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Midwest Biochar Conference

Biochar continues to fascinate researchers as a net-carbon negative fuel source and soil amenity which continues to surprise the scientific community. The Illinois Biochar Group, in conjunction with the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as co-organizers, announces the 2014 Midwest Biochar Conference which will be held on August 8, 2014, in Champaign, IL. The conference will feature presentations and posters on the latest in biochar research and plenty of opportunities for discussion with those interested in all aspects of biochar work. The event will take place at the Hilton Garden Inn from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm CST, with a reception following from 4:30 – 6:00 pm.
For more information, submit an abstract, or register for the conference please visit the conference website.

 

Topics from last year’s conference include:
• Cook stoves
• Large scale biochar production
• Biochar’s effect on soil
• PAHs in Biochar
• Biochar supercapacitors
• Biochar as a filtration or aeration media

 

2013 Conference Agenda

Illinois Biochar Group logoISTC logoUSDA logo

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Series Focuses on Sustainability at Illinois EPA

Elmo Dowd, Associate Director of the Illinois EPA will speak on “Illinois EPA: Sustainability Practices for Air, Water and Land Protection, at 1 p.m. Friday, March 21 at ISTC. The event is part of the spring ISTC Sustainability Series on the theme “Perspectives on Sustainability in Illinois.”

 

Illinois EPA is working to incorporate sustainability practices into its policies, programs and services.  This presentation will outline the agency’s major program areas and discuss how it is working to help improve the quality of life of communities, enhance local economic vitality and promote stakeholder engagement.  The presentation will include information on several projects, including green infrastructure, statewide nutrient reduction, greener cleanups, community methane recovery and environmental justice outreach.

 

This webinar will be broadcast live and also archived on our website www.istc.illinois.edu for later viewing. If you cannot attend the event at ISTC, you may view the webinar live by registering at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/317489175.

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Lightning Strikes Thursday at the I Hotel

The third Prairie Lightning Symposium will be held Thursday, March 20 at the I Hotel and Conference Center.  The symposium features five-minute lighting talks from forty of your colleagues from across the Prairie Research Institute. Like previous symposia in 2011 and 2012 this event is an entertaining opportunity to learn about the diverse research being conducted by one or more of PRI’s Surveys.

 

The facility opens Thursday morning at 8:30 with a continental breakfast and plenty of coffee.  The program gets underway at 9 a.m. sharp.  And the afternoon concludes with a reception and hosted poster session starting at 4 p.m., with live music by the Irish folk band SMC.

 

The Prairie Lightning web page has the 24-page program booklet with complete titles and abstracts, videos of prior years’ talks, and links to social media to help spread the word to friends and colleagues.  prairie.illinois.edu/lightning.

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Mark Your Calendars for Sustainability Film Festival April 22, 23, & 24

LDcropWith funding from the UI Office of Public Engagement, the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) is hosting a Sustainability Film Festival during Earth Week on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

Three documentaries will be screened at the Spurlock Museum’s Knight Auditorium on the evenings of April 22, 23, and 24th from 6-7:30 PM: Living Downstream, Terra Blight, and Waste=Food, respectively. Mark your calendars–admittance will be free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis. Doors open at 5:30 PM. After each film, a Q&A/discussion will be held with ISTC staff and other relevant experts. Panelists are being confirmed and will be announced as the time of the screenings approaches.

 

The DVDS of the documentaries will be made available after the film series at the Prairie Research Institute Library for professors, students, and members of the general public to check out for use in classes, meetings, and for personal enrichment. The general public will have access to materials either from their local public library via inter-library loan through the University’s participation in the Illinois Heartland Library System, or directly from the Institute library if they have a UIUC Library courtesy card. The DVDs will have downloadable activities and resource lists associated with them to enhance the educational impact of the films.

 

A flyer for the film festival is available at http://istc.illinois.edu/docs/SustainabilityFilmFestFlyer.pdf. The Spurlock Museum is at 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL 61801. The Institute Library is in the Forbes Building, at 1816 S. Oak St., Champaign, IL, 61820. Further information on each of the films is available at http://www.livingdownstream.com/, http://www.terrablight.com/, and http://www.icarusfilms.com/new2007/waste.html.  For more information on the series, contact Joy Scrogum at 217-333-8948 or jscrogum@illinois.edu.

 

TerraBlightWasteFood

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Let Go of Your Old Dusty Electronics for Free

Recyclemania

ISTC will accept electronic waste for recycling from 2-6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18. As part of the national 2014 Recycle Mania Tournament, electronic waste can be dropped off at three locations on the University of Illinois campus. ISTC will feature vehicle drop off collection behind its 1 East Hazelwood Drive facility in the Research Park.

Walk up collection of e-waste will also be accepted at Allen Hall Circle Drive and Ikenberry Commons on Euclid. The event will give citizens a way to get rid of all personal electronic devices that have a plug or run on batteries. Illinois law bans the disposal of e-waste in the state’s landfills.

 

Please note that university-owned inventory cannot be accepted at this event.

 

For more information about the Recycle Mania Tournament, go to www.recyclemania.org. For more information about the local event, contact Bart Bartels at bbartel@illinois.edu.

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Engineer Explains the Promise of the Other Hydrogen Fuel

AmmoniaEngineJunhua Jiang, Senior Research Engineer at ISTC is featured in two Lightning Talk presentations from 2011 now available on the Prairie Research Institute’s YouTube channel.
In one talk, Jiang deals with his work on improving electrochemical nanostructured microelectrodes for sensing nitrogen. He describes his work increasing nitrogen sensor sensitivity and using biochar nanostructures in the electrodes.
In a second talk he describes the promise of using ammonia as a transportation fuel using direct ammonia fuel cells. Jiang describes the promise of a ammonia economy, providing an inexpensive, sustainable liquid fuel that can use existing infrastructure and emits no carbon dioxide.
Also, click here for more information about the 2014 Prairie Lightning Symposium.

#prairielightning

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Registration Open for Green Chemistry Conference

2014-logoRegistration is open for the The Great Lakes Green Chemistry Conference: Innovating for Success in Cleveland on April 1–2, 2014.

 

The purpose of this conference is to show how innovations in green chemistry practices drive advances in business, academia, policy, and human health protection in the Great Lakes region, and how integration and collaboration in these areas is crucial for success.

 

The conference will include keynote presentations by John Warner, Warner-Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry; Julie Zimmerman, Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering at Yale; and Dennis McGavis, Global Sustainability Director at Goodyear Tire & Rubber along with plenary sessions, panel sessions, breakout sessions and a poster networking exchange.

 

This conference will be preceded by a half-day Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR) meeting and followed by one-day training on the hazard assessment tool, the GreenScreen™ for Safer Chemicals..Separate registration is required for each event. Co-sponsors include the U of I, ISTC, and GLRPPR.

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Water Research to Contribute to One Billion Gallon Goal

The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has announced a call for proposals that will contribute to ISTC’s goal of conserving a total of one billion gallons of water in the state of Illinois.

 

Projects awarded for FY14 can be focused on methods for reducing water use; treatment of wastewater or other process water for reuse; novel recycling methods; or other significant water-saving measures. Technologies or practices that are easily transferable to other industries or businesses are preferred. Projects that target significant water savings through energy savings will also be considered.

 

Projects should be able to achieve real measurable water savings/conservation within the time frame of the project or be able to show a very high potential for significant water savings/conservation in the near future. Funded projects will be used as case studies by ISTC to provide information to other entities about sustainable water-saving/conservation practices and technologies.

 

ISTC administers its Sponsored Research Grant Program to advance the state of knowledge/practice in areas of sustainability, pollution prevention, energy generation and conservation, and environmental issues of importance to the State. ISTC conducts research and technical assistance in the areas of pollution prevention; energy conservation and new energy technologies; biofuels; waste reduction; water quality improvements; and water use and reuse.

 

There will be approximately $225,000 available for new projects. We anticipate funding three to six projects (maximum grant amount of $75,000). Project period should be one year or less, with earliest starting date of July 1, 2014, and latest completion date of June 30, 2015.

 

Application will be a two-step process; a 3-page pre-proposal followed by a full proposal. Pre-proposals are due to ISTC by March 11, 2014.  Successful pre-proposal applicants will be notified by March 24, 2014, and asked to submit a full proposal by April 25, 2014. Notification of funding will be made by June 3, 2014.

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Three Spring Sustainability Seminars Announced

“Perspectives on Sustainability in Illinois,” ISTC’s spring seminar series announced its next three events.

 

Noon- 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21 –  “Beyond RFS and MPG: Promoting Cleaner Trucking Services” presented by Warren Lavey – Adjunct Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences as well as the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Senior Fellow at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, and Senior Regulatory Counsel at the American Clean Skies Foundation. At ISTC, 1 E. Hazelwood Dr., Champaign.

 

Technologies to cut truck emissions are available and cost-effective, and should be encouraged by a range of government and private actions. In 2013, Chicago approved the expansion of a railroad terminal contingent on retrofitting dozens of trucks with clean diesel filters. Illinois agencies are reforming freight and package delivery purchasing programs to implement the Transportation Sustainability Procurement Program Act of 2013. Similarly, the U.S. General Services Administration is applying new environmental preferences in selecting transportation vendors and tracking their performance.

 

This webinar will be broadcast live and also archived on our website www.istc.illinois.edu for later viewing. If you cannot attend the event at ISTC, you may view the webinar live by registering at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/917343279.

 

Noon- 12:50 p.m. Monday, March 3 – “Under Pressure and in Hot Water: Algae Conversion to Fuels and Chemicals” presented by Phil Savage, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At 3310 Newmark Civil Engineering Lab: a joint seminar between the Energy-Water-Environment Sustainability (EWES) Program seminar series in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the ISTC Sustainability Seminar Series.

 

Noon- 1 p.m. Friday, March  7 – “The Realities of Energy in Illinois and Beyond” presented by Tom Wolf, Executive Director, Energy Council, Illinois Chamber of Commerce. At ISTC, 1 E. Hazelwood Dr., Champaign.

 

Energy is used by everyone in the state of Illinois — we all rely on some form of energy or another as we live, work and play in a 21st century society. However, where does this energy come from? What are the challenges and opportunities associated with energy development and transportation? Are renewable energies really the answer? What’s next? Tom Wolf, the executive director of the Chamber’s Energy Council will give a high-level overview of energy issues in Illinois in an effort to ensure policy decisions are based on realty and not fantasy.

 

What do Illinois businesses think about hydraulic fracturing, energy conservation, climate change or exporting oil? This presentation will provide some insights as to the priorities for Illinois businesses when it comes to energy and where it might lead us in the coming years. Plus, it includes references to Princess Leia, Whack-a-Mole, and the 80’s rock icon, Meatloaf (Google him) — so it can’t be all bad, right?

 

This webinar will be broadcast live and also archived on our website www.istc.illinois.edu for later viewing. If you cannot attend the event at ISTC, you may view the webinar live by registering at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/715828607.

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UI Projects in Haiti Subject of Jan. 28 Meeting

ISTC will host a meeting of faculty and staff from 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 28 to discuss projects in Haiti.

 

Staff at ISTC have participated for several years in an effort to establish bio-diesel production facility in northeast Haiti. Other campus efforts are also underway and this is an opportunity to share information and potential collaborations.

 

Please contact Nancy Holm (naholm@illinois.edu) if you are interested in attending. The meeting will be at the IL Sustainable Technology Center, One E. Hazelwood Dr., Champaign.