Word: peated
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period...
...food additive. Growing it has long been a big business in Southeast Asia. But it can also be used in the production of a relatively clean-burning alternative fuel: biodiesel. As oil prices have soared in recent years, Indonesian companies have been converting vast tracts of forests and peat bogs into palm-oil plantations to feed a rapidly expanding biodiesel industry; between 1995 and 2005, the amount of Indonesian land being used to grow oil palms increased by some 8.6 million acres (3.5 million hectares), more than doubling total plantation area, according to a recent report on the industry...
...Amaker said. “We needed that. He had played as well as we wanted him to play up to this point, but I think tonight could be a really strong, positive step forward for him to do some positive things for us.” THREE-PEAT For the third year in a row, a nail-biter between these two teams ended with a double-digit victory margin. Two years ago, Harvard held a 51-49 lead on the road with less than four minutes to play before pulling away for a 70-55 victory. Last year...
Dumping has also been valuable for Tennessee's Bouldin Corp. In 2003 the firm began taking Warren County garbage and converting it to what Bouldin calls "fluff." That's household trash ground up, with the metals removed, and heated so it's inert. Fluff is used as a peat substitute. Bouldin's new landfill project is expected to swing to profitability after it launches its first durable products next year: landscape timber and building blocks made from trash. "A few years down the line, we'll wonder why we ever put this stuff in the ground," says marketing manager Terry...
...wetlands study darkened the picture further. Marshes in Alaska and northern Canada are natural sinks for mercury, which chemically adheres to damp peat and readily converts to the methyl form. That is not a problem as long as the mercury stays put. But increasingly frequent droughts--a likely consequence of global warming--have led to increasingly frequent wildfires, causing wetlands to release centuries' worth of collected mercury in one toxic breath. "There's mercury that's been accumulating since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution," says ecosystems ecologist Merritt Turetsky of Michigan State University, who has been studying the problem...