Dr. Jim Clarke, the longtime chair of the Vanderbilt Environmental Advisory Committee, has been approved for membership in the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) and for Certification by Eminence as a Board Certified Environmental Scientist (BCES) in the April 2012 inaugural class.

Clarke is a Vanderbilt professor of civil and environmental engineering, as well as earth and environmental sciences. He focuses his research on chemical and nuclear waste management, sustainable approaches to the remediation of contaminated sites, environmental policy and environmental forensics. Read the full story here.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

With the age of the incandescent light bulb fading rapidly, the holy grail of the lighting industry is to develop a highly efficient form of solid-state lighting that produces high quality white light.

One of the few alternative technologies that produce pure white light is white-light quantum dots. These are ultra-small fluorescent beads of cadmium selenide that can convert the blue light produced by an LED into a warm white light with a spectrum similar to that of incandescent light. (By contrast, compact fluorescent tubes and most white-light LEDs emit a combination of monochromatic colors that simulate white light).

Seven years ago, when white-light quantum dots were discovered accidentally in a Vanderbilt chemistry lab, their efficiency was too low for commercial applications and several experts predicted that it would be impossible to raise it to practical levels. Today, however, Vanderbilt researchers have proven those predictions wrong by reporting that they have successfully boosted the fluorescent efficiency of these nanocrystals from an original level of three percent to as high as 45 percent.

You can read more about Quantum Dots here at Vanderbilt’s Research News Page.

“The Tour de Nash does a great job each year bringing individuals and families to our urban greenways and bike lanes, and this year’s bike ride will be extra special for me since it includes the new Music City Bikeway,” Mayor Karl Dean said. “The 26-mile Music City Bikeway is a practical and scenic way for commuters and recreational riders to get from place to place and is one more step toward reaching my goal to transform Nashville into one of the most bikeable cities in the country.”

Kicking-off the event, Nashville Mayor Dean is joined by Walk/Bike Nashville President, David Kleinfelter, who thanked the following Tour de Nash sponsors: Regions Bank, Nashville Electric Service, Metro Parks, AFLAC Insurance and Vanderbilt University.

In addition to highlighting the Music City Bikeway, other unique features of this year’s Tour de Nash is that Vanderbilt is offering Camp Vandy for children where they learn bike safety tips while parents ride the Grand Tours. Regions Bank is offering a bike giveaway, which is one of the kinds of cruisers that Nashville uses for the bike share program.

The rides offered are the Family Ride — a free eight-mile ride along bike lanes in portions of Metro Center, downtown, and the Richland Creek Greenway. The Grand Tours include a 28- and 62-mile route with a cross section of Nashville’s best parks, greenways and bike lanes.

The Solar Dok patio table is located at The Commons Center. (John Russell/Vanderbilt)

Members of the Vanderbilt community can now enjoy the outdoors and charge their personal electronics at the same time thanks to four solar-powered charging stations that have been installed on campus. The Solar Dok patio table is located at The Commons Center patio, and three walk-up Solstice units are located at Branscomb Quad, the McTyeire volleyball courts and the Buttrick patio.

“We wanted to bring the Solar Dok and charging stations to the Vanderbilt campus because, for most people, this is their first direct contact with solar energy. It is a practical application of alternative energy that can benefit students, faculty and staff on a daily basis,” said first-year student Morgan Goldberg, who proposed the project with SPEAR (Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Responsibility) president Skyler Hutto.

The charging stations were a project of the Vanderbilt Green Fund, a collaborative venture of Plant Operations, the Office of the Dean of Students and Vanderbilt Student Government to fund utility conservation projects proposed by students and selected with student input.

“The Green Fund has provided students a unique chance to advance Vanderbilt’s sustainability initiatives directly and with their own ideas. I hope that this new campus infrastructure will keep people conscious of the university’s ongoing effort to advance itself sustainably,” Hutto said.

Contact:

Liz Entman, (615) 322-NEWS

Liz.entman@vanderbilt.edu

Weekday service on two new lines –Route 27 Old Hickory and Route 36X Madison Express – begins Monday, April 30. Route 27 Old Hickory will provide weekday service in Old Hickory via Lakewood. Also, a new route in Madison – Route 36X Madison Express – will offer express travel between Madison and downtown Nashville. New park-n-rides are located at the former Lakewood City Hall and at the new MTA Administrative Offices on Myatt Drive in Madison.

This is a great opportunity to take advantage of Vanderbilt’s Ride to Work Program. Vanderbilt employees, graduate students, and VUMC volunteers are eligible to ride to and from work on an MTA bus — simply swipe your I.D. card upon boarding! Complete bus route and schedule information is available at www.nashvillemta.org.

Stop by and shop for local fruits and vegetables, dairy products such as goat cheese, milk and yogurt, grass-fed beef, eggs, pasta, honey, healthy baked goods and flowers.

Cash is accepted at all vendors. Credit cards and debit cards accepted at some.

You can find the market at Vanderbilt Medical Center Plaza across from Langford Auditorium.

The market runs every Thursday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., rain or shine.

To learn more and view the 2012 vendor list, click here.

David Friedman is the author or co-author of more than 30 technical papers and reports on advancements in conventional, fuel cell, and hybrid electric vehicles. His work includes: A New Road: The Technology and Potential of Hybrid Vehicles: Building a Better SUV; A Blueprint for Saving Lives, Money, and Gasoline; and, Drilling in Detroit: Tapping Automaker Ingenuity to Build Safe and Efficient Automobiles. Mr. Friedman served on report committees on fuel economy, fuel cells, plug-in hybrids, and tire efficiency for the National Academy’s Board on Energy and Environmental Systems and the Transportation Research Board. He also served on the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Technical Advisory Committee for five years.

He will discuss the most recent UCS book, Cooler, Smarter, a collaboration with other UCS authors. The book seeks to assist us in learning how to pursue a low-carbon lifestyle. While the routine decisions that shape our days—what to have for dinner, where to shop, how to get to work—may seem small, collectively they have a big effect on global warming. But which changes in our lifestyles might make the biggest difference to the climate? This science-based guide shows you the most effective ways to cut your own global warming emissions by twenty percent or more, and explains why your individual contribution is so vital to addressing this global problem.

Earth Day 2012 proved exceptionally green for a Vanderbilt University team of five engineering seniors who designed a biohybrid solar panel that substitutes a protein from spinach for expensive silicon wafers that are energy intensive to produce, and is capable of producing electricity.

The team won a Phase II $90,000 grant at the 8th Annual National Sustainable Design Expo held at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., over Earth Day weekend.

The Expo – co-sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – featured 44 university and college teams competing for Phase II funding under the EPA’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) student design competition. More than 30 exhibitors from nonprofits and government agencies also showcased innovative environmental solutions.

Senior design team members (l-r) Philip Ingram, Jason Ogg, Paul McDonald, Trevan Locke, Eric Dilbone and Professor Kane Jennings at the P3 student design competition at the National Mall.

Not only did the Vanderbilt senior design team earn advanced funding intended to further develop the design, implement it in the field, or move it to the marketplace, they also won the Marketplace Innovation Award from Paladin Capital, a private equity firm, and the Student Choice Award, a special nod from their peers in competition.

“The team absolutely excelled in clearly presenting their engineering innovations to the public. From the first minutes of the competition, they generated a buzz that rapidly spread across vast P3 exhibition space. We were one of only two teams (out of 44) to win three awards,” said Kane Jennings, professor of chemical engineering and one of the team’s two mentors.

The students – Eric Dilbone, Phil Ingram, Trevan Locke, Paul McDonald and Jason Ogg – had won a Phase I $15,000 grant in November from the EPA for their bio-inspired solar panel. Dilbone and Ingram are senior mechanical engineering majors; Locke, McDonald and Ogg are senior chemical engineering majors.

“After seeing the level of competition this weekend, we were thrilled with our results and we were proud to represent Vanderbilt on a national level,” said Dilbone. “The crowd was overwhelmingly fascinated by what we have done with spinach. There were a great number of people who wanted us to email them updates and provide them with a website where we can continue to showcase our progress.”

A last-minute strategy session before traveling to D.C. produced some clear tactics.

“There was no doubt that the scaled-up panel would be a star attraction, but there were nagging doubts about how the slight power from the panel would convince the judges,” said Amrutur Anilkumar, professor of the practice of mechanical engineering and a mentor.

 At the strategy session, the team established some taglines:

• “The project has the power to inspire.”
• “We’ve taken the first steps to scale a laboratory-proven science.”
• “We’ve shown that the quantum efficiency of the cells can be improved.”
• And, “It would be possible to expand the power by a few orders of magnitude with Phase II funding.”

Armed with this game plan they set out to win over the judges.

The Vanderbilt team had designed a novel, large-scale biohybrid solar panel for power production from many individual photoelectrochemical cells that employ photosynthetic proteins as the active elements for light-harvesting and energy conversion.

A miniature bio-cell can produce minute electricity from Photosystem I (PSI), the protein in plant chloroplasts that converts light to electrochemical energy. The team extracted PSI from spinach and used it as the working medium in the bio-photovoltaic cells. The two scaled-up panels consist of 24 cells connected in series with each cell measuring 75 x 38 mm.

Production of such a scaled-up device has never been attempted before. “They have standardized a production and assembly scheme that can serve as a footprint for future scale up of next generation cells,” said Anilkumar.

“We built on the foundation laid by last year’s seniors, who worked on the initial EPA proposal. Now it’s our turn to contribute something and move on,” said Philip Ingram.

“We worked hard and our efforts are clearly visible in the professional design of our final project. The future for this project is bright – few orders of magnitude greater power output just utilizing current research alone,” Ingram said. “It makes me happy to know that just as this project was handed down to our team by graduates last year, we hand down the project to other undergraduates in the coming two years.”

“With the funding we will right away work on the research aspects of achieving the higher energy conversion goals for the individual cells,” said Jennings.

“Then, a new senior design team will be selected to establish standard protocols for quality control, testing and analysis, so that assembly would be a breeze and the end product would be as desired,” said Anilkumar.

Beginning in May, plastic and aluminum recycling is coming to The Vanderbilt Clinic and Medical Center East.

Every staff break room will have a receptacle for collection of both aluminum and plastic — no sorting required. Receptacles will also be placed in several public areas inside the two buildings.

According to Andrea George, Ph.D., director of the Sustainability and Environmental Management Office, TVC and MCE were the only two remaining buildings on the Vanderbilt campus that did not offer plastic and aluminum recycling.

Vanderbilt Medical Group’s janitorial vendor helped set up the program and has agreed to service the receptacles at no additional cost. The School of Medicine is purchasing the receptacles, and will reap the modest recycling revenue.

Between reduced landfill fees and rebates from the recycling vendor, recycling provides a net savings for VUMC, according to George.

“Associate VMG Director Racy Peters and her staff, especially Project Coordinator Amanda Bright, are to be commended for getting this program up and running,” George said.

For more information, contact the Sustainability and Environmental Management Office via e-mail at sustainvu@vanderbilt.edu