Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Honolulu's Recycling Plan Needs Important Revisions

Throughout my campaigns for mayor of Honolulu I focused on the flawed recycling efforts of Honolulu. Huge amounts of effort and fuel are wasted to recycle things instead of safely burning them and making free electricity for Honolulu.

Back in 2013 I developed a pictorial guide for Honolulu.

Later in 2013, a graduate student of mine and I published an article in the Pacific Business News which revealed that "Waste to energy is superior to any other technology in the long term."

Then in July 2015 HONOLULU magazine quotes me about a dozen times in their detailed article Should Honolulu’s Recycling Program Go Up in Flames?


“Trash is treasure,” says Panos Prevedouros, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UH Mānoa and a former mayoral candidate. “Not only do you make energy, you remove something that is bad.” Prevedouros adds that a waste-to-energy plant can make “serious money” charging tipping fees, selling its electricity to the utility and harvesting the valuable metals for what he calls “a win-win-win” situation: The plant helps the state meet its renewable energy goals...

Paper and cardboard are heavy and hard to compact further for efficient shipping to recycling plants; they burn beautifully, and are depressed in price. “Paper, oh, my God, it’s really perverse to recycle. We’re losing the opportunity to make energy, and we’re wasting more fossil fuel to ship it somewhere else. If you have paper, put it in the gray bin,” says Prevedouros.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Driving Automation ... Sooner?

Automatic Cars Or Distracted Drivers: We Need Automation Sooner, Not Later argues professor Don Norman.  Technology is moving that way. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

In 2005 Stanford's "Stanley" a driverless VW SUV won the DARPA award for negotiating a grueling 132 mile off-road race in the California/Devada desert.

By 2010 Google had several driverless Prius cars plowing streets in California practically accident free.

In 2015 the Google car is unveiled with no steering wheel and a top speed of 25 mph.

When will the ability of driverless vehicles meet and exceed the ability of drivers? Driver distraction and age effects are helping technology by raising risk which is better controlled in driverless cars.