Two chemical engineers at the University of Delaware are developing better ways to produce fuels from sunlight. Feng Jiao and Bingjun Xu received a $500,000 from the NSF for research on solar-driven carbon dioxide utilization(利用)for environmental sustainability.

This research is motivated by the fact that the world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and it will be increasingly critical to balance food, energy and water resources and reduce harmful carbon dioxide. Many processes involved in food and water production and transport are major contributors to carbon dioxide emissions.

Together with researchers at Tianjin University in China, Jiao and Xu designed a system that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by using solar electricity. Their system will use electrolysis(电解), a process that uses electric current to make a chemical reaction to turn carbon dioxide and water into liquid carbon-based fuels. They will use copper to speed up the chemical reactions.

Then, the research team will develop a prototype(原型)reactor and perform technical and economic analysis to determine the potential to commercialize this technology. If used on a large scale, this technology has the potential to reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

Finally, the team will determine the environmental impacts of their device. The technology developed through this could help the solar industry and research community and could be extended to chemical processes beyond the breakdown of carbon dioxide.

”If successful, this technology could provide the community a green, sustainable way to produce chemicals and fuels without using any fossil source, “said Jiao.” This technology also aims to address the challenges associated with renewable energy utilization and storage.“

An English mother, Liz Pinfield-Wells, has recycled more than 2,600 pounds (1,200 kg) of trash (垃圾) through a DIY recycling center in her garden shed (棚) in Dawley Shropshire. Pinfield-Wells established the recycling center after the birth of her third child when she discovered that her town’s roadside recycling program did not accept certain items.

The recycling center accepts 30 different categories of recyclable waste. Pin field-Wells encouraged the public to leave their mixed recycled items at the end of her driveway, and dozens of residents have since dropped off their trash in her shed. She has even accepted Pringles tubes, which have metal and plastic components and should not be placed in the roadside bin. “Setting up the recycling drop-off center, in my front garden has hopefully helped the community to recycle more. It can sometimes seem a little difficult knowing where to start but with every small step, it gets that little bit easier,” she said.

Every month, she sends the collected items in vacuum-packed (真空包装的) bags to TerraCycle, a firm that turns the waste into small plastic balls for use in other products, such as watering cans and benches. The weight of the trash is then changed into points for money, which can be paid out twice a year to a charity or sports organization of her choice.

In the last three years, Pinfield-Wells has raised more than £1,000, which she has donated to her 14-year-old daughter Zoe’s gymnastic group to buy new equipment. She has also donated money to another local charity to buy woodchips for their community garden.

Pinfield-Wells hopes that her recycling center will raise awareness about the importance of recycling and encourage others to take small steps to reduce their carbon footprint. She has created a Facebook group for here eco-center recycling shed, which now has over 1,000 members.

Native people in the Amazon may have been creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years. And what they learned could offer lessons for people concerned about climate change today.

The Amazon River basin covers much of central South America, across which are archaeological sites where ancient people left their mark on the land. And patches(小块) of strangely fertile soil dot the landscape at many of these sites. It’s darker in color than surrounding soils and richer in carbon.

The industrial world has long viewed the Amazon as a vast wilderness — one that was mostly untouched before Europeans showed up. One reason for this idea was that the soil there is nutrient-poor. But a large number of ancient finds in recent decades has been turning that idea on its head. Plenty of evidence now shows that people were shaping the Amazon for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Ancient city centers have been found in modern-day Bolivia, for instance.

To find out more, Perron, an Earth scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, became part of a team that reviewed interviews with Kuikuro people, who reported making dark Earth using ash, food scraps and controlled burns. They call the product eegepe.

The researchers also collected soil samples and found that there were “striking similarities” between dark Earth samples from ancient and modern sites. Both were far less acidic than the soils around them and also contained more plant-friendly nutrients.

The soil samples also revealed that on average, dark Earth holds twice as much carbon as the soil around it. Infrared(红外线的) scans in one Brazil region suggest the area holds many pockets of this dark Earth, which may store up to about 9 million tons of carbon that scientists have overlooked, Perron’s team says. That’s about as much carbon as a small, developed country emits per year.

‘Figuring out the true amount will require more data,’ says Antoinette Winkler Prins, a geographer working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. Still, ‘the new research could offer insights into the Amazon’s past and future.’