Green Tech

British adventurer and bank dynasty heir David de Rothschild plans to sail from San Francisco to Australia--in a boat made from discarded soft-drink bottles.

No sharp epoxy smells greet us on San Francisco's Pier 31 when we go to visit de Rothschild on a sunny weekday afternoon. Instead, popping sounds from bottles being re-inflated echo like a huge popcorn machine in the northern end of a hangar. This is where the strange vessel, called "Plastiki," is being built.

In part of this hangar the size of a football field, 12,000 recycled bottles donated by the Waste Management company are being washed, cleaned, and pressurized for their new role--acting as flotation devices in the two pontoons of the 60-foot high-tech catamaran.

"If we really want to move from Planet 1.0 to Planet 2.0, we need to really start taking action and stop just talking," de Rothschild says as he arrives at the construction site.

The tall, bearded 30-year-old--a charismatic scion of the British Rothschild bank dynasty and the youngest British person to ever reach both the North and South poles--demands attention as he circles the busy site.

He runs the Adventure Ecology educational organization and is the mastermind behind the Plastiki project, which, among other things, aims to change people's perception of garbage. Today, most plastic bottles in the U.S. are not recycled, according to environmental organizations, and instead end up in the world's landfills and oceans.

"Thirty-nine billion plastic bottles are consumed in the U.S. every year," de Rothschild says. "Only 20 percent are recycled. Imagine what that is in terms of resources."

The lofty goal of a voyage to Australia has spurred a number of inventions. The skeletal hull, decks, and cabin of the boat, for example, are made of composite Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) plastic panels consisting of layers of self-reinforcing PET skins, a woven fabric made of reused plastic.

"What we have been exploring with is biocomposites, bioglues, biopolymers," de Rothschild says, "things that are not just going to be positive for this project, but have ongoing implications."

BioSolar has developed a plant-based plastic for making durable, less expensive, and more sustainable solar equipment, the 2-year-old company said Tuesday.

The company's BioBacksheet is a protective coating for crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells. Its material consists of layers of cotton fiber and a nylon resin from castor beans provided by Arkema, a Philadelphia chemicals company. Genetically modified crops aren't involved, according to BioSolar.

Castor beans and cotton make up the backing of this solar cell.

(Credit: BioSolar)

Unlike many plant-based plastics, which are ideal for throwaway forks and food packaging, BioSolar's material is supposed to withstand extreme temperatures and moisture, keeping solar photovoltaic equipment safe when exposed to the elements. The company, based north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita, aims to develop thin-film solar applications down the road.

Stan Levy, chief technology officer of BioSolar, was set to release details about the use of cotton and castor beans in BioBacksheet on Tuesday morning at the SPIE Symposium on Solar Applications and Energy in San Diego.

"Not only is this product produced from sustainable and renewable resources, but is expected to be more cost effective than the current backsheets," Levy said in a statement.

If he's correct, then BioBacksheet could serve as an alternative to DuPont's Tedlar brand material, which is composed of polyvinyl fluoride.

In July, DuPont Photovoltaic Fluoromaterials said it created one-step production of the polymer, licensing the technology to Tokyo-based Toppan Printing for commercialization within photovoltaic backsheets by 2010.

Small makers of solar cells reportedly have been waiting as long as six months for Tedlar, which is in short supply.

Silicon solar backsheets also use polyesther and ethylene-vinyl acetate. BioSolar's executives hope that rising costs for fossil fuels and concerns about the toxicity of petroleum-based plastics will drive solar equipment makers to consider its product.

Car interiors and car seats are becoming less toxic, although "new car smell" continues to carry poisons linked to allergies and cancer, according to a report last week by the Ecology Center.

The Ann Arbor, Mich., group found that General Motors made the most progress in reducing potentially harmful materials, followed by Mazda and Nissan, since the nonprofit's initial Healthy Car report last year.

The Acura RDX appears to smell sweeter than other SUVs in a report by the Ecology Center.

(Credit: Corrine Schulze/CNET Networks)

The ingredients in question include lead, chlorine, and phthalates from plastics, as well as brominated flame retardants from cushions and padding.

The car with the best marks was the Acura RDX SH sport-utility vehicle. Three Smart cars made the list of 10 best picks, as did two Chevy models and two Toyotas. Also among the lauded models were the Chevy HHR SUV, as well as the BMW M5 and Honda Accord EXL sedans.

Among the worst vehicles, according to the rankings, were the Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider convertible and Suzuki Reno hatchback, as well as the BMW 120i and Volkswagen Beetle convertibles.

In addition, scores of children's car seats fared 27 percent better than in 2007. Sunshine Kids and Graco brands fared especially well, while seats from Alpha Sport and Britax were among the worst in the rankings.

The Ecology Center interpreted its results as proving that harmful chemicals are unnecessary for making safe cars and car seats, and it called for lawmakers to ramp up regulations.

The environmental watchdog group looked at more than 200 popular models of cars released between 2006 and 2008, as well as 60 types of car seats. It used X-ray fluorescence to examine components that drivers and passengers frequently come into contact with, such as steering wheels, seats, doors, dashboards, and armrests.

The presence of the ingredients detected isn't otherwise indicated by manufacturers. Nor do third-party green consumer labels usually describe such details for cars and car seats.

The results of the report can also be found by sending from a mobile phone a text message that includes the make and model of a car or car seat.

Critics of the Ecology Center's study have charged that it sensationalizes the health risks of cars, whose biggest danger comes from road accidents rather than toxic chemicals.

Correction June 30 11:30 a.m. PDT: See below for details.

A sampling of green-tech news with quick commentary.

• High fuel costs threaten suburban lifestyles - The Boston Globe
  Does America need a redesign? Rising gas prices could drive an exodus from suburbs into city centers.

• Novomer launching plastic made from CO2 - Greentech Media
  Plastic made from carbon could be used in electronics and solar equipment.


Digital maps show the scope of California wildfires.
(Credit: Google Earth)

• Google Earth maps California fires - Google Earth Blog
  Tagged maps and NASA satellite imagery help to pinpoint some 1,400 fires raging in California.

• Number of flights to plummet by summer's end - The New York Times
  The number of flights by American carriers could plummet to post-9/11 levels as airlines struggle with rising fuel prices.

• Canadian carbon tax kicks in - Canadian Press
  A new tax has British Columbians paying an additional 8 cents per gallon for gasoline. Are similar taxes bound for the United States?

• Pacific 'Ring of Fire' nations mull geothermal power - Reuters
  Rich in volcanoes, Indonesia and the Philippines consider tapping deep into the earth for energy.

• Molten salt provides highly efficient thermal storage - Renewable Energy World
  Molten salt could be key for solar "towers of power" to work smoothly despite volatile weather conditions.

• Will shoppers become hip to square milk jugs? - The New York Times
  Square milk jugs meant to save fuel and water are bound for more bulk discount stores.

• EcoRAM could save power in server farms - GreenTech Pastures/ZDNet
  Spansion says its new flash memory would be 10 times more reliable and consume one-eighth the energy of DRAM.

• Military resists superfund cleanup - The Washington Post
  The Pentagon and Environmental Protection Agency battle toxic waste cleanup.

• Report: World to use 50 percent more energy by 2030 - Red, Green, and Blue
  This is a good explanation of last week's report that projects a 51 percent rise in carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades.

• VW testing 94 MPG plug-in hybrid electric Golf - Carscoop
  Volkswagen is testing a plug-in hybrid that can run 30 miles on a charged lithium-ion battery.

Correction: This story initially misstated the comparison between Spansion's new flash memory and DRAM. The new memory would consume approximately one-eighth the energy DRAM does.

The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)

Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn't waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.

The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.

To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.

The sailors plan to collect samples from plastic-polluted ocean water, but this mission's main aim is to attract attention.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The 1.5-ton junk features a solar panel and wind turbine to power GPS and other devices. It's made of six pontoons each 30 feet long, filled with 2,000 soda and sports drink bottles, and triple-wrapped in used fishing nets. Twenty sailboat masts provide a frame, secured to a cabin cut from a Cessna 310 fuselage.

On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.

In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.

"They haven't finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic," said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita's education adviser. "What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting."

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn't well understood because satellites can't spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

"No one really knows what's out in the other gyres," Cummins said. "In the north Pacific alone there's Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members."

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.

"Recycling isn't the solution," Cummins said. "We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic."

Cummins said she backs the attention-getting adventure but feels nervous about the safety of Paschal and Eriksen, her fiance.

For more than a decade Algalita researchers have been collecting samples from the North Pacific Gyre, which traps untold amounts of plastic particles in its eddies.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

"Yes, we are risking our lives, but the issue of petroleum-based plastic and our national dependence on petroleum, warrant urgent action," noted Eriksen on a blog that will chronicle the journey.

However, he added, the sailboat masts and aluminum airplane fuselage are easy for radar to detect. "We have a better chance of being seen by big ships than typical fiberglass sailboats do."

Two satellite telephones keep the sailors in touch with the rest of the world. They also have several GPS units, VHF radios, and a Coast Guard beacon. Three months' worth of food includes a bucket of Hershey's Kisses.

It's not the first junk journey for Eriksen, who holds a doctorate in science education. After serving as a Marine in the Gulf War, he traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade raft of plastic bottles, then wrote a book about the trip.

The current odyssey is costing between $40,000 to $50,000, with big support from donations, Cummins said. Most of the bottles were given by a Burbank, Calif., recycling center. Patagonia gave the crew 500 Nalgene bottles being phased out due to concerns about bisphenol-A leaching from them.

The crew, towed first to San Nicolas Island before setting sail, encountered gale force winds Tuesday night. They plan to arrive in Hawaii in about six weeks.

The junk, floating on bottles meant to support 6 tons of weight, left Long Beach on Sunday.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)

Click on this image for a photo gallery showing what's within the major types of plastic.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

A growing body of scientific evidence makes plastics increasingly less attractive to "green" consumers. Hormone-altering substances seep from drinking bottles. Great plastic garbage patches swirl in the ocean. And plastic bits have been found to concentrate poisons at levels a million times higher than in the water. Many people don't even know that most plastic is made from petroleum.

But agriculture giants including Archer Daniels Midland and small companies such as Cereplast are baking plastic from corn, soy, potatoes, and tapioca. Start-ups are even exploring pig urine and carbon dioxide to make plastics. Bioplastics could make up 30 percent of the plastics market by 2030, according to Helmut Kaiser Consultancy.

Still, most plastics continue to be made from petroleum or natural gas, which, although increasingly expensive, remain cheaper than using plants.

Click here to see all of News.com's Earth Day 2008 stories, photo galleries, and more.

Fossil fuel plastics involve toxic chemicals to produce, can harm human health, pollute ecosystems, and are rarely recycled. Some people struggling to eliminate daily use of plastics find it nearly impossible.

However, codes marking many plastic products can help people figure out what's inside the bottle and what to do with it when it's spent, depending upon regional recycling rules.

To help recyclers, the plastics industry more than two decades ago started a labeling system that identifies seven major types of plastics by a numeric stamp on the bottoms of bottles. But what do the numbers mean?

I took a look at the seven categories in products from around my apartment. I retain a fair share of ecologically-damaging habits, but it hurt to make a trip to the store for polystyrene cups (No. 2) and root beer for the polyethylene six-pack rings (No. 4). The PET water bottle (No. 1) was mailed to me in a press package from a company that makes "green" products. However, while sometimes I splurge on bubbly bottled water, I try to use a stainless steel Klean Kanteen for flat water. (Ahem, the HDPE foot powder (No. 2) was left by a guest.) Check out the photo gallery for more.

Chinese authorities in January announced they would ban ultrathin plastic bags, and make customers pay for reusable canvas grocery bags, in an effort to reduce waste.

Are reusable shopping bags a thing of the future?

(Credit: Paper Nor Plastic)

A Beijing Review article quotes a Hangzhou supermarket manager on the old days, when shopping didn't produce billions of bags worth of waste that will biodegrade only after 200 years, if at all.

"When I was a child, my mother always took me to the vegetable market with a bamboo basket. She put a bowl in the basket for holding bean curd. When we bought sugar powder or salt, the sellers would wrap them with a piece of paper. I miss those days very much," Jin said.

The main purpose of promoting the (canvas) bags is to encourage the consumers to reuse the materials, he added. Some old living habits should not be thrown away, no matter how fast the economy has developed.

I would worry a little bit about my ability to move tofu in a bowl on my bike in Beijing, but I'm more or less onboard with the initiative. It's sometimes hard to convince cashiers that I'd like to put my food in the canvas bag with my books and computer. I've never thought of bringing an old jar when buying grains, but that wouldn't be a bad idea at all!

It took about two decades for the packaging creature known as the "oyster" or "clamshell" to conquer the world of consumer electronics. But the hard-to-open casings of plastic considered by many to be toxic could start to disappear soon, according to some experts in packaging and design.

Although clamshells remain widespread, a small but growing number of companies are housing products in packages that are not only easier to open, but manufactured more efficiently with recycled or recyclable ingredients.

Oyster packaging forms what may seem like a hermetic seal around a wide array of goods, including MP3 players, Webcams, USB drives, mice, headsets, software, printer cartridges, and batteries.

"Clamshell packaging is so over," said Wendy Jedlicka, a packaging designer. "We know it sucks. We're fixing that." Jedlicka belongs to the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a group that met last week in San Francisco that has grown to more than 300 member organizations in a few years.

More than a handful of packaging manufacturers have introduced eco-friendly alternatives to oysters within the past several years.

However, retailers have favored the rigid clamshell casings that deter shoplifters, are easy and cheap to ship and store, and offer a peek of the product inside.

The expansion of big-box stores, particularly bulk outlets that lack display cases, will drive demand for clamshells by 5.3 percent each year to $2.7 billion in sales within the next two years, according to the Freedonia Group, a market research firm. At that pace, more than 8 billion oyster packs will be produced by 2015.

However, growth could be hampered by corporations' sustainability efforts, along with spikes in petroleum prices, the firm added. Despite the energy-intensive process of spinning plastics from fossil fuels, traditional plastics still remain cheaper than those from recycled or plant-based materials.

Although greener alternatives to clamshells are a small niche in the packaging world, they may win favor with the public for reasons totally unrelated to their environmental footprint.

Clamshells can make products impossible to free with bare hands. Some attempts at grappling with knives and scissors have led to amputated fingertips and severed tendons. "The degree of injuries can be pretty severe, depending on the frustration of getting a package open," said Melissa Barton, an emergency room physician at Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit.

She sees at least one patient each week--more around Christmas--suffer cuts and worse, usually from box cutters and other tools used to puncture and pry open the packaging.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that there were some 6,500 emergency room visits related to plastic packaging in 2004.

Some packaging makers are creating resealable, snap-out, or perforated designs that could reduce the amount of wounds and cursing triggered by clamshells.

Despite those steps, environmental groups dislike the toxicity and waste of using virgin plastics for disposable purposes. Some people go to extremes to avoid plastic trimmings for everyday goods, but find few practical alternatives.

"Consumers are becoming much more sensitive to the environmental ramifications of excess packaging," said Tod Marks, a senior editor at Consumer Reports.

The magazine for two years published an "Oyster Awards" hall of shame for hard-to-open packaging. Last year's winner was an Oral-B electric toothbrush tucking clamshells into a tight plastic and cardboard shell.

There weren't enough changes in packaging to warrant awards for 2008, but Consumer Reports will focus on packaging sustainability later this year, Marks said.

Packaging accounts for nearly one-third of consumer garbage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And plastics comprise 12 percent of U.S. waste each year, but are rarely recycled, while some scientists fear that irresponsible dumping is making a plastic soup of the world's oceans.

The European Union attempts to regulate packaging design and waste. California's Rigid Plastic Packaging Container Law encourages the use of recycled plastics. Yet such rules are rare in the United States, where businesses rather than government are driving dramatic changes.

"We're aggressively attacking the clamshell market," said Jeff Kellogg, a vice president of MeadWestvaco. Its Natralock line of packaging features a pop-out, glue-free clear plastic display "blister" surrounded by paperboard of one-third recycled content. Plant-based plastics could also be used.

Compared with clamshells, Natralock packages cost up to 30 percent less and weigh half as much, which cuts shipping expenses, Kellogg added. They also require less energy to seal in a factory, and can run on traditional equipment.

Competing products include Rohrer's Eco-View Pak, a mix of chipboard with a plastic display bubble.

Winterborne's Enviroshell packaging mixes a recycled-plastic blister with cardboard of more than two-thirds recycled material and soy-based inks. The board and plastic aren't fused together, enabling both to be recycled.

Enviroshell packaged the Xbox 360 when it launched in Wal-Mart stores in 2005. Toshiba began using the packaging in 2006 for storage devices.

Wal-Mart's sustainability goals (PDF) include reducing the amount of packaging in its stores by 5 percent by 2013. Its Sam's Club outlets halved the amount of packaging for digital media in 2006.

Phasing out PVC
In the United States, those attempts would remove millions of pounds of landfill-bound trash as well as wasted energy and greenhouse gas pollution, the equivalent of taking 213,000 trucks off the road every year, according to Wal-Mart. To help meet a goal of becoming packaging neutral by 2025, Wal-Mart's packaging scorecard measures suppliers' sustainability.

The retailer is also one of many phasing out toxic PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, formerly the main material for oyster packaging. Its manufacture and disposal is believed to release cancer-linked chemicals, including dioxins.

Other brands shunning PVC include Target, Sears, Johnson & Johnson, and Bath & Body Works. Wal-Mart and Apple worked together to develop iPod packaging free of PVC. Microsoft discontinued PVC in software packaging in 2005 and has since stopped using clamshells in half of its packed products.

PET, the common replacement for PVC, is widely considered better but still ecologically harmful. Plastics from PET, or polyethylene terephthlate, are also commonly used for soda bottles, and are being recycled for use in electronics packaging.

Participation in the Sustainable Design Coalition by businesses across a swath of industries, including electronics, clothing, cosmetics, and food, proves that progress in packaging is accelerating, according to Scott Ballantine, a packaging engineer at Microsoft. He has driven the use of PET recycled from Coke and Pepsi bottles for use in packaging.

Ballantine said he imagines that producers might eventually institute take-back programs for packaging, such as those Dell and HP have instituted to collect used electronics and accessories.

"Maybe someday there will be an 'unpacking' station in the Costcos and Wal-Marts of the world where customers can remove the packaging and companies can collect the materials," he said.

Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton.

"We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic," said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. "There's no evidence it will end in a millennium."

Moore and his crew continue to study samples of plastic 'soup' from deep in the Pacific Ocean.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii. There, his crew had found in the water six parts of plastic for every part plankton, with a fivefold increase in the amount of plastic between 1997 and 2007.

But their latest voyage found the pollution even thicker in the "highway" of ocean leading to the great Garbage Patch, according to Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. Moore said that area comprises 2.5 million square miles.

In the Pacific alone, heavily polluted plastic zones amount to the size of the continent of Africa, Moore estimated.

Bobbing in the waters, especially closer to shore, are leftovers of everyday consumer products: plastic bags, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, bottles and their caps, toys, and fast food wrappers.

"We found a video camera case that was clean enough that you could put a video camera in it, but it was starting to get covered in barnacles," he said.

Eighty percent of garbage within waterways, most of it plastic, begins its journey on land rather than coming from boats, according to Algalita and the California Coastal Commission.

Toxic plastic kills wildlife, poisons seafood, and could even exacerbate global warming.

Stories abound of the bellies of birds and sea creatures stuffed with colorful plastic caps and wrappers mistaken for food.

On their latest trip, Moore's crew was shocked to find that plastic could be creating new habitats. Hungry gulls are traveling far from home into the ocean to feast upon barnacles and crabs attached to plastic debris.

Although there's no solid data about how much plastic birds and fish are eating, plastic in seafood is likely harmful for people to eat, as are better-understood toxic metals such as mercury. Plastic acts like a sponge for poisons such as PCBs, concentrating them at levels a million times higher than in seawater.

Plastic ingredients are linked with various cancers and reproductive problems. For instance, bisphenol A, found in water bottles, has shown in lab rats to disrupt hormones and is associated with obesity and diabetes.

Some scientists believe that those bobbing bits of polymer in the ocean could contribute to global warming by creating a shaded canopy that makes it harder for plankton to grow.

Pelagic crabs attached to plastic, like this laundry basket pulled from the ocean, attract hungry birds.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The deeper Moore's crew traveled into the Garbage Patch, the harder it became to tell what the plastics used to be. That's because the material breaks down into dusty bits. The plastic "soup" is visible up close but not from the air, making its scale difficult to measure with satellite or aerial imagery, he said.

"Day after day, sitting on the bow of that ship, seeing confetti on the surface of ocean, you really become appalled," Moore said.

He gets e-mails nearly every day from companies proposing plastic cleanup methods for the oceans, but none seem feasible by a long shot, he said.

"They want to have navies trawling the ocean, but the ocean's average depth is 2 miles. First you've got to prove you can sift the Sahara Desert."

And Moore is cautious about plans from start-ups such as Climos, which is seeking to seed the ocean with plankton, because there's no proof the algae they'd grow would be safe.

Because Moore sees no way to eliminate the plastic pollution, he urges consumers to change their habits to keep plastic out of waterways. And he wants plastics that can't be recycled not to be produced in the first place.

He and other activists hope for the government to accelerate research into alternatives, perhaps even subsidizing the makers of bioplastics, while building a better recycling infrastructure.

Only about 3 percent of plastics are recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And of those that are recycled, most appear to be sent abroad because there are relatively few plastics recycling centers in the United States.

Moore is suspicious, however, of new, 'green' plastics that haven't been studied in-depth and whose labels don't show how long they would take to break down in water as opposed to a compost heap.