Cities planting trees get $3 back for every $1 invested

According to Shaping Tomorrow, Melbourne has set a target for increasing canopy cover from 22% to 40% by 2040, and within that target improving quality and diversity of plants and species. Green roofs are being incorporated into more and more developments. In the process, according to research done elsewhere in the world, they will save lives, carbon and millions of dollars.

When a pest which killed an estimated 100 million trees across 15 states in north western America, there were 6.8 additional deaths from respiratory diseases and 16.7 additional deaths from cardiovascular problems per 100,000 adults: a total of 21,000 deaths. That is because trees help absorb air pollution by up to 30%. In one study of 10 US cities, trees removed between 4.7 and 64.5 tonnes tonnes of particulate matter, with annual economic benefits of between $142,000 per tonne in Atlanta and $1.6 million per tonne in New York. The value of benefits was predominantly related to less illness / fewer deaths. 

An important tool in quantifying the economic value of trees is iTree, which was originally developed in 2006 and is in its 5th iteration, with new capabilities being added each wave. In Pittsburgh, they established that their street trees – in pavements and on streets only – provided $2.4 million worth of eco-system services – such as shade, reduced temperature, air quality, aesthetics. That represented a return of $3 for every dollar spent on tree planting and maintenance. A later study, including the cities full tree population, valued their services at between $10 and $13 million per year.

30-Year Battery Could Replace Natural Gas Plants

According to MIT Technology Review, investors recently chipped in $15 million to fund battery startup EOS Energy Storage, a company that says its batteries could eventually compete with natural-gas power plants to provide power during times of peak demand. It plans to build a pilot manufacturing plant by the end of the year or early next year, and to start making full-size one-megawatt batteries by the end of 2014.

EOS wants to produce batteries that cost as little as $160 per kilowatt-hour and last for 30 years. Current batteries that cheap would fail after only a couple of years of service. The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of batteries at $100 per kilowatt-hour that can be recharged 5,000 times with 80 percent efficiency, saying that at that point batteries could be widely adopted for grid storage. EOS says its batteries can last 10,000 charges, which could make up for the higher upfront cost and lower efficiency of its batteries.

But the company hasn't reached its goals yet. It says it's "well within" $300 per kilowatt-hour. EOS has completely charged and discharged the most recent iteration of its battery cells over 1,000 times, and the batteries have so far retained 90 percent of their capacity. EOS says it's teaming up with seven utility companies to test the battery and design it to the performance specifications they need—it will announce the partners in the next couple of weeks.

Shine Africa Shine: SolarAid's lighting revolution

Some 590 million Africans live off the electric grid, instead using dangerous and polluting kerosene lamps. With the ambitious goal of eliminating the kerosene lamp from Africa by 2020, Solar Aid, winner of the Ashden International Gold Award, works with headteachers in rural areas to promote good quality, affordable solar lights to families. With over 400,000 lamps sold since 2010, the organisation is now the largest distributer of solar lights in Africa. Solar Aid

Lights are sourced from global suppliers, and are sold with warranties for between US$7 and US$40, depending on size and features. By end March 2013, 408,000 lights had been sold, with 57% in Tanzania (where the campaign started first in late 2010), 27% in Kenya, and 16% in Malawi and Zambia. With around 390,000 lights in use, 2 million household members benefit from better quality light without kerosene fumes. Replacement of kerosene lamps is saving about 15 million litres/year of kerosene, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 36,000 tonnes/year CO2e.

SolarAid research showed the main use was for study, also cooking and general household lighting. Kerosene saving of about US$1 per week means that cost is recovered quickly. Competitive procurement process is under way, using field experience to specify requirements for the next generation of SunnyMoney lights. SunnyMoney is launching operations in two new countries in 2013, and aims to be active in 24 countries by 2020, with schools campaigns followed by direct sales and then local distributors.

New Red List for Endangered Ecosystems

The IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is well known for its "Red List" of Threatened Species, which has become like a "barometer of life".  In 2011 there were over 61,000 species on the Red List and all mammals, birds, amphibians, sharks, reef-buliding corals, cycads and conifers have been assessed. Recently, the IUCN has also announced criteria for a new "Red List" of Ecosystems. When the list is complete - 2025 is the target date - we will be able to say whether an ecosystem is not facing imminent risk of collapse, or whether it is vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. This will be measured by assessing losses in area, degradation or other major changes such as conversion.

The criteria have been designed based on 20 case studies, which they believe can help them assess the health of all of Earth's varied ecosystems, from spring-fed limestone caves to sparkling coral reefs. For example, the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan is a freshwater ecosystem, which has already collapsed, while the Cape Sand Flats in South Africa are a terrestrial ecosystem that are critically endangered. The Tapia forest of Madagascar and the Coolibah-Black Box woodland in Australia are both endangered, while the Great Lakes Alvars of United States and Canada are vulnerable/endangered. Europe's fresh-water reed beds are vulnerable, while the Tepui shrubland of Venezuela are classified as least concern.

California set for world's biggest solar thermal plant

Later this year, on 4,000 acres near the California-Nevada border, the world's biggest solar thermal plant - called Ivanpah - will turn on. Once all three of the units, each with a 500 ft (150 m) solar tower, is complete, the plant's 300,000 sun-tracking mirrors will produce 392 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 140,000 homes. Ivanpah will double the global capacity of solar thermal in a single step.

Unlike conventional rooftop photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, the California plant will capture heat, which will be converted to steam to create electricity. Crucially, this allows energy to be stored for use when demand exists. Ivanpah's solar thermal technology also uses 95% less water than competing wet-cooled thermal solar plants, using air instead of water to condense steam.

Electricity from Ivanpah will avoid millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants – the equivalent of taking 70,000 cars off the road.  The project will create more than 2,100 jobs for construction workers and support staff and 86 jobs for operations and maintenance employees in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in local and state taxes. The $2.2 billion project represents a durable model for far-reaching employment and economic benefit both locally and nationally.

Polluter pays: China joins carbon trading

Today China - the world's biggest carbon emitter - launched a pilot carbon trading scheme in the city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. The scheme is expected to cover at least 635 companies, totalling a third of business emissions in the city. Pilots are also due to be rolled out in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, as well as in the provinces of Guangdong and Hubei. Their success could lead to a national Chinese emissions trading scheme in 2015.

According to the Financial Times, China's economic planning ministry has also indicated that it is considering an outright cap on emissions for its next five-year plan (2016-20). The US, responsible for 18% of the world's carbon emissions, and the EU, accounting for 14%, already have emission caps, so this would bring an additional 24% under a CO2 commitment, totalling 56% of global carbon emissions. This move by China could help to break a deadlock at the heart of UN climate talks, which are aiming to agree a legally binding global deal on cutting emissions – at a 2015 meeting in Paris – that would take effect from 2020.

Mushroom materials: Growing a sustainable future

Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer are co-inventor of a process that grows all-natural substitutes for plastic from the tissue of mushrooms. They say they want to be the Dow or DuPont of this century, and to do it, they have created a company called Ecovative, which is mainly build on Mushroom® packaging, a cost-competitive alternative to Styrofoam™. The company wants to go beyond simple 'triple bottom line' to "building a business that is not just sustainable, but actually makes the planet a better place for all organisms on Earth."

The company explains: We don't manufacture these materials, we grow them. We grow them from agricultural byproducts and mycelium, a fungal network of threadlike cells. It's like the "roots" of mushrooms. In 5 – 7 days, in the dark, with no watering, and no petrochemical inputs, the mycelium digests the agricultural byproducts, binding them into a beautiful structural material. The mycelium acts like a natural, self assembling glue.

This technology is a radical departure from traditional bioplastics. While feedstocks for bioplastics are typically food crops, Ecovative are able to upcycle very low value waste products. They utilize materials that are environmentally low-impact, 100 percent biodegradable and renewable, and are part of a healthy ecosystem. Unlike other bio-plastics, their technology isn't based on turning food or fuel crops into materials; they're only using inedible crop waste to grow our products. The final biodegradable materials we produce have a variety of end-of-life options, including home composting.

Triodos Bank puts the values back into value

In 1968, an economist, a tax law professor, a management consultant and banker formed a group to study how money can be managed sustainably. In 1971, they launched the Triodos Foundation to use gifts and loans to support innovative projects and companies. In 1980, Triodos registered as a bank in The Netherlands and in 1990, launched the first green fund in Europe. Today, they have assets under management of over 6.7 billion euros. 

Triodos says their mission is to make money work for positive social, environmental and cultural change. They achieve this in various ways: by financing the entire organic food chain, from farm to fork; by funding renewable energy over the past 25 years, with associated annual CO2 savings of over 2 million tonnes; by putting 68 million euros into arts and culture programmes; and by supporting over 80 microfinance institutions in 40 countries around the world.

Triodos is also a founding pioneer of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV), which uses finance to deliver sustainable development for unserved people, communities and the environment. In 2009, the GABV announced a commitment to raise $250 million in new capital over three years to support the expansion of $2 billion in lending to green projects and unbanked poor communities around the world. Today, GABV represents seven million customers in 20 countries, with a combined balance sheet of over $14 billion. Their aim is to positively improve the lives of one billion people by 2020.

DIY eco-manufacturing: Turning banana peels into bio-plastics

Elif Bilgin, from Istanbul, Turkey is a finalist in the Google Science Fair Festival. After two years of experimentation, she has developed a simple method for using banana peels in the production of bio-plastic as a replacement for the traditional petroleum based plastic. The bioplastics can then be molded into a making cosmetic prosthetics or used in the electrical insulation of cables. Banana plastic is cheaper to make than the petroleum based plastic we currently use, it recycles a waste material, and it's simple enough to make in your kitchen.

The banana peel is something we throw away every day, but little do we know, it has much more efficient uses. For example, in Thailand, 200 tons of banana peels are thrown away daily and this number increases each year and in the fruit industry. All those peels may be put into much more use. Starch and cellulose are important raw materials used in the bioplastic industry. Since they are rich with starch and this starch is very easy to extract, potatoes are the most commonly used raw materials.

The 9th and 10th pilot experiment Bilgin conducted was successful in producing plastic, but had started to decay after only 3 days. Then she discovered that in order to improve shelf life of post-harvest wild mango fruits, sodium metabisulphite can be used. On the 11th and 12th trials, she dipped the banana peels in this solution prior to the preparation of the plastic. Both trials were successful and have not shown any signs of decay for 2 months and counting.

Energy savings of cloud computing could power L.A.

Berkley Lab has released a research report suggesting that - despite data centers 

currently accounting for 1-2% of global electricity use - the potential for energy savings from cloud-based computing is substantial: if all U.S. business users shifted their email, productivity software, and CRM software to the cloud, the primary energy footprint of these software applications might be reduced by  as much as 87% or 326 Petajoules. That's enough primary energy to generate the electricity used by the City of Los Angeles each year (23 billion kilowatt-hours).

Cloud data centers are also likely to play an increasing role in reducing demand for physical goods and services (a process known as dematerialization) through the provision of digital news and entertainment, e-commerce, and remote work and collaboration capabilities. For example, life-cycle assessment studies suggest that digital music can reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions intensity of music delivery by 40%-80% compared to compact discs and that digital news can reduce CO2 emissions of news delivery by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to a newspaper.

Last week, Google hosted a conference called How Green is the Internet?

Patient capital from Acumen: The rise of impact investing

Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of the Acumen Fund, started as an international banker, then drifted into the aid world in Africa. According to the New York Times, Novogratz became frustrated that many of the aid projects didn't help and sometimes made things worse. In Rwanda, she became involved in a bakery project, in which 20 poor women made doughnuts and samosas to sell in the neighborhood. Two charities subsidized the project at the rate of $650 a month – more than $1 per woman per day – and yet the women earned only 50 cents per day from selling the baked goods, too little to survive. Jacqueline helped the women transform it from a charity project into a real business, in which they turned a profit and averaged $2 a day in earnings each. 

This experience was one of the early inspirations for the Acumen Fund, which today states its mission as working to create a world beyond poverty by investing in social enterprises, emerging leaders and breakthrough ideas. They invest patient capital in business models that deliver critical, affordable goods and services to the world's poor, improving the lives of  millions. Since 2001, Acumen Fund has invested more than $70 million in enterprises that provide access to water, health, energy, housing, education and agricultural services to low income customers in South Asia, East Africa and West Africa.

For impact investing to work, it has to make genuine investments in businesses that can generate a return. According to the Monitor report on impact investing, From Blueprint to Scale, Acumen Fund's investing experience reflects this reality: it has considered more than 5,000 companies in the past ten years and has invested in just 65 of those. Recent Monitor studies of inclusive businesses on the ground paint a similarly challenging picture. The team looked at 439 promising inclusive businesses and found that only 32 percent were commercially viable and had potential to achieve significant scale. Only 13 percent were actually operating at scale.

Next-gen cars: Silicon Valley bids to become the new Detroit

The Googlemobile, Google's famed self-driving car, has logged some 500,000 miles since 2009. Capturing 1.3 million bits of data per second along with video feeds and radar pulses, the car's computers can "see" the vehicles around it and keep clear of them. Nissan's CEO, Carlos Ghosn, predicted driverless cars will hit showrooms by 2020. The market for smart vehicle systems like lane-departure warnings and collision-avoidance will be around $22 billion by 2020, Ian Riches, director of the global automotive practice at London-based Strategy Analytics, told Forbes.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric carmaker, is riding high. The company reported its first ever quarterly profit this month and saw its stock price shoot upwards of $97 per share—an all-time high. At more than $10 billion, the company's market value is now greater than that of established automakers Fiat and Mitsubishi Motors. And for icing on the cake, Tesla's first made-from-scratch car, the electric Model S sedan, has received a rare near-perfect score from Consumer Reports, according to National Geographic.

In the first three months of this year, Tesla reported $7 million in revenue from development services. Another $68 million, or roughly one in every eight dollars of revenue during the quarter, came from selling credits earned under California's zero emission vehicles (ZEV) program. About $17 million came from sales of "other regulatory credits." The company is preparing to take advantage of its popularity on Wall Street by raising an estimated $648 million by selling a combination of shares and debt-like securities, to be repaid in 2018.

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Big IF campaign to end global hunger

Ekkleisa reports that 45,000 people joined the Big IF anti-hunger rally from 2pm-5pm in London's Hyde Park on Saturday 8 June. Its aim was to press for global action, and it starts ten days of campaigning action targeted at the G8 and other world leaders. There has also been a rally in Belfast, and Big IF actions have been developing across the country. Two million petals were arranged in the shape of the campaign petition in London, to symbolise children dying of hunger every year.

Meanwhile, in a small but helpful boost to the campaign, the the UK has committed an additional £375 million of core funding to help feed the world's poorest children, as part of a £2.7 billion global agreement. Participants at the G8 summit, who signed a Global Nutrition for Growth deal this week, committed their countries and organisations to:

• Improving the nutrition of 500 million pregnant women and young children.
• Reducing by an additional 20 million the number of children under five who are stunted.
• Saving the lives of at least 1.7 million children by preventing stunting, increasing breastfeeding and better treatment of severe and acute malnutrition.
  

'Enough Food For Everyone IF' is a joint coalition of over 200 UK organisations campaigning for action to eliminate the causes of hunger. Its key message is: "There is enough food for everyone, yet one in eight people do not have enough food. This year, world leaders must tackle hunger and save millions of lives."

The age of the solar cell printer has dawned

Inhabitat reports that an incredible new printer at the University of Melbourne has allowed researchers to print solar cells up to the size of an A3 sheet of paper every 2 seconds. Developed in collaboration between the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC), CSIRO, and the University of Melbourne, the solar cell printer makes renewable energy even easier to source. 

The solar cell printer can transform plastic or metal into photovoltaic panels ranging from the size of a fingernail up to an A3 sheet of paper. CSIRO's Dr. Scott Watkins foresees these cells being used on rooftops, glass surfaces, or even personal devices like laptops. In just three years, the researchers behind the printer have been able to increase the output size from just 2 centimeters to 30 centimeters wide.

The printer cost a whopping $200,000, although the University of Melbourne is accepting proposals for manufacturing orders – which will allow small companies to gain access to the device to print out projects (much like a screenprinting business). The printer lays semiconducting inks onto plastic or steel at a rate of one cell every two seconds.  Printed on flexible material, the solar cells are more versatile than silicon solar panels. The team will continue to work on making the printer more affordable so that they can make it available for purchase by other companies.

Urban mining: Glittering pavements and underworld treasure

According to New Scientist, the streets are literally paved with riches. A team at the University of Birmingham has set up a company called Roads to Riches to recover platinum from our catalytic converters that ends up as road dust. The best platinum mines in South Africa have 2-10 ppm of platinum in their ore. Street sweepings have 1 ppm, but are much easier and less expensive to mine. Birmingham University's Angela Murray calculates that £64 million of platinum metals are swept from UK roads every year and dumped. 

In fact, the riches may be even greater, since roadside soils have concentrations may be 100 to 1,000 times greater, according to the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. That's one of the reasons that academics like Helen Parker at the University of York, UK, are experimenting with 'hyper-accumulating' plants grown in soil rich in the platinum metals. Besides roadside plants, they have also found that seaweed can successfully capture gold, coppy, nickel, zinc and platinum group elements.

A team at Linkoping University in Sweden has another lucrative strategy. They estimate that there is between 90,000 and 400,00 tonnes of copper power cables worth $630 million beneath Swedish cities. Using this scrap metal instead of mining the copper would save 360,000 tonnes of CO2. In Japan, the source of riches is industrial waste sludge. In Nagano, these effluent flows have gold concentrations of up to 2.9 kg per tonne, nearly five times greater than conventional gold ores. This has also been a practice in India's major cities for some time, where gold is extracted from waste sludge in the jewellery districts.

Alchemy is possible: New partnership to turn waste into materials

During his plenary presentation at the Sustainable Brands 2013 conference, designer, author and sustainability thought leader William McDonough announced a new partnership between McDonough Innovation and Waste Management, Inc — North America's largest environmental solutions provider and residential recycler. The Sustainable Innovation Collaborative will directly serve producers, manufacturers, retailers and suppliers of packaged goods and products. Advising on product and packaging redesign for recyclability and positive ecological and health impacts will be among the collaborative's goals.

McDonough said: "Designing up from the dumpster is one reason why I am personally very excited to launch the Sustainable Innovation Collaborative with Waste Management. Working together, we will use the tools of design, science and principled business practices in collaboration with manufactures, retailers, distributors, consumers and recyclers of products and packaging to profitably work toward eliminating the very concept of waste. We can link healthy, safe materials and sophisticated logistics, and this allows us to bring a uniquely valuable perspective for continuous innovation and quality improvement with supply-side and demand-side collaborators."

"Over the years, enlightened manufacturers have taken positive and forward-looking steps to lighten their footprint on the environment," said Tom Carpenter — Director, Sustainability Services at Waste Management. "As those efforts have progressed, we now see a growing demand by these same manufacturers to address every link along supply chains that produce residual waste. This collaborative will combine design, recycling and material science expertise to guide these next generation strategies."

Biometrics stop drivers falling asleep at the wheel

The Fatigue Monitoring System (FMS) from Seeing Machines of Canberra, Australia, is designed to prevent accidents caused by tiredness, which account for 70 per cent of those where the driver was to blame. With an infrared camera that can see through sunglasses, and an image-processing computer, the FMS assesses the frequency, duration and speed of the driver's blinking to weigh up inattention and the likelihood of imminent "microsleeps".

An "eyes on road" message booms out if the FMS senses the driver is distracted, but a shrill alarm that's "humanly impossible to sleep through" sounds if a microsleep is predicted, says Seeing Machines' CEO Ken Kroeger. Mine operators are warned of each event wirelessly, so they can redeploy consistently sleepy drivers. In early tests the FMS reduced fatigue events by 72 per cent, Kroeger says. According to New Scientist, the drowsiness detector in the cab has proved so successful that US-based firm Caterpillar is fitting the $10,000 system in all its mining trucks.

Novartis social business expands healthcare access in India

Swiss-based healthcare company Novartis has joined the Business Call to Action (BCtA) with a commitment to further expand their rural healthcare programme in India, which has already reached more than 40 million people. Their the Arogya Parivar ("healthy family") programme aims to empower communities to make better healthcare decisions and expand access to health education and affordable drugs.

Over six years, Arogya Parivar has helped create more than 500 jobs and has built skills and capacity among hundreds of business partners, suppliers, and customers, including healthcare professionals in India. Its impact translates to providing 42 million people with improved access to healthcare across an estimated 33,000 villages. According to the company, 50,000 doctors and pharmacies have also received medical knowledge transfer.

Coca-Cola aims to double 50,000 farmers income in Kenya and Uganda

Launched early in 2010, Project Nurture is an $11.5 million partnership among The Coca-Cola Company, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the international non-profit organization TechnoServe. It intends to double the fruit incomes of more than 50,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda by 2014 by building inclusive mago and passion fruit value chains.

Harvards CSR Initiative has analysed the project and finds some impressive achievements already:

• More than 42,000 farmers have participated in the program, 14,000 of them women
• Annual fruit incomes have, on average, already more than doubled.
• 297 loans worth $115,300 have been disbursed to finance passion-fruit farming start-up costs such as seeds, seedlings, poles, and wires.
• Coca Cola expects to recoup its investment in the project in the next 3-5 years through cost optimization and replication in other countries

Key elements of the model have been implemented in Haiti and India, with further replication being considered for Zimbabwe, Nigeria and/or Ghana. The foundation is now looking to establish similar additional partnerships for widely-grown staple crops such as rice, maize, and cassava.

Philips and UNIDO create centres of light in Africa

Dutch technology company Royal Philips and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) have signed a declaration regarding their joint collaboration on innovative LED lighting solutions for poverty reduction. 

Philips is currently installing more than a hundred Community Light Centres across Africa. These are areas of approximately 1000m2, or the size of a small soccer pitch, and are lit using a new generation of efficient solar-powered LED lighting. The concept of the Light Centres is to create areas of light for rural communities, which live without electricity, thus effectively 'extending the day and extending play', creating numerous opportunities for social, sporting and economic activities in the evening.

The joint declaration commits UNIDO and Philips to cooperate to promote rural access to energy and energy efficiency for productive activities, technology transfer and access to renewable energy solutions through solar-powered LED technologies, in particular in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. The two organizations state their intention to identify suitable projects relating to the above areas of cooperation on an annual basis.

Using the web to improve accountability in war-torn countries

Integrity Action's mission is to empower citizens to act with and demand integrity, actively taking part in building institutions to promote a state that is open, accountable and responsive. They were recently selected to receive a £500,000 Global Impact Award from Google's Global Impact Challenge.

With the Global Impact Award, Integrity Action plans to develop an online data collection and reporting platform that enables citizens to hold government and development agencies accountable. Over the next 18 months, Integrity Action will train over 2,000 community monitors in seven war-torn countries and help citizens fix 50% of problems in public services and infrastructure projects. This will ultimately lead to better quality of life for over 500,000 poor people.

Fredrik Galtung, CEO of Integrity Action said: "The Google Impact Award is an  incredible endorsement by Google of the power of technology to empower even the poorest and most disenfranchised so that their voices will be listened to". The organisation operates from offices in Jakarta, Jerusalem, and London and has staff permanently based in Amman, Bishkek, Nairobi and Yerevan.

China gears up for green building boom

According to the China GreenTech Report 2013, buildings currently account for at least 33% of China's total energy consumption. Green buildings offer a solution, which can dramatically reduce the environmental impact of new and existing developments. Aggressive targets set within the 12th Five-Year Plan, and developed through more recent policies and guidelines, could encourage widespread adoption of green building practices, driving significant near-term growth.

China aims to develop 1 billion m2 of new green building floor area by 2015. This represents a fourteen-fold increase on the 69.5 million m2 in existence at the end of 2012. By 2014, all government investment in public buildings, and all affordable housing in selected cities, must meet green building standards and 30% of new buildings measured by floor area must be certified as green by 2020.

During the past six years, China has been developing and promoting its own green building rating system, based on a rising scale of one, two and three stars. There is a wide difference in standards between the three but all are considered by the government to qualify for green certification. More recently, international systems such as LEED, BREEAM and CASBEE have also been recognized and applied.

Greening Lighting: Check out the Algae Powered LED bulb

Designer Gyula Bodonyi has harnessed the power of green algae in a light bulb, according to Yanko Design on Inhabitat. Algae projects have already been seen powering power entire buildings, but Bodonyi's concept brings green power to the public on a more user-friendly scale. With the Algaebulb, algae powers a single LED activated by a tiny air pump and hydrophobic material able to create a teeny-tiny power house for light. 

The tear-shaped bulb is made up of an air pump, LED, hidrophob container, PC Shell, and air outlet. The system sucks in carbon dioxide and water through the pump near the E27 screw-top, and as the air passes through the bulb, chlorella pyrenoidosa spirulina microalgae are fostered. While algae flourishes, it gives off oxygen, which in turn powers the tiny LED inside.

When the AlgaeBulb is not illuminated, it appears to be a dark green; a result of the colony of microalgae living within. When illuminated, it gives off a slightly green tinge on the interior, making for a green bulb that is literally "green." Although small in size, if AlgaeBulb is employed on a large scale, it holds the potential to save a significant amount of energy. Aside from providing a light source with renewables, the bulb also sucks up carbon dioxide, helping to alleviate greenhouse gases one bulb at a time.

Honey-suckers in Bangalore turn sewage into sweet profits

Every year, each of us produces some 500 litres of urine and 50 kilograms of faeces a year, enough to fertilise plants that would produce more than 200 kilograms of cereals. Scale that up and the world's population excretes 70 million tonnes of nutrients annually. Applied to fields, this could replace almost 40 per cent of the 176 million tonnes of nutrients in chemical fertilisers used by the world's farmers in 2011.

In Bangalore, the so-called "honey-suckers" hoover up the city's sewage from a million septic tanks and pit latrines and head for farms outside the city, where their loads are in demand to fertilise vegetables and coconut and banana trees. The fact is that human sewage is packed with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds, the three main nutrients plants need to grow - helpfully in roughly the correct proportions.

Provided there are sufficient controls for hygiene, health and safety concerns can been dealt with. And on the up side, there are significant economic benefits. In one experiment, after just 13 weeks, corn cobs were about 15 times bigger than they would have been without being fertilised by urine. Besides this, a single truck driver can service a population of 20,000 people, and generate an income of $50,000 a year, twice the price of a new truck.

Source: New Scientist. Full article here.

Pioneering White-Space Wifi Gives Remote Internet Access in Kenya

To improve technology access, Microsoft has announced the deployment of a pilot project with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications and Kenyan Internet Service Provider, Indigo Telecom Ltd., to deliver low-cost, high-speed wireless broadband and create new opportunities for commerce, education, healthcare, and delivery of government services across Kenya. 

The deployment is called 'Mawingu', which is Kiswahili for cloud. It is the first deployment of solar-powered based stations together with TV white spaces, a technology partially developed by Microsoft Research, to deliver high-speed internet access to areas currently lacking even basic electricity.

Microsoft hopes to implement similar pilots in East and Southern Africa in the coming months to further explore the commercial feasibility of white space technologies. These pilots will be used to encourage other African countries to accelerate legislation that would enable this white spaces technology to deliver on the promise of universal access – high-speed wireless internet – for the African continent.