News: Environment

Producing renewable energy that communities want

September 21, 2022

New position paper calls for getting stakeholders involved in wind power projects from the start.

Gómez-Bombarelli awarded $150K J-WAFS grant for rapid removal of micropollutants from water

September 8, 2022

Patrick Doyle, from MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, and DMSE's Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli will use the funds to enable pilot-scale water treatment systems to be built and tested using sustainable hydrogel microparticles.

A better way to quantify radiation damage in materials

August 4, 2022

More complete than existing methods, the new approach might enable longer operational lifetimes for nuclear reactors.

Selective separation could help alleviate critical metals shortage

January 4, 2022

A new way of processing rare-earth and other key metals to separate them from other materials could reduce environmental impact and cost.

Through UROPs, Students Explore Topics in Sustainability

September 25, 2021

Course 3 student Louise Anderfaas participated in a climate UROP.

Making catalytic surfaces more active to help decarbonize fuels and chemicals

September 7, 2021

A new approach increases the efficiency of chemical reactions that are key to many industrial processes.

Boosting the efficiency of carbon capture and conversion systems

January 28, 2021

New design could speed reaction rates in electrochemical systems for pulling carbon out of power plant emissions.

A fix for foulants

August 18, 2020

Researchers devise a practical solution for preventing corrosive CRUD buildup in nuclear systems.

Possibilities for other applications of dirty carbon

May 6, 2020

Carbon Building Blocks

April 24, 2020

Coal could someday be used to make a variety of useful devices, researchers suggest.

Cleaning up steel

January 22, 2020

Making buildings from industrial waste

January 16, 2020

MADMEC 2019 winning team addresses non-degradable plastics

October 18, 2019

Cody Friesen awarded Lemelson-MIT Prize

October 11, 2019

Prof. Allanore receives Elsevier Atlas Award

August 19, 2019

MIT Energy Initiative awards Seed Fund grants for methane conversion and machine learning

August 16, 2019

Finding local fertilizer alternatives

February 12, 2019

Professor Antoine Allanore and his research team have demonstrated a new method of fertilizer production can better suit the needs of farms in Africa and around the globe.

A new way to provide cooling without power

December 5, 2018

MIT researchers have devised a new way of providing cooling on a hot sunny day, using inexpensive materials and requiring no fossil fuel-generated power. The passive system, which could be used to supplement other cooling systems to preserve food and medications in hot, off-grid locations, is essentially a high-tech version of a parasol.

A new concept for thermal energy storage

November 30, 2018

More than half of all the energy used to power mechanical, chemical, and other processes is expelled into the environment as heat. Power plants, car engines, and industrial processes, for example, produce vast amounts of heat but use a relatively small fraction of it to actually do work. And…

Advanced Potash Technologies: Solving the food crisis with a better fertilizer

October 19, 2018

At a 2012 conference, Wender met with members of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, who he says quickly understood the magnitude and impact of the project and wanted to be involved. After less than a year of sponsored research, the team at the Allanore Group proposed a…

Yet-Ming Chiang co-authors paper warning we aren't doing enough to reduce emissions

July 3, 2018

Yet-Ming Chiang co-authored a new paper in Science that offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where we simply don’t have affordable ways of halting greenhouse-gas emissions. Air travel, long-distance transportation and shipping, steel and…

How AI is helping us discover materials faster than ever

May 30, 2018

One way of using AI is to create a “cookbook,” or a collection of recipes for materials. In two…

Aluminum production could get much better for the environment

May 11, 2018

You probably don’t think about aluminum very much. But you should. The ubiquitous metal is in airplanes, iPhones, and engine blocks made by General Motors, to name just a few uses. A 12-inch MacBook, for example, consists of over half a pound of aluminum. And since the late 19th century, the…

Investing in Tech That’s Worth the Wait

February 23, 2018

Innovations in fields like energy and transportation often take time—and extra support—to develop. The Engine at MIT is helping them make the leap from the lab to the marketplace. Liquid separation wouldn’t top most people’s lists of world-changing technologies. But consider this: every…

A new approach to rechargeable batteries

January 24, 2018

A type of battery first invented nearly five decades ago could catapult to the forefront of energy storage technologies, thanks to a new finding by researchers at MIT. The battery, based on electrodes made of sodium and nickel chloride and using a new type of metal mesh membrane, could be used…