Eoin Lane, IBM Smarter Water Architect

By Eoin Lane

People often say that water is the new oil, but really, it’s not. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years and a lot of pressure to create. When we burn oil – for example, by driving our cars – it is gone forever (or at least for a few more millions of years before it can be created again!).

Water, on the other hand, cannot be created or destroyed (this is not strictly true, but bear with me). The same amount of water is around today that was around when the Earth was formed. The truth is there is a lot of water on Earth – just not a lot of drinking water. Here are some facts about just how little drinkable water is available:

* 97.5 percent of all water on Earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5 percent as fresh water
* Of that fresh water, nearly 70 percent is locked in ice
* Most of the rest of that freshwater is in aquifers which we are draining much more quickly than the natural recharge rate
* Two-thirds of our freshwater is used to grow food
* With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up unless we change how we use it.[1]

Margaret Catley-Carlson of the Global Water Partnership has said, ”We cannot create water, but we can manage it better, much better.” [2] Take, for example, the longest water tunnel supplying NYC: it is 85 miles long, and it leaks 35 million gallons of water every day. We need to become much smarter about how we manage this precious resource and about how we collect, analyze and use water data.

There are three ways we can become smarter about water management:  Instrumentation, Big Data analytics, and cooperation

Element Blue, an IBM Premier Partner and leading Smarter Planet solution provider, has released the industry’s first mobile application for use with the IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) platform.

“Our goal in developing the Intelligent Operations Dashboard for Consumers app was to make our real-time solution even more easy and efficient for our clients to use,” said Joey Bernal, Element Blue Managing Partner and CTO.

Using the mobile app, customers may view events, alerts and KPIs through the IOC in real time via any smart device such as iPhone, iPad and Android platforms. The application allows consumers to view updates as they occur on the IOC and associated products such as IBM Intelligent Operations for Water.

Juan Hindo, Program Manager, Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, IBM

By Juan Hindo

Today, World Community Grid celebrates eight years of bringing together volunteers from around the world to support humanitarian research. World Community Grid taps the spare computational power of computers volunteered by the general public and provides it – free of charge – to scientists who might not otherwise have access to the intensive computing power they require for timely, humanitarian research.

 In eight years, our volunteers have provided research scientists with the equivalent of more than 600,000 years of computing power to seek cures and new treatments for many diseases, identify clean sources of energy and seek to improve water quality. These projects have yielded more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers – industry recognition of scientific research being advanced by World Community Grid.

Continue reading at Citizen IBM.

This is the fourth year Newsweek ranked the 500 largest companies on their environmental footprint (45% of score), corporate management (45%) and transparency (10%), using data from Trucost and Sustainalytics.

World’s Top Green Corporations

All the top companies got scores of 82 out of 100 or above - here are some very brief highlights on what makes them stand out.

IBM - which always tops these lists - is the only US company included in the world’s 20 top corporations.

It’s rated #4 in the world for its “Smarter Planet” service that helps clients measure and reduce their own footprint, while saving them money. At its Zurich lab, water that cools a supercomputer is used to warm nearby buildings. Read our profile on IBM.

Improved microbial fuel cell (credit: Oregon State University)

Engineers at Oregon State University have made a breakthrough in the performance of microbial fuel cells that can produce electricity directly from wastewater, opening the door to a future in which waste treatment plants not only will power themselves, but will sell excess electricity.

The new technology developed at OSU uses new concepts — reduced anode-cathode spacing, evolved microbes and new separator materials — and can produce more than two kilowatts per cubic meter of liquid reactor volume — 10 to 50 more times the electrical per unit volume than most other approaches using microbial fuel cells, and 100 times more electricity than some.

This technology cleans sewage by a very different approach than the aerobic bacteria used in the past. Bacteria oxidize the organic matter and, in the process, produce electrons that run from the anode to the cathode within the fuel cell, creating an electrical current.

Almost any type of organic waste material can be used to produce electricity — not only wastewater, but also grass straw, animal waste, and byproducts from such operations as the wine, beer or dairy industries.

By Dylan Matthews, washingtonpost.com

Many of the world’s most impor­tant food-producing regions depend on fresh­wa­ter from mas­sive under­ground aquifers that have built up over thou­sands of years. The Ogal­lala Aquifer in the mid­west­ern Unit­ed States. The Upper Ganges,…

IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities Gleans Insight, Increases Efficiency

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/13/4558781/arizonas-desert-mountain-community.html#storylink=cpy

The exponentially growing number of objects connected to the Internet is changing our world. What new business models will appear? Which processes can be optimized? How many vertical markets are benefited? Libelium, a wireless sensor networks platform provider, has made a list showing how the “Internet of Things” is becoming the next technological revolution. 

The list includes the most trendy scenarios, like Smart Cities where sensors can offer us services like Smart Parking to find free parking spots in the streets or managing the intensity of the luminosity in street lights to save energy. Climate change, environmental protection, water quality or CO2 emissions also are addressed by sensor networks.

“Since 2008, there are more objects connected to the Internet than persons in the world and this figure will hit 50 billion by 2020!. Now we can interact not only with contents in Websites but with real objects,” the company says. “For the first time, we can live in Smart Cities full of sensors that help us to improve our lifestyle and machines that talk to other machines on their own. As a result, people and objects jump into the Internet adding new layers of data and complexity. The ‘virtual’ Internet we knew is becoming more ‘physical’ than ever. We have entered into the ‘Internet of Things’ era.”

Biological treatment plus ozone can reduce the amount of sludge coming from wastewater treatment plants by a factor of ten

The process was developed by the Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Italian National Research Council and tested and scaled-up as part the EU-funded Innowatech project.

We know that biological processes offer the cheapest way to treat industrial wastewater. But pollutants from industries such as leather, textiles and pharmaceuticals are not easily broken down by microbes.