Ugly fix preserves options for a classic steel library cart

I was presented recently with a 60-plus year-old library cart whose solid rubber wheels had flattened from sitting for years under load.

You could force it to roll, but it went "Ka-lunk Ka-lunk Ka-lunk," which is an annoying sound in a library. My job was to make it roll quietly.

It is a classic blue-painted steel cart with two bins and four wheels, two of which turn and two that donʻt. The rubber wheels still had the legible name of the manufacturer: The Colson Company of Elyria, Ohio.

Turns out Colson still exists, and their customer service is excellent. They had to refer me to one of their old-timers, who told me they closed their Elyria plant in 1957. So the cart is at least 62 years old, and maybe older.

Colson still makes wheels for library carts, but theyʻre modern designs. They no longer make the bulletproof steel wheels that were on this cart.

The cartʻs wheels still turn on their original greased bearings. Each wheel axle has its own Zerk grease fitting, and they still work. I greased them. The wheels can be taken apart to replace the solid circle of rubber that serves as a tire. I took one apart and removed the tire, to prove to myself that it was possible.

But as far as a couple of hours of internet searching was able to determine, the tires for this wheel are no longer made. Colson had no idea where to look.

Their Honolulu agent recommend I go ahead and replace the whole wheel mechanism with a modern plastic caster. But that seemed wrong. This American steel wheel was still functional, and someone long ago had designed and built it, understanding that it would last a long time. It could be serviced and was built so that the tires could someday be replaced.

After giving up on the internet, I went to local tire stores, local hardware stores, local car parts shops, all with no luck. I could not locate a replacement tire of the right size—three-inch center diameter, five-inch outer diameter, with the tire itself an inch thick in cross-section.

I even thought about using a giant O-ring to replace the tire, but the rubber would be too soft. Another option would be to find wheels the same size, and tear them apart to get the rubber wheels off and switch then to these wheels. Someone at a hardware store even suggested I could 3-D print a tire. Maybe thatʻs the eventual fix in the modern era.

Instead, for now, I used an abrasive grinder to grind the hard rubber wheels round again. It took a third of an inch off each wheel, but the old wheels are still turning, the cart is rolling quietly, and if anyone ever again makes a tire to fit them, theyʻll still be ready for a new set.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

A random wander through recent science: peat, compost, flying, rain in dead forests and coffee

Coffee sparks athletic performance, don’t drain those peat bogs, composting, et cetera.

Today, we’ll take a random walk through some recent science papers. No particular theme, just stuff that caught my attention.

PEAT 

Here’s an interesting, although somewhat misleading piece out of Denmark.

It goes under the headline, “Growing crops on organic soils increases greenhouse gas emissions.” But what it really found is that if you drain a peat bog to make farmland, the peat decomposes and releases higher levels of carbon dioxide than it would if you hadn’t drained the bog.

So, it seems that it’s more the draining of the peat bog than the growing of crops that causes the problem. If you want to stop the carbon dioxide production, just let the water back in: “The climate can be given a helping hand by taking the organic soils out of rotation,” the authors say.

COMPOST

Everybody already knows composting is a better solution than tossing your organic scraps into the trash, right? This new study confirms that, generally, but not always. It is, predictably, published in the journal Compost Science & Utilization.  

The key piece of information is that if you toss food into the trash and it gets landfilled, it produces a lot of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas—considerably worse for the climate than carbon dioxide. If you compost, not so much. On the other hand, if a landfill is well managed and the methane is captured for reuse, it can turn the numbers around.

The study uses a couple of measures, including the U.S. EPA Waste Reduction Model (WARM). It concludes, “The WARM model suggests that landfilling yard waste is superior to composting.”

The message, perhaps, is that if your community has a really good landfilling methane recapture system--perhaps making electricity out of it--the landfill is not so bad. Otherwise, compost.

TREES

When a forest dies, it makes sense that rainfall will fill streams instead of being sucked up by the trees, right? Nope, according to a study of pine forests killed by the mountain pine beetle. 

A study in the journal Water Resources Research says that a series of test sites showed that stream flows stayed the same or actually declined in the areas where trees were dying.

The proposed cause was both increased evaporation and increased activity by the understory plants after the death of the canopy trees: 

“Although counter to initial expectations, these results are consistent with increased transpiration by surviving vegetation and the growing body of literature documenting increased snow sublimation and evaporation from the subcanopy following die-off in water-limited, snow-dominated forests.”

FLYING

A lot of folks talk green, but hardly act green, and air travel is a big example. 

The environmental community may talk a lot about saving the planet, but this has not reduced folks’ flying habits—even though flying is perhaps a human’s most climate-destroying activity.

“Despite the fact that flying can be more damaging than any other activity that an individual can undertake, many otherwise green consumers still choose to fly, offering an opportunity to elicit narratives about the differences between their attitudes and behaviours,” write the authors of this paper, “Flying in the face of environmental concern: why green consumers continue to fly.”

This “do as I say, not as I do” behavior is pervasive, they say.

“There is evidence across a wide range of environmentally responsible behaviours that people advocate specific products or product groups, conservation behaviours and lifestyle choices but that awareness or approval does not necessarily lead to behaviour change.”

What’s clear is that people on the green side do understand the impacts. Some of them try to justify their behavior, suggesting they take more efficient flights, and switch to other form of transportation like trains for shorter trips, but they still travel.

“For the majority of this sample, the ‘doing without’ option was not considered for long-haul flights nor was the possibility of changing travel destinations to accommodate not flying,” the authors said. 

The study was based on interviews with 29 individuals identified as environmentalists.

COFFEE 

And finally, on a pretty unrelated subject, some researchers, writing in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, found that a cup of coffee before you exercise can improve how you do at it. 

It’s not an actual physical study, but a review of numerous studies done on coffee, other sources of caffeine, and exercise. This won’t be news to a lot of athletes, but it reports that most scientific review of the topic finds that a cup of coffee both increases your performance and also makes you feel like you aren’t working so hard.

“Based on the reviewed studies there is moderate evidence supporting the use of coffee as an ergogenic aid to improve performance in endurance cycling and running,” the authors write

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Battery technology exploding, in a good way

If the future of energy is the ability to cheaply and safely store intermittent renewables, then there’s lots of good news on the battery front.

Renewable plus storage means decarbonizing the grid. Public policy argues that’s something we should do effectively and as quickly as possible.

One of the problems is that batteries haven’t been up to the task. Some are too expensive, some are too toxic, some are too fragile, some lose too much energy charging and discharging, some die too soon and need to be replaced. 

The list goes on.

But there’s amazing work being done globally on battery technology. We have reviewed some of that in an earlier series that starts here.  

But since that 2013 series, there’s lots of new stuff. We’ll review a couple of innovations here, starting with flow batteries. .

Researchers at Harvard have been looking for non-toxic alternatives to flow batteries using bromide electrolytes. Flow batteries have energy-rich electrolytes in external tanks, and the electrolytes are pumped through the battery, meaning battery capacity can be increased simply by increasing electrolyte storage.

“Harvard chemistry professor Roy Gordon said they found a formulation using cheap, common materials that “deliver the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive and low-cost chemicals for flow batteries.  They reported their research in the Sept. 25 issue of Science.

Project chief investigator Michael Aziz said it would be a great way to store solar power: “"This is chemistry I'd be happy to put in my basement. The non-toxicity and cheap, abundant materials placed in water solution mean that it's safe -- it can't catch on fire -- and that's huge when you're storing large amounts of electrical energy anywhere near people." 

Scientists at Ohio State have combined a solar cell and a battery in what they’re calling an aqueous solar flow battery. It’s still a ways from commercial production, but its inventors believe it has a lot of potential.

"This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing 'electrolyte fuels' that might be used to power future electric vehicles," said lead author Mingzhe Yu. They reported their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Stanford researchers have written about their new aluminum battery, which they say is fast-charging, inexpensive and lasts a long time. They believe it can replace alkaline and lithium-ion batteries. How fast a charge? Think about charging a cell phone in a minute, and a battery that can handle daily charging for decades.

The battery has an aluminum anode and graphite cathode in a liquid salt electrolyte. It still needs some work, but shows great potential, its inventors say.

And it’s not just for small electronics. “The grid needs a battery with a long cycle life that can rapidly store and release energy. Our latest unpublished data suggest that an aluminum battery can be recharged tens of thousands of times,” said Stanford chemistry professor Hongjie Dai. 

But this isn’t to say that all the research is on new battery technologies. There’s also still a lot of work underway on improving existing batteries. As an example, South Korean researchers are reporting on a new lithium-ion design that improves its performance while reducing the problem of overheating. 

And MIT researchers say they’ve developed a way to cut in half the cost of building lithium-ion batteries. That, and they work better, too.

Furthermore, there’s research underway in figuring out how to improve the amount of energy lost in charging and discharging a battery. Generally, you can lose 20 percent or more of the energy it takes to charge a battery when to draw that energy back out.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they’ve adapted solar cells to dramatically increase that efficiency. They wired four perovskite solar cells in series and were able to charge a lithium-ion battery with 7.8 percent loss—the best performance seen to date, they say.

Here is the paper, but it’s a little technical. The Science Daily report on the work is here. 

Perovskite solar cells are comparatively new on the solar scene. They can be manufactured inexpensively, and reportedly can convert into electricity a larger proportion of the sun’s light than other solar panels.

A lot of folks have wondered whether supercapacitors can be adapted to provide long-term energy storage. Supercapacitors are units that can store a lot of power, but they discharge almost instantaneously. Great for a sudden need for power—like when a motor starts up—but less useful as a continuing source of energy.

But there are a lot of applications for bursts of energy that are inefficiently met with standard batteries. Researchers at Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University looked at new ways to use water materials—specifically old tires—in the manufacture of supercapacitors. 

The point here has not been to cover the universe of battery innovation, but to show that there’s a lot going on. Some of this stuff may not pan out, but a lot of it will, and it will change the energy landscape. 

Some of these technologies may end up in our phones, in our cars, in our houses, out on our utility grids--and maybe even in places where we've never imagined a role for energy storage.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Oceanic plastic mystery: where's it all going?

It certainly isn’t news that the oceans are full of plastics; The news is perhaps how little we know about it.

(Image: plastics collected on the Malaspina Expedition. Credit: CSIC.)

“Our awareness of the significance of plastic pollution in the ocean is relatively recent, and basic questions remain unresolved. Indeed, the quantity of plastic floating in the ocean and its final destination are still unknown,” write scientists who participated in a recent Spanish science expedition.

They found plastics throughout the oceans, and a scientific paper on the results concluded that they’re getting into the marine food chain. 

The researchers emphasized how little is known about the impacts of the plastics—and even where some of the plastic goes. A lot of it is unaccounted for: “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean.”

The Malaspina Expedition of 2010, sent out by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), was named after an early Spanish scientific circumnavigation from 1789 to 1794, headed by Alessandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra.

They collected plastics in all the world’s oceans. And they found plastic in both the North Pacific and Atlantic, where it was known to occur in large amounts, but they also found large amounts in the southern oceans: the South Pacific, South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

"Ocean currents carry plastic objects which split into smaller and smaller fragments due to solar radiation. Those little pieces of plastic, known as microplastics, can last hundreds of years and were detected in 88% of the ocean surface sampled during the Malaspina Expedition 2010,” said Andrés Cózar, of the University of Cadiz.

"These microplastics have an influence on the behavior and the food chain of marine organisms.

“On one hand, the tiny plastic fragments often accumulate contaminants that, if swallowed, can be passed to organisms during digestion; without forgetting the gastrointestinal obstructions, which are another of the most common problems with this type of waste.

“On the other hand, the abundance of floating plastic fragments allows many small organisms to sail on them and colonize places they could not access to previously. But probably, most of the impacts taking place due to plastic pollution in the oceans are not yet known,” Cózar said.

The amounts of plastic estimated to be in the oceans is stunning. The Malaspina 2010 paper middle estimates are that there are 4.8 thousand tons in the North Pacific, 2.7 in the North Atlantic, 2.2 in the Indian Ocean, 2.6 in the South Atlantic and 2.1 in the South Pacific.

Some of the plastic is at the surface but even if it is buoyant, some is carried down through the water column via the added weight of biofouling, or being contained in the feces of marine life forms that eat the plastic.

And there may be other methods for sinking the plastics.

“Our observations also show that large loads of plastic fragments with sizes from microns to some millimeters are unaccounted for in the surface loads. The pathway and ultimate fate of the missing plastic are as yet unknown. We cannot rule out either of the proposed sink processes or the operation of sink processes yet to be identified,” the paper says.

It could be that the plastic is being broken down into such small pieces that they’re not getting caught in the sampling nets of marine scientists: “Missing micro- plastic may derive from  nano-fragmentation processes, rendering the very small pieces undetectable to convectional sampling nets, and/or may be transferred to the ocean interior.”

The University of Hawai`i’s Dave Karl edited the paper, Plastic debris in the open ocean, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are

Andrés Cózar,  Fidel Echevarría, Ignacio González-Gordillo, Xabier Irigoien, Bárbara Úbeda, Santiago Hernández-León, Álvaro T. Palma, Sandra Navarro, Juan García-de-Lomas, Andrea Ruiz, María L. Fernández-de-Puelles, and Carlos M. Duarte.

If you’re conversant in Spanish, the Malaspina 2010 website is here. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014

Kaua`i Council's GMO bill, a review.

The Kaua`i County Council this week passed a groundbreaking piece of legislation, regulating both pesticides and genetically modified crops.

Whether you support or oppose the bill, and whether it is rejected in court or not, it represents a significant legislative event. 

Its key features are an aggressive disclosure policy targeted at big farmers, significant buffer zones, and the call for a study of the environmental and health impacts of big ag—specifically big ag that uses both genetically modified crops and any kinds of pesticides. 

The bill has taken a circuitous route to the form that is now being considered for signature or veto by Mayor Bernard Carvalho. 

Here are key provisions of the document approved by an exhausted Kaua`i County Council, driven by a drumbeat of chants of “Pass The Bill!,” after 3 a.m. on October 15, 2013. 

1.      Any farm that uses more than 5 pounds or 15 gallons of a restricted use pesticide (the kind that require you be a certified pesticide applicator), must disclose the use of all pesticides of any kind during the following year. Warning signs must be posted at the site of pesticide use 24 hours ahead of time and during and after the application. Farms must also post all such pesticide notifications at a central area for workers.

2.      Farms must, before applying pesticides, personally notify neighbors within 1,500 feet of the farm’s property lines. That includes anyone who lives, works, keeps bees or who occupies the property, legally or otherwise. These “Good Neighbor Courtesy Notices” can be sent by phone, text or email. Such messages need to be sent weekly or more often as necessary.

3.      Similar messages are also required to be made available weekly to everyone else on the island, through reports to the county that will be posted online. The weekly after-use reports are to include what pesticide is being used including its trade name and EPA registration number, on what day, at what time, on what field, over what acreage, during what wind conditions. Maps of pesticide application locations are to be provided.

4.      Farmers must also provide an emergency hotline to provide to medical personnel details of pesticide use when there is a documented medical need.

5.      Farms that grow genetically modified crops must file annual reports with the county and state, and those reports are to be posted for the public online. Annual reports are to describe the genetically modified crop being grown, where it is grown and when it was first planted there.

6.      The farms that use 5 pounds or 15 gallons of restricted use pesticides must establish 500-foot no-grow zones around care homes, medical facilities, residential houses, and schools. There’s 250-foot buffer around parks, 100 feet along roads (unless signs are posted), and 100 feet along shorelines or streams, 

7.      A two-part environmental and public health impact study will be outlined by a fact-finding group within 12 months, which will then oversee the conducting of the study by a professional consultant, which has an 18-month deadline. The study is to look into impacts from big agriculture uses of both genetically modified crops and pesticides.

The 2.5-year total for the study may seem generous, but it took the United States from the 1940s, when scientists began expressing concern about DDT, until the 1970s, to ban DDT. Various neonicotinoid insecticides began being marketed in the 1980s and 1990s, but it took until this year, 2013, before significant numbers of studies prompted European restrictions on their use.

In each case, 30 years for a single pesticide or class of pesticides.

An optimistic Kaua`i County Council hopes that on Kaua`i, the problems of  pesticides as well as genetically modified organisms can be identified and regulations recommended—in 30 months.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013