Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
The high-pitched whine of a tiny diesel engine is sweet music to the ears of researchers at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.
They’re developing the bio-diesel fuel powering the engine from algae. The potential environmental benefits are incredible, says Dr. Patrick Hatcher, a professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry who oversees the research.
Instead of releasing harmful pollutants into our water and atmosphere, algae actually use them as they grow. More algae means more fuel.
"Why not take that carbon dioxide and those nutrients and use it to make bio-diesel?"
Making it starts in the lab with Dr. Margie Mulholland, an associate professor at ODU.
She's using treated waste water to grow the algae in her lab.
"The benefit for us is growing the algae, but it is also a benefit to the municipal facility because we can help reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus further in their treated waste water," she explains.
The challenge is to find the best algae for the fuel.
"Algae come in all shapes and sizes and what we're trying to do is see which ones produce the most oil, which ones grow the fastest. And we're trying to manipulate and do experiments to where we can increase the oil content of particular types of algae."
After the algae is harvested, it is taken to Dr. Hatcher's lab where it's dried and run through a chemical reactor to extract the oil.
The process works, but the goal is to make it more efficient.
"The algae are harvested and they just move on a conveyor belt and plop into the second generation reactor and they get cooked and produce oil at the end of it."
"One of the last big challenges is going to be taking the algae growth and the whole process to a larger scale. Here at the HRSD VIP Plant, that's exactly what they are hoping to do."
Plant manager Sami Ghosn sees the potential. While it will help further cleanse the treated water that is released into the Elizabeth River, he thinks more rural treatment centers with fewer resources could benefit even more.
"We have to go into different areas to explore them and to see how effective they are going to be. If we don't do it, we will never know and we've got to try something. And this is a good place to start."
