Inventions, Solutions, Possibilities and Perspectives

As the newest scientific data worsens the environmental prognosis for our planet, the pressure is building for us to find a sustainable way of living here. So far, no revolutionary breakthroughs are promising the comprehensive cures we need to meet our climbing energy demands, to curb our rising levels of pollution, and to satisfy the lifestyle expectations of a soaring human population.

Perspective should remind us that we are in the very early stages of a serious examination and renovation of a technological culture that is bringing us such a rich and contradictory parcel of comforts and dangers. But the environmental challenges we face are now recognized as so fundamental and pervasive that they also invite us to re-evaluate ourselves. We are just beginning these difficult and complicated tasks.

Not only do we each have the individual responsibility of reviewing our personal behaviour, we also have the collective challenge of shifting the incredible complexity of our whole economic system toward a sustainable relationship with the emerging reality of limits. Profligate waste and ecological indifference need to be replaced by new efficiency and greater environmental awareness.

We now have a glimpse of what this shift must accomplish but we don't yet know how to do it without compromising our lifestyles of plenty. We want a cure without costs. Like the proverbial monkey with its hand caught in the narrow hole of the baited trap, we don't want to let go of the fruit so we can escape to freedom.

But we have started to renovate ourselves. And as we do so, we are also releasing the innovative ingenuity of our technological inventiveness. Presently, these corrective ideas are arriving in unedited hoards. Some have hints of promise although they may currently be impractical; others are immediately helpful. Collectively, they suggest that our best option is a diversity of solutions, each of which will move us toward the monumental shift we must eventually make. Although no single idea will be a comprehensive cure, employing many will have a huge impact. Here is a sample:

• Methane escaping from our landfill sites not only causes global warming — more than 20 times an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide — but it is a valuable energy source going to waste. Greater Victoria's Hartland Landfill now captures its methane and burns it to produce enough electricity to power about 1,500 homes. A similar plant is operating in the Lower Mainland, and a new one is opening in Nanaimo. Similar projects are being planned for the Campbell River and Comox Valley landfills. Rough calculations indicate that the Hartland project alone reduces emissions nearly enough for Greater Victoria to meet its Kyoto Protocol goals. Most landfill sites in the country should be considered for similar capture-and-use technologies.

• A more progressive and intelligent solution for garbage is to process it for energy before it goes to landfills. A number of companies, such as International Bio Recovery (www.ibrcorp.com), have developed processes that anaerobically convert organic wastes into methane and high quality fertilizer. Scraps from slaughterhouses, dregs from distillers, and even manure and sewage can be processed into useable products. Ontario's Inniskillin Wines will soon be "digesting" 2,000 tonnes a year of pomace (the leftover seeds and skins from making wine) into methane. Waste that previously went to landfill sites will now make electricity.

• And thermal depolymerization is a wholly-enclosed heat-and-pressure digestive system that converts virtually all carbon-base waste into methane, clean water, oil and elemental minerals. Grind up computers, plastics or household garbage — anything but radioactive material — and they are transformed into their basic components in re useable form, all in a few hours and at an efficiency greater than 85 percent.

• Sea snakes, long and flexible floating tubes that are bent by wave action, move hydraulic fluids that then rotate turbines to produce electricity. This Pelamis Wave Power system is another way — besides tidal — of extracting energy from the sea.

• Scientists are developing a blue-green algae that might be able to extract huge amounts of captured carbon dioxide from industries that burn fossil fuels. The biological process is similar to the one that first converted high concentrations of CO2 from Earth's early atmosphere into the oxygen so essential for higher life forms. The algae could then be "mined" for biodiesel, hydrogen, methane and other products.

• Other scientists are working to develop bacteria that will convert any biodegradable material into hydrogen — "microbial fuel cells" that could make fuel for fuel cells.

• Terra preta is the storage of carbon in soil, a technique originally practiced by ancient Amazonian cultures — they added charcoal from burned trees. If carbon could be captured from the gaseous CO2 waste of the fossil fuel industry and then converted to a solid form, it could be added to soil for both nourishment and sequestration.

• Batteries continue to be the key to a more efficient use of electricity from renewable energy sources and for vehicles. "Flow batteries", huge tanks of Vanadium solutions, are now capable of storing thousands of kilowatts of high-voltage power, just what is needed to equalize irregular outputs from wind, tidal or solar systems. Capacitor-like, "nanophosphate" batteries may be the long-awaited breakthrough for electric cars.

Actually, we are bursting with strategies and insights that would allow us to live more sustainably on our planet. But time is critical. Our present situation is reminiscent of a Talmudic story recounting how people were always making excuses for not undertaking a difficult task. "It's not for you to complete the task," said their wise old rabbi, "but you must begin."