Death by Burning…? Don’t be so Irresponsible

Do you want to be cremated when you die? I know, morbid thoughts, and for that, I apologize. But seriously, cremation is bad news for the environment. The whole process is riddled with CO2 emissions. For starters, the average body releases about 110 lbs of CO2 when burned. That doesn’t even include the energy required to turn a body into ashes. Temperatures in excess of 850 degrees Celsius are needed to turn a human body to ashes. Average burn time is 75 minutes per corpse. This translates into even more CO2 given off from the furnace. That doesn’t even include the mercury that is burned off from corpse’s fillings.

Burial doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me either (unless you’re religious, in which case I won’t step on your toes).

1. It takes up a lot of land, which is a scarce commodity in many areas. The rate of grave reclamation is climbing.

2. Below ground, there isn’t enough oxygen for aerobic decomposition. As such, bodies decompose anaerobically, producing methane, which is about 23 times worse for global warming than CO2.

3. The nutrients in your body are not returned to their respective natural cycles. Rather, they remain trapped six feet below ground.

4. The coffins are hardly eco-friendly. Handles are made of plastic; the wood is usually chip board, which contains formaldehyde. This then leaches into the soil as the coffin decomposes.

Well then, you may ask, what is the solution? What should we do instead of burning bodies? You could donate your body to science. There is a huge lack of bodies available for science and research purposes. You could donate your body to forensics researchers. Apparently they store bodies in all sorts of states to answer questions such as: How fast does a body decompose in the sun vs in the shade? What happens if the body is underwater? They leave corpses out in varied environmental conditions and keep notes on how they rot in order to have some baseline for any situation. Not as glamorous, but you will be serving a good cause.

I did a little more digging, and there are a couple interesting alternatives to cremation and burial and the other alternatives outlined above. I’m not going to claim they’re viable options, but at least people are thinking about the problem. Here’s a list of some of the solutions that are being toyed with: Composting, burial at sea, sky burial (where the body is left to the vultures).

I saved the best for last: freeze-drying and turning bodies into tree mulch.

Links:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/04/ill_compost_your_corpse_1.html

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/ill_compost_you.php

Cut Out the Cutting

So I was talking with my parents over the weekend when my dad made a comment about how the grass needed cutting. At first it just occurred to me that it is May now so there actually isn’t snow on the ground at my parent’s house anymore, then I was like huh, mowing, what a stupid process.

You want to talk about unsustainable? In my opinion, lawn mowing (no offense to anyone – clearly my parents participate in the practice) is one of the most ridiculous uses of energy ever concocted by man. Think about it. Americans burn fuel to drive out to their suburban home, where they own a house surrounded by a yard. Then all through the summer months, they water and fertilize this yard, just to burn more fuel mowing it down once every week or so. In fact, how often do the majority of Americans actually spend time in this yard they feel so obligated to keep so perfectly tame and green? One of my favorite articles by David Owen captures this best:
“One of the main attractions of moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of your own; yet you can travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with the help of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of.”

According to a book called “The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession,” approximately 3,000,000 tons of fertilizer that is produced is used on lawns (one estimate is that 60% of this applied nitrogen just ends up in ground water). In addition, 580 million gallons of gas are used annually for power mowers alone, and according to the book “Redesigning the American Lawn” it is estimated that in California alone, annual emissions from lawn care equipment is equivalent to the emissions produced by 3.5 million 1991 automobiles driven 16,000 miles each! Never mind the water consumed to keep that grass its luscious deep green color.

Why do we do it? When did our grass have to remain no more than two inches high? What is wrong with letting it grown a little longer between each mowing? Imagine the potential for reduced fuel consumption and increased carbon sink potential if all of American suburbia stopped cutting their grass. How about skipping TerraPass, saving that five bucks (plus the cost of gas to fuel your lawnmower), and letting your grass grow as a carbon offset for your trip to work? Or better yet, how about doing both?

Ultracapacitors and Gravity Batteries

There have been a few excellent threads lately about energy storage mechanisms. Chemical batteries and flywheels were mentioned. On a fundamental level, there are only so many ways to store energy. Basically, we have electrical, chemical (which is electrical with a disguise), magnetic, kinetic, gravitational, and nuclear [aside: traditional fission and fusion are the so-called 'weak' force; the 'strong' force is theoretically another storage mechanism but that's science fiction for now]. Am I leaving any out?

Chemical includes batteries and fuel cells. Nuclear includes fission and fusion, and in general is the hardest nut to crack. Gravitational includes our Hetch-Hetchy water system and Courtright Reservoir. Courtright, along with Wishon Reservoir is, as far as I know the world’s largest battery. This gigantic battery – 1.2 GIGAWatts! – balances day and night loads and minimizes the need for PG&E to bring power plants on- and off-line.

“The single largest component [of PG&E's hydroelectric portfolio] is the Helms Pumped Storage Facility, located in Fresno County, California. Helms consists of three units, each rated at 404 MW, for a total output of 1,212 MW. The facility operates between Courtright and Wishon reserviors, alternately draining water from Courtright to produce electricity when demand is high, and pumping it back from Wishon when demand is low. The power house itself is situated more than 1,000 feet inside a solid granite mountain.” (taken from wikipedia article)

Indientally, Courtright also has some fantastic slab climbing for any rock climbers out there.

Continuing on, kinetic includes flywheels and heat storage. Magentic includes inductors and this. Electrical includes capacitors. Electromagnetic would include methods of traping light. The most interesting to me are magnetic and electric. They are fundamentally faster and stronger mechanisms than chemical, graviational, or kinetic mechanisms.

I mentioned in class once that electric cars could have a 1 second charge time in theory. This is if they used ultracapacitors. I think eventually all energy storage will be done with capacitors. There are some technical hurdles, but capacitors basically give you the best of every aspect important to energy storage. They have a lifetime of millions of charge cycles, they have charge/discharge rates orders of magnitude faster than batteries or mechanical systems. They have energy densities that could out perform the best chemical batteries. A company called EEStor is working on some ultracapacitors. According to a KP partner I asked about EEStor, he says they still have “major technical hurdles” but at least there’s no law of physics in their way. Their first application will be some electric cars. Other companies are trying ultracapacitors as well. My prediction: in 50 years (50 might be optimistic..) all cars will be electric and “gas stations” will have high voltage power from the grid to allow these cars to recharge in under 10 seconds.

Interface Carpet

The New York Times recently ran two articles of note (Ray Anderson: Executive on a Mission, Harnessing Methane, Cutting Waste, Recycling Tiles]) both concerning Interface Corporation, a Georgia carpet company, of which McDonough would be proud to call his own. The company so seemed to have McDonough’s fingerprints on it, I read the article expecting to find Cradle to Cradle references around every corner, but found nada.

Ray Anderson, the founder of Interface, sounds like a bit of an environmental nut (not that there’s anything wrong with that of course). He drives a Prius, as one might expect, but he also lives off the grid on an 86 acre plot designed for minimal environmental impact. It was his insight and vision that led Interface’s complete renovation of their business practices. According to his timeline, the company has until 2020 to become a “restorative enterprise,” meaning they have no negative impact on the biosphere.

Among the steps the company has taken include those that Anderson considers obvious: using low-wattage, long-life light bulbs, recycling packing boxes, and buying carbon credits, a practice that Anderson looks at as only a temporary solution, but one that’s “better than nothing.” Other steps are less obvious, however. Special parking spots are reserved for carpoolers, German masking tape is used in place of American tape because it causes less wear on boxes that can be reused (who knew?) and the company has switched from using natural gas to methane pumped in from the local dump. This benefits the local economy by giving value to a previously worthless resource as well as benefitting the company by finding a cheaper energy supply. The last change is the most exciting to me- I can’t really conceptualize how it’s done, but it seems like an idea that could be beneficial to all industries, while simultaneously having a huge impact on the environment.

Interface has also helped popularize the notion of carpet tiling. They have taken the idea one step further, however, by collecting worn tiles, grinding them up and using them as backing for new tiles. Left is a picture of one of their recycling sites for worn carpet. Downcycling, I guess, but not terribly so.

Most importantly, though, Interface is now more successful than ever. Anderson says “I always make the business case for sustainability. It’s so compelling. Our costs are down, not up…” The company has cut its contributions to landfills by 80%, they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 60%, but at the same time, their sales are up 49%. Pretty impressive. Let’s hope Interface’s success can help propegate its ideals further into the murky world of industry.

Parasitic Design

I have been thinking about the cradle-to-cradle material stream concept, and it seems a bit unnatural in a way. This is not to say that it is bad, and in fact I think it is highly preferable in some cases. However, it’s not the path nature often takes. When a leaf falls from a tree, it is not picked up and recycled directly into a new leaf. That is not to say that the leaf is wasted. Instead, it is utilized by other organisms. The outputs of one living thing become the inputs for something else. Evolution has created complex webs of parasites, each of which feed and are fed on by other members of an ecosystem. Wherever there is waste, a new niche is born from the available resources.

You might argue that the nutrients from the leaf eventually make it back into a new leaf, but the path is long, circuitous, and complex, very different from a cradle-to-cradle system. The direct recycling cradle-to-cradle stream is an excellent choice with rare or non-renewable resources. This way, technical nutrients remain in the system and do not have to be continually extracted or produced. However, are there opportunities to make use of this parasitic paradigm? This seems like a great point of design inspiration and something that could be more applicable in some cases than cradle-to-cradle. Below are some examples I’ve seen recently.

First, two articles about feeding off car traffic. We might gripe about the waste from zipping thousands of pounds of metal with a chewy human center down the highway, but why not at least take advantage of some of the wasted energy? The theory is that cars produce a lot of air turbulence at high speeds, so why not use this wind to power turbines? This article suggests building vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT’s) into highway barriers. Generated electricity could be used directly in a light rail system, a good option because it virtually eliminates transmission problems and because peak power would coincide with peak use. Don’t get too excited about this, since responses indicated the wind power available might not be much and turbines might increase drag on the cars (is this true?), but the concept is nice.

Second, and possibly more realistic, is the application of thermal depolymerization or the “Thermal Conversion Process”. Basically, this is like Phil’s idea for a trash fueled pellet stove on steroids: they are able to dramatically speed up the geothermal processes that break up long chain hydrocarbons and turn organic material into oil. A company called Changing World Technologies has already set up a fully functioning plant in Carthage Missouri, next to an industrial turkey processing plant (check out this article and its earlier versions for a great intro). After some technology tweaking and other unforeseen setbacks, they are now running at a profit. Instead of using the turkey “offal” from the 35,000 birds slaughtered daily to feed other turkeys (ironically cradle-to-cradle-esque), the waste is used to make oil: one ton apparently makes 600lbs of oil, and the conversion rates are better for things like tires and plastic bottles. If this waste was free, as it is in other countries where animals can’t be fed to each other, this could be a huge parasitic money maker, not to mention a source of renewable diesel.

What are other sources of waste that can be parasitized into useful products or services? Even in systems where a cradle-to-cradle stream is ideal, it will often be slow in the making, so how can we take advantage of waste more easily in the present? What if we used disposed Styrofoam cups as building insulation (like the jeans), since they are difficult to recycle? Does this condone their production? If they could be so welled used and reused for this, does it matter?

All this came from a little questioning of the cradle-to-cradle paradigm we’ve been learning about. It seems like an excellent system in many cases, but I’m not sure if it fits in everywhere, conceptually or realistically. I think the idea of parasitic design might be a complimentary system that can help to fill in these gaps. Within a product, as within an organism, efficiency can be the goal: minimize waste out for resources in. However, there is bound to be some waste, and nature doesn’t necessarily eliminate it, it just utilizes it. On a system level, beyond the individual products and organisms, “efficiency” is achieved through parasites. Waste can be abundant, and it definitely is in our society, but if it is taken advantage of, it can be a benefit. With the right technology and perspective, abundant output becomes abundant and potentially free input. Using this idea both beside and beyond a cradle-to-cradle perspective might be another great tool to inspire our design thinking.

Long Live the Grid

The power grid gets such a bad wrap. People so commonly quote it as inefficient and drum up the benefits of distributed generation. Being a solar cell designer, you may think I’d be such a person. But indeed electricity transmission is by far the most efficient way to transport power. According to the DOE, the US grid is 95% efficient when it’s fully loaded. This number drops almost to 90% when the grid is overloaded. If you don’t believe the DOE for some reason, US Climate Change Technology Program (US Government sponsored program) quotes 7.2% grid losses.

Of course with distributed generation, we could make that figure nearly 100%. But everything has its price. Large-scale power plants gain much in efficiency and economy from their economies of scale. Plus, even distributed generation requires some power source. New england can’t run on sunshine. Even solar cells benefit from utility scale generation. Expensive collectors and highly-efficient multi-junction cells and push the price per kWhr down much lower than a typical rooftop system.

Not saying that the grid is perfect. I was pretty ticked off at power transmission when I visited Macchu Picchu in Peru only to see power lines along a portion of the Inca Trail and within eye sight of Macchu Picchu itself. But, still, I think people give the grid too hard of a time for the amazing job it does at the very tough task of delivering power.

Flywheels: The Forgotten Form of Energy Storage

Last summer I first became interested in flywheel energy storage systems while reading an alternative energy technology book written by one of my previous undergraduate professors. Relative to other energy technologies about which he spoke, flywheels only received about a page and a half of his 350 page book. However, this was all it took to spark my interest, and thus, oddly enough, I found myself researching flywheels at work one day while running tests on a vehicle fuel cell system. What I found (and have read since) only increases my bafflement as to why flywheels are not more widely used or studied.

What is a flywheel? I am sure “How Stuff Works” or “Wikipedia” can explain better than I, but basically a flywheel is a rotating disk (or rotor) used to store energy as rotational inertia (other applications use flywheels to balance periodically forced rotational loads) . Made of high strength carbon-composite materials, flywheels spin at speeds ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 rpm, and high performance flywheels utilize magnetic bearings to position the rotor in the center of a vacuum-sealed case in order to minimize frictional losses. But rather than boring you with too many technical details that you can easily look up yourself, I will get to the source of my bewilderment: why aren’t flywheels more readily used?

Flywheels have long lifetimes, high energy densities (on the order of 130Wh/kg), storage efficiencies as high as 90%, and are capable of large power outputs. Unlike chemical batteries, flywheels are not adversely affected by temperature and they are made of inert or benign materials. More importantly, they can be fully charged in less than 15 minutes! Compare that to the charging time of Tesla’s state-of-the-art battery pack. Am I the only person who thinks this is a significantly better idea than any current or future battery or fuel cell technology?

Don’t get me wrong, flywheels do have some drawbacks. One of them being the risk of rotor failure. If a flywheel is spun-up past its operational range, the stresses in the rotor could cause it to shatter. With rotational speeds of thousands of revolutions per minute, the shattered pieces become speedy projectiles. However, there has only been one reported case of such a catastrophic failure, and it was caused by abnormal circumstances (I believe the research group was tasked with getting the rotor to fail and since they could not cause it to fail due to rotational speeds, they shot it with a bullet). Nonetheless, protective casings and disintegrating rotors (basically materials that unwind or turn to dust when they fail) have been developed to alleviate this problem. A second drawback to flywheel energy storage is the high cost of the magnetic bearings. Currently, these bearings are too expensive for automotive manufactures to use in vehicles.

For stationary applications, neither of these drawbacks are a problem. Since weight is not an issue, heavy protective casings and larger rotors (that do not require magnetic bearings) can be employed. So what about using flywheels to solve wind power’s intermittency issues, or as energy storage for photovoltaic systems? Again I ask, why do haven’t we seen more widespread use of this technology?

Batteries, batteries, and more batteries

As I’m sitting down to compose this little piece of rambling on the status of advanced battery technology, and thus the prospects for PHEVs and full EVs, the lovely little arrangement of lithium ion cells under my left palm are feverishly pumping their final few amps through my PowerBook. They were “fully charged” about 30 minutes ago. Daft. I love irony almost as much as I detest sarcasm.

What does this mean? I’m not exactly sure. For one thing, it means that although I’d love to go out and buy a PHEV or EV and ditch my petrol swilling ICE-only vehicle (which won’t happen for at least 2 years after they hit showrooms, as purchasing a new car is pure financial bollocks), I’ll be damned suspicious about plunking down money for a vehicle that runs lithium ion batteries. As I’m sure you are aware, these are the batteries being groomed for the lead role in our electrically motivated transport future.

Perhaps you are wondering how old my computer is. A fair question. It’s almost up to it’s second birthday. Is that old? Maybe, but at a grand and a half a pop I’ll be holding on to this one for a while longer, thanks. I’ll simply have to replace the battery, which will cost a few hundred dollars. While not smile-inducing, this is palatable because a) I do not wish to run my laptop on petroleum products, and b) $200 is not $15000+ as would be the case for my racy new electric sports car. Tesla warranties the battery in the Roadster for 5 years… It might live to 10 years, or it might only last 5 years and 3 days. I sure could offset a lot of carbon with a $3,000 TerraPass each year. I found Who Killed the Electric Car? an entertaining exercise in conspiracy theory, but there’s little question in my mind that we aren’t yet where we need to be with battery technology.

Believe it or not major automakers also recognize this fact (they’re not as dumb as they look.) They were frank about their battery requirements for commercial PHEVs and EVs during last week’s Advanced Automotive Battery and Ultracapacitor Conference (AABC) in Long Beach, California. According to Joe LoGrasso, Engineering Group manager for Hybrid Energy Storage Systems at GM:

GM uses a multiphase process [for battery integration], qualifying cell and module capability, cycle life, calendar life and power. Then we develop and test the packs to evaluate performance attributes, then work through the integration. This is all a precursor to declaring a solution technically ready and then planning production. This can take on the order of 5 years—from the start of evaluation to the showroom.

So will the Chevy Volt be coming to a Chevrolet mega-automall near you by the 2010 production date Bob Lutz gave at the Detroit Auto Show? It’s possible, though distinctly unlikely. In 1997 GM told you that a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle would be in your neighbour’s garage in time to ring in the new millennium. I’d say it’s a good bet you’ll never see such a vehicle owned by an individual (yes, there are astronomically expensive fleets of them puttering about for testing.) The real problem is that even if GM hits its delivery target people probably won’t beat each other up to be first inside the showroom. I, for one, will be happy to let some “early-adopters” (marketing speak for guinea pigs) get burned by battery failures while I wait for a certified pre-owned model from a German or Japanese company.

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This is what happens when you design a car in a brick building in Pontiac, MI…hmm

Toyota, having a bit more sense, hired the Italians (specifically ItalDesign SpA in Turin) for their Volta concept. In both cases originality in naming is comically lacking.

Jasper Ridge Online

I joined the group that visited Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve yesterday. While we expected a nature walk, we received an educational tour of the environmental thoughtfulness and efficiencies in the design, programming, building and use of the field station building. I hadn’t heard the expression “programming” used for a building before, but it seems like a process of extended need-finding and design focus onto the functional spaces, furniture and equipment requirements, heating and cooling, traffic flow, and related attributes of a complex building prior to its construction. Facility manager and tour leader Philippe Cohen told us they had removed thousands of square feet from the design – along with the incident construction and ongoing maintenance costs – from their 9 months of programming.

But another thing that Philippe said intrigued me the most: that he was able to monitor the building’s energy use and generation from home. He mentioned it indirectly, through an anecdote about the way he learned that student researchers had been spending time working in the building at night. One evening, he was checking energy usage online and found it higher than expected. He thought someone had left the lights on, so he called the night manager to ask him to turn them off. Instead, the manager found students in the lab, working and reading.

The image above is a live capture of the last 24 hours of energy usage at the field station. A link to the monitoring kiosk with other timescales and aggregate information is included below.

Philippe’s experience made me think that if folks like building managers or policy makers want to conserve energy, why not put electric meters (or at least mirrored meter indicators) in very visible locations? Like by the front door, or on a My Yahoo! start page. It seems like it would require only a small change to infrastructure: just an upgrading of meters (and maybe only on new construction at first) to the type used at Jasper Ridge, which transmit data over the network. It might provide the same information feedback that we saw with Prius owners and hyper-milers, who use the car’s efficiency gauge to moderate their fuel usage. Maybe it would create more hyper-energiers.

Interior programming support at the University of Kansas

Leslie Shao-ming Sun Field Station energy performance

Jasper Ridge field station kiosk display

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve

A nice AIA page on the field station

Cloud Cult

I was channel surfing the other day and came upon a brief MTV spot on the band Cloud Cult. The founder of the band, Craig Minowa, is also the founder of Earthology Records (a record label which markets “environmentally friendly CDs” by making them from recycled materials). The band’s recording studio is also made completely from recycled/reused materials. Other than that, they appear to be just your average band. They choose not to sing about being sustainable, but rather have a direct impact on the world through their practices. I applaud them for this, but are they really doing as much as they claim? or as much as they could be?

On the MTV spot, Craig claimed that the band was “effectively spreading the message of living green”. However, are they on the really having as much impact as they claim? or as they should be? It could be argued that they might not have achieved the recognition they have gotten thus far by singing about sustainable issues, but is this slowing their message? I’m in no position to be telling them what to write songs about, but it seems that if they prioritize the planet over their band, which they also claimed to do in the MTV spot, might they not be more effective in spreading their message if they sang about sustainable issues?

In the day and age of digital music, it could be argued that CDs are becoming obsolete, so is it really more sustainable to push towards recycled CDs rather than push towards digital music? It seems to me that if the band truly wanted to have as much of an impact as possible, they would be leaning towards a digital approach to music, or maybe even singing about it.