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The guinea pig economy

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:35:00 GMT

The average income in Peru is a bit above the world average, at about $1,870 per person per year. It's therefore not surprising that poverty is one of the biggest social issues facing this beautiful nation. So when two plant pathologists — one educated at Cornell — decided to do something to help, they had their work cut out for them. Well, they've found an answer, and it's adorable. Gaia Vince explains:

Guinea pigs, those Andean rodents so beloved by European children as pets, are more than strokeable, tailless rats – they have uses. Many. The ingenious people of the rural town of Pachacamac, outside Lima, are using the furry fellas to light their homes, cook their food, grow their veggies, power their televisions and, this is Peru after all, line their bellies.

The 1,000 guineo pigs that Carmen Felipe-Morales and Ulises Moreno raise produce about 3 tons of manure a month. They cuddle and chitter and purr and eat, delighting the hordes of school children who come to visit. 200 kg a month of manure pellets are fed into a bio-digester, adopted from a Chinese model, that produces methane from one portal and 50 liters a week of an odor-free brown liquid plant nutrient from the other. Ulises calls it "Caca Cola". The methane is more than enough for cooking, heating and generating all of the electricity the family needs. The extra plant food is sold for $0.65 a liter (the industrial equivalent goes for $50 a liter).

Perhaps the best part is why they have such an amazing set of accomplishments. “My message to the people of Peru is: don’t blame your poverty. Transform your poverty using affordable technologies and processes to improve your quality of life and happiness.”

Bicimáquinas

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:25:00 GMT

Milling corn, pumping water, washing clothes, making fruit smoothies... all vital enterprises in a bustling Guatemalan village. And every one of them pedal-powered. Founded in 1997 by Carlos Marroquin, Maya Pedal builds about fifty bicimáquinas — pedal-powered machines — every year. From the site:

Bicimáquinas are pedal-powered machines that assist with a variety of jobs in the home, on the farm, on the road and in small businesses. Each bicimáquina is handmade in our workshop using a combination of old bikes, concrete, wood, and metal.

The organization hosts volunteers from all over the world for several weeks at a time. Volunteers work with Marroquin to build the innovative devices, using bicycle parts donated through partner organizations around the world. Blueprints and Sketchup models are freely downloadable from their Web site.

Tiny source, big reaction

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:24:00 GMT

Popular Science reckons that Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia's brainchild would take about five years to wean the whole world of oil. How's that for attention-grabbing? The secret is thorium, a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive silvery white element. As the Telegraph reports, “Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.”.

The process is different than the reactors found in today's nuclear power plants. In an accelerator-driven reactor, a beam of protons is directed at the fuel. The beam is fired at a block of heavy metal, which absorbs them and produces excess neutrons. The neutrons are then absorbed by the thorium, which transforms into uranium 233, a uranium isotope not found in nature. The process is much safer than normal reactors as well, producing no hazardous waste. It's efficient, too. One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium or 3.5 million tons of coal. A network of small 600MW underground reactors could supply all of the energy the world needs, without hazardous materials, and with no danger of producing fuel for nuclear weapons as a side effect.

Gift economies

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:29:00 GMT

The fundamental transaction in our economy is buying and selling. What would an economy look like whose basic transaction is giving and receiving? Allow me to introduce you to dama! Dama is a gift-based economy that has been thriving in Mali for many generations, alongside the much more recent market economy that most of us know. Within dama (and in common with other gift economies), participants consciously seek opportunities to give. The act itself serves to build and strengthen relationships within the community, and to provide a gentle disincentive to the sort of selfish acquisition of resources that seems to be inherent in more conventional economies. It also has practical benefits, making food and other resources available to people in need without a formal welfare program.

Dama is by no means a lone example. In many Pacific island societies, before contact with European societies, gift economies were the principal means of acquiring needed resources. With the advent of the Internet, many see programmer communities as gift economies, practicing a sort of "receive and then give away" ethic of ownership.

What does a gift economy have to offer us, as we pursue a sustainable way of life? Beverly Bell writes:

In its purest form, a gift economy is about the collective, allocation based on need, and abundance. Behind gifting is human relationship, generation of goodwill, and attention to the nurturance of the whole society and not just one’s immediate self and family. Maintaining economic and social relations outside of the market keeps cooperation and ethics thriving.

At the very least, an economy that has those principles at its heart (and it seems to be a big heart!) is worthy of our attention and study. And who knows what it might give back?

Future Positive: Gift economy

An underground home gallery

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:40:00 GMT

We love the idea of earth-sheltered houses. Some of the designs of visionary architect Malcolm Wells, to take one of our favorite examples, are truly inspiring. And Mike Oehler's $50 and Up Underground House Book is a fascinating glimpse at a style of house that nearly anybody can afford. We thought you might enjoy seeing some of the houses that inspire us. Here, from inhabitat, is a gallery of "six buried homes".

Click to see the full article.

Pot ale to fuel tank

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:43:00 GMT

When Irish missionaries returned to Ireland from the Mediterranean region in the 6^th and 7^th centuries, they brought something with them — the art of distillation. Discovered in the 2^nd century by Babylonians, the practice eventually led to the development of whisky (from uisce beatha — "water of life" in Gaellic). Today, Scotland produces £4 billion a year of the stuff, making it the UK's fifth most valuable export. Making that much aqua vitae leaves behind many, many ton(ne)s of draff and pot ale (spent grains and distillation residue) — materials which have always ended up in landfill. Recently, Scottish scientists have made an exciting discovery. Robin Shreeves at Mother Nature Network reports:

These two waste products are being used by researchers at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland to create a new biofuel. [The fuel] can be used in regular cars — meaning there’s no need to adapt the engine as there is with some other biofuels. Researchers also say it's possible the biofuel could be used to fuel planes.

The end product is called butanol, and it contains 30% more energy than the ethanol that's produced as fuel from corn. One huge advantage is that it uses a pure waste product as its feed stock, leaving the corn for the dinner table. And besides all that, it originates in making Scotch. What's not to love?

Solar power from space

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:56:00 GMT

Let's start with some good news. There's enough energy pouring down from the sun in every square meter to power an average US house (1.377kW compared to average household energy use of 1.26kW). Thankfully, much of that never hits the ground, or we wouldn't be here. About 30% never makes it through the atmosphere. The rest only hits the day, and over half of what's left is lost due to various other causes. When you factor in an average 13% efficiency for solar cells, that 1.477kW is whittled down to just 20W per square meter — hardly enough to power the light in the fridge.

What if you could eliminate a lot of the loss? That's the thought that had led to space-based solar power (SBSP). The concept boosts the amount of energy captured in several ways. First, the collectors are located in space, where there's no atmosphere to soak up or reflect the energy. Second, the energy is converted to microwaves, and beamed to terrestrial collectors. The microwaves pass right through the air and the clouds, eliminating another large set of losses. Finally, power is beamed down 24 hours a day, again doubling the amount available.

The downside, of course, is that it's expensive. If you look at the numbers, though, we're already spending that much on oil and wars to protect it. The benefits of the research and development and infrastructure required to support SBSP would be enormous. With a limitless supply of free energy from the sun, coupled with other technologies to bring the energy to where it's needed, it could be a whole new world.

Greywater

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:57:00 GMT

Storm water, black water, grey water... all of it goes down one drain or another, magic happens and we can forget about it... right? Well, not quite. Blackwater is what goes down the toilet. You have to be careful with black water. (The best idea is not to generate it in the first place — we'll save that for another article.) Grey water is another matter entirely. Greywater is what goes down the drain of the tub, the bathroom sink and the dishwasher. It contains far fewer pollutants and pathogens than blackwater, and the ones that it does contain are easily treated.

In the city, the standard approach is to just mix the grey water and the black water together, and pipe it all to a sewage treatment plant. Where municipal sewage treatment isn't available, the standard approach is to drain the black water and grey water into a septic tank, where the solids decompose over a period of years, and the liquids leach into a septic field underground where the soil eventually filters out the pollutants and returns the water to the local aquifer.

Recently, though, a "new" approach to handling grey water — called "artificial wetland" — has begun to be used more widely. The idea is to fill an artificially constructed marsh with hydrophilic plants. The water percolates through the marsh over a period of days or weeks, and the marshes remove essentially all of the pollutants. Companies like Nutricycle Systems sell treatment systems that clean up greywater to the point where it can be used completely automatically. (The Maryland State Highway Administration used one such system to maintain flower beds at truck weigh stations.)

Does the idea work for family-scale grey water treatment? It certainly can, but depends on exercising somewhat more care that most of us are used to in what goes down the drain. The benefits, though, go beyond just feeling good about removing a source of pollution. Self-sufficiency isn't really self-sufficiency if it depends on polluting somebody else's backyard. By nurturing and acting upon an awareness of how our own lives and practices affect what's around us, we take a big step toward building co-suffiency at the level of the community.

"Paging Alice.. your bricks are ready..."

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:14:00 GMT

We love hearing about novel ways to build, but you also need materials to build with. There are bricks that you grow and bricks that you press. How about bricks made of mushrooms? That's just what Philip Ross, whom Time Magazine describes as “an artist, an inventor and a seriously obsessed amateur mycologist” used to build Mycotectural Alpha, an art project currently on display at a gallery in Germany. It started when Ross noticed something about the way that mushrooms grow:

Underground, they form a vast network called a mycelium. Far West Fungi's dirt-free hothouses pack in each mycelium so densely that it forms a mass of bright white spongy matter. The mycelium is nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It's also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.

To produce building materials from mycelium, you start with agricultural waste like the seed husks of rice or cotton. You inoculate them with spores, spray them with water and myco-vitamins, put them into molds and then let them sit in the dark for a couple of weeks. What emerges is a whole new material — sort of a wood-like plastic. Eben Bayer, CEO of startup Ecovative Design reports that his company is building a 10,000 sq. ft. myco-factory in Green Island, New York, to manufacture mycobricks as an organic packing material.

We're wondering what might happen if someone designed a process and a factory that, say, a Haitian micro-entrepreneur could afford to build and run. With molds for the pieces of a prefab dome or other builder-friendly design, it could make a significant contribution to improving housing for the 25% of the people on the planet who live on a dollar or two a day.

Simply beautiful

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:16:00 GMT

"It rises from the ground flowing upwards from the path edges..." "the construction method minimises any impact on the ground and surrounding mature woodland..." "sunlight pass[es] naturally through the structure ... creating light patterns which change constantly throughout the day..." Designed by architect Nicholas Groves-Raines, it won the 2010 American Institute of Architects Excellence in Design Award. So... what is it? It's a garden compost shed, and it's beautiful.

The architect used rebar (steel rods used for reinforcing concrete), bent into gentle curves and woven together. The shed occupies the corner of a yard, and flows around a five ton boulder that's incorporated into the design. The roof is planted with a soft grass, which both handles rainwater and visually integrates the structure into the mature woodland surrounding it. It's rare to see a single project that incorporates sustainability, excellence in the use of simple materials, and a passionate pursuit of beauty.