July, 2020

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Why Modular Construction Is More Sustainable

U.S. Green Technology

The construction industry is one of the most necessary sectors in the world. It’s also one of the most common culprits of energy waste and pollution. In comparison to the traditional method, modular construction is the more sustainable option. Modular construction entails partial building in a controlled, off-site location, like a factory. Then, workers can.

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Artificial Intelligence Platform Detects Power Grid Flaws And Wildfire Dangers Better And Faster Than Humans

Jim Conca

Powerlines and equipment problems have been the cause of most recent wildfires. But a new AI and machine vision technology can analyze millions of images of powerlines and towers to find dangerous faults and flaws to help utilities identify problem areas and repair them before a fire starts.

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How a Blue New Deal charts a course for a sustainable sea change

GreenBiz

How a Blue New Deal charts a course for a sustainable sea change. Joel Makower. Mon, 07/20/2020 - 02:11. Last week, a group of activists, scientists, academics and others issued a report calling for policies and other initiatives to generate prosperity while addressing inequity and the climate crisis. They called it the Blue New Deal. Its focus: an ocean-based blue economy.

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Standard Lithium Ramping Up Lithium From Brine Operations

CleanTechnica

Standard Lithium of British Columbia has developed a process that captures lithium from the waste water of bromine facilities in Arkansas.

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How to Drive Cost Savings, Efficiency Gains, and Sustainability Wins with MES

Speaker: Nikhil Joshi, Founder & President of Snic Solutions

Is your manufacturing operation reaching its efficiency potential? A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) could be the game-changer, helping you reduce waste, cut costs, and lower your carbon footprint. Join Nikhil Joshi, Founder & President of Snic Solutions, in this value-packed webinar as he breaks down how MES can drive operational excellence and sustainability.

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It will take personal sustainability to meet the global challenges we face

GreenBiz

It will take personal sustainability to meet the global challenges we face. Chris Gaither. Mon, 07/06/2020 - 02:15. Earth Day, when we remember the planet’s fragility and resilience, was when I finally understood that I had nothing left to give. It was April 2017. After two decades of striving in my career, I had risen to a role of great impact: a director on Apple’s Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives team.

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Eos Bioreactor uses AI and algae to combat climate change

Inhabitat - Innovation

A new AI invention could prove to be an effective solution to mitigating climate change.

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Feeding The Planet Isn’t Science Fiction - It’s Cultivated Meat

Jim Conca

Combine animal stem cells with nutrients, salts, pH buffers, and growth factor in science-fiction-like vats and you get actual meat without growing the whole animal. It’s called cultivated meat production and will probably meet the world’s meat requirements in a decade or so.

Energy 464
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‘Enormous Step’ for Energy Storage as Court Upholds FERC Order 841, Opening Wholesale Markets

GreenTechMedia

In a victory for the energy storage industry, a federal appeals court has upheld Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841 , clearing the way for transmission grid operators across the country to open their markets to energy storage, including aggregated batteries connected at the distribution grid or behind customers’ meters. Friday’s court opinion ( PDF ) declared that FERC has jurisdiction over how energy storage interacts with the interstate transmission markets it r

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What is a Biodigester? And How Can Your Business Benefit from One?

Green Business Bureau

What is a biodigester? What are the benefits? Businesses gain numerous benefits by implementing sustainable practices. Sustainability in the industry can be practiced in various ways. One way for a business to be more sustainable is by utilizing a biodigester. They are an excellent addition for businesses looking to be more environmentally friendly.

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How tree-planting startup Propagate Ventures monetizes land conservation

GreenBiz

How tree-planting startup Propagate Ventures monetizes land conservation. Heather Clancy. Thu, 07/09/2020 - 01:30. Earlier this year, when I was chatting with venture capitalist Nancy Pfund of DBL Partners about which new areas of climate solutions were intriguing to her, she pointed to business models that had the potential to monetize land conservation.

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The Key to Sustainable Energy Optimization: A Data-Driven Approach for Manufacturing

Speaker: Kevin Kai Wong, President of Emergent Energy Solutions

In today's industrial landscape, the pursuit of sustainable energy optimization and decarbonization has become paramount. ♻️ Manufacturing corporations across the U.S. are facing the urgent need to align with decarbonization goals while enhancing efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehensive energy data poses a significant challenge for manufacturing managers striving to meet their targets. 📊 Join us for a practical webinar hosted by Kevin Kai Wong of Emergent Ene

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Prefab apartment proposal wants to make city living more sustainable

Inhabitat - Innovation

BARBIZON’s timber construction would be integrated with shared green spaces to encourage neighborly relations and to offset the urban heat island effect.

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Aluminium packaging recycling rates reach record levels, shows Q2 PRN data

Envirotec Magazine

According to data released by the Environment Agency on 22 July, a record 40,653 tonnes of aluminium packaging were collected for recycling in Q2 2020. This indicates that 76,933 tonnes were collected for recycling in the first half of the year – a significant increase of 52% compared to the same period in 2019 (50,744). Aluminium packaging collected through kerbside, bring and on-the-go systems increased by 37% during the first half of the year (53,312 in 2020, compared to 38,882 in 2019), whil

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How Extremophile Bacteria Living In Nuclear Reactors Might Help Us Make Vaccines

Jim Conca

Extremophiles like the bacterium D. radiodurans that can withstand levels of radiation thousands of times what most animals can, are able to help us make vaccines faster, cheaper and safer. They use special molecular protectors to shield their repair proteins but not their DNA or RNA.

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Sunrun To Acquire Vivint Solar for $3.2B In All-Stock Deal

GreenTechMedia

California-based solar installer Sunrun plans to acquire competitor Vivint Solar for $3.2 billion, the companies announced Monday night. The price rivals that of other high-profile clean energy acquisitions; Tesla bought SolarCity for $2.6 billion in 2016, while Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion in 2014. The all-stock deal will grow the portfolio of Sunrun, already the nation’s leading home solar installer, to more than 3 gigawatts and over 500,000 customers.

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Electrofuels Are the Future: The Driving Force to Decarbonizing Heavy Transport

Speaker: Ayesha Choudhury - Senior Vice President, Head of Capital Markets at Infinium

With the first wave of the energy transition, renewable energy sources (such as solar and wind) have begun replacing coal power generation. However, some sectors are lagging behind and struggling to decarbonize more than others, including large-scale transportation like commercial aviation, shipping, and rail transit. Electrofuels (aka eFuels) are the next generation of solutions to help the hardest-to-abate sectors pivot from their reliance on fossil fuels.

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Sustainable Takeout Packaging: A Smart Choice for Your Business

Green Business Bureau

With today’s current pandemic, restaurants are solely surviving off their take-out orders. And with an increase of carryout from restaurants, comes an increase of plastics that will most likely end up in the garbage. Almost half of Americans say that it is difficult to recycle properly , so this means most of the plastic containers from take-out orders are actually being sent to a landfill.

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Could trash-to-energy technology feed hydrogen demand?

GreenBiz

Could trash-to-energy technology feed hydrogen demand? Arlene Karidis. Wed, 07/15/2020 - 01:00. One novel spin on emerging hydrogen fuel options is "clean hydrogen" made from trash. . Early pioneers of these hydrogen-from-waste technologies such as Ways2H, SGH2 Energy (SGH2) and Standard Hydrogen say not only are they making carbon-free, energy-rich fuel, their approaches also will divert mountains of trash from landfills and waterways, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. .

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Modular, affordable housing project opens in Portland

Inhabitat - Innovation

Argyle Gardens, a newly-opened modular co-housing development, is providing affordable housing for people who formerly experienced homelessness and are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in Portland, Oregon.

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Lack of trust and government mixed signals hamper UK-EU environment deal

Envirotec Magazine

The EU Environment Sub-Committee has stressed the benefits of the level playing field in future relationship negotiations. Peers urge compromise to secure a ‘level playing field’. Lack of trust is the biggest barrier to a breakthrough on the environment and climate change parts of an agreement between Britain and Brussels, a group of Peers has warned.

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AR/VR Simulations for Sustainable, Regenerative, Circular Cities

Speaker: Nik Gowing, Brenda Laurel, Sheridan Tatsuno, Archie Kasnet, and Bruce Armstrong Taylor

With 191 country signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement now hard at work in the race to zero carbon by 2050, much of the heavy lifting in ecosystem sustainability falls on the shoulders of the world's densely populated urban centers. This conversation considers how today's AI-enabled simulation media, such as AR/VR, can be effectively applied to accelerate learning, understanding, training, and solutions-modeling to sustainability planning and design.

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Atomic Weapons Testing While Troops Looked On – Did It Increase Their Cancer Risks?

Jim Conca

A new study reports on 114,270 nuclear weapons test participants that were followed for up to 65 years. Contrary to decades of anecdotal reports, the study concluded that there were no statistically significant occurrence of cancers or adverse health effects from radiation among these soldiers.

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Bloom Energy Soars After Launch Into Green Hydrogen Market

GreenTechMedia

Shares of Bloom Energy surged nearly 40 percent on Wednesday, lifting the fuel cell maker above its initial public offering price for the first time since 2018, after the California-based company announced it would enter the commercial hydrogen market. Bloom’s core product is its Energy Server, which converts natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical process without combustion, reducing carbon emissions compared to conventional gas-fired power generation and doing away with o

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The Plastics Recycling Puzzle: Can Chemistry Close the Loop?

CleanTech Group

Challenges associated with plastics across their lifecycle have become increasingly apparent in recent years. There are significant emissions attributed to their production, most.

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Amazon to buy bio jet fuel to lower air cargo emissions

GreenBiz

Amazon to buy bio jet fuel to lower air cargo emissions. Katie Fehrenbacher. Wed, 07/08/2020 - 08:00. Amazon's plans to decarbonize its shipping supply chain isn't just focused on electrifying its delivery vans. On Wednesday morning, the logistics and retail giant announced that it plans to buy 6 million gallons of bio jet fuel via a division of Shell and produced by World Energy, a big biodiesel producer.

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How Digital Transformation will Bend the Curve of the Linear Economy Toward the Circular

Speaker: Bruce Armstrong Taylor, Co-Founder & Managing Director of SmartNations Foundation, Jimmy Jia, Venture Partner at Pi Labs, Fabienne Durand, Senior Advisor to the SmartNations Foundation, & Roger Strukhoff, Executive Director of the Tau Institute

The Climate 4.0 Economy. Climate change is here. We see it in many ways already. Weather catastrophes: Texas freezing over, the wildfires of California, the increasingly unpredictable violence and frequency of hurricanes, the rapid melting and disappearance of polar ice caps. Much more evidence all around us. What can we do in our corporate organizations, in our homes and communities, to change the current course?

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Victory at Standing Rock as Dakota Access pipeline shut down

Inhabitat - Innovation

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe won a reprieve after the Monday decision by a U.S. District Court judge to suspend the Dakota Access pipeline pending further environmental review. The highly controversial pipeline has operated for three years.

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Disposal firm announces “state-of-the-art” animal by-product processing facility

Envirotec Magazine

Plans for a Category 1 animal by-product processing facility at the renewable energy and recycling site of SecAnim in Widnes, Cheshire were announced in late July. The firm is a provider of safe and secure collection and disposal services to the farming and meat production sectors, and the “world-first” operation completes a two-stage site regeneration plan, supported by a capital investment of more than £15 million, says the firm.

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Powered By Plutonium, NASA’s New Mars Rover Is Ready To Roll

Jim Conca

Last week, NASA’s new Mars rover, Perseverance, received its nuclear power source, a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, whose energy is provided by a tiny piece of Pu-238, supplied by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which will power the rover for 15 years.

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Super-Hybrid: Dutch Offshore Wind Farm to Include Floating Solar, Batteries and Hydrogen

GreenTechMedia

Oil major Shell and Dutch utility Eneco will build a super-hybrid offshore wind farm, having won the latest Dutch tender. Shell is chasing carbon neutrality by 2050 or sooner and the project in the Netherlands offers a glimpse of how it hopes to get there. The pair’s CrossWind consortium was revealed on Wednesday as the winner of the subsidy-free auction for the Hollandse Kust (noord) project.

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American Wind Energy Association Statement on Biden Climate Plan

altenergymag

“We strongly applaud the Biden campaign for taking an ambitious, comprehensive approach to climate change policy that recognizes the renewable energy industry’s ability to grow America’s economy towards a cleaner environment and a more prosperous and equitable future.

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GRI and SASB are collaborating. Is that good news for companies?

GreenBiz

GRI and SASB are collaborating. Is that good news for companies? Joel Makower. Sun, 07/12/2020 - 17:56. For years, corporate reporters — those inside companies responsible for creating sustainability reports and reporting environmental, social and governance data to various other organizations — have been frustrated by what many refer to as an alphabet soup of standards and frameworks: CDP, GRI, IIRC, PRI, SASB, TCFD, UNGC and more.

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Energy-neutral school in Utrecht enhances biodiversity

Inhabitat - Innovation

At the Winkerlaan in Utrecht, Dutch architecture firm EVA architecten has completed SO Fier, an energy-neutral primary school for Special Education Cluster 2 students that emphasizes sustainability, flexibility and connections with nature.

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Scrapping red diesel will add £1 per tonne to Council waste bills, says recovery firm

Envirotec Magazine

Joseph Doherty of Re-Gen Waste Ltd. Joseph Doherty, MD of Re-Gen Waste, which provides materials recovery facilities for Council waste in the UK, has questioned the wisdom of Government plans to scrap the lower rate of fuel duty on red diesel from April 2022, which he says will add an extra £200,000 per annum cost to his company’s fuel bill. The changes to the tax treatment of red diesel will lead to a number of impacts on his firm’s profitability, he suggested, the most immediate being in

Waste 214
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Green Fuel On The Horizon - Achíni Green Crude

Jim Conca

Achíni Scientific announced that they have developed a way to make fuel from air and water, which they call Green Crude – green because it doesn’t add to the atmospheric CO2 burden and it burns cleaner than petroleum-based fuels. .

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Europe’s Green Hydrogen Revolution Is Turning Blue

GreenTechMedia

Green hydrogen may get all the headlines, but the prospect of it fueling Europe's future hydrogen economy on its own looks increasingly questionable. Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology scooping up the resulting CO2. Green hydrogen, in contrast, is produced by using (ideally dirt-cheap) renewable electricity to power an electrolyzer that splits the hydrogen from water molecules.

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