Without a doubt, the only thing that’s green about lawns is its color.
We’ve already gone on a long tirade about this expensive and resource-intensive crop, but did you know that simply mowing your grass once a week comes at a hefty environmental price?
Here’s why: The typical gasoline-powered lawnmower is a huge, filthy polluter. The EPA estimates that in a single hour, these mowers emit 11 times the air pollution of a new car that’s driven in the same amount of time. That’s something that the planet — and our lungs — shouldn’t have to go through just for a nice patch of green. (Unless you own an electric mower, of course!)
That’s where NOx-Out comes in. It’s a one-of-a-kind device from the student engineers at the University of California-Riverside (UCR). By fitting this L-shaped pipe over a regular mower’s muffler, it significantly cuts emissions from lawnmowers more than 90 percent. According to a UCR press release, when an earlier version of the NOx-Out was tested, it cut carbon monoxide by 87 percent; nitrogen oxides by 67 percent and particulate matter by 44 percent. In the current version, 93 percent of particulate matter emissions were eliminated.
The device, which won a huge grant from the EPA’s P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) competition, works in a three-step process, UCR says. “First, a glass quartz filter captures particulate matter. Then an ultra-fine spray of urea solution is dispersed into the exhaust stream. The urea spray primes the dirty air for the final stage, when a catalyst converts the harmful nitrogen oxide and ammonia into harmless nitrogen gas and water and releases them into the air.”
MORE: Why New Farm and Construction Equipment Will Improve Air Quality and Save Lives
The idea for the NOx-Out came from team member Rosalva Chavez, a UCR environmental engineering student. Chavez suspected that her janitor father, who earned extra money mowing lawns over the weekend, had developed coughing and asthma due to his exposure to emissions via gasoline-powered lawn equipment.
The best news about this story? As TreeHugger found, the UCR campus will be using these devices on their own lawns, and eventually, the entire University of California system could benefit from cleaner air, thanks to the NOx-Out.
UCR says that team is also thinking about commercializing the product once it’s further refined — selling for about $30 each. When 80 percent of Americans live in a home with a lawn, that’s a small price to pay to help out the planet.
[ph]
DON’T MISS: A Roof That Can Clean the Air?
Tag: University of California-Riverside
A Roof That Can Clean the Air?
Now talk about something that smog-filled Southern California could really use.
Students at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering have developed an insanely cheap and simple solution to air pollution.
According to UCR Today, the team created an experimental coating that, when applied to your average clay tile, can remove between 88 to 97 percent of smog-causing nitrogen oxides.
The coating is made of titanium dioxide — a very common product found in paint, sunscreen and even some candy — that breaks down nitrogen oxides found in air pollution. Remarkably (since the product is made of such an ordinary compound) the students say that it would only cost $5 to coat the average residential roof.
ALSO: These Two Students Developed an Incredibly Cheap Solution to a Common Disability
Crunching the numbers, the young researchers figured that if the coating were applied to a single roof, it would gobble up the same amount of nitrogen oxide in one year that’s produced by a car driving 11,000 miles. Apply these tiles to a million homes, and they would eliminate 21 tons of nitrogen oxides every day — about 4 percent of the 500 tons of nitrogen oxide emitted each day in Southern California.
That’s not too shabby of a return on a few bucks.
The coating inventors, who are all set to graduate, hope to see their project taken on by a new team of students for testing in the real world. Besides rooftops, these ambitious college seniors want to see their creation applied on concrete and freeway walls or dividers to curb another big SoCal problem: Traffic pollution.
DON’T MISS: These High Schoolers Solved a Foodie Problem With a 3-D Printer
This Tiny Sticker Could Save Thousands of Lives
For millions of people around the world, mosquitoes aren’t just a summertime nuisance. They’re disease-carrying killers. Researchers from the University of California-Riverside have developed a breakthrough that could forever change mosquito protection — and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The Kite Patch is a simple sticker that attaches to clothing and makes wearers virtually “invisible” to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours. The patch works by emitting chemicals that prevent mosquitoes from sensing the carbon dioxide humans exhale, which is how the insects commonly track us, but doesn’t include dangerous toxins that are used in traditional repellants.
Malaria, Dengue Fever and West Nile Virus are just a few of the diseases that mosquitoes share with their human hosts — all of which can be deadly, especially in the developing world, where access to life-saving medications is scarce. According to the World Health Organization, 219 million cases of malaria were contracted from mosquito bites worldwide in 2010, resulting in more than 660,000 deaths, mostly in Africa. Mosquito nets, toxic lotions and sprays, and anti-malaria medications may help, but they simply don’t do enough to protect people from bites.
The Kite Patch, which was created in partnership with ieCrowd, holds incredible promise. The product’s developers raised more than $500,000 during its Indiegogo campaign, and are now moving into the implementation phase. The Kite Patch will be available in the U.S. after it receives approval from the Environmental Protection Agency. But more importantly, researchers are now preparing for a large-scale field test in Uganda — one of the product’s key “battlegrounds”, where malaria rates top 60% —promising to bring more than 1 million hours of Kite Patch protection to the families who need it most.
[ph]
MORE: A Nickel-Sized Device Could Soon Save Your Life