A lot of rubbish ends up in the ocean.  It's an unfortunate fact but it's true.  Have you ever wondered where all the junk ends up however?  Plastics take a great many years to break down,  and also tend to float.  Turns out that currents and winds have a tendance to collect all this junk in certain areas of the oceans.  One such place is in the Pacific and is twice the size of Texas.

It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.

But on November 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water--after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals, and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

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Through a combination of increased population size and climate change we are now experiencing approximately 4 times the natural disasters that we did in the 1980's. 

As a result engineers are going to have to change the ways they look at things.  Increasingly we are going to have to be designing buildings and equipment to sustain these extreme conditions.  We are also going to have to consider new and improved equipment and processes for providing aid in these circumstances.

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WHITING, Indiana: Every day, 20 million gallons of industrial waste carrying everything from hard hats to thick globs of oil flow from BP's Indiana refinery to its last stop before Lake Michigan - a 30-acre wastewater treatment plant.

Three months ago, the London-based oil company said it would scrap the Whiting refinery's planned $3.8 billion expansion if it could not find ways to cut the amount of additional waste that project would send into the lake.

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Google , the Internet company with a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.
The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced Tuesday that it intended to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.

Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

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A lot of attention at the moment is being directed to what we can do to minimise the polution that is apparently contributing to global warming.  The problem is that the damage would already seem to be done and that it may take a rather long time before we can observe the benefits of the changes,  especially at the slow pace in which we are curbing said polution.

Another solution has been proposed which would act to directly cool the globe by several means.  While this may in fact work it also seems to me to be something I wouldn't want people playing around with.  We have all too often seen attempts to change the surrounding environment in our advantage fail due to unforseen side effects.  Directly changing the temperature of the world on a global scale just seems to be asking for trouble.

Not exactly leading the world,  but not getting left behind either -

Britain's first bioethanol plant was officially opened on Thursday, hailed by engineers and officials as a major turning point in the reduction of carbon emissions in the UK transport system.

The plant, which started operations in September, produces 70 million litres of ethanol biofuel a year from locally grown sugar beet processed at Associated British Foods' British Sugar plant in Wissington, Eastern England.

Yellowstone Park's bizarre steam vents and odiferous boiling pools are more than just tourist attractions and geological curiosities. They are home to unique microbes — living organisms that thrive in extreme heat. More than that, they are valuable resources for industries searching for fresh and big profits.

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The heart of the ethanol discussion is in America's heartland, where corn is grown for both livestock feed and alternative fuel, an energy source with as many critics as true believers. Companies like VeraSun Energy, Pacific Ethanol and privately owned Hawkeye Energy Holdings are betting that as the price of oil continues to skyrocket, so will the demand for alternative fuel.

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MALMO, Sweden — Steadying himself on the heaving foredeck of an inspection ship recently, his face flecked by spray, Arne Floderus pronounced it a good day for his new offshore wind farm.
A 30-mile-an-hour wind was twirling the fingerlike blades of a turbine 380 feet above his head. Around him, a field of turbines rotated in a synchronized ballet of engineering that, when fully connected to an electrical grid, would generate enough power to light 60,000 nearby houses.

“We’ve created a new landmark,” said Mr. Floderus, the project manager of the $280 million wind park, one of the world’s largest, which was built by the Swedish power company Vattenfall.

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It may look like an ordinary construction site, but engineers and crews at the Alderney Landing parking lot are really breaking ground.

On Monday, workers began chipping away at the world’s largest geothermal cold-energy storage project , which is expected to reduce the city’s annual operating costs by $250,000 a year and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 580 tonnes a year.

"It will help our children and grandchildren in terms of a healthier air quality, but also (give us) a healthier bank balance, in terms of not having to expend as many dollars over the duration," Mayor Peter Kelly said after a news conference at Alderney Landing, a five-building complex on the Dartmouth waterfront.

Britain is to build the biggest biomass plant in the world, Business Secretary John Hutton said after giving the green light to the renewable energy engineering project.

The 350-megawatt wood chip-fuelled electricity generating plant will be sited in the industrial town of Port Talbot on the south Wales coast. It will cost 400 million pounds (830 million dollars, 560 million euros) to construct.

Biomass refers to living and recently dead biological material that can be used as fuel or for industrial production. Most commonly, biomass refers to plant matter grown for use as biofuel, but it also includes plant or animal matter used for production of fibres, chemicals or heat

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