Bamboo has become an increasingly popular fixture in green consumerism, becoming trendy – and quite useful – in everything from floors to t-shirts. Bamboo, because of its durability and growth (up to 24 inches in a single day), is one of the world’s most sustainable building materials. And now Dell is using the bamboo to cushion its products. Although the bamboo cannot be recycled yet – at least not until next year – the bamboo products are cheaper to produce than paper pulp, and it even utilizes recaptured water.

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The ground-breaking Envion Oil Generator (EOG) gave its first public performance at the Montgomery County Solid Waste Transfer Station in Derwood, Maryland recently. The EOG can be fed almost any petroleum-based waste plastic and will convert it into synthetic light to medium oil for less than USD$10 per barrel. As with crude oil, the synthetic oil can then be processed into commercial fuels or even back into plastic.

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Concrete is the most prevalent building material on the planet, but it does come at a price – around 5-8 percent of all human-generated atmospheric CO2 comes from the concrete industry. A culprit is Portland cement, the binding agent in concrete. Production of Portland cement is currently exceeding 2.6 billion tons per year worldwide and growing at 5 percent annually.

A greener alternative, inorganic polymer concrete (geopolymer), utilizes ‘fly ash’, one of the most abundant industrial by-products on earth, as a substitute for Portland cement.

Geopolymer concrete has a number of benefits. It has the potential to substantially curb CO2 emissions. It can also produce a more durable infrastructure capable of lasting hundreds of years, instead of tens. And by utilizing the fly ash, it can conserve hundreds of thousands of acres currently used for disposal of coal combustion products, and protect our water ways from fly ash ‘contamination’, too.

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Researchers have developed a new advanced Lithium Ion battery that will allow mobile phone and laptop computers to be fully charged in seconds. Electric car batteries may be charged in as little as five minutes, removing one of the main barriers to wider uptake of EVs. Solar and wind power generation could also benefit as better batteries could be used to store surplus energy.Two companies have already licensed the technology. Because it involves a new approach to manufacturing lithium-ion battery materials, rather than a new material, it could be ready within two to three years.
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Researchers at the University of Maryland and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed a supercapacitor with 10 billion nanoscale capacitors per square centimeter, giving it 250 times greater surface area than that of a conventional capacitor of comparable size. The Nano Supercapacitor is being developed primarily as part of a hybrid battery-capacitor system for electric cars.Current commercial supercapacitors range from 0.5 to 30 wh/kg, while the research is in its early stages, if they reach their claim of a 100 increase that will result in 3000 wh/kg. For comparison, a conventional lead-acid battery is typically 30 to 40 wh/kg and modern lithium-ion batteries are about 160 wh/kg. In automobile applications gasoline contains around 12,000 wh/kg, which operates at 15% tank-to-wheel efficiency giving an effective energy density of 1800 wh/kg

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Arizona-based company First Solar has achieved a major milestone in reducing the manufacturing cost for solar panels below the $1 per watt price barrier – the target necessary for solar to compete with coal-burning electricity on the grid or grid-parity. Using cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology in its thin-film photovoltaic cells, First Solar claims to have the lowest manufacturing cost per watt in the industry with the ability to make solar cells at 98 cents per watt, one third of the price of comparable standard silicon panels. The efficiency is in part due to a low cycle time – 2.5 hours from sheet of glass to solar module – about a tenth of the time it takes for silicon equivalents.Read more here.

It was recently described that Indian scientists have used naturally occurring bacteria to convert CO2 into calcium carbonate – a technique for converting CO2 into a form that can be buried. Now a Colorado based company, ION Engineering, announced that they have developed technology that could be used in a similar way to economically remove CO2 and other contaminants from fossil fuel power plant emissions and raw natural gas.While recent developments in carbon capture technology have brought costs of carbon capture down to $50 to $100 a ton, the company’s ionic liquid technology could cut the costs of capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants to as low as $20 a ton.

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Believe it or not, someone has actually invented a printer that uses old coffee grounds as ink. Even more, the printer is manually operated and does not even require electricity!Check it out here!

Researchers in Australia have started a three-year project to develop a spray-on coating for solar panels and more efficient cells that are less costly than today’s photovoltaics.Solar cells are typically made of silicon coated with a thin layer of silicon nitride – which is used as an anti-reflective agent to increase cell efficiency. However, these types of cells are costly to produce because the anti-reflective layer must be deposited in a vacuum.

The new method uses a spray-on hydrogen film and spray-on anti-reflective film. Instead of needing a vacuum, the cells travel along a conveyor belt where the films are sprayed on. The simplified process could reduce about $5 million in capital equipment costs per medium-sized factory with these savings resulting in cheaper solar cells.

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