New Florence. New Renaissance.

Kites for wind energy

The wind blows more strongly at higher altitudes. That is why wind turbines have grown ever taller. The blade tips of today’s biggest now reach up a dizzying 260 metres, the height of the Transamerica building in San Francisco. Many dream of capturing stronger winds even higher up than that, but building taller turbine masts and constructing blades able to withstand the terrifying stresses involved in high-altitude wind gathering are costly. A number of firms are therefore developing a different and, they hope, ultimately cheaper approach to generating electricity at great heights. Their idea is to skip the mast altogether. Instead they propose to fly kites.

The Economist

 

 

 

Plastic Eaters

That’s because plastics aren’t just happening to Johnson. He’s happening to them. Johnson is a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and this past year, he and his colleagues created a biological enzyme that can chew efficiently through throwaway plastics like those that make water bottles and soap containers. The team is optimistic they can engineer a world where humans keep using this overabundant material—without winding up literally or figuratively overwhelmed by it. In that world, as part of a broader, robust recycling system, microorganisms will digest polymers into their chemical components so they can turn a profit as new and better products.

Popular Science

 

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQa6as8fhoo&feature=youtu.be

Green Concrete

Making cement–the mineral compound that constitutes the most crucial ingredient of concrete–is an extremely carbon-intensive process. It’s produced in factories with massive kilns where raw materials, like limestone, clay, and shale, are heated to temperatures up to 1550 degrees Celsius, then ground into a powder. Heating the cement minerals to such high temperatures poses a sustainability concern, says Kemal Celik, professor of civil engineering at New York University in Abu Dhabi and the director of the Advanced Materials and Building Efficiency Research (AMBER) Laboratory. Producing cement accounts for around 7% of global CO2 emissions.

This fact, Celik says, got him interested in finding a better way to make the material. He and his team already knew that magnesium oxide, a mineral found in salt deposits like lakes and salt flats, could be converted into a type of cement. In the United Arab Emirates, where Celik and his team work, they realized they could tap the over 70 operating desalination plants for access to brine left over from the process of purifying seawater, which would otherwise just be dumped back into the Gulf. Synthesizing the magnesium oxide in brine into a cement-like substance requires much less heat than making ordinary cement. And, Celik says, as magnesium oxide cement hardens over its lifetime, it absorbs carbon dioxide over time to gain strength, potentially making it a carbon-negative building material.

FastCompany

 

 

Polywood

Those milk jugs sparked an idea in Rassi—namely, to create a "lumber" that would be durable and sustainable. "Because of my entrepreneurial experience with vinyl fencing, I had a deep understanding of alternative material that [could] replace products made of wood in outdoor applications," he tells the Connection. When he saw his first Adirondack chair on a trip to Boston, he knew he’d found the perfect match, so he went to work creating an Adirondack chair out of plastic bottle waste (think milk and detergent bottles) and other high-density polyethylene material. Rassi made the first chairs himself out of what was named POLYWOOD, and the duo sold them in Phillabaum’s store in Syracuse, Indiana.

Costco Connection

 

Gates annual letter

In this year’s annual letter, we’re highlighting nine more things that have surprised us along this journey. Some worry us. Others inspire us. All of them are prodding us to action. We hope they do the same for you, because that’s how the world gets better.

Gates Notes         

a video where they summarize their findings

Zero-waste platform

In the not-too-distant future–as soon as this spring, if you live in or near New York City or Paris–you’ll be able to buy ice cream or shampoo in a reusable container. When you’re done eating a tub of Haagen-Dazs, you’ll toss the sleek stainless steel package in your personal reuse bin instead of your trash can. Then it will be picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility so that it can be refilled with more ice cream for another customer.

Loop, a new zero-waste platform from a coalition of major consumer product companies, will launch its first pilots this year.

FastCompany

 

Plan B for the environment?

Y Combinator has chosen four “frontier technologies” it would be “excited to fund.” They are:

• Ocean phytoplankton: Using genetically engineered microbes that can supercharge their natural ability to absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow.
• Electro-geochemistry: Using electricity to enhance the natural rate at which certain types of minerals absorb carbon dioxide.
• Cell-free systems: Modifying naturally existing enzymes outside living cells to capture carbon dioxide.
• Desert flooding: Adding huge amounts of water to deserts to convert into small lakes with phytoplankton and perhaps into cultivable land.

Quartz

Video below on views of Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator

 

Y Combinator has chosen four “frontier technologies” it would be “excited to fund.” They are:

• Ocean phytoplankton: Using genetically engineered microbes that can supercharge their natural ability to absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow.
• Electro-geochemistry: Using electricity to enhance the natural rate at which certain types of minerals absorb carbon dioxide.
• Cell-free systems: Modifying naturally existing enzymes outside living cells to capture carbon dioxide.
• Desert flooding: Adding huge amounts of water to deserts to convert into small lakes with phytoplankton and perhaps into cultivable land.

Quartz

Video below on views of Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator

 

Y Combinator has chosen four “frontier technologies” it would be “excited to fund.” They are:

• Ocean phytoplankton: Using genetically engineered microbes that can supercharge their natural ability to absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow.
• Electro-geochemistry: Using electricity to enhance the natural rate at which certain types of minerals absorb carbon dioxide.
• Cell-free systems: Modifying naturally existing enzymes outside living cells to capture carbon dioxide.
• Desert flooding: Adding huge amounts of water to deserts to convert into small lakes with phytoplankton and perhaps into cultivable land.

Quartz

Video below on views of Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator

 

Underwater lawn mower

Cleantec Infra is using aquatic weed harvesters and "trash skimmers" to clean up lakes and rivers in India. Both these platforms can pick up tonnes of weeds and trash per day to make the bodies of water in India healthier for the ecosystem.

Mashable

Massive ocean clean up

The 2,000-foot-long unmanned structure was the product of about $20 million in funding from the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic during the boom’s first year at sea. Within five years, with the creation of dozens more booms, the organization hopes to clean half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The patch, a gyre of trash between California and Hawaii, comprises an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of scattered detritus, including at least 87,000 tons of plastic.

New York Times

NASA’s OMG

OMG is a multi-pronged effort to map the underwater contours of the Greenland coast, and better understand how warming ocean waters drive melting ice.

A giant leap forward came late in 2017, when NASA, the University of California, Irvine and others published high resolution maps of the bedrock and sea floor around Greenland

OMG’s measurements by ship and plane, including ice thickness data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, were plugged into a computer modeling tool called BedMachine. The result: high-precision maps that unveiled previously unknown features on the Greenland coast, and beneath its ice sheet.

NASA