When faced with the prospect of a cockroach-infested home, even the most eco-conscious among us might throw our principles out the window. Something about stepping into the shower and being greeted by a creepy crawler unleashes a primal desire to kill — and this nearly always involves using poisons and toxic chemicals. On a larger scale, while public outcry against the use of pesticides in agriculture grows every year, the farmer helplessly watching insects wipe out his livelihood clearly has a very different take on things. Inside and outside, pests are a problem.

Luckily, there’’s an alternative to uncorking that Raid bomb: non-toxic pest control. SpringStar, a nine-year-old start-up based outside of Seattle, has developed an array of earth-friendly products for home and agricultural use that are built around natural insect attractants and adhesive traps instead of poisons. Specific traps are available for everything from cockroaches to mosquitoes to garden slugs.

The traps don’’t always kill — depending on the nature of the insect, beneficial ones (such as Asian ladybugs) are spared, while more onerous ones (fleas) meet “a sticky end,“ according to the product’ literature. A few products are even designed to attract more (good) bugs, such as the “Fruit Booster,” which mimics the queen bee pheromone to attract more beneficial honeybees.

SpringStar’ founder Michael Banfield first got into the field in the late 1990s. When other companies were looking to ban pesticides altogether, Banfield instead focused on natural bacteria-based fungicides and pheromone-based insect attractants to control pests without harming the environment.

As another sign that green industry now involves more than just producing an earth-friendly product, SpringStar says that all of its disposable products are either recyclable or compostable, and everything is developed and manufactured here in the U.S. Other than hitting that cockroach with your shoe, they may well be offering the greenest way to keep pests under control.

Today’s Wall Street Journal devotes a good part of its front page to the growing problem of air pollution produced by cargo ships, which are used to transport 90 percent of the world’s goods. The tonnage of goods sent by cargo ships has tripled since 1970, according to the Journal, and in 2005, pollution from shipping produced an estimated 27 percent of the world’s smog-causing emissions. Not only are the numbers staggering, but the solution is going to be very complicated.

We wrote about the opportunities for eco-shipping containers a few months ago. The source of most cargo ships’ pollution is their source of power — residual fuel oil, a.k.a. bunker fuel, which is about as dirty as they come. Bunker fuel is the “tar-like sludge” that remains after petroleum is refined. The heavy metal-laden goo is collected from the bottom of distillation towers that process crude, making it cheap for shippers — less than two-thirds the rate of marine-gas oil, according to the WSJ — and a boon for refiners, who can sell of their excess waste.

While this exchange works out nicely for those two parties, the losers in the deal are the rest of us. Environmental Science & Technology (the journal of the American Chemical Society), published a study this month that estimated air pollution from ships is causing 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung-cancer-related deaths a year, chiefly along trade routes.

Continue reading this story

As if we needed any more proof that this is the year the candidates get serious about being green, Sen. Hillary Clinton proclaimed in a speech unveiling her energy policy yesterday that the climate crisis is “one of the greatest economic opportunities in the history of our country.”

Like her fellow Democratic hopeful Barack Obama, Hillary calls for a cap-and-trade system that aims for 80 percent emission reductions by 2050, and also auctions 100 percent of pollution credits. In terms of electricity, she wants 25 percent of it to come from renewable sources by 2030, and her bold plan for biofuels will raise a few eyebrows — 60 billion home-grown gallons by 2030.

Ever on the more pragmatic (others would say conservative) side than her fellow Democratic candidates, Hillary’s plan hinges on the very realistic mission of increasing efficiency, but the scale is ambitious. She borrows Al Gore’s Connie Mae program idea that would help Americans finance energy-saving home projects (the NY Times reports she consulted with the man himself for her speech). She wants to modernize utility grids, promote clean coal, and raise fuel standards to a significant 55 mpg by 2030 (realizing Detroit is a little behind the curve in this area, she promises $20 billion to our automakers to help meet the challenge).

Continue reading this story

Listen up, cleantech crew: according to one scientist, you may want to relocate your labs to the slopes of Mount St. Helens. Yesterday’s NY Times features a provocative op-ed piece by Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Global Ecology, in which he asserted that seeding the stratosphere (above where jets fly) with sulfates (such as those produced by a volcanic eruption) could not only stop global warming, but actually cool the Earth.

Caldeira cites the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines that erupted in 1991, as evidence his theory works. “The eruption resulted in sulfate particles in the stratosphere that reflected the sun’s rays back to space, and as a consequence the earth briefly cooled,” he writes. So, is this for real?

We asked Stephen Stretton, a researcher at Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research. He says that the idea is not entirely new. British futurist James Lovelock proposed something similar in his 2006 book Revenge of Gaia, though instead of sulpher Lovelock researched using dimethylsulphide produced by plankton. The idea also may be more complicated than Caldeira’s article implies.

Continue reading this story

Here’s betting you’ve never heard of one of the world’s top ten killers: indoor air pollution. Every day roughly 3 billion people around the world cook and heat their homes by burning biomass such as wood, crop waste, and dung without proper ventilation, and, according to the World Health Organization, the resulting toxic air accounts for a staggering 1.6 million deaths a year — one death every 20 seconds. Indoor air pollution is five times more lethal than outdoor pollution, and its effects range from pneumonia (especially in children) to lung cancer and tuberculosis.

The solution is clean-burning stoves, and a sustainable business plan to get them where they’re needed. Enter the Shell Foundation, an independent UK-based charity established by Shell Group (RDS) in 2000. The foundation is partnering with Envirofit, a four-year-old nonprofit with ties to Colorado State University’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, to develop, market and distribute new clean-burning stove technology.

Envirofit’s market plan does not rely on donating or subsidies; rather, it relies on consumer-focused market mechanisms to drive demand. The Shell Foundation, itself business-focused, has committed $25 million over five years to bring 10 million clean-burning stoves to the market, with an initial focus on India.

Perhaps it’s because their conservative base is wary of the environmental issue, or maybe it’s because they don’t want to sound like tax-and-spend liberals, but the Republicans are quieter than the Democrats when it comes to exact figures for funding clean technologies.

However, the major Republican candidates have come out and made statements about where greener innovation stands on their priority lists, and what areas they are likely to bolster if elected. Here are the men that we are voting “most likely to fund cleantech”…

Mike Huckabee: Probably not going to win, but wins our cleantech vote.

Yes, I know we said “major” candidates, but he’s at the top of the long-shot heap. Though he’s been polling around the 3 to 7 percent mark, Huckabee has big dreams for a greener future. He maintains that the first thing he’ll do as president is introduce a “comprehensive plan for energy independence” to Congress. He uses the strongest language of his fellow Republicans, such as lamenting how “pathetically behind the curve we are” with federal spending on energy R&D.

Continue reading this story

Amidst all the inflated rhetoric about the war in Iraq, health care and new taxes, you’ll be forgiven if you’ve had trouble separating one candidate from the next on environmental technology issues. But one of these people might become the next president, and billions in funding (as well as the fate of the planet) hangs in the balance. So who — among the Democrats — is looking out for you? (Later in the week we’ll look at the Republicans). Read on…

1. John Edwards: We crown him the most cleantech friendly.
Yes, he’s still in the race, and he came out early and set the bar on energy policy at a height none have yet matched. Highlights of his “New Energy Economy” include reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. By ending tax breaks for big oil and charging polluters for emissions permits, Edwards proposes a $13-billion-a-year New Energy Economy Fund that would create a million jobs in the cleantech sector.

Continue reading this story

For two dollars, you could enjoy a hearty bottle of Trader Joe’s famous Two Buck Chuck, but it would hardly save the planet. Thanks to a group of clever MIT students, you may soon be able to take that lowly two bucks and do just that. The group of students, who go by the team name BioVolt, have developed a charger that digests plant-based cellulose and turns it into usable electricity. BioVolt says the materials needed to make the charger can be sourced for a mere $2, and it runs on everyday organic materials such as grass clippings and leaves — imagine a Sunday picnic in the park and being able to charge your cell phone with the fuel found under an adjacent tree.

Continue reading this story

With over a third of the world’s CO2 coming from energy production, innovations that promise to clean up that process are a breath of fresh air. So it’s fitting that a team of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim have patented a new membrane technology that separates out CO2 from emissions — by mimicking human lungs. The process is known as “facilitated transport.” The team has developed a fixed agent within the membrane that combines the CO2 with moisture to form a new molecule, explains Professor May-Britt Hägg in the article, which passes easily through the membrane while all the other gases are retained.

Continue reading this story

We know you’re busy, so we’ll forgive you for overlooking this week’s announcement that researchers at England’s University of Leeds have discovered a way to mimic the toxic defensive spray of the bombardier beetle. But you’ll want to sit up and pay attention when you find out why: to create a new water-based compression technology called µMist that’s being touted as the key to everything from improved fuel efficiency to next generation fire suppression to chemical-free drug delivery.

The lead researcher, Professor Andy McIntosh, describes the beetle’s abilities as a type of complex pressure cooker. “Essentially it’s a high-force steam cavitation explosion,” he says in the release, “Using a chamber less than one millimeter long, this amazing creature has the ability to change the rapidity of what comes out, its direction and its consistency.”

Continue reading this story