A typical landfill isn’t the sort of place where residents have peaceful picnics and take nature walks or go to stargaze. But Singapore’s Semakau landfill is far from ordinary. Pulau Semakau – where Singapore’s only landfill is located – is a 20-minute ferry ride from the mainland. Its appearance can come as a surprise: turquoise waters, flowering shrubs, a carpet of grass, and nature-enhancing landscaping. Egrets skim the waters of artificial lagoons that are actually dormant refuse cells. Anglers also use the lagoons for sport fishing. It seems more like a recreation area than a dumping ground.

Actually, it’s both.

Singapore, located at the tip of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, has become increasingly prosperous since it became an independent republic in 1965. As a result, its trash has doubled every decade until currently – the volume is close to 8,000 tons a day, even after stringent recycling.

Unlike larger countries, this densely populated island – smaller than the US state of Rhode Island – cannot banish refuse to the hinterlands. And using precious space as a dumping ground to be greened later is an unaffordable luxury. When Singapore’s previous landfill was filled up in 1999, the tiny nation had to find a new way to dispose of its refuse. “Scarcity of land means that an offshore landfill is our only viable option for solid-waste disposal,” says Ong Chong Peng, general manager of the Semakau landfill.

Space, not environmental benefit, was the driving force behind the landfill, but careful planning created vibrant ecosystems as part of it.

The 865-acre space was divided into cells for dumping refuse that has first been incinerated on the mainland. Dormant cells contain water and are used as lagoons until they’re needed to hold trash.

Then, “once a cell becomes full, it is covered with soil and planted with grass,” says Loo Eng Por, manager of the landfill. Some trees, “planted” by birds, also thrive in the reclaimed land. Every night, incinerated trash is brought to Semakau in closed barges drawn by tugboats. “Burning brings down the volume of solid waste by 90 percent,” explains Mr. Loo.

Initially, carbon emissions went up when refuse was burned, but now emissions are sucked back into the combustion chambers at the incinerators. Bulky trash that can’t be recycled or burned – such as demolition debris – is buried. Because the refuse disposed of at the landfill is inert and inorganic, there is nothing for flies to feast on, Loo points out. That rules out foul smells as well.

As landfill material, incinerator ash tends to be relatively innocuous, says Peter Shanahan, senior lecturer in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Because organics have been burned away, there is no buildup of gases, such as methane, which is associated with decomposition. Still, it’s important that the surrounding waters be vigilantly monitored for contaminants, he says.

Semakau’s sea wall is lined with an impermeable membrane as well as marine clay to prevent any seepage of waste into the ocean. Every month, though, water around the active cells is tested for heavy metals and other pollutants. Mangrove trees growing at the sea’s edge also serve as a biological indicator of water quality.

Many trees were cut down to make room for the landfill. “Some 400,000 saplings were hand-planted later,” says Mr. Ong, but no one was sure if they would take root. Now they’re almost indistinguishable from the original trees. Semakau is home to many species of birds, including the great-billed heron. Since 2005, visitors on guided walks have been able to explore the mangroves and coral reefs that ring the island. “Pulau Semakau harbors some rare plants – such as the seashore bat lily or the pink-eyed pong pong tree – that were lost on mainland Singapore,” says Ria Tan, who created and maintains the Wild Singapore website for nature enthusiasts.

The National Environment Agency even organizes field trips to the landfill for schoolchildren to learn how to minimize waste.

When the last of the landfill’s cells becomes full, refuse will be piled into hillocks up to a certain height, says Loo. Semakau, it is estimated, can take care of Singapore’s landfill needs until at least 2045.

Meanwhile, Singapore constantly seeks out innovative technologies to reduce the amount of material that’s added to the landfill. About 3 percent of the island’s electricity comes from the incineration process. The ash is used as construction material. A new plant composts food waste, converting it to biogas, which is burned as fuel. Singapore’s experience could serve as an example to many densely populated areas around the world that are facing solid-waste disposal issues.

“Singapore has faced resource constraints on land and water long before any other country,” says Ms. Tan. “We have been forced to address this sustainability issue long before it became fashionable.”

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Even if news sites overlooked a certain event, chances are that a blogger has not. “But how do you find stuff you don’t know you are looking for?” asks Ethan Zuckerman.

This koanlike question comes from his work as a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Mr. Zuckerman spends a lot of time pondering the intricacies of the Internet and how to realign its many moving parts to make the Web more useful. He helped start the Web-hosting service Tripod and later founded Geekcorps, a nonprofit that aims to help emerging nations get online and join the global conversation.

While wearing these many hats, Zuckerman has seen again and again that people love what the Internet can provide them, but they have no idea how much they are missing. “People generally pay attention to what they already know about and what they care about,” he says.

Serendipity can strike – users can occasionally stumble on a marvelous new site – but that rare find shouldn’t be left to chance, he says. It should be engineered into the system. For example, even a film buff may be unaware of Nigeria’s movie industry. But Nollywood, as it’s called by fans, is the third-largest movie industry in the world after Hollywood and India’s Bollywood. “These movies made in Lagos [Nigeria] will probably not be on your Netflix queue anytime soon,” he says. But the Internet puts the films, directors, and Nollywood fans within reach for Americans.

Discovering such gems in the online rough can be difficult when you rely on people much like yourself to expand your online horizons. News aggregators such as Digg and Reddit help, but their audiences are still pretty homogenous. “The Reddit community, for instance, is 92 percent male, 70 percent employed in the IT industry or as students, and 70 percent from the US,” says Zuckerman.
There’s a word for this social quirk, where people tend to hang out with like-minded individuals: homophily. “This can make you really dumb,” says Zuckerman. “We need to break out of such echo chambers.” Part of the solution, he says, could come from tapping into the informed bloggers of the world.

Right now, the blogosphere gets a bad rap. Without a good filter, its many diverse viewpoints can come off as babel. That’s why Zuckerman cofounded GlobalVoicesOnline.org in 2004. He wanted a site that could help guide readers through the international maze of citizen journalism. A team of “bridge bloggers” contextualizes the news coming out of Asia, Africa, and elsewhere for an international audience. “Their insight can help us connect the dots,” he says.

Mahmood’s Den is one of Zuckerman’s favorite blogs. “I try to dispel the image that Muslims and Arabs suffer from … in the rest of the world,” says blogger Mahmood Al-Yousif, a Bahraini engineer who has worked in the United States. Mr. Yousif’s goal is to “create a better understanding that we’re not all nuts, hellbent on world destruction.” Zuckerman’s mission, in turn, is to amplify voices like that of Yousif.

Yousif stopped blogging recently but others, such as his compatriot Amira Al Hussaini at SillyBahrainiGirl, continue at Global Voices.
“Blogs tend to be mirrors of society and they don’t only focus on serious happenings like revolutions, bombings and gloom,” says Ms. Hussaini, the Global Voices editor for the Middle East and North Africa. “People party, they care about pets, post recipes and, in fact, write about everything under the sun.”

Such blogs give readers a window into the lives of others, adds Hussaini, who currently lives in Canada.
“The Internet can only make the world smaller when we let it,” says Solana Larsen, the managing editor of Global Voices. “The truth is, we’re still trying to figure out a way to make people – and bloggers and journalists – more curious.”

Step 1 is letting them know that it’s possible to figure out what bloggers in other countries are saying, she says. Hopefully, her team and other sites will soon figure out a good Step 2. “Homophily, in itself, is not a bad thing,” writes Amy Gahran, an independent media consultant on her blog contentious.com. Nor does Zuckerman dismiss the value of “commonality,” she points out.

Zuckerman’s aim, she notes, is “to recognize broader and subtler commonalities – by gaining respect for divergent views and experiences.”
In other words: tuning in to diverse viewpoints prevents us from being blind-sided, as many were after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Suddenly, many Americans needed to learn a whole new vocabulary – Sunni, Shiite, Al Qaeda – words that were within reach online but somehow not in many people’s line of sight.

Zuckerman refers to our news diet as a problem of “broccoli versus chocolate cake.” Right now, he says, it is as if we are at a buffet of news stories and we reach out for whatever gratifies us immediately. We are unlikely to change our habits without compelling reasons, he says.
“Perhaps our information diet should come with the equivalent of nutritional labels,” he says. “Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices.” The possibility of that accidental discovery that could essentially alter one’s worldview cannot be left to random chance, he emphasizes.

Read the rest of the story here. pdf.

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She wants to hit the gym, tackle schoolwork, and, as captain of an intramural soccer team and member of a campus health advocacy program, she has plenty of e-mail to respond to every evening.

“Though I know I am being productive, it feels like a complete waste of time to sit there and do just [e-mail replies],” says Ms. Peach.

So, once she arrives at the gym, Peach makes a beeline for a special stationary bike that has a laptop built into the front. The computer is not plugged in. There is an empty space where the battery once fit. But when Peach starts pedaling, the computer fires up. Her spinning workout powers the laptop – and lets her cross off two tasks at once.

Pedal power has been a small-time alternative-energy source for ages. Many innovators have tried to tap the simple motion to power devices – especially those engineered for developing countries, where power grids are unreliable. But few designs have stuck. People aren’t willing to exert much energy just to run simple devices.

But in gyms across the country, ecoconscious patrons are asking why cardio equipment needs to drain power, when the exercisers are already eager to burn calories. Now, fitness centers are beginning to experiment with ways to put muscle strength to good use.

“The idea pretty much sold itself,” says Adam Boesel, a personal trainer in Portland, Ore.

He saw a television report about a Hong Kong gym with human-powered equipment and set out to create an eco-friendly fitness center in his hometown. Mr. Boesel’s Green Microgym opened in late August and has already registered more than 100 members.

The gym chose Team Dynamo stationary bikes, which harness the power of four connected bicycles to generate an average of up to 200 watts per hour. That’s enough to power a LCD television and stereo system for the duration of the ride, according to Team Dynamo inventor Mike Taggett. “And you don’t have to be cycling champ Lance Armstrong to do this because it is a team effort,” he says, referring to how four bikers help charge the batteries.

At Green Microgym, electricity generated by the bikes flows into a bank of batteries, which, in turn, powers devices. Boesel plans to install a “grid-tie” inverter, which allows the generated energy to stream directly into the power grid. This device allows creators of alternative energy, such as solar and wind, to “spin the meter backward” and sell power to their local utility company.

The idea is to meet the gym’s power requirements – kept low by a prudent use of plugged-in devices – with solar panels and an array of energy-producing equipment, says Boesel.

Power bike setups of all sizes
David Butcher, a California Web manager, gets his daily workout on a generator-bike he built three years ago. Pedaling at a steady pace, he charges many appliances at once: the robotic vacuum cleaner, a set of lights, and his laptop. Mr. Butcher webcasts live from his Los Gatos, Calif. basement during these 40-minute sessions. Thanks to the energizing workout, “I feel like a rocket now,” he says, a little breathless from his morning exercise.

Elsewhere, others are testing retrofitted equipment in well-trafficked commercial gyms. A group spinning class can produce a monthly output of 300 kilowatt-hours – enough energy to light six homes for a month and cut 420 pounds of carbon emission, according to Jay Whelan, founder of Green Revolution.

“There is no use it or lose it, or battery maintenance, because the power goes right back to the grid,” says Mr. Whelan, a clean-energy entrepreneur who recently retrofitted bikes for the spin class at the 1,200-member Ridgefield Fitness Club in Connecticut.

Elliptical trainers, another popular piece of cardio equipment, are a good source of human power.

“They are even better than bikes since they involve both arm and leg muscles,” says Hudson Harr, founder of ReRev.com in St. Petersburg, Fla. In April, his start-up company installed an array of retrofitted ellipticals at the 28,000-member Gainesville (Fla.) Health & Fitness Center. A student gym at the University of Florida in Gainesville was next on his list. “Not doing this would be such a waste of energy,” says David Bowles, the school’s director of recreational sports.

How to balance the workout
The idea of using human energy to power appliances – instead of using batteries – is catching on for two reasons: fun and environment-consciousness, says Arjen Jansen, a researcher in human-powered energy systems at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“Laptops and televisions have evolved and the designs are very energy-efficient, says Jason Moore, a Fulbright scholar studying bicycle design at the Dutch university. Now that these rigs are better at capturing energy, gyms are can put them to use – powering little perks such as TVs, laptops, and lights.

Still, few people go to a fitness center in order to generate electricity.

“People go the gym primarily to get a good workout,” says Whelan from Green Revolution. The workout equipment should feel just like it did before the retrofitting, he emphasizes. Raising the resistance level on these machines will increase the output exponentially, but it might ruin the experience for his customers. He opts to let the rider have complete control over the settings, same as before.

What’s next for ecogyms?
“What we are doing now is taking baby steps in the right direction,” says Boesel of Green Microgym.

All aerobic equipment, including Stairmasters and rowing machines, can be retrofitted to generate power. Each device, however, comes with its own set of engineering challenges. And while the industry is most driven by retrofitting companies, “in the future, manufacturers may offer power-generation as an option on cardio equipment,” says Joe Cirulli, owner of the Gainesville Health & Fitness Center.

Some energy savings could be incidental. “As the exerciser’s output exceeds the display needs, the extra power is ‘shunted’ to resistors, which then heat up simply to shed the energy that is created,” says Mr. Taggett of Team Dynamo. The cardio room warms up and requires extra air-conditioning in warmer climates. With these new machines, however, the excess energy is channeled into creating power.

As exercisers become aware of the metrics of human power-production, it could push them to work harder.

“What we have been finding is that people challenge themselves to work a little bit harder because now they can measure how much energy they create,” says Whelan. “It seems like there is a personal goal to try and create just a little bit more than the last time they worked out.”

When they gravitate to these innovative systems, gym-goers could also move away from power-hogging equipment. Once people figure out that the average treadmill takes 1,500-2,000 watts to run, they may switch to power-producing machines, says Taggett.

“Right now, it would take nine Lance Armstrongs or 15 nonathletes to keep one treadmill chugging along,” he says.

That’s less “fitness revolution” and more “Tour de France in your cardio room.” Until then, the smarter move might be to ditch the treadmill, hop on a bike, and enjoy the rare satisfaction of knowing your sweat is literally keeping the lights on.

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As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as “drumsticks.” Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this backyard tree as a possible solution to malnutrition in tropical countries – he called it a “miracle tree,” no less.

Ounce for ounce, says Lamine Diakite, a Red Cross official from French Guinea in West Africa, moringa leaves contain more beta carotene than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges, and more potassium than bananas. Its protein content is comparable to that of milk and eggs, and its leaves are still available for harvest at the end of the dry season, when other food may be scarce. Malnourished children gained weight when put on a timely dietary supplement made from the leaves, Mr. Diakite says. He passed around pouches of the green, henna-like powder at a recent international summit in Boston held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Until a decade ago, moringa was not widely known in Africa. Its leaves (boiled like spinach) were an occasional vegetable. Immigrant Indians prized the long, slender seedpods (stewed or cooked like green beans) as a delicacy. “But its nutritional value, newly ‘discovered,’ has been known for a long time,” says Lowell Fuglie, an international development administrator who has been instrumental in popularizing the moringa in Africa for the past 10 years. Laboratory analysis has corroborated traditional knowledge about the plant. It now awaits further validation by modern science.

But even those who know moringa is edible don’t always exploit its nutritional value, particularly beneficial to those eating a carbohydrate-heavy diet (meat is often costly in Africa). Senegalese people using moringa leaves to make mboum sauce, for example, discard the cooking water, which contains many nutrients, Mr. Fuglie says. His interest was sparked by research findings collated by the nonprofit Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO). “Seeing moringa described as the most nutritious of all tropical vegetables,” says Fuglie, whose father worked for USAID in Africa, “I wondered why there was so much malnutrition in regions where the tree is easily grown and used.”

Species of moringa are native to the Indian subcontinent and pockets of Asia and Africa. One species in particular, Moringa oleifera, which has especially edible leaves, has become naturalized in other regions, says Mark Olson, an evolutionary biologist. Moringa growing wild on Mexico’s Pacific coast probably arrived long ago via the Philippines when Spanish galleons sailed between Manila and Acapulco, he says. He has traveled to remote areas to document the dozen or so species of the diverse, hardy native of the dry tropics. “It’s very hard to kill the moringa with drought or heat,” he says. Protein-rich plants like soybeans and legumes cannot survive such conditions or thrive in poor soil.

The fact that the leaves – and not just the seedpods and seeds – are edible makes moringa a desirable crop. The seeds also yield oil that could be used as biofuel, and ground seeds can help purify water. Parts of the tree are used in traditional medicine. It also grows rapidly (good for reforestation), reaching a mature height of 30 feet, though often it’s pruned annually to be as short as five feet, to keep leaves and seedpods within easy reach. It would be difficult to find a low-maintenance tree that offers more, says Fuglie.

In the 1980s, development workers began to hear of the tree. Its popularity grew by leaps when Fuglie began to promote the shade-dried leaf powder as a food supplement, says Martin Price, director of ECHO. Reports from Fuglie’s pilot nutrition project were persuasive.

Still, there have been no clinical human trials to quantify the moringa’s role in fighting malnutrition, says Jed Fahey of Johns Hopkins University. He is a volunteer for Trees for Life International, a group that promotes planting moringas. Based on centuries of human consumption, however, a strong case can be made that eating the leaves causes no harm, says Dr. Fahey, a phytochemical researcher. But because there is no definitive dietary study on the moringa, the scientific community and relief agencies still have reservations. Fuglie predicts that more moringas will be planted once aid organizations are convinced of the leaves’ nutrition.

Fuglie needs no persuading: If you had to design an affordable source of enriching supplements for the dry tropics, he says, “it may be impossible to come up with anything better than the moringa.”

P.S. In Chennai, a photographer, a middle-aged man, set out to find me a suitable image for the piece. As he roamed the streets on this mission, a helpful auto-driver asked him what he was looking for. His reply, “a pod-laden moringa tree,” prompted a smirk. When he asked around, other passersby smiled knowingly. All this could have had something to do with the local belief that the moringa pod is an aphrodisiac.

Despite traditional use and scientific promise, why is moringa still underutilized?

pdf

Drumstick Pudina Pepper Soup

by binal valand

Ingredients
• 1 tbsp uncooked moong dal
• 3–4 drumsticks, cut into long pieces
• Salt, to taste
• Spice Mix: ground pepper + chili powder + chaat masala
• Juice of 1 lemon (or to taste)
• Handful fresh coriander
• 1 green chilli
• Few sprigs of pudina (mint)

Method
1. Cut drumsticks as shown in the video. Boil them with moong dal for 3 whistles.
2. Once cooled, carefully remove the drumstick pulp (avoid hard fibre). Wash the drumstick skins to extract all residual pulp.
3. In a mixie jar, grind fresh coriander, green chilli, and pudina into a fine paste. Add the drumstick pulp, cooked dal, salt, and the saved stock water. Blend into a smooth paste.
4. Transfer this mixture to a pan, add water, and bring to a boil.
5. Finish with lemon juice, pepper, and the spice mix. Stir well.
6. Serve hot, topped with corn, sprouts, or crunchy soya sticks. Drizzle extra lemon and sprinkle more spice mix if you like.

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Converging here at the MIT, these 61 inventors from 20 countries divided into multilingual teams, each drafting and tinkering with their own device that will hopefully make life for the world’s poor a little easier. There was no grand prize to be won at this second-annual International Development Design Summit (IDDS), but members sometimes skipped meals and stayed up late – sawing, hammering, and welding – to perfect and build their designs. Soon, their prototypes will be rebuilt and refined in the developing world by artisans using locally available materials and tested ultimately by consumers who live on less than a dollar a day.

Read the story here. html. pdf.

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Amy Smith is not an easy person to track down. Even during the school year, this inventor and instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hops over to remote African towns and Latin American villages.

When she is on campus, the best bet for finding Ms. Smith is in her basement laboratory – a cluttered workshop with a long whiteboard, exotic souvenirs, and basic tools – known as D-Lab.

Unlike most of MIT, Smith’s workshop is far from cutting-edge. There are no next-gen computers, no vials of polysyllabic chemicals, no fancy equipment. The space is decidedly low-tech – and that’s the point. D-Lab students pinpoint practical problems in the developing countries and then brainstorm and build solutions. Because the people they are trying to help are below the poverty line, the class’s inventions must be simple, effective, and most important, inexpensive.

“What people need is usually completely different from what we imagine sitting here in America,” says Jodie Wu, a mechanical engineering junior, whose group went on a school-sponsored trip to Tanzania over winter break. The idea for her current project – a mobile, pedal-powered corn sheller – came from a conversation with a Tanzanian bike mechanic.

The D in D-Lab stands for three things – development, design, and dissemination – and each is the theme of a different semester-long class.

The first class travels to developing countries and identifies issues that the lab can tackle during the next term. For example, in heavily deforested countries, the students found an alternative to firewood.

The design class – often filled with different kids – takes on the practical engineering. Here they planned and built a charcoal-briquette maker, a metal press that can make clean-burning fuel out of agricultural waste. “It could be corncobs in Tibet and sugar-cane waste in Haiti,” says Derek Brine, a teaching assistant.

The third phase takes the students’ work and deploys it across the globe.

“These classes are the ones I wish I could have taken during my time here [as a student],” says Smith, herself an MIT-trained mechanical engineer.

D-Lab forces students to set aside their high-tech training. “Though it appears like a step backward in terms of technology, you are moving forward because you learn to do more with less,” says Ms. Wu.

This design process takes many rounds of revision. For instance, the briquette-maker was originally a foot-long piston. After many prototypes and field tests, the models got smaller and cheaper. The final six-centimeter-long version inspired a mantra for the D-Lab crew: “When you have to go to a tenth of the cost, reduce the material by 90 percent.” Paring down certainly helped in this case – the tool, originally $20, is now only $2.

Smith has built her career on this style of practical solutions. In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship – often called the “genius award” – for creative uses of simple technology to solve everyday problems in developing countries. Smith’s early inventions grew out of her four years in Botswana, volunteering for the Peace Corps. Her electricity-free incubator – an icebox packed with phase-change pellets – keeps samples warm for 24 hours and is an integral part of inexpensive water-testing kits.

Smith’s travel continues, but often with teams of students in tow. She has developed a growing, global network of community partners. Each summer, indigenous inventors from across the world come to a design summit hosted by D-Lab to exchange know-how and ideas. Clearly, D also stands for dialogue.

Within a decade, Smith has transformed this cramped basement into a wellspring of ingenious, low-cost inventions. In a sense, says engineering junior Kendra Johnson, Smith’s best invention yet is the D-Lab itself.

Read the rest of the story here. pdf.

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