A lot of natural gas is just burnt away, without serving any meaningful purpose whatsoever. The flares are a common sight on many such installations. In 2005, it was estimated that nearly 0.5% of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels come from natural gas flaring. Today, it may be enough to power Germany. This natural gas could be put to perfectly good use, and that is exactly what Brazil’s Petrobas intends to do.

The Brazilian state oil company is looking for solutions that may come from the partnership of U.K.-based Compact GTL and Japan’s Sumitomo Precision Products, or from Columbus-based Velocys. It is expected that this “associated gas” can be turned into synthetic crude oil. This would be achieved by the use of compact GTL (gas to liquid) plants that the said companies are developing.

The process is commercially viable only on a huge scale, so the challenge facing the companies is to reduce the GTL plants into compact packages that can fit into an offshore platform, or on the floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessels used to explore and service offshore oil fields.

Source: Technology Review/ TreeHugger

The Smart Energy Glasses from Dutch company Peer+ make a lot of sense, they give you the desired privacy, and they generate energy. Also, they don’t look like ugly or other-worldly appendages on your windows. With these glasses in place, you can do away with the need for curtains and blinds, and simply adjust the settings of the glasses to go from opaque, to translucent and transparent, courtesy of a “privacy mode” in the windows bearing these glasses.

As you select privacy to the highest, the glasses go opaque, while they turn transparent for the other extreme. Also, while the glasses are darkest, they are most efficient in generating power, probably because they get to absorb more of the solar energy incident on them. In terms of looks, these glasses go a step ahead and let users display text or logos through the windows. These indeed have to be the catchiest among the lot that offer similar services.

Smart Energy Glass from Peerplus on Vimeo.

Source: FastCompany, TreeHugger

Lead has been a major concern of environmentalists lately – many efforts have been put into getting rid of it in the development of electronics, and it’s certainly quite a problem. The metal pollutes the soil, as well as ground water tables, and this is due to the disposal of electronics in landfills. Not to mention that it’s a toxic substance in e-waste dumps.

At the University of Maryland, a new possible solution is brewing – a material replacement for lead, which can be used in transducers, actuators, sensors and various other electronic components. Researchers have been experimenting with bismuth ferrite as a replacement for lead in pizoelectric charging in devices. And researchers from Yale have invented a new material for soldering, which could eliminate the need for lead in this area of electronics, by using magnets instead of heat to bind materials together.

This is a great advancement in the way technology developers work, and if the trend continues, we may see a lot more environmentally-friendly devices being produced in the near future – and we certainly hope so.

[ Via Treehugger ]

The way things stand, most of our gadgets have toxic compounds, and manufacturing them includes the use of more toxic compounds. Many companies have made conscious attempts to eliminate these toxins but there has been little success. And that is exactly why IBM deserves kudos for eliminating the use of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) compounds from the company’s chip manufacturing business.

IBM is the first company to phase out these toxins from all known uses of these compounds, making e-waste a tad less toxic. These compounds were used for imprinting designs and for embedding patterns for silicon chips. It took IBM a number of years to phase out their use, mainly because they had to look for an alternate compound that would do a job as good as these toxic ones, without putting the chips through any fall in quality.

IBM is making this technology available to other companies as well, and they say that many have already received the solution “through their technology development alliances with IBM.”

Source: TreeHugger

Lighting has always been a major issue when it comes to conserving energy. The currently used methods all have their disadvantages in some way, and the biggest one seems to be related to placement – you’re fairly limited in moving your lights around after placing them.

Yanko Design have shown a new concept for a ceiling covered in RGB LEDs, bunched together in groups equipped with sensors. The user could then use a laser pen to turn on and off spots of light on the ceiling, creating patterns of light.

This can make for a very interesting addition to your home – imagine being able to set the light down to the spot, illuminating various areas of the place that you find interesting. It doesn’t end there – comments from users give even better ideas, like motion sensor-enabled lights that follow you around when you get up to go to the bathroom during the night.

[ Via Gizmodo ]

Recycling plastic effectively would save our world millions of tons of waste, but the bad guy that plastic is, it doesn’t lend itself easily to recycling. There are of course recycle numbers on most plastic containers, but then even these plastics with same numbers often cannot be recycled together. All this basically takes us to huge mountains of plastics that need to be sorted before they can be put to recycling.

Manually segregating these large amounts is even more difficult than it sounds, resulting in an abysmally small percentage of plastics ever being recycled. To sort out the problem, Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Corp and Osaka University have created a robot that uses lasers to sort plastics into six different types. The robot uses lasers of different wavelengths and sees the reflectivity of these lasers to determine the composition of the plastic and subsequently sort these plastics.

There’s no word on the amount of plastic the robot can handle in a day, but it would probably be good as the bot is going to be commercially available soon with a price tag of $55k.

Source: Osaka University, Bot Junkie

Cellular Networks are an essential part of modern lifestyle, but at the same time, they are responsible for very high emissions. That said, cellular networks play an important role in communications, and countries which haven’t yet been able to have a decent wired network, now provide access to cellular networks for millions of people. Expanding cellular networks to such areas would mean increased emissions and costs, but VNL, a company based in India has a decent solution to the problem.

The company has managed to create GSM base stations that require only 50 – 150Watts of power, which can easily be supplied by solar cells. Assembly and mounting of the components requires only two people and can be completed in six hours, and be ready to serve hundreds of people. Not only is this cost effective for the companies, but also a lot more environment friendly and a great way to serve rural areas.

There are a few units installed in India, and the company now plans to head for Africa. These stations provide basic calling facilities, but cannot handle texts. Not a problem, say company executives, because most of the target mobile phone consumers are illiterate!

Source: Technology Review, Planet Green

Researchers at IBM have claimed to have found a new path to solar power, one that will make solar panels a lot more cheaper. The cheaper part is achieved by the use of “Earth abundant” elements, the use of which will be comparatively more cost effective than the Copper, Indium, Gallium, and Selenium that GIGS thin film cells use.

These abundant elements in question are copper, tin, zinc, sulfur and selenium. With the sunlight absorbing layer made of these elements than those listed earlier, the cost of the solar panels can be brought down. It isn’t just the cost these new panels are supposed to save, the conversion efficiency for such solar cells is at 9.6%, a 40 percent increase over previous such attempts, and there is always a possibility to boost efficiency further.

IBM says that it has no plan to step into the solar tech manufacturing arena, but it would be willing to partner with solar cell manufacturers.

Source: Tree Hugger

From the way things seem, the spray-on liquid glass, or the “SiO2 ultra-thin layering” is quite a magical thing. Created by Turkey’s Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials, and patented by Nanopool, the coating is a very thin film of glass; just about 100 nanometers thick.

It is non-toxic and free from nano-particles, resins or additives, with just the quantum forces holding molecules in the coating together. This coating could potentially protect almost any surface from water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. This means the applications are nearly endless, from agriculture where it protects plants and seeds, to sterilization, and even protecting clothing from stains.

They haven’t given out a whole lot of details on the creation/ constitution of this layering, but it has Silicon dioxide from quartz sand added to water and ethanol, and a mystery process that finally yields the thin layering. The material is already undergoing tests or having trial uses at a number of places, and if it really is the magical creation that it appears to be, it is soon going to be everywhere.

Source: TreeHugger

Weird as it may sound, engineers at the Princeton University have found a way to harvest power from Silicone Implants. Simple body movements like walking could help generate power. Researchers say the bio compatibility of silicone has already been proven with cosmetic implants, which makes us think of some bouncy power generators and the hazards of putting in a power plug there to charge a mobile phone.

These silicone rubber sheets transformed into piezoelectric materials can however, be worn outside the body, or implanted inside. Using a combination of silicone and nanoribbons made of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), these sheets can convert an impressive 80% of the mechanical energy into electric energy.

There are a number of applications these silicon rubber sheets could work on. Shoes or dresses that could power gadgets, or implants inside the body that could power pacemakers are among the few uses these may be put to.

Source: Popsci