Green Energy : Everything You Need To Know

Green technology is seeing greater popularity and there are plenty of good reasons for that. You can save ample amounts of cash and also make a meaningful environmental contribution. This article will give you tips so you can live a green lifestyle today.

Keep your home’s lights turned off when they’re not in use. Use your lights after dark when you need them, but make sure to switch them off when leaving a room. Turn off your porch light if everyone is home, or cabinet lighting in your kitchen when no one is in there. You will use less energy because of this.

coffee machines

There are products available for purchase that can help you reduce your energy costs. Examples of these include windows, light bulbs, and appliances, all of which have been designed to run efficiently on reduced energy. You cut your cooling and heating costs when you use these items as well.

Take into consideration using lighting that is Eco-friendly. Compact fluorescent bulbs, CFLs, are affordable and environmentally friendly. Also, they give you enough light while lowering your energy usage. You can help your home remain environmentally friendly in the process.

blinds

Work for legislation that will encourage companies to use green energy. Awareness of the energy policies of companies is an effective tool and should be fully utilized. If people were aware that certain companies chose profit instead of green energy, they may avoid buying from them. When businesses are held responsible for their practices in a public way, that is the first step toward more green actions.

You may want to get a shower head that saves water. It gives you the exact same feeling as traditional shower heads do, but you save a huge amount of water. You’ll not only have lower water bills, but you will also help the environment by saving water.

fancy dress

A simple way to save energy is to close the curtains. Another option is installing darkening shades. Since your home will become cooler, you will not have to use the air conditioning that much. You will save energy and money.

Electric heaters should only be used when necessary in order to be more green. You can wear warmer clothing instead, and warm up your home with your fireplace. You will breathe better during your sleep if the air is cool.

beds

Use a laptop instead of a desktop computer. Making this switch can reduce your power consumption by up to 75%. This is especially true if you are an Internet addict or do heavy word processing. Plus, you can take your laptop with you anywhere you go!

Check your utility bills against previous years’ bills to see how you’re doing in your efforts to go green. You should also write down your goals for energy efficiency and reminders to help you stay on track. When you’re aware of energy expenses, you’re better positioned to reduce them. If you are specifically focusing on reducing your electricity and water consumption, then you are going to be more conscious of lights left on, or dripping taps.

office furniture

An often-repeated, yet useful tip for anyone who wants to start saving energy today, is to flip off the light when they leave the room. Get yourself into the habif of always turning lights off and you can save a lot of energy. You also will be saving money when it comes to your power bill.

This article should have helped you out with your home. Using greener energy can be useful to you in many ways and can really make you feel good! Remember these tips and make a greener, more efficient home.

A collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

“The fact that our microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important,” says Jay Keasling, the Chief Executive Officer for JBEI, and a leading scientific authority on synthetic biology. “Given that the costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs required to distill ethanol, we believe our results can significantly contribute to the ultimate goal of producing scalable and cost effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals.”

The collaboration has published the results of their research in the January 28, 2010 edition of Nature.

Source: Renewable Energy World.com

The environmental and monetary costs of powering a home can be greatly reduced through green energy sources. If you want to learn how to go green with your energy usage around the house, read on for some tips that can help you consume energy wisely.

Remove your laptop battery if you can plug it into the wall. The battery will continue to draw energy, even at full capacity, so taking it out will save a few kilowatts of power. A bonus is that you will also improve the battery’s life.

When not using things, turn them off. When you leave a room, take the time to turn off lights, the tv or the computer. A power strip is an easy way to turn off multiple appliances at once, so consider placing one in a conspicuous place where many electronics are located.

Learn about energy sources within your community. Find out what the cost would be to switch, how much it would cost to maintain, and whether your government has any legislation regarding its use. It may be beneficial to switch from electric heat to natural gas heat, or from city water to well water, for example.

Cut energy usage while cooking by making better use of your oven’s light. The oven light will allow you to check your food without opening the oven door. When you open the oven door you lose a lot of the heat.

Think about going from a traditional cooling and heating system to some kind of geothermal system instead. Alternate HVAC systems require underground pipes that have water and refrigerant. They then enter a device which either heats or cools your home as necessary. This type of system is more efficient as the below-ground temperatures are steadier than outside air temperatures.

You may be able to reduce your energy usage by upgrading your insulation. Homes that are more than thirty years old probably need an update to their insulation. Many could probably stand a full re-application. This will make your home retain more heat, which will cut your heating bills by quite a bit.

If you want to have hot water, but at a lower cost, then check into solar energy. There are many solar hot-water appliances to get the job done. There are direct circulation systems and indirect ones. If you have been plagued by frozen or broken pipes in the past, an indirect one could be for you.

Using green energy now means a better future for the planet and future generations. This article has shown that it is neither expensive nor difficult to go green.

Management of Water and Wastewater at Source

We focus on micro and community scale domestic wastewater treatment technologies; on-site treatment technologies for industrial wastewaster; and management of diffuse and urban drainage.

Energy Efficient Water and Wastewater Treatment

The water industry is energy intensive, consuming about 2% of total energy used in the UK. We engage with research and development in; optimising energy use in treatment technologies, low-energy use pumping, increasing the availability of renewable / recovered energy use, increasing biogas recovery and the development of carbon footprinting methodology to aid the move to the delivery of a carbon-neutral/carbon negative service.

Low Impact Water and Wastewater Treatment

There has been significant growth in the use of water treatment chemicals to improve global water quality. However, health & environmental concerns combined with escalating use and cost, and security of supply issues, is pushing the water industry to look at the sustainable use of chemicals. We are working with those exploring the road towards chemical free water and wastewater treatment

Integrated Product Policy

Eco-design: Going beyond product design to consider product-services and entire systems: planet, profit, and people.

Design for Process Efficiency: We are interested in furthering new design concepts which increase material and/or energy efficiency during or after operational lifetime. Remanufacturing for instance restores end of life products to new condition and is distinct from recycling, which destroys the product to recover materials for use in different products.

LCA thinking: We are interested in moving the agenda for industry beyond compliance and management into full life cycle thinking. For example – product lightweighting: lightweight or rightweight? Less material consumption is broadly a Good Thing but sometimes a more substantial design can mean less negative environmental impacts across the whole product life cycle.

End of Life Material Management

We engage with projects dealing with specific material considerations, for example mixed plastic waste, and high value, low value mixed metals, and with novel instrumentation for mixed material separation and monitoring.

Resource Constraints

Materials Security: Access to raw materials is essential for a sustainable economy. Material security issues include limited availability, price increases and dependence on a limited number of sometimes politically unstable sources.

Management of Waste at Source

Topics include micro and community scale domestic waste treatment; and On-site treatment technologies for industrial waste.

Market Sector Supply Chain Integration

We are particularly interested in addressing the challenges of the Retail & Leisure; Food; Construction; and Electronics sectors.

Environmental Measurement

We are engaging with advances in rapid measurement tools and in environmental monitoring and forensics.

Carbon Sequestration and Storage

Sequestration is one important strategy in the fight to overcome the consequences of excessive greenhouse gas emissions. We are particularly interested in biogenic and geological aspects of CSS.

In Situ Land Remediation
Rising hazardous landfill prices and reduced capacity mean that traditional ‘dig & dumping’ of contaminated land is not as attractive as it once was. Alternative in-situ remediation technologies are consequently coming to the fore.

Forum for the Future has just completed its review of the second year reports by the 37 insurance companies that make up ClimateWise, and found evidence of increased collaborative research into risk analysis of this kind. The report ClimateWise the 2009 Review is available to download (4.9Mb).

Source: Forum for the Future

Soil Health

Healthy soil supports animal and plant diversity and productivity. Priority topics include soil degradation, soil nutrients, composting and anaerobic digestion.

Sustainable Marine and Land Based Food Production

The human race needs more sustainable agri-food systems. We are concerned with activities which help more effectively integrate the food sector’s approach to sustainability. Closer to the ground, we help businesses addresses operational challenges such as waste minimisation, energy efficiency, and meeting the Animal By-Products Regulations.

Green refineries

Management of waste materials as inputs and outputs from refineries and manipulation of material to enhance their suitability and potential as refinable feedstocks.

Biffa and Sainsbury’s have been working together since October 2005. Biffa provides a comprehensive range of recycling and waste management services to almost 600 stores, and manages specific waste streams at the remainder of Sainsbury’s stores nationwide. This includes recycling of waste oil, the management of confidential paperwork, ABP wastes and in-store photoshop waste, front of store recycling at 26 London stores, and back-of-store residual waste collection, treatment and disposal.

Biffa operates the first mixed waste anaerobic digestion plant to be built in the UK, at Wanlip, Leicestershire, which is where the food waste will be treated. The plant was designed to receive food waste mechanically separated from household refuse and was commissioned in 2004. Since then the plant has been reconfigured to increase capacity and enhance performance, and is now equipped to remove packaging materials from food waste. The plant has received approval to treat Cat 1 ABP waste so can now receive all types of food waste for treatment.

“Securing this contract with Sainsbury’s for the management of food waste from their Midlands stores has been the culmination of 18 months hard work to optimise the performance of the Wanlip AD plant and then to secure the necessary authorisations to receive food waste direct” said Biffa’s Engineering Director John Casey. “We now have a state of the art plant achieving best in class reliability and optimal biogas production. We are now driving forward the development of new AD capacity in the Midlands and elsewhere to meet the growing demand of our customers.”

The company’s new plant in Cannock, Staffordshire is due to be fully operational by Autumn 2010.

Resource Recovery Forum

www.resourcesnotwaste.org

Faced with a tough but desperately needed decision, the European Commission is ducking the issue: in December, its directorate-general for energy and transport recommended that environmental safeguards for the use of biomass should not be established.

European Voice reports that DG Tren’s position – which might become EU policy in late January – is in direct contradiction with that of five member states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland and the UK), the Commission’s own DG Environment and also the renewable energy directive.

It does, though, have the support of a group of biomass trade associations, who argue that any sustainability criteria for wood- or waste-based fuels should be non-binding. The European Forest Owners Association has even asserted that “the risks of using unsustainable biomass are low”.

On this and other occasions, they are, in effect, promoting the notion that any biomass is good biomass. That is nonsense. In terms of its impact on global warming, biomass can range from carbon-negative to carbon-positive. Moreover, this goodness or badness can be quantified, according to what, where, how (and even why) it is produced and consumed. This has been shown in numerous studies, affirmed by committees at the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and pointed out by a wide range of environmentalists, researchers around the world, and governments such as Canada’s and the US state of California’s.

Compulsory, hard-nosed sustainability criteria for biomass fuels would not only serve the environment, but would also be in the interests of the biomass industry and of the Commission.

Why are binding criteria so important? There are two principal reasons. One is that the biofuel medicine can be worse than the fossil-fuel disease. Knocking down forests to avoid pumping oil or gas is good only to the extent that we improve the net carbon balance while protecting natural habitats and human health. Many proposed biomass projects fail to do this.

Moreover, there is a compelling political and international dimension. One of the few successes of the UN’s climate-change talks in Copenhagen was the increasing acceptance of the REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) initiative. Can the REDD-supporting Commission really say out of one side of its mouth that protecting forests is mission-critical while, out of the other, say it is not? Critics would surely label this as cynical, protectionist and condescending.

The second reason is that plunging ahead blindly without sustainable criteria puts the reputation of biofuels at risk. DG Tren has surely not forgotten that transport biofuels, once the darlings of governments and NGOs, have since been demonised. As recently as late 2007, a UN special expert on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called the practice of converting food crops into biofuel “a crime against humanity”. Debates over land-use changes and other negative effects of bioethanol and biodiesel almost caused the UK’s Renewable Fuels Agency to close before it even opened.

For biomass, some of the particulars are different (which is why separate criteria are needed), but the potential for public outrage and government/industry embarrassment is similar.

Without criteria, the chances of a biomass scandal become huge. Even non-experts can work out that, say, importing wood chips from South America is environmentally questionable, or that chopping down trees depletes carbon stocks. Many would reach the wrong conclusion – that any biomass is bad biomass.

It will be tough, both technically and politically, to develop criteria. This is apparent in the ongoing ISO/CEN deliberations and the development of criteria for transport biofuels. Moreover, after criteria-setting there will be another tough job: propagating the criteria into related rules and regulations (such as the EU’s emissions trading scheme and into various building certification schemes, which erroneously count all biomass/biofuel emissions as inherently carbon-neutral).

But doing this is in the public interest, and it is for such tough tasks that we appoint and elect public officials. Besides, without sustainability criteria, we run a serious risk of causing more environmental harm than good, while destroying the public’s fragile trust in this nascent industry and its regulators. Eric Johnson is the editor of “Environmental Impact Assessment Review”, managing director of Atlantic Consulting, a member of CEN Technical Committee 383 and director of Green Cross, an NGO.

Resource Recovery Forum

www.resourcesnotwaste.org