The predictions we made a few year ago at RG regarding the uptake of renewable energy, electric cars etc, far exceeded our expectations. In the last ten years, solar generation increased 6,327 per cent Wind power grew by 701 percent globally.”

The next phase of the revolution is not about harvesting and generation, it involves storage. Grid parity has already been breached for generation. Billions are being invested in storage solutions and government subsidies are moving away from generation to storage. This will fuel further growth. In 5 years time the revolution will be a matter of fact, not a question.

To start the New year on a positive note, we still have a big environmental mess to clean up. This story is one of what can be achieved. I have seen in China a massive clean up of waterways. The solutions are here and this is one of them.

As well as restoration, work has to be done to prevent the problem occurring again, thats the expensive part making sure sewage and industrial wastes are properly treated in the first place.

Morikawa has found a way to decontaminate wetlands without using chemicals.

Before heading into the story please watch this short video. Its a couple of years old, but the technology and efforts to clean lakes has really taken of.

Peruvian scientist Marino Morikawa, who “revived” polluted wetlands in 15 days using nanotechnology, now plans to try to clean up Lake Titicaca and the Huacachina lagoon, an oasis in the middle of the desert, reported EFE on Wednesday

El Cascajo, an ecosystem of roughly 50 hectares (123 acres) in Chancay district, located north of Lima, began its recovery in 2010 with two inventions that Morikawa came up with using his own resources and money.

The idea of restoring the wetlands came from a call from Morikawa’s father, who told the scientist that El Cascajo, where they used to go fishing when Marino was a child, “was in very bad condition,” Morikawa told EFE.

Marino Morikawa, who earned a degree in environmental science from Japan’s Tsukuba University, visited the wetlands and found a dump for sewage ringed by an illegal landfill where migratory birds fed.

The stinky swamp was covered by aquatic plants, Morikawa said.

Morikawa set out to find a way to decontaminate the wetlands without using chemicals, and his first invention was a micro nanobubbling system, which consists of bubbles 10,000 times smaller than those in a soda beverage and remain in the water between four and eight hours.

The bubbles trap and paralyze viruses and bacteria, destroying them and causing them to evaporate, Morikawa said.

The environmental scientist also designed biological filters with clay to retain inorganic pollutants, such as heavy metals and minerals, that adhere to surfaces and are decomposed by bacteria.

In just 15 days, the effort led to a revival of the wetlands, a process that in the laboratory had taken six months.

“Nature does its job. All I do is give it a boost to speed up the process,” Morikawa said.

By 2013, about 60 percent of the wetlands was populated by migratory birds, especially Franklin gulls that used El Cascajo as a stopover on their route from Canada to Patagonia.

Since then, Morikawa, who has helped in the recovery of 30 habitats around the world, has set his sights on two ecosystems that are emblematic in Peru.

One, scheduled for 2018, is the recovery of Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America, located 4,000 meters (13,115 feet) above sea level between Peru and Bolivia, and is polluted by sewage.

The second project aims to restore the Huacachina lagoon near the southern city of Ica, where water stopped seeping in naturally in the 1980s.

Source: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nanotech-Armed-Peru-Scientist-to-Battle-Lake-Titicaca-Pollution-20160706-0030.html