> It's Official! San Francisco Bans Bottled Water on City Property. In a permanent extension of a 2007 law, San Francisco has made it illegal for the City to buy or distribute plastic water bottles. Bottled water contributes to massive amounts of litter and plastic waste all over the world. San Francisco has an aggressive plan to achieve zero net waste by 2020. In late 2013, Inhabitat reported that San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors appeared ready to enact one of the strictest bans on bottled water in the nation. Days ago, the proposal became law, and plastic water bottles smaller than 21 ounces will no longer be allowed on city property starting Oct. 1, 2014.
> Solar power cheaper than natural gas, coal, and nuclear power in Texas!
Ah, remember when solar power was expensive. You know, just a couple years ago. Things change fast, don't they?
1) the DOE projected that solar would get below 6¢/kWh by 2020, and 2) Austin Energy was initially seeking bids for solar power from a power plant or power plants totaling 50 megawatts of capacity, but after receiving over 30 proposals, including the winning proposal from SunEdison, it increased the size to 150 megawatts. Overall, this is big news for the solar industry. It's increasingly safe to say that solar power is now mainstream.
> Poop and pee are valuable stuff; that's why people used to collect it and even pay for it. That's why our current toilet system is so awful, just mixing them with lots of water and flushing them away, and why the Caltech Toilet that got all the coverage in the Gates Foundation Reinvent the Toilet program was so problematic, it was really just a fancy flush.
In fact human byproducts (don't call it waste) have real value is a world of peak fertilizer and peak phosphorus; it provides both. That's what's so interesting about the Blue Diversion toilet developed by Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. It is a mix of high and low tech that does a whole lot more than just flush and forget.
> Soft robotic fish makes a big splash. The growing field of soft robotics holds promise for devices that can maneuver around a space without damaging the surrounding environment. "We're excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons," MIT professor of computer science and engineering Daniela Rus said in a news release this week. "As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it's much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there's no danger if they whack you."
> Every year, Americans send millions of tons of food to the landfill. What if you could use all of those pizza crusts and rotten vegetables to heat your home? That's already happening in one unlikely laboratory: the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn.
The plant's longtime superintendent, Jimmy Pynn, shows off the plant's crown jewels: eight huge, shiny, oval-shaped steel tanks known as digester eggs. Each one contains millions of gallons of black sludge that's roughly the consistency of pea soup. Pynn calls it "black gold."
"It has a pungent odor to it," Pynn says. "To most people it's like ugly, yucky stuff."
Where others see foul and potentially hazardous sludge, Pynn sees a source of renewable energy, thanks to trillions of helpful bacteria inside the digester eggs.
"The digesters like to be fed like us: three times a day," he says. "They like to be kept warm, 98 degrees. And whether we want to admit it or not, we all make gas. And that's what we have these guys for: to make gas." Read on.
The digester eggs at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn contain millions of gallons of black sludge.