Earlier this week, our fine paper ran a story about how our local solid waste district wasn't up to snuff with EPA standards. The story lamentably slid into one of the back pages of The Post, but it pokes at some unnerving and discombobulating questions.
How odd is it a waste district that houses Ohio University and all its environmentalist extracurriculars would even come close to contention with EPA recycling standards? What's more, Ohio's EPA requires 10 percent less solid waste to be recycled than most of the country. Yesterday's Earth Day was a sad one.
A statement such as this suggests that OU, and Athens as a whole, should revisit its status as a beacon of clean energy - every bit as much as we should reconsider the correctness of clean coal. It's one thing to make incredible discoveries and another to give them back to our neighbors. OU needs to redouble its efforts on spurring business interest and translate headlines from Outlook into tangible projects.
In economics, a bottom line is what remains after profits are made and payments paid. For all the gains in innovation OU has made locally, Athens County is still woefully trapped in the foothills of Appalachia. Its remaining low-grade coal reserves still vitalize the economy like crack cocaine and we run our own small coal plant because that is still our most cost-effective option.
Athens County simply might not be the most conducive place to stage the blitz of green energy. We have no oceans to harness wave motion. Nor do we have any vast, whooshing corridors for windmills - though I could name a few bare mountaintops that have a lot of air thrown at them, figuratively and literally.
I suspect the term rock star is seldom thrown around the halls of Stocker Center, but if there were one name that could claim the title, it would be Gerardine Botte.
Instead of face-melting solos, Botte (who falls somewhere between Joan Jett and Fergie on Slash's new album) orchestrated a new system that uses human excrement - pee - as a source for energy. The process is so complicated it wouldn't be journalistically prudent to detail in a newspaper column, but it involves converting ammonia from urine to hydrogen to produce electricity.
All those grody toilets in the dorms, however, are still getting flushed, and capital investment is swirling down the commode as well. Perhaps the least likely of sponsors at a public university, the U.S. military has footed much of the bill for Botte's research. The Columbus Dispatch dedicated 1,200 words to her work, and she received recognition from AllBusiness.com. The government's rationale: silent and sustainable camps on the battlefield.
Compare that to the enigmatic Bloom Box unveiled in February by K.R. Sridhar and Bloom Energy. Granted, the Rubik's Cube-sized fuel cell has its own intriguing story: NASA engineer is charged with making a device to produce oxygen on Mars; NASA engineer eventually reverses it to make super-efficient fuel cells; NASA engineer touts they'll eventually be sold at $3,000 and power houses.
Cue $400 million in investments and larger box field-testing at the headquarters of eBay, Google, FedEx, Walmart and Staples. One can hardly say the Bloom Box is more innovative than the, ahem, pee-drogen power from Athens, Ohio.
Bloom Energy is on 60 Minutes because it adhered to one of the great tenets of up-start, earth-shattering innovation: location, location, location. It's based in Sunnyvale, Calif., a major city in the Silicon Valley, where things look sunny all the time.
Thomas Edison had no 19th-century Silicon Valley. A seemingly unusable tract of land in Raritan Township, N.J., became the birthplace of some of history's greatest inventions. By the time he invited the phonograph and incandescent light bulb, the Wizard of Menlo Park made the area a major hub. Today, Edison, N.J., is one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.
We have the wizards. It's time we give them their Menlo Park.
Adam Liebendorfer is a sophomore studying journalism and Spanish, and Friday columnist for The Post. Send him your Earth Day resolutions at al211307@ohiou.edu.
4 Opinion
Adam Liebendorfer
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