Filed under: Emerging Technologies

There are thousands of landfill sites around the world filled with hundreds of millions of tires. Unfortunately used tires have been notoriously hard to recycle until now. They have been ground up and used as an aggregate in road surfaces or for flooring but sixty-five percent of annual rubber production is used to make new tires. The vulcanizing process chemically changes the rubber and makes it unsuitable to reuse in new tires.

British researchers may have found a way to make the previously vulcanized rubber adhere to new rubber so that it can be reused. By grinding up old tires and then treating them in an ionized oxygen plasma chamber they have been able to get the carbon bonds to break and adhere to new rubber particles. Once that happens the rubber can be reprocessed in to new tires. Similar process have been tried before with chlorine or flourine but using oxygen is definitely less risky.

[Source: New Scientist Tech, thanks to Howard for the tip]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Filed under: Ethanol, GM, AutoblogGreen Exclusive

GM’s group vice president for Global Powertrain and Quality, Tom Stephens, spoke yesterday at the US BioEnergy ethanol plant in Woodbury, Michigan. Earlier, we brought you a video of some folks from US BioEnergy on how the plant and company operate. Now, here’s GM’s view on how to use all that ethanol. Stephens cites the two biggies – energy independence and less CO2 released into the air – as reasons GM is supporting ethanol so much (see, for example, this post and this one), but he makes it clear that hybrid/PHEVs and then EVs and hydrogen vehicles are the way of the future.

Give Tom a listen here.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Academy-award nominated Japanese animator Koji Yamamura has created this tiny, beautiful story about a Japanese headmaster who saves a whale, returning a debt for having been saved from starvation after the second world war. The 2-minute film took him 5 months to make and comprises 1700 drawings.

You can read more about Yamamura here.

Photo credit: MyGo-PasadenaInspired by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new GREEN LA climate change action plan, announced earlier this month, I’ve decided to take a look a big element of life in LA: transportation. As any Angeleno knows, ridiculous traffic and poor air quality have a huge impact on our overall quality of life here in So Cal (Mountains? I don’t see any mountains!) But what’s included in the plan, and what are our options in the meantime?

In the works
According to Nancy Sutley, Deputy Mayor for Energy and the Environment for the City of Los Angeles, “LA hasn’t spent a dime in 15 years on expanding freeway capacity.” Really? I hadn’t noticed.

Fortunately, the city has worked to expand and green public transportation, used by over a million people every day. Working towards the elimination of diesel buses by next year, the MTA sports the largest fleet of natural gas buses in North America. Even better, expansions to the light rail and subway system are also planned, including the unlikely Subway to the Sea project that entails expanding the Metro Red line underneath Wilshire Blvd. 15 miles to the ocean. The project would take 15 years at a cost of $5 billion, but would provide public transport for one of the most heavily traveled routes in the city. If it happens.

Is there a more eco-friendly way to package milk besides plastic jugs and gable-top cartons? A UK company seems to think so. Greenbottle is a new two-part milk packaging system that was recently test-piloted in Asda supermarkets during a one-week trial. The bottles quickly sold out.

Designed by Martin Myerscough from Framlingham, Suffolk, the bottle consists of a pulped recycled cardboard outer (think cardboard egg cartons) and a corn-based bioplastic bag liner. After the milk is gone, the bioplastic bag can be removed and composted, and the outer shell can be recycled or composted.

Logging has restarted in the disputed Saami reindeer forests in Inari. Finnish state has decided to continue the destruction of old-growth wilderness forests in Kessi. Read what Saami Council has to say.

Continue reading Logging restarted in the disputed forests…

Filed under: Biodiesel, Diesel, Emerging Technologies, Ethanol, Flex-Fuel, Manufacturing/Plants

Two pieces of news from Chevron today. First, Chevron Corporation and the Texas A&M Agriculture and Engineering BioEnergy Alliance have initiated a “strategic research agreement” to accelerate the production of biofuels from cellulose to the consumer. These groups thereby enters into a four-year partnership that will endeavor to:

• identify appropriate non-food crops to cultivate for the production of bio-oils and cellulose,
• optimize the genetic design of said crops through genomic study and breeding,
• develop viable means of harvesting, storing, converting and distributing these bioenergy crops,
• and develop appropriate processing techniques.

Between this year and 2009, Chevron expects to spend $2.5 billion on this massive R&D project. Read the wordy press release here.

Also contributing toward that end, Chevron and BioSelect unveiled a fully operational biodiesel production facility in Galveston, TX. The plant will start off producing 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year, and has the projected capacity of 110 million gallons per year. It won’t stop there, as Chevron plans on expanding its biodiesel production to other facilities and thereby producing up to 470 million gallons per year by 2010. Interestingly, there are already 700 retail sources for biodiesel in the U.S. because it can be sent out through the existing distribution system. Little or no modifications need be made to convert most diesel engines to run on B20. Other benefits include better lubrication then petroleum-based diesel, extending engine life. That’s certainly a step in the right direction.

[Source: Chevron]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Photo by KG4CHW. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Cindy Sheehan spoke with Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow yesterday about the day her son Casey died in Iraq, campaigning to hold Bush and Congress to account for the Iraq war, becoming a leading peace activist, and divisions in the movement.

She wrote a sort-of resignation letter to the US peace movement on Monday, in which she wrote: “When I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the ‘left’ started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of ‘right or left’, but ‘right and wrong.'”

I think Cindy is right to take time now to withdraw, reflect, and perhaps retool for another crack at it some day. I always found her story about moving from grieving mother to antiwar activist profoundly challenging. Above all, it has lessons about love of enemy — the soldiers and mercenaries who’ve died invading Iraq, Iraqis and foreign fighters involved in the quagmire there. And now it reminds us to love ourselves too.

Sometimes peace groups and sustainability campaigns could do with a bit more of that peace internally, if they want to last or be a model for more people to join. So look after yourself Cindy — and thank you!

Filed under: Hybrid, MPG

We’ve all know for some time that the EPA was revising the way they calculate the fuel economy ratings for new vehicles to hopefully make them more representative of real world driving. Well the new updated numbers are finally available at FuelEconomy.gov. As expected most numbers are down by 2-3mpg although some take a bigger hit, particularly some of the higher-rated hybrids.

For example the Prius drops from 60/51/55mpg city/hwy/combined down to 48/45/46mpg. Similarly the Honda Civic hybrid goes from 49/51/50 mpg to 40/45/42 mpg. Not all hybrids dropped as severely with the 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid went from 36/31/34 to 31/29/30 mpg. Since all hybrids are highly dependent on control strategies that are defined by software, they can be tuned to perform their best on specific circumstances.

What this seems to indicate is that Toyota and Honda tuned their strategies to work best on the EPA test cycles to the detriment of real world performance. On the other hand, Ford seems to have tuned their system to provide the best efficiency to the driver. That’s not to say that the Toyota and Honda don’t still provide outstanding efficiency, because they do. It’s just that the previously published numbers are artificially inflated, perhaps in an attempt to get bragging rights. I’ll have more to say on this subject in a piece following my upcoming review of the 2008 Escape Hybrid in a few days.

[Source: Environmental Protection Agency]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Phoenix

AeroVironment, a company that helps build drones (unpiloted flying machines) for the U.S. military as well as earlier work on vehicles like the Sunraycer and the GM Impact, announced today that its ten-minute recharge demonstration of an Altair Nanotechnologies 35kWh battery pack was successful, and restored enough power to drive the car for two hours at 60 mph. The demo was performed for folks from California Air Resources Board (CARB) at AeroVironment’s Monrovia, California Energy Technology Center.

AeroVironment used a 250kW, grid-connected AV advanced battery charger for the demo. AV says that its earlier tests of Altair’s batteries demonstrate “that such battery packs can sustain several cycles per day of ten minute charging and two hour discharging. Each cycle is equivalent to an electric vehicle traveling for two hours at 60 miles per hour.”

So, how is this news? Altair’s CEO, Alan Gotcher, has been telling us and others about the capabilities his batteries have for quite some time. AV calls the demo a “milestone,” so that sounds like it means either this is the first time someone other than Altair has been able to verify Altair’s claims, or it’s the first time a group like CARB was on hand to see the quick charge in action. Either way, it’s another step forward for these batteries and the Phoenix vehicles they’re destined for.

Related:

• Berko throws cold water on Altair Nanotechnologies as an investment
• Phoenix makes $2.2 million order for Altair’s NanoSafe battery packs
• AutoblogGreen Q&A: AltairNano CEO Alan Gotcher

[Source: AeroVironmental]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.