"While Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, I expect or at least hope you may want to hear my “what’s new with Solar CITIES” 3 minute exposition in which I would like to reveal our three chief weapons against such diverse elements as poverty indoor air pollution, deforestation and climate change.
Weapon #1:
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1) We’ve created an open source Do it Yourself “refugee camp ready” rollable family sized “salchicha” or “sausage shaped” biodigester for crisis situations that fits in the overhead rack of an airplane for rapid deployment. It is large enough to provide over an hour of cooking each day on half a bucket of yesterday’s kitchen scraps. It’s cheap, it can be made locally, it’s made out of a single sheet of hand welded PVC tarp and a couple of plumbing pipes. We literally rolled it out in field trials this spring in Pennsylvania and Pakistan, with the Amish and the... Islamish!
Weapon #2:
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2) To go along with our rollable digester, we’ve created our own Do It Yourself vertical airlift aeroponics garden tower, or “PVC tree”. It uses an air pump instead of a water pump to lift the liquid fertilizer to the roots so it uses 1/10th of the energy to circulate the bioslurry nutrients that we get from our digester. It never clogs or runs dry because it uses bubbles from a cheap aquarium air pump to do the water lifting. This system comes apart and also fits in the overhead rack of the airplane and can provide a family with their salad greens and tomatoes using the slurry from yesterday’s kitchen scraps.
Weapon # 3:
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3) In Palestine this month we developed the Palestinian Pickle Barrel Biodigester or PPBB, a small scale but functional educational model that can be built by kids in schools everywhere and provides just enough gas to cook 3 cups of tea a day on a cup of kitchen scraps. We built one with the Palestinian Ministry of the Environment in Ramallah last week which they will be teaching in the West Bank and Gaza. It can be easily scaled up using the same parts but a larger tank to serve communities.
And finally the fourth of our three weapons:
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Working on a Kibbutz in the middle of a "hyper arid "desert of the Arava Valley between Jordan and Israel" with the Arava Institute of the Environment this summer we hooked up the world’s first commercial Israeli Home Biogas system to a standard Einstein refrigerator absorption chiller, ran it for 52 hours on two buckets of food scraps, and proved that the hotter it gets outside, the cooler we can make things inside. Thus “until we’ve reversed global warming, we can use global warming to help stop global warming by using the heat to make the fuel from garbage that can replace fossil fuels.
Gesundheit.