The winner of the Innovate or Die Pedal Powered Machine competition is the Aquaduct, a pedal-powered vehicle that stores, filters and transports water. Intended for use in developing countries where clean water is scarce and obtaining it is challenging, the Aquaduct comprises a storage tank, filter, peristaltic pump, clean tank and clutch, mounted within a tricycle-like assembly. As the rider pedals, the pump draws water from the storage tank, through a filter to a 2 gallon clean tank, which can be removed on arrival. When more water is needed, the tank is replaced, the clutch engaged and the Aquaduct can be pedalled while stationary. Videos of all 102 entries to the competition can be viewed here.

Some of this sounds a little familiar. In December 2007, the BBC’s Dragons’ Den featured a team from Red Button Design, a Glasgow based speculative design company, seeking funding for a product called “Reverse Osmosis Sanitation System” (ROSS), “an innovative water transport, sanitation and storage device designed to bring relief to the 1.2 billion people across the world without access to safe water.” See their pitch here.

The core principles behind both devices are very similar, using the energy from the circular motion of the wheels to pump water through a filter, but the implementations are very different, with the Aquaduct designed to be ridden while ROSS is a tank pulled by a pedestrian.  The Aquaduct won a competition sponsored by Specialized, the cycle company, so the form of the solution was pre-determined by the entry rules. “The answer’s a bicycle, now what’s the problem?” The ROSS team, on the other hand, used the problem as a starting point, and this shows, as does their awareness of issues such as simplicity, robustness, maintenance and cost of ownership. I’m sure that both devices could do a worthwhile job, but on cost grounds alone ROSS wins hands down, at around £20 a pop. Where can you get a customised tricycle for £20 nowadays? Which is more likely to be stolen, a bike or a water tank?

There’s some amazing snobbishness about technology for developing countries. One of the Dragons wanted to compare costs between ROSS and a conventional standpipe/purification plant, as if to suggest this was the only ‘proper’ solution to the water problem. When Freeplay wanted to push Trevor Baylis’s clockwork radio out in the developing world, people got very sniffy about fobbing Africans and Indians off with ‘primitive’ technology. The idea that leaving a plastic bottle of contaminated water in the sun for a day would kill nearly all the microbes was scorned across the board because it would be seen to remove the urgency for providing wells and standpipes. Never mind that thousands of lives could be saved.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there was a brief attempt to move away from the term ‘alternative technology’ to ‘appropriate technology’. These two devices are undoubtedly appropriate, not just for the task they have to perform, but for the environment in which they will be put to work.

Tonight, The History Channel broadcasts a two-hour documentary special ‘Life After People’. The program speculates:

“What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive?”

A mix of science fiction and science fact, using expert testimony from a range of disciplines, we are shown how the world as we have made it would change if the human race were no longer there to ‘maintain’ it. Judging by the accompanying History Channel web site, the program follows quite closely the general thread of a 1996 New Scientist article, ‘Return to Paradise‘, which traces the changes in a deserted London over 5, 10, 50 and 500 years.

The thing about ‘What if?’ scenarios is that they often raise more questions than they answer. In this case, one has to ask how the human race disappeared, because the manner of our departure could have a strong influence over how, or if, the planet and its remaining occupants survive us. The web site describes a number of possible causes: pandemic, nuclear winter, asteroid impact. Several of these would be relatively quick, but indiscriminate, possibly leaving a totally dead planet. The premise of the show seems to be an instantaneous vanishing, leaving all physical traces of our civilisation intact. This kind of begs the question, who turns the lights off? Who makes the nukes safe, and closes down industrial processes? What about the mess?

I suppose this is outside the scope of the program. As another New Scientist article ‘Imagine Earth Without People’ put it in 2006:

“Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses).”

Cheery stuff. Inevitably, ‘Life After People’ concentrates on the decay and collapse of our built environment, because it makes more dramatic visuals than watching grass grow, which I imagine would be a major activity if this were to happen for real. It should be remembered that there’s very little of the planet’s surface left that doesn’t bear the mark of human activity, and very few ecosystems that wouldn’t change once we went.

If you’re one of those people who’s prone to lightbulb moments, when a bright idea pops into your head when you least expect it, your time has come. NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, has launched the Big Green Challenge, a nationwide competition to come up with innovative ways of reducing CO₂ emissions in the community by 60%.

The £1 million prize fund is designed to encourage and reward people working together to develop new approaches to saving energy. So, the competition is only open to organisations or groups of people. These will need to be formally constituted as ‘not-for-profit‘, although newly formed groups can apply for this status later.

Ten finalists will have a year to turn their ideas into action. The winner will be announced in late 2009. The first stage of applications closes at the end of February, so get together and get those thinking caps on.

Individuals can’t enter, so if anyone wants a partner for this challenge please let me know. I give great brainstorm, and I’m so easy to work with

I’ m grateful to the guys at Ecospace for drawing my attention to this little baby. The boffins at Nokia have come up with a piece of kit that has the potential to extend the capabilities of mobile technology to a completely new level. Or it might prove a complete non-starter that never sees the light of day. Whatever, as with the car industry, it’s a fair bet that what actually hits the shops will be nothing like this prototype.

Nokia’s key concept is to combine a mobile phone and a compatible sensing device, enabling you to “stay connected to your friends and loved ones, as well as to your health and local environment”. Applications in the frame at the moment include the local environment, e.g. weather conditions, UV levels or atmospheric pollution, and the user’s health (blood pressure, pulse rate etc), with more to follow. Perhaps they’ll develop a plugin Geiger counter. According to Nokia “You can also share the environmental data your sensing device collects and view other users’ shared data, thereby increasing your global environmental awareness”. One has to wonder why we would want to, other than giving us something new to put on our Facebook site.

Apart from being a solution in search of a problem, the Eco Sensor Concept is interesting for its ‘green’ credentials, incorporating the 3 R’s of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The use of printed electronics reduces the size of electronic components. Bio-materials such as PLA plastics and elastomers reduce the use of non-renewable inputs and require less energy. The case will be made from 100% recycled steel. The electrowetting display will use less energy than conventional screens. The remote sensor will incorporate solar cells, and may also employ kinetic or heat energy from the user.

http://www.nokia.com/A4707477#stayintouch

And apparently it’s a phone too. Not quite in the “I Want One Of Those” league yet, though.

The environmental propaganda machine continues to rumble forward on ‘The Archers’, BBC Radio 4′s venerable soap opera and green information channel. Tuesday’s episode featured an earnest discussion of anaerobic digesters on farms, turning animal muck into methane and generating electricity for sale back to the grid. According to jet-setting career agriculturist Debbie Aldridge, calling home from Eastern Europe where she runs her father’s offshore organic farming operation apparently single-handedly, the Germans are streets ahead of the UK with this technology. She wants a piece of the action at Home Farm.

It’s taken a while for art to imitate life. Last year the BBC reported how an agricultural college was using methane from the muck produced by its dairy herd to power its working farm all year round (‘College harnesses cow pat power‘ ), saying “the technology is used at more than 1,000 farms in Germany but only at a handful in the UK”.

Why are we so far behind here? The natural conservatism (small ‘c’) of UK farmers? Problems financing the project? General uncertainties in the farming industry? The idea seems to tick all the right boxes: cheap electricity, lower emissions, reduced water pollution. For me, the only fly in the ointment is the need for artifical fertilisers to replace the muck that used to be spread on the fields.

The reason they’re ahead in Germany is, you guessed it, money. In 2004, Renewable Energy World reported:

In Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the incentive system for anaerobic digestion consists of both a subsidy for the green electricity generated, and of either investment subsidies or fiscal incentives. Of all the countries reviewed, Germany has the best investment climate for anaerobic digestion at this level, the main reason being its high feed-in tariff for the electricity generated – 10.1 Eurocents/kWh. Moreover, this rate is guaranteed for a period of 20 years.

Sounds tempting. I bet Brian Aldridge would jump at that deal, if it were available in the UK.

Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum…

Recycled waste silicon from IBM’s chip manufacturing processes will soon be finding its way into solar panels.

A new process in IBM’s Vermont factory enables it to refurbish scrap semiconductor wafers to a standard where they can be reused in-house, and subsequently ‘retired’ to be sold on for use in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells.

Up to 3.3% of the 250,000 wafers used by the semiconductor industry each day are scrapped, approximately 3 million each year. Most are crushed and sent to landfills, or melted down and resold, because they contain intellectual property which makes them unsuitable for processing by third-party recycling companies.

IBM says the wafer reclamation process generates energy savings of up to 90% by reducing the demand for new wafers to meet manufacturing needs. When wafers reach end of life they are sold to the solar industry. Solar cell manufacturers could save between 30% and 90% of the energy required if they had used a new silicon material source.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution article

Process details (geeks only)

IBM press release

The Eden Project is already a world-renowned attraction and now it’s looking to add an extra edge to its success. Their latest building, the Edge, will demonstrate options for energy supply, water conservation and waste management intended to act as models of how we all might live in the next decades. From www.theedge.org :

“Its scale and ambition will make the Edge an international icon of sustainability, showing mankind is capable of amazing things. The building will be a model of cutting-edge architecture and technology, harvesting water and energy from the sun, wind, and rain to show how we all might live in the future. It will be a testament to one-planet living, built to the lowest possible carbon footprint and designed to last.

“The awe-inspiring oasis, desert, water gardens and underground chambers inside the Edge will become somewhere to inspire and explore new solutions, rethink our values and our goals, work together to create a positive future.

“The point of the Edge is that while resources may be limited, the imagination isn’t. The building will create a setting for asking questions fundamental to our future

• What makes humans content?
• How can we still find richness in our lives without rampant consumption?
• What lessons from the past can inform the future?

“We will look back to understand how people coped with change in the past. We will look at people living ‘on the edge’ today to learn from the ingenious solutions they have put into practice. We will look forward to explore how we can find the spirit, imagination and knowledge to adapt to the challenges facing us.

“The Edge won’t be a building about climate change, it will be a building because of climate change.”

Sounds wonderful, but once you’ve fought your way past all that blowsy rhetoric, what have you got? Using language reminiscent of an Olympic bid, under the flag of sustainability, the Eden Project wants to build another biome to attract more visitors and generate more revenue. Why should we care? Because Eden wants to fund this with Lottery money. The Big Lottery Fund has put up a prize of £50m to be granted to a single “inspirational” project as part of The People’s £50 Million Lottery Giveaway. The Edge is one of four shortlisted projects, along with Sustrans’ Connect2, Sherwood:The Living Legend and the Black Country Urban Park.

The winning project will be decided by public vote in December 2007. Have your say at www.thepeoples50million.org.uk.

The Environment Agency has just published the Winter 2007 edition of its quarterly bulletin ‘Your Environment’. In the plastic wrapper (“made from bioegradable material and will decompose in landfill”. Oh joy!) I also discovered a supplement called ‘Your Environment Extra’. The EA has gathered together a team of 25 experts (most of whom I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of) to answer the question “What are the 50 things that will save the planet?”.

Most of the usual suspects are there, although I suspect we could argue about the relative placings. Top of the list is “Powering down”, ahead of solar power (3), Kyoto replacement (4), home generation (5), recycling (11), renewables (14), carbon capture (16) to name a few. My personal favourites? Good to see population growth (18) identified as a root cause of environmental problems. “Growing your own” (23) should be higher up the list.

But the idea that really brightened my day only just scraped in at number 48, “Going with the floe”. Ian Christie, Associate at the New Economics Foundation, says:

“If we must have ‘climate engineering’ technofixes, then forget about seeding oceans with iron and deflecting sunlight via space shields. Instead, replace lost polar albedo and lost ice cover by creating artificial floating reflective floes, which will help the polar bears too.

I thought of this a couple of years ago. Trouble was, whenever I mentioned the idea in conversation people looked at me as if I was mad and I gave up. A bit late to claim any credit I know, but I’m dead chuffed that ‘my’ brainwave is out there at last.

Your Environment Extra (PDF) Your Environment Issue 17 (PDF)

“The overall message is clear. It is in our gift to stop harming our planet. We understand the problems we have created and how to begin undoing the damage. So let’s do it.”

My colleague Matt has recently spoken out against the doom ‘n’ gloom merchants: “Try smiling. Think positive. Get positive. Make changes. Get involved.” Five years, that’s all we’ve got …

It’s true that for every disaster that might befall us, there’s a group taking an almost pornographic delight in talking about it as if it’s inevitable. Current favourites are climate change, terrorism, a ‘flu pandemic, Peak Oil and global financial meltdown. What steps you take depends on who you are and where you live. In the USA, you buy a remote stronghold and stock up on beans, bullets and band-aids. In the UK, you queue outside your bank and treat yourself to a beige cardigan from M&S.

Well, here’s a bunch of people who are really putting their money where their mouth is. The Lammas community is creating an ecovillage in Pembrokeshire which will become a demonstration model for low impact living.

“We aim to combine the best of the old with the best of the new. Our project is based on the traditional welsh smallholding model. To this we will also bring the latest developments in environmental design, green technology and permaculture. We are currently applying for planning permission for stage 1 of the project. We are optimistic that we will succeed.
“The proposal is for a new settlement of eco-smallholdings. It will be sited on 175 acres of mixed pasture and woodland next to the village of Glandwr. The Ecovillage will be completely independent of all mains services. All water will be sourced from the site using a combination of an existing spring for drinking water and rainwater harvesting from rooftops. All electricity will be produced on site using renewables. Fortunately there is an existing water turbine system on site which Lammas plans to renovate. All organic waste will be composted on site using a combination of compost toilets, wormeries and compost heaps.
“In accordance with Pembrokeshire Planning Policy for Low Impact Development residents will need to demonstrate that they are substantially meeting their household needs directly from the land. In practice this means that the people involved will need to be working the land to good effect. Lammas residents are proposing a range of livelihoods from the land including woodland crafts, horticulture, tree nurseries, livestock and woollen crafts.”

This group deserves all the praise and support they can get, as does the Pembrokeshire local authority, currently the only county in the UK with a low-impact policy (if you don’t count Milton Keynes!). Will their ideas and ideals enter the mainstream? I wish.

Lammas Home Page

A Low Impact Woodland Home

….. were hit by a Category 3 Hurricane?

In New York City, over eight million people live on land that has 578 miles of waterfront. By 2030, the population is expected to reach nine million. At the same time, global climate change has put New York City at an increased risk for a severe coastal storm. In recent years, storms have become more intense, occur more frequently, and continue farther north than they have historically. The city would face many challenges during and after such a storm; one of the most difficult is the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their homes.

The New York City Office of Emergency Management is sponsoring an open competition to generate solutions for post-disaster provisional housing. “What if New York City…” is a call for innovation and an opportunity for designers and policy-makers to collaborate on one of the biggest challenges facing densely settled urban areas after a disaster: how do we keep people safely and comfortably housed while reconstruction proceeds?

A jury of experts in the fields of architecture, design, urbanism, and government will choose ten entrants who will be awarded $10,000 each and technical support to develop their proposals into workable solutions. These solutions will provide support for New York’s most vulnerable communities and be a precedent for dense urban areas all over the world.
This design competition will rely on a fictional but realistic New York City neighbourhood devastated by a hypothetical Category 3 hurricane. How will residents resume their lives? How can they be provided safe, comfortable living space? How can this housing be quickly deployed and adapted to different site conditions? How can it be reused in subsequent emergencies, environmentally sustainable, and cost effective?

‘What If New York City ….’ Home Page

Such a shame that coastal cities in developing countries around the world, desperate to prepare themselves for the same risks as NYC, don’t have the same level of resources to run a competition like this. I suppose that once the winning solution has been implemented, the Americans will be happy to share …. at a price.