The Chic Ecologist

Eco Biofuel From Biodiesel B5, B20 and B99 to Flexfuel E85 – The Future of Alternative Fuel?

Propel Biofuel Station - South Lake Union, Seattle

I was walking around the South Lake Union area of Seattle when i happened across a pretty little fueling station named Propel. It had a green roof, planters and educational interpretive signs like something you might find at a wetland or bird observation area. It looked more like a grade school garden experiment funded and built by green design architect parents. It changed the way i looked at biofuel and biodiesel stations. I was used to the more home-grown bio-diesel stations you find in Berkeley, or the backyard cookers. The ones that are old, kind of junky and funky, but at the same time give you that › Continue reading

Tags: Automotive, Engineering, environmental impact, Fuel

Green Building Design or Engineering Problems? Ask Nature

Looking for that muse to help you with your design? Whether its for a green building, an eco-friendly clothing line, your sustainable home products, environmental projects, or even for your army of robots, nature has your answer. Just about every joint, color scheme, support structure and pattern has been refined and perfected over billions of years. Asknature.org is a design solution for your designers block. With case studies and specific examples of biomechanics and form + function in action are available for you to search.

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world.

Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

- Asknature.org

Created by the founder of the Biomimicry Institute, Janine Benyus, AskNature is a free public resource that can be researched no matter what your challenge. If you are a biologist who wants to share your expertise, or a architect, engineer, chemist, designer, or just curious about planet-friendly and nature inspired solutions. The site is sponsored by Autodesk, the creators of AutoCAD desktop software, a key product to aid in design.

Examples of investigated solutions are how organisms in nature filter air and water, gather solar energy, repel water, and create non-toxic dyes and glues. The public domain library hopes using biomimicry strategies will help create the next generation of sustainable, efficient buildings, products and designs.

Tags: Architecture, Biomimicry, Building, Design, Engineering, Green Design, nature