environment

US mandating Urea scrubbers on diesel vehicles starting 2010

Most diesel vehicles, particularly trucks, manufactured after Jan 1, 2010 in the US will need to have a urea scrubber built in that will ‘scrub’ the nitrogen oxide (NOx) from the exhaust.

The urea-based scrubber will reduce the NOx emissions by as much as 90%, and that in turn can be reduced to near zero levels when used with another filter.

Europe is already ahead of us in this game with already about 500,000 trucks having this technology.

Of course, there is already pushback from trucking companies in particular, but let’s face it – there is going to be some pain as we migrate industries and products to more environmentally-friendly systems.

Panasonic Announces Nationwide Consumer Electronics Recycling Program

Panasonic Corporation of North America recently joined the growing list of environmentally conscious corporate citizens who have launched electronics recycling programs.

The Panasonic program began on November 1, 2008, with more than 160 recycling drop-off locations in 10 states, and is slated to expand to all 50 states, with hundreds more sites, over the next three years. For a list of current states and sites see www.MRMrecycling.com.

Good on you Panasonic! Check out other recycling efforts and resources by searching our blog.

Samsung offering a recycling program in the US

Thank you Samsung for deciding to launch a recycling program in the 50 states. With the exception of appliances, you can drop off any Samsung consumer electronics at various drop-off points. Here is the Samsung Recycling Direct website.

If you’re looking for more recycling resources, just do a search on our site as we’ve covered numerous recycling resources over the years.

Mercedes aims to get rid of gas-powered cars by 2015

Kudos to Mercedes Benz for setting themselves such a lofty goal. No more petroleum in their automobile lineup. Alternative power sources include technologies like electric batteries, fuel cells and biofuels.

They may fail, but having set such a goal, they will in all likelihood make a great deal of progress and probably meet their goal only a few years shy.

DoE report says wind power could be 20% of power reqs by 2030

2030 to me seems too far away, but I’ll take it. The report itself was over 200 pages, which indicates to me that they spent a ‘government’ god-awful amount of money to produce it. Ok, fine, but let’s see if they now spend the important money to make this a reality.

According to the report, it would $6/person/year to implement this. The Wired article wasn’t clear on whether this was every year or just for 1 year, but who cares? At that amount, I will gladly take a line-item tax on my 1040. Persons making less than $40k or so can get that waived.

Other stats – wind power could account for 300Gigawatts of power, reduce carbon emissions from coal and natural gas plants by 25%, drop water consumption by 4 trillion gallons per year. Yes, yes, this will all take some doing including infrastructure overhauls, but do we have a choice? BTW, a town in MO has already shown the way.

10 under-$50 ways to be green

The Sci-Fi channel’s gadget blog, Dvice is running a great article on how you can be ‘greener’ without spending a ton of money. Many of the 10 entries almost deserve their own write-up and we plan to do just that.

Among the top 10 are suggestions like putting an end to junk mail, using reusable shopping bags, riding shared vans and/or carpooling, e-cycling (c’mon geeks!), and even using your urine as a fertilizer for your plants.

While I hardly consider myself a fanatic when it comes to the environment, each passing day has me feeling that we’re going to experience some really horrible things on our planet, not that those things aren’t happening already, but it’s not something that gets quite enough media attention and so it’s not high enough in the public’s awareness (yet).

Even if you’re not an eco-conscious individual, take a look at some of these ideas as they may actually save you some money as well.

Better U.S. Carbon Measurements

In case you were up late at night wondering what a profile of the continental US’s carbon output was like, wonder no more. The Vulcan Project measures CO2 levels at finer time and distance scales than have been documented in the past. Here is one such map that has come out of this project.

They also have a ton more data and analysis in various formats on their site and even a video that they stuck up on YouTube.

via Wired.com

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