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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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  • How to make a solar water heater from plastic bottles

    How to make a solar water heater from plastic bottles

    Giovana Zilli

    6th May, 2010

    Retired mechanic Jose Alano invented a simple, cheap, energy saving rooftop solar water heater which is benefiting thousands of people. Here’s how it’s done…

    José Alano is a model of creativity in tackling environmental problems in Brazil. In 2002, the retired mechanic transformed a pile of plastic bottles and cartons into a solar water heater. Since then, thousands of people in southern Brazil have benefited from Alano’s invention, saving money while reducing waste.

    The idea came from the lack of recycling collection services in his small home town of Tubarão. Refusing to throw plastic bottle, carton and other recyclable waste into the landfill, José Alano soon realised he had a problem: a room full of rubbish.

    ‘Being 59 years old, I have had the opportunity to witness the technological advances of science, which improved food storage. But nowadays, some packaging weighs almost the same than the food itself! Years ago, my wife and I realised that we were not prepared for this new form of consumption.’

    Using his basic knowledge on solar water heating systems, he and his wife built an alternative version using 100 plastic bottles and 100 milk cartons. ‘It worked perfectly well, and we got rid of our waste in a responsible way,’ he says.

    A winning invention

    Alano’s initiative became widely known in Brazil after winning the Superecologia prize, offered by the Superinteressante magazine for renewable projects in the not-for-profit sector. Since then, the retired mechanic has been busy with workshops and lectures in community centres and schools, particularly in the Brazilian southern state of Santa Catarina, where he lives.

    Yet, Alano never wanted to profit from it, and explains why: ‘I am a simple person, but I am very aware of my own responsibilities as a consumer. The recycled solar water heater was just my small contribution to the environment, and to improve the lives of people who need to save money. I registered the invention, so nobody else could copy and profit from it. Although the information on how to build it is in the public domain and anybody can access it, there are two restrictions: to its industrial production and to its use by politicians during electoral campaigns.’

    The information on how to build the recycled solar heater has reached communities through the support of local governments, media, state-owned and private electricity companies, which also donated pipes and other materials.

    Alano says that now it is difficult to keep track of all the projects being developed across Brazil, but he mentions some figures from the southern states: ‘More than 7,000 people are already benefitting from the solar heaters in Santa Catarina state alone. There are two cooperatives, one in Tubarão and other in Florianópolis, the last producing 437 solar heaters to be installed in council houses. In Paraná state, the number of solar heaters had reached 6,000 in 2008, thanks to the DIY leaflets and workshops that the governmental body SEMA organised there.’

    Big savings

    The alternative water heater can provide power savings of up to 30 per cent, but apart from that, Alano notes that every recycled solar water heater built also means less plastic bottles and cartons finding their way to landfill. Since Alano’s invention, Tubarão has been benefiting from regular collection of recyclable waste, something that unfortunately still doesn’t happen in many Brazilian towns.

    Alano has lost count of the number of times he has lectured or been visited by groups of students, eager to learn about the invention. However, this is not his only one. Alano designed a low cost multifunctional bed for disabled people, but he is struggling to find a business partnership. Although there has been much interest to put it into production, Alano says that the problem is always to keep profits lower in order to benefit the consumers.

    Eight years after its creation, the solar heater still takes a lot of his time, but he believes that now he will finally be able to focus on the multifunctional bed and other projects: ‘The recycled solar water heater is only the result of persistence over frustration’, he explains. ‘I don’t consider myself an inventor. I am just a citizen trying to find solutions to problems.’

    Do it yourself
    Despite latitude and climate differences between southern Brazil and Britain, the solar water heater designed by Alano is based on the principle of thermosyphon, used in many commercial heaters sold in the UK for as much as £6,000. In this system, neither pumps nor electricity are used to induce circulation. The different water densities are enough to cause a cyclic movement from the collector panel to the tank: less dense hot water upwards, more dense cold water downwards.

    The assembly is straightforward, and can be better understood through the illustrations contained in the DIY leaflet (text only in Portuguese). Obviously, size does mater. Alano reckons that to heat water for a shower of one person, a 1m² panel would be enough.

    If you are interested in building up your own, these are the basic materials needed: 2L plastic bottles (60), cartons (50), 100mm PVC pipe (70 cm), 20mm PVC pipe (11.7m), 90-degree 20 mm PVC elbows (4), 20mm PVC T-connectors (20), 20 mm PVC end caps (2), PVC glue, black matt paint and roller, sand paper, self-amalgamating tape, rubber hammer, saw, wood or other material for the support.

    With the diagrams in the DIY leaflet as a guide, use the 100mm PVC pipe as a mould and cut off the bottom of the bottles. Cut the 20mm PVC pipes into 10 x 1m and 20 x 8.5 cm pieces, and assemble with the T-connectors. Cut and paint the cartons (pag.10-12), as well as the one-meter long pipes. Assemble according to figure B.

    The panels must be placed at least 30 cm below the tank and be sited on a south facing wall or roof. To optimise heat absorption, the panels must be mounted at the angle of your latitude, plus 10°. In London, for instance, the panel’s inclination should be 61°. Alano recommends that the plastic bottles in the panels should be swapped for new ones every 5 years: ‘Over time, the plastic becomes opaque, which reduces the heat caption, while the black cartons can be repainted.’

    Giovana Zilli is a freelance journalist

     

  • Major blow in bid to stem oil leak

     

    Workers have moved the concrete and steel box some 200 metres to the side on the seabed while they evaluate their options.

    An estimated 210,000 gallons of oil have been gushing every day from a pipe ruptured when the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.

    The high-stakes attempt to cap the leak, rife with expectations because it will take three months to drill relief wells to stem the flow, had been considered the best short-term solution to stave off the biggest US environmental disaster since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

    “I wouldn’t say it’s failed yet,” Mr Suttles said.

    “What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work.”

    He said BP was also considering other methods to capture the flow. Among the options being considered was to plug the leak by injecting ground-up material in a “junk shot”.

    “It has certain issues and challenges and risks with it, and that’s why we haven’t actually progressed up to this point. But we look and continue to see whether that’s a viable option,” Mr Suttles said.

    “It’s all to do with we’re working in 5,000 feet of water in a very difficult, challenging environment.”

    Workers have also sprayed dispersants over the slick to break it up and deploying hundreds of thousands of feet of boom to contain the spreading oil.

    But environmentalists have warned that dispersants like Corexit were also nefarious to sea life.

    “Those products don’t make the oil go away,” Gulf Coast Research Laboratory marine biologist Joe Griffitt said.

    “It just falls to the sea bottom. That’s where you’ll find the sediments and the larvae. So the toxic effect is double.”

    Mr Suttles said BP had anticipated encountering hydrates, but had not expected them to be as significant as a problem. Teams were evaluating whether the issue could be overcome by providing heat, methanol or other methods.

    The dome had been expected to be operational on Monday local time and to collect about 85 per cent of the leaking crude by funnelling it up to a barge on the surface.

    – AFP

  • Europe on the brink: the web of debt that threatens the world

     

    The falls, which continued in early European trade, came as fund managers warned that if Europe’s sovereign debt woes were not dealt with they could soon infiltrate the arteries of the global financial system. Investors’ fears centre on $3.9 trillion worth of debt owed by Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain to other European nations.

    Markets are unconvinced the US$145 billion rescue package for Greece is enough to prevent the country defaulting, and on Thursday night Moody’s warned the banking systems of Britain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain faced ”very real, common threats” through the massive build-up in sovereign debt.

    The head of credit trading at UBS, Luke Fay, said expectations were building that the European Central Bank would be forced to intervene to address plunging investor confidence.

    To prevent a repeat of the credit market meltdown of late 2008 some investors expect the ECB to start buying euro zone bonds – as the US did in its program of ”quantitative easing”.

    ”We’re getting to the stage where this is becoming a systemic problem and the market is now expecting the ECB to act,” Mr Fay said.

    Under the worst case scenario, the flow of capital between banks could dry up, bringing interbank lending to a halt. This could spark a plunge in confidence, significantly increasing global borrowing costs and ultimately damage global economic growth and recovery.

    ”If you can’t effectively price and transfer credit through the system, it affects everybody,” Mr Fay said.

    Despite this, on Thursday night the ECB said it had not considered buying euro zone bonds.

    The chief currency strategist at Westpac, Robert Rennie, said the ECB’s ”tough love” approach was stoking fears of a credit freeze, and investors were flocking to safe havens such as US Treasury bonds. The Australian dollar, seen as a risk asset, has plunged 3¢ in the week to less than US89¢ .

    ”What we’re really dreading here is a sovereign default in Europe,” Mr Rennie said. ”Given that we have a series of European bond redemptions over the next couple of weeks, the chances of a default are definitely rising.”

    Besides Australian banks’ $56.4 billion in exposure to Europe at the end of December, most analysts say the economy has few other direct links. But the market plunge could have serious effects on confidence.

    Prasad Patkar, of Platypus Asset Management, said: ”If there’s any prospect that we could have a GFC Mark II, then people don’t want to be caught holding stocks of risky assets.”

  • Dome placed over leaking US oil well

     

    It is now more than two weeks since the BP oil rig exploded 67 kilometres off the Louisiana coast.

    Since then an estimated 200,000 gallons of oil a day has been spewing into the sea.

    It is the biggest oil spill since the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 and many fear that the consequences of this one could be even worse.

    The first reports have come in that the oil had closed in on the delicate Chandelier Islands off the Louisiana coast.

    The group of islands forms a natural barrier between the Gulf and the Mississippi Delta wetlands.

    Late on Friday BP engineers were directing underwater robots to position the huge purpose-built concrete dome over the leak 5,000 feet below the surface.

    It may take some days to know for sure if the capping operation works.

    Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano says she is not overly optimistic.

    “I hope it works. It has not been used at that depth before, but we are still proceeding as if it won’t,” she said.

    “If it does that of course will be major positive development.”

     

    Fishing disaster

     

    Small boats have been laying boom out there since the spill began in the hope that the oil can be stopped before it reaches the sensitive marshes, the breeding areas for one of the country’s most fertile fishing grounds.

    Stan Cuhanovic, who first came to the Louisiana from Croatia in 1971, has been working this part of the gulf ever since.

    Out in the bay he punched in the coordinates on his on board satellite navigation system and spelt out the consequences should the oil breach the islands.

    “Very productive fishing areas. Oysters, they’re growing by itself – you don’t have to do anything to them,” he said.

    “If this area is ruined it would be devastating for the oyster people.”

    Fishing is a huge industry in Louisiana and although no-one quite knows what the impact of the spill will be, many are expecting the worst.

    This disaster will change life for everyone, but until now most people there had embraced the oil industry as part of the fabric of life in the gulf.

    As Stan Cuhonavic tells it, many here worked in both industries.

    “A lot of people who are doing the part time fishing, they work in oil field on their day off,” he said.

    “They use their small shrimp boat and they go trawling and catching the shrimp.”

    Even if the cap works no-one here thinks the crisis is over.

    In the short-term, more oil exploration in the gulf is highly unlikely and many fear it could take decades for the fishing to recover.

    Tags: business-economics-and-finance, industry, oil-and-gas, disasters-and-accidents, accidents, maritime-accidents, united-states

    First posted 30 minutes ago

  • Green Party victory start of ‘ historic new political force’

    Green Party victory start of ‘historic new political force’

    Ecologist

    7th May, 2010

    Newly elected MP Caroline Lucas said her party was now ready to ‘take its rightful place in Parliament’ after her landmark victory in yesterday’s general election

     

    Green Party leader Caroline Lucas has become the first ever Green to be elected into Parliament after winning the seat of Brighton Pavilion.

    A close race saw the Green Party gain 31.3 per cent of the vote and beat Labour and the Conservatives into second and third places respectively.

    The party did not come close to winning any other seats although its deputy leader Adrian Ramsay did gain an 8 per cent rise in support for the party in Norwich South, eventually won by the Liberal Democrats. Former Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper gained around 8 per cent of the vote in the Cambridge constituency.

    Although the Green Party has two MEPs, including Lucas, as well as more than 100 councillors across the UK, they have never previously won their own parliamentary seat. They did win 8.7 per cent of the vote in last year’s European elections.

    Long-time campaigner

    Lucas joined the Green Party in 1986 and has been an MEP since June 1999, representing the South East of England. She was elected party leader in 2008.

    As a member of the European Parliament she has campaigned strongly on food and farming issues, opposing GM crops, the dominance of the supply chain by big supermarkets and supporting measures to toughen up rules on pesticide use.

    She has also fought numerous campaigns on illegal logging, mobile phone masts and continues to push for Europe to take a stronger lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).

    Speaking after her victory she said green principles and policies would now have a voice in Parliament.

    ‘Policies such as responding to climate change with a million new “green” jobs in low-carbon industries, fair pensions and care for older people, and stronger regulation of the banks will be heard in the House of Commons,’ she said.

    Lucas said she also strongly backs calls for a referendum to replace the first-past-the-post voting system with a form of proportional representation.

    Useful links
    Full list of results for Green Party

  • British summer is coming earlier each year, study finds

     

     

    Grant Bigg and Amy Kirbyshire of the department of geography at Sheffield University examined temperature records of central England over recent decades, together with observations of 140 types of summer flowering plant, such as geraniums and roses, and when they came into bloom.

    To determine the onset of summer, they looked for the third day of each year when average temperatures reached 14C. That may sound distinctly chilly for summer, but comfortably allows for daytime temperatures above 20C.

    “We wondered if we could set a defining moment of when summer begins,” Bigg said.

    According to the analysis, summer should, on average, arrive in Britain tomorrow.

    Records show that in the period 1954-1963, the average date for the third such day was 25 May. By the 1990s, it had shifted forwards to 14 May. By 1998-2007, on average, summer arrived on 7 May. The shift is consistent with global warming, Bigg said. “It’s always very difficult to make direct attributions but scientists say global warming is very likely driven by human activity and I think we can say the same thing.” The researchers saw a similar, though smaller, pattern with summer plant flowering. On average, the first flowering date for 1954-1963 was 29 May. By 1991-2000 it was 26 May.

    Announcing their results in the journal Climatic Change, the duo say they “present a convincing argument that the onset of the British summer season has become increasingly early in the last 50 years”. The finding is consistent with similar studies that have used the timing of natural events to investigate the onset of spring and autumn.

    Earlier summers may have encouraged drought or heatwave conditions by prolonging the period of warm temperatures, the scientists suggest. The earliest recorded summer onset day was 18 April in 2003, which was followed by a record breaking heat wave.

    An early start does not always herald a good summer. The second-earliest onset day was in 2007, which preceded the wettest summer in England and Wales since records began in 1766. “An early summer onset is clearly no guarantee of a barbecue summer,” the scientists say.

    This year is not following the early summer pattern however, as there has not yet been a day with an average temperature of 14C.