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  New York City’s water: Brought to you by Mother Nature

  Eddie & Sam’s Pizza in downtown Tampa, Fla., boasts “Real New York Pizza.” The distinguishing characteristic of real New York Pizza? Not the crust, the cheese, the sauce, the toppings, or even the giant, floppy slices. It’s the water. Every few months, Eddie & Sam’s brings in 1,000 gallons of water from the same Catskill springs that feed New York City’s reservoirs. Another company, the Brooklyn Water Bagel Co., with about 20 locations across the country, has gone even further. Rather than import water from Brooklyn, the company seeks to recreate the precise chemistry of New York water through a patented 14-step filtration process, and only then can the water be used to make their bagels. All that time, money, and technology to get just the right water for pizza and bagels may seem excessive, but New Yorkers take justifiable pride in their water. Most of New York’s supply never passes through a filter and receives comparatively small doses of chlorine and fluoride. For their high-quality and lightly-treated water, today’s New Yorkers can thank quite a few forested hillsides and a handful of foresighted city planners. Though they did not put it in these terms, those planners invested in nature, and generations of New Yorkers have reaped the benefits ever since. The city planners’ investment had particular urgency. Cholera outbreaks that spread through the city’s water in the early 19th century killed thousands of New Yorkers. These epidemics, along with water pollution and a quickly growing population, forced city officials to search the countryside for cleaner and more reliable sources than surface water and local wells. Even in 1837, New York officials, anticipating the city’s growth, invested in a system of aqueducts to bring water from the Croton River, east of the Hudson River and some 25 miles north of the city line. By the end of the 19th century, population growth outstripped the capacity of the aqueducts from the Croton River. To supplement this supply, officials turned their attention to the Catskills, 2,000 square miles of hills and valleys west of the Hudson and three times as far from the city as the Croton. The region was still almost entirely rural. There were some farms, but forests were largely intact and streams clean-running. Construction of a system of reservoirs, tunnels, and conduits from this ideal water supply began in 1905. The system grew beyond the Catskills to include the Delaware River watershed, and by 1964, the entire system, the largest waterworks in the country, was complete. An engineering marvel, New York’s waterworks rely on gravity and little else to deliver 1.2 billion gallons of water every day through nine reservoirs, three lakes, 300 miles of tunnels, and 6,000 miles of distribution mains. The system has worked well for decades, teaching us an invaluable lesson: With care, and absent catastrophic changes in climate, this system can provide clean water forever. Clever engineers have not discovered how to build dams and pipes that will never decay. Instead, they knew to rely on services that nature provides. Soil and tree roots filter water, microorganisms break down contaminants, plants in streams absorb nitrogen from automobile emissions and fertilizer runoff, and cattails and other wetland plants suck up nutrients while trapping sediments and heavy metals. Protect those services — which improve with age — and everything else is merely maintenance. The Catskills watershed is a textbook example of what has become known as green infrastructure. In contrast to built or gray infrastructure, such as pipes and treatment plants, green infrastructure consists of woodlands and grasslands, wetlands and rivers. Networks of these natural lands, together with working landscapes such as farms, woodlots, and other open spaces, keep ecosystems functioning, provide wildlife habitats, and contribute to the well-being of human communities by filtering water, controlling floods, cooling and cleaning the air, and providing areas for recreation, among many other benefits. In the choice between building new gray infrastructure and conserving the green kind, the latter option is often less expensive and more efficient. Consider the example of New York’s Croton River and Catskill watersheds. The largely suburban Croton lies within an easy drive of the city. The roads, parking lots, lawns, golf courses, and other elements of suburbia mean more pollution washing into reservoirs — fertilizers and other chemicals, trash, motor oil, tiny particles spewing from the exhausts of cars and trucks. This so-called nonpoint source pollution, the bane of freshwater ecosystems everywhere, is notoriously difficult to control. By the late 1980s, New York officials gave up on fully controlling the pollution through such measures as improving septic systems and reducing erosion and accepted that they would eventually need a filtration plant for the 10 percent or so of the city’s water that flows through the Croton system. Construction took eight years and cost $3.4 billion; the plant began operations in 2012, and will cost millions more each year to operate. Pollution remained far less of an issue in the Catskills throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but risks were growing as a result of changing economics of the region. Owners of small family farms and woodlots struggled to stay in business. Many turned to intensive agriculture in smaller areas, which increased runoff and soil erosion, or they built more roads to get more timber to sawmills. Others chose to sell their land to vacation-home developers, jump-starting even more road construction and the salting necessary to keep those roads open in winter. Pollution began to spike, with a risk of worse to come if development overwhelmed rural septic systems. Many New Yorkers began to see a new filtration plant as inevitable. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued strict new rules for surface water in 1989, the city faced the daunting prospect of building an even larger filtration plant than that on the Croton River, at a cost of perhaps $8 billion. The owners of more than 800,000 buildings in New York City would end up footing the bill through increased water and sewer fees. The economic cost to the city overall would be enormous. City officials, led by Al Appleton, commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and director of the city water and sewer system, had another idea. Maybe instead of building a filtration plant, protecting the watershed would cost less and achieve the same, or better, results. To put a complex political, economic, and scientific argument in its simplest terms: If you can prevent pollution in the first place, then you won’t have to spend huge sums of money to clean it up later. Appleton and other city officials recognized that investing in nature, specifically the Catskills watershed, would pay a huge dividend: decades of clean water for New York City. No one had tried this before — not at this scale. But with a multibillion-dollar project on the horizon, New York’s leaders made the leap. Through much of the 1990s, New York City, 60 towns, 10 villages, seven counties, the state of New York, the EPA, and environmental groups negotiated the terms under which the EPA would waive its filtration requirement and allow the city to avoid building the new plant. They finally reached an agreement in 1997. That agreement limited growth in the watershed and committed the city to spend $1.5 billion to buy land, build storm sewers and septic systems, and upgrade existing sewage plants. The brilliance of New York’s solution was that Al Appleton and other officials did not try to take on just one problem. They thought big. Rather than attempting to plug one source of pollution at a time — an approach that has failed repeatedly — the city worked with farmers to help them manage their land in ways that would allow them to meet their own economic needs while providing clean water downstream. While the city has the power under state law to manage development in the Catskills, most land there remains in private hands. Conservation would have to be a cooperative venture. Unless the residents of the Catskills were behind this, New York City knew that enforcement of pollution standards from 100 miles away would never work. The city began to pay for pollution control investments on each farm as an incentive for farmers to join. Instead of selecting a top-down menu of best management practices, farmers worked with city and state agencies to custom-design pollution control measures — such as building fences and bridges to keep livestock away from waterways — to maximize their effectiveness and minimize their cost. The resulting solutions were not only better and less costly at controlling pollution than previous efforts, they also saved farmers both time and money. This realization turned the usual pollution dynamic upside down. Businesses and communities tend to resist new regulations, seeing them, rightly or wrongly, as burdensome. Far better, then, to engage these businesses and communities as providers of a valuable service to a willing market. Farmers now had a new crop to sell: water. The city needs periodic approvals from the EPA, the latest issued in 2007 and lasting for 10 years. As part of that agreement, New York also committed to spend another $241 million for land acquisition over 10 years. In early 2011, the state issued New York City a permit to acquire 105,000 more acres in the watershed. New York City has spent billions of dollars in the Catskills, a huge transfer of wealth from the city to the countryside. Those investments boosted the upstate economy with more jobs and businesses, from contractors to install septic systems and upgrade wastewater treatment plants, to jobs with the city and state, to new tourism enterprises. Catskills farmers, who had previously thought of the environment as something that forced them to spend money to solve somebody else’s problems, now made money by becoming environmentalists. For some, that extra income was the difference between selling out and staying on the land. More than 90 percent of the farms in the watershed participate in the program, putting about 75,000 acres under improved management. The combination of protected lands and improved management of working farms enables New York to pull off a neat trick — a win-win-win. People in New York City get cleaner, more secure water; residents of the Catskills get paid for a benefit they have long supplied for free; plants, animals, and people benefit from more conservation. That last one can be tangible, too. Gretchen Daily sums it up in a question, and only partly in jest: “Would you rather spend a romantic weekend at a filtration plant or in the Catskills?” Excerpted with permission from Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature, by Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013. Source: Grist Related articles 5 tips for healthier, Earth-friendly laundry For this mobile phone charger, just add water Internet of Things extends under your sink with new water and electricity sensor technology

  1 comments | May.20.2013 | view:47

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  More power to solar energy

  The government has received a white paper from the industry suggesting steps to enhance solar energy projects A demand for the creation of a separate window under the National Clean Energy Fund (NCEF) has been made by the industry. It may provide a boost to the country’s domestic solar energy projects by providing easy access to finance for such clean energy technology, the industry has stated in a FICCI white paper. The paper on reducing the cost of finance for solar energy projects through NCEF has been submitted to the government for consideration. The Fund was announced in the budget 2011-12 and is expected to be a step for funding research and innovative projects in clean energy technology. The white paper in essence, suggests innovative models for sharing and distribution of risk and cost of financing through NCEF as the cost of financing from the domestic Financial Institutions is high. “Given the challenges faced by the solar industry in India due to the high cost of finance, the government’s decision to extend an interest subsidy from the NCEF for enabling lowering the cost of finance for renewable energy projects is a commendable step,” states the white paper. The paper recommends that the interest subsidy be made available for eligible projects and routed through the lenders to such projects so that borrowers would get lower interest rates for the loans while the lenders directly receive the subsidy. The FICCI Solar Energy Task Force was launched in February 2010, with the launch of Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) to provide a platform for the solar energy sector to deliberate on policy and regulatory issues and advance interests of the sector at domestic and global platforms. The document states that since solar energy projects are treated on par and as part of all power sector and categorised under power for categorisation and monitoring of sector exposure, it limits the availability of finance to the sector. Treating solar energy projects under a separate category (say, Renewable Power) or under a sub-limit, similar to RPO norms stipulated by Electricity Regulatory Commissions, will provide the much needed fillip to lending to solar energy projects. In view of the absence of a separate exposure limit to renewable energy, providing a thrust to the sector for creating additional funding mechanisms becomes an imperative. An interest subsidy could be made available for eligible projects and routed through the lenders to such projects. Thus, borrowers would get lower interest rates for the loans (not a reimbursement) while the lenders directly receive the subsidy. Since number of projects seeking such interest subsidy will be relatively large, some selection mechanism will have to be implemented to select such projects. One way to select such projects can be in line with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) scheme for rooftop subsidy, where-in channel partners can directly seek subsidy on behalf of customers. In a similar way, the Concerned Nodal Agency (CNA) can have banks as channel partners where-in Banks would be able to seek interest subsidy directly on behalf of projects. Under such a mechanism, banks acting as Channel Partners would do their own due diligence on the projects before approaching MNRE or the CNA. This will ensure that only quality projects get such an interest subsidy. Since there are no industry-wide benchmarked interest rates, domestic lenders typically lend on semi-fixed rate, that is, interest rate linked to a base rate which is reviewed from time to time. Such fluctuation in the rate of interest is borne by the borrowers. The lenders may be incentivised to provide fixed interest rate loan for three to five years by providing an additional interest subsidy (for instance, 1-2 per cent per annum higher than the regular interest subsidy). Cost of financing can also be brought down through a guarantee scheme that guarantees a certain percentage of exposure to banks. Non-performance of this guarantee scheme can be funded through the NCEF. NCEF will need to create a corpus that will act as a backstop determined based on an assumed default rate. To prevent the issue of moral hazard, guarantee can be provided on 50 per cent of exposure to the bank. The white paper is of the view that interest rates in India are high compared to other countries including developed and other emerging markets such as China. While loans from international organisations are available at a low interest rate, the hedging costs have impeded its utility. While multilateral agencies are willing to lend, they do not want to take the Rupee exposure. In case of floating rate, the hedging cost includes cost of hedging currency and cost of hedging interest rate. Both these costs lead to a much higher effective cost of debt. As a result, a fully hedged loan in foreign currency, for example the US Dollar, becomes expensive. It is suggested that while the fluctuation in the rate of interest in the case of international loans may be borne by the borrower, the currency should be hedged with government support. Source: Hindu Related articles “Hooray, My solar-powered Vehicle Won the Race” Solar Cell Material Created From Microwave Oven Solar Impulse’s U.S. Expedition Begins

  0 comments | May.20.2013 | view:35

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  Fuji Electric introduces new hydrogen fuel production system

  Fuji has high hopes for hydrogen fuel Fuji Electric, a massive electrical equipment and holding company based in Japan, has announced that it has developed a product designed specifically for hydrogen fuel production. This product is meant to be incorporated into existing fuel cell products in order to make them more alluring to the Japanese market. Hydrogen fuel has managed to capture a great deal of interest in this market, but much of this has been reserved to the transportation sector. Fuji Electric believes that there are many promising opportunities for hydrogen fuel beyond transportation. New system produces hydrogen through the use of methane The new hydrogen fuel production technology is capable of converting methane gas into hydrogen. This makes it particularly attractive to fuel cell systems that are used in sewage treatment. Fuji Electric claims that the system will cost approximately 40% less than conventional gas engine technologies for the same purpose. The company hopes to take advantage of an incentive program launched by the Japanese government in 2012 in order to promote the system. Fuel cells could have a promising future in sewage treatment Hydrogen fuel cells and sewage treatment often go hand-in-hand. Fuel cells are able to use polluted waters to generate electricity and as these waters are used in a fuel cell, they are purified by the intense heat that the process generates. Moreover, sewage treatment facilities are typically a promising source of methane gas, which can be used to produce hydrogen fuel that can be used by fuel cells. If enough methane can be tapped into, fuel cells can be used to power the sewage treatment process entirely. Japan continues to show strong support for hydrogen fuel Fuji Electric plans to sell 20 of its new hydrogen fuel production systems this year. The demand for such systems is relatively modest as the prospects of hydrogen fuel cells are not yet widely embraced. Japan is home to one of the world’s largest hydrogen fuel cell networks, called the ENE-FARM, which has helped draw more attention to the possible benefits of hydrogen fuel. Source: Hydrogenfuelnews Related articles Hydrogen fuel may receive more funding in the US Ash as a source of hydrogen fuel

  0 comments | May.20.2013 | view:33

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  Turning Gold ‘Green’ — Non-Toxic Method For Mining Gold Developed

  The gold-mining industry is one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world. While there are a variety of reasons for this, one of the most prominent is the wide-scale use of cyanide as a means to extract gold from crude sources. But now, new research from Northwestern University may have addressed this, with the discovery of an effective alternative to cyanide — an inexpensive and environmentally benign method using simple cornstarch. The new process can also be used effectively to extract gold from consumer electronic waste. The new ‘green’ method can effectively separate and extract gold from a large variety of crude sources, and the other metals with which they are often found bound and mixed together. This is the process that toxic cyanides are currently used for. Almost all of the major gold-mining companies in the world make use of cyanide for this purpose, leading to significant environmental contamination and often significant health problems for those that perform the mining. “The elimination of cyanide from the gold industry is of the utmost importance environmentally,” said Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “We have replaced nasty reagents with a cheap, biologically friendly material derived from starch.” The new material was actually discovered by accident, during experiments to create “an extended, three-dimensional cubic structure, which could be used to store gases and small molecules,” a Northwestern University press release notes. “Zhichang Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Stoddart’s lab and first author of the paper, took two test tubes containing aqueous solutions — one of the starch-derived alpha-cyclodextrin, the other of a dissolved gold (Au) salt (called aurate) — and mixed them together in a beaker at room temperature.” Rather than the cubic structure being created though, ‘needles’ were forming rapidly upon the mixing of the two solutions. “Initially, I was disappointed when my experiment didn’t produce cubes, but when I saw the needles, I got excited,” Liu said. “I wanted to learn more about the composition of these needles.” “Nature decided otherwise,” said Stoddart, a senior author of the paper. “The needles, composed of straw-like bundles of supramolecular wires, emerged from the mixed solutions in less than a minute.” The press release continues: After discovering the needles, Liu screened six different complexes — cyclodextrins composed of rings of six (alpha), seven (beta) and eight (gamma) glucose units, each combined with aqueous solutions of potassium tetrabromoaurate (KAuBr4) or potassium tetrachloroaurate (KAuCl4). He found that it was alpha-cyclodextrin, a cyclic starch fragment composed of six glucose units, that isolates gold best of all. The supramolecular nanowires, each 1.3 nanometers in diameter, assemble spontaneously in a straw-like manner. In each wire, the gold ion is held together in the middle of four bromine atoms, while the potassium ion is surrounded by six water molecules; these ions are sandwiched in an alternating fashion by alpha-cyclodextrin rings. Around 4,000 wires are bundled parallel to each other and form individual needles that are visible under an electron microscope. The best part of the new method/material is that the alkali metal salt wastes that are produced are relatively environmentally benign when compared to the cyanides that are currently used. According to the researchers, the new method is also a good bit more efficient than the currently used commercial processes. The new research was published May 14 in the online journal Nature Communications. Source: Cleantechnica Related articles Gold rush sweeps Latin America, Amazon suffers Flash vaporization during earthquakes evidenced by gold deposits

  0 comments | May.20.2013 | view:31

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  Watch your breath megacities: Project aims to track greenhouse gases from LA, Paris

  Every time Los Angeles exhales, odd-looking gadgets anchored in the mountains above the city trace the invisible puffs of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that waft skyward. Halfway around the globe, similar contraptions atop the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere around Paris keep a pulse on emissions from smokestacks and automobile tailpipes. And there is talk of outfitting Sao Paulo, Brazil, with sensors that sniff the byproducts of burning fossil fuels. It’s part of a budding effort to track the carbon footprints of megacities, urban hubs with over 10 million people that are increasingly responsible for human-caused global warming. For years, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants have been closely monitored around the planet by stations on the ground and in space. Last week, worldwide levels of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million at a Hawaii station that sets the global benchmark — a concentration not seen in millions of years. Now, some scientists are eyeing large cities — with LA and Paris as guinea pigs — and aiming to observe emissions in the atmosphere as a first step toward independently verifying whether local — and often lofty — climate goals are being met. For the past year, a high-tech sensor poking out from a converted shipping container has stared at the Los Angeles basin from its mile-high perch on Mount Wilson, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains that’s home to a famous observatory and communication towers. Like a satellite gazing down on Earth, it scans more than two dozen points from the inland desert to the coast. Every few minutes, it rumbles to life as it automatically sweeps the horizon, measuring sunlight bouncing off the surface for the unique fingerprint of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. In a storage room next door, commercially available instruments that typically monitor air quality double as climate sniffers. And in nearby Pasadena, a refurbished vintage solar telescope on the roof of a laboratory on the California Institute of Technology campus captures sunlight and sends it down a shaft 60 feet below where a prism-like instrument separates out carbon dioxide molecules. On a recent April afternoon atop Mount Wilson, a brown haze hung over the city, the accumulation of dust and smoke particles in the atmosphere. “There are some days where we can see 150 miles way out to the Channel Islands and there are some days where we have trouble even seeing what’s down here in the foreground,” said Stanley Sander, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What Sander and others are after are the mostly invisible greenhouse gases spewing from factories and freeways below. There are plans to expand the network. This summer, technicians will install commercial gas analyzers at a dozen more rooftops around the greater LA region. Scientists also plan to drive around the city in a Prius outfitted with a portable emission-measuring device and fly a research aircraft to pinpoint methane hotspots from the sky (A well-known natural source is the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of LA where underground bacteria burp bubbles of methane gas to the surface.) Six years ago, elected officials vowed to reduce emissions to 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 by shifting to renewable energy and weaning the city’s dependence on out-of-state coal-fired plants, greening the twin port complex and airports and retrofitting city buildings. It’s impractical to blanket the city with instruments so scientists rely on a handful of sensors and use computer models to work backward to determine the sources of the emissions and whether they’re increasing. They won’t be able to zero in on an offending street or a landfill, but they hope to be able to tell whether switching buses from diesel to alternative fuel has made a dent. Project manager Riley Duren of JPL said it’ll take several years of monitoring to know whether LA is on track to reach its goal. Scientists not involved with the project say it makes sense to dissect emissions on a city level to confirm whether certain strategies to curb greenhouse gases are working. But they’re divided about the focus. Allen Robinson, an air quality expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said he prefers more attention paid to measuring a city’s methane emissions since scientists know less about them than carbon dioxide release. Nearly 58 percent of California’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 came from gasoline-powered vehicles, according to the U.S. Energy Department’s latest figures. In much of the country, coal —usually as fuel for electric power — is a major source of carbon dioxide pollution. But in California, it’s responsible for a tad more than 1 percent of the state’s carbon dioxide emissions. Natural gas, considered a cleaner fuel, spews one third of the state’s carbon dioxide. Overall, California in 2010 released about 408 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The state’s carbon dioxide pollution is greater than all but 20 countries and is just ahead of Spain’s emissions. In 2010, California put nearly 11 tons of carbon dioxide into the air for every person, which is lower than the national average of 20 tons per person. Gregg Marland, an Appalachian State University professor who has tracked worldwide emissions for the Energy Department, said there’s value in learning about a city’s emissions and testing techniques. “I don’t think we need to try this in many places, but we have to try some to see what works and what we can do,” he said. Launching the monitoring project came with the usual growing pains. In Paris, a carbon sniffer originally tucked away in the Eiffel Tower’s observation deck had to be moved to a higher floor that’s off-limits to the public after tourists’ exhaling interfered with the data. So far, $3 million have been spent on the U.S. effort with funding from federal, state and private groups. The French, backed by different sponsors, have spent roughly the same. Scientists hope to strengthen their ground measurements with upcoming launches of Earth satellites designed to track carbon dioxide from orbit. The field experiment does not yet extend to China, by far the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluter. But it’s a start, experts say. With the focus on megacities, others have worked to decipher the carbon footprint of smaller places like Indianapolis, Boston and Oakland, where University of California, Berkeley researchers have taken a different tack and blanketed school rooftops with relatively inexpensive sensors. “We are at a very early stage of knowing the best strategy, and need to learn the pros and cons of different approaches,” said Inez Fung, a professor of atmospheric science at Berkeley who has no role in the various projects. Source: Washingtonpost Related articles “Greenhouse Gas Emission Factors Needed to be Estimated by Power Sources” SK Telecom’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Technology Recognized by International Community Government Seeks to Reduce Greenhouse Gases by 268,000CO₂ Tons in Building and Transportation Sectors

  0 comments | May.20.2013 | view:37