Nanotechnology: The promise of water desalination for the masses

By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

"The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health," said Richard Crooks, the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences. "Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we've developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system."

This new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet's inhabitants live. Many of these regions have access to abundant seawater but not to the energy infrastructure or money necessary to desalt water using conventional technology. As a result, millions of deaths per year in these regions are attributed to water-related causes. "People are dying because of a lack of freshwater," said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. "And they'll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent."

Better Life Index: In search of the good life?

The OECD's Better Life Index is a way to look at what life is actually like for people by measuring 11 key aspects of life – not just income and jobs but their housing, environment, social network, work-life balance, personal security, education, health, whether they feel part of the democratic process and their level of satisfaction with life in general. Everyone starts out with the same 11 elements, but can rank them according to personal preference to see how their country shapes up in terms of what matters to them. 

The Index currently profiles the 34 OECD member countries as well as key partners 

Brazil and Russia across the 11 topics of well-being, and will eventually include other key OECD partner countries (China, India, Indonesia and South Africa), representing the world's major economies. Of course there are also individual differences – while civic engagement is among the lower priorities for users everywhere, those in Mexico, Chile and Spain rank it higher than people in most other countries. Sense of community matters a lot to users in France, while housing is of particular concern to those in Russia, judging by their BLI choices.

The Index also lets you see how life compares for men and women, and for those at the top and bottom of the social and economic ladder. There is little difference in what is important in life to women and men, although women are more concerned about community, health and work-life balance, while men place more importance than women on income when it comes to defining what makes for a better life. Perhaps not surprisingly, health tends to matter more to people as they get older, while concerns about work-life balance fade.

Some of the results have been quite surprising. Yes we are all different but overall, the same three elements turn out to be most important for all of us, regardless of where we live in the world. Health, education and life satisfaction consistently come out as more important across the more than 180 countries where people have created an Index. Life Satisfaction has been the topic ranked as most important for a better life by users since the BLI was launched in 2011, followed by health and education. This still holds true today, when the BLI has had 2.2 million visitors, from all over the world – some 196 countries – so the coverage is truly global.

VIDEO

Fairphone: Buy a phone, start a movement

Electronics waste accounts for about 70% of toxic waste in landfills. More than 90% of the waste in a mobile's life cycle is discarded raw material. According to Nokia, for every tonne of final waste product (discarded phones), 21 tonnes of waste are created during manufacture and 189 tonnes during raw materials extraction and processing. During its lifetime (less than 2 years) a mobile phone has an average energy consumption of 260 megajoules (MJ) – 180 MJ for the manufacturing and 80 MJ for the usage phase. 260 MJ is enough to power 1,200 60 watt light bulbs for one hour. Multiply that by 35, which is the number of phones the average consumer will purchase during their lifetime.

Human rights concerns about the mining of critical materials for mobiles centre on tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold – collectively known as 3TG. The DRC and neighbouring countries provide 17% of global tantalum production, 4% of global tin production, 3% of global tungsten production, and 2% of global gold supply. Pressure is growing on global electronics companies to tighten their supply chains to avoid such abuses. A 2010 docu-drama Blood in the Mobile triggered widespread bad publicity about the mining of the mineral cassiterite, used in tin production for mobile phones, in the DRC. The filmmakers alleged child labour, prostitution of under age girls and poor working conditions in the mines, and claimed that revenue from the minerals was financing the war in the region.

Fairphone is a social enterprise started in 2010 to address many of these concerns about the social and environmental impacts of mobile phones. Fairphone aimed at raising awareness about conflict minerals in electronics and the wars that the sourcing of these minerals is fueling in the DR Congo. The campaign and research into the complex supply chain ran for 3 years. In 2013, they established the social enterprise with the aim of designing, creating and producing their first smartphone and taking the next crucial step in uncovering the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling of electronics.

The Fairphone is built around 5 principles:

• Made with care -  transparent, long-term relationships with suppliers to ensure good working conditions and safe recycling practices
  
• Smart Design - design that considers its full life cycle and gives you complete control over how use and configure it
• Clear Deals - transparent price breakdown, ensuring buyers understand what their purchase is supporting
  
• Lasting Value - extending the useful life of the phone and promoting e-waste recycling options
• Precious materials - ensuring the sourcing of conflict-free minerals from the DRC, which don't fund illegal armed forces
  

Production has been crowdfunded through pre-orders, which allow them to make a first production run of 20,000 phones, 56% of which have already been pre-sold. For more information - or to join the movement - watch the video below or go to http://www.fairphone.com/.

Footprint tool: New Nike materials impacts app for designers

Over 16,000 materials are used in Nike's products each year. A pair of shoes alone can use more than 30 materials. In line with the company's commitment to "Considered Design" principles, last year, the company made its dataset of sustainable materials--developed over an eight-year period--available online for the public to use. The big reveal was part of the company's Open Challenge for Sustainable Materials, which asked visitors to "select materials beautifully, simply, and accurately, based on sustainability."

FastCompany reports that this month, Nike made that challenge just a little bit easier with the Nike Making app, now available through iTunes. The app is essentially a portable version of the database that has been available for a little over a year. Designers can look at 22 product materials--including silk, down, cotton, and polypropylene fabric--and find out their environmental impacts in four categories: waste, water use, energy, and chemistry. Performance and aesthetics are also taken into account.

US private investors place $100 billion bet on renewables

Since 2004, the private sector has invested more than $300 billion in the U.S. renewable energy market, according to "Strategies to Scale-Up U.S. Renewable Energy Investment," a report by the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), and Climate Policy Initiative released at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum-Wall Street. The groups highlighted the role of policy at the state, federal, and regulatory level in unlocking private capital in the industry during the past decade. 

 

Further, the paper finds that state policies such as Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) have effectively leveraged over a hundred billion dollars in private investment into the 29 states with RPS policies. These policies have been extremely effective at maximizing the amount of private investment in renewable energy projects, and as a result, all 50 states should aim to strengthen or create a policy framework aimed at leveraging private capital into this industry.

 

The study also explores how federal policies play an important role in leveraging private dollars into renewables, which has in turn lead to technological advances that have resulted in steep cost reductions of clean energy technologies. These advances led to a capstone year in 2012 when 49% of new electrical generation capacity brought online was from renewables, beating natural gas.

(News sourced from Clean Edge)

Habitat banking: Get your nature credits here

The Environment Bank is a private company set up to deliver biodiversity gain through 'biodiversity offsetting'. Offsetting is supported by the UK Government - it was a key policy initiative in the government's 2011 Natural Environment White Paper and six government pilots are testing how it will work. The Environment Bank is a lead partner on two such pilots, in Essex and Warwickshire. Here's how it works:

1. A Local Planning Authority agrees with the developer that planning consent can be conditioned with biodiversity offsetting. 
2. The residual environmental impact of the proposed development is calculated using government metrics that assess habitat type, condition and area.
   
3. The developer is left with, for instance, '15 grassland credits' that need to be bought to offset the impact of the development and satisfy the planning condition. 
4. Elsewhere, a farmer or conservation NGO land manager has submitted to the registry (the Environmental Markets Exchange) a long-term management plan that will, if funded, deliver biodiversity gain of 15 credits.
   
5. When the two – developers needs and land manager's offers – are matched, then credits are bought and sold and money passes into the system to fund long-term conservation management.

The Environment Bank admits that some habitats are simply not 'recreatable'.  Habitats such as peatlands or ancient woodlands, cannot be recreated by man (at least not within a lifetime) – for these habitats one cannot 'offset' damage in one place by creating habitat in another. However, they see it as a partial solution to a planning system is failing to protect biodiversity, since the wildlife value of land is often ignored or, at best, underestimated.

Sustainable food: Fish farming overtakes beef farming

According to the Earth Policy Institute, the world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons. And 2013 may well be the first year that people eat more fish raised on farms than caught in the wild. More than just a crossing of lines, these trends illustrate the latest stage in a historic shift in food production—a shift that at its core is a story of natural limits.

According to a report of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, diet is responsible for around 1/4 of the total ecological footprint of individuals. Surprisingly, the transportation of food has a very small impact (1.7%) on the overall footprint. Beef has an ecological footprint of 15.7 gha /1000 kg, while fish is 10.1 (vegetables are 0.4). And farmed fish - of the kind consumed in China (e.g. silver carp), which accounts for 62% of the world's aquaculture - has an even lower ecological footprint and are a relatively sustainable way of fish farming (as opposed to salmon farming, more typically consumed in the West, which relies on wild catches of anchovies to feed the salmon).

The Rashomon Project: Activist tool get's video evidence straight

Recent protests, political unrest, and news events have been well documented with digital videos and photos posted online to social media sites such as YouTube. As access to smartphone technologies increases, this trend of capturing and sharing world events in digital formats will only accelerate. Yet as fragmented glimpses shared across divergent networks, it remains difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of contested events, resulting in viewers often drawing uninformed and contradictory conclusions.

To help address this issue, The Rashomon Project is developing an open-source toolkit that can facilitate the rapid assembly and public review of "Video Timelines" where many video and photo perspectives are time-aligned and displayed simultaneously. Their goal is to allow the public to gain a richer understanding of contested events from user-generated video and photo than is currently available online. In many cases, this video evidence is used in criminal court cases that follow protest activities.

Through temporal metadata embedded in the digital files of smartphone videos and photos, audio signals, and manual timeline adjustments according to visual cues, Rashomon have developed the capacity to accurately and quickly synch multiple video perspectives, and display a potentially limitless number of videos on The Rashomon website (with each project receiving its own unique url) which can help to verify the authenticity of footage, reveal more nuanced views into events, and archive videos in a safe, advertising-free space that does not expose the identities of users who upload and participants (when face-blurring is activated).

Crowdsourcing an access-friendly map for people with disabilities

People with disabilities often suffer a 'civil death' due exclusion primarily related to physical barriers of the built environment. AXS Map is building a social movement around inclusion for people with physical disabilities. AXS Map is a crowd-sourced platform for mapping wheelchair accessibility of buildings and places, and sharing that information across a network.

At its core, AXS Map is a tool for creating social inclusion for people with disabilities, and bringing mobility freedom to this minority group historically excluded. As the AXS Map data base grows AXS Map will become a tool for visualizing data on wheelchair accessibility in buildings, documenting the success and/or failures of policy and codes across different geographies.