Archive for September, 2011
Human Consumption Management
More and more consumers as well as manufacturers are finally becoming aware of the importance of sustainability, and are finally incorporating it into their day-to-day ventures and budget. However, one aspect of sustainability that needs further focus is human consumption.
Human consumption drives many businesses. Consumption means profit. However, consumption has direct impacts to the environment, especially when it outpaces the ecosystem’s sustainable capacity. This is called overconsumption. Prolonged patterns of overconsumption can result to environmental degradation or worse, complete depletion of resources.
One major cause of overconsumption is overpopulation. The more people there are, the higher the consumption of raw materials to sustain everyday living is. Developing countries are more likely to consume more than what their territories can support. Once overconsumption happens over long periods of time, conflicts over diminishing resources will increase, and may result to the Malthusian catastrophe. Humans will be forced to live at a subsistent level and stick to the basics, which means goodbye to merchants, and hello to self-preservation.
Tags: consumption habits, human consumption, lifestyle choices, recycling technologies, time conflicts
Sharp Solar Panels ? Thin Film Technology Is Coming
Despite of the recent advances in solar panel manufacturing process, the production costs of the traditional crystalline silicon solar cells remain high and there is a significant room for energy and material efficient technologies to be involved. The dominant process nowadays includes three main steps: 1) treatment of the silicon wafers with dopants (mainly phosphorus containing substances); 2) imprinting/soldering of the metal contacts (silver and aluminium) into the resulting photoactive plates and 3) deposition of an anti-reflective coating for the solar cell (silicon nitride). All procedures require high-temperature regimes (furnaces): the doping at the first stage typically runs at 800 – 900 ºC and the final deposition – at 260 ºC, most of the processes subjected to oxygen-free conditions.
A few years ago SHARP came up with a new technology based on so called tandem-type silicon thin-films. The manufacturing process was found to be more ecologically and energy sustainable: the new cells use only 1% of the silicon needed for traditional solar panels. These films are mainly prepared by chemical vapour deposition without the standard thermal multi-step treatment of the bulky silicon wafers. In addition to the light-weight version available, the thin-layer technology allows the cells to be semitransparent to the light. This way electricity generating layers can be introduced into windows, tinting efficiently from the direct sunshine and UV-irradiation.
Tags: chemical vapour deposition, silicon solar cells, silicon wafers, thin film silicon, thin film technology