The Century-Old Renewable You’ve Never Heard Of

Good News Notes: “Japanese island of Kumejima to work as an English teacher after graduating from a business school in landlocked Arizona. Now he runs a power plant fueled by ocean water. “I don’t have an engineering degree, and I do all the maintenance for our electricity,” he said. “It’s relatively easy.” The plant, which…

Pilot program turns Boise, ID plastic recycling into a bench”

Good News Notes: “When the Hefty EnergyBag recycling program was announced in Boise about three years ago, it asked residents to separate those hard-to-recycle No. 4-7 plastics into orange bags. The bags were shipped to a Utah company which planned to chemically deconstruct the plastic into diesel fuel. Equipment problems quickly forced the end of that destination,…

Electric Reefers Could Cut Millions of Tons of CO2

Good News Notes: “Reefers, or refrigerated trailers, are cooled by diesel fuel, with electricity from either the tractor’s generator or an Auxilary Power Unit (APU) mounted on the trailer. An idling diesel tractor burns a gallon of fuel per hour; an APU, 4/10ths of a gallon. According to XL Fleet, which makes “electrification solutions for…

Purdue University develops new way to recycle polyolefin plastics

Good News Notes: “Single-use plastic scrap continues to be a growing problem internationally with only 9 percent of the 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced in the last 65 years being recycled. One of the biggest contributors to this issue is polyolefins, such as polypropylene and polyethylene. Researchers at Purdue University are working to solve that problem…