From fuel cells to the smart grid, Northeastern University is leading the way toward a greener future. Here is a collection of blog posts about sustainability related research and events around campus.
I wrote a story for today’s news email about civil and environmental engineering chair Jerry Hajjar‘s new NSF grant to develop building design methods that take eventual deconstruction into account. Here is a graphic of the clamping system he discussed in the article: Image courtesy of Mark Webster for Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Inc.
Okay, admittedly this is not a research post…but bear with me. We pride ourselves on being sustainable here at Northeastern. But are we putting our money where our mouth is…so to speak? I know there are probably a million things I personally could be doing better — I’m a paper fiend, for instance. I recycle ...
I have now switched all the light bulbs in my life from incandescents to CFLs — compact fluorescent lights. The initial motivation was cost: while a single CFL bulb is a lot more expensive than an incandescent, it can last 10 to 25 times longer and saves a lot of money in the long run ...
Yesterday I took a stroll over to the West Village Quad to see what was happening at the Spring Fling, an event organized by the office of Housing and Residential Life to celebrate Earth Day 2012 and generate interest and awareness about the sustainability efforts taking place around campus. It was great! The weather was ...
Oh, this is so disheartening, friends. The EPA has canceled a $20-million fund to promote green chemistry research projects with virtually no explanation of why. Read the Environmental Health News story about this sad turn of events here. In response to the decision, Graham Jones, chair of the Northeastern Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology ...
…and she’s trying to get Northeastern students mad too. Because maybe if people are mad enough, she said, they’ll start making changes. Gibbs, a nationally renowned environmental activist and executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, spoke at last night’s meeting of the Husky Environmental Action Team (HEAT). Gibbs recounted the horrifying ...
Last week the Sustainability Committee invited John Warner to speak to the Northeastern community about the “green chemistry movement,” which he helped create in the mid-nineties. I realized during his talk that despite spending five years in the chemical industry and another five studying with a professor who was personally interested in the area of ...
One of my first conversations here at Northeastern was with Chemistry professor Sanjeev Mukerjee who has one ultimate goal for his research: “to replace all combustion related power sources with an electrochemical energy conversion storage system, which are cleaner, more efficient, and very silent.” Mukerjee’s team at the Center for Renewable Energy Technology(NUCRET) explores how ...
There’s a great story in the News@Northeastern today about Laura Lewis‘ ARPA-E grant — a $3.5million award from the Department of Energy, which Lewis’ team will use to identify new, super-strong magnetic materials. As Matt Collette explains in the article, China has a hold on the rare earth industry, currently the main element used to ...
According to associate professor Edmund Yeh of the electrical engineering department, the US loses about $100 billion each year due to blackouts in the energy grid. When the power goes out, so does the economy. The current grid is based on predictable sources of energy, but unpredictable blackouts still occur. Renewable energy — like wind ...
What you see to the left may look like a giant dehydryated cocroach overgrown with some form of alien kudzoo, but in fact it’s a microbe only a few microns long. That’s a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. Slava Epstein of the the department of biology found this little guy in the ...