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B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition
Researchers have figured out how to make airplanes fly on landfill gas
The aviation industry, which is responsible for 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Zero carbon fuels for airplanes are an important part of decarbonizing flying. And while many are looking to making sustainable aviation fuels from biomass, it remains expensive and often competes with agriculture.
But now, researchers in Korea have come up with a way to convert landfill gases into liquid aviation fuels. Their integrated process is based on a special hybrid cobalt catalyst that they reported in the journal Fuel.
To take the research out of the lab, they built a pilot plant that can produce 100 kg of SAF a day, according to a press release.
Companies make SAF today mainly from used cooking oil and waste animal fats. These resources are limited. The team at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) instead turned to landfill gas, the methane-rich gases produced when bacteria consume organic waste in landfills and animal manure pits. It offers a cheaper, more abundant feedstock for making biofuels.
There is a well-known way to produce convert greenhouse gases into drop-in fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS), the method relies on catalysts to convert syngas—a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen—into hydrocarbon molecules that are found in liquid fuels.
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The synthesis process is energy-intensive because it requires high-temperature heat. Low-temperature FTS over cobalt-based catalysts produces a higher share of waxy hydrocarbons as opposed to liquids.
So the researchers developed a hybrid catalyst by combining cobalt with zeolite, common aluminum-and-silica minerals that have a porous structure. They fine-tuned the structure of the catalyst particles at the microscopic level so that the cobalt and zirconia atoms are close to each other. This boosted the production of liquid fuels over waxy products, increasing overall efficiency of the process. In tests, the catalyst selectively produced more than 79% liquid hydrocarbons in 900-hour runs.
For the reactor, the researchers came up with a microchannel design composed of alternating layers of catalyst and coolant channels. This allows the large amounts of heat generated during the chemical reaction to quickly be removed so that the catalyst is not destroyed. Because of the integrated design, the reactor has a smaller footprint compared to conventional systems.
Source: SeongWoo Jeong et al. Comprehensive study of cobalt-based hybrid catalysts for selective liquid fuel production via Fischer–Tropsch synthesis. Fuel, 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
Diálogo de tejedores: Crianza Mutua México, Vikalp Sangam India, Crianzas Mutuas Colombia - 04/12/2021 - creado
Dialogue of Weavers: Crianza Mutua México, Vikalp Sangam India, Crianzas Mutuas Colombia - 04/12/2021
Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a successful rainforest recovery program.
Programs around the world have tried to harness the power of money to save habitat, by paying people to protect or restore their land.
When ecologist Giacomo Delgado wanted to test whether one of the oldest and most established programs was translating into biodiversity gains, he chose to listen for it.
Using more than 100 weatherproofed microphones and powerful computer programs, the Ph.D. student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich) collected nearly a million minutes of audio recordings from land scattered across Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula.
The results revealed that the din of life in forests regrowing under a program that paid landowners to leave pastureland untouched had a lot in common with intact forests in the area, Delgado and colleagues reported recently in Global Change Biology.
“These findings represent perhaps some of our best evidence to date that ecosystem restoration can benefit biodiversity at large spatial scales,” Delgado wrote in a blog post.
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The subject of his study was an experiment begun in Costa Rica in 1996, the first nationwide program in the world that paid people to preserve land and the underlying environmental benefits. The program is funded chiefly through a tax on fossil fuels, and has been credited with helping the country become a place growing more forest than it loses.
But until Delgado picked up his microphones, it wasn’t clear that this forest renewal had translated into a revival of forest inhabitants. While he might have opted to try the painstaking approach of counting individual animals in a small number of places, the scientist opted to tap into the burgeoning field of bioacoustics, in which mountains of digital recordings are crunched by computers to understand the natural world.
He and collaborators placed microphones on 142 sites in the peninsula, a mix of native forest, pasture, and sites that had been allowed to recover on their own or been replanted with a single tree species as part of the national program. They emerged with 999,470 minutes of audio data recorded between May and July 2022.
Using computers, they developed a kind of fingerprint of the soundscapes for each kind of land. Natural forests were raucous – loud and marked by lots of variation in sounds, particularly around dawn and dusk. Birds and insects were particularly noisy during twilight. Pastures, by contrast, had far more human sounds, no big burst at sunrise and sunset, and more noise at night.
The former pasture turned young forest, where people were paid to let it regrow, bore many of the hallmarks of the intact forest, particularly during the dusk burst of activity. Overall, it was 1.4 times more similar to the natural forests than to the pastures. The sounds of the replanted forests lagged behind a bit, at 1.24 times more similar the natural forests.
The regrowing forests still had a way to go before they were indistinguishable from old growth. In particular, the dawn chorus was more muted. That might be because biodiversity in those altered landscapes still lags, or because nearby human activity quieted the creatures, the scientists suggested.
For Delgado, the results offer hope for ecological restoration and for simultaneously bringing economic benefits to the people, many of them poor, who live on and protect the land. “Empowering local people and sharing nature’s bounty among all, instead of locking it away for the privileged few, is a radically effective ecological solution,” he wrote.
Delgado, et. al. “Large-Scale Forest Restoration Accompanied by Biodiversity Recovery in Costa Rica’s Redistributive Payment for Ecosystem Service Program.” Global Change Research. Feb. 4, 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
Rethinking the world with Iván Illich and Gustavo Esteva - [Agenda]
Repensar el mundo con Iván Illich y Gustavo Esteva
Between Parks and Rubble: Childhood and Public Space in Damascus
There’s now hard evidence guaranteeing a second life for old concrete
Concrete slabs, beams, columns and other elements from dismantled buildings can be safely reused in new construction, according to a new study. The analysis could facilitate incorporating concrete—currently responsible for as much as 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions—into the circular construction industry and make the building sector as a whole more sustainable.
“Due to its durability, concrete can have a long life, and if we reuse it, we maximize its longevity, and avoid the carbon-intensive process of producing new cement and the energy-heavy machinery required for crushing and recycling waste,” says study team member Arlind Dervishaj, an architect and graduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Building codes generally require concrete to be sound for at least 50 years. When buildings are torn down (even before the 50-year mark, as is increasingly the case) it’s usually assumed that concrete’s useful life is over. Old concrete either gets landfilled or downcycled into rubble for road construction or aggregate for new concrete production.
That’s a major missed opportunity, the new study suggests.
But until now, there has been no organized method to evaluate the potential of reusing salvaged concrete. The researchers ran thousands of computer simulations to predict the future lifespan of reused concrete, based on measurements of the condition of existing buildings.
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“Our study demonstrates that we can scientifically guarantee a ‘second life’ for these elements, shifting the perspective of old buildings from end-of-life waste to a valuable resource of durable components,” says Dervishaj.
The future lifespan of a given piece of concrete depends on its past use, storage history, climate conditions like humidity and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and how it is deployed in its second life.
For example, a concrete slab that has been exposed to harsh elements for many decades may be best reused as an interior component. Repair and refurbishment techniques—such as waterproof coatings—can also extend the lifespan of concrete.
The researchers constructed a flowchart to help builders be confident that reused concrete components will be structurally sound for the anticipated lifetime of a new structure. “We can prove that much of this concrete is safe for another full service life,” says Dervishaj. “It’s a positive ‘re-discovery’ of a material we already have.”
To facilitate re-use, the history of concrete components will need to be tracked in an organized way. Ground-truthing of the researchers’ rubric is also necessary: “We now need to monitor real-world projects with reused concrete to see how it performs under changing exposures,” says Dervishaj.
“We are currently working on the first comprehensive standard for precast concrete reuse in Sweden—and arguably the first of its kind in Europe,” Dervishaj says. The researchers hope their approach will eventually lead to Europe-wide and perhaps even international standards for concrete reuse.
Source: Dervishaj A. et al. “From durability to circularity: ensuring service life and enabling reuse of concrete in circular construction.” Materials and Structures 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
Dictionary of Radcial Alternatives Platform Launch - [Organized by]
02-10
events:dictionary_launch_flyer_1080.png - created
Kurdistán: un año después, ¿hay avances hacia la paz y la democracia? ¿Cuáles son las implicaciones del conflicto actual en Siria?.
Kurdistan: A year on, is there progress towards peace and democracy? What are the implications of the ongoing conflict in Syria?
02-17 - created
Main page
events:gta_members_statement_on_rojava_1.2.2026.pdf - created
Place-based, Earth-centred governance in Australia
Michelle Maloney and Mary Graham
As communities around the world work to protect their homes, traditional lands and ecosystems in the face of escalating climate change and biodiversity loss, many people in Western societies are looking for new modes of …
Pesticides Devastate Farmworkers Lives
Photo: Lakeview Middle School in Watsonville, CA, surrounded by farms that use pesticides
At a Pesticide Reality Tour last May, Dr. Ann Lopez stood next to legendary farmworker activist Dolores Huerta, Lopez’s inspiration for her work to elevate the lives of farmworkers. Dolores Huerta, ever the activist at age 95, was there to support the Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) co-founded by Lopez to eliminate the exposure to toxic pesticides that farmworkers endure with devastating regularity.
Seventy percent of the population of the farming community of Watsonville, CA, where the rally was held, is Latinx, many of whom work in the local berry fields in the Pajaro Valley that straddles the Santa Cruz and Monterey County line. In this agricultural region, like many others, pesticides are routinely sprayed around schools and homes. Each year, one million pounds of pesticides are applied to farmland in Santa Cruz County, 67% of which are toxic fumigants that become airborne and can travel for miles.
One of these pesticides, chloropicrin, is banned or restricted in Europe. The chemical is injected into the soil as a sterilizing fumigant before planting a crop. In the First World War, it was used as a poison gas and recently there have been allegations that it is being used by the Russians in the war against Ukraine.
The European Union’s Food Safety Authority has established that chloropicrin is toxic when inhaled and causes severe eye, skin, and respiratory irritation. Some studies have indicated that it could also cause DNA damage.
Lopez, a biologist turned farmworker advocate, addressed the gathering about the dangers of pesticides with a tone of indignation, “I’m sick and tired of meeting families that have at least one kid that has some anomaly that will probably affect them for life including brain cancer, bone cancer, ADHD, and learning disabilities. It was shocking to go house-to-house and meet these families and almost everyone has some child that has one of the serious anomalies…. Mothers sent me pictures of their children just before they died.”
Lopez’s ire is not solely based on anecdotal evidence. The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has identified 13 pesticides correlated to the onset of childhood cancer between birth and 5 years old, when the mother lives within 2.5 miles of pesticide application while pregnant.
Dr. Lopez pointed to the fact that Latinx school children are 3.2 times more likely than white students to attend schools with high exposure to hazardous pesticides as an example of environmental racism. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of these agricultural toxins.
Ernestina Solorio has been working in the farm fields since 1993, even when she was pregnant with her two youngest children who have been diagnosed with ADHD, have learning problems and suffer from depression. Holding back tears as she addressed the CORA rally in Spanish, Solorio said, “Both of them are constantly going to medical appointments and counselors and psychologists. It is very difficult to see that they are not getting better or making any progress. If I had known about the chemicals in the field, I would have chosen not to work there. The difficult thing for me is that my lack of knowledge now results in my kids’ suffering. My 18 year old asks why he can’t be normal. The owner of these fields should have some conscience and think about the kids and how much they suffer… Driscoll’s should have some conscience and change those farms to organic for the kids and the farmworkers and the community.”
The CORA campaign is primarily targeting Driscoll’s, a family owned company that began in the early 1900’s in Watsonville and is now the largest berry grower in the world with farms in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Baja California, Chile, and Peru. CORA is promoting organic and regenerative farming as the remedy to the tragedy of farmworker families’ exposure to toxic pesticides that destroy health and even take lives. Fifteen to twenty percent of Driscoll’s production is currently organic, however, 9 of the 11 schools in Pajaro Valley are adjacent to conventional farms that use toxic pesticides and the 2 others are only a couple of blocks away from farms that use chemical sprays.
Driscoll’s position is that they are in full compliance with state and federal pesticides laws. But evidence is mounting that those laws are woefully insufficient to protect the public’s health. Ultimately, CORA wants to see the more than 25,000 acres of farmland in the Pajaro Valley farmed organically. In the short term, their campaign is focused on having the fields near homes and schools converted to organic farms in order to protect the health of children and the wider community.
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