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You don’t need to buy a bunch of disposable plastic junk to decorate your entire house for Halloween! Create your own reusable, recycled eco-friendly Halloween decorations with these 13 easy and fun tutorials. Spooky milk bottle lights, pumpkin garlands made of paper towel tubes, scrap wood tombstones and skull-face Easter eggs full of candy are among the items you can make using household items, recyclables and a few craft supplies.

According to a new study, some of the coldest geographic locations on earth have the best solar power generation potential if using photovoltaic panels.
Some of the regions include the southern Andes and the Himalayas.

Electric vehicles pose all sorts of problems for automakers as start to make this huge shift from fossil fuels to electricity. One problem are the charging ports, and figuring out an international standard so as to streamline the process. A major consortium of automakers from around the world are doing just that.

Studies, studies, and more studies have been done to research cell phone safety – do they cause brain tumors? The World Health Organization officially classified cell phones’ radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as cancer-causing (cue massive debate), not long after Dr. Devra Davis claimed that cell phones were especially dangerous to children. Dr. Davis may be right after all — new research published in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine indicates that kids absorb more radiation than adults. This is, in a nutshell, bad.

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Want to go vegetarian or vegan? One of the first things you should do to get started is to build a pantry full of flavorful and nutritious ingredients that will make sticking to a plant-based diet easy and totally delicious. The following non-perishable pantry essentials should be combined with lots of fresh produce, tofu, tempeh, dairy products for ovo-lacto vegetarians and a moderate amount of refrigerated or frozen convenience foods as desired. Keep these items stocked and you’ll always have the basis of a fantastic meat-free meal.

A remarkable rooftop solar project is now under construction in the UK. Solarcentury reports it is installing a solar roof containing over 4,000 photovoltaic panels above a bridge spanning the River Thames – a part of the Blackfriars station. When complete, the Blackfriars Bridge will be the world’s largest solar bridge.

We’ve been reporting on the efforts and strides being made by energy researchers around the country to reduce CO2 emissions and produce clean energy by mimicking photosynthesis. Well, a research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently overcame a major obstacle in efforts to use CO2 emissions to produce liquid fuel.

What does it mean to be a responsible consumer?  Whether you are purchasing for yourself, the family or your companion animals? In the case of our pets they have no say, they have no voice. They are reliant on your informed choice and thus the responsibility is that much more severe and binding.

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Capturing the carbon dioxide emitted from the myriad variety of industrial and commercial operations that use fossil fuels to produce power has been a “big idea” that’s really gone nowhere despite years of fossil fuel industry support, lobbying and many millions of dollars of government subsidization. Similarly, fuel cells and the “hydrogen economy” have long been touted as the energy system of the future, but that future still seems a long way off, if it will ever come about.

Fuel cells may hold the key to solving the increasingly urgent problem of how to capture CO2 emissions from coal-fired and other fossil fuel plants, at least that’s what fuel cell proponents assert and the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) intends to find out.

The DOE awarded $3 million to Connecticut-based FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ: FCEL) to evaluate the use of the company’s Direct Fuel Cells (DFC) “to efficiently and cost-effectively separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emissions of existing coal-fired power plants,” according to a press release. If proven successful, carbon capture can then lead to finding the means to store, or sequester, the greenhouse gas.

The three-year research project will involve system design, cost analysis, and long-term testing of a multi-kilowatt DFC stack, with funding occurring in stages upon reaching certain progress milestones, according to the DOE. The project’s principal goals are to capture at least 90% of the CO2 from a coal-fired power plant’s emissions within the DOE’s cost targets. Achieving this could lead to a demonstration project with a DFC power plant installation at an existing coal-fired power plant, the press release explains.

“FuelCell Energy has over 80 Direct FuelCell power plants providing ultra-clean power and usable high quality heat at more than 50 locations globally,” noted Tony Leo, FuelCell Energy’s vice president, Applications Engineering and New Technology.

FuelCell Energy’s carbonate fuel cell technology separates and concentrates CO2 in a side reaction to generating electricity. According to the company, carbon capture research it has carried out has demonstrated the DFC “is a viable technology for the efficient separation of CO2 from a variety of industrial facility flue gases, such as cement plants and refineries.

In addition to removing CO2, FuelCell Energy has also verified that its DFC technology can destroy some of the nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions in flue gas streams and reduce the cost of doing so.

Fuel cell usage is spreading and becoming more diverse. They’re being used in municipal transit company buses. Auto manufacturers continue to develop and test hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Waste-to-energy and co-generation applications are also on the rise, and fuel cells are also being tested as means of electrical power generation in the home.

The principal demand for FuelCell Energy’s hydrogen fuel cells has come from power generation companies, such as South Korea’s POSCO, that use them for electricity grid-support. They’re also used to produce electrical power independently at remote locations and those where the costs of power outages are deemed to outweigh the costs of buying, installing and running a fuel cell system.

“This award enables us to further expand the use of our existing commercial technology to develop an additional application with significant market potential, namely the ability for our power plants to economically capture carbon dioxide from the emissions of conventional fossil fuel-fired power plants.”

Source: GO Media - written by Andrew Burger

We’ve covered these Solar Windows from New Energy Technologies in the past, but sister site Green Building Elements recently did a slightly more detailed piece on them, so I thought I’d share it with you. Here’s the first part of it:

Today instead of asking how to get rid of waste, many are asking how they might put parts of the waste stream to better use, like making their own fertilizer and gas, for instance.