Green Tech

Tiny bits of toner wafting from laser printers can't be blamed for polluting indoor air, according to research released this week.

In 2007, a study from Queensland University of Technology in Australia suggested that breathing toner particles from printers could hurt the lungs as much cigarette smoke.

Researchers examined laser printer emissions in an enclosed area.

(Credit: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft)

But researchers from that school and the Fraunhofer Wilhelm Klauditz Institute in Germany have found no evidence to support that claim, after examining the makeup of chemicals released from laser printers.

They determined that such airborne materials include paraffins and silicon oils that evaporate when a printer's fixing unit, which attaches dry toner ink to paper, reaches temperatures as high as 428 degrees Fahrenheit.

"One essential property of these ultra-fine particles is their volatility, which indicates that we are not looking at toner dust," said Tunga Salthammer, a professor who worked on the study, in a statement.

The study did not describe how breathing in the ultra-fine chemicals could affect human health. However, volatile organic compounds are a major source of pollution indoors, where they are found in the air at levels up to 10 times higher than outdoors, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The nonprofit GreenGuard Environmental Institute offers a directory of electronics that emit relatively few of such chemicals, but that does not include printers. Last year's Australian study identified printer models with the highest emissions.

Add-on filters would do little to prevent printer emissions, according to researchers participating in the latest study, who noted that volatile organic substances are also released into the air from other household activities, such as toasting bread and cooking.

Printer makers belonging to the German Association for Information Technology partly funded the research.

German lawmakers plan to talk about the potential for laser printers to cause health problems at a meeting in January , according to Heise Online.

(Credit: Virgin America)

Virgin America announced Thursday it will offer customers the option to pay a voluntary fee when booking their ticket, which will go toward supporting carbon offset projects.

The U.S. domestic airline based in California, of which Richard Branson's Virgin Group is a minority share investor, has partnered with Carbonfund.org on the effort.

Through Carbonfund.org, the money Virgin America collects from consumers will be directed toward projects sanctioned by the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF) official CarbonOffsetList.org.

One of the projects from that list that Virgin America chose to support, for example, is IdleAire.

IdleAire lets truckers connect their cabins to electricity sources at rest stops, rather than keep their engines idling to keep their power on. The process saves each trucker about a gallon of diesel per hour, according to Virgin America.

While IdleAire sounds like a practical project, it's questionable whether consumers will go for it.

Many other airlines have tried offering carbon offsets with lackluster results. Virgin Atlantic, admitting its online option wasn't getting many takers, announced last year it would try guilt by offering an offset in the air alongside the drinks.

Consumers could get nitpicky about each individual project. Donating to IdleAire sounds fine, but where is that electricity the truckers' tap into coming from? Is the local electricity being used generated from a renewable resource or coal?

There's also the world food shortage, and many poverty and disease-fighting nonprofits struggling from a lack of available charity due to the tough economy. Consumers might place environmental causes at the bottom of their charity list if they themselves are limited to what they can give this year.

Then, again, it's been argued that some water and food shortages can be directly linked to environmental changes in those problem areas. Will consumers feel there's a long view to be seen and donate toward offsetting pollution with that hope of improving things down the road?

Perhaps more promising is the second tact Virgin American plans to take.

While it's not in place yet, the airline plans to offer an onboard option. Through the touch-screen televisions on their flights, consumers will have a second chance to donate once their flight is already in the air.

Will a view of the clouds (and the occasional smog ruining skyline views) shame the guilty into donating? I'm just not sure.

After all, with Virgin America's new Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service, consumers could just as easily donate online to another cause if they're feeling charitable while airborne.

When 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew went to China to record the black market dismantling of electronic waste, or e-waste, the experience was almost as hazardous for the 60 Minutes team as working with the toxic material is for poor Chinese workers.

Jumped by a gang of men overseeing the e-waste operations who tried to take the CBS team's cameras, Pelley's crew managed to escape and bring back footage of the hazardous activities. Pelley's investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

The Chinese attackers were trying to protect a lucrative business of mining the e-waste -- junked computers, televisions and other old electronic products -- for valuable components, including gold. "They're afraid of being found out. This is smuggling. This is illegal," says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in poor countries that certifies ethical e-waste recyclers in the United States. "A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they're afraid this is all going to dry up."

E-waste workers in Guiyu, China, where Pelley's team videotaped, put up with the dangerous conditions for the $8 a day the job pays. They use caustic chemicals and burn the plastic parts to get at the valuable components, often releasing toxins that they not only inhale, but release into the air, the ground and the water. Potable water must now be trucked into Guiyu and scientists have discovered that the city has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies in Guiyu are six times more likely to result in miscarriages, and seven out of 10 children there have too much lead in their blood.

In a rare independent study of China's energy sector, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the problem with China's coal power generation is not that its power plants lack cleaner technology.

The emissions are definitely higher than they could be, the report found, but the culprit is usually low-quality coal rather than low-tech plants. As an MIT statement explains:

Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade anthracite comes mostly from China's northwest and must travel long distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost.

The researchers gathered their own data instead of relying on Chinese government statistics, which can be unreliable. This may not sound like a big deal, but even large international organizations often, or even primarily, depend on government numbers.

"The kinds of technology currently being adopted in China are not cheap," lead researcher Edward S. Steinfeld said in the statement. "They're not buying junk, and in some cases, the plants are employing state-of-the-art technology."

There could be room for improvement in technology, however. A pilot power plant capable of using carbon-capture technology opened in China in July, and widespread efforts on energy continue. But this MIT report underlines the challenge of cleaning up power generation when the fuel is dirtier than usual.

The full report is available in PDF.

A sampling of green-tech news with quick commentary.

• Is first eInk magazine an e-waste misstep? - Fast Company
  Esquire's experimental eInk issue will make an ecological mess, according to a Fast Company calculation, which says producing the magazine would lead to electronics waste and emit as much carbon dioxide as 15 Hummers over a year.

• Tying wind power to power lines - Greentech Media
  Wind energy can be cheaper than solar, but tying it to the grid remains a costly challenge. Still, some investors see the problem as an opportunity to profit.


Electronic ink is engineered to make thin, flexible digital displays, potentially replacing paper publications and devices such as this Amazon Kindle.
(Credit: Amazon)

• Manure could provide as much energy as renewables - Earth2Tech
  Converting manure to biogas could provide some 3 percent of the nation's need for electricity, about the same provided currently by renewables including wind and solar, according to Texas researchers.

• Oil could make Arctic rich, Texas-style - The Independent
  Deep in the heart of the Arctic may lie one-fifth of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas, enough to feed America's appetite for oil for a dozen years. But exploiting the oil comes with a price.

• GE teams up with Abu Dhabi on clean tech - Cleantech Group
  GE will pour $50 million into Abu Dhabi's clean-tech efforts, which include a research center for the $22 billion, zero-waste Masdar City.

• 'Hot' granite countertops leak radiation - The New York Times
  Some granite kitchen countertops emit uranium and radon. Although the cancer risk from them may be one in a million, a new crop of lawsuits may follow.

• Greening health care, one thermometer at a time - Washington Post
  Hospitals are aiming to improve energy efficiency and reduce toxic waste, by eliminating potentially harmful plastics from IV bags and mercury from thermometers.

A chemical used to make LCD televisions and semiconductors could cause more global warming than coal-fired power plants, a report warns.

Nitrogen trifluoride is a "missing greenhouse gas," according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on June 26. It's used in chemical vapor deposition, which makes liquid crystal displays, semiconductors, and synthetic diamond.

Production of the chemical could double to 8,000 metric tons in 2009, atmospheric chemist Michael Prather, who co-wrote the report, told New Scientist.

Nitrogen trifluoride's globe-warming effect reportedly could be 17,000 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide.

However, the picture is incomplete because nitrogen trifluoride isn't among the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol international climate change agreement.

This year alone, its production would release the equivalent of the global-warming emissions from Austria, totaling some 67 million metric tons, New Scientist noted.

And that would amount to more global-warming pollution than all the industrialized world's emissions of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and of sulfur hexafluoride, which is considered more potent.

Kyoto's terms left out nitrogen trifluoride and some dozen other gases, in part because they weren't produced at a scale large enough to cause significant harm.

Some companies had turned to the man-made chemical initially to reduce pollution.

The market for flat-screen televisions, including LCDs, is expected to boom with the United States' full transition to digital television next February.

Along with it, watchdog groups warn that additional ecological harm could come, if toxic electronics waste isn't disposed of properly. Americans are expected to discard 80 million analog TVs by the end of 2009.

However, LCD televisions are often painted as eco-friendly because they consume less power than plasma and older rear-projection sets.

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.)

Smoke cigars, do a partial load of laundry, drink bottled water, and feel no shame. That's what a campaign against a carbon trading bill is urging.

The latest parody of the proliferation of "green" social-networking sites and eco-friendly events comes via "Carbon Belch Day," a campaign from the conservative Grassfire.org alliance that encourages people to pollute as much as possible on June 12.

This carbon calculator encourages ecologically uncouth behavior.

(Credit: Grassfire.org)

So far, more than 140,000 people have signed a petition against "climate alarmism," according to Ron De Jong, spokesman for Grassfire.org. If the effort attracts half a million people, it would lead to the release of 105 million pounds of carbon a week from this Thursday.

The effort is strong on shock value, yet weak on social networking and Web 2.0 tools, other than its "belch" calculator. There are no real-world events planned, so expect no sea of SUVs clogging freeways, other than the usual weekday bottlenecks.

The point, instead, is a political campaign to get people to oppose the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would establish a corporate carbon cap-and-trade system, but is already threatened by a promised White House veto.

"Somehow, this bogus idea of environmental indulgences has become accepted as a real and valid way to deal with our carbon guilt," De Jong wrote in an e-mail.

Other popular Grassfire petitions include "Secure our borders" and "Save marriage." Group founder Steve Elliott holds a master's degree in public policy from Regent University, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, which counts many graduates in prominent government positions in Washington, D.C.

The campaign may be a crude attention-getting ploy to which I can be accused of pandering. But its effort seems doomed, swimming against the mainstream tide. Conventional wisdom has shifted to embrace global warming as a near scientific certainty, and, like it or not, popular culture celebrates all things "green."

Even if Lieberman-Warner flops, many experts in the clean-tech sector anticipate a boost as carbon markets expand in the United States, perhaps following the European model, especially as a new administration takes the helm in Washington. Attendees of clean-technology conferences regularly mention the coming carbon markets with the same certainty used to describe melting ice caps.

As carbon trading scales up, however, the next challenge will come as the public grapples with an abstract subject and demands accountability. Personal carbon footprint calculators and offsetting services are hard enough to navigate.

And motivation aside, the "belch" campaign shares a point with which many environmentalists would agree: that promoting fear of climate change could be counterproductive.

Remember the tagline of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? It was supposed to be "The most terrifying movie you'll ever see." A Time magazine cover last spring warned, "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid."

Apocalyptic headlines and images of drowning polar bears sell, but they make people less motivated to "green" their daily habits, according to Michael Shellenberger, author and co-founder of the progressive Breakthrough Institute.

A study commissioned in 2000 by CNN founder Ted Turner found that the more people learned of the dire consequences of global warming, the less they felt they could do anything about it.

"And people were more likely to say they would buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come rather than support increased CAFE standards," Shellenberger noted at a conference earlier in May.

Most Americans live and work in buildings awash in chemicals blamed for asthma, lung cancer, and a host of other maladies.

The best way to clean the air could be with a green thumb, according to Bill Wolverton, a former NASA environmental scientist who has spent more than 30 years studying how plants purify the air. The results of his research could come to market this fall as a household air filter that looks like a potted plant.

A U.S. version of the EcoPlanter, sold in Japan, is being produced. It's supposed to provide the air-purifying power of more than 100 potted plants.

(Credit: Bill Wolverton)

"Every chemical we tested, plants could take them out," said Wolverton, who originally worked on life support systems for the moon and Mars.

Plants absorb and convert airborne poisons to energy and food. At the roots, ever-adapting microbes munch on toxicants.

Wolverton worked to enhance those processes and has licensed his technology to Phytofilter Technologies, an upstate New York state startup. It's creating potted plant air filters to sell for several hundred dollars each later this year.

The device has a fan at the base of a plant pot, drawing and trapping toxins near the roots, where hungry microorganisms dwell. A version has been sold in Japan for seven years as the EcoPlanter, which includes a mold-killing ultraviolet light.

The self-cleaning filter is supposed to pack the purifying power of more than 100 plants and destroy poisons that are only trapped by carbon, zeolite, and high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters.

Phytofilter founder Martin Mittelmark also developed a plant-based filtration system for a building at Syracuse University this spring, backed by funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.

In recent years, air quality tests by the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, found that levels of toxins in offices shrank by 75 percent with the presence of only six plants per room.

Wolverton thinks his technology on a larger scale could clean the exhaust from power plants by trapping air pollution in water, then feeding it through a closed system of marshes. A similar tactic taken by small towns in Mississippi turns sewage into fertilizer by diverting it through marshes. But Wolverton sees more interest coming from developing nations including China and India.

"Universities in the U.S. are geared up to use mechanical means to clean up the environment, and when you mention plants to some of these engineers, that's sissy to them," he said.

For now, Wolverton plans to give away plant filters to residents of formaldehyde-polluted trailers in areas still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. The technology cut formaldehyde levels by one-sixth in trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in tests he explored with the Sierra Club.

Common building products and furniture are also laced with formaldehyde and toxins including flame retardants. And scientists increasingly link chemicals in consumer electronics to myriad health woes.

Plants can offset indoor air pollution from industrial chemicals in consumer electronics, buildings and furniture. Could they clean up coal power plants too?

(Credit: Good Magazine)

Emissions from laser printers can be worse for the lungs than cigarette smoke, according to an Australian study released in August. Toxic flame retardants float from TV sets and desktop PCs within household dust.

The World Health Organization blames bad indoor air for nearly 3 percent of diseases. Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors, where air is more polluted than outside and can contain more than 900 volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, according to the EPA.

"The newer, more energy efficient buildings are sealed tighter and create more of a problem because chemicals offgas from practically everything in them," Wolverton said.

"Green" buildings might use paints and varnishes without VOCs, which don't release headache-inducing fumes. But standards for green buildings too often overlook the use of plants, Wolverton said. "You need plants to act as lungs in buildings."

Several plants in a 200-square-foot space will improve the air in most rooms, according to Wolverton, who recommends potting in inert pebbles or clay mix rather than soil, in which mold can grow.

A well-drawn guide to household plants that absorb formaldehyde, benzene, and trichloroethylene comes from graphic artists at Good Magazine, who used Wolverton's research.

Based upon chemicals in common consumer products, for instance, a peace lily might be ideal for a laundry room, and a new couch could be flanked by bamboo palms. Among the plants researchers found to have potent air-purifying qualities are the Eureka palm, lady palm, peace lily, and rubber plant.

However, people with curious cats or dogs might beware of lilies, poinsettas, and other plants that may poison them. The Pet Friendly House lists plants that won't hurt pets who chew on their leaves.