And if your car is old (like, at least a couple years outside the manufacturer’s warranty) it may occasionally benefit from a dose of fuel injector cleaner added to the gas tank. When not to use a fuel additive? If it’s something your car obviously doesn’t need at all (like a lead additive on a modern car or a diesel additive on a gas car). For example, if you have a vintage car (like from the 1970s or before) that was designed to run on leaded gasoline, you probably already know that there are additives on the market that are lead-free, but claim that they can make such cars run better on our modern, unleaded gas. Diesel, for example, can grow fungus, become gelled or develop sediment if stored improperly. In the Bayan Obo region of China, for example, miners removed topsoil and extracted the gold-flecked metals using acids that entered the groundwater, destroying nearby agricultural land. Unfortunately, both nickel-hydride batteries and the newer lithium-ion batteries rely on the mining of nickel, copper and so-called rare earth metals. There are additional environmental concerns related to those rare earth metals, like those used in the magnets of hybrid batteries.

Hybrid carmakers like Toyota are set to release a new breed of plug-in hybrids. This type of manufacturing process requires tremendous inputs of energy, particularly the forging of materials like steel, aluminum, glass and plastic. Whether or not a fuel additive will make any difference to your car depends on a couple things: the type of additive you’re considering, and whether or not your car actually needs it. This is one of the oldest designs for fuel cells; this type was the first the United States space program used to produce electricity and drinkable water on-board rockets and shuttles. But when nucleons combine to form stable nuclides, they combine in a ratio of one part proton to one part neutron in 99.4% of ordinary matter. If your car could benefit by one of the few additives that actually offers a tangible benefit, then sure, go right ahead. One of the reasons China could sell lithium so cheaply was because it widely ignored environmental safeguards during the mining process. Even the normally tight-lipped Chinese government admitted that rare earth mining has been abused in some places. Strickland, Eliza. “Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China.” Discover.

Even though stains can be tough to remove in general, check out these green cleaning fabric stain tips to learn an alternate way to remove them. Keep reading as we break down the statistics for both hybrid production emissions and hybrid driving emissions and learn what “green” really means. But do the environmental impacts of hybrid vehicle production outweigh the long-term benefits of driving a cleaner running automobile? Regenerative braking lets hybrids generate and store their own energy to power the vehicle at low speeds and while idling. Nitromethane is basically a liquid explosive and contains a great deal of energy per unit volume (more than twice that of gasoline). The trouble with plug-in hybrids (and electric cars, too) is that electricity isn’t always cleaner than gasoline. Natural gas generators, as the name suggests, use natural gas — which includes the propane used for backyard grills or the methane that utilities supply through underground lines — to generate electricity.

More than 45 percent of electricity in the U.S. In any case, by the time the automobile became widely available in the U.S. But since hybrid cars are much more fuel efficient than conventional vehicles — the U.S. Energy Information Administration sets the average mileage for a hybrid at 38.7 miles per gallon (16.5 kilometers/liter) compared with 26.7 (11.4 kilometers/liter) for a gas-only vehicle — they require far less gas to cover the same distance. If every gallon of gasoline contains 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of carbon dioxide, then a hybrid car will emit 51.6 pounds (23.1 kilograms) of carbon dioxide every 100 miles (161 kilometers), while a conventional car will emit 74.9 pounds (34 kilograms). If you assume that both vehicles travel 160,000 miles (257,495 kilometers) over their lifetime, the conventional vehicle requires 6,500 Btu of energy per mile compared to 4,200 Btu per mile for a hybrid. Although hybrid vehicle production is more energy-intensive and results in higher production emissions, hybrid vehicles are still the greener choice overall. For multicellular organisms, during short bursts of strenuous activity, muscle cells use fermentation to supplement the ATP production from the slower aerobic respiration, so fermentation may be used by a cell even before the oxygen levels are depleted, as is the case in sports that do not require athletes to pace themselves, such as sprinting.