Construction equipment consumes a vast amount of energy, but that’s not the only thing to worry about.  Manufacturing the building materials and then transporting them to the building site to be installed and constructed into the final structure all emit a great amount greenhouse gases, and take a fair amount of energy, too.  The building science journal Building and Environment published a case study of a Hong Kong example to demonstrate the building construction costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hui Yan and his collaborators aimed to calculate all the greenhouse gas emissions for a building’s construction.  Independent studies have been done on energy in the manufacture of building materials, transportation of those materials, and greenhouse gas emissions in building construction, but none have taken all of these aspects into consideration of the whole picture.

Manufacture of the building materials is just one of six greenhouse gas contributors identified for this study.  The others are the transportation of building materials and equipment to the site, energy use of the construction equipment, transportation of workers, and final disposal of the construction waste.

Half of the world’s energy goes into buildings throughout their lifetime, from construction, through use, and finally demolition.  They also contribute almost half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.  Transporting the materials to the site constitutes 6-8% of total greenhouse gas emissions for a project.

Construction is one of the largest consumers of raw materials.  In fact, 25 % of the world’s timber goes to construction efforts.  Nevertheless, the manufacture of concrete and reinforced steel account for 94-95% of the greenhouse gas emissions for construction materials.

The British car Inspiration team set the record for land speed of a steam-powered vehicle in 2009.  Nevertheless, Gizmag reports that a U.S. team will be attempting to break that record as early as August.  The LSR Streamliner uses a 6-cylinder Cyclone Mark V engine.

The current land speed record for a steam-powered vehicle is 148 miles per hour.  That equates to 238 kilometers per hour.  The team hopes the Cyclone Mark V will propel the LSR Streamliner to over 160 miles per hour.  The attempt, which will only take a few minutes, will take place at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats.

The Cyclone is a heat-regenerative external combustion engine.  In this setup, the water stays in a closed system. The fuel is mixed with air and burned to heat the coils of water.  The super-heated steam produced pushes the pistons to turn the crankshaft.  That steam then condenses and gets pumped back into the coils.  The hot air goes into a heat exchanger to heat the air that is on its way to the combustion chamber and cool the exhaust.

The Cyclone can run on any fuel and produces fewer emissions than internal combustion engines.  The team considered modifying the engine and combustion chamber, but decided to attempt to break the record with the engine as it might be one day be seen in a regular car.  This will better represent the power, clean emissions, and multi-fuel capabilities of the engine.

Though federal regulation may not come out of the Environmental Protection Agency’s study on hydraulic fracturing techniques, the blueprints for it are almost ready.  Fuelfix.com has the article on the EPA’s study that will examine the safety of the way natural gas is being unlocked from shale across America.

To release natural gas, mixtures of sand, water, and chemicals that are injected deep underground under high pressure to crack open the shale formations. The potential environmental damage, including water contamination, has sparked protests. Risks of explosions have also been raised due to escaping natural gas from poorly designed and secured wells.

The Interior Department is considering imposing chemical disclosure requirements, but this will only cover federal lands.  Oil and gas companies have taken the initiative to develop a voluntary registry where they can disclose the chemicals used in their fracturing fluids.  Moreover, the American Petroleum Institute has already published best practices for water management at fracturing sites, and has now also released ways to reduce their runoff.

State and local governments currently regulate the drilling process.  Determining whether there are holes in this existing structure will be one of the determinations made from the study, which may or may not result in federal rules for hydraulic fracturing.  The scope of this congressionally mandated study was the topic of hearings around the country last year. The hope is that it will relieve skepticism on the safety of fracturing techniques.

Northwestern researchers have created a new material by putting nanocrystals of rock salt (SrTe) into lead telluride (PbTe).  The new semiconductor can more efficiently turn heat energy into electricity.  If used to power something like a light bulb that produces heat, the system could essentially generate some of its own fuel source.

This study, led by professors Mercouri Kanatzidis and Vinayak Dravid, is the first to use nanostructures in lead telluride not only to increase the energy-conversion efficiency of the material, but also reduce electron scattering that has decreased conductivity of the material in the past.

Dravid hopes that this discovery will be used by other researchers who can find additional applications for it.  As a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, he doesn’t think the implications are limited to the energy crisis and environmental efforts, either. Vehicle exhaust systems are just one example where this new technology could be used.  So many industries use vast amounts of heat to make their products that using the waste heat to produce electricity would generate immense savings.

Northwestern’s NewsCenter has more of the story on this study, which was published in the journal Nature Chemistry. Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg Collage, collaborated with multiple disciplines at Northwestern.  Other authors of the study are also from Nanyang Technical University and the University of Michigan.

We’ve all heard about the polar bears.  Melting Artic sea ice is causing dropping success in polar bear reproduction.  A loss of sea ice cover would mean polar bear extinction.  Nevertheless, polar bears aren’t the only ones being affected.  Other animals are coming out of hibernation earlier, and caribou and reindeer may have trouble finding food.

Invertebrates make up 97% of all animal species, and insects in particular have an amazing effect on their respective ecosystems.  Many species act as pollinators for various plants.  Though warmer climates may mean thriving insect populations, when the insect in question is the spruce budworm, the ecosystem may prefer less of them.

The yearly cycle of birds’ lives is synchronized with that of their food supply (insects) and the changing seasons.  If these two cycles no longer match up, the birds and the entire ecosystem could suffer.  Birds have already begun to alter their wintering habits.

Here in the United States, fishing is not only a commercial activity, but a recreational one as well.  Warmer temperatures and lower water levels in rivers and streams are affecting fish populations.  Streams in the southern Great Plains are already reaching the temperature limits for fish survival, and a rise of eight degrees Fahrenheit would likely eliminate half of the habitable waters of brook trout in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Last, but not least, reptiles and amphibians will have to adapt to climate change or face the decreasing size of their habitats.  In the cloud forests of mountainous Costa Rica, the rise in cloud altitude has been related to the decline in amphibious species in the area.  If the pools of water where amphibian eggs are laid dry up too soon due to warmer weather, amphibians would also suffer.

(Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency)

Lyon, France introduced its shared bicycle system in 2005.  Dubbed Velo’v, the system features onboard computers that have been collecting data throughout the project’s life.  This data, analyzed by Pablo Jensen at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and his colleagues (and broken down in this piece from MIT’s Technology Review), has rendered some interesting findings about the trends of urban bikers.

The data analyzed is composed of 11.6 million individual bike trips.  The start and finish location of each trip, as well as its time duration was recorded.  Turns out, the average trip is under 3km.

An average weekend speed of 10km/hr compares to that of an inner-city car ride.  However, the statistics during rush hour turn in the cyclist’s favor, with bicycle speeds averaging up to 15km/hr.  Rush hour for urban bikers is depicted in the data as a sharp spike in average speed as bikers feel the morning rush around 7:45 and 8:45am.  The data also shows higher average speeds on Wednesdays in particular.  This is not due to any change in car traffic, but could be because some women stay at home to care for children on Wednesdays, leaving a higher proportion of male bikers.

The data also reveals the interesting freedoms taken in biking that you don’t have the liberty to perform while driving.  One-way streets, pavement, and stalled traffic are no obstacle for those on only two wheels.  This also makes bike trips shorter than the corresponding car ride would have to be.

Almost 350 stations spread across Lyon rent these bicycles each day.  Parking is therefore easier for Velo’v riders than for those still driving their cars.  Traffic has also improved, with many drivers switching to Velo’v bicycles for their short commutes.  Now, cities around the world have begun shared bicycle systems of their own in hopes of seeing similar fortunate results.

The Clean Energy Challenge is meant to bring entrepreneurs together with people who can help them prepare for commercial deployment.  Finalists will present business plans to a panel of judges that includes venture capitalists, corporations, and business leaders.  There’s also prize money, provided by the United States Department of Energy as part of the $1.05 million grant awarded to the Clean Energy Trust in October.

“The Clean Energy Challenge will help take creative, innovative concepts in clean energy and make them realities,” says Warren Ribley, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Director.  This gig is for small start-up ventures.  In order to participate, applicants can’t be bringing in more than $2 million, excluding grant income.

The Clean Energy Trust is a new Chicago-based nonprofit “founded by prominent business and civic leaders to accelerate the pace of clean energy innovation in the Midwest.” The Trust also advocates for the adoption and advancement of clean energy technology, and our very own Northwestern University is one of the Trust’s university partners!  TechNexus is a Chicago incubator and the location of the Clean Energy Trust.

Clean energy is the way of the future, and the Clean Energy Trust aims to make Illinois and the rest of the Midwest a leader in clean-energy entrepreneurship.  They provide financial assistance and other support services to the most promising technologies.  They also have a bit of a focus on renewable energy as well as other areas like smart meters and information technology to help with behavior modification.

Though the original idea wasn’t to build a house out of a plane, The Wing House is constructed from a Boeing 747-200.  This particular commercial airliner provides over 17,000 cubic feet of cargo space.  With so much space, it is being used to build six structures in addition to the main residence, including a guest house and animal barn.

Outside Los Angeles, on a 55-acre property, large sections of a 747 are becoming Francine’s dream home.  At first it was going to be just the wings, supported on rammed-earth walls cut into the hillsides.  However, instead of purchasing one of the over 3,000 airplanes that have been abandoned in California just for the wings, the decision was made to use the fuselage as well.  At $8,000 an hour, helicopters flew pieces of the plane to the site.

In building so close to LAX, the roof needed to be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration, and each piece needed to be marked with a big red ‘X’ so that pilots won’t mistake it for a plane that has gone down in a crash.  Homeland Security even paid a visit to the build site when they noticed the architects were asking a lot of questions about the structural integrity of such a large passenger aircraft.

Architects can play a major role in stewardship over land use, as well as building materials.  This self-sustainable construction in the hills of Malibu, California,  will be 100% post-consumer material.  The airplane being used was designed for efficiency, and now so is this house.

Google is investing in a wind-energy project that will create thousands of jobs as well as thousands of megawatts of electricity.  Spanning the offshore region from New Jersey to Virginia, the project will be able to serve approximately 1.9 million households, relieving congestion in an area in great need of higher transmission capacity.

The Atlantic Wind Connection, as it’s called, will be a transmission backbone along the mid-Atlantic continental shelf.  Google is willing to finance this renewable energy project based on good business sense as well as the good feeling of doing the right thing. Green business operations director Rick Needham even announced the agreement via The Official Google Blog.

The project will allow these lucky coastal states to take advantage of their location.  Relatively shallow waters that extend miles out to sea mean wind turbines can be more easily installed 10-15 miles offshore.  This also means they’ll be almost out of sight from the coast.  The stronger and steadier winds way out there will allow the use of larger wind turbines to capture 60,000 megawatts of energy to help these states meet their renewable energy goals.

The scale of this project prevents individual wind farms from having to run their own transmission lines back to land, which makes balancing the grid easier.  Offshore power hubs will collect power from multiple wind farms and transfer it to transmission nodes on land via efficient sub-sea cables.  It will also increase the reliability of the grid along the Mid-Atlantic coast.

Recycling rare earth metals is one of Japan’s growing endeavors looking forward. Kosaka, Japan, used to mine copper and coal. That ended twenty years ago when they couldn’t keep up with global competition. Now, some of those buildings have been converted for a new type of mining. Dubbed “urban mining,” the process involves melting motherboards in a 200-foot furnace to then extract the traces of rare earth metals.

Crucial to many Japanese technologies, these rare earth elements have primarily been coming from China, but in September, China began to block their export to Japan. Uneven enforcement has allowed a few shipments through, but the semi-processed rare earths Japanese companies need to make their products aren’t allowed to flow between the two countries anymore. Although no formal ban has been placed on anyone besides Japan, China has reduced their export quotas for these important minerals.

Japan has huge stockpiles of used computers and cellphones that have now found new value. It has been estimated that Japan’s supply of used electronics could hold 300,000 tons of rare earths. Tapping this resource could help reduce their dependency on China. Japan’s trade minister has also asked that a “rare earth strategy” be included in the supplementary budget for this year.

Wind turbines, LCDs, and hybrid cars all include rare earths in their production process. Antimony, used in the silicon wafers of semiconductors, is just one of the rare earths that has been successfully extracted through urban mining. Neodymium, used in electric motors, is more difficult, and methods are still being developed for reclaiming it.