improvements

The Enormous Cost Of Steel Corrosion | Earth Wise

February 28, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Global steel production has been rising for decades. Because steel corrodes over time, part of the demand for more steel comes from the need to replace the steel used in construction materials – in everything from bridges to cars – that has become corroded over time. Studies have estimated that the economic cost of corrosion is an astonishing 3 to 4% of a nation’s gross domestic product. Globally, this means that steel corrosion costs the world trillions – yes, trillions with a T – of dollars each year.

On top of the staggering economic impact of corrosion, there is the fact that steel production is one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters of any industry, accounting for more than 25% of all manufacturing sector carbon emissions. In fact, steel manufacturing causes over 10% of total global carbon emissions.

As a result of regulations placed on the steel industry, technological advances in the steelmaking process have resulted in a 61% reduction in the industry’s energy consumption over the last 50 years. There are continuing efforts to reduce the energy consumption of steel making and to move away from the use of fossil fuels to produce the needed energy. But without significant improvements, just the emissions associated with replacing corroded steel could make the goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement unfeasible.

It’s hard to believe that something costing the world trillions of dollars and has a major negative impact on the climate is largely invisible. Steel corrosion is an enormous societal challenge that has gone under the radar for decades and therefore has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

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Reducing steel corrosion vital to combating climate change

Photo, posted July 24, 2008, courtesy of Phil Whitehouse via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Climate A Winner In The Elections | Earth Wise

December 22, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The dominant issues in midterm elections in November were the economy and abortion rights, but at the same time there were also ballot initiatives in various cities and states across the country related to climate. What some describe as the ‘silent surprise’ of the election was that these initiatives generally passed and, in some cases, by large majorities.

The most significant of these ballot measures was in New York, where two-thirds of voters passed the largest environmental bond measure in state history. The measure funds up to $4.2 billion for environmental improvement projects including increasing flood resiliency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, electrifying school buses, and creating more green and open spaces.

The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act provides up to $1.5 billion for projects aimed at climate change mitigation. Another $1.1 billion is targeted for flood risk reduction and waterway restoration. $650 million goes for water quality and infrastructure improvement.

Rhode Island voters passed a green bonds act that will allow the state to invest in climate resiliency at the municipal level, as well as local recreation, open space protection, brownfields remediation, and forest and habitat restoration.

Other climate-related ballot measures passed in Boulder, Colorado and in El Paso, Texas. There were however a few climate measures that lost. Proposition 30 in California that would have taxed very high-income residents to encourage sale of electric vehicles failed. So did Arizona Proposition 310, which would have increased sales taxes by 0.1% to fund fire districts.

But overall, it was a good election for the climate.

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Voters pass historic climate initiatives in ‘silent surprise’ of US midterms

Photo, posted September 24, 2021, courtesy of Ivan Radic via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Cleaning Up Urban Rivers With Nature’s Tools | Earth Wise

October 7, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Fifty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act, urban waterways across the United States are continuing their comeback and are showing increasing signs of life. A strategy that is being adopted in many places is to use natural restoration techniques focused on bolstering plants and wildlife to improve water quality.

A nonprofit called the Upstream Alliance has focused on public access, clean water, and coastal resilience in the Delaware, Hudson, and Chesapeake watersheds. Working with the Center for Aquatic Sciences and with support from the EPA and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the alliance has been repopulating areas of an estuary of the Delaware River near Camden, New Jersey with wild celery grass, which is a plant vital to freshwater ecosystems.

In many places, scientists, nonprofits, academic institutions, and state agencies are focusing on organisms like bivalves (typically oysters and mussels) along with aquatic plants to help nature restore fragile ecosystems, improve water quality, and increase resilience.

Bivalves and aquatic vegetation improve water clarity by grounding suspended particles, which allows more light to penetrate. These organisms also cycle nutrients both by absorbing them as food and by making them more available to other organisms.

Underwater restoration projects have been underway in New York Harbor for more than a decade, where the Billion Oyster Project has engaged 10,000 volunteers and 6,000 students.

The hope is that bringing back bivalves and aquatic plants can create a lasting foundation for entire ecosystems. It is restoring nature’s ability to keep itself clean.

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How Using Nature’s Tools Is Helping to Clean Up Urban Rivers

Photo, posted December 19, 2019, courtesy of Scott via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A New “Wonder Material” | Earth Wise

February 11, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Graphene is a form of carbon made of single-atom-thick layers. It has many remarkable properties and researchers around the world continue to investigate its use in multiple applications.

In 2019, a new material composed of single-atom-thick layers was produced for the first time. It is phosphorene nanoribbons or PNRs, which are ribbon-like strands of two-dimensional phosphorous. These materials are tiny ribbons that can be a single atomic layer thick and less than 100 atoms wide but millions of atoms long. They are comparable in aspect ratio to the cables that span the Golden Gate Bridge. Theoretical studies have predicted how PNR properties could benefit all sorts of devices, including batteries, biomedical sensors, thermoelectric devices, nanoelectronics, and quantum computers.

As an example, nanoribbons have great potential to create faster-charging batteries because they can hold more ions than can be stored in conventional battery materials.

Recently, for the first time, a team of researchers led by Imperial College London and University College London researchers has used PNRs to significantly improve the efficiency of a device. The device is a new kind of solar cell, and it represents the first demonstration that this new wonder material might actually live up to its hype.

The researchers incorporated PNRs into solar cells made from perovskites. The resultant devices had an efficiency above 21%, which is comparable to traditional silicon solar cells. Apart from the measured results, the team was able to experimentally verify the mechanism by which the PNRs enhanced the improved efficiency.

Further studies using PNRs in devices will allow researchers to discover more mechanisms for how they can improve performance.

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‘Wonder material’ phosphorene nanoribbons live up to hype in first demonstration

Photo, posted October 6, 2010, courtesy of Alexander AlUS / CORE-Materials via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Increasing Palm Oil Production Without Harming The Environment | Earth Wise

May 5, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Palm oil is the most important source of vegetable oil in the world. The oil itself and ingredients based on it are found in approximately 50% of the products on supermarket shelves, including both food and non-food items. Many of the mysterious chemicals that show up on ingredient lists such as sodium lauryl sulfate are actually derived from palm oil.

Dozens of countries produce palm oil, but about 2/3 of the world’s supply comes from Indonesia and the demand for its oil keeps growing. To keep up with that demand, Indonesia continues to convert valuable ecosystems that contribute greatly to biodiversity to palm production.

A four-year research project at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln has found that keeping up with palm oil demand may not necessarily mean converting valuable, fragile ecosystems into agricultural land. According to the study published in Nature Sustainability, palm oil yields on existing farms and plantations could be greatly increased with improved management practices.

The researchers identified key practices that could lead to larger yield. These include improved harvest methods, better weed control, improved pruning, and better plant nutrition. With such practices, Indonesia could produce 68% more palm oil on existing plantation areas.

The results were surprising to the researchers and are significant from both environmental and economic standpoints. In particular, it could have a great impact on the millions of individual farmers who draw their livelihood from small palm farms often containing just a few acres. In Indonesia, about 42% of land used for palm oil production is owned by smallholder farms.

The researchers are now working with various stakeholders in Indonesia to put these management techniques into practice.

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Husker research shows palm oil production can grow while protecting ecosystems

Photo, posted August 15, 2006, courtesy of Lian Pin Koh via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Grid-Scale Battery Storage is on the Rise | Earth Wise

February 4, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Driven by steeply falling prices and improving technology, grid-scale battery storage systems are seeing record growth in the U.S. and around the world. Battery storage is a way to overcome one of the biggest obstacles to renewable energy: the cycling between oversupply when the sun shines or the wind blows, and shortage when the sun sets or the wind drops. Storing excess energy in battery banks can smooth imbalances between supply and demand.

In California, a 300-megawatt lithium-ion battery plant is being readied for operation with another 100 megawatts to come online in 2021. The system will be able to power roughly 300,000 California homes for four-hour periods when energy demand outstrips supply. It will be the world’s largest battery system for a while until even larger systems in Florida and in Saudi Arabia come online.

Nationwide, a record 1.2 gigawatts of storage were installed last year and that number is projected to jump dramatically over the next five years to nearly 7.5 gigawatts in 2025.

The price tag for utility-scale battery storage in the U.S. has plummeted, dropping nearly 70% just between 2015 and 2018. Prices are expected to drop by a further 45% over the next decade. Battery performance has continued to improve dramatically with increased power capacity and the ability to store and discharge energy over ever-longer periods of time.

Favorable energy policies including renewable energy mandates coupled with continued price drops will drive the widespread expansion of battery energy storage.

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In Boost for Renewables, Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is on the Rise

Photo, posted November 17, 2016, courtesy of Steve Ryan via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Hacking Photosynthesis | Earth Wise

September 14, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

A team led by the University of Illinois has been pursuing a project called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency or RIPE, which has the aim of improving photosynthesis in order to provide farmers with higher-yielding crops in an increasingly challenging climate. Photosynthesis is the natural, sunlight-powered process that plants use to convert carbon dioxide into sugars that fuel growth, development, and for us, crop yield.

If we think of photosynthesis as a factory line composed of multiple machines, the growth of plants is limited by the slowest machines in the line. The RIPE project has identified some steps in photosynthesis that are slower than others and are attempting to enable plants to build more machines to speed up those slower steps.

The researchers modeled a total of 170 steps in the process of photosynthesis to identify how plants could manufacture sugars more efficiently. In the study, the team increased crop growth by 27% by resolving two constraints: one in the first part of photosynthesis where plants turn light energy into chemical energy and one in the second part when carbon dioxide is turned into sugars.

The researchers effectively hacked photosynthesis by adding a more efficient transport protein from algae to enhance the energy conversion process.

In the greenhouse, these changes improved crop productivity by 52%, but in field trials, which are a more important test, these photosynthetic hacks boosted crop production by 27%.

Ultimately, the team hopes to translate these discoveries to a series of staple food crops, such as cassava, cowpea, corn, soybean and rice, which are needed to feed the world’s growing population this century.

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Photosynthetic hacks can boost crop yield, conserve water

Photo, posted June 14, 2017, courtesy of Alex Holyoake via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Small-Scale Climate Solutions | Earth Wise

May 18, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In order to meet international climate targets, we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next decade and reach net-zero by mid-century. Achieving this will require unprecedented and rapid changes in how energy is supplied, distributed and used.

Researchers at several European universities collected data on a wide variety of energy technologies at different scales and tested how well they performed in accomplishing an accelerated low-carbon transformation.

Large-scale, costly, non-divisible or so-called lumpy technologies, such as utility-scale generation, nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, high-speed transportation, and whole-building retrofits are often seen as the most effective way to achieve emission-reduction goals. A key finding of their study is that low-carbon technologies that are smaller scale and can be mass deployed are more likely to enable a faster transition to net-zero emissions.

So-called granular options include solar panels, electricity storage batteries, heat pumps, smart thermostats, electric bikes, and ride-share services. These options scale not by becoming larger but by replicating.

Small-scale options are quicker to deploy, their technologies have shorter lifespans and are less complex, so innovations and improvements can be brought to market more rapidly. They are also more widely accessible and help create more jobs, giving governments a sound basis for strengthening climate policies.

However, smaller-scale technologies are not a panacea. There are no small-scale replacements for industrial plants and other kinds of major infrastructure, but in many different contexts, they can outperform larger-scale alternatives as a means of accelerating the low-carbon transformation.

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Smaller scale solutions needed for rapid progress towards emissions targets

Photo, posted April 8, 2019, courtesy of the City of St Pete via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Speed Breeding Of Crops

January 4, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

A technique pioneered by NASA for the purpose of growing plants extra-terrestrially is now being applied here on earth to fast-track improvements in a range of crops. The technique, known as speed breeding, has been adapted for use by British and Australian researchers on a scale ranging from vast greenhouses to desktop growth chambers.

Speed breeding uses enhanced LED lighting and day-long regimes of up to 22 hours to optimize photosynthesis and promote rapid growth of crops. By speeding up the breeding cycle of plants,it is possible, for example, to grow six generations of wheat in a year compared with two generations using traditional breeding methods.

With shortened breeding cycles, genetic improvements such as yield gain, disease resistance and climate resistance can be fast-tracked in crops such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, various Brassica species, oil seed rape and peas.

The ability to do this in compact desktop chambers permits cutting-edge research to be performed inexpensively before being scaled up to large greenhouses.

Crop development is an increasingly important activity and speed breeding is increasingly attractive in light of the opposition in some quarters to modern gene-editing techniques to create GMO crops. Speed breeding allows crop improvements via anon-GMO route.

The new technique is already being applied in Australia, which is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record. It is being used to rapidly cycle genetic improvements to make crops more drought resilient.

Generation time in most plant species is a major bottleneck in applied research programs and breeding. Speed breeding can greatly reduce this bottleneck, allowing scientists to respond more quickly to emerging diseases, the changing climate and increased demand for specific plant traits.

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JIC joins European scientists to safeguard precision breeding

Photo, posted May 8, 2016, courtesy of Yair Aronshtam via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Saildrones For Science

July 11, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Nine years ago, engineer Richard Jenkins broke the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle with a sailboat on wheels driving across a dry lakebed at 126 miles per hour. After years of engineering development, his technology has now taken on the form of a saildrone that can autonomously sail the sea gathering ecologic, oceanic and atmospheric data.

The Dirty Laundry On Dirty Laundry

September 1, 2017 By EarthWise

We’ve discussed the problem of microplastics polluting our oceans at great lengths on this program before. Much of the small plastic particles result from the breakdown of plastic litter, such as plastic bags, packaging, and other materials. Another source is microbeads, which are often found in health products such as face scrubs and even some toothpastes. But there is a another source of microplastic pollution that is quite troubling: dirty laundry.