Biomass

With Earth Day upon us again, CNET News.com green reporters sat down and selected five leading companies in five different clean technology categories. Here are the ones to watch in the recycling realm:

1. GreenFuel Technologies: Large oil companies and many academics favor capturing carbon dioxide, turning it into a liquid, and storing it underground. Politically, though, that's a tough sell.

GreenFuel, with a pedigree from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and millions in venture funding, wants to feed captured carbon dioxide to algae, and then turn the algae into biofuel. The company is still fine-tuning … Read more

Want to green your life in honor of Earth Day on Tuesday? Good luck. There's seemingly no limit to the potential catch-22s of trying to do the right thing by the environment.

For example, could so-called green fuel destroy rainforests and drive up food prices? Are organic vegetables shipped from South America really better than those grown conventionally yet closer to home? What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Consumers are far removed from the design, mining, manufacture, packaging, and transportation involved in making goods available for daily life, while a complex global … Read more

It looks good on paper. Combine the managerial expertise of the computer world's start-ups with the growing market for green energy.

But, as Larry Gross as discovered, it doesn't always work. Gross, brother of Bill Gross and a former entrepreneur at Idealabs, is no longer the CEO of AltraBiofuels, according to Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech. The 4-year-old AltraBiofuels has pulled in millions in venture funds.

So far, there's no explanation for the departure.

Gross, though, isn't the only former IT exec to also be a former energy exec. Late last year, Martin Tobias, a software VC … Read more

What's causing the global rise in food prices? Everything.

Growing demand for food in emerging nations, wheat crop failures, currency fluctuation, speculation in the commodities market, hastily conceived government policies, and the growing demand for biofuels have all--among other factors--converged to drive up the price of food, experts say.

"Those who say it's all the fault of biofuels are wrong and those that say that none of the fault belongs to biofuels are wrong," said Walter Falcon, a professor emeritus of international agricultural policy at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Sciences … Read more

AqWise, which builds condominiums for bacteria, has raised an additional $3.6 million in funding. The founder, though, is toiling in a new venture.

The company, with which we spoke during a swing through Israel in 2006 (just in time for the outbreak of border hostilities), has created an intricate polymer cylinder that, when placed in wastewater treatment ponds, clusters microbes that consume contaminants. The water can then be safely discarded or used to irrigate fields.

The trick is that the honeycombed cylinder sports a huge amount of surface area for microbes to grow. The greater amount of surface area … Read more

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."

A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific … Read more

San Francisco may have shaken some flowers from its hair since hosting the first Earth Day 38 years ago, but the city continues to be named one of America's greenest. Satirists mock its politically correct "smug cloud" of eco-hipness, but many other regions tend to follow the city's environmental lead. For instance, more than a handful of U.S. cities are now mulling a ban on plastic grocery bags, first passed in San Francisco last March.

Fresh into his second term, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson in January set goals for the city to become carbon-neutral … Read more

The renewable energy industry hits the fan Tuesday in California.

Pacific Gas & Electric and BioEnergy Solutions plans to open a pipeline Tuesday that will deliver methane to the utility from a manure-to-gas facility at a Fresno-area farm. Some farms in California, such as cheese maker Joseph Gallo Farms, and a number in Europe already generate gas from manure, but they also consume it to run their operations. This marks the first time that manure-generated gas will get sold across pipelines in the state.

BioEnergy Solutions owns and operates the digester (the thing that converts the manure into gas), which … Read more

Most owners of the 13 million recreational boats in the United States dump their waste in the water, fouling fish and coral reefs with sewage and fuel, according to Klean Marine. The start-up plans to help boaters clean up their act.

Its founders aim to launch a service that would clean sailboats, motorboats, and yachts in ports of harbor around the country. Klean Marine would thus be able to serve, say, traveling snowbirds whether they're docked in Chicago in July or Miami in December. An annual subscription would start at $250.

Company president Kean Fulton, presenting Tuesday at the … Read more