As far as I am concerned, the two biggest problems facing humanity are kicking our addiction to oil, and figuring out a way to get rid of all our garbage without stuffing it into big, endless holes in the ground. Wouldn’t it be great if we could kill two birds with one stone? One day, we might be able to, but for now at least one company is working on a way to fix their fuel woes within the confines of their own business. Waste Management, one of the biggest garbage companies in the co... Read Full Story

The Progressive Automotive X-Prize, closing in on its May 2010 competition start date, held a technical summit of the participating 43 teams at the 2009 SEMA show in Las Vegas. Twelve of those teams brought along vehicles to display at the show, each one in varying degrees of completeness. This post is an excerpt of an article from Popular Mechanics . You can read the full post on their website . Written by Ben Stewart. Read more of this story Please Share or Bookmark this post Read Full Story

Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink , a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it. Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let y... Read Full Story

By Lisa Stiffler Stormwater — the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants — poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars . The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes... Read Full Story

By Laurent Granier Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and mapping offer great opportunities for the transfer of legal data from books to maps. GIS applications have been evolving in many directions, well beyond geography. Many fields such as environmental economics, social science, health science and administration are now aggregated with scientific representations. The methods for environmental and social mapping are now participatory too. Together, these tools offer new, integrated vis... Read Full Story

by Bill Becker New Study: Changes to Economic Policy Necessary for Switch to Low-Carbon Economy In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International. Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes: Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrializati... Read Full Story

SAB Miller, South African grown, second largest brewer in the world has introduced anaerobic digestion to treat the waste leaving its Alrode Brewery in Gauteng, South Africa. Anaerobic fermentation of organic material produces methane, which is used to reduce the consumption of fossil fuel based energy. Copper brewhouse in a Trappist brewery Brewery Waste & Biogas In the brewery the waste is a collection of unavoidable losses of carbohydrate and protein rich materials, which would other... Read Full Story

Veteran solar installer Parkson Corporation is lending its expertise to a new wastewater treatment plant upgrade for the town of Berlin near the Maryland coast.  When it’s finished, the new plant will almost eliminate the use of fossil fuels for drying and converting biosolids, also known as sludge , into a lightweight Class A soil amendment or sustainable fuel.  The process is pushed along by a stainless steel “Electric Mole” that automaticaly mixes, aerates, and granulate... Read Full Story

Total, a French oil company, recently agreed to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $4 million for a 5-year research project to develop stationary batteries that can more efficiently store solar energy. More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular. Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen? Read mo... Read Full Story

Kristen Stewart has made it clear she’s done dealing with all the gossip So now she’s on to talking about the ‘Twilight’ movies . She said filming the breakup scene was frightening. “That was the scariest thing. I was almost as worried about messing it up than I was about what I actually should have been thinking about which was the issues that Bella is dealing with. Reading it, it’s so iconic. There’s nothing like that moment in reality even. It&#... Read Full Story