Energy Independence

"Zabaleen" is the Arabic term for those visionary and enterprising people whose culture revolves around recycling. The Zabaleen are experts at "transforming one man's garbage into another man's gold" and aspire toward a net zero-waste economy. Applied and supported this could lead to true energy independence, not only by radically reducing our demand for "raw materials" and hard to extract natural resources but by recycling other less obvious phenomena and materials that are now wasted.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Hydrogen -- is it hype or is it hot?

The other day in class I started describing how easy it is to make hydrogen. According to Marshall Brain in

How the Hydrogen Economy Works

"The problems with the fossil fuel economy are so great, and the environmental advantages of the hydrogen economy so significant, that the push toward the hydrogen economy is very strong."

To make this happen though, we all need to learn what hydrogen is and how it is made, and we've looked at the fact that you can make hydrogen using simple drain cleaner and waste aluminum foil. (see

Run Your Car on Hydrogen from Aluminum Soda Cans and Lye

byTimAnderson). In this article he even shows how to run a car on home made hydrogen.

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The Zabaleen ethic

There is no such thing as "garbage". Nothing should be wasted. A Zabaleen looks around him or her and asks, "what new use or value can I find in this object, this environment, this moment." The Zabaleen ethic, if properly applied and supported, could lead to true energy independence by making use not only of what we traditionally call "trash" but of other wasted commodities: embedded solar radiation found in light, heat, wind, hydrological cycles, geothermal mass and biomass and from the synergistic behavior of microbes, plants, fungi and non-human animals. We can all be Zabaleen...