Lead (Mercury, PCB’s, Cadmium, Copper, Ash, Acid, And Slag) Us To The Promised Land(fill)? One of the greatest ideas of our lifetime is the concept of instantaneous access to all of the information accumulated over the span of the centuries. Human existence and scientific speculation of the Earth before human existence is now available to [...]

Precycling : The Original Green Idea Since we have talked about the staggering amount of waste clogging our landfills, it’s time to do something about it BEFORE it gets to the landfill. This is precycling, or preventing consumption-waste items from being part of the recycle chain. Precycling can take place at the industrial, business, or [...]

Paper or Plastic? Douglas Adams had a great premise for a story about a hitchhiker. ‘Make sure you know where your towel is,’ he declared, with the towel in this case being the basic item a hitchhiker could use for just about any situation. Since we never managed to get the hang of interstellar space [...]

A Straight Flush The modern day flush toilet has probably saved more lives than any idea that medicine has come up with in 700 years. At the beginnings of city level civilization, waste disposal was the limiting factor of population growth because without a sanitary method of human waste removal, the population would get sick [...]

Water Water, Everywhere, And None of It Is Potable? What Happened? Honestly, we happened. Human beings are the only mammals who can screw up drinking water. It takes opposable thumbs, apathy, and a big streak of selfishness to waste the resources we waste every single day. It’s the prize we get for being at the [...]

I Love The Smell OF Methane In The Morning Natural gas might be one answer to the problems with pollution in the power grid. Relatively cheap, abundant, and in some cases renewable, natural gas has become one of the most recent members to join the Big Three of coal, petroleum, and nuclear as a power [...]

But How Can That Be? If The Water Is In A Bottle, How Do We Waste It? It takes 3 bottles of water to make one bottle for a bottle of bottled water. The plastic bottle industry uses 17,000,000 barrels of oil to make the over 26 billion bottles we will use and throw away [...]

I Don’t Think I Shall Ever See… Biomass was our first energy source. Fires were built from wood and manure to heat, cook, and light our homes. As human civilization moves into the 21st century, biomass is being considered for large scale production of energy, enough energy to power whole cities from a central point. [...]

The Heat Is On! Geothermal heat is heat produced from the natural flux of heat from the Earth’s core to the mantle. The mantle then transfers the heat to rocks and rainwater in the Earth’s crust, producing hot rocks and steam. The steam can be harnessed either by building a power turbine on top of [...]