The Californian environmental group Heal the Bay has released this BBC nature file-style mockumentary:

The world’s worst underground coal fires are in Inner Mongolia. Some have been burning for 50 years. The amount of coal being burned is estimated to be about 20 million tonnes a year.

The Inner Mongolia regional government has now announced plans and financing of 200 million yuan ($au36 million) to begin extinguishing the fires.

According to the plan, half of the fires could be extinguished by 2012 simply by digging coal out of the path of the fires and covering the fires with sand.

The government said that the fires were caused by "improper mining practices" and "dry weather" but did not explain why it has taken 50 years to produce a plan to put them out.

Collapsing coal seam burning in an open pit mine in the Rujigou coalfield in China. 

A sewage plant near Berlin has found that playing Mozart to its biomass-eating microbes makes them work harder. They expect that it will save the facility as much as €1,000 a month.

The waste-treatment facility in the town of Treuenbrietzen southwest of Berlin has been testing a special stereo system over the past two months after an Austrian waste treatment plant said that Mozart made their sewage-eating micro-organisms perform better, helping to cut costs.

The process was developed by Mundus, a small German firm in Wiesenburg in northeastern Germany.

According to Anton Stucki, a founder and managing partner of the firm, the sonic waves of Mozart’s compositions spur micro-organisms to a higher performance in breaking down biosolids. As a result, wastewater facilities can save energy costs and decrease the amount of residual sludge, which is expensive to dispose of.

Our latest YouTube video clip is a look at what our dependence on oil is doing to the Earth.

Scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago have developed a new material which permanently traps only the radioactive ion cesium and not other harmless ions like sodium.

The material is made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound. It has been found to be extremely effective in removing radioactive cesium – which found in nuclear waste but is very difficult to clean up – from a sodium-rich solution, similar to real liquid nuclear waste. The cesium triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap its pores shut, like a venus flytrap, and trap the cesium ions within. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while ignoring all of the sodium ions.

The research was described in an article in the Nature Chemistry journal. The paper’s senior author, Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences commented that "Seeing the windows close was completely unexpected, We expected ion exchange — we didn’t expect the material to respond dynamically. This gives us a new mechanism to focus on….A new class of materials that takes advantage of the flytrap mechanism could lead to a much-needed breakthrough in nuclear waste remediation."

American garbage-disposal giant, Waste Management, has partnered with InEnTec, an Oregon-based company, to begin commercializing
a plasma-gasification process which converts garbage into energy.

Plasma gasification technology has been in development and pilot testing for decades. Major pilot plants, capable of processing 1,000 tonnes or more of garbage daily, are under development in Florida, Louisiana and California.

In theory, the process is simple. Torches pass an electric current through a gas (often ordinary air) in a chamber to create a superheated plasma with a temperature above 7,000 degrees Celsius. The plasma’s tremendous heat dissociates the molecular bonds of any garbage placed inside the chamber, converting organic compounds into syngas (a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) and trapping everything else in an inert vitreous solid, called slag. The syngas can be used as fuel in a turbine to generate electricity. It can also be used to create ethanol, methanol and biodiesel. The slag can be processed into materials suitable for use in construction.

In practice, gasification has been unable to compete economically with traditional municipal waste processing. But the cost has been coming down, while energy prices have been going up.

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Republic Services Inc, an Arizona waste management company which operates 213 landfill sites, has converted a landfill cover in San Antonio into a flexible solar power generating system.

Republic Services capped part of the landfill with what they say is a  first-of-its-kind solar energy cover. It consists of a synthetic geomembrane with more than 1,000 flexible strips with photovolatic silicon cells, measuring less than a 5 millimetres thick, adhered to its south-facing slope.

"The solar energy cover is easier to inspect, maintain and repair than a traditional clay cap, and is technically superior in terms of odor control and storm water management," said Tony Walker, Republic Services project manager.

Together with a methane gas-to-energy system, which has been in operation at the site since 2002, the solar energy cover will generate a combined nine megawatts of electricity.

Researchers Peter H. Gleick and Heather Cooley at the Pacific Institute in California have published research which shows that bottled water requires as much as 2,000 times more energy to produce than tap water.

Gleick and Cooley calculated the energy requirements for various stages in bottled water production, including manufacturing the plastic bottles, processing the water and the bottles, and transporting and cooling the final product. 

Combining the energy for these stages, the analysis finds that producing bottled water requires between 5.6 and 10.2 megajoules of energy per litre of water – up to 2,000 times the energy cost of tap water, which takes about 0.005 megajoules per litre to treat and transport. Around 50 million barrels of oil per year are used just to produce the plastic bottles – very few of which are currently made from recycled material. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

Stuart Strand of the University of Washington has proposed making bales of crop residue, such as stalks, and sinking them into the deep ocean in order to sequester carbon.

Strand calculates that the the process of harvesting, transporting and sinking bales of crop waste, weighed down by stones, in ocean waters below 1,500 metres, would be 92 percent efficient at sequestering carbon for thousands of years. In comparison, leaving the residues on the ground is 14 percent efficient and using them to make ethanol is 32 percent efficient.

If 30 percent of the world’s crop residue was treated in this way – with the remainder being left to condition the soil – it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 15 percent.

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