Birds of a Feather

In the wee hours of May 4, a female peregrine falcon — the same one that nested there last year — laid an egg in a nest atop the Clinical Sciences Building on the U of A campus. That initial egg-laying — captured on camera as part of the Peregrine Webcam Project — was followed by the laying of another egg on May 6 and two more on May 8 and 11, respectively. The Webcam project is the joint effort of a number of groups, including the Environmental Coordination Office of Students, the Alberta Public Interest Research Group and the U of A’s Engineering and Infrastructure services.

As well as providing interesting viewing, the project is meant to serve as an important component to campus sustainability because it creates awareness of endangered species that exist within our immediate environments. The first three all-white chicks hatched on June 13, followed a day later by the fourth. The birds were later banded — something they, and their parents, weren’t too keen on — with red, black, yellow and white bands. Yellow band was the first to fledge (or fly) on July 21, followed by red band on July 24 and black band on July 28. Unfortunately, white band — who had a very short flight on July 21 — disappeared sometime between the evening of July 22 and early morning on the 23rd. Despite an extensive search, white band could not be located.

An adult peregrine falcon — a carnivorous raptor — can reach speeds of over 320 kilometres an hour in a dive, making it the fastest animal in the world. Once endangered due to pesticides such as DDT — which caused the female to lay thin-shelled eggs that were easily broken — the birds can now be found on every continent except Antarctica.

Fibre Optics

Years of the agriculture industry looking at ways to get more out of the plant fibre it generates led to a 2007 provincial report titled: Alberta’s Fibre Roadmap: Getting Value from Every Fibre — Making the Most of Alberta’s Lignocellulose Resource. From the recommendations in this report was born the Alberta Bio-Refining Conversions Net­work (BCN). To be headquartered at Edmonton’s Agri-Food Discovery Place on the main campus at the U of A, BCN is being directed by David Bressler, a professor in the Department of Agricul­ture, Food and Nutritional Science.

Although agricultural scientists had been making steady progress in fibre research for some time, it took the report to galvanize government into action. “The report showed us that gaining more value from agriculture and forestry fibres can be a new untapped resource,” says Doug Horner, Minister of Advanced Education and Technology. “We’re now targeting some of the products that aren’t currently being used, such as crop and forestry residues or by-products left from animal rendering. In the future, this may lead to items like fats becoming environmentally friendly fire retardants, crop by-products becoming food additives, and forestry pulping waste becoming a source of electricity and heat.”

The BCN is jointly funded by the provincial government ($3 million) and private sector partners, including local and international companies ($500,000). The BCN will also be able to access the Alberta Biomaterials Development Centre, a forest fibre research centre that will be sited at both Agri-Food Dis­covery Place and the Alberta Research Council’s facility in Vegreville, AB.

The BCN aims to connect experts in the fields of thermal, biological and chemical science in an interdisciplinary and inter-agency environment where researchers, producers and entrepreneurs will all work together to find bio-solutions that advance a zero-waste approach to the products developed by its participants.

“We’re excited to play the coordinating role, matching disciplines and technologies to solutions,” says Bressler. “The Network will provide access to research facilities and also the talented people and experience that multi-partner projects like this need to bring new ideas to the next stage of development, including prototyping and field testing.”

Tree Line

I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree....
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
—“Trees,” Joyce Kilmer

Digging holes in the earth to extract the resources below ground is not exactly forest friendly. But Simon Landhäusser, ’94 PhD, a professor in the Department of Renewable Resources, has been given a five-year opportunity to see what he can do to help re-establish the trees after the land they once grew on has given up its treasures and been infilled once again, readied for reclamation. As the new industry research chair in forest land reclamation (supported by EPCOR, Shell, Suncor, Syncrude and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) in the Faculty of Agriculture, Life and Environ­ment Sciences, Landhäusser will study tree seedling quality, site conditions and planting techniques that provide the optimum conditions for the quick regeneration and establishment of a natural tree cover.

Initial research will focus on aspen, which naturally regenerates from its root system, but since they’ve been ripped up (literally) by the roots, Land­­häusser will be looking for robust seedlings that can quickly establish themselves in this harsh environment. “It’s a stressful environment for a seedling,” he says, “and we don’t have much experience in growing aspen yet. Sitting out there in the open with the sun beating down and with limited moisture, the seedlings have to be quite hardy.”

Although the forest industry has been re-planting logged land with seed­lings for decades, their advantage is that the forest floor is very little disturbed. But in the case of open-pit mining such as in oil sands extraction, everything is removed, and the soil has be returned to the dig and brought back to life.

“You have to develop a new forest from scratch,” says Landhäusser. “But the sooner we can provide forest-dependent species with a security blanket (the canopy from the aspen) the faster we can kick-start the redevelopment of forest ecosystems on these disturbed landscapes and create stable forests that will, over time, resemble natural systems.”

House Work

U of A civil and environmental engineering professor Mohamed Al-Hussein wants to put the “pre” back in “prefabricated” as a way of greening the housing construction industry. Although the prefabricated building industry — which prefers to refer to its products as being built “off-site” — has been operating for decades, Al-Hussein thinks it’s time that more builders did away with all that wasteful, arbitrary and inefficient on-site framing, wiring, plumbing, drywalling and painting that generates a haze of greenhouse gases.

“All that material, all those trucks and people coming and going every day,” says Al-Hussein. “Estimates are that building a home between 1,200 and 1,600 square feet generates about 55 to 100 tonnes of CO2, while also heating a home while it is being built (to keep temperatures optimum, not just for the workers, but for things like drywall compound and paint) can generate another five tonnes of CO2 a month. We think we can cut that in half.”

Al-Hussein and his team have been working for the last couple of years on computer-assisted design and other artificial intelligence software they’ve been developing to streamline the house-building process. The “parts” for the house are made in an off-site factory and then assembled on the foundation that’s been poured for the house. The goal is to cut the construction time by more than 60 percent while reducing home construction costs by 20 percent.

“We’ve got it to about 30 homes a month and capacity to go to 40 or 45, though demand for new homes has slowed a bit recently here,” says Al-Hussein.

Seeing Green

James Thorsell, ’62 BSc, ’09 LLD (Honorary), was recently on campus to accept his honorary degree and deliver a convocation address. A world expert when it comes to national parks and heritage lands and a leading international authority on conservation, Thorsell spoke of once seeing the ruins of an ancient city and making the connection between resource depletion and the collapse of that once thriving metropolis. “The misuse of natural resources seemed like a puzzling and preventable tragedy to me,” he said. “It hit me then that the man-nature nexus was what I wanted to specialize in.”

And so he did. Thorsell began his career working for Parks Canada in Banff, AB, and was an early pioneer of sustainable development and natural conservation before making a name for himself with the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. His field experience covers more than 700 protected areas in 90 countries including Antarctica, the Serengeti, the Galapagos Islands and Mount Everest. He has evaluated more than 175 sites nominated for World Heritage listings, resulting in almost one million square kilometres of land and sea being protected under this prestigious convention. Thorsell, who grew up in Wetaskiwin, AB, was also the first to recommend that the Rocky Mountain parks and Waterton Park in southern Alberta be designated World Heritage Sites.

Thorsell, who admitted to the convocating students that he had personally seen more “wounds” on planet Earth than he cared to remember, closed out his address with some slightly more hopeful lines that can be found chiseled into a large memorial wall for Victorian industrialist Alexander Morton (1844-1924), which is located in Darvel, East Ayrshire, Scotland: “The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shape of things, their colours, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.”

[See video of Thorsell.]

Solar Solace

Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun
And I say
It’s alright
— George Harrison

With our present-day technological know-how we can extract about 25 percent of the roughly 1.6 billion barrels of oil trapped in Alberta’s oil sands. That amounts to approximately 400 billion barrels of oil — which can still only provide as much energy as the sun puts out in three hours. So if we could trap just a day’s output of the sun’s energy we would have on hand more energy than about four oil sands put together.

Now imagine the roof of your house studded with little plastic photovoltaic cells, solar panels that soak up the sun’s rays and provide power for everything from the TV to the fridge. U of A researchers at the National Insti­tute for Nanotechnology have helped bring that possibility closer to reality by developing a method that increases the efficiency in plastic photovoltaic cells by 30 percent. While not as efficient in harvesting the sun’s energy as the high-grade silicon-based solar panels, the advantage of using plastic to harvest the sun’s energy is that it’s cheaper and thus lends itself more easily to mass commercialization.

“This is our first big result that we’re really happy to talk about,” says chemistry professor Jillian Buriak, who helped lead the project. Buriak and her team of chemists, engineers and physicists made their breakthrough by introducing a one-billionth-of-a-metre-thick compound between two layers of the plastic solar cell that give it that 30 percent boost in efficiently when converting the energy into usable electricity.

Although still far from having a product they can take to market, the researchers have taken a big step forward to developing a commercially viable product. And while Buriak admits that the plastic cells will probably never be as efficient as silicon, she says, “The point is the cost. By making the plastic cells inexpensive, and thus, manufacturable, is where we think we can have an impact.”