bridge gap between economy, ecology

Pick your area and you'll find that technology can make Earth-friendly choices easier to make. Green buildings have historically been trophy homes or corporate headquarters designed to make a statement about a company's commitment to the environment. That's still the case, but the gap, if there is one at all, between paying a premium for green goods is narrowing for products, such as efficient lighting or materials made from recycled content.

Everyone knows we can lower the cost of clean energy and clean transportation, but there's a lot of innovation that can happen in materials and waste reduction. The first sustainability initiative at Wal-Mart was when one executive reduced packaging for a toy, which eliminated the need to ship 215 containers from China. Now, Wal-Mart is driving those reductions--and cost savings--through its supply chain of partners.

Dell developed packaging for a Netbook that is made of bamboo, sourced sustainably from China. The cost is the same as other packaging materials, and Dell expects it can be compostable. It also gives the company options if prices fluctuate for different packaging materials, according to Oliver Campbell, senior manager for global packaging engineering at Dell.

Dell developed bamboo packaging for its line of Netbooks, one area where the company is developing eco-friendly products.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The key is for employees to reconsider the environmental footprint of their jobs, people said. Chemistry companies, for example, can seek to make products from plants rather than fossil fuels or make more environmentally benign chemicals.

"We're looking at things in different ways. We're looking through the lens of sustainability and developing new technologies to address really big problems," said Scott Elrod, vice president and director of hardware systems Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center, which is developing technologies for cheaper water treatment or techniques to convert carbon dioxide from power plants into a liquid fuel.

Link

New light bulbs will last almost two decades

General Electric has unveiled a light bulb it says will last 17 years.

"This is a bulb that can virtually light your kid's bedroom desk lamp from birth through high school graduation," says John Strainic of GE Lighting.

The GE Energy Smart LED 40-watt light bulb will hit shelves in 2011. According to GE, the bulb will consume nine watts, provide a 77% energy savings and produce about as much light as a 40-watt incandescent bulb.

More efficient light bulbs mean fewer sales, which is why these new energy-smart bulbs will cost between $40-$50 US a pop.

In April, the Canadian government announced it would ban inefficient light bulbs by 2012. The U.S. also plans to wean its citizens off inefficient light bulbs between 2012 and 2014.

TorontoSun: Link

Visiting China, Seeing Green

Much has been written over the past year about how other countries, particularly China, are investing heavily to increase their economic competitiveness by building domestic clean energy industries (see Lindsey Graham: “Every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy”).

Senior staff from the Center for American Progress will therefore be traveling to China to meet with policymakers and companies that are driving its aggressive pursuit of clean energy technology development. They’ll share their findings with you on the CAP energy policy page. Guest Blogger Julian L. Wong has the background on China and the trip.

At least three studies were released this past month alone about China’s clean energy investment. A report from Pew Charitable Trusts, using data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, declared China the early winner in the clean energy race by outspending the United States $34.6 billion to $18.6 billion in 2009. And while it’s true that decarbonizing our economies requires significant financial investments, it will not happen simply by throwing money to the wind. Deutsche Bank’s global survey of national clean energy policies highlights China, Brazil, and Germany for their exemplary scale and effect. And our own report “Out of the Running?” discusses how Germany, Spain, and China are adopting comprehensive policy approaches to clean energy by developing markets, building infrastructure, and financing research and deployment projects.

China recently identified alternative energy as a “key industry” that it would actively support in its next five-year economic development plan. This move is wholly consistent with China’s push for the new and more sustainable kind of development pathway that they call “scientific development.” As we discussed in “Out of the Running?,” China has created powerful top-down policies such as national clean energy and energy conservation targets, and more recently a goal to limit growth of carbon emissions. These top-down policies are supplemented by local incentives and investments to stimulate the innovation, manufacture, deployment, and export of low-carbon technologies.

These concerted efforts have yielded concrete results in renewable energy deployment, enhanced energy efficiency, and pushed the creation of new rail and grid infrastructure. China already boasts the world’s fastest high-speed train in operation, has developed the world’s leading technology for ultrahigh-voltage grid transmission wires, and is on track to become the largest producer and user of solar panels.

These developments will reduce the Chinese economy’s carbon intensity while significantly boosting job creation. China employed 1.12 million people in clean energy sectors by 2008, according to the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association. This number is small compared to a labor pool of 700 to 800 million, but it is forecasted to grow significantly over the next decade. A study by the Global Climate Network in conjunction with the Research Center for Sustainable Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projects that the combination of policies and investments in clean energy industries can create up to 6.79 million new jobs in the country by 2020.

The speed and extent to which China has raced ahead to invest in green technologies is worthy of envy. Yet the many recent media stories come up short in explaining just how the Chinese government is coordinating this massive push.

The CAP trip, which will include Sarah Wartell, Kate Gordon, Michael Ettlinger, Sarah Miller, and myself, is a fact-finding mission to three northeastern cities in China to see how national policy is intersecting with researchers, businesses, and leaders at the local level. We will start in Beijing, the nation’s capital and the heart of national energy policy decision making, and make day trips to Tianjin, a relatively new and rapidly growing national economic development zone, and Baoding, a city in neighboring Hebei province that has gained attention for its strategic emphasis on clean energy industries.

As we travel, we will hope to address a slew of questions, including:

• What lessons can the United States successfully draw from China—given the very different political-economic architecture—to develop its own domestic strategy for developing a clean energy economy?
• What challenges have the Chinese faced as they seek to expand the share of clean energy in their overall energy mix?
• How well are the central government’s top-down national policies implemented at the provincial, municipal, and local levels? What mechanisms do they use to ensure and enhance implementation?
• How do the public and private sector deal with the sheer capital intensity of clean energy projects? What channels exist to access the significant volumes of financing needed to build new energy infrastructure?
• What specific local incentives does the Chinese government employ in locating manufacturing or research and development centers? Does qualification for these incentives differ between domestic and foreign companies?
• What is the country investing in work force training and education? Is there a government strategy that considers the human capital requirements of a low-carbon transition? What role do different Chinese educational institutions play?
• How does China negotiate the tension of welcoming foreign investment and technologies while maintaining homegrown innovation? How are some Chinese companies partnering with foreign companies to strengthen their competitiveness?

We will log our findings and impressions as we meet with central government and municipal-level government officials, top energy policy and technology researchers, and executives from leading Chinese and foreign energy technology companies. The Google map on this page will be updated regularly and track our progress as we travel through Beijing, Baoding, and Tianjin.

We may not be able to get definitive and comprehensive answers to all our questions, but we are hoping that we will at least start the conversation on these topics—a conversation that is vital if we are serious about America’s own economic competiveness in the clean energy sector.

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The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green

LONDON — As Kermit the Frog sang so wisely, it’s not easy being green. Think of Britain’s wannabe prime minister, David Cameron, cycling to Parliament followed by a limo carrying his papers. The “organic” products that are smothered by superfluous biodegradable packaging. And “caring” celebrities who blow their eco-cool by flying into environmental protests on private jets.

Even those deluded celebs don’t seem as daft as the 265 ton “iceberg” built by Chanel as the set for a recent fashion show in Paris. Made from ice and snow imported from Sweden, it was “recycled” afterward by being returned there in yet another gas-guzzling journey. Presumably it was meant to make me crave a new Chanel bag, but all I could think of were those heartbreaking photographs of polar bears marooned on melting ice caps.

Kermit was correct, being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”

This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.

Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.

If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome. Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to reproduce them accurately.

Even if they succeeded, the results often faded or discolored, as did green dyes. When the 19th-century British designer William Morris created wallpapers inspired by medieval tapestries, he copied the blue hues in the originals. But most of those “blues” were really greens, which had changed color over the years.

Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.

This noxious heritage should have been forgotten after green’s reinvention as a symbol of ecological purity by environmental protesters in the early 1970s.

It was a perfect choice as their emblem. One reason is, of course, that green is the color of nature. Another is that its natural associations had made it unpopular with the Modern Movement. This enhanced its appeal to early environmentalists, who rejected Modernism as soulless and destructive.

They were also attracted to the maverick qualities that had bedeviled green in the past. Even today, despite all of the advances in color technology, producing green dyes and pigments is still problematic. “Getting the right tones of artificial green is always difficult, and there’s often something disturbing about the result,” said the Dutch product designer Hella Jongerius. “Whereas all shades of green look beautiful in nature

From : http://twitter.com/SaveTheWaves

Link

Biodiesel plant to open if price is right

By ALAN WOOD - BusinessDay

Biodiesel New Zealand management is awaiting fuel-sector price developments before it commits to a new $10 million to $20m biodiesel plant at its Rolleston site.

A recommendation by the team to the firm's state-owned parent Solid Energy to go ahead with the plant could come in 18 to 24 months, says Christchurch's Biodiesel NZ general manager Andrew Simcock.

The parent had already made a capital investment in the order of $20m in Biodiesel NZ including an oilseed rape (canola) storage facility and a pressing plant in Rolleston and a small biodiesel plant at an Addington site.

But a new plant would depend in part on another fuel price surge, which would make oilseed rape-canola growing by farmers and a biodiesel plant more economic.

"The plan is we build a new biodiesel plant within 18 months to two years at Rolleston depending on market conditions," Simcock said.

"We're looking at the market and it would take market conditions to change and improve. We're reviewing it six-monthly and when the conditions are right and we have the right track record we'd put a proposal in front of the board."

Biodiesel in May 2007 launched its ambitions to be a big biodiesel maker. At that time it said it wanted to take biodiesel production from one million litres a year to 70 million litres in three years.

Simcock last week said the company was now committed to producing 70 million litres a year of blended transport fuel by 2011.

It had support from the Government in terms of a grant to enable that fuel to be close in price to that of mineral-based diesel now selling at the pump for between $1.10 and $1.15 a litre.

Simcock said the parent, Solid Energy, and its chief executive Don Elder were committed to expanding the company's approach to become an "energy" rather than coal company, incorporating new and renewable energy sources. "He's got very strong aspirations for New Zealand in terms of an energy business rather than a coal business."

Biodiesel NZ produced two main strains of its biogold branded product – NZ100 biodiesel, which was particularly useful for the boat industry helping the impact of oil spillages, and the NZ20 blend (one-fifth biodiesel).

NZ20 was sold into the commercial market with the help of a Government grant of around 8 cents a litre of the blended fuel. "We're around pump [prices] or a bit below maybe," he said.

Solid Energy bought Canterbury Biodiesel in mid 2007, changed its name to Biodiesel New Zealand and launched an oilseed rape-based business, incorporating the collection of used cooking oil from throughout New Zealand.
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Biodiesel NZ had ramped up the amount of oilseed rape being processed by upgrading the processing plant in Rolleston in October-November 2009.

"We've completed a plant out at Rolleston, and we have 10,000 tonne of storage and eight presses ... that's been operating."

The number of farmers growing oilseed rape under contract had grown to 60 from 24 in the last year or so. Biodiesel NZ had several thousand hectares of land for oilseed rape and other rotated crops, spread between Marlborough and Southland.

The company now had annual revenues of "several million" including those from crops, used cooking oil collection and the sale of biofuels.

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