Top Three Greenies

From beer that’s going to save the world to wrapping your bike around a pole without crashing, and turning goop to gas, here are three of the coolest green news stories from the past few weeks.


Wrapping Your Bike around a Pole


You know when someone has a bad bike accident and witnesses say, “He wrapped his bike around the pole”? Well, now you really can – without having an accident!

Twenty-one-year old British student, Kevin Scott (who looks remarkably like Luke Wilson!), has designed a bendable bike that allows you to literally wrap your beloved two-wheeler around a pole and then lock up both tyres at the same time! Smart!

Scott’s ingenious design came about after he’d had enough of trying to fit a six-foot bike into a rack that was only a few inches wide.

The bike has a ratchet mechanism that’s rigid and bendable but not at the same time. So how it works is when you jump off your bike to park it, you push a lever on the frame and the bike becomes flexible.

The De Montfort University graduate (and his wrap-up bike) was runner-up in the Business Design Centre New Designer of the Year Award and says he’s planning to commercialise the design in the near future.


Drink More Beer; Save Energy!


Just when you thought beer couldn’t get any better! A UK-based plant will soon start converting waste from a local brewery into energy. Yup, you heard right.

The waste from about 600 pints of beer is said to be able to heat a home for a day and with Brits gulping down 28million pints a day, there’s more than enough waste to go round.

The new plant - called the Adnams Bio Energy Anaerobic Digestion Plant - will use brewery waste and local food waste to produce a renewable gas called biomethane that will be fed back into the UK’s national gas grid. By diverting waste from landfill, the plant will also prevent the release of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.

It’s thought that the plant could produce up to 4.9 million kilowatt-hours of energy annually – enough to heat 235 homes for a year. It will also produce gas that can be used as a liquid fuel. According to a study by the UK’s National Grid, biomethane could account for at least 15 percent of domestic gas consumption by 2020.


From Goop to Gas


Algae may look disgusting but the truth is it could be fuelling your car in future. According to media reports, pond scum (which contains algae) is raking in the cash, with industry and governments pouring billions into it in an attempt to unlock algal power. It makes sense, really.

Algae, the single-celled phytoplankton that produce half of our planet’s oxygen are the fastest-growing green organisms currently known to man. On land – in shallow seawater ponds – they can use sunlight and sewage to turn concentrated carbon dioxide into usable hydrocarbons, half of which can almost be poured straight into a diesel engine.

According to those in the know, ten million hectares of algae could supply all US transportation fuel! If that’s not impressive enough, algae can also live in seawater in the desert!

Last year oil giant ExxonMobil committed $600 million to develop algal fuels with genome pioneer Craig Venter. And John Benemann, formerly a lead investigator on the ASP, estimates that $2billion could be flowing into algal energy projects between 2009 and 2011.

ExxonMobil believes it will be able to sell algal diesel through existing refineries and petrol stations. They may be right. Just last month the first jet engine powered entirely by algae oil flew at an air show in Berlin, Germany.