It’s always nice to hear about people finding some value in our posts here on the blog. I must admit to being a bit of a feedback junkie - even if people want to provide us with critiques, I am more than happy to receive them with open-arms since such feedback can only help in the long run.
While we certainly can’t hope to win everyone over, we do aim to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. I know I can let my ‘inner goofball’ get away from me at times, but hopefully our more informative posts help to balance things out.
Anyway, I came across a nice blurb on the PeakOilDesign blog today (I made some of it bold):
…EcoSherpa has a post on solar panels made from blueberries. The site in general contains a number of excellent posts and really serves as a news source for edge-of-the-envelope sustainability news. They also link to a new site that could be promising, The Better World Homepage. I’d love to see how this one develops.
Well we certainly appreciate the kind words, and do enjoy offering up some interesting and unusual green news bytes whenever we can.
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While I have everyone’s attention I guess it wouldn’t hurt to make this into a bit of a Sherpa News post.
1) First of all, I’m sure some of you have noticed the absence of Steve (aka “Sherpa”) for the last little while. Just so you know he is still alive and kicking, but happens to be extraordinarily busy with work projects at the moment. We should expect to hear much more from him in the new year. In the meantime I (”Sherpa #2″) am more than happy to hold down the fort.
2) You may have also noticed a couple new links to our EcoSherpa Squidoo Lens popping up in various places. Be sure to have a look if you haven’t checked it out in awhile (or at all). It’s coming along reasonably well and I hope to add more to it in the near future. I think it will be a great place to post some of the notable resources we come across (and blog about), and it also provides access to our EcoSherpa Flickr gallery (which at the moment is focused solely on my winter composting activities).
3) We are planning to launch an EcoSherpa newsletter before too long (probably early in new year) so keep your eye out for that. Aside from keeping everyone up to date with general Sherpa news, we hope to get to know our readers a wee bit better (and thus be able to provide an even better resource over time), and also will be periodically releasing a full-fledged newsletter (with graphics and longer articles etc).
4) Also stay tuned for some new websites from yours truly. As you can probably tell I’m pretty passionate about composting. While I enjoy sharing that passion on the EcoSherpa blog, I certainly don’t want to dilute our overall theme with too many composting-related posts - so I’m going to put together some smaller sites dedicated solely to the topic.
Ok, well I think that’s about it for now. As per usual, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions/comments/suggestions/requests.
Cheers,
Bentley
Technorati Tags: ecosherpa, sustainability, sustainably living, compost, composting
Written by Bentley on December 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Interesting & Notable.
Interesting Slime Mold Growing in Bin It’s been a little while since I last provided updates on my ‘winter composting extravaganza’ so I figured today was as good a day as any!
Truth be told, I haven’t even been out to the bin in a number of days so I really wasn’t sure what to expect. One major development since my last post has been a major retreat by Old Man Winter - a mild spell for the last week or so has resulted in all the snow melting away.
What’s interesting is that temperatures in the bin were somewhat cooler than expected the last time I took measurements (last week) - many zones having dropped to the 10-15 C (50-59F) range. I guess that’s the trade-off when you use heaps of snow as insulation around an outdoor bin.
Temperatures seem to have increased once again - many readings from today were in the 20-30 C range (68-86F), with some zones even hotter than that. This probably explains why I found quite a few worms in the upper layer of leaves, even though conditions were fairly dry in this region.
Another potential indicator of high temperatures was the congregation of thousands of springtails along the underside of the lid and in the upper layer on leaves. For those of you unfamiliar with springtails, they are a tiny fungus-eating invertebrates often found in areas rich in organic matter, such as forest leaf litter. They tend to be very common in composting bins (both indoors and outdoors) and certainly shouldn’t cause concern (I even have a small ‘pet’ population of these critters in the rich soil of one of my tropical houseplants).
Another interesting organism which seems to be doing very well in the bin these days is some form of slime mold (I think). It’s presence seems to be linked to the rise in bin temperatures since I only started noticing it when things went thermophilic on me a little while ago. It seems to be doing very well once again - as you can see in the picture above, it has spread onto the old door mat that’s been sitting at the top of the bin.
I decided to add some water today so as to cool things off and provide a little more moisture for the worms in the upper layer of leaves. I am however trying to avoid this practice as much as possible since we have very thick clay soils and I suspect my hole in the ground (below the bin) will become a lake of compost tea by spring if I’m not careful.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Hopefully before too long winter will test my skills a little more than it has been.
Previous posts in this series:
Composter’s Log: Stardate 60393.6 - Winter Has Arrived
Composter’s Log: Stardate 60376.9 - RED ALERT!!
Composter’s Log - Stardate 60352.8
Winter Composting Extravaganza
Technorati Tags: compost, composting, vermicompost, vermicomposting, worms, winter, springtails, slime mold
Note: The Winter Composting Extravaganza has moved to a new home. To catch all the latest winter composting action be sure to check out the Compost Guy
Winter Composting Page.
Written by Bentley on December 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Waste Management.
New Zealand’s Aquaflow Bionomic Corp. has become the World’s first producer of biofuel from sewage-pond-grown algae (well, the first to announce it anyway).
This certainly caught my attention since it sounds like an interesting variation of the algal-biofuel idea we’ve been discussing in several posts on the blog.
Aside from the fact that expensive reactor systems are not required (presumably some sort of effective harvesting system would however be needed), unlike other algal-biofuel technologies this approach relies on ‘wild algae’ - ie. algae that naturally colonize sewage ponds already.
According to a brief blurb on Radio New Zealand, Aquaflow thinks this approach has the potential to fulfill up to 80% of New Zealand’s diesel needs.
Here are some interesting exerpts from a more substantial article on Red Herring (link to follow):
Many consider algae to be an attractive alternative to current biofuel materials—such as corn, soybeans, and palm—because the slime has a high lipid density (read: it’s oily) and could theoretically produce far more oil per acre, reducing the cost of biofuels.
At a panel last week, Martin Tobias, CEO of biodiesel company Imperium Renewables, said algae could theoretically produce 10,000 gallons of oil per acre, compared with 680 gallons per acre for palm, the current highest-oil-yielding crop (see Biofuels Smackdown: Algae vs. Soybeans).
That’s important because a major obstacle to biodiesel is the fact that the same land used to grow biodiesel crops is also needed to grow food. And, as Rona Fried, editor of the green investing newsletter Progressive Investor, said: “People need to eat more than they need to use fuel” (see Waste-Based Ethanol $30M, Iogen’s Ethanol Ploy, The Fuel of the Future?).
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According to Mr. Gerritsen, a co-founder, the company originally started with the idea of making ethanol. Then, he saw U.S. Department of Energy research on aquatic species. He himself owned a mussel farm, and ran into an agriculturalist with a background in cultivating algae for fish food (now an agriculturalist for Aquaflow.)
Mr. Gerrisen said he believes Aquaflow’s technology could supply 10 percent of America’s biodiesel requirement in five to 10 years.
The U.S. biodiesel market grew from 25 million gallons in 2004 to 78 million gallons in 2005, according to a report by Emerging Markets Online, and that number could grow enormously as the U.S. aims to replace 30 percent of its transportation fuel with biofuel by 2030.
Joel Makower, a principal at Clean Edge, said waste streams are a great untapped resource. “I welcome this,” he said.
Unlike the idea of turning algae into hydrogen, using algae from sewage ponds to make biodiesel represents “a much straighter path,” he said.
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One particular advantage of the human-sewage approach is that algae from sewage tends to have a lot of oil, said Cary Bullock, CEO of Greenfuel Technologies, a company cultivating algae to convert emissions into biofuels (See Ethanol: Cellulose Break Down).
However, it’s a limited opportunity, because waste facilities are generally not huge, he said.
Sewage-treatment plants with open ponds make up only about a third of New Zealand’s plants, and with Aquaflow’s technology, that would make a potential supply of 20- to 30-million liters a year. That’s not much compared to a 3.1-billion-liter worldwide biodiesel market, itself a tiny part of the diesel market.
Aquaflow isn’t limited to New Zealand, however. Just this week, the company has gotten inquiries from the U.S., Portland, Scotland, Italy, and South America, Mr. Gerritsen said.
It also isn’t limited to poop. Aquaflow hopes to tap into other waste streams, such as dairy, wine, and food.
Well this definitely seems to be another interesting development in the algae-biofuel arena. I like the idea of combining waste management with fuel production. Undoubtedly there be considerable research and experimentation needed before any of these concepts really comes to fuition on a large scale, but thus far I think it looks quite promising.
I highly recommend you check out the Red Herring article (source of exerpts above): Poop-Grown Algae to Fuel Cars?
Also, another very interesting Red Herring article I highly recommend: Biofuels Smackdown: Algae vs. Soybeans
On a related note, I came across an article on News.com discussing similar research being conducted by others. Here is an exerpt:
LiveFuels is partnering with Sandia National Labs to devise a version of car fuel out of algae. The algae would be grown in ponds and then sold off to refiners who could turn it into petroleum. The science comes from Sandia; LiveFuels handles the business side of things.
The company has already trademarked the name Supercrude (which, I think, was also the name of a Redd Foxx album in the ’70s.)
LiveFuels says it can, potentially, get 10,000 gallons of useable hydrocarbons for an acre-size pond a year. The hydrocarbons will be boiled down into useable diesel or petroleum. The ponds will be fed by farm waste water.
Very interesting stuff (well I think so anyway), and a topic I know we will be revisting again before too long.
Related EcoSherpa Articles:
Algae + CO2 = Biofuel
South African Firm To Make Biofuel From Algae
Algae-Biofuel Revisited…Again
Technorati Tags: algae, biofuel, fuel, biodiesel, ethanol, diesel, alternative energy, green fuels, aquaflow, New Zealand, sewage, waste water
Written by Bentley on December 18th, 2006 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Green Energy.
