Day: November 23, 2016

Awards & contests, Solar

Solar stove research team wins $100,000 award for innovation

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story from the UIUC Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment.

Researchers in the iSEE-funded Stored Solar Stove Project are the recipients of The Ocean Exchange’s 2016 Gulfstream® Navigator Award.

Presented each year at The Ocean Exchange’s Annual Event, this $100,000 award honors an outstanding innovation that demonstrates positive impact on the environment, economies, and health while respecting cultures around the world and has applications across multiple industries.

Created by the project team, Sun Buckets are portable, stored solar energy cookstoves that allow users to cook without fire, fuel, or emissions. The cooking vessel design maintains local cooking traditions by emulating the temperature of fire and allowing users to cook where and when they wish, even when the sun isn’t shining. Watch how it works.

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products, Publications, Water

Widespread Shallow Groundwater Contamination Found in Southwestern Illinois Cave Streams and Springs

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story from the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Researchers have detected prescription and over-the-counter medications and personal care products in Illinois groundwater, an indication that humans are contaminating water that is vital to aquatic life…

This study was funded by PRI and the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center and is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Great Lakes, Water

Environmental policy center to convene Great Lakes mayors

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story from the University of Illinois Chicago.

The Freshwater Lab, a University of Illinois at Chicago-based environmental research and policy center, has been awarded two grants to support its work examining social and human issues related to water, energy and natural resources in the Great Lakes region.

A $50,000 grant from the McDougal Family Foundation will enable the Freshwater Lab to host a Great Lakes mayoral summit in 2017, entitled “Untrouble the Waters: Leading the Future in the Great Lakes.”

In addition, a $200,000 grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation will also support the summit and allow the Freshwater Lab to continue its work with community partners on freshwater issues and create a curriculum on Great Lakes issues to be used across the region.

Biofuels, Fuel cells, Publications, Renewable energy, Transportation

U.S. Department of Energy Guide to Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles

by  •  • 0 Comments

View the Guide.

More than a dozen alternative fuels are in production or under development for use in alternative fuel vehicles and advanced technology vehicles. Government and private-sector vehicle fleets are the primary users of these fuels and vehicles, but consumers are increasingly interested in them. Using alternative fuels and advanced vehicles instead of conventional fuels and vehicles helps the United States reduce petroleum use and vehicle emissions.

Fashion & beauty products, Recycling

Eileen Fisher has designs on keeping clothing out of landfills

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

Buying recycled items from trusted retailers is the next big fashion trend — and saves billions of tons of clothing from going to waste.

Environmental health, Publications

New method shows some Great Lakes fish consumption advisories may not protect health

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story in Great Lakes Echo.

Great Lakes fish consumption advisories could be inadequate and exposing consumers to higher levels of toxic chemicals than anticipated.

A new study says that the current approach to creating advisories doesn’t take into account what happens when more than one chemical is present in a fish. This means they are “probably deficient in protecting the health of human consumers,” the study says.

Natural resources, Publications

The Gulf oil spill caused more land to fall into the ocean, scientists say

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

Six years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still taking stock of the damage it caused. And increasingly, they’re reporting that widespread shoreline erosion and loss of wetlands — which can hurt important salt marsh ecosystems and leave coastal areas, and the city of New Orleans, more vulnerable to sea-level rise — was a major side-effect of the disaster.

A new study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reports extensive shoreline recession in the Mississippi River Delta as a result of the oil spill — and it finds that the spill’s impact was even more widespread than the erosion caused by Hurricane Isaac two years later.

Regulation

EPA Aims to Finish Climate Rules; Decisions Fall to Trump

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story at Bloomberg BNA.

The Obama administration aims to cement its greenhouse gas regulations in the time remaining, but some of the largest greenhouse gas decisions will slide to President-elect Donald Trump, according to the updated federal regulatory agenda.

Maps

Pic4Carto

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full post at Maps Mania.

Pic4Carto is an easy and simple way to find open sourced photographs of any location in the world. Simply click on the Pic4Carto interactive map and you can find photographs of that location from Flickr, Mapillary and Wikimedia.

Green business, Recycling

Trash to treasure: the social enterprises transforming recycling

by  •  • 0 Comments

Read the full story in The Guardian.

Convincing companies to buy back their own rubbish sounds like an unlikely business model – yet the Melbourne social enterprise Green Collect has found a way to make it work.

Companies in the city’s office towers pay Green Collect to take away hard-to-recycle waste. Green Collect then employs socially disadvantaged people to refashion it into something useful and then sells it back to the companies that threw it out. It’s a double whammy. As social enterprise expert Prof Jo Barraket says: “It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Social enterprises such as Green Collect exist to solve social, environmental, cultural or economic problems. They aim to be self-sustaining and at least 50% of their profits are ploughed back into their mission. “And that capacity of being able to find latent value is really a characteristic of all social enterprises,” says Barraket, director of the Centre for Social Impact Swinburne.

%d bloggers like this: