Living Planet: Environment Matters Around the Globe

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DATE : Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:30:00 GMT
Entered in Database : 2009-10-29 16:30:00
length : 14576818
Link to the Show / Show Notes

Using human waste as an eco-friendly building material, trees that can quickly deliver a large, steady supply of quality hardwood, and turning carbon from coal-fired power plants into fertilizer.
Bricks take on an organic twist

Everything flushed down the toilet eventually ends up at a sewage treatment plant where it is turned into sewage sludge. Each year in Germany some 200 million tons of the stuff is processed. Half of that is burned in power plants and the other half is used on fields as fertilizer. But farmers are using less and less due to a fear of pollutants. So what do we do with it all?

Scientists at the Institute for Environmental Technology and Management at the University of Witten/Herdecke are experimenting with a new building material made from lime sandstone mixed with sewage byproducts. The project – called EcoBrick – has worked in the lab. Whether it is usable on a larger scale will be proven over the next three years.

Report: Holly Fox

It used to be customary in Japan to plant a paulowna tree – or kiri tree, as they're known in Japanese – after the birth of a daughter. When the girl grew up and got married, the tree, which in that time had reached a very large height, was chopped down and used to make cupboards and trunks to store the brides many silk kimonos.

These days tree-planting space in Japan is at a premium, but in Europe there is plenty of room. Now two graduate students from the University of Bonn want to plant their own kiri trees on large plantations in Germany and the rest of the EU. They've created a company called We-grow, and are hoping to lure investors with the promise of money that, quite literally, will be growing on trees.

Capturing carbon from power plants and factories and storing it under the ground has become a hot topic these days, though most people are not very excited about the second part of the plan.

As the deadline to the climate change summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year looms, more and more people are talking about carbon dioxide emissions and how we can reduce or negate them. At the Juelich research center near the western German city of Aachen, scientists are working on the problem. Living Planet visits the center to find out how this new technology can be considered "green" in more ways than one.

Report: Nathan Witkop

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