The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Climate CoLab is currently running a series of contests where people all over the world can work with experts and each other to develop climate change solutions.

The waste management contest is now open. We are seeking practical proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from waste and waste management that can be rapidly implemented, scaled-up and/or replicated. We especially encourage proposals that address national (e.g. Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or National Adaptation Plans) and/or sub-national strategies to address the challenges of climate change and aim to help countries, states, and communities implement those strategies.

The Judges’ and Popular Choice Winners will be invited to MIT to present their proposal, enter the Climate CoLab Winners Program and be eligible for the $10,000 Grand Prize. All award winners will receive wide recognition and visibility by the MIT Climate CoLab. See last year’s conference. Entries are due May 23, 2016. Early submissions welcome — entries can be edited until the contest deadline.

Even if you don’t have new ideas yourself, you can help improve other people’s ideas and support the ones you find most promising. Visit the CoLab to learn more.

While we may have a good understanding of battery application and potential, we still lack a great deal of knowledge about what is actually happening inside a battery cell during cycles. In an effort to build a better battery, ECS members from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have made a novel development to improve battery performance testing.

Future of energy

The team’s work focuses on the design and placement of the reference electrode (RE), which measure voltage of the individual electrodes making up a battery cell, to enhance the quality of information collected from lithium-ion battery cells during cycles. By improving our knowledge of what’s happening inside the battery, researchers will more easily be able to develop longer-lasting batteries.

“Such information is critical, especially when developing batteries for larger-scale applications, such as electric vehicles, that have far greater energy density and longevity requirements than typical batteries in cell phones and laptop computers,” said Daniel Abraham, ECS member and co-author of the newly published study in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “This kind of detailed information provides insight into a battery cell’s health; it’s the type of information that researchers need to evaluate battery materials at all stages of their development.”

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Rooftops can provide more than shelter from the elements; they may also provide a goldmine of untapped energy production.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently issued a report stating that rooftop solar panels have the potential to power nearly 40 percent of the U.S.

“It is important to note that this report only estimates the potential from existing, suitable rooftops, and does not consider the immense potential of ground-mounted PV,” co-author of the report Robert Margolis said. “Actual generation from PV in urban areas could exceed these estimates by installing systems on less suitable roof space, by mounting PV on canopies over open spaces such as parking lots, or by integrating PV into building facades. Further, the results are sensitive to assumptions about module performance, which are expected to continue to improve over time.”

Essentially, solar panels could have limitless possibles. However, land is a precious commodity. Roofs, however, provide a space that typically goes unused to generate a huge amount of power for the U.S.

People across the globe are looking toward renewable solutions to change the landscape of energy. But what happens when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing? In order to guarantee green energy that is consistent, reliable energy storage systems are critical.

“Currently, single systems of photovoltaic cells which are connected together — mostly lead-based batteries and vast amounts of cable — are in use,” said Ilie Hanzu, TU Graz professor and past member of ECS. “We want to make a battery and solar cell hybrid out of two single systems which is not only able to convert electrical energy, but also store it.”

The idea of a battery and solar cell hybrid is completely novel scientific territory. With this project, entitled SolaBat, the team hopes to develop a product that has commercial applications. For this, the scientists will have to develop the perfect combination of functional materials.

“In the hybrid system, high-performance materials share their tasks in the solar cell and in the battery,” Hanzu said. “We need materials that reliably fulfill their respective tasks and that are also electrochemically compatible with other materials so that they work together in one device.”

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In an effort to move away from fossil fuels toward a renewable future, researchers have invested time and resources into developing hydrogen fuel. The most efficient way to create this sustainable fuel has been through water-splitting, but the process is not perfect. Now, researchers from MIT, the Skoltech Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas at Austin believe they may have made a breakthrough that could lead to the widespread adoption of water-splitting to produce hydrogen fuel.

The key discovery in the paper published in Nature Communications is the mobilization of oxygen atoms from the crystal surface of perovskite-oxide electrodes to participate in the formation of oxygen gas, which can speed up water-splitting reactions.

The breakthrough could be a crucial step in helping the energy infrastructure efficiently move away from traditional energy sources to renewables.

“The generation of oxygen from water remains a significant bottleneck in the development of water electrolyzers and also in the development of fuel cell and metal-air battery technologies,” said J. Tyler Mefford, current ECS member and lead author of the study.

But the new results didn’t come out of the woodwork. The data illustrates collaborative work across experimental and theoretical fields. The new work essentially explains over 40 years of theory and experiments, looking at why some approaches worked and others failed.

“If we could develop catalysts made with Earth-abundant materials that could reversibly and efficiently electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, we could have affordable hydrogen generation from renewables — and with that, the possibility of electric cars that run on water with ranges similar to gas powered cars,” Mefford said.

Access to clean drinking water is something many take for granted. Crises like that of Flint, MI illuminate the fragility of our water infrastructure and how quickly access can be taken away. Even now, hundreds of millions of people around the world still lack access to adequate water.

Gaining access

But it’s not all negative. In the past 25 years, 2.6 billion people worldwide gained access to clean drinking water. This initiative stemmed from part of the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 1990, attempting to cut the number of global citizens without access to clean drinking water in half. While this goal was achieved in 2010, there are still about 663 million without proper water and sanitation.

(MORE: Check out powerful images from the Water Front project.)

The divide

So who doesn’t have clean drinking water? Overall, urban areas tend to have greater access due to improved water infrastructure systems set in place. Access in rural areas has improved over the years, but people in these areas are still hit the hardest.

The major divide is most visible when analyzing the numbers by regions. Africa, China, and India are among the hardest hit, making up the majority of the 663 million citizens without access to water.

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It doesn’t matter how green you thumb is, there will always be fruits and vegetables in your garden that just don’t quite make it. The same concept goes for commercial farms, where farmers accumulate tons of fruit and vegetable waste every year.

In fact, the state of Florida alone produces an estimated 369,000 tons of waste from tomatoes each year. But what if you could turn that waste into electricity?

That’s exactly what one team comprised of researchers from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, Princeton University, and Florida Gulf Coast University are doing.

In order to produce the electricity, the team developed a microbial electrochemical cell that can use tomato waste to generate electric current.

“We have found that spoiled and damaged tomatoes left over from harvest can be a particularly powerful source of energy when used in a biological or microbial electrochemical cell,” says Namita Shrestha, a graduate student working on the project.

This from Tree Hugger:

The bacteria in the fuel cell trigger an oxidation process that releases electrons which are captured by the fuel cell and become a source of electricity. The tomatoes have proven to be a potent energy source. The natural lycopene in the tomatoes acts as a mediator to encourage electricity generation and the researchers say that while waste material usually performs poorly compared to pure chemicals in fuel cells, the waste tomatoes perform just as well or better.

Read the full article.

While their first trial resulted in just 0.3 watts of electricity per 10 milligrams of tomato waste, the researchers believe that more trials will result in improved electricity generation.

When we think of carbon and the environment, our minds often develop a negative association between the two in light of things such as greenhouse gases and climate change. But what if carbon is the answer to clean energy?

A team of researchers at Griffith University is looking toward carbon to lead the way in the clean energy revolution. Their latest research showed that carbon could be used to produce hydrogen from water. This could offer a potential replacement for the costly platinum materials currently used.

“Hydrogen production through an electrochemical process is at the heart of key renewable energy technologies including water splitting and hydrogen fuel cells,” says Professor Xiangdong Yao, leader of the research group. “We have now developed this carbon-based catalyst, which only contains a very small amount of nickel and can completely replace the platinum for efficient and cost-effective hydrogen production from water.”

(MORE: Learn about the future of electrochemical energy.)

This from Griffith University:

Proponents of a hydrogen economy advocate hydrogen as a potential fuel for motive power including cars and boats and on-board auxiliary power, stationary power generation (e.g., for the energy needs of buildings), and as an energy storage medium (e.g., for interconversion from excess electric power generated off-peak).

Read the full article.

The researchers also believe that these findings could open the door for new development in large-scale water electrolysis.

Upcycling has become a huge trend in recent years. People are reusing and repurposing items that most wouldn’t give a second glance, transforming them into completely new, high-quality products. So what if we could take that same concept and apply it to the greenhouse gas emissions in the environment that are accelerating climate change?

An interdisciplinary team from UCLA is taking a shot at upcycling carbon dioxide by converting it into a new building material named CO₂NCRETE, which could be fabricated by 3D printers.

“What this technology does is take something that we have viewed as a nuisance – carbon dioxide that’s emitted from smokestacks – and turn it into something valuable,” says J.R. DeShazo, senior member of the research team.

The fact that the team is attempting to produce a concrete-like material is also important. Currently, the extraction and preparation of building materials like concrete is responsible for 5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The upcycling of carbon could cut that number drastically all while reducing the enormous emissions being released from power plants (30 percent of the world’s emissions).

“We can demonstrate a process where we take lime and combine it with carbon dioxide to produce a cement-like material,” says Gaurav Sant, lead scientific contributor. “The big challenge we foresee with this is we’re not just trying to develop a building material. We’re trying to develop a process solution, an integrated technology which goes right from CO₂ to a finished product.”

When the loaves in your breadbox begin to develop a moldy exterior caused by fungi, they tend to find a new home at the bottom of a trash can. However, researchers have recently developed some pretty interesting results that suggest bread mold could be the key to producing more sustainable electrochemical materials for use in rechargeable batteries.

For the first time, researchers were able to show that the fungus Neurospora crassa (better known as the enemy to bread) can transform manganese into mineral composites with promising electrochemical properties.

(MORE: Read the full paper.)

“We have made electrochemically active materials using a fungal manganese biomineralization process,” says Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee in Scotland. “The electrochemical properties of the carbonized fungal biomass-mineral composite were tested in a supercapacitor and a lithium-ion battery, and it [the composite] was found to have excellent electrochemical properties. This system therefore suggests a novel biotechnological method for the preparation of sustainable electrochemical materials.”

This from University of Dundee:

In the new study, Gadd and his colleagues incubated N. crassa in media amended with urea and manganese chloride (MnCl2) and watched what happened. The researchers found that the long branching fungal filaments (or hyphae) became biomineralized and/or enveloped by minerals in various formations. After heat treatment, they were left with a mixture of carbonized biomass and manganese oxides. Further study of those structures show that they have ideal electrochemical properties for use in supercapacitors or lithium-ion batteries.

Read the full article here.

The manganese oxides in the lithium-ion batteries are showing an excellent cycling stability and more than 90 percent capacity after 200 cycles.