Berkeley Marina Clean-Up

I participated in a service project today at the Berkeley Marina, and spent part of the day cleaning up the shoreline, being introduced to the ocean's toilet bowl and the power of plastics, and learning about a house made of straw.

Earlier today, a crew of 20 of us swarmed parts of the coastline at the Marina, picking out trash accumulated on and around the rocks. I'd like to be exaggerating when I say this, but in an hour we literally removed a total of 10 heavy bags of flotsam from the shoreline. Plastics made up the bulk of what we found, mainly food packaging and assorted bags, along with the occasional hypodermic needle.

Our coastline is sometimes referred to as "the rim of the toilet bowl" due to proximity to the North Pacific Gyre, a phenomenon of the Pacific Ocean's currents that traps floating waste into a large swirling swath of area between Hawaii and the West Coast. Waste accumulates in its large center, and occasionally spills out onto nearby coastlines, such as ours, and deposits presents for motivated college students like ourselves to pick up.

Normally waste stuck in this never-flushing toilet bowl will, over time, biodegrade.

[Enter, Plastics].

Plastics do not biodegrade, but instead break up into smaller and smaller pieces, until their likeness to small foodstuffs that the lower food chain prey on is uncanny. They enter the food chain, and bring with them a number of health issues, such as introducing toxic pollutants attached to their surface. In this swirling toilet bowl the issue is most prominent: in the gyre in 2001 it was shown that the mass of plastics exceeded that of zooplankton (the dominant animalian life in the area) by six times.

Today we were also lucky enough to check out the Marina's Straw Bale Building. A "green house", it was made from recycled materials, and is even insulated entirely with straw bales. It is an environmentally-friendly answer to some environmental concerns:

* Forests in the world are declining, lumber costs are high, construction and demolition waste accounts for 20-25% of solid landfill volume.

* Rice straw bales--the primary building material, unlike many other agricultural byproducts, do not decompose quickly under natural conditions. Farmers have had little choice but to burn the leftover material. Over a million tons of rice straw are burned annually in California, releasing 47,000 tons of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere (2nd worst air polluter in California; 1st are cars).

* Energy conservation: the building is fire resistant and provides exceptional insulation, saving heating and cooling costs throughout the year.

All in all today was very productive and educational, not too mention friggin' gorgeous. How 'bout that weather?

EPA Library Closure

I’m already losing confidence in the efficacy of science policy in 2007. From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The EPA has begun closing its nationwide network of scientific libraries, effectively preventing EPA scientists and the public from accessing vast amounts of data and information on issues from toxicology to pollution. Several libraries have already been dismantled, with their contents either destroyed or shipped to repositories where they are uncataloged and inaccessible.

…

In February 2006 under the guise of cutting costs, the Bush Administration proposed cutting $2 million out of the $2.5 million library services budget for fiscal year 2007. Such a drastic cut would ensure the closing of most of the library network, but would hardly register as a cost savings against the $8 billion EPA budget.

Despite the fact that Congress has not yet passed the 2007 budget or approved these funding cuts, the EPA has already moved with astonishing speed to close down several of its libraries to both the public and EPA staff. Three regional libraries, the Headquarters Library and a specialized library for research on the effects and properties of chemicals have already been closed, and four additional regional libraries have been subjected to reduced hours and limited access. Some books, reports and other resources formerly housed at these libraries have been sent to three repositories where they remain uncatalogued and inaccessible to the scientists and others who depend upon them. Other materials have already been recycled or thrown away.

…

The closure of these libraries and the warehousing of their resources represents an additional barrier to the free flow of scientific information. The EPA will not have the best information readily available when it makes regulatory decisions, negatively impacting the agency's ability to carry out its mission of protecting human health and the environment.

Cal Dining Great!

I have a few more posts that relate with training but not a whole lot of time to write them, so I will intersperse them with more current posts throughout the next week or so.

In cleaning/organizing my room/piles of stuff, I found this pamphlet I picked up at the local residential dining hall, which made me smile. The front cover's text reads as follows:

Social Responsibility

Cal Dining is committed to being a socially responsible program that supports the campus and local communities. We constantly strive to increase our environmental efforts and help educate our customers to do the same. From having the first two green facilities on Cal's campus to becoming the first organic certified University dining program, Cal Dining will continue to evolve.

Only in Berkeley can you find the phrase "Social Responsibility" emblazoned on dining hall brochures.

Re: Fume Hoods?

A commenter asked why the fuss about fume hoods? She also asked me to post my reply, and I'm just such an obliging person:

Why do I mention fume hoods? Because the Berkeley Hood would save billions of dollars and be a huge step in the push for energy conservation. We HAVE fume hoods all over the place in a science laboratory (hundreds in just our building alone), but they are products of antiquated technology and use comparatively WAY too much energy.

A simple analogy would be the Energy Star light bulbs. They emit comparable amounts of light yet only use 1/3 the energy of normal bulbs, which translates into HUGE energy savings. Taken straight from the .gov website:

"If every American home changed out just 5 high-use light fixtures or the bulbs in them with ones that have earned the ENERGY STAR, each family would save more than $60 every year in energy costs, and together we'd keep more than one trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of our air – equal to the emissions of 8 million cars. That's a $6 billion energy savings for Americans, equivalent to the annual output of more than 21 power plants."

Conserving energy is as simple as swapping out your moribund light bulbs with their smiling, sanguine Energy Star counterparts (collectable Candy Filled Bulb not included). Actually, the Energy Star bulbs don't give off the "I'm-a-bulb-rapist" vibe, as our friend pictured here does.


No matter. We as a society urgently need to look into alternative ways to manage our energy consumption, and given a choice between using Energy Star brand appliances and Berkeley Hoods, or quenching our usage of said machines cold turkey, the pragmatic choice is clear.

A Certified Energy (Death) Star Appliance

Dylan writes about a reply he received from the campus energy manager at his school (ssssss) in response to his query: does a fume hood in a laboratory really use up more energy than an entire house? Well, it does.

Yes, it is true that a single fume hood uses as much energy as a whole house. The key word is 'energy'’ since it is not just the electricity to run the exhaust fan (which is significant) but also all of the energy that went into cooling and heating the air that gets sent out the stack. None of that air can be recirculated as it would be in an office building since it might be contaminated with dangerous chemicals.

...

She went on to quote some actual monetary figures, and even sent me Lokey'’s power bill for the month of June. I will not reproduce those details here but suffice is to say it was an astonishing amount of money, about 7x more than a similar sized hood-free building. For the rest of the day I felt the pang of self-guilt that comes from being associated with such an energy-hungry association. The grand total aside, I was informed that each fume hood costs ~$5,000/year (~$420/month) to operate.

Self-guilt is right. Five-frickin'-thousand a year, for one lousy fume hood? For those not in the know, fume hoods are simply exhaust fans placed on top of benches where scientists can safely work with hazardous/volatile chemicals, as pictured to the right, behind the, uhm, lobster scientist.

In my lab, on the 8th floor of Latimer Hall, there are roughly 40 of these energy death star fume hoods, amounting to a $200000+ yearly fee just to keep these suckers running all day long, and that's only for our floor. These, along with the building's ventilation system, are important to feed the rooms with a constant negative air pressure, meaning that air is constantly sucked out of the rooms through exhaust vents, allowing for quick removal of any toxic/smelly fumes that may permeate the lab from chemicals/graduate students. This importance precedes the exorbitant energy usage they require, yes, but are there any ways to reduce this expenditure and are we pushing for this to happen? Of course.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) actually is at the forefront of new hood technologies. Aptly titled the Berkeley Hood (hold your puns), it utilizes separate fans near the front of the bench to assist in removing vapor contaminants, and allows for a significantly decreased rate of air flow from the exhaust; you can see it visually with this nifty flash animation.

Tests have shown (and a more interesting movie clip) that this new technology is just as effective as standard energy-whoring hoods, and LBNL estimates that the air flow savings in 'da Hood will conserve 75% more energy. Always at the pinnacle of scientific excellence, Berkeley is also well-known by another phrase: treading knee-deep in bureaucracy.

See, the Berkeley Hood was created way back at the turn of the millennium, and possibly earlier (the earliest article I could find was in 2001), but only recently has seen some success in procuring the Go Ahead for new field tests. As it turns out, the California Occupational Safety and Health program (Cal/OSHA), an enforcer of California laws and regulations related to workplace safety and health, also regulates laboratories for safe practices and equipment, including fume hoods. Cal/OSHA adopted a standard over 30 years ago that proclaimed an air flow of 100-feet-per-second as the minimum rate a hood can be operated at. Even in the face of new technologies that could safely lower that air flow considerably, Cal/OSHA is reluctant to change precedent: researchers were asking to perform field tests with the Berkeley hood back in 2002, and just this year have been approved to begin.

In the midst of all of this Berkeley-esqe pseudo-progress, it is recommended that we simply close our hoods to decrease the air flow. Maybe we should just give up and patent that.