Earth Hour 2011

Don't forget! This March 26th is Earth Hour Day. Turn off your lamp from 8.30 pm until 9.30 pm

Slip a Banana Peel in Your Drink For Purity

Banana peels may be than more just trash. They could help in the struggle against contaminated water.

• Banana peels can bind to trace amounts of copper and lead.
• The peels could be a cheap new way to more easily detect heavy metal contamination in drinking water.
• Don't try this at home! If banana peels do end up in real-world applications, they will probably show up in industrial settings.

 

Brazilian researchers have found an unexpected helper in the struggle against contaminated drinking water: Bananas.
In a new study, minced banana peels were able to bind and accumulate trace amounts of lead and copper in river water, making the toxic metals 20 times easier to detect with crude equipment. The findings offer a new source of hope to people in developing countries, where water quality can be poor and the latest water-screening technologies hard to come by.
No one should rush out and put mushed bananas into dirty water to make it potable, the researchers say. Instead, the technique might some day find its way into industrial settings as a cheap and non-toxic helper in the effort to ensure clean drinking supplies.
"The surprise came when I found its extraction capacity, which is higher than other similar materials constructed under chemical reactions, such as modified silica, alumina and cellulose," said Gustavo Castro, an analytical chemist at the Biosciences Institute at Botucatu, Brazil.
"All these materials are produced in the laboratory with the same objective -- to remove metals from water," he said. "However, they present high costs, and in their preparation, some toxic residues are produced."
Heavy metals like copper and lead are common contaminants in industrial and agricultural run-off. Even at extremely low concentrations in drinking water, the metals can be toxic to human health, with effects ranging from nausea to liver and brain damage. But they can be hard to detect at such low doses.
In the search for greener ways to both find and remove metals from water, research groups have been working with sugar cane, coconut fibers, apple peels and more. Castro and colleagues were the first to test banana peels, which contain proteins that are known binders of metal.
The researchers started with flasks of water that contained pre-determined levels of positively charged copper and lead ions. They added dried and ground banana peels. Then, they stirred. After a few minutes, Castro said, there was less metal in the water than there was at the beginning of the experiment. That showed that the peels had bound the metals.
The technique worked even at high levels of pH, which would be useful in waste flows from industrial sources. And the banana peels retained their metal-binding powers for more than 10 cycles of testing.
Banana peels can't actually be used to remove metals from water or to clean up contamination, said Ashok Gadgil, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead, their value lies in their ability to gather together trace amounts of copper and lead and make the metals easier to detect.
The maximum allowable level of lead in drinking water, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is just 15 parts per billion. Levels so low can easily escape many kinds of equipment. In the new study, banana peels increased the concentration of both metals by a factor of 20, making them far easier to sense, even with basic tools.
"Anybody who has a relatively insensitive instrument will be happy to find a 20-fold improvement in the concentration of something they want to look for," Gadgil said. "This is something that is interesting for people who have limited access to highly sophisticated instrumentation. They could use this as a pre-concentrator so that they could then detect minute quantities of metal, even with equipment that has high detection limits."
Before applying banana peels to the task of water monitoring in the real world, however, Gadgil urged more tests on a wider range of banana types at various levels of ripeness.
"I would want to know if a banana in Bangladesh works the same way as a banana in Brazil," he said. "Chemistry is tricky. I would want to be damn confident of a method of analysis before jumping on an action plan."
Source : Discovery Channel

World Water Day 2011

Today, March 22nd , is the world water day. the 2011 theme is WATER FOR CITIES: RESPONDING TO THE URBAN CHALLENGE

you can find more fact and info about world water day in:

http://www.worldwaterday.org/ 

and 

http://www.worldwaterday2011.org/ or click the button on the right side

Happy World Water Day guys!

Depends on What You Throw

One day, my uncle throwing garbage onto the sidewalks. Of course I didn't let him doing that, but then he said,

"If there's no garbages on the sidewalks, then lots of people will lose their job"  

(the street cleaner or cleaning service -red)"

Well not to be a hypocrite, I agreed with that because that's actually true. But, that is not right! Even though there are lots of unemployment here in Indonesia, but it can't be an excuse for people to do wrong, right? If we start to dispose garbage to the trashcan, then there will be nothing to be cleaned up on the sidewalks and lots of people could find better job than be a cleaning service. Moreover, it's not that hard to throw garbage into the trashcan. Even if there's no trashcan near the place you stand, you could put your garbages in your pocket and just keep them until you find a trashcan. It's really effortless, right?
Now, let's talk about what trash you dispose. Mostly there are two kind of trash cans. One for organic trash, and the other one for unorganic trash. But for me, and maybe for some others, it's quite hard to distinguish the organics and the others. So that, here's the example for the organic and the unorganic trashes,

Organic Trash : Recyclable trash, such as leafs, residual foods, papers, etc.

Unorganic Trash : undegradable trash, such as plastics, cans, residual mines, etc.

Then, why we should distinguish garbages? It's to ease people for recycling the garbages. Because, you don't want your grandchildren living in the earth full of garbages, right? And that's supporting the 3R campaign namely Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
We've have discussed about Recycle, now live the rest, Reduce and Reuse. If we could recycle the organic trashes then we have to reduce the unorganic ones which we couldn't recycle. it's that simple, but the next question appeared is "how?". How to reduce the unorganic trashes? The answer is, reuse what you got. Let's start to the simplest thing like, start using your tumbler to bring mineral water than buy the mineral water in plastic bottle. Or you could bring your own canvass bag when you go for shopping than recieve plastic bags from the store.
Plastics, or the unorganic trashes, will not just fulfill our earth but it could pollute the air by the metane gas it produced. And yes, metane gas is dangerous for our body. Those are lots of causes, why we should stop producing plastic and start reusing what we already got. So, what are you waiting for? Let's start from NOW!
Then, besides we have to stop throwing the undegradable trashes, we also have to stop throwing away the useful energy. Inconceivable if the world is already running out of energy. So that, we have to reduce the energy we use. It becomes the most crucial, but also the easiest way to go green. Why is it become the easiest? Because even by using shower to bath is reducing energy. Or turning off the lights when you sleep is also reducing energy. So let's turn off the electricity while we're not using it, as our act to save our planet.

Written by,

Wimala Puspa Enggaringtyas

this century nature issue: global warming

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global surface temperature increased by 0.74 ± 0.18 °CF) during the 20th century. Most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century has been caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, which result from human activities such as the burning of fossil fuel and deforestation.Global dimming, a phenomenon of increasing atmospheric concentrations of man-made aerosols, which affect cloud properties and block sunlight from reaching the surface, has partially countered the effects of warming induced by greenhouse gases. (1.33 ± 0.32 °

Climate model projections summarized in the latest IPCC report indicate that the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the 21st century. The uncertainty in this estimate arises from the use of models with differing sensitivity to greenhouse gas concentrations and the use of differing estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions. An increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropicaldeserts.Warming is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely effects include more frequent and intense extreme weatherspecies extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields. Warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe, though the nature of these regional variations is uncertain. As a result of contemporary increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the oceans have become more acidic, a result that is predicted to continue events,

The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. Nevertheless, skepticism amongst the wider public remains. The Kyoto Protocol is aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentration to prevent a "dangerous anthropogenic interference". As of November 2009, 187 states had signed and ratified the protocol.

Proposed responses to climate change include mitigation to reduce emissions, adaptation to the effects of global warming, and geoengineering to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or block incoming sunlight.

source: wikipedia

image source: google