Tips And Idea's to help Save our planet

[Aaron]

I thought i start a discussion on sharing tips and ideas on what we can do to take Action and save our planet.

What i do is Instead of buying a new bottle of water all the time, I always take a bottle of water with me everywhere i go so i can save on plastic. I usually don't have to refill it that much, like i have one big one and one medium size one. So if we all did this we would be cutting back on plastic bottles. Whenever i buy my Arizona green tea i recycle those big bottles, instead of Throwing them out.

So if you all want to share tips and ideas here, go right ahead.

[Ullan]

This is a sticky question, since it encompasses a myriad of problems and therefore almost an infinite amount of solutions. Fairly important to not, I believe, is that no idea is without merit, and everything thrown onto this forum has the potential of being picked up and carried forward. Personally, I like to focus on energy.

Very important for the near and distant future, in my personal opinion, is the use of alternative energy sources. That this is a necessity is beginning to dawn on even the most recalcitrant individuals, having seen what sort of exuberant prices can be commanded for a single barrel of oil, in a time when oil isn't even scarce. Predictions that the price for a single barrel of Brent Crude can rise up to 200 dollars per barrel in fairly short order should give us all pause. On the other hand, wind and solar energies are at the moment very bulky and impractical for personal use. Development into more efficient versions of these generators is at a virtual standstill since R&D departments have a hard time getting funding in the current economic climate. This is a cruel paradox so typical of the society we live in. Water turbines require the building of massive dams which are at the same time expensive and cause irreparable damage to nature, and together with nuclear power are both well outside the reach of the common consumer. Any attempts to build your own nuclear power plant should be abandoned at inception. The warning 'don't try this at home' has never been more true than in this case.

It should be clear from my previous rambling that I am looking in the prospect of power generation on a very local basis. The first step to solving the energy problem is to make every household responsible for their own power. If it can be created cleanly and be cost efficient, I see no reason not to have a power generator installed in every garage, attic, loft or shed as standard. Why do I believe this?

Shared power networking is the key. If you have a means of creating your own energy, which costs you less than you pay now to power companies, and if you can create more energy than you consume, it is a fairly simple matter to share the excess energy with your neighbors, or sell it back to a power company. Hydrogen fuel cells come to mind. A hydrogen fuel cell power generator is powerful enough to power several households and, if properly installed, can be safely operated out of a garden shed. Share the power with your neighbors, share the running costs of the generator, or even encourage your neighbors to buy their own. Link them together in a small network, share with more neighbors, share the costs, encourage them to buy their own with what they save monthly on electricity bills, and so on and so forth. What you end up with is a neighborhood or entire community which is self sufficient and has the ability to sell excess power to a local company to generate revenue. As hydrogen is a clean energy source, and can be fairly easily produced without creating excessive pollution, switching a whole neighborhood to such locally generated power can save several tons of noxious emissions from power plants. Eventually, if enough people in one area switch to this scheme, the local power plant can even be shut down permanently, as the power company would be buying excess electricity from the community and distribute this to other parts of the same area without having any production costs of their own.

At the moment, such a concept is nothing more than a dream, but with enough development of hydrogen fuel cell generators and a small change in mentality can become a reality within a decade.

Give it some thought.

[Ullan]

Simone said:

Ullan, can you please explain how a hydrogen fuel cell works?

I will try :)

Mind you, I'm neither an expert nor an engineer, but I do have a grasp of how many things actually work and I've always been very fond of innovative technology.

Briefly said, hydrogen fuel cells are reactors that run on hydrogen gas, which is easily produced by splitting the hydrogen atoms off the oxygen in water (H2O -> H, H, O). An important discovery in the use of hydrogen is that when it is reunited with an oxygen atom and thus reforms water (H, H, O -> H2O) it produces a minute electrical energy. Up until this discover, hydrogen gas was only looked at for its lighter than air (Hindenburg) and explosive qualities (sadly, also see Hindenburg). There are currently several electric cars in test phase which use a hydrogen fuel cell as power plant. Engineers have found that it produces quite a lot of power, far more than is needed to power the car, and could in fact be used to power parts of a house. And this is just a small mobile hydrogen fuel cell.

The major advantage of hydrogen is that it is fairly easily produced with minimum pollution, can these days be safely stored and transported, and the only waste product of a hydrogen fuel cell is clean water. Major problem to my proposition at the moment, however, is that hydrogen fuel cells have not yet been manufactured to the scale of say diesel generators and are at the moment only 55 to 65 percent efficient. However, at this efficiency a full scale hydrogen fuel cell should still provide enough power to keep a household running, and as electric cars will begin to be more common, I can see the research and refining of the fuel cell leading to more efficient systems.

For a look of what an electric car /can/ be, even though this example uses Lithium Ion batteries rather than hydrogen, see www.teslamotors.com . This is not an endorsement, I'm not related to this company and I most certain do not agree with their asking price :)

[torz]

Education is the key, 20 yrs ago in most countries re=cycling was a weird and unheard of in the public domain that it was considered the laughabe and only applied to the "Hippie Fringe".... Well guess what 20 yrs, if not less: i.e. Germany down the line we are all trying to do our bit and now have recycling facilities everywhere.... Its just that not everyone makes full use of them...

Another way to reduce, reuse and recyle is the popular and growing "Free Cycle" now a worldwide practice to those who CHOOSE to.... Most, if not all of our clothes are bought from charity shops, any furniture we need is swapped or re used via Free Cycle.... If the demand for new products decreases, as costs escalate because the demand is fed via the 2nd hand/no longer needed growing market then the need for raw materials decreases too, thus the cycle is broken.

Just my thoughts based on my lifestyle and ethics...

Where are the local companies now.... gone bust because the larger, more powerful companies have priced them out of the market.... we need (for our own survival) to return to community based businesses, where we re-connect with each other on a daily basis...

Torz xx