Food and drink

A new sugar-based polymer could be used to make common food containers compostable at home right alongside your potato peels and egg shells.

A team of engineers and scientists at the Imperial College London led by Charlotte Williams in partnership with BioCeramic Therapeutics have created a degradable material from sugars derived from the breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass.

Williams noted in the group's announcement that while they're not the first to come up with a "biorenewable plastic," many of those have previously been made from sugar beet- or corn-based biomass.

It's a fairly accurate estimate.

In … Read more

The Minnesota Twins' new stadium will include a rain-water recycling system, the baseball team said Tuesday.

The system was custom designed for Target Field by Minnesota-based Pentair, a tech company that specializes in part on water treatment and storage. Pentair's system will capture, filter, and purify rainwater for reuse at the stadium.

Specifically, the system will collect and purify rainwater from throughout the ballpark's seven acres, including the stands, and store it in a cistern buried deep in the ground under the outfield. That so-called gray water will then be used to wash down the stands and irrigate … Read more

Jackson Family Wines, known for its Kendall-Jackson label, has developed a process to reduce winery water usage by 70 percent.

The majority of water consumed in wineries typically goes toward rinsing wine barrels, tanks, and equipment.

A new system developed by Jackson Family Wines recycles and filters the hot water used for rinsing, losing only about 10 percent of that water in the process, the company said Tuesday. The system also retains 75 percent of the water's heat. As a result, the process also saves energy.

The company developed and tested the process in conjunction with the University of … Read more

Renew Blue's Seadog pump, which uses wave and tidal power to produce electricity and can be harnessed for desalination, is about to be put to the commercial test off the coast of Texas.

Earlier this month, Renew Blue, a subsidiary of the Minneapolis-based Independent Natural Resources, was granted the first-ever state off-shore wave energy lease from the Texas General Land Office. On Thursday, Renew Blue announced that it has licensed its technology to Texas Natural Resources and that they will partner to develop an off-shore facility for 18 Seadog pumps that will both produce power and desalinate seawater for … Read more

It's hard to ignore the incessant messages to buy local, plant a garden, check for organic labels, and lead a sustainable lifestyle, yet most of us dismiss these suggestions as practices that require too much money, time, and effort.

And it's true--they really do.

Last summer I went through a green phase, heading to the plant store to purchase soil, seeds, shovels, pots, and everything else that Martha Stewart suggests I buy. Well, $120 and two weeks later, I had forgotten I'd even planted a garden and deemed my project a failure.

Thankfully, there is hope for … Read more

It's been criticized for contributing to the obesity epidemic and condemned by PETA, but now a Burger King franchise in the New York metro area has announced that it wants in on the green movement. The high-traffic restaurant in Hillside, N.J., will install a speed bump designed to harness the kinetic energy produced by the hundreds of cars that pass through the drive-thru daily.

As they wait for their Double Whopper, customers will roll through a section of the drive-thru lane lined with metal plates that move down and up as cars head to the next window. The … Read more

It looks so simple, and that's the key innovation.

The Kyoto Box consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other. The inner box is painted black to absorb sunlight, and the heat is trapped with a transparent acrylic lid. Captured solar energy heats up the air in the box enough to boil food and water and bake, but the stove is not powerful enough to fry food.

The invention received the $75,000 FT Climate Change Challenge award last week. The competition, run by Forum for the Future with The Financial Times and Hewlett-Packard, had nearly 300 entries, which were judged on their contribution to tackling climate change.

"It feels good. It was the only finalist that was a solution for developing countries," Kyoto Energy CEO Jan Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya, told CNET News during a call on a crackling phone line from Nairobi.

The invention was inspired by the 240-year-old "hot box," a heat catcher by Swiss inventor Horace de Sausseur, and it could solve problems plaguing rural areas of developing countries.

Deforestation is a huge problem in Africa, note the inventors of the Kyoto Box, who hope the stove could halve firewood use, saving trees and preventing carbon emissions. The Kyoto Box is targeted at people who currently use firewood, a fuel that takes the rural poor hours of hard labor per day to collect, and can cause health problems when the fumes from the often primitive stoves are breathed in the home. … Read more

Desalination start-up Oasys Water is banking on the fact that water will shortly be the new oil.

Flagship Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson seem to agree as the three invested a total of $10 million in Series A funding, according to a Wednesday announcement from Oasys Water.

Oasys (Osmotic Application Systems) Water, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company formed from a Yale University research project and seed money from GreatPoint Ventures, employs patented water treatment technology called Engineered Osmosis (EO).

The system was developed by Rob McGinnis, Oasys chief technology officer, while he was under Menachem Elimelech, the … Read more

Did you know there's some leeway on when a refrigerator must run its automatic defrost cycle?

Well, apparently, there is, and it could help ease the stress on local energy grids during peak hours, according to GE Consumer & Industrial.

Currently, GE refrigerators' automatic defrost modes are prompted by factors like door openings. But, the company says, it could build refrigerators that delay that cycle until a local electrical grid signals it's a good off-peak time to suck down more electricity.

Refrigerators are not the only appliances that could be programmed to wait for convenient times to run. … Read more