Aviation and space exploration suck – fossil fuel that is. Not to mention clean air, and quiet habitat. Can these industries, so essential to global scientific and economic progress, go green? The race is definitely on.

Offering hope, inspiring blog posts and tweets-a-plenty over the past two weeks were the test flight of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, which burns 20% less fuel than other passenger planes of its approximate size, and the unveiling of the world’s first, commercial passenger space craft, the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. SS2 is reportedly more fuel efficient than NASA’s spacecraft.

But such breakthroughs are just the start of what’s possible, in terms of fuel efficiency and other environmental advances, says Joe Parrish, vice president of research and development for Aurora Flight Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aurora makes innovative aerospace products, including unmanned space vehicles, planes that can fit in your pocket, and planes with a 500-foot wingspan that can stay aloft for five years.

Working on the NASA N+3 “future commercial flight program” with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and the engine technology firm Pratt & Whitney, Aurora Flight Services’ research showed, in preliminary results, “that as much as 40% fuel reduction can be achieved through reduced cruise speed and redesign of aircraft,” Parrish reported.

In other words – a makeover and taking it easy!?

“You can’t take an existing aircraft and just reduce its speed to realize these environmental benefits. It’s not a matter of pulling back the throttle. But the redesigned aircraft does not look totally different from the old,” Parrish notes.

The more fuel efficient flying machine Aurora researchers envision (illustration, above) would be designed to cruise at mach 0.72 instead of the industry standard of mach 0.8. It would not have to use composite materials (which are lighter weight and used in the newly tested Boeing 787 Dreamliner) but it could use conventional aluminum and manufacturing technology, while still saving substantial amounts of fuel.

25% of costs for a typical airliner are spent on fuel, studies show. So the environmental benefits should deliver economic benefits, too.

Can the same efficiencies apply to space travel and space ships? As an industry, commercial space travel is too nascent to “go green,” Parrish says. But it is starting with a very ecological-minded entrepreneur, Richard Branson, along with pioneering spacecraft designer Burt Rutan. Branson famously supported and financed the development of alternative, renewable energy and signed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006.

A report out on Wednesday (Dec. 16, 2009) from the American Lung Association showed “sixty percent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy air pollution levels,” even with new laws in place attempting to regulate and improve air quality. Every little bit of petroleum saved, and greenhouse gas emission avoided, helps.

Read up on the Boeing 787, and the SpaceshipTwo, and make your wishes for greener commercial and space flight known.

Basic Reading:

“With more than 300 future passengers already putting up the $200,000 for a seat on SpaceShipTwo, there appears to be a strong demand for the rides to the blackness of space…” – Wired.com

“Boeing’s first new aircraft for ten years represents a radical departure for the manufacturer, eschewing traditional aircraft materials in favour of composites, in the pursuit of efficiency and lightness. If the composites, comprising 50% of the aircraft by weight, do not perform as expected, major headaches could emerge.”- Center for Asia Pacific Aviation

“The [Boeing 787] Dreamliner will offer greater efficiency for airlines… The plane [should] use 20% less fuel than today’s aircraft of comparable size, provide up to 45% more cargo capacity and include a new interior environment with cleaner air, larger windows, more stowage space, improved lighting and other conveniences.”- AviationRecord.com

Further Resources:

A NasaWatch blog entry in anticipation of the roll out of SpaceShipTwo, entitled “Big Party in the Mojave Tonight”

A blog entry at UniverseToday that includes photos and a video tour of the six-passenger vehicle, the SpaceShipTwo

A story in the New York Times entitled “A Takeoff and Hope for Boeing”

The official home page of N.A.S.A., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the U.S. Government

Image: Aurora

This is the latest installment of EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by columnist Lora Kolodny.

Would you drink the condensed breath of your coworkers?

The EcoloBlue 28 Atmospheric Water Generator, which I first saw at Ave Natura, is a marvel of green ingenuity. Using nothing but a tiny current of electricity, it’s an office cooler that fills itself up over time, no water supply required.

That’s because the EcoloBlue fills up by wringing moisture from the surrounding air. The device filters the water, renders it bacteriologically safe (according to the water quality lab reports on EcoloBlue’s website) and gurgles the results into your waiting cup.

So while it’s true that you’d be drinking the expelled moisture of Tom in Accounting’s post-lunch burp, it’s really not so bad. (Depending upon how you feel about Tom.)

Consider:

Water from the EcoloBlue is just like what comes out of your tap, only a lot quicker. It’s nature with a small fire lit under her, hurrying along the natural hydrological cycle.

It’s amazingly cost-effective – no pipes or water deliveries required, and a claim-back rate of around 5 gallons of water for every dollar of electricity spent.

It keeps people away from bottled water – and anything that fights against the growing threat of global water shortages deserves our attention.

It’s upcycling the very air around us – a dazzling technical feat!

The biggest hurdle that EcoloBlue has to clear isn’t a technical issue but a cultural one. It’s how we react to a product that shortens the water-recycling loop so we’re intensely aware that the water in our cup left another human being a very short time ago.

The air expelled from our lungs is at 100% relative humidity (think of how quickly your car windows fog up and run with condensation on a cold day). Sweat evaporates off our skin – where does that go? In this instance, into someone else’s next sip. Condensing our office air into drinking water is a kind of refreshing honesty about the way the world works already. We just may not want it poured down our throats.

Images: Clearly Ambiguous and Amazon

I can’t say I’ve ever given much thought to the humble banana skin. Once I peel the banana, the skin is simply thrown into the compost. But work currently being done by scientists at The University of Nottingham has opened my eyes to the fact that it has the potential to do more than simply rot away.

Joel Chaney, a PhD student at the university, has developed a method for turning banana skins (and leaves) into fuel briquettes that could be used for cooking and heating.

The process involves using a domestic meat mincer to turn the banana skins and leaves into a pulp, then adding some sawdust to create a consistency that allows the mixture to be molded into briquettes. After being baked in an oven at 105 degrees, the dried briquettes turn into an effective fuel source.

It’s such a simple idea that offers huge potential for communities in the developing world. In places like Rwanda, where bananas are a staple crop, these banana briquettes could be the answer to the problem of dwindling firewood, a direct result of intense deforestation.

Watch how Joel makes his banana briquettes with this video at Test-tube.org.

Image: Jason Gulledge

Some people have an incredibly creative ability to make a pretty sweet lemonade out of very, very rotten lemons. What I mean is this: I live in northern Arizona, and much of our electricity comes from coal power plants on Navajo and Hopi land. Not cool. Not a sustainable industry or healthy for the residents. But that’s another story. This story is about turning coal burning’s poisonous by-product into homes.

Navajo Flexcrete is a small, innovative company, based out of the tiny town of Page, Ariz. Using the extremely toxic fly ash (think arsenic, lead, barium and mercury) from the local coal plant, it’s harvested, saturated with water and used as a concrete-like building material.

Now wait, you’re thinking, won’t this make a toxic building? Yes and no.

I spoke with Ed Dunn, an ecological builder who uses Navajo Flexcrete, and he says that during the construction process, builders need to use a particulate mask (just as they use when cutting wood or regular concrete block), because cutting or drilling the Flexcrete blocks will let out some toxic powders, but once the block is sealed and painted, there is no off-gassing and the product is stable and safe. Flexcrete has an R-factor of 35, providing excellent insulation, perfectly suited for homes utilizing passive solar.

Granted, this is not the most perfect of ecological home-building products, but when you consider the current situation of the coal plant’s fly ash being dumped into a side canyon of beautiful Lake Powell, wouldn’t it be better used to make well insulated homes that are suited for the extreme heat and cold of the high northern Arizona desert?

And I’m sure the creators of Navajo Flexcrete don’t want to perpetuate the dirty coal business in order to have more fly ash for their product – they are simply using the toxic waste that’s already there and safely turning it into homes.

Alchemy, if you ask me.

Image: ASU

Living in New Zealand, a country that has, in my opinion, the best and safest drinking water, it’s hard to imagine that one-sixth of the world’s population (nearly one billion people) are without clean water on a daily basis.

Most of us simply acknowledge information such as this by finding an organization to donate some money to help fund clean water campaigns and then move on to the next pressing issue. But some Iowa engineering students didn’t. They heard the facts and then rolled up their sleeves and designed a $5, hand-held device that can sanitize water, saving lives as a result.

What started as a simple class project has developed into something much, much bigger. The hand sanitizer took away the First Prize at the 2008 Environmental Protection Agency Awards, a prize that is worth $75,000. The win is prestigious enough but to the students at UI College of Engineering, the money is the key, for it’s going to be used to make water sanitizers available to Ghana and other developing countries in the future.

Source

Image: Snap

Of course it’s only the throwaway parts of modern life that need to be shorter-lasting. (Everything else can simply be reused). Packaging, office supplies, newspapers ““ either we need to rethink our need for them, or stop making them so durable. There’s a difference between organic (in the sense of something that was once alive) and fully biodegradable, yet the two are often assumed to be interchangeable. But under exactly the wrong circumstances ““ such as the anaerobic depths of a landfill ““ seemingly short-lived substances like food and paper won’t break down at the speed we need them to, let alone metal and plastic. (For a primer, check out William L. Rathje’s Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage – 2001).

So let’s celebrate some creative uses of alternative materials. Firstly, the most recent Glastonbury rock festival in England encouraged a shift to biodegradable tent pegs made from starch, to prevent the annual nuisance of metal tent-pegs littering the fields for months afterwards. It’ll be fun seeing where this technology goes ““ why not biodegradable nails for temporary structures?

And what about the notorious Styrofoam cup, environmental scourge of the last century? Would you believe that someone’s made a biodegradable equivalent? There are now products, such as Earthshell, that can withstand heating ““ even microwaving ““ without melting, yet will quickly break into their constituent chemicals when the time is right.

Let’s hope short-term technology has a long life.

Image: michel clair

A new makeshift shelter has emerged in the form of resin-soaked cellulose recovered from recycled cardboard and newspapers.

Costing $5,000, the Universal World House was invented by design engineer, Gerd Niemoeller, as a quick dwelling for long-term refugees in Third World shantytowns. The paper house, developed at German’s Bauhaus University, was featured in the Times Online. It contains built-in single and double beds plus a veranda equipped with a private shower and bathroom. It’s apparently easy to assemble, earthquake-proof and stable enough to withstand strong winds. The interior features prefab panels that look like honeycomb patterns and an air vacuum fills each unit, similar to the construction technique employed in aircraft and high-speed yaghts. This allows for the combination of flexibility and strength.

According to the Telegraph, the paper houses have been tested in the worst slums of South African and one of the first settlements of the houses will be built in Zimbabwe in conjunction with the German aid organization, World Vision. Nigeria also has ordered 2,400 of the houses. Neimoeller is the founder of the Swiss company, The Wall AG, which has a patent on the mini houses.

Firewinder is a swirling corkscrew of LED lights that spins when the wind catches it, getting brighter the faster it turns. It’s as mesmerizing as when you wave a sparkler and your eyes can’t quite keep up, so you see glowing streaks in the air.

What’s it for? Well, to mesmerize you. But there’s a message, too. Here we are, at the bottom of an ocean of air (1 ton of it pressing down on each of us), buffeted by currents we can’t see, still just learning to tap the invisible energy roaring past us. Wind-triggered displays like Firewinder connect us with all of that.

Gorgeous as it is, Firewinder isn’t as directly useful as, say, Demakersvan’s Light Wind. But I can think of a few uses – for example, how about shrinking it down and adapting it for the spokes of bicycle wheels? There’s no way a driver will miss that coming.

In the meantime, it’s a calming novelty night-light with a deep eco-vibe. Give it a whirl.

Image: Firewinder

Show of hands: how many of you dream about moving to the country, growing your own food and living off the grid? It may not be for you, but my husband and I talk about this all the time. Our biggest obstacle? Affording the land and infrastructure and then making enough money to get by until we become self-sufficient. The people who have done it are inspiring.

Take the story of Mr. and Mrs. Phillipe-Johnson, who gave up steady employment, moved to the country, assumed a lifestyle of Voluntary Creative Simplicity and made their dream come true. It wasn’t always easy, and some commuting was involved, but with experimentation and innovation, they were able to live off-grid, grow their own food and start a small, local business selling fresh sourdough bread to their neighbors. They live happily and comfortably on $6,500 a year.

They started with the snowball approach to debt: they worked as hard as possible to eliminate all debt, one loan at a time. After that, they got creative with reducing expenses and saved up for a small parcel of land. They built their own temporary shelter; then their own home. The transition period involved a lot of testing and ingenuity – not to mention plenty of odd jobs – but they did it. They learned to garden. To build. To survive.

Admittedly, this lifestyle is not for everyone. Personally, I love access to the internet. But I also love the land. We all need to find our own balance, but we can all simplify. Remember, the lifestyle is called Voluntary Creative Simplicity ““ so how creative can you get?

Image: fosforix

Look into the future of custom housing: steel frames and insulated panels delivered to your lot for quick, on-site assembly. That’s what’s being done at Eco Steel, a firm of architectural visionaries that connects with other forward-thinking industry partners to deliver these dwellings to homeowners and businesses. Instead of fully finished prefab, the building systems gives you an excellent shell to be finished by your own green contractor.

EcoSalon has been singing the praises of modular prefab dwellings, not just because they often contain recycled content but because they are energy efficient, space saving and low maintenance. These ones designed by Eco Steel tout thermal efficiency and LEED rating benefits.

A fine example of their custom projects is the Goshawk Ranch in Park City, Utah, where Eco Steel is based. This fabulous structure features solar powered radiant heat, low voltage lighting, electric generating windmills, robust grey water irrigation and an outdoor amphitheater.

The company also used eco-friendly steel to construct these Scandinavian-style three-story residential lofts in the coastal Delaware town of Rohoboth Beach. They are engineered for extreme wind loads, and come in 4-bedroom options for multi-family use. Weathering all kinds of climate (and climate change) is a goal of the architects. They also cut down on the time and cost of building a conventional custom house.

“Our building system is a hybrid that offers faster construction and higher quality than traditional means yet is less expensive and more flexible than full prefab techniques,” says Eco Steel.

Your job is to find the land and the right contractor to complete the task.