Innovation

Charge While You Drive

May 29th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

You just got a shiny new electric vehicle, you’re hip and ready to go. Driving could be a dream, but where are you going to “fill up”?

What if you could charge your new car while driving it? Sounds fantastical, but actually the ability to charge while you drive with wireless technology may be just around the corner.

Researchers at Stanford have come up with a wireless charging technology that uses “magnetic resonance coupling” - in other words, copper coils in your car and in the ground transfer electricity between each other while you are driving. Charge while you’re driving and you never have to stop to refill your battery!

This potentially revolutionary new system is outlined in a paper recently published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

While there are some kinks to be worked out, the idea behind the technology is quite innovative and tackles head on the “range anxiety” that many people feel when deciding whether or not to purchase an electric vehicle.

Imagine a carpool lane magnetized for electric cars only. It would require tearing up some of the freeway pavement, but the metal coils needed to make it run are very affordable. One more important innovation on the road to a new way of driving.

Food System

Grow Biointensive

May 28th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

Nestled in the redwoods of northern California’s Mendocino county is the small town of Willits. This community is the home of the farming pioneers Ecology Action, and the home of their Grow Biointensive mini-farm.

Founded in 1971, Ecology Action was first headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. The project’s original aim was and still is to “teach regular classes, collect data, make land available for gardening and publish information” on the techniques of Biointensive agriculture. The work grew from a collective concern about worldwide starvation and malnutrition as a result of overpopulation.

At the foundation of the Grow Biointensive method are the scientific principles which underlie ancient traditional farming methods such as:

• Double-Dug, Raised Beds
• Composting
• Intensive Planting
• Companion Planting
• Carbon Farming
• Calorie Farming
• The Use of Open-Pollinated Seeds
• A Whole-System Farming Method (www.growbiointensive.org)

The methods aim to minimize water inputs (done properly this method requires 67-88% less water than conventional agriculture) and produce more food on less land by increasing the soil health and producing food without the use of petroleum or natural gas products.

According to Ecology Action, “There may be as little as 40 years of farmable soil remaining globally. For every pound of food eaten, 6 to 24 pounds of soil are lost due to water and wind erosion, as the result of agricultural practices.” This means that soil health should be a top priority for anyone passionate about food security for the future.

The group now holds workshops at the farm in Willits and at other locations around the country teaching others how to grow more food with less space, save water and replenish soil during the process.

Eco Living

A Love Affair With Worms

May 27th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

What is Vermicomposting?

It almost sounds like a foreign word, but vermicomposting is the process of using worms to compost food waste into a rich, black humus. The “humus” is actually a compost of the worm castings (castings is a fancy way of saying: worm poop!)

The worms eat the food scraps, paper, etc that you put into your bin and their excrement is a rich, black, dirt-like compost that your plants will absolutely love! (and it has no smell, it really looks and feels like dirt, so don’t worry!)

To get started you need:

• Worm Bin
• Worms - make sure you get the right kind of Redworms - not all worms are alike!
• Paper and food scraps to compost!

If you choose to buy a worm bin, there are a few different styles to choose from.

There are also several websites that will help you build your own worm bin.

Once you have the bin and the worms, you’ll want to prep it for success. The worms like paper including your junk mail minus the plastic parts. They eat most food waste as well with the exception of  dairy, meats and citrus (although citrus is ok in small amounts).

The first time you put the worms in the bin make sure you have a good mix of paper and food waste. The shredded up paper/newspaper/old magazines/cardboard is called “bedding” and you’ll need a good layer of bedding to start your bin off. Make sure you shred it well so the worms can move around and through the bedding. Spray a little water on the bedding to get it damp.

You’ll want to add some of these paper products every so often so the inside of the bin doesn’t get too wet. The heat inside the bin creates water vapor and your worms can drown in too much water!

Most bins will have a valve to drain excess water. The water is actually called “worm tea”. This brown “tea” is also great for your plants or your garden.

Expect to harvest your worm castings every few months. All you need to do is keep feeding your worms. The amount of worms you’ll need depends on how much kitchen waste you produce each day. Start with one pound of worms for a typical family of four and add more if they aren’t eating the food fast enough.

It helps to chop or cut up the food and paper waste before putting it in your bin. The worms will be able to eat it faster.

The worms will keep reproducing and if a couple escape into your soil it’s good for the whole ecosystem so don’t worry! The great thing about worm bins is they don’t smell - as long as you follow the rules and don’t put in any dairy or meat. It’s a great way to up-cycle almost all your food waste. And when you put the compost back into your garden to grow more food, you’ve created a closed-loop, truly sustainable food system.

Food System

What Is Food Waste

May 26th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

What is food waste and what can I do about it?

Food waste is a significant problem. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately 1/3 of food produced for humans in the world is either lost or wasted.

Think about that for a moment: 1/3 of the food we produce and all the energy, time, resources (water, land) and money that went into growing it, packaging it and shipping it is wasted.

Here are a few other startling facts from the UNFAO website:

• Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes.
• Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tons) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons).
• Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.
• The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tons in 2009/2010).

Some of this loss is due to poor infrastructure, especially in developing countries, when the food is processed, stored and package for distribution. But a lot of the waste comes from consumers in the developed world.

What can you do to curb your own food waste?

• Only buy or order what you need and what you can eat. A lot of food is thrown out because it's gone bad.
• Take home your leftovers and eat them, or Replate them.
• If something does go bad in your fridge or you can't save the leftovers, then compost the food waste. At least the compost will contribute to soil health and growing more food.
• Be less picky about the appearance of your fruits and vegetables. A lot of food is thrown out because it's not attractive enough for consumers.
• Talk to your local restaurants about donating food they can't use to a local food pantry and/or starting a compost or a restaurant grade worm bin.

It’s time to realize that throwing away food is no longer acceptable practice. Raising awareness and changing personal habits is the first step.

Eco Living

Electric Scooter Updates

May 26th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

Electric scooters are all the rage in some cities. San Francisco is launching Scoot Networks, a scooter version of the Zipcar idea, next month. Subscribers pay a monthly fee to access a city-wide network of super cute electric scooters.

You can find the scooters nearest you with your smartphone. Your phone then slips into a dock on the scooter’s dashboard to unlock it and voila! you’re off and riding.

The scooters top off at about 30 mph and go for about 30 miles before they need a charge, perfect for the range of city riding. Scoot Networks was one of the companies chosen by the Greenstart cleantech startup accelerator program which provides start up capital to innovative cleantech business ideas.

Photos Wired.com

In other great scooter innovations, the people of smart, an eco-subsidiary of Daimler, are now developing a scooter line called eScooter. It’s cute and fast, up to 30 mph with a 60 mile range on full charge. Originally unveiled during the 2010 Paris Motor Show, the scooter is just one part of Daimler’s overall strategy to create comprehensive urban mobility for the future. Photo Daimler

Innovation

The Clean Car Calculator

May 25th, 2012 | By Nicole Rogers

Until now shopping for a high fuel efficiency car, like an electric or hybrid vehicle, could be confusing with overwhelming amounts of data to digest and compare, but students at The Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at The University of California, Santa Barbara have just made it seductively simple.

Enter the Clean Car Calculator: an elegant online calculator that allows the consumer to compare any two high fuel efficiency vehicles on the market, providing a financial and environmental analysis of the cars and even recommending other vehicles to consider given the user’s criteria. The calculator allows the user to adjust for as many or as few variables as desired, like the car’s primary use, percentage of highway miles driven, government tax incentives, etc. One of the most valuable aspects of the calculator is that it determines how long one must own a high fuel efficiency vehicle for it to make economic sense in fuel savings.

The idea for the calculator was inspired by a homework assignment. Project manager Kate Ziemba explains:

The Calculator resulted from an assignment in the Energy and Resource Productivity class taught by Dr. Sangwon Suh at the Bren School that challenged students to understand the return on investment for businesses and consumers to implement energy saving technologies. Students compared lifetime costs and emissions of conventional gas versus high efficiency vehicles. The graduate student developers were surprised to find that hybrids not only paid themselves back in fuel savings, but also that newly released vehicles, such as the Volt and the Leaf, were smart purchases even without a government subsidy.

There you have it! There is more data everyday to show that electric cars and hybrids make sense for the environment and the consumer. But don’t take our word for it - check out the calculator and have fun comparing a few of your favorite green dream cars.

Transportation

A Peak Oil Primer

May 24th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

What is Peak Oil?

Peak oil is not the end of oil. It’s not as if all the reserves in the world are just going to dry up. Rather, it’s the end of cheap and available oil, something we humans have become quite used to in the last 100 or so years.

EROEI is a term often tossed around in this field of study. It stands for Energy Return on Energy Investment. What this measures is how much energy you create or extract minus the energy you spent during the process. For example, when oil was really cheap and more easily available in 1930, the EROEI was about 100:1. In 2004, when extraction had become much more difficult and costly, it was approximately 11-18:1. That is a significant difference.

When the EROEI is less than 1:1 that energy source becomes what is called an “energy sink” and is no longer feasible from a practical economic perspective. You can’t use more energy to extract the energy that you plan to use, it’s simple math. Peak oil means that the cost to extract oil from the ground will create such low EROEI that oil will no longer make sense as a primary energy source.

This is concerning for many reasons:

• Our food supply in America is directly tied to the very extensive shipping and distribution industry which relies on cheap and available oil.
• Our food supply is also dependent on petroleum products in the form of fertilizers and the fuel used to run the machines that are a backbone of the industrial farming sector.
• Even alternative energy sources as they stand now require parts and pieces that are made with petroleum products. We still do not have a truly "renewable" energy source.
• All the renewable energy sources available today do not produce nearly enough energy to replace the amount of oil Americans use on a daily basis.

It is possible for America to get on a speedy path to sustainability, but it will take a serious and concerted dedication of resources and innovation to achieve real energy and food security. Ready… set… go!

Transportation

What are fossil fuels?

May 24th, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

I imagine some day hundreds of years from now, when a future humanoid describes the fossil fuel era, they may say something like this:

Humans found the decomposed bodies of long dead organisms big and small buried under the ground. They created a way to burn this sludge and create energy that they used to power all kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the burning of this sludge created all kinds of other problems in the air, water, soil and in the bodies of living beings. Then, the humans realized that there were only so many organisms buried under the ground and they couldn’t keep burning them forever.

http://youtu.be/cJ-J91SwP8w

The term fossil fuels refers to the fuel sources coal, petroleum and natural gas which are all made from the decomposed bodies of once living organisms. It takes millions of years for the bodies of these once living creatures to become the fossil fuels that we use for creating energy today.

We live in a peculiar time. With fossil fuels discovered just a few hundred years ago, we have been depleting a resource that took millions of years to create at a pace that is clearly unsustainable into the future. Yet, until quite recently humankind has not been compelled to change in any significant way. The result is a global economic system that is intimately and perilously dependent on these buried dead organisms.

While there are debates about the reality of Peak Oil, it is clear that we will need to get creative about alternative forms of energy, quickly.

The rising price of oil is unsustainable for America’s economy. In addition, our leaders have acknowledged that our dependency on imported fossil fuels has become a matter of national security. It is clear that alternative renewable energy sources and energy efficiency will be key to creating a sustainable future for America and for the world.

Food System

Backyard Chickens

May 23rd, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

Imagine having access to your own eggs, fresh, every day. When you have your own backyard chickens, you will have access to all the eggs you can eat and you will know exactly what your chickens ate to make those eggs. Chickens are also great upcyclers, they will eat almost all your kitchen scraps - vegetables, fruit, bread, rice… basically anything but chicken!

Many counties have restrictions on livestock, so check to make sure that backyard chickens are legal in your neighborhood before you start. Courtesy to neighbors is also important protocol. Chickens are noisy animals so you want to bu sure that you place your coop out of neighbors ear shot.

When building a coop, a place for the chickens to nest and sleep at night is crucial, and you should plan for a larger enclosure where they can roam and eat bugs and the feed that you give them.

If you want to start with baby chicks, you can buy them online. There are lots of websites that sell different breeds of chicken. If you want a real egg laying machine, check out the Rhode Island Red, but there are also more exotic breeds like the Poodle Chicken… enough said.

If you start with chicks, you’ll want to keep them in a box with a warming lamp for about the first 6 weeks and they will only eat chick started feed until they get old enough to be on their own in the coop.

For the coop and enclosure, make sure you have:

• A raised area with a "nest" where the chickens can feel safe sleeping and laying their eggs. They like to sleep off the ground because the ground is where their natural predators roam.

•  A way to access the eggs, either a door or a roof that opens so you can get to the eggs each day. Make sure when you harvest the eggs that the chickens aren't sitting on them! That will make them feel nervous to lay in that nest again. Wait until they are roaming the enclosure and can't see you.

If you have a fully secure enclosure then you don’t have to clip their wings. If your enclosure is just fenced, you will have to clip the chickens wings every few weeks. They are birds and they can fly!

For some great coop designs and more information on caring for your chickens, check out Backyardchickens.com and don’t forget to ask your friends for creative omelet recipes!

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Food System

Local Produce Link

May 22nd, 2012 | By Aubrey Yee

In New York City, a innovative new program aims to bring healthy, fresh food to food pantries and the citizens they serve. Just Food is a New York City non-profit that “connects communities and local farms with the resources and support they need to make fresh, locally grown food accessible to all New Yorkers.”

Through Local Produce Link, some 44 farmers are connected with New York’s Food Pantries to provide fresh produce. Each food pantry receives approximately 200 lbs. of mixed vegetables each week, about 6 to 10 boxes. The produce varies with the season and often includes more unusual vegetables like bok choi (an asian cabbage) that patrons of the food pantry can try.

Farmers are paid by the pound through funding from the New York State Department of Health’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP).

Just Food also hosts community cooking programs and provides resources for recipes and nutrition information to help food pantry clients learn how to prepare the vegetables they receive in healthy ways. They host Farm Visits so that food pantry volunteers and clients can meet the farmers that grew their food, making the connection from farm to table.