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Category: sustainability – Page 225

It is scheduled to be completed by 2050.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government plans to build a high-tech, sustainable city on reclaimed land in its bay area — Tokyo Bay eSG. Announced in April 2021, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is clearing the decks for action to make the city carbon-neutral and better able to withstand future climate and health crises.

As its name implies, Tokyo eSG will be designed on the fundamentals of social and environmental governance and combine cutting-edge green technologies.

Continue reading “Tokyo builds an eco-friendly high-end technology city on the bay” | >

New light has been shed on the formation of increasingly precious rare earth elements (REEs) by researchers from Trinity College Dublin. They accomplished this by creating synthetic rocks and testing their responses to varying environmental conditions. REEs are used in many electronic devices and green energy technologies, including everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

The findings, just published on September 19 in the journal Global Challenges, have implications for recycling REEs from electronic waste, designing materials with advanced functional properties, and even for finding new REE deposits hidden around the globe.

Dr. Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco, Associate Professor in Nanomineralogy at Trinity and an iCRAG (SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences) Funded Investigator, was the principal investigator of the work. He said:

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This novel technology can be built in many ways, even like a snake.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has revealed a breakthrough technology with wave energy. The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.

NREL — which specializes in the research and development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy systems integration, and sustainable transportation — has already taken out the patent of its unique distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec).

NREL

Continue reading “NREL’s newly patented technology will generate electricity from ocean waves, lab claims” | >

Engineers at EPFL have found a way to insert carbon nanotubes into photosynthetic bacteria, which greatly improves their electrical output. They even pass these nanotubes down to their offspring when they divide, through what the team calls “inherited nanobionics.”

Solar cells are the leading source of renewable energy, but their production has a large environmental footprint. As with many things, we can take cues from nature about how to improve our own devices, and in this case photosynthetic bacteria, which get their energy from sunlight, could be used in microbial fuel cells.

In the new study, the EPFL team gave these bacteria a boost by inserting carbon nanotubes – tiny rolled-up sheets of graphene, a material that’s famously conductive. The nanotube-loaded bugs were able to produce up to 15 times more electricity than their non-edited counterparts from the same amount of sunlight.

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Quantum tech is going green.

A new take on highly sensitive magnetic field sensors ditches the power-hungry lasers that previous devices have relied on to make their measurements and replaces them with sunlight. Lasers can gobble 100 watts or so of power — like keeping a bright lightbulb burning. The innovation potentially untethers quantum sensors from that energy need. The result is an environmentally friendly prototype on the forefront of technology, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Physical Review X Energy.

The big twist is in how the device uses sunlight. It doesn’t use solar cells to convert light into electricity. Instead, the sunlight does the job of the laser’s light, says Jiangfeng Du, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

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Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and hummers — all have electric equivalents. Governments, including the one running the United States, are improving infrastructure, offering tax incentives, and enacting policies aimed at getting more electric vehicles on the road. And modern-day industrial icons like Elon Musk, who obviously has a vested interest in the electric car’s success, constantly promote the concept. Musk recently published a tweet that likened internal combustion engines to the steam engine — an archaic method of producing mechanical power.

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