Superyachts are notoriously dirty luxury toys, with a single billionaire’s boat emitting as much as 7,020 tons of CO2 per year. And while it’s unlikely uber-wealthy shoppers are going to forgo from their statement vessels anytime soon, at the very least there’s now a chance to make superyachts greener. That’s the idea behind the new Project 821, billed as the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell superyacht.

Announced over the weekend by Danish shipyard cooperative Feadship, Project 821 arrives following five years of design and construction. Measuring a massive 260-feet-long, the zero-diesel boat reportedly sails shorter distances than standard superyachts on the market, but still operates its hotel load and amenities using completely emissionless green hydrogen power.

Hydrogen cells generate power by turning extremely lightweight liquid hydrogen into electricity stored in lithium-ion batteries. But unlike fossil fuel engines’ noxious smoke and other pollutants, hydrogen cells only emit harmless water vapor. The technology remained cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging for years, but recent advancements have allowed designers to start integrating the green alternative into cars, planes, and boats.

There are still hurdles, however. Although lightweight, liquid hydrogen must be housed in massive, double-walled -423.4 degrees Fahrenheit cryogenic storage tanks within a dedicated section of the vessel. According to Feadship, liquid hydrogen requires 8-10 times more storage space for the same amount of energy created by diesel fuel. That—along with 16 fuel cells, a switchboard connection for the DC electrical grid, and water vapor emission vent stacks—necessitated adding an extra 13-feet to the vessel’s original specifications. But these size requirements ironically makes superyachts such as Project 821 arguably ideal for hydrogen fuel cell integration.

And it certainly sounds like Project 821 fulfills the “superyacht” prerequisites, with five decks above the waterline and two below it. The 14 balconies and seven fold-out platforms also house a pool, Jacuzzi, steam room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, gym, pantry, fireplace-equipped offices, living room, library, and a full walkaround deck.

Such luxuries, however, will need to remain relatively close-to-harbor for the time being. Project 821 still isn’t capable of generating and storing enough power to embark on lengthy crossings, but it can handle an “entire week’s worth of silent operation at anchor or [briefly] navigating emission-free at 10 knots while leaving harbors or cruising in protected marine zones,” according to Feadship.

[Related: This liquid hydrogen-powered plane successfully completed its first test flights.]

“We have now shown that cryogenic storage of liquified hydrogen in the interior of a superyacht is a viable solution,” Feadship Director and Royal Van Lent Shipyard CEO Jan-Bart Verkuyl said in the recent announcement, adding that “additional fuel cell innovations… are on the near horizon.”

Of course, the greenest solution remains completely divesting from ostentatious, multimillion-dollar vanity flotillas before rising sea levels (and angry orcas) overwhelm even the wealthiest billionaires’ harbors. But it’s at least somewhat nice to see a new eco-friendly advancement on the market—even if it still looks like a Bond villain’s getaway vehicle.

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After a five-year reign, the world’s largest 3D printer located at the University of Maine has been usurped—by a newer, larger 3D printer developed at the same school.

At a reveal event earlier this week, UMaine designers at the Advanced Structures & Composite Center (ASCC) showed off their “Factory of the Future 1.0,” aka the FoF 1.0. At four times the size of their previous Guinness World Record holder from 2019, MasterPrint, FoF 1.0 is capable of printing 96-by-32-by-18-foot tall structures and objects. Such sizable creations also require an impressive amount of building materials, however. According to its creators, FoF 1.0 can churn through upwards of 500-pounds of eco-friendly thermoplastic polymers per hour.

[Related: 3D printers just got a big, eco-friendly upgrade (in the lab)]

Global construction projects generate around 37 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from the carbon-heavy production of aluminum, steel, and cement. Transitioning to more sustainable architecture and infrastructure projects is a key component of tackling climate change, spurring interest in massive 3D printer endeavors like FoF 1.0.

But just because there’s a new printer on the block doesn’t mean UMaine’s previous record-holder is obsolete. Designers created FoF 1.0 to print in tandem with MasterPrint, with the two machines even capable of working together on the same building components.

ASCC researchers and engineers aim to utilize these industrial-sized 3D printers to help construct some of the estimated 80,000 new homes needed in Maine over the next six years. FoF 1.0’s predecessor, MasterPrint, has already helped build the surprisingly stylish, sustainable, 600-square-foot BioHome3D prototype a few years back. 

“It’s not about building a cheap house or a biohome,” ASCC director Habib Dagher said at this week’s event. “We wanted to build a house that people would say, ‘Wow, I really want to live there.’”

With FoF 1.0’s help, those plans could potentially expand to encompass whole neighborhoods. According to Engadget’s calculations, the new machine could make “a modest single-story home in around 80 hours.”

Of course, such biofriendly projects don’t only catch the eye of sustainable architects. Funding for FoF 1.0 came in part from contributors such as the Department of Defense, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers. UMaine’s announcement also notes these backers hope to harness such machines for other projects, including “lightweight rapidly deployable structures and vessel technologies.”

Going forward, ASCC researchers hope to experiment with additional bio-based polymer sources, particularly wood residuals from Maine—which just so happens to be the country’s most forested state.

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Lots of stuff we throw away could easily go into compost. But getting started with composting can be tricky. Do it wrong, and you’ll stink up your whole kitchen. Vitamix’s Food Cycler makes it easy, and right now, it’s down to $299, which is $100 off of its regular price at Amazon.

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Chuck food waste and other compostable items into the Food Cycler’s two-liter canister and then close the carbon lid. When you run the device, it circulates air through the chamber and pulls moisture from the material without creating a smell in your house. Once it’s done, your waste will be considerably smaller and easy to mix into your garden soil, where it will work as a natural fertilizer. This is a great way to reduce the amount of food byproducts you send to the landfill and improve your garden simultaneously. Plus, it runs almost silently, so you don’t have to worry about making too much noise in your kitchen—one of the many reasons Vitamix tops our best compost bins.

More composting deals

Maybe you’re not ready for a $300 composter on your counter. That’s cool! Luckily, Amazon has some other composting gear on sale for Earth Day.

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• Miracle-Gro Potting Mix, Potting Soil for Indoor and Outdoor Container Plants, Enriched with Plant Food, 2 cu. ft. (2-Pack) $27 (was $35)

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The Earth’s octopuses have been around for at least 330 million years. While they evolved before dinosaurs roamed the planet, their present day descendents don’t live for very long. They generally die soon after mating or laying eggs, with some octopus species living only six months and the average living about two to three years. Some species like the giant Pacific octopus can live up to five years at most. 

To keep fish populations sustainable, fisheries must ensure that enough breeding individuals are either left alone or released back into the wild. Government agencies can enforce catch laws, while scientists can inform laws by understanding the breeding lives of various fish. For octopuses, their short lifespans have been okay on an evolutionary level. However, as human taste for these cephalopods grows, it’s become a problem to meet demand. 

In an effort to protect the longevity of this incredibly old and smart sea creature while ensuring that octopus fisheries remain sustainable, a team of scientists in Australia have created the first known step-by-step guide for determining the age of an octopus. The guide is detailed in a paper published April 11 in the Marine and Freshwater Research Journal and offers a first step in creating guidelines for fishers to follow and ensure that they are catching octopuses that are not of breeding age.

There are a few ways to tell how old an organism is–a process called aging. Trees famously have rings that indicate how many years they have been living. Examining teeth and bone structure in mammals also can reveal similar information about age. That process has been a little bit tricky for octopuses. In the new paper, the team looked at their beaks and stylets–internal shells located near their gills. They pinpointed the growth rings similar to tree’s are located here and are a useful tool to validate the age of an octopus.

[Related: Octopuses rewrite their own RNA to survive freezing temperatures.]

“Over the past 30 years, various studies have explored different methods to age octopus, but only a small number of researchers worldwide have the hands-on knowledge to execute these methods in the laboratory,” study co-author and University of South Australia marine ecologist Zoe Doubleday said in a statement. “It’s critical that we don’t lose this practical scientific knowledge because by determining their age, we can understand the impact of different rates of fishing on the population.”

The team explains how scientists can examine an octopus’ beak, stylets, and growth rings in the lab to determine how old the animal is. In the future, these methods could then be applied in the wild to get a sense of how old octopuses living in the ocean are.

“Understanding an octopus’s age helps to keep fisheries sustainable,” study co-author and University of South Australia PhD student Erica Durante said in a statement. “If you know a species’ age, you can estimate how fast they grow and reproduce and how much you can catch to keep a fishery sustainable.”

[Related: Eating seafood can be more sustainable and healthy than red meat.]

Age data can also tell scientists how long it takes for an animal to mature. This way, octopuses that have not matured enough to breed can be avoided when fishing. According to Durante, age is important for the general conservation and management of a species, whether or not it is commercially fished. 

One tricky part is that while growth rings on trees represent years, the growth rings on octopus represent days. According to the team, these methods will need to be customized for each of the roughly 300 known species of octopus. The team also acknowledges that these guidelines will continue to evolve as we learn more about the lives of these multi-legged creatures.

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A team of international researchers have developed an adaptation to potentially help with 3D printing’s polymer problem. 

For quick prototyping jobs, designers often turn to fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printers. In these machines, molten polymers are layered atop one another using a heated nozzle. This process is underpinned by what’s known as slicer software, which informs the device of all the little details like temperature, speed, and flow necessary to make a specific desired product, instead of an amorphous blob of congealed goo. But a slicer only works for a reliably uniform material—that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, except most of those materials are often unrecyclable plastics.

But thanks to engineers collaborating between MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Center for Scientific Research in Greece, a little computational fine-tuning can now allow an off-the-shelf device to analyze, adjust, and successfully utilize previously unrecognizable printing materials in real-time to create more eco-friendly products.

3D printers often rely on unsustainable materials, but you can’t simply swap out those polymers for potentially more sustainable alternatives. Unlike artificial polymers, eco-friendly options contain a mix of various ingredients that result in widely varying physical properties. Plant-based polymers, for example, can change based on what’s available season-to-season, while recyclable resins fluctuate depending on its source materials. Those can still be used, but a device’s software parameters would need tweaking for each and every batch. And considering how a 3D printer’s programming usually contains as many as 100 adjustable parameters, this makes recyclable workarounds a difficult sell.

[Related: A designer 3D printed a working clone of the iconic Mac Plus.]

In a new study published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, engineers detailed a newly designed mathematical function that allows off-the-shelf 3D-printer’s extruder software to use multiple materials—including bio-based polymers, plant-derived resins, or other recyclables.

First, researchers took a 3D printer built to provide data feedback while it is working, then outfitted it with three new tools to measure various factors such as pressure, filament thickness, and speed. Once installed, the team created a 20-minute test during which those instruments measured varying flow rates as well as their associated temperatures and pressures. After some trial-and-error, engineers realized the best approach to this was to set the hottest temperature possible for a 3D printer’s nozzle, also known as a “hotend,” for obvious reasons. In this case, the hotend’s maximum temperature lived up to the name—290 degrees Celsius, or about 554 Fahrenheit. They then set it to extrude filament at a steady rate, turned off the heater, and let it run.

“It was really difficult to figure out how to make that test work. Trying to find the limits of the extruder means that you are going to break the extruder pretty often while you are testing it,” CBA graduate student and study first author Jake Read said in a statement on Monday. “The notion of turning the heater off and just passively taking measurements was the ‘aha’ moment.”

Read and their collaborators then entered the information gleaned from their test into a new mathematical function that automatically computed workable printing parameters and machine settings depending on material. Once those were available, the team simply entered the parameters into the 3D printer software and let it run normally.

To test their system, researchers used six different materials to 3D print a small toy tugboat. Even including eco-friendly options derived from algae, wood, and sustainable polylactic acid, engineers reported no “failures of any kind” in their small model vessels—although from an aesthetically standpoint, the wood and algae resins did make for rather stringy-looking final products. 

But while the new alterations may not yet offer a “complete reckoning with all of the phenomenology and modeling associated with FFF printing,”  the team believes the system shows that “even simple methods in combination with instrumented hardware and workflows that connect machines to slicers can have promising results.”
Next up, researchers hope to expand on their computational modeling efforts, as well as design a way so testing parameters can automatically apply to a 3D printer instead of requiring manual entry. In the meantime, they have made their mechanical and circuit designs, as well as firmware, framework, and experiment source codes available online for others to try for themselves.

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Rare earth elements touch almost every aspect of modern life. Elements and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt support the technology that can power clean energy, electric vehicles,  telescope lenses, and computer screens, and more. Since they are stored deep within the Earth, extracting these elements can be ecologically damaging.

The demand for rare earth elements in countries in Africa is driving the destruction of tropical rainforests, as it is home to over half of the world’s cobalt and copper. Now, the continent’s great ape population is more threatened from mining than scientists originally believed. A study published April 3 in the journal Science Advances estimates that nearly 180,000 gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees are at risk.

[Related: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

“There has been an increase in mining in Africa to satisfy the demand from more industrialized countries and linked to the ‘green revolution’. This requires [a] significant amount of critical minerals to build electric cars, wind turbines, etc.,” Genevieve Campbell, a study co-author and primatologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and conservation nonprofit re:wild, tells PopSci. “Unfortunately the location of these minerals often overlap with ape habitat, but people are not aware of the impact of their consumption patterns on apes. This study aimed to quantify this impact and bring awareness to this issue.”

Looking at west Africa

In the study, an international team of scientists used data on operational and preoperational mining sites in 17 African countries and defined 6.2 mile wide buffer zones to account for direct impacts from mining, including habitat destruction and light and noise pollution. They also defined 31 mile buffer zones for the more indirect impacts linked to increased human activity near mining sites, including new roads and infrastructure to access formerly remote areas and more human presence. More human activity generally puts more pressure on the animals and their environments due to increased hunting, habitat loss, and a higher risk of disease transmission. 

“Mining often exacerbates existing threats by, for example, building roads to remote areas that in turn facilitate access for hunters,” says Campbell.

Integrating the data on the population density of great apes allowed the team to pinpoint how many African great apes could be negatively impacted by mining activities and mapped out areas where high ape densities and heavy mining overlapped. 

They found that more than one-third of the great ape population–180,000 animals–is in danger. The west African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, and Guinea had the largest overlaps of high ape density and mining areas. The most significant overlap of mining and chimpanzee density was found in Guinea, where more than than 23,000 chimpanzees (80 percent of the country’s ape population) could be directly or indirectly impacted by mining activities. The most sensitive areas are also not generally protected.

“I expected the spatial overlap between mining projects and ape habitat to be large and I suspected that previous estimates had underestimated the potential impact of mining-related activities on great apes,” study co-author and IUCN and re:wild conservation biologist Jessi Junker tells PopSci. “The results of this study thus didn’t really come as a surprise since no assessments at this spatial scale had been done previously.”

‘Critical Habitat’ zones

The study also explored how mining areas intersect with areas that could be considered ‘Critical Habitat.’  These regions have unique biodiversity and plant life that is crucial to a species’ survival. They found 20 percent overlap between proposed mining areas and Critical Habitat zones. When a region is designated this way strict environmental regulations can be implemented. These regulations particularly apply to any mining projects looking for funding from groups such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) or other money lenders adhering to similar standards. 

According to the team, previous efforts to map Critical Habitats in African countries have overlooked large portions of ape habitats that would qualify under international benchmarks.

“Companies operating in these areas should have adequate mitigation and compensation schemes in place to minimize their impact, which seems unlikely, given that most companies lack robust species baseline data that are required to inform these actions,” Tenekwetche Sop, a study co-author and manager of the great ape population database at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Germany, said in a statement. “Encouraging these companies to share their invaluable ape survey data with our database serves as a pivotal step towards transparency in their operations. Only through such collaborative efforts can we comprehensively gauge the true extent of mining activities’ effects on great apes and their habitats.”

What can be done

In future research, the team hopes to quantify the direct and indirect impacts of mining activities in a different range of African countries and different ape species. Currently, these risks are not considered often and mitigated by mining companies. The study’s authors also urge mining companies to avoid their impacts on great apes and for more data collection to create a more accurate picture of where apes live in relation to where mining activities may take place. 

[Related: How can we decarbonize copper and nickel mining?]

The general population also has a responsibility to ensure a shift away from fossil fuels does not come at the expense of biodiversity. 

“We can all do something to help protect great apes and their habitat. It is crucial for everyone to adopt a mindset of reduced consumption,” says Junker. “Moreover, policymakers must enact more effective recycling policies to facilitate sustainable reuse of metals.”

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Transitioning towards sustainable clothing practices is a must for combating climate change, so researchers are turning to bacteria for their fashion inspiration. As detailed in the research journal Nature Biotechnology, a team at Imperial College London has genetically engineered new microbial strains capable of being woven into wearable material, while simultaneously self-dyeing itself in the process. The result is a new vegan, plastic-free leather that’s suitable for items such as wallets and shoes—although perhaps not the most fashionable looking shoes at the moment. 

As much as 200 million liters of water is consumed across the global textile industry every year, and 85 percent of all used clothing in the US winds up in landfills. Meanwhile, the particulates shed from washing polyester and other polymer-based fabrics already make up 20-and-35 percent of the oceans’ microplastics. Then there’s all the pesticides used in industrial cotton farming. And when it comes to animal leather production, the statistics are arguably just as bad. Basically, from an ecological standpoint, it costs a lot to dress fashionably.

Sustainable, microbial-based textile alternatives haven increasingly shown promise for greener manufacturing, especially the utilization of bacterial cellulose.

[Related: A new color-changing, shape-shifting fabric responds to heat and electricity.]

“Bacterial cellulose is inherently vegan, and its growth requires a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions, water, land use and time of farming cows for leather,” Tom Ellis, a bioengineering professor at Imperial College London and study lead author, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Unlike plastic-based leather alternatives, bacterial cellulose can also be made without petrochemicals, and will biodegrade safely and non-toxically in the environment.”

Unfortunately, synthetically dyeing products like vegan leather remains some of the most toxic stages within the fashion industry. By combining both the manufacturing and dyeing processes, researchers believe they can create even more environmentally friendly wearables.

To harness both capabilities, Ellis and his colleagues genetically modified bacteria commonly used in microbial cellulose to self-produce a black pigment known as eumelanin. Over a two-week period, the team then allowed their new material to grow over a “bespoke, shoe-shaped vessel.” Once completed, the leather-like cellulose was loaded into a machine that gently shook it for about 48-hours at roughly 86-degrees Fahrenheit, which stimulated the bacteria to begin darkening from the inside out. Finally, the material was attached to a pre-made sole to reveal… well, if not a “shoe,” then certainly a “shoe-shaped vessel.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But if the bulbous clogs aren’t your style, maybe the team’s other example—a simple bifold wallet—makes more sense for your daily outfit.

According to their study, the team notes they still want to cut down the cellulose’s water consumption even further, as well as engineering their bacterial cellulose to allow for additional colors, materials, and even patterns.

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The Biden administration has announced some of the biggest pollution regulations in US history. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency revealeded the finalization of new, enforceable standards meant to ensure electric and hybrid vehicles make up at least 56 percent of all passenger car and light truck sales by 2032.

To meet this goal, automotive manufacturers will face increasing tailpipe pollution limits over the next few years. This gradual shift essentially means over half of all car companies’ sales will need to be zero-emission models to meet the new federal benchmarks.

According to the EPA, this unprecedented industry transition could cut an estimated 7 billion tons of emissions over the next three decades. Regulators believe this will also offer a nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits for the nation, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits from improved air quality alongside $62 billion in reduced annual fuel, maintenance, and repair costs for everyday drivers.

[Related: EPA rule finally bans the most common form of asbestos.]

Transportation annually generates 29 percent of all US carbon emissions, making it the country’s largest single climate change contributor. Aggressively pursuing a nationwide shift towards EV adoption was a cornerstone of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign platform. While in office, Donald Trump rolled back the Obama administration’s previous automotive pollution standards applicable to vehicles manufactured through 2025. He has promised to enact similar orders if re-elected during this year’s presidential election.

The EPA’s new standards is actually a slightly relaxed version of a previous proposal put forth last year. To address concerns of both manufacturers and the industry’s largest union, United Auto Workers, the Biden administration agreed to slow the rise of tailpipe standards over the next few years. By 2030, however, limits will increase substantially to make up for the lost time. The EPA claims today’s finalized policy will still reduce emissions by the same amount over the next three decades.

The new rules are by no means an “EPA car ban” on gas-powered vehicles, as lobbyists with the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers continue to falsely claim. The guidelines go into effect in 2027, and only pertain to new cars and light trucks over the coming years. The stipulations also cover companies’ entire product lines, so it’s up to manufacturers to determine how their fleets as a whole meet the EPA benchmarks.

Still, fossil fuel companies and Republican authorities are extremely likely to file legal challenges over today’s announcement—challenges that could easily arrive in front of the Supreme Court in the coming years. Earlier today, the vice president of federal policy for the League of Conservation Voters said during a press call that they already discussed such possibilities with the Biden administration, and “they are crystal clear about the importance of getting rules out to make sure that they withstand both legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry and any congressional attacks should Republicans take over the Senate and the White House.”

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The world needs a better source of sustainable meat. Many conventional livestock raising systems are considered unsustainable and generally make the environment worse, so scientists are searching for new ways to feed and satisfy a growing human population. One source could come from one of the most feared animals on Earth. Farmed pythons could offer a low-emission source of protein, according to a study published March 14 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

Pythons are not venomous, but they do reach lengths of 20 feet. That girth comes with a lot of white meat that is high in protein and they are considered a delicacy in some Southeast Asian countries. Venomous snakes have historically been farmed for their venom, but the practice of keeping large quantities of snakes for meat has begun to grow. The farmed snakes are typically set up in large barns surrounded by “sun traps” that help snakes bask in the sun.

These snake farms could offer a solution, particularly in regions where python farming has already begun to expand in recent decades. While the farming still faces some issues scaling up, it is something to consider according to the team from this new study. 

“Climate change, disease and diminishing natural resources are all ramping up pressure on conventional livestock and plant crops, with dire effects on many people in low-income countries already suffering acute protein deficiency,” Daniel Natusch, a study co-author and herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, said in a statement.

[Related: Scientists swear their lab-grown ‘beef rice’ tastes ‘pleasant.’ ]

In this study, a team of scientists from Vietnam, Australia, England, and South Africa, looked at more than 4,600 pythons on two commercial python farms in Thailand and Vietnam. They compared two species–the reticulated python (Malayopython reticulatus) and Burmese python (Python bivittatus) and tested the effects of different food regimes. 

They were fed a mixture of locally sourced food, including pork byproducts, fish pellets, and rodents. Baby pythons were also ‘sausages’ made of waste protein from meat and fish offcuts. These sausages led to faster growth, without any apparent impacts on health.

“It’s a bit like hiding broccoli in the meatballs to get your kids to eat their veggies,” Natusch said.

“We showed that snake farms can effectively convert a lot of agricultural waste into protein, while producing relatively little waste of their own.”

They gained upwards of 1.6 ounces per day and the female snakes grew quicker than the males. According to the team, they were never force-fed and they also found that the snakes could fast without losing body mass. This means that it required less human labor for feeding than traditional livestock farming. 

Since they grew so quickly on smaller amounts of food, they had a good feed conversion ratio. In farming, feed conversion is the amount of animal feed that is needed to produce one pound of meat. 

“In terms of food and protein conversion ratios, pythons outperform all mainstream agricultural species studied to date,” said Natusch. “We found pythons grew rapidly to reach ‘slaughter weight’ within their first year after hatching. While large-scale python farming is well established in Asia, it has received little attention from mainstream agricultural scientists.”

Pound for pound, reptiles like snakes also generate fewer greenhouse gasses than mammals do. They have sturdy digestive systems capable of breaking down bones and produce almost no water waste and poop less than mammals.

“Snakes require minimal water and can even live off the dew that settles on their scales in the morning,” said Natusch. “They need very little food and will eat rodents and other pests attacking food crops.”

[Related: Snakes can actually hear really well.]

While there is also some concern from conservationists about commercial snake farming learning to the illegal harvesting of endangered and wild snake populations, Natusch has argued that the opposite is true. It may give local communities a financial incentive. 

“We also found some farms outsource baby pythons to local villagers, often retired people who make extra income by feeding them on local rodents and scraps, then selling them back to the farm in a year,” said Natusch.

Burmese pythons are considered an invasive species in Florida’s Everglades, where they are hunted to cull the population. A 2023 study from the US Geological Survey said Florida’s python problem is one of the world’s most challenging invasive species management issues. Their meat reportedly tastes like chicken, the team acknowledges that encouraging more people to eat snakes in other parts of the world will take some time. 

“I think it will be a long time before you see Python burgers served up at your favorite local restaurant here [in Australia],” said Natusch.

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A shipping vessel left China for Brazil while sporting some new improvements last August—a pair of 123-feet-tall, solid “wings” retrofitted atop its deck to harness wind power for propulsion assistance. But after its six-week maiden voyage testing the green energy tech, the Pyxis Ocean MC Shipping Kamsarmax vessel apparently had many more trips ahead of it. Six months later, its owners at the shipping company, Cargill, shared the results of those journeys this week—and it sounds like the vertical WindWing sails could offer a promising way to reduce existing vessels’ emissions.

Using the wind force captured by its two giant, controllable sails to boost its speed, Pyxis Ocean reportedly saved an average of 3.3 tons of fuel each day. And in optimal weather conditions, its trips through portions of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans reduced fuel consumption by over 12 tons a day. According to Cargill’s math, that’s an average of 14 percent less greenhouse gas emissions from the ship. On its best days, Pyxis Ocean could cut that down by 37 percent. In all, the WindWing’s average performance fell within 10 percent ts designers’ computational fluid dynamics simulation predictions.

[Related: A cargo ship with 123-foot ‘WindWing’ sails has just departed on its maiden voyage.]

In total, an equally sized ship outfitted with two WindWings could annually save the same amount of emissions as removing 480 cars from roads—but that could even be a relatively conservative estimate, according to WindWing’s makers at BAR Technologies.

“[W]hile the Pyxis Ocean has two WindWings, we anticipate the majority of Kamsarmax vessels will carry three wings, further increasing the fuel savings and emissions reductions by a factor of 1.5,” BAR Technologies CEO John Cooper said in a statement on Tuesday.

The individual success of Pyxis Ocean is encouraging news, but that’s just one of the 110,000-or-so merchant ships in the world. On top of that, ports are currently designed to accommodate shipping vessels’ traditional proportions—that 125-feet of height added by WindWings could potentially complicate docking in many locations. According to Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill’s Ocean Transportation business, they’re already working to address such issues.

“Cargill is creating ways for all [wind assisted propulsion] vessels—not just the Pyxis Ocean—to operate on global trade routes,” they said in this week’s announcement, adding that the company has begun talking to over 250 ports to figure out the logistics needed to accommodate such ships.

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Giant buoys over 60-feet tall may one day generate clean energy to feed into local power grids—but making it a reality isn’t as simple as going with the ocean’s flow. To successfully keep the idea afloat, it’s all about timing.

Swedish company CorPower recently announced the completion of its first commercial scale buoy generator demonstration program off the coast of northern Portugal. Over the course of a six-month test run, CorPower’s three-story C4 Wave Energy Converter (WEC) endured four major Atlantic storms and adapted to constantly shifting wave heights. Although final analysis is still ongoing, CorPower believes the technology offers a promising new way to transition towards a sustainable future.

As New Atlas explains, the basic theory behind CorPower’s C4 is relatively straightforward. As its air-filled chassis bobs along the rolling waves, an internal system converts the up-and-down movement into rotational power for energy generation. At the same time, however, a tensioned, internal pneumatic cylinder reacts in real-time to wave phases—slightly delaying its movements behind the waves amplifies the buoy’s bobbing, thus creating even more energy production. According to CorPower, using this system can boost power generation as much as 300-percent.

But what about when the sea inevitably gets choppier, as was the case during storms that produced waves nearly as high as the C4 itself? When this happens, the pneumatic cylinder switches off its active control to allow the machine to enter “transparent” mode, during which time it simply rides out the adverse ocean conditions until it’s time to spring back into action. CorPower compares this “tuning and detuning” feature to similar systems in wind turbines, which adjust the pitch of their blades in response to surrounding weather conditions.

[Related: Huge underwater ‘kite’ turbine powered 1,000 homes in the Faroe Islands.]

CorPower says its team recorded as much as 600kW of peak power production during the C4 trial, although they believe it’s possible for the buoy’s current version to ramp that up to around 850kW. While that by itself isn’t much compared to a single offshore wind turbine’s multi-megawatt range, CorPower’s plan is to eventually deploy thousands of more efficient WEC machines to create a much more powerful generator network. If it can scale a farm up to produce 20 gigawatts of energy, it estimates the buoys could offer something between $33-$44 per megawatt-hour. That’s pretty attractive to investors, especially given C4’s aquatic power source operates virtually 24/7, unlike wind or solar generators.

Right now, however, 20 gigawatts would require over 20,000 buoys, so a more economical and efficient buoy system is definitely needed before anyone starts seeing fleets of these canary yellow contraptions floating out there on the open oceans. CorPower seems confident it can get there, and is next planning a new trial phase that will see multiple C4 buoys in action.

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US farmers are closer than ever to raising genetically edited pigs immune to one of the animal’s deadliest diseases. But while millions of dollars could be saved with livestock impervious to highly virulent, diverse strains of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), animal rights groups maintain the cutting-edge idea isn’t an ethical solution, but yet another industrial farming stopgap.

PRRS is a dynamic, often fatal virus that affects millions of pigs around the world and costs farmers as much as $2.7 billion each year. Current vaccines only reduce symptom severity, and the antibiotics used to treat an infected pig’s weakened immune system can exacerbate the development of other resistant bacterial diseases.

[Related: Scientists swear their lab-grown ‘beef rice’ tastes ‘pleasant’]

Genus, an international breeding company, believes the best way to solve this major issue is to engineer pigs that are incapable of contracting the virus. As highlighted in a recent New Scientist profile, Genus researchers succeeded through CRISPR gene editing technology. By removing a portion of protein called CD163, the disease cannot infect a pig’s cells and allows the animal to remain “healthy and indistinguishable in appearance and behavior,” according to a Genus research study recently published in The CRISPR Journal.

Doing so isn’t an easy task. Just one-fifth of Genus-bred piglets possessed the desired gene—and even then, only within certain body cells due to a biological condition known as mosaicism. Meanwhile, some lab livestock may have lacked CD163, but at the cost of other unwanted genome changes.

Because of such issues, experts have spent years attempting to create a healthy, gene-edited animal. Genus says it has so far bred hundreds of PRRS-immune pigs, and expects to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to begin public sales as soon as next year. Meanwhile, regulatory approvals are also being pursued globally in countries including China and Mexico—both of which import large amounts of US pork.

But according to factory farming critics and animal rights advocates, the real issue isn’t livestock disease susceptibility—it’s the livestock’s living conditions. According to the international welfare nonprofit World Animal Protection, farm stock receives three-quarters of global antibiotic supplies each year in an attempt to stave off disease, treat infections, and promote faster growth rates. Doing so is directly linked to the rise in treatment-resistant superbugs, which are more likely to leap between animals to humans within a factory farm’s cramped, poorly ventilated environments.

“Crowding animals into stressful, unhealthy conditions has led to the emergence of new virulent pathogens and diseases,” Gene Baur, President and Co-Founder of the animal rights group Farm Sanctuary, said in an email to PopSci. “Rather than developing genetically engineered animals who can survive the horrific cruelties of factory farming, agribusiness should focus instead on addressing the conditions that create these diseases in the first place.”

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The whole point of lab-grown meat, by and large, is to create a sustainable product capable of… you know, replacing meat. Researchers at universities and startup companies across the world have spent years and a lot of money on attempts to accurately imitate chicken, beef, fish, and even extinct woolly mammoths.

It’s an uphill battle, but convincing a substantial portion of the population to reduce, if not entirely cut, animal meat from their diets is widely considered a key way to combat industrial farming’s massive global carbon emissions. But instead of trying to replicate the minutiae of a burger’s mouthfeel and flavor, one group of scientists decided to sidestep those goals entirely for a new dish: “beef rice” grown from lab-cultured cow fat cells.

But if you are skeptical at the thought of spoonfuls of synthetic meat-grain meals, fear not: Its makers swear their pinkish globules offer its consumers a “unique blend of aromas” including that “slight nuttiness and umami” usually associated with meat… or, at least, that’s what research lead Jinkee Hong swears.

“We tried it with various accompaniments and it pairs well with a range of dishes,” he relayed in a Wednesday profile at The Guardian.

Hong and his collaborators have detailed their process in a new paper published with Matter. Before unleashing their Frankenstein concoction into the world, the team first slathered regular rice grains with fish gelatin and injected them with lab-grown muscle and fat stem cells. The resultant hodgepodge then cultured anywhere from 9-to-11 days before being steamed for dinner time.

[Related: Scientists made a woolly mammoth meatball.]

Depending on the meat-to-fat cell ratios, taste tests of Hong’s reportedly yielded different scent and taste palates. Higher muscular contents predictably gave hints of meat and almond, while fattier variants offered notes of cream, butter, and coconut oil. Due to the altered chemical compositions, however, the rice generally proved firmer and more brittle than standard grains. Generally, the new dish also contains 8 percent more protein and 7 percent more fat than its naturally grown source rice.

Of course, rice isn’t exactly known for its high amounts of protein or fat, so those numbers aren’t going to factor into anyone’s pre-workout meal prep anytime soon. The real benefits to such a food alternative, argues researchers, is its impressively sustainability and cost-saving potential.

By their calculations, beef rice “has a significantly smaller carbon footprint at a fraction of a price.” Real beef farming releases nearly 50 kg (110 lbs) of CO2 emissions per 100 g of protein—the hybrid grain, meanwhile, releases less than 6.27 kg (14.8 lbs) for the same amount. And while beef costs less than $14.90 per kg (2.2 lbs), the equivalent rice might only set you back $2.23.

For what it’s worth, it doesn’t sound like the mad scientists behind beef rice expect their pink granules to replace your next hot pot’s bottom layer anytime soon. Instead, such a creation could find its way into emergency food supplies in regions struck by famine or natural disaster, as well as potentially within astronaut and military rations.

“While it does not exactly replicate the taste of beef, it offers a pleasant and novel flavor experience,” Hong said. Hungry yet?

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Methane emissions, be it from industrial cattle farming or fossil fuel extraction, are responsible for roughly 30 percent of the Earth’s climate change issues. But despite the massive amounts of methane emissions released into the atmosphere every year, it’s often difficult to track the pollutant—apart from being invisible to the human eye and satellites’ multispectral near-infrared wavelength sensors, methane is also hard to assess due to spectral noise in the atmosphere.

To help tackle this immediate crisis, Google and the Environmental Defense Fund are teaming up for a new project with lofty goals. Announced in a new blog post earlier today, MethaneSAT in a new, AI-enhanced satellite project to better track and quantify the dangerous emissions, with an aim to offer the info to researchers around the world.

“MethaneSAT is highly sophisticated; it has a unique ability to monitor both high-emitting methane sources and small sources spread over a wide area,” Yael Maguire, Google’s VP and General Manager of Geo Developer & Sustainability, said in a February 14 statement.

[Related: How AI could help scientists spot ‘ultra-emission’ methane plumes faster—from space.]

To handle such a massive endeavor, the EDF developed new algorithmic software with researchers at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory andHarvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and its Center for Astrophysics. Their new supercomputer-powered AI system can calculate methane emissions in specific locations, and subsequently track those pollutants as they spread in the atmosphere. 

MethaneSAT is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early March. Once deployed at an altitude of over 350 miles, the satellite will circle the Earth 15 times per day at roughly 1,660 mph. Aside from emission detection duties, Google and EDF intend to harness their AI programs to compile a worldwide map of oil and gas infrastructure systems to hone in what aspects rank as the worst offenders. According to Google, this will function much like how its AI programs interpret satellite imagery for Google Maps. Instead of road names, street signs, and sidewalk markers, however, MethaneSAT will help tag points like oil storage containers.

“Once we have this complete infrastructure map, we can overlay the MethaneSAT data that shows where methane is coming from,” Maguire said on Wednesday. “When the two maps are lined up, we can see how emissions correspond to specific infrastructure and obtain a far better understanding of the types of sources that generally contribute most to methane leaks.” Datasets like these could prove valuable to watchdogs and experts attempting to rein in oil and gas emission locations that may become more prone to leaks.

All this much-needed information is intended to become available later this year through the official MethaneSAT website, as well as Google Earth Engine, the company’s open-source global environmental monitoring platform. In the very near future, the new emissions data will be able to combine alongside datasets concerning factors like waterways, land cover, and regional borders to better assess where we are as a global community, and what needs to be done in order to stave off climate change’s worst outcomes.

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It’s been over a decade since PopSci last checked in on Minesto’s underwater “kite” turbine technology. Since then, the Swedish green energy startup has made some big strides in their creative approach to generating clean electricity from swimming against the ocean currents. 

Last week, Minesto announced a major moment for their largest creation. A nearly 40-foot-wide, 30-ton, highlighter yellow Dragon 12 “tidal power plant” delivered its first 1.2 megawatts (MW) of energy to the Faroe Islands’ national grid. That’s enough power to sustain a small town of 1,000 homes.

[Related: Tidal turbines put a new spin on the power of the ocean.]

Although referred to as a “kite,” Dragon 12 arguably more resembles a biplane, and remains almost entirely below the ocean surface. Minesto’s video montage celebrating the inaugural voyage shows their tidal energy system leashed to a tugboat as it travels across an inland bay for installation.

Once installed, the Dragon 12 uses an onboard control system to steer its rudders. This allows continuous travel along a predetermined, countercurrent figure-8 pattern faster than surrounding water to rotate its turbine. The resulting generated energy then transfers down a subsea cable tether and to an onshore power facility through an umbilical line installed on the ocean floor.

The idea behind tidal green energy plants isn’t new, but for years the underlying technology has proven cost prohibitive and logistically difficult. Other designs are frequently massive endeavors. Scotland-based Orbital Marine Power’s 232-feet-long O2 turbine “superstructure,” for example, weighs in at nearly 700 tons while generating about 4 MW of power—a little more than four-times what Dragon 12 accomplished this month. Both approaches likely have their uses, but Minesto’s latest milestone indicates smaller, more modular, interlocked options could soon become available to energy providers.

And linking up multiple Dragon turbines is exactly what Minesto hopes to do next. According to The Next Web, the company intends to partner with a local Faroe Islands utility company to construct a 120MW system comprising around 100 tidal kite turbines. If successful, such a project could provide as much as 40-percent of the island archipelago’s entire electricity needs.

For microgrid plans, Minesto also has a smaller sibling to the Dragon 12. Dubbed the Dragon 4, this kite turbine system can generate 100kW of energy, and at just 13 x 16 x 9ft, can fit inside a standard shipping container for easy transport.

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After 40 years of major nuclear fusion milestones, the Joint European Torus (JET) facility finally shut down in December 2023—but not without one final record shattering achievement. On Thursday, representatives for the groundbreaking tokamak reactor confirmed its final experiment generated 69.26 megajoules of energy in only five seconds. That’s over 10 megajoules more than JET’s previous world record, and more than triple its very first 22 megajoule peak power level back in 1997.

[Related: The world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor is up and running.]

Located in Oxfordshire, UK, the JET reactor facility began operations in 1983 in the hopes of edging the world closer to sustainable, economically viable fusion production. While fission emits massive amounts of energy through splitting atoms, fusion involves smashing atoms such as tritium and deuterium together at temperatures over 150 million degrees Celsius to create helium plasma, a neutron, and ridiculous amounts of energy. The sun—and every other star, by extension—are essentially gigantic celestial nuclear fusion reactors, so mimicking even a fraction of that kind of power here on Earth could revolutionize the energy industry.

The first tokamak—an acronym of “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”—reactor came online in the USSR in 1958. Tokamaks resemble a huge, extremely high-tech tire filled with hydrogen gas fuel that is then spun at high speeds through magnetic coiling. The force of its rotations around the chamber then ionizes the atoms into helium plasma.

While multiple facilities around the world can produce nuclear fusion reactions, it remains extremely cost prohibitive. JET’s December record, for example, pulled off its all-time energy levels in only five seconds—but that 69 megajoules was still only enough to warm a few bathtubs’ worth of water.

Even the most optimistic realists estimate it could take another 20 years (at the very least) before affordable fusion energy is a viable option. Others, meanwhile, argue useful fusion reactors will never be a financially feasible solution. It currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to simply fire up a fusion reactor, much less sustain its processes indefinitely—which none can, since the technology isn’t available yet. On top of that, today’s climate emergency can’t wait for a solution two-or-more decades down the line. But if society ever does make fusion reactors a real and sustainable alternative, however, it will be largely owed to everything JET accomplished over its four decades of service.

Speaking with the BBC on Thursday, UK Minister for Nuclear and Networks Andrew Bowie called JET’s final experiment a “fitting swan song” for the reactor pushing the world “closer to fusion energy than ever before.”
With JET powered down for good, the world’s largest fusion reactor is now Japan’s six-story-tall JT-60SA tokamak located north of Tokyo. Although inaugurated in December 2023, if all goes as planned the JT-60SA won’t hold the title for long. Its European sibling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is scheduled to go online sometime in 2025—although that project has not been without its difficulties and delays.

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Making aluminum is dirty work, and hasn’t improved much since the 1886 debut of its most widespread production method. Aside from all the carbon emissions, the ubiquitous metal’s smelting process also creates massive amounts of a toxic red mud byproduct with a pH level often rivaling commercial bleach or engine cleaner. The caustic gunk is usually relegated to giant landfills, unless something like an industrial accident unleashes torrents of the sludge, as was unfortunately the case for rural Hungarian residents back in 2010.

But if there’s anything worse than aluminum manufacturing, it’s steel, which accounts for about 8 percent of all CO2 emissions. In order to reduce the industry’s damaging impact, many researchers and companies are working towards a “green steel” future—strategies such as swapping out the dirty power sources in steel factories for renewable energy, and integrating hydrogen or electric energy into production.

As many engineers continue focusing on reducing industrial smelting’s notorious emission issues, a team at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung has developed a way to quickly and affordably recycle aluminum’s red mud byproduct for use in green steel projects with a little help from hydrogen plasma.

[Related: Inside the high-powered process that could recycle rare earth metals.]

The researchers’ paper, recently published in Nature, details how the aluminum industry could one day account for its annual generation of an estimated 198 million tons of red mud—a number expected to only grow larger as demand for the material increases.

For the scientists, it’s a (relatively) simple procedure. Red mud is deposited in an electric arc furnace, where it is subjected to the extremely high temperatures of a plasma containing 10 percent hydrogen. The intense heat then melts down the mud, which separates into liquid metal oxides. As much as 60 percent of red mud is iron oxide, which subsequently transforms into a liquid iron so pure that it can immediately be used in steel production. All told, the “plasma reduction” process takes just 10 minutes to complete.

Meanwhile, the furnace heat largely neutralizes any other leftover oxides’ corrosiveness, including heavy metals like chromium. Scientists believe with further investigations, these valuable metals could also be separated for reuse, thus lessening the chance for them to otherwise leach out of red mud into the environment. After all that, everything remaining in the furnace then cools into glass-like residuals that researchers think could be useful as various filling materials in the construction industry.

While the test utilized only 15g of red mud (yielding 2.6g of metallic iron), the team calculated that their process is both economically viable and industrially scalable. In a recent university profile, research group leader Isnaldi Souza Filho estimates that around 770 million tons of CO2-free steel could derive from the world’s existing 4.7 billion tons of red mud—about one-third of annual steel production’s needs.

“Our process could simultaneously solve the waste problem of aluminum production and improve the steel industry’s carbon footprint,” added Matic Jovičevič-Klug, another scientist involved in the study.

Because electric arc furnaces are already widespread within metal production, it would only take a proportionally small investment to ready them for this new process. With some additional research and adjustments, aluminum’s longtime, notoriously noxious waste could finally become something useful—and far more eco-friendly.

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An orbital satellite testing the technological feasibility of one day harvesting and transmitting solar energy down to Earth has concluded its year long mission, and researchers are eager to dive into the results. According to Caltech’s mission recap released today, engineers behind the Solar Space Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) consider all three of 110-pound prototype’s onboard tools a success and believe the project “will help chart the future of space solar power.” That future, however, is still potentially decades away, if such projects are funded.

Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early January 2023, the SSPD-1 contained  a trio of experiments: First, its Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment (DOLCE) investigated the durability and efficacy lightweight, origami-inspired solar panel structures, while ALBA (Italian for “dawn”) tested 32 different photovoltaic cell designs to determine which may best be suited for space. At the same time, the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE) tested microwave transmitters meant to convey solar power harvested in orbit back to Earth.

[Related: A potentially revolutionary solar harvester just left the planet.]

Perhaps most importantly, MAPLE successfully demonstrated for the first time ever that solar power can be collected by photovoltaic cells and transmitted down to Earth via a microwave beam. Over the course of eight more months, SSPD-1 team members purposefully ramped up MAPLE’s stress tests, eventually leading to a drop in transmission capabilities. Researchers then reproduced the issue in a laboratory setting, eventually determining that complex electrical-thermal interactions and the wear-down of individual array components were to blame.

Ali Hajimiri, co-director of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) and the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, announced today that the results “have already led to revisions in the design of various elements of MAPLE to maximize its performance over extended periods of time.”

“Testing in space with SSPD-1 has given us more visibility into our blind spots and more confidence in our abilities,” Hajimiri added.

Today’s solar cells used in satellites and other space technologies are as much as 100 times more expensive to manufacture than their terrestrial counterparts. Caltech explains this is largely due to the cost of adding protective crystal films known as epitaxial growth. ALMA determined that perovskite solar cells, although a promising design here on Earth, showed major performance variabilities in space. At the same time, gallium arsenide cells worked consistently well over a large period of time—but without the need for including epitaxial growth.

As for DOLCE, researchers readily admitted on Monday that “not everything went according to plan.” Although originally meant to deploy over three-to-four-days, DOLCE encountered multiple engineering issues, such as snagged wiring and jammed mechanical components. Thankfully, the team managed to sort out the issues by referencing onboard cameras to mimic the problems on a full-scale lab replica. Despite the headaches, DOLCE’s space test “demonstrated the robustness of the basic concept,” according to SSPP co-director and Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, Sergio Pellegrino.

[Related: Are solar panels headed for space?]

But even with SSPD-1’s overall successes, it still may be years before solar power could be efficiently and affordably amassed using satellite arrays. Previous estimates put solar power gathered in space at costing $1-2/kWh, while it is currently less than $0.17/kWh for US electricity. Material costs will need to drastically decrease, while also still remaining strong enough to endure space’s solar radiation and geomagnetic activity.

There are other issues that need addressing before space-derived solar power can ever contribute to humanity’s sustainable energy infrastructure. As The New York Times noted last year, the amount of energy transferred by SSPD-1 through a microwave beam was extremely negligible compared to what’s needed for everyday use, and such orbital solar arrays will likely need to be several thousand feet wide—the International Space Station, for reference, is just 357-feet-long. There are also questions of safety regarding beaming powerful microwaves and laser beams back to Earth.

SSPP researchers are aware that all these problems require solutions before orbital solar farms are truly possible. But their most recent progress indicates that, at the very least, they appear to be on a promising path.

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Researchers can now access artificial intelligence analysis of global satellite imagery archives for an unprecedented look at humanity’s impact and relationship to our oceans. Led by Global Fishing Watch, a Google-backed nonprofit focused on monitoring maritime industries, the open source project is detailed in a study published January 3 in Nature. It showcases never-before-mapped industrial effects on aquatic ecosystems thanks to recent advancements in machine learning technology.

The new research shines a light on “dark fleets,” a term often referring to the large segment of maritime vessels that do not broadcast their locations. According to Global Fishing Watch’s Wednesday announcement, as much as 75 percent of all industrial fishing vessels “are hidden from public view.”

As The Verge explains, maritime watchdogs have long relied on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to track vessels’ radio activity across the globe—all the while knowing the tool was far from perfect. AIS requirements differ between countries and vessels, and it’s easy to simply turn off a ship’s transponder when a crew wants to stay off the grid. Hence the (previously murky) realm of dark fleets.

“On land, we have detailed maps of almost every road and building on the planet. In contrast, growth in our ocean has been largely hidden from public view,” David Kroodsma, the nonprofit’s director of research and innovation, said in an official statement on January 3. “This study helps eliminate the blindspots and shed light on the breadth and intensity of human activity at sea.” 

[Related: How to build offshore wind farms in harmony with nature.]

To solve this data void, researchers first collected 2 million gigabytes of global imaging data taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite constellation between 2017 and 2021. Unlike AIS limitations, the ESA satellite array’s sensitive radar technology allows it to detect surface activity or movement, regardless of cloud coverage or time of day.

From there, the team combined this information with GPS data to highlight otherwise undetected or overlooked ships. A machine learning program then analyzed the massive information sets to pinpoint previously undocumented fishing vessels.

The newest findings upend previous industry assumptions, and showcase the troublingly larger impact of dark fleets around the world.

“Publicly available data wrongly suggests that Asia and Europe have similar amounts of fishing within their borders, but our mapping reveals that Asia dominates—for every 10 fishing vessels we found on the water, seven were in Asia while only one was in Europe,” Jennifer Raynor, a study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of natural resource economics, said in the announcement. “By revealing dark vessels, we have created the most comprehensive public picture of global industrial fishing available.”

It’s not all troubling revisions, however. According to the team’s findings, the number of green offshore energy projects more than doubled over the five-year timespan analyzed. As of 2021, wind turbines officially outnumbered the world’s oil platforms, with China taking the lead by increasing its number of wind farms by 900 percent.

“Previously, this type of satellite monitoring was only available to those who could pay for it. Now it is freely available to all nations,” Kroodsma said in Wednesday’s announcement, declaring the study as marking “the beginning of a new era in ocean management and transparency.”

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Researchers at Drexel University are experimenting with imbuing concrete with living organisms to extend the building material’s lifespan. And although the new approach is based on cutting-edge technology, the underlying engineering strategy originates within the human body.

Concrete is second only to water as the most consumed material on Earth—a particularly problematic statistic, given the enormous carbon emissions of its manufacturing process. A number of promising, green updates to the millennia-old structural material are already in the works, but another avenue to reduce concrete’s environmental impact is to extend its longevity. Depending on the surrounding environment, concrete can begin to weaken and break down barely 50 years after setting. Delaying this degradation using innate real-time repair mechanisms could offer a solid way to get more out of the material.

[Related: Dirty diapers could be recycled into cheap, sturdy concrete.]

As detailed in a new paper recently published in Construction and Building Materials, a team of engineering researchers at Drexel University have developed a new polymer “BioFiber” coated in bacteria-infused hydrogel, all within a damage-responsive casing half a millimeter thick. The BioFiber is then arranged in layers of grid patterns as concrete is poured, serving as a reinforcing additive much in the way builders have used straw or horsehair to strengthen bricks for millennia. Of course, these reinforcements can only do so much—but when the team’s BioFibers begin to falter is when they really shine.

“In our skin, our tissue [repairs] naturally through multilayer fibrous structure infused with our self-healing fluid—blood,” Amir Farnam, an associate professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering and research co-lead, said in a December 8 university profile. “These BioFibers mimic this concept and use stone-making bacteria to create damage-responsive, living, self-healing concrete.”

Inside each BioFiber is a cache of Lysinibacillus sphaericus in their dormant, endospore form. Generally found in soil, the bacteria undergoes a process known as microbial induced calcium carbonate precipitation—basically, it generates a rock-like substance as it consumes its nutrients.

This could be particularly handy if the bacteria could be found near, say, a newly formed crack within a certain, popular building material. After the team’s BioFibers break under stress, water from the outside environment eventually finds its way into the concrete, where it comes into contact with the endoscopic bacteria. This then activates Lysinibacillus sphaericus, which begins to push out and up towards the surface—all while beginning its microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation. That calcium carbonate then fills the cracks in question, where it hardens into ostensibly a cement scab, much when dried blood covers and protects a cut. In recent tests, the concrete “healed” itself within two days.

Although researchers still need to better understand and control the BioFiber-imbued material’s repair time, self-healing materials may one day help reduce the need for additional, climate-costly concrete.

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Japan and the European Union have officially inaugurated testing at the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion plant. Located roughly 85 miles north of Tokyo, the six-story, JT-60SA “tokamak” facility heats plasma to 200 million degrees Celsius (around 360 million Fahrenheit) within its circular, magnetically insulated reactor. Although JT-60SA first powered up during a test run back in October, the partner governments’ December 1 announcement marks the official start of operations at the world’s biggest fusion center, reaffirming a “long-standing cooperation in the field of fusion energy.”

The tokamak—an acronym of the Russian-language designation of “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”—has led researchers’ push towards achieving the “Holy Grail” of sustainable green energy production for decades. Often described as a large hollow donut, a tokamak is filled with gaseous hydrogen fuel that is then spun at immense high speeds using powerful magnetic coil encasements. When all goes as planned, intense force ionizes atoms to form helium plasma, much like how the sun produces its energy.

[Related: How a US lab created energy with fusion—again.]

Speaking at the inauguration event, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson referred to the JT-60SA as “the most advanced tokamak in the world,” representing “a milestone for fusion history.”

“Fusion has the potential to become a key component for energy mix in the second half of this century,” she continued.

But even if such a revolutionary milestone is crossed, it likely won’t be at JT-60SA. Along with its still-in-construction sibling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Europe, the projects are intended solely to demonstrate scalable fusion’s feasibility. Current hopes estimate ITER’s operational start for sometime in 2025, although the undertaking has been fraught with financial, logistical, and construction issues since its groundbreaking back in 2011.

Experts alongside Simson believe creating sustainable nuclear fusion would mark a revolutionary moment that could ensure an emissionless, renewable energy future. Making the power source a feasible reality, however, is fraught with technological and economic hurdles. Researchers have chased this goal for a long time: The world’s first experimental tokamak was built back in 1958 by the USSR.

While researchers can now generate fusion energy at multiple facilities around the world, it is usually at a net loss. By advancing the technology further at facilities like JT-60SA, however, industry experts think that it is only a matter of time until fusion reactors regularly achieve net energy production gains.

[Related: Colorado is getting a state-of-the-art laser fusion facility.]

In the meantime, another possible road to fusion energy is making its own promising gains. Earlier this year, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a net energy gain for the second time using what’s the inertial confinement fusion method. In this process, a high-powered laser is split into 192 beams that then hit a capsule containing a pellet of tritium and deuterium. The resultant X-rays generate pressure and temperatures that then initiate fusion.

No matter which process—be it tokamak reactors or ICF lasers—a successful nuclear fusion facility could play a major role in finally shifting humanity away from fossil fuels.

The post The world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor is up and running appeared first on Popular Science.

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Google’s first-of-its-kind geothermal power plant is now fully operational in Nevada, marking a major moment in the company’s overall goal to power its office campuses and data centers using carbon-free energy by 2030. Built in partnership with the green energy startup Fervo, the facility feeds clean electricity into a local grid connected to the tech company’s Google Cloud operations in Las Vegas, as well as data centers in Henderson and Reno.

[Related: An American start-up claims it just set a geothermal energy record.]

According to a November 28 announcement, Fervo’s geothermal energy procurement differs from traditional methods through its reliance on drilling techniques developed within the oil and gas industry. Known as an enhanced geothermal system (EGS), Fervo first drilled a pair of 7,700 feet deep wells into a gas reservoir before connecting them through nearly mile-long horizontal pipes. Fluid pumped into the reservoir then heats the underground region as high as 376 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam then travels to aboveground turbines, which generate clean electricity. During the entire procedure, fiber optic wiring within the wells provides real-time performance monitoring. 

Fervo successfully completed an industry-standard 30-day trial run over the summer at its Project Red commercial pilot site in Nevada. At the time, the geothermal plant produced 3.5 megawatts of sustained power—enough to power roughly 2,600 homes. Now, that same energy will help keep the lights on at a handful of Google’s local, resource-devouring data centers.

Geothermal production is an increasingly attractive alternative power source to other sustainable industries such as wind and solar, since it is capable of providing around the clock energy regardless of time or weather conditions. According to the US Department of Energy, the country rests above enough geothermal reserves to theoretically power the entire world—yet geothermal energy supplied roughly 0.4 percent of all US energy in 2022. Federal regulators estimate up to 120 gigawatts of geothermal energy could come online within the US by 2050, enough for about 15 percent of the country’s anticipated electricity needs.

[Related: How Google Search is helping ‘greenwash’ oil companies.]

Google first pledged carbon neutrality in 2007, and continues to pursue its ambitious goal of carbon-free power at all its office campuses and data centers by 2030. Such a feat remains a massive undertaking—current geothermal kilowatt-per-hour costs are about 90 percent more expensive than the Department of Energy’s current goal of $45/kWh by 2035. Over the summer, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer described the Nevada facility’s production costs as “significantly” higher than the DOE goal, but expects the price to significantly lower in the coming years as the technology scales. Fervo clearly wants to help with that scaling—the company is currently working on a 400 megawatt geothermal facility located in Utah scheduled to go online in 2026.

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Reducing damaging “ultra-emission” methane leaks could soon become much easier–thanks to a new, open-source tool that combines machine learning and orbital data from multiple satellites, including one attached to the International Space Station.

Methane emissions originate anywhere food and plant matter decompose without oxygen, such as marshes, landfills, fossil fuel plants—and yes, cow farms. They are also infamous for their dramatic effect on air quality. Although capable of lingering in the atmosphere for just 7 to 12 years compared to CO2’s centuries-long lifespan, the gas is still an estimated 80 times more effective at retaining heat. Immediately reducing its production is integral to stave off climate collapse’s most dire short-term consequences—cutting emissions by 45 percent by 2030, for example, could shave off around 0.3 degrees Celsius from the planet’s rising temperature average over the next twenty years.

[Related: Turkmenistan’s gas fields emit loads of methane.]

Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for aerial imaging to precisely map real time concentrations of methane emissions. For one thing, plumes from so-called “ultra-emission” events like oil rig and natural gas pipeline malfunctions (see: Turkmenistan) are invisible to human eyes, as well as most satellites’ multispectral near-infrared wavelength sensors. And what aerial data is collected is often thrown off by spectral noise, requiring manual parsing to accurately locate the methane leaks.

A University of Oxford team working alongside Trillium Technologies’ NIO.space has developed a new, open-source tool powered by machine learning that can identify methane clouds using much narrower hyperspectral bands of satellite imaging data. These bands, while more specific, produce much more vast quantities of data—which is where artificial intelligence training comes in handy.

The project is detailed in new research published in Nature Scientific Reports by a team at the University of Oxford, alongside a recent university profile. To train their model, engineers fed it a total of 167,825 hyperspectral image tiles—each roughly 0.66 square miles—generated by NASA’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) satellite while orbiting the Four Corners region of the US. The model was subsequently trained using additional orbital monitors, including NASA’s hyperspectral EMIT sensor currently aboard the International Space Station.

The team’s current model is roughly 21.5 percent more accurate at identifying methane plumes than the existing top tool, while simultaneously providing nearly 42 percent fewer false detection errors compared to the same industry standard. According to researchers, there’s no reason to believe those numbers won’t improve over time.

[Related: New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change.]

“What makes this research particularly exciting and relevant is the fact that many more hyperspectral satellites are due to be deployed in the coming years, including from ESA, NASA, and the private sector,” Vít Růžička, lead researcher and a University of Oxford doctoral candidate in the department of computer science, said during a recent university profile. As this satellite network expands, Růžička believes researchers and environmental watchdogs will soon gain an ability to automatically, accurately detect methane plume events anywhere in the world.

These new techniques could soon enable independent, globally-collaborated identification of greenhouse gas production and leakage issues—not just for methane, but many other major pollutants. The tool currently utilizes already collected geospatial data, and is not able to currently provide real-time analysis using orbital satellite sensors. In the University of Oxford’s recent announcement, however, research project supervisor Andrew Markham adds that the team’s long-term goal is to run their programs through satellites’ onboard computers, thus “making instant detection a reality.”

The post How AI could help scientists spot ‘ultra-emission’ methane plumes faster—from space appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best solar generator		Jackery Solar Generator 1000		SEE IT	Harness the power of the sun to keep your devices and appliances juiced with this portable generator.
Best for hydration		Hydro Flask Water Bottle with Straw Lid		SEE IT	Keep water ice-cold all day long while reducing plastic waste.
Best for students		Rocketbook Core Reusable Smart Notebook		SEE IT	This smart notebook lets users save their scribblings to the cloud, then erase and start all over again.

It’s a great feeling when you give a gift that delights a loved one—and it probably means that you scoured through plenty of ideas before landing on a true winner. But while gift-giving can be fun, knowing the impact these new products can have on the environment can take some of the holiday spirit out of shopping. Though any new product will contribute to emissions due to its manufacturing and shipping processes, these environmentally friendly options can help cut down on waste and carbon footprint. From replacing single-use plastics like water bottles and coffee cups to going green by riding a bike to work, these are our picks for sustainable gifts that are a must-have for anyone who wants to help the planet. 

• Best for coffee lovers: Bruvi Coffee Maker
• Best for office workers: YETI Rambler Stainless Insulated Mug
• Best for students: Rocketbook Core Reusable Smart Notebook
• Best composter: Lomi Smart Waste Kitchen Composter
• Best compost bin: Joseph Joseph Compo 4 Easy-Fill Compost Bin Food Waste Caddy
• Best for commuters: 6KU Track Fixed Gear Bicycle
• Best solar generator: Jackery Solar Generator 1000
• Best for new homeowners: Coyuchi Towels
• Best for new cooks: The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z
• Best for home cooks: The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook: 500 Inspired, Flexible Recipes for Eating Well Without Meat
• Best for healthy eaters: Pacific Merchants Acaciaware Set
• Best for gardeners: Sporgard Galvanized Steel Watering Can
• Best for families: Nordic by Nature Reusable Sandwich Bags
• Best for kids: Tiny Land Wooden Train Set for Toddlers
• Best for hydration: Hydro Flask Water Bottle with Straw Lid
• Best reusable straws: StrawExpert Set of 16 Reusable Stainless Steel Straws
• Best sneakers: KOIO Men’s Sneakers
• Best slippers: Glerups Wool Slip-On Leather Slippers
• Best for puzzle lovers: Party Fowls Trick Puzzle
• Best for music lovers: House of Marley Champion True Wireless Earbuds
• Best bag: Troubadour Sling Bag
• Best for neat freaks: Me Mother Earth Quick Dry Diatomaceous Stone Bath Mat
• Best toothbrush: SURI Electric Toothbrush
  

Best for coffee lovers: Bruvi Coffee Maker

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Pod coffee makers aren’t typically known for being sustainable (or providing delicious brews), but the Bruvi Coffee Maker is aiming to change that. Its pods—which pack in 40 percent more grinds than typical competitors—are a curated selection from around the globe. You can select from coffee, tea, espresso, Americanos, espresso, and cold brew in 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, or 12-ounce sizes. And when it comes to sustainability, the pods can also biodegrade 84 percent in an anaerobic environment in less than two years, according to the company’s testing, unlike plastic pods. Plus, you can use the Bruvi app to remotely ensure the WiFi-ready IoT brewer has the coffee ready in the morning and automatically reorder favorite blends. For more options, check out best coffee makers.

Best for office workers: YETI Rambler Stainless Insulated Mug

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We’re not immune to the appeal of a specialty latte or coffee while on the go, but those quick trips to your local cafe quickly add up. Globally, 16 billion paper cups hit the waste bins each year, which equates to roughly 6.5 million trees cut down and four billion gallons of water wasted. It’s also a common misconception that your coffee cup can be tossed in the recycling—paper cups are lined with a plastic moisture barrier called polyethylene, which actually contaminates the other recyclables in your bin.

The simple solution to limiting your own personal waste? A reusable travel mug. The YETI Rambler comes in 30 different colorways, is BPA-free, dishwasher safe, and has an insulated design to keep your beverage at the desired temperature for longer (take that, paper cups). Not to mention that many coffee shops give you a small discount for bringing your own mug as an incentive to help our planet.

Best for students: Rocketbook Core Reusable Smart Notebook

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Your favorite student can take notes or draw but save paper with the Rocketbook Core Reusable Smart Notebook. This 6-inch by 8.8-inch, 36-page digital notebook works with an app to save your notes and drawings to the cloud, should you wish. The set comes with a pen for your scribbling and a cloth to wipe the page clean when you’re finished. Plus, it’s got the traditional spiral rings of a notebook for the classic experience, comes in executive and letter versions, and is available in 16 fun colors and patterns.

Best composter: Lomi Smart Waste Kitchen Composter

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Composting is good for the Earth, but it can take months for food scraps to decompose into soil in the backyard. But with the Lomi Smart Waste Kitchen Composter on the counter, users can turn the remnants of dinner into nourishing feed for plants in a matter of hours with the touch of a button. This unobtrusive appliance also serves as an odor-free compost bin and lets users cut down on what they send to the landfill and pay for fertilizer.

Best compost bin: Joseph Joseph Compo 4 Easy-Fill Compost Bin Food Waste Caddy

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We’ve all had that bag of spinach rotting in the back of our fridge, or berries that sprout mold after just a few short days. While your instinct might be to toss them in the garbage, composting provides a more sustainable way to dispose of food. As food scraps and garden waste account for almost 30 percent of our garbage, starting your own compost bin reduces your overall waste stream and cuts down on methane emissions produced by organic decomposition in landfills. 

Our pick for the best compost bin to get you started? This pick reduces the peskiest part of composting—the smell. The ventilated design allows air to circulate through, which results in less moisture and odors. It also features a replaceable odor filter to trap any potential smells, a polypropylene body for easy cleaning, and a flip-top lid with a wide opening,

Best for commuters: 6KU Track Fixed Gear Bicycle

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Cars represent the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, contributing almost 30 percent of the country’s total emissions. Riding a bicycle is one of the only modes of transportation that requires no fossil fuels or pollution.

This fixed-gear bicycle from 6KU is perfect for cruising through most towns and cities, as it maintains speed to make riding simpler. While this sustainable gift is more of an investment than some other options, a high-quality bicycle is a functional pick that can be used for years to come—and as far as commuter road bikes go, this one is on the affordable end.

Best solar generator: Jackery Solar Generator 1000

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Whether you’re on a long camping trip or setting up lights in your backyard, a portable generator is an eco-friendly way to power up devices without resorting to a gas-guzzling generator. Not only is the Jackery Solar Generator 1000 significantly more portable than its gas counterparts, but it also saves money in the long run, as you won’t need to continue buying gas for refueling. 

With 1,000 watts, a topped-off power station can run even large appliances like refrigerators, TVs, and electric grills. While many people might turn to solar generators for journeys off the grid (i.e., camping, road trips), you can also use the Jackery Solar Generator to power your outdoor appliances, like Christmas lights, electric heaters, and electric lawnmowers. Simply set up the solar panels (some included here, more sold separately) facing the direction with the most sun and plug in your tech. And if you like this idea but want more options, we’ve got the best solar generators coverage, well, covered.

Best for new homeowners: Coyuchi Temescal Organic Towels

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Moving into a new home is exciting but also a big expense. Treat some new homeowners to a gift that will last: Coyuchi’s Temescal Organic Towels. Hand-woven from organic cotton in Turkey, these towels are both plush and lightweight, with ribbing for extra drying power. The six-piece set includes two bath towels, two washcloths, and two hand towels. It’s available in four rich colors (Alpine White, Deep Ocean, Terra, and Shadow), plus an undyed version that will go well in any bathroom. This set is also certified by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) for extra peace of mind. 

Best for new cooks: The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z

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Cooking from home is an excellent way to save money and know exactly what’s in the food you’re eating. But for new cooks, the prospect of whipping the disparate ingredients in the fridge and cabinets into a tasty meal can be daunting. Fortunately, The Everlasting Cookbook: Leftovers from A to Z provides a comprehensive guide to combining everything from a leftover burrito to aging scallions to even potato chip crumbs into something delicious. Written by award-winning cookbook author Tamar Adler, The Everlasting Cookbook features more than 1,500 recipes with beautiful illustrations that show how even those last few black olives in the jar can transform into a work of art.

Best for home cooks: The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook: 500 Inspired, Flexible Recipes for Eating Well Without Meat

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Speaking of vegetables, if someone you know could use some inspiration to get three to five servings a day, consider The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook. With 500 recipes developed by America’s Test Kitchen, this book also provides a primer on plant-based eating and includes a section of gluten-free recipes. Everyone from vegans to people just exploring meat alternatives and looking to get more veggies on their plate will find plenty to like in these easy, budget-friendly recipes that draw on culinary traditions from around the globe.

Best for healthy eaters: Pacific Merchants Acaciaware Set

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The USDA recommends three to five servings of vegetables each day, and that should include some leafy greens. This wonderful 12-inch round bowl comes with two servers, all made from natural acacia wood. Fill it up with some nice field greens, or just live the dream of making an all-crouton salad. Just don’t put it in the microwave or dishwasher because that will ruin the wood. Round out your table with more of the best serving bowls.

Best for gardeners: Sporgard Galvanized Steel Watering Can

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Whether your giftee is a new plant parent or has a green thumb, they will certainly appreciate the utility of a good watering can. This one-gallon steel container is both practical and decorative and can be used on indoor and outdoor plants alike. And not only is this can designed to endure, but the steel can also be recycled. The double handle makes it easy to manage, even when it’s totally full of liquid. We recommend using water and not energy drinks.

Best for families: Nordic by Nature Reusable Sandwich Bags

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Living sustainably can be challenging when you’ve got a family to feed 365 days a year. Nordic by Nature’s Reusable Sandwich Bags make it a little easier. The set comes with four bags: two large, one medium, and one small in a pretty floral pattern that zips closed. They’re free of toxic chemicals such as BPAs and lead and they come at an affordable price. Plus, cleanup is super easy: just toss them in the dishwasher.

Best for kids: Tiny Land Wooden Train Set for Toddlers

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There’s nothing quite like the excitement of a kid opening a brand-new toy. But as kids grow and change interests, over 80 percent of these new toys will ultimately end up in the trash. And as 90 percent of toys are made of plastic, these playthings will stay in our environment for over 450 years after they’re discarded. 

So—how can you give your kiddo a new gift that won’t further contribute to our climate crisis? The best option is toys made of biodegradable materials like wood, silicone, or recycled fabric. While these toys still produce emissions, once discarded they will have less dire impacts on the environment. This 39-piece polished beach wood train set allows your kid to create a variety of paths using the curved and flat tracks, and the bridge, people, engine, car, and hauler will keep them playing for hours. Ultimately, your little one will thank you for looking after their future planet. 

Best for hydration: Hydro Flask Water Bottle with Straw Lid

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Globally, 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute, 1.3 billion bottles every day, and 481 billion plastic bottles every year. With only 20 percent of plastic successfully recycled and reused, the best alternative to cutting down on your consumption and carbon footprint is investing in a reliable, reusable water bottle.

And if you’re searching for a nearly indestructible, BPA-free, phthalate-free, stainless steel bottle that will keep H20 chilled all day long, the Hydro Flask is a reliable favorite. You can toss it in the dishwasher for easy cleaning without worrying about the powder coating getting damaged.

Best reusable straws: StrawExpert Set of 16 Reusable Stainless Steel Straws

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From restaurant booths to drive-through coffee shops, single-use plastic straws are a ubiquitous part of daily life for many Americans—with an approximated 500 million straws used in the United States each year. And with a lifetime of 200 years, this relatively small piece of our daily waste adds up. While straws account for less than one percent of the plastic waste in our oceans, taking small measures to reduce your impact can add up. Though compostable straws are a step in the right direction, reusable straws are the best way to cut down on production and landfill waste. They are a staple in most sustainable gift guides.

This set of stainless steel straws from StrawExpert can last a lifetime—with enough sizes and shapes to suit any kind of tumbler or cup. The 10.5-inch straight and bent straws fit up to 34-ounce tumblers, while the regular 8.5-inch straws are great for 16- to 20-ounce water bottles or mugs. And if you hate the feeling of metal on your teeth, these straws also come with a small silicone mouthpiece for added comfort. 

Best sneakers: KOIO Men’s Sneakers

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For a person that just any footwear won’t do, consider KOIO Men’s Sneakers. Handmade in Tuscany, these kicks combine buttery Italian leather with recycled rubber soles that use up to 40 percent recycled materials. The hand-painted trim also provides a sleek look. Available in more than 30 colorways, these laced low tops are also water-resistant and come with a removable insole for extra comfort. The recycled foam and rubber insoles also make them perfect for all-day wear. We highly recommend checking out the boot, sneaker, and slip-on options for both men and women.

Best slippers: Glerups Wool Slip-On Leather Slippers

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The Danish are well-known for their appreciation of coziness. So it’s no surprise that these comfy, rustic slippers are made by Glerups, a company based in Denmark. It all began in 1993 when the co-founder started making felt boots as a hobby from the wool of her Gotland sheep for friends and family. Now, Glerups makes a line of slip-ons, shoes, and boots using natural textiles and dyes and designed for comfort. Plus, the company practices regenerative agriculture and recycles its wool and leather. So, if your giftee isn’t into bunny slippers, these Glerups slip-ons are unisex and available in seven muted colors (gray, charcoal, cranberry, petrol, red, blue, forest).

Best for puzzle lovers: Party Fowls Trick Puzzle

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This head-scratcher of a jigsaw puzzle features some tricky chickens. At 1,000 pieces and 20 by 27 inches, the Party Fowl Trick Puzzle is a project. But your puzzle lover will also be in for a surprise, as the final product doesn’t exactly match the box. It’s all in good fun, and you can also feel good about this purchase, as the puzzle is made of 100 percent recycled chipboard and paper.

Best for music lovers: House of Marley Champion True Wireless Earbuds

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Made by a company inspired by the late singer, these wireless earbuds provide up to 28 hours of high-quality audio on a single charge and feature a microphone for hands-free calls. Designed for a snug fit, these earbuds are also made from sustainable materials, including bamboo, environmentally-friendly silicone, and natural wood fiber. And they’re sweat- and water-resistant, which also makes them great for fitness lovers.

Best bag: Troubadour Sling Bag

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We’ve all got a handful of essentials we need to take with us, but hauling a pocketbook or tote everywhere can be a hassle, while traditional fanny packs can scream tourist. Troubadour’s Sling Bag elegantly bridges the divide, with a sleek bag that can fit your phone, wallet, charger, water bottle, keys, sunglasses case, and more. Made from recycled plastic, it’s waterproof and comes with a cleanable anti-microbial lining. Plus, the shoulder strap comes with a magnetic buckle that you can easily adjust for maximum utility.  

Best for neat freaks: Me Mother Earth Quick Dry Diatomaceous Stone Bath Mat

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Say goodbye to soggy bath mats! The lucky recipient of the Me Mother Earth Quick Dry Stone Bath Mat won’t have to step over puddles on the bathroom floor anymore. It’s made from diatomaceous clay, which is derived from fossilized algae and is the same material used in swimming pool filters. This 6.4-pound, non-slip stone mat is capable of absorbing 150 percent of its weight within seconds (and it’s fun to watch wet footprints disappear). Plus, it’s easy to clean with soap, water, and vinegar.

Best toothbrush: SURI Electric Toothbrush

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Oral health can provide a window into someone’s overall well-being; for example, periodontitis has been linked to the development of diabetes, according to the World Health Organization. Fortunately, good oral hygiene goes a long way. So why not help a loved one ditch the plastic toothbrush for some cutting-edge teeth technology? The SURI Electric Toothbrush uses 33,000 sonic vibrations a minute to deep clean teeth between dental checkups. The body of the device is made from aluminum and slim enough to fit into a travel pack. And it comes with plant-based replaceable heads, so there’s no need to get a new brush every time they visit the dentist.

Final thoughts on sustainable gifts

Our sustainable gift guide allows you to keep the holiday spirit of giving while staying environmentally conscious. Whether you’re trying to send a hint to the aunt who gets a to-go coffee every day or you’re in search of a plastic-free present for the kid in your life, these picks are a gift to your loved one and our planet.

The post Sustainable gift guide: 20+ gifts that keep on giving appeared first on Popular Science.

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Americans consume billions of pounds of meat each year. And yet, there’s a plethora of research showing that copious amounts of meat can be unhealthy, both for the Earth and our bodies.  

The question of how to steer consumers toward healthier and more sustainable plant-based foods is a tricky one. Warning labels, similar to the ones found on cigarette packs, could be one way to raise awareness about the negative impacts of meat and perhaps sway consumer choices. But they’re still completely experimental.

In a new study published in the journal Appetite, psychologists in the UK created an online food-selection task where about 1,000 participants—all of whom ate meat—had to choose between a meat-based, fish-based, vegetarian, or vegan meal 20 times. A quarter of these participants based their decisions on images of each of the dishes. The remaining participants were randomly assigned to also see a warning label about the impact of meat on health, climate change, or the risk of future pandemics (researchers and organizations like the United Nations have linked high meat consumption with risk of infectious diseases). The team found that each warning label type reduced the subjects’ desire to eat meat: by 9 percent with health labels, 7 percent with climate labels, and 10 percent with pandemic labels. The individuals also viewed the climate label as the most credible of the three and the pandemic label the least, but potentially had a stronger emotional response to the latter.

One reason these warnings might work is because people see a negative outcome attached to meat, so they have a gut reaction and opt for a different food, says Jack Hughes, a psychology researcher at Durham University in England and lead author on the new paper. Another explanation could just be that the extra information gets people to think more consciously about their decisions, he explains. 

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet]

The results of the study are “very in line with what we’ve seen with regards to labeling efforts and their effect on consumer behavior,” says Lindsey Smith Taillie. “They have a small to moderate effect on consumer choices.” Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina who studies how policies affect food choices, notes that the inclusion of pandemic-related labels is a first for this kind of research, at least to her knowledge. She would be especially interested to see how consumers in the US would react to that kind of messaging given the different political and cultural climate.

There are many factors that could influence the effectiveness of a warning label on a product. For example, as basic as it sounds, pictures make a difference. “We do know for tobacco in the UK that when images became mandatory alongside the text, labels got more effective,” Hughes explains. In two prior studies, Taillie and her collaborators found that text-only labels cautioning of health and environmental impacts of meat consumption only mildly reduced people’s carnivorous intentions, if at all. 

But not all images are the same. Take the case of high sugar content: A photo of teaspoons full of sugar is more factual and informative than a visual of a diseased heart, Taillie says. Regardless, “graphic labels are generally considered to be the most effective type,” she adds.

With warning labels, the goal is to grab people’s attention and get them thinking about their food’s footprint. But it ends up being counterproductive if the message makes the consumer feel angry or restricted, Taillie adds. One 2022 study out of Europe found that eliciting disgust by adding graphic images to packaging can both increase and decrease the likelihood of individuals choosing meat products, depending on whether they felt manipulated. Another recent European study found that meat-shaming messages on products can have paradoxical effects on buying habits.

The next step for this sort of research, says Taillie, would be to see how such labels affect choices in real-world settings—when factors like smells, prices, and peer pressure might influence consumer decisions. It’s also probably easier to choose the plant-based option when it’s a hypothetical online task and you don’t actually have to eat the food, she adds.

[Related: When faced with tough choices, your brain secretly tips the scales]

But choosing a meat-free diet can be an incredibly impactful way for individuals to reduce their carbon footprint, and this research can help nudge people in that direction. “In the UK, the Climate Change Committee says that meat consumption in the country needs to be reduced by 20 percent by 2030 [to meet carbon emission goals],” Hughes says. His team’s work shows that one simple and cheap action could change minds in a portion of the population. 

Would that be in the case in the US as well? Taillie sees a parallel with graphic tobacco warnings, which were adopted by European countries but have stalled in the state due to lawsuits. With meat labels, she says, “I think we’re looking at a timespan of decades.”

The post Graphic warning labels might convince people to eat less meat appeared first on Popular Science.

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The wind energy company Ørsted has officially shuttered plans for two New Jersey offshore wind farms, citing rising inflation, interest rates, and supply chain problems. The blow to US green energy infrastructure arrives less than two weeks after the Danish wind industry giant promised to pay the Garden State a $100 million penalty if its Ocean Wind I turbines weren’t online by the end of 2025. But although the company’s plans off the coast of Atlantic City are canceled, similar projects are still underway across the US as the country transitions towards a sustainable energy infrastructure.

“We are extremely disappointed to have to take this decision, particularly because New Jersey is poised to be a US and global hub for offshore wind energy,” David Hardy, Ørsted Group EVP and CEO Americas, said in an October 31 statement. “I want to thank Governor Murphy and NJ state and local leaders who helped support these projects and continue to lead the region in developing American renewable energy and jobs.”

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

According to the Associated Press on Tuesday, however, NJ Gov. Phil Murphy had strong words for the company, citing Ørsted’s recent statements “regarding the viability and progress of the Ocean Wind I project.”

“Today’s decision by Ørsted to abandon its commitments to New Jersey is outrageous and calls into question the company’s credibility and competence,” added Gov. Murphy per the AP. He also hinted at impending plans to pursue an additional $200 million Ørsted reportedly pledged for the state’s offshore wind industry. In the meantime, Gov. Murphy reiterated New Jersey’s commitment to offshore wind infrastructure, and said the state will solicit a new round of project proposals in the near future.

Both Ocean Wind endeavors had faced intense scrutiny and pushback from both Republican state legislators and locals, who criticized the farms’ alleged ecological impacts, ocean horizon views, as well as the millions of dollars in subsidies granted to Ørsted. Earlier this month, Ørsted received a lawsuit filed on behalf of an environmental group called Clean Ocean Action alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations. In May 2023, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which deemed it responsibly designed and safe for the region’s ecological health.

If completed, Ocean Wind I would have included nearly 100 giant turbines roughly 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Once online, the farm would have annually generated 1.1 gigawatts of energy—enough to power over 500,000 homes. Ocean Wind II was slated for construction next to its sibling wind farm, and would have offered similar energy outputs.

[Related: Watch a heavy-lifting drone land a perfect delivery on an offshore wind turbine.]

While the Danish company’s plans in New Jersey are dashed, America’s wind farm buildup is still progressing elsewhere—and Ørsted remains a part of that trajectory. The same day as its Ocean Wind announcement, the company confirmed it is moving forward with a $4 billion project, Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island. If completed, the offshore wind farm will supply clean energy for residents in both Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Meanwhile, a utility company called Dominion Energy received crucial federal approval on Tuesday for plans to construct 176 turbines over 20 miles off the coast of Virginia. Dominion claims the project is the largest offshore project in the US, and will generate enough energy for nearly 660,000 homes upon its estimated late-2026 completion date. According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of US electricity by 2050.

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An autonomous drone with the wingspan of an albatross is now trialing cargo restocks for a giant offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Overseen by the Danish wind power company Ørsted, the 128-pound unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—roughly the weight of “a large baby giraffe”—is meant to cut down on time and costs, while also improving overall operational safety, and is billed as the first of its kind in the world.

“Drones mean less work disturbance as turbines don’t have to be shut down when cargo is delivered,” Ørsted’s October 30 announcement states. “They avoid risk, making it safer for personnel working on the wind farm and minimize the need for multiple journeys by ship, reducing carbon emissions and climate change impacts.”

In a video posted to the social media platform, X, the hefty drone is shown launching from a cargo ship’s deck while towing a large orange bag suspended by a cable beneath the UAV. From there, the transport soars over a few hundred feet of North Sea waters to hover above one of Hornsea 1’s 7-megawatt wind turbines. Once in place, the drone carefully lands its cargo on the platform before releasing its tether to return to its crew transfer vessel, where human pilots have overseen the entire process.

While Ørsted didn’t name its drone partner in the project announcement, additional promotional materials provided by the company confirm it is a Skylift, a UK-based business focusing on offshore wind farm deliveries.

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

“[W]e want to use our industry leading position to help push forward innovations that reduce costs and maximize efficiency and safety in the offshore wind sector,” Mikkel Haugaard Windolf, head of Ørsted’s offshore logistics project, said via the company’s October 30 reveal, adding that, “Drone cargo delivery is an important step in that direction.”

Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm consists of 174 turbines installed across over 157-square-miles in the North Sea. Generating roughly 1.7Gw of power, the farm’s electricity is enough to sustainably power over 1 million homes in the UK.

Despite the company’s multiple Hornsea wind farm successes, Ørsted has encountered significant setbacks during attempts to expand into the US market. Earlier this month, local officials in Cape May County, NJ, filed a lawsuit attempting to block construction of a 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines off the coast of Atlantic City, citing regulatory sidesteps and environmental concerns. In an email to PopSci at the time, the American Clean Power Association’s Director of Eastern Region State Affairs described the lawsuit as “meritless,” and reiterated that offshore wind energy production remains “one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation.”

According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of the country’s sustainable electricity by 2050.

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In 2017 news broke in North Carolina that the water downstream of the Fayetteville Works Plant, owned by the Chemours Company (a spin-off of DuPont), and public water systems reliant on the Cape Fear River contained high levels of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These contaminants, which are common in everyday products like adhesives, food packaging, and cookware, are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment and can linger in the body while causing numerous health problems. And indeed, in the years after the positive PFAS tests, evidence emerged on suspected thyroid cancer clusters in local communities.

The Cape Fear River remains tainted to this day, and many of the residents of southeast North Carolina feel its presence in their lives. “We have a lot of pockets of strange illnesses,” says Dana Sargent, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Cape Fear River Watch. She notes that people in the area still buy bottled water and are anxious about the pervasive pollution.

[Related: 2 ways of knowing if there are PFAS in your drinking water]

Chemours has been sued multiple times for dumping chemicals in public waterways. But scientists and environmental groups are still investigating the extent of the contamination.  In recent research using novel chemical-analysis tools published in the journal Science Advances, scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University found 11 types of PFAS in the Cape Fear River that were previously undetected in those waters. Even worse, eight of those 11 compounds had never been reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), marking them as new forever chemicals. While it’s incredibly difficult to detect and identify toxins scientists aren’t aware, the study authors says this is a crucial step to studying and regulating PFAS that are still under the radar.

“The goals with this project were twofold,” says Kaylie Kirkwood-Donelson, one of the main contributors on the paper. Kirkwood-Donelson, now a chemist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was a graduate student and research assistant at North Carolina State University while conducting this work. “One was to work on a method we could use to identify new PFAS and get more information about their chemical structures than we’d typically get. The second was to apply that method.”

To identify the previously undocumented chemicals, the team established four points of testing. The first three were pretty standard—they assessed each chemical’s mass, size, and polarity. Kirkwood-Donelson then used a relatively novel technique: ion mobility spectrometry, a method that reveals electric activity in the target molecule to help narrow down and pinpoint what you’re looking at. The process was fruitful. In total, she and her colleagues found 47 different forever chemicals in the Cape Fear River, including eight that weren’t already on the EPA’s “CompTox PFAS Master List,” which already covers some 14,000 compounds. 

Despite decades of monitoring, PFAS can be challenging to catalog. To validate the ID, you’re supposed to check that your analyses match those of a “standard” sample of the substance that you either purchase or synthesize, says Erin Baker, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an author on the new study. But standard samples don’t exist for most PFAS yet, and many are too difficult or expensive to synthesize in labs. Creative techniques give researchers more power to identify the mysterious characteristics of these chemicals, Baker says.

The ion mobility spectrometry method the team used “is an amazing method,” says EPA chemist Mark Strynar. “I think it’s the wave of the future.” While the agency has its own process for identifying new PFAS, he adds that it won’t be long before experts start asking, “why isn’t everyone doing this?” He just acquired the equipment needed for ion mobility spectrometry tests in his own lab last week. 

[Related: The US might finally regulate toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water]

When investigating chemicals as toxic pollutants, the EPA typically assesses them as individual molecules, not classes of chemicals as a whole. It also won’t work toward stronger regulations or a ban until the chemical has proven to be damaging in some way. “We’re hoping that by introducing these new technologies we can speed up the discovery of novel PFAS,” Baker says. But right now, completing the process and validating groundbreaking findings can take an incredibly long time, during which potential toxins remains in the water. “That’s a huge barrier,” says Kirkwood-Donelson. Her Cape Fear research, for example, took six years to finalize. 

On the bright side, now that these new kinds of PFAS have been detected, “other researchers will use this information to see if these chemicals exist across the US and across the world,” Kirkwood-Donelson says. If they’re widespread, toxicologists can begin to assess potential adverse effects. 

Sargent, from Cape Fear River Watch, hopes the EPA will make strong and swift rules limiting PFAS use, starting with the Fayetteville Works Plant. But a recent letter from the agency shows that it authorized Chemours to import up to 4 million pounds of waste material containing the PFAS GenX from the company’s Netherlands facility to North Carolina. GenX has been at the center of several cancer and other health studies.

What’s frustrating is that instead of taking action to reduce PFAS in the environment, the EPA is “actually now just doing the exact opposite, which is huge,” says Sargent. “This issue is not going away,” she adds, and “we need to pay attention.”

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“It’s been forever considered a garbage fish, but it’s probably the most delicious fish that we serve,” David Standridge says about the bottom-dwelling sea robin. Standridge is the executive chef of a farm-to-sea-to-fork restaurant The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Connecticut. For him, the historically maligned but mild tasting sea robin is the “poster child” for a fish that should be eaten more because it is so abundant.

“Part of supporting local and supporting small business is really building a more resilient food system,” says Standridge. “So that’s the first thing that we look at when we look at abundance, and what species we are choosing.”

Seared sea robin, smoked swordfish tater tots, and locally caught whiting wrapped in sugar kelp (tempura fried) are just some of the potentially sustainable dishes diners can find on the menu here. While using ingredients sourced by local farmers is difficult to scale up to more mainstream restaurants and grocery chains, The Shipwright’s Daughter’s creative work with both supply chains and flavor profiles make for a delicious starting point. 

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

The Shipwright’s Daughter is a 2023 James Beard Foundation Smart Catch leader, working with other restaurants and chefs to evaluate the environmental impact of the fish served. Standridge uses the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch–an assessment tool that helps consumers and chefs alike gauge the sustainability of their seafood–to evaluate every fish on the menu. This year, 97.3 percent of the fish served is certified sustainable, according to Standridge. 

While the menu adjusts to the seasons and what’s readily available, one of its popular items is a delightful soup with a subtly flavored local white fish called scup, served with kelp vinegar and smoked sea beans. The seared sea robin is surprisingly light. A member of the distinct Triglidae family of fish, sea robins are covered in spines. They use “walking rays” to crawl along the bottom of the ocean and help them sense the mollusks and crustaceans that they eat. Yet, the dish is approachable–for the more selective eaters.

These fish live along coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, which cuts down on shipping costs and reduces the amount of fossil fuels used to bring fish from the water to the dinner plate. The entrees on the menu range from about $25 to $60, which is on par with smart casual restaurants in Mystic. The seaside town is an emerging New England food destination with everything from artisanal doughnuts to fusion cuisine from Bangladeshi chef Sheuli Solaiman. 

Standridge also works closely with nearby Stonington Kelp Co. co-owner and sugar kelp farmer Suzie Flores to incorporate this giant seaweed into many of their signature dishes. Alongside her husband, Flores farms three acres of kelp on sturdy mooring lines about a mile from shore in Fishers Island Sound. She sells it fresh from the docks of a local marina in season and at multiple farmers markets in Connecticut. From there, consumers have a wide range of ways to eat it, from fresh salads, pickled, or even powdered and sprinkled on pasta and pizza for a little kick of extra nutrients.

[Related: Eating sustainably may mean skipping the lobster for now.]

Standridge and Flores share a similar approach to both sustainability and food and Flores devotes a great deal of time promoting kelp and growing this viable market so people of all incomes can eventually benefit from it. 

“Sustainability is kind of a multi-faceted approach,” Flores tells PopSci. “It’s something that is grown while doing as little harm as you can. It’s also possibly about negating harm and can be restorative in some ways and can help support an economy and community. It’s not just about growing something using no fertilizer, not using any freshwater, or putting pressure on resources, but it also is about developing an economy around it as well.”

Flores cultivates sugar kelp which is a native seaweed that grows along the Northeastern United States and up into Canada. Farmed sugar kelp grows over the winter months and is harvested every spring. It absorbs excess nitrogen from the water, while also producing oxygen. Sugar kelp also grows as quickly as six and a half feet from the time it is planted to harvest, according to Flores. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Nutritionally, sugar kelp is an excellent source of fiber, vitamins C and K, calcium, and more. “I feel like it’s kind of common knowledge that fish is good for you, and the reason fish is good for you is because of all of the things that are present in seaweed,” says Flores.

Seaweeds like kelp could be major components of building a more sustainable food system. They can be used in cow feed to reduce methane emissions and research from Tufts University found that it could help tackle food insecurity. The plants with a reputation for being a messy nuisance can even be used in tasty desserts including the restaurant’s sea salt caramels and its light and sweet kelp cake. 

“We pickle as much as we can and then it’s just really a delicious kind of condiment for anything. In that form, you can mix it into soups and sauces, you can put it into salads,” says Standridge. “We can do a lot of things where you just kind of want a little bit of ocean flavor in something that’s not going to be overpowering. It’s a great product.”

One of the biggest challenges of sustainable agriculture is bringing it up to scale so healthy foods like kelp are more affordable. Standridge says that his restaurant and others that use seaweed can help encourage people to try to incorporate more of it into their diets because diners there are typically more open to trying something new. It can pique interest in kelp and other ingredients that consumers may be less familiar with.

Financial support from organizations like NOAA Sea Grant and the National Science foundation can help fund the next steps of scaling seaweed production up and using existing fishing infrastructure to keep seaweed sustainable and economical. Educational events like Kelp Harvest Week or maintaining a presence at farmer’s markets has also helped the public become more open to eating seaweed. 

“If you go to an apple orchard, there’s usually apples that are down on the bottom and rotting. You wouldn’t pick those up and have that be your representation of an apple,” says Flores. “We harvest our kelp fresh from a line out in the ocean, so it’s not the same seaweed that you find washed up on the shore. And that makes a huge difference.”

Bringing sustainable ingredients up to scale requires time, investment, and faces the tug of war of maintaining its low environmental impact without generating more waste or burning unnecessary fossil fuels. Despite the challenge, supporting smaller farms and fisheries could prove to be a tool in working towards a more sustainable food system for more of us, perhaps with a side of pickled kelp. 

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If you’ve ever spent time on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, there is a solid chance you stumbled across a slimy mass of stinky, sulfurous-smelling seaweed. The specific marine plant in question during those gross encounters is likely sargassum—while helpful for absorbing CO2, sargassum is also incredibly invasive, and can wreak havoc on both shoreline and ocean ecosystems. Cleanup efforts can cost tens of thousands of dollars while disrupting both tourist and fishing industries, but a recent aquatic robot project is showing immense promise in alleviating sargassum stress. In fact, AlgaRay’s recent successes have even earned it a spot on Time’s Best Inventions of 2023.

Co-designed by Seaweed Generation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to utilizing the versatile plant to help mitigate and remove carbon emissions, an AlgaRay prototype is currently patrolling off the coasts of Antigua. There, the roughly 9-foot-wide robot scoops up clumps of sargassum until its storage capacity is filled, at which point the autonomous bot dives 200m below the surface.

[Related: Rocks may be able to release carbon dioxide as well as store it.]

At this depth, the air pockets that make sargassum leaves so buoyant are so compressed by the water pressure that it simply can’t float anymore. Once released by AlgaRay, the seaweed then sinks to the ocean floor. According to a new writeup by Seaweed Generation’s partners at the University of Exeter, the robot can repeat this process between four and six times every hour. And thanks to a combination of solar panels, lithium batteries, and navigational tools connected to Starlink’s satellite internet constellation, AlgaRay will “ultimately be able to work almost non-stop,” reports the University of Exeter.

Of course, ocean ecosystems are complex and delicate balancing acts at any depth. AlgaRay’s designers are well aware of this, and assure its potential additional ocean floor CO2 deposits won’t be carried out recklessly. Additionally, they note sargassum blooms—exacerbated by human ecological disruption—are already causing major issues across the world.

“Sargassum inundations… cause environmental, social and economic disruption across the Caribbean, Central US and West African regions,” Seaweed Generation CEO Paddy Estridge and Chief of Staff Blythe Taylor, explain on the organization’s website. “Massive influxes of seaweed wash ashore and rot, releasing not just the absorbed CO2 but hydrogen sulfide gasses, decimating fragile coastal ecosystems including mangroves and seagrass meadows and killing countless marine animals.”

[Related: The US is investing more than $1 billion in carbon capture, but big oil is still involved.]

Estridge and Taylor write that humans “need to tread carefully” when it comes to depositing biomass within the deep ocean to ensure there are no “negative impacts or implications on the surrounding environment and organisms.” At the same time, researchers already know sargassum naturally dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Still, “we can’t assume either a positive or negative impact to sinking sargassum, so a cautious pathway and detailed monitoring has been built into our approach,” Estridge and Taylor write. “The scale of our operations are such that we can measure any change to the ocean environment on the surface, mid or deep ocean. Right now, and for the next few years our operations are literally a drop in the ocean (or a teaspoon of Sargassum per m2).”

As the name might imply, the AlgaRay is inspired by manta rays, which glide through ocean waters while using their mouths to filter and eat algae. In time, future iterations of the robot could even rival manta rays’ massive sizes. A nearly 33-foot-wide version is in the works to collect upwards of 16 metric tons of seaweed at a time—equal to around two metric tons of CO2. With careful monitoring of deep sea repositories, fleets of AlgaRay robots could soon offer an efficient, creative means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]  has been very clear that we need to be able to remove (not offset, remove) 10 billion [metric tons] of carbon a year from the atmosphere by 2050 to have a hope of avoiding utter catastrophe for all people and all earth life,” write Estridge and Taylor. Knowing this, AlgaRay bots may be a key ally for helping meet that goal. If nothing else, perhaps some beaches will be a little less overrun with rotting seaweed every year. 

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Chicken feathers, much like human hair and fingernails, are composed mostly of a tough protein called keratin. And like with your own hair and nails, the birds produce a lot of feathers over the course of their lives. Generally speaking, this isn’t a big issue—but it’s another matter for the food industry. Each year, approximately 40 million metric tons of chicken feathers are incinerated during the poultry production process, releasing harmful fumes like carbon and sulfur dioxide.

Finding a new use for all those feathers could dramatically cut down on food waste and pollution, and a team of researchers may have figured out what to do with them: turn feathers into a vital component of green hydrogen fuel cells.

[Related: Why you should build a swing for your chickens.]

As detailed in a new paper published via ACS Applied Materials & Sciences, scientists from ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) have developed a method to extract feathers’ keratin and spin it into thin fibers called amyloid fibrils. From there, these fibrils can be installed as a hydrogen fuel cell’s vital semipermeable membrane. Traditionally composed of highly poisonous “forever chemicals,” these membranes allow protons to pass through while excluding electrons. The blocked electrons are then forced to travel via an external circuit from negative anodes to positive cathode, thus creating electricity.

“Our latest development closes a cycle: [we took] a substance that releases CO2 and toxic gasses when burned, and used it in a different setting,” Raffaele Mezzenga, a professor of food and soft materials at ETH Zurich, said in a recent university profile. “With our new technology, it not only replaces toxic substances, but also prevents the release of CO2, decreasing the overall carbon footprint cycle.”

According to researchers, the keratin-derived membranes are already cheaper to produce in a lab setting than existing synthetic hydrogen fuel cell membranes, and hope similar savings will translate to mass production. The team has applied for a joint patent, and is now looking for partners and investors to make the product publicly available. Still, a number of hurdles remain for the fuel cells to become truly viable renewable energy sources. While hydrogen cells’ only emissions are heat and water, the power that actually helps generate their electricity still largely stems from natural gas sources like methane. Such a reliance arguably undercuts hydrogen fuel cells’ promise of green energy.

But even there, chicken feathers could once again come to the rescue. The keratin membranes reportedly also show promise in the electrolysis portion of hydrogen energy production, when direct current travels through water to split the molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

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The ocean’s diverse seaweeds are full of nutrients and can be very tasty. While seaweed is common in many Asian dishes, it is not as popular in many traditionally European cuisines. However, this was not always the case. New archaeological evidence also shows that early Europeans ate seaweeds and freshwater plants 8,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Nature Communications and anchor the plants in the past.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

In the study, researchers examined biomarkers that were taken from the calcified dental plaque of 74 individuals found at 28 archaeological sites from northern Scotland to southern Spain. The plaques revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”

The samples where biomolecular evidence survived showed signs that red, green, or brown seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants were eaten. One sample from Scotland’s Orkney archipelago also had evidence of a type of sea kale. The researchers also found that seaweeds and freshwater plants were continually eaten in Europe into the Early Middle Ages. 

“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources,” study co-author and University of York bioarchaeologist Stephen Buckley said in a statement.

The nutritional benefits from eating seaweed were likely very well understood by ancient European populations. Some historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, France, and Ireland dating back to the 10th Century. Sea kale is also mentioned by Roman naturalist and writer Pliny as an anti-scurvy remedy for sailors on long sea voyages. Through the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food and is featured in a popular Irish-language folk song. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Currently, there are roughly 10,000 different species of seaweeds around the world, but only 145 species are regularly consumed. Depending on the type of seaweed, the plants are a great source of fiber, iron, and potassium among other vitamins and minerals. Cultivating seaweed can also be very environmentally friendly, as the seaweed produces oxygen while absorbing excess nitrogen in the water.

“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally,”  study co-author and University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy said in a statement. “It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”

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Despite decades of innovation, solar powered cars remain comparatively expensive and difficult to mass produce—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to pack a serious punch. At least one prototype reportedly handled an off-road sojourn across the world’s largest non-polar desert at speeds as fast as 90 mph.

Designed by a team of 21-to-25-year-old  college students at the Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology, their Stella Terra recently completed a 620 mile (1,000 km) test drive that began in Morocco before speeding through portions of Tangier and the Sahara. While miles ahead of what is currently available to consumers, the army green two-seater could be a preview of rides to come.

[Related: Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels.]

As highlighted by The Guardian on Monday, the aerodynamic, comparatively lightweight (1,200 kg) Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a clear, sunny day without recharging. This is thanks to the car’s solar converter designed in-house by the students, which turns 97 percent of its absorbed sunlight into an electrical charge. For cloudier situations, however, the vehicle also includes a lithium-ion battery capable of powering shorter excursions. For comparison, the most efficient panels available today only sustain roughly 45 percent efficiency, while the vast majority measure somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. According to The Guardian’s rundown, Stella Terra’s panels actually proved a third more efficient than designers expected.

In a September project update, Wisse Bos, Solar Team Eindhoven’s team manager, estimated Stella Terra’s designs are between 5 and 10 years ahead of anything available on the current market. But Bos also stressed their ride is meant to inspire similar experimentation and creativity within the automotive industry.

[Related: Swiss students just slashed the world record for EV acceleration.]

“With Stella Terra, we want to demonstrate that the transition to a sustainable future offers reasons for optimism and encourages individuals and companies to accelerate the energy transition,” Bos said at the time.

While the innovative, army green off-roadster is unlikely to hit American highways anytime soon, the students believe larger auto manufacturers’ could look to Stella Terra to help guide their own plans for more sustainable transportation options. Speaking with CNN on Monday, the team’s event manager, Thieme Bosman, hopes companies such as Ford and Chrysler will take notice of such a vehicle’s feasibility. “It’s up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles,” Bosman said.

And if off-roading isn’t your thing, don’t worry: Solar Team Eindhoven’s previous teams have also designed luxury vehicles, self-driving cars, and even mobile tiny homes powered by the sun.

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On October 13, President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced plans to develop seven regional clean hydrogen hubs across the US. The hubs will receive $7 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen.

These new hubs aim to produce more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually. They are estimated to help eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the combined annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars. 

According to the White House, advancing clean hydrogen is essential to achieving President Biden’s “vision of a strong clean energy economy that strengthens energy security, bolsters domestic manufacturing, creates healthier communities, and delivers new jobs and economic opportunities across the nation.” 

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element on Earth. However, it rarely exists on its own in nature and instead is usually found in compound form like in water (H₂0). Elemental hydrogen is also an energy carrier, meaning it can transport energy in a usable form from one place to another. However, hydrogen must be produced from another substance in order to do this.

Hydrogen fuel is made by separating water molecules, sometimes using a device called an electrolyzer. Fuel from hydrogen can also be produced from natural gas during a process called steam methane reforming that combines methane with steam. 

While a clean fuel itself, the current processes used to make it is anything but clean. Large quantities of fossil fuels are used, which emit greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Energy companies are working to advance cleaner versions of making emission-free hydrogen fuel and California, Texas, and Colorado are already working to become clean hydrogen centers.  

[Related: This liquid hydrogen-powered plane successfully completed its first test flights.]

These newly announced hubs will be focused on the goal of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen production. This huge undertaking will require large amounts of renewable energy to power the manufacturing process. It could also require additional nuclear power and a large network of carbon storage facilities that will grab and bury emissions in the regions where natural gas is still used to make hydrogen.

Cleanly manufacturing hydrogen could help decarbonize multiple industries in the US, as hydrogen is used to make fertilizer and is important in the chemical and petrochemical industry. 

“This has potential to be transformative,” Oleksiy Tatarenko, who focuses on hydrogen at RMI, a clean energy advocacy group, told The Washington Post. “But we need to get it right from day one. We need to ensure this hydrogen can demonstrate climate benefits.”

How long will this take?

Granholm tells PopSci that the initiative provides the US with the opportunity for,  “creating an entirely new economy around hydrogen and putting thousands and thousands of people to work, particularly people who have powered our nation for the last century.” 

The hubs will be an asset in bringing hydrogen production up to scale, to reduce the currently high costs of hydrogen production. It also incorporates multiple industries from construction to operations to design. 

“For the seven hydrogen hubs, it’s about a one-to six-investment, meaning for every dollar the federal government puts in, six dollars come from the private sector, so it’s government enabled, but private sector led,” says Granholm. “These projects are not just one year projects, these are projects that last several years to be able to plan and design, build, and operate.”

Where will the ‘hydrogen hubs’ be located?

The seven new hydrogen hubs will stretch across 16 states and are organized by geographic region.

“These states that were selected are not awardees yet. There’s a negotiation period that will occur between selection and award. So there is a period of time there for states to make sure that they’ve got an environment that will make these hubs of success, “ explains Granholm.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

The Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey will repurpose old oil infrastructure and use renewable and nuclear electricity from both established and innovative electrolyzer technologies.

The Appalachian hub will be located across West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. This hub is slated to be among the largest in terms of production and will use the region’s methane gas to derive hydrogen. 

The California hub will span the entire Golden State and encompass the busy ports Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland to produce hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass.

A Gulf Coast hub will be based in Houston, Texas, and could potentially expand into Louisiana. Houston is the traditional energy capital of the US and the plans for this hub include large-scale hydrogen production through both natural gas with carbon capture and renewables-powered electrolysis.

The Heartland Hydrogen hub spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota will use wind energy to derive hydrogen in an effort to decarbonize the region’s critical agricultural sector. 

The Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan will further decarbonize industrial sectors by using hydrogen in steel and glass production, power generation, refining, heavy-duty transportation, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The Pacific Northwest hub in parts of Eastern Washington State, Oregon, and parts of Montana plans to produce clean hydrogen exclusively from renewable sources.

“The hub design in itself is important because it creates clusters of supply and demand that are close to one another, minimizing the need to tackle challenges that would come with moving hydrogen long distances,” Adria Wilson, the hydrogen policy lead at Breakthrough Energy, told CNBC.

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Niobium can be found in steel, particle accelerators, MRI machines, and rockets, but sourcing it is largely limited to a handful of countries including Brazil and Canada. Earlier this month, however, Chinese news outlets announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of ore deposit in Inner Mongolia containing potentially vast amounts of the superconductive rare earth element. According to Antonio Castro Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore speaking with the South China Morning Post, the new resource trove could even be so large that it would make China self-sufficient in its own niobium needs.

The ore found in Inner Mongolia—dubbed niobobaotite—also contains large quantities of barium, titanium, iron, and chlorine, according to a statement from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) earlier this month.

Discovered in 1801, niobium is named after Tantalus’ daughter Niobe in Greek mythology due to its chemical relationship to tantalum. Almost 85-to-90 percent of all mined niobium in the world goes towards iron and steel processing production. Adding just 0.03-0.05 percent to steel, for example, can boost its strength by as much as 30 percent while adding virtually no extra weight. That prized performance enhancement is comparatively difficult to obtain, however. The element only occurs within the Earth’s crust at a proportion of roughly 20-parts-per-million.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

In addition to its many current uses, niobium is of particular interest to researchers hoping to further the development of niobium-graphene and niobium-lithium batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widespread rechargeable power sources, but remain restricted in terms of charge times and lifespans, as well as safety concerns. Earlier this year, researchers working on improving niobium-graphene batteries estimated future iterations of the alternative could fully charge in less than 10 minutes alongside a 30 year lifespan—approximately 10 times longer than current lithium-ion options.

As promising as the discovery may be for China, labor concerns will almost undoubtedly be an issue for outside observers. The nation has a long and troubling history of exploitation within the mining industry. Rare earth mineral mining also generates a wide array of pollution issues.

Brazil is by far the world’s largest exporter of niobium, with Canada trailing far behind in second place. China currently needs to import about 95 percent of its niobium supplies, but the newfound deposits could dramatically shift their sourcing to almost complete independence. Meanwhile, the US is currently working towards opening the Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in southern Nebraska, which when opened will be the country’s first niobium mining and processing facility.

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One e-toy for every person on Earth—that’s the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children’s gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste—like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems—are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, “nontraditional” e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This “invisible e-waste” is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year—and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

[Related: People will throw away about 5.3 billion phones this year.]

According to UNITAR’s findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to “almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks,” enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles–the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year.

“People tend to recognise household electrical products as those they plug in and use regularly. But many people are confused about the waste category into which ancillary, peripheral, specialist, hobby, and leisure products fit and how to have them recycled,” Pascal Leroy, Director-General of the WEEE Forum, said in a statement ahead of International E-Waste Day. The WEEE Forum asks that instead of trashing the e-waste, consumers bring it to “the appropriate municipal collection facility” in their area.

Leroy’s organization states e-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, and to deal with it properly, many more people need to recognize these “invisible” examples.

“A significant amount of electronic waste is hidden in plain sight,” says WEEE Forum member, Magdalena Charytanowicz, via the announcement. “Sadly, invisible e-waste often falls under the recycling radar of those disposing of them because they are not seen as e-waste. We need to change that and raising awareness is a large part of the answer.”

Charytanowicz cites past informational campaigns that successfully raised awareness about the many issues surrounding plastic pollution, and points to the UN’s treaty on plastics due next year. “We hope the same will occur in the e-waste field,” she adds.

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Artificial intelligence programs’ impressive (albeit often problematic) abilities come at a cost—all that computing power requires, well, power. And as the world races to adopt sustainable energy practices, the rapid rise of AI integration into everyday lives could complicate matters. New expert analysis now offers estimates of just how energy hungry the AI industry could become in the near future, and the numbers are potentially concerning.

According to a commentary published October 10 in Joule, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Business and Economics PhD candidate Alex de Vries argues that global AI-related electricity consumption could top 134 TWh annually by 2027. That’s roughly comparable to the annual consumption of nations like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomenon.]

Although de Vries notes data center electricity usage between 2010-2018 (excluding resource-guzzling cryptocurrency mining) has only increased by roughly 6 percent, “[t]here is increasing apprehension that the computation resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.” Given countless industries’ embrace of AI over the last year, it’s not hard to imagine such a hypothetical surge becoming reality. For example, if Google—already a major AI adopter—integrated technology akin to ChatGPT into its 9 billion-per-day Google searches, the company could annually burn through 29.2 TWh of power, or as much electricity as all of Ireland.

de Vries, who also founded the digital trend watchdog research company Digiconomist, believes such an extreme scenario is somewhat unlikely, mainly due to AI server costs alongside supply chain bottlenecks. But the AI industry’s energy needs will undoubtedly continue to grow as the technologies become more prevalent, and that alone necessitates a careful review of where and when to use such products.

This year, for example, NVIDIA is expected to deliver 100,000 AI servers to customers. Operating at full capacity, the servers’ combined power demand would measure between 650 and 1,020 MW, annually amounting to 5.7-8.9 TWh of electricity consumption. Compared to annual consumption rates of data centers, this is “almost negligible.” 

By 2027, however, NVIDIA could be (and currently is) on track to ship 1.5 million AI servers per year. Estimates using similar electricity consumption rates put their combined demand between 85-134 TWh annually. “At this stage, these servers could represent a significant contribution to worldwide data center electricity consumption,” writes de Vries.

As de Vries’ own site argues, AI is not a “miracle cure for everything,” still must deal with privacy concerns, discriminatory biases, and hallucinations. “Environmental sustainability now represents another addition to this list of concerns.”

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Traffic lights are the worst—not only do they put stops in your journey, but all those stopped cars pollute the local environment. According to one paper, pollution can be 29 times worse at city intersections than on open roads, with half the emissions coming from cars accelerating after having to stop. Many companies are developing tech that can make intersections “smarter” or help drivers navigate around jams. Google, though, has an AI-powered system-level plan to fix things.

Called Project Green Light, Google Research is using Google Maps data and AI to make recommendations to city planners on how specific traffic light controlled intersections can be optimized for better traffic flow—and reduced emissions. 

Green Light relies on Google Maps driving trends data, which Google claims is “one of the strongest understandings of global road networks.” Apparently, the information it has gathered from its years of mapping cities around the world allows it to infer data about specific traffic light controlled junctions, including “cycle length, transition time, green split (i.e. right-of-way time and order), coordination and sensor operation (actuation).”

From that, Google is able to create a virtual model of how traffic flows through a given city’s intersections. This allows it to understand the normal traffic patterns, like how much cars have to stop and start, the average wait time at each set of lights, how coordinated nearby intersections are, and how things change throughout the day. Crucially, the model also allows Google to use AI to identify potential adjustments to traffic light timing at specific junctions that could improve traffic flow. 

[Related: Google’s new pollen mapping tool aims to reduce allergy season suffering]

And this isn’t just some theoretical research project. According to Google, Green Light is now operating in 70 intersections across 12 cities around the world. City planners are provided with a dashboard where they can see Green Light’s recommendation, and accept or reject them. (Though they have to implement any changes with their existing traffic control systems, which Google claims takes “as little as five minutes.”) 

Once the changes are implemented, Green Light analyzes the new data to see if they had the intended impact on traffic flow. All the info is displayed in the city planner’s dashboard, so they can see how things are paying off. 

A big part of Green Light is that it doesn’t require much extra effort or expense from cities. While city planners have always attempted to optimize traffic patterns, developing models of traffic flow has typically required manual surveys or dedicated hardware, like cameras or car sensors. With Green Light, city planners don’t need to install anything—Google is gathering the data from its Maps users.

Although Google hasn’t published official numbers, it claims that the early results in its 12 test cities “indicate a potential for up to 30 percent reduction in stops and 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” across 30 million car journeys per month. 

And city planners seem happy too, at least according to Google’s announcement. David Atkin from Transport for Greater Manchester in the UK is quoted as saying, “Green Light identified opportunities where we previously had no visibility and directed engineers to where there were potential benefits in changing signal timings.”

Similarly, Rupesh Kumar, Kolkata’s Joint Commissioner of Police, says, “Green Light has become an essential component of Kolkata Traffic Police. It serves several valuable purposes which contribute to safer, more efficient, and organized traffic flow and has helped us to reduce gridlock at busy intersections.”

Right now, Green Light is still in its testing phase. If you’re in Seattle, USA; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Manchester, UK; Hamburg, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Haifa, Israel; Abu Dhabi, UAE; Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, India; and Bali and Jakarta, Indonesia, there’s a chance you’ve already driven through a Green Light optimized junction.

However, if you’re a member of a city government, traffic engineer, or city planner and want to sign your metropolis up for Green Light, you can join the waiting list. Just fill out this Google Form.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels to consume fluids like water or honey; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in their many pores. And as scientists around the world are beginning to show, sponges’ cavity-filled forms mean they could provide a solution to one of our era’s biggest scourges: microplastic pollution.

In August, researchers in China published a study describing their development of a synthetic sponge that makes short work of microscopic plastic debris. In tests, the researchers show that when a specially prepared plastic-filled solution is pushed through one of their sponges, the sponge can remove both microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics from the liquid. These particles typically become trapped in the sponge’s many pores. Though the sponges’ effectiveness varied in experiments, in part depending on the concentration of plastic and the acidity and saltiness of the liquid, optimal conditions allowed the researchers to remove as much as 90 percent of the microplastics. They tried it in everything from tap water and seawater to—why not—soup from a local takeaway.

The plastic-gobbling sponges are made mostly from starch and gelatin. Looking a bit like large white marshmallows, the biodegradable sponges are so light that balancing one atop a flower leaves the plant’s petals upright and unyielding, which the researchers suggest ought to make them cheap and easy to transport. Inside, the sponges’ structure appears less like lots of tiny bubble-like cavities and more like a jagged surface.

According to Guoqing Wang, a materials chemist at Ocean University of China and coauthor on the paper, the sponge formula is adjustable. By tweaking the temperature when the two compounds are mixed, he says, the sponges can be made more or less porous. This affects the size of particles collected—highly porous sponges have lots of very small pores, which is good for catching very tiny particles.

The sponges, if ever produced at an industrial scale, Wang says, could be used in wastewater treatment plants to filter microplastics out of the water or in food production facilities to decontaminate water.

It would also be possible to use microplastic-trapping sponges like this in washing machines, suggests Christian Adlhart, a chemist at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland who has also experimented with creating sponge filters for collecting microplastics. Some microplastics enter waterways after being shed by synthetic fabrics when they are swirled around in the wash. “You could place such a sponge inside the drum,” says Adlhart. “I think it would absorb a large fraction of the fibers.”

Sponges like this work thanks to a duo of mechanisms, he adds. If water is actively driven through one, for example as it is squeezed and released, microplastic particles get trapped inside the sponge’s pores like collecting marbles in buckets. But even when the sponge is simply floating in still water, electrostatic interactions mean that some plastic particles will cling to it.

There are hiccups to the sponge’s potential adoption, though. One, says Adlhart, is that starch and gelatin are important to the food industry, meaning that there could be competition for the key ingredients in the future. However, similar sponges can be made with different materials. The version that Adlhart and his colleagues developed, for instance, uses chitosan—a sugar derived from the shells of crustaceans—to provide the sponge’s structure. Chitosan isn’t widely used commercially, says Adlhart, so it wouldn’t face the same competition.

Adlhart says his sponge design, which involves spinning together a matrix of chitosan nanofibers, was inspired by the filter-feeding activity of oysters, which trap particles in their gills as they pump seawater through them.

Chitosan, starch, and gelatin are all biodegradable. However, the process developed by Wang and his colleagues to make their sponge uses formaldehyde, a highly toxic compound, and there were traces of this in the sponges themselves. Wang says they’re working to come up with an alternative so that they can make a completely environmentally friendly sponge.

Anett Georgi, a chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany who wasn’t involved in the research, says that when it comes to cleaning up microplastic pollution in the ocean, the key is to stem the flow. We should start, she says, by targeting wastewater treatment plants that don’t yet employ technologies that already exist—such as filters made with sand or activated carbon—to remove plastic.

That’s something that could be realized quickly, says Georgi: “We don’t have to wait for crazy material.” But for smaller-scale applications, such as removing microplastics from household water supplies, the new sponge filters could be useful, Georgi suggests.

What’s still lacking, says Alice Horton at the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre, is proof that any of these newer sponge-based technologies can be cost effective and successful in removing microplastics from water at a large scale. But one thing she is confident about is that efforts to remove microplastics after they have already reached the ocean are probably doomed to fail.

“I don’t think there is anything we can do on a large enough scale that will have any impact,” she says of that. “We have to stop it getting there in the first place.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Trees are magicians with carbon, pulling it out of the air at remarkable rates to store it in their bodies. They are so good at removing this greenhouse gas that “planting trees” is often synonymous with doing environmental good. 

And lots of people are planting trees. The number of tree-planting organizations has grown by almost 300 percent in the past 30 years, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Biological Conservation. Those groups have planted nearly 1.4 billion trees across 74 countries since 1961. But while tree planting can capture a great amount of carbon, it is hardly a silver bullet for the climate crisis—experts estimate that even if we maximized our available lands for trees, this alone would not be enough to counteract anthropogenic carbon emissions. Plus, many plantations grow the same few species in monocultures, which can hurt local biodiversity. 

A planted tree will suck up carbon regardless of species or its planters’ motivation. But it’s difficult to make blanket statements about the efficacy of carbon capture forestry: Tree plantations are found all over the world, surrounded by different ecosystems with their own native species and local populations who live and rely on these lands—there will be no “one tree fits all” solution.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to selecting, planting, and protecting a new tree]

The minority of tree plantations are set up with carbon capture solely, or even primarily in mind, says Jacob Bukoski, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University. Most trees are planted with the goal of harvesting timber or wood pulp for paper. Tree-planting organizations are more likely to create plantations for agroforestry or commercial reasons, the authors of the 2021 paper also note, rather than for biodiversity or carbon capture. 

These groves sometimes support voluntary carbon markets, also known as carbon offset markets, where corporations pay for activities like planting trees as a way to offset their total emissions. People tend to like using carbon credits for tree plantation over other options because the goal is clear, Bukoski says. You can tangibly understand that your carbon offsets will result in planted trees that are ideally managed and monitored afterward. But only a small minority of trees are planted for these carbon markets, he says. 

In forestry, there’s a saying that you have to plant “the right tree in the right place, for the right reason.” But when many tree plantations are established for commercial purposes, the tree that is planted is often not the “right” tree, says Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, an ecologist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. 

In a paper published recently in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Aguirre-Gutiérrez and colleagues argue that focusing on the goal of carbon sequestration causes organizations to ignore the importance of restoring balanced ecosystems. Globally, tree plantations tend to plant the same species such as teak, eucalyptus, mahogany, and a few others valued by the timber, paper, and other industries, Aguirre-Gutiérrez says. The result is a swath of trees that do not support local organisms or promote biodiversity in the way native plant species would have. 

[Related: We need billions more baby trees to regrow US forests]

These problems are present in plantations all over the world, but Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his colleagues are particularly concerned about the tropics. Land there is vast, and conditions such as stable temperatures and high humidity promote tree growth—“that’s why there’s been a boom in plantations in these locations,” he says. At the same time, the tropics are host to an incredible variety of plants and animals found nowhere else. Ignoring them while planting trees is damaging. When plantations increased the woody cover of the Brazilian savannah by 40 percent, this “resulted in an about 30 percent reduction in the diversity of plants and ants,” Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his co-authors write in the new paper.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez doesn’t want to discourage people from growing more trees, he says. Rather, we need a better way to protect the natural ecosystems and species there, like encouraging the restoration of native forest tree species. Local plants will be “better adapted to the conditions” in these environments, he says, which means they, and nearby species, are more likely to thrive. “If we go in that direction, that will bring us the added value of capturing carbon, but also this sustainability.”

When assessing the utility or good of a tree plantation, “there’s a lot of nuance,” says Bukoski, and often cases need to be evaluated individually. For example, a plantation where the trees will be harvested for timber won’t provide long-term carbon capture benefits—does that make it not worthwhile? That’s not a conclusion you can necessarily draw without more information, he says.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez says we need more research quantifying the impacts tree plantations are having on their local ecologies, and the populations of people living in those areas, beyond carbon. “Because at the end of the day, the impacts of these plantations are going to be first felt by these local communities.”

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If you’ve been wondering what climate change means for your neighborhood, you’re in luck. The most detailed interactive map yet of the United States’ vulnerability to dangers such as fire, flooding, and pollution was released on Monday by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University.

The fine-grained analysis spans more than 70,000 census tracts, which roughly resemble neighborhoods, mapping out environmental risks alongside factors that make it harder for people to deal with hazards. Clicking on a report for a census tract yields details on heat, wildfire smoke, and drought, in addition to what drives vulnerability to extreme weather, such as income levels and access to health care and transportation.

The “Climate Vulnerability Index” tool is intended to help communities secure funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law President Joe Biden signed last summer. An executive order from Biden’s early months in office promised that “disadvantaged communities” would receive at least 40 percent of the federal investments in climate and clean energy programs. As a result of the infrastructure law signed in 2021, more than $1 billion has gone toward replacing lead pipes and more than $2 billion has been spent on updating the electric grid to be more reliable.

“The Biden Administration has made a historic level of funding available to build toward climate justice and equity, but the right investments need to flow to the right places for the biggest impact,” Grace Tee Lewis, a health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

According to the data, all 10 of the country’s most vulnerable counties are in the South, many along the Gulf Coast, where there are high rates of poverty and health problems. Half are in Louisiana, which faces dangers from flooding, hurricanes, and industrial pollution. St. John the Baptist Parish, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, ranks as the most vulnerable county, a result of costly floods, poor child and maternal health, a list of toxic air pollutants, and the highest rate of disaster-related deaths in Louisiana.

“We know that our community is not prepared at all for emergencies, the federal government is not prepared, the local parish is not prepared,” Jo Banner, a community activist in St. John the Baptist, told Capital B News.

Even in cities where climate risk is comparatively low, like Seattle, the data shows a sharp divide. North Seattle is relatively insulated from environmental dangers, whereas South Seattle — home to a more racially diverse population, the result of a history of housing covenants that excluded people on the basis of race or ethnicity — suffers from air pollution, flood risk, and poorer infrastructure.

Similar maps of local climate impacts have been released before, including by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, but the new tool is considered the most comprehensive assessment to date. While it includes Alaska and Hawai‘i, it doesn’t cover U.S. territories like Puerto Rico or Guam. The map is available here, and tutorials on how to use the tool, for general interest or for community advocates, are here.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/new-map-climate-change-risks-neighborhood-vulnerability-index/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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On October 5, operators of Japan’s derelict Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resumed pumping out wastewater held in the facility for the past 12 years. Over the following two-and-a-half weeks, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plans to release around 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

This is TEPCO’s second round of discharging nuclear plant wastewater, following an initial release in September. Plans call for the process, which was approved by and is being overseen by the Japanese government, to go on intermittently for some 30 years. But the approach has been controversial: Polls suggest that around 40 percent of the Japanese public opposes it, and it has sparked backlash from ecological activists, local fishermen, South Korean citizens, and the Chinese government, who fear that radiation will harm Pacific ecosystems and contaminate seafood.

Globally, some scientists argue there is no cause for concern. “The doses [or radiation] really are incredibly low,” says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “It’s less than a dental X-ray, even if you’re consuming seafood from that area.”

Smith vouches for the water release’s safety in an opinion article published on October 5 in the journal Science. The International Atomic Energy Agency has endorsed TEPCO’s process and also vouched for its safety. But experts in other fields have strong reservations about continuing with the pumping.

“There are hundreds of clear examples showing that, where radioactivity levels are high, there are deleterious consequences,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

[Related: Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants]

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, TEPCO started frantically shunting water into the six reactors to stop them from overheating and causing an even greater catastrophe. They stored the resulting 1.25 million tons of radioactive wastewater in tanks on-site. TEPCO and the Japanese government say that if Fukushima Daiichi is ever to be decommissioned, that water will have to go elsewhere.

In the past decade, TEPCO says it’s been able to treat the wastewater with a series of chemical reactions and cleanse most of the contaminant radioisotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. But much of the current controversy swirls around one isotope the treatment couldn’t remove: tritium.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that has two extra neutrons. A byproduct of nuclear fission, it is radioactive with a half-life of around 12 years. Because tritium shares many properties with hydrogen, its atoms can infiltrate water molecules and create a radioactive liquid that looks and behaves almost identically to what we drink.

This makes separating it from nuclear wastewater challenging—in fact, no existing technology can treat tritium in the sheer volume of water contained at Fukushima. Some of the plan’s opponents argue that authorities should postpone any releases until scientists develop a system that could cleanse tritium from large amounts of water.

But TEPCO argues they’re running out of room to keep the wastewater. As a result, they have chosen to heavily dilute it—100 parts “clean” water for every 1 part of tritium water—and pipe it into the Pacific.

“There is no option for Fukushima or TEPCO but to release the water,” says Awadhesh Jha, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK. “This is an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t store it—they have to deal with it.”

Smith believes the same properties that allow tritium to hide in water molecules means it doesn’t build up in marine life, citing environmental research by him and his colleagues. For decades, they’ve been studying fish and insects in lakes, pools, and ponds downstream from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. “We haven’t really found significant impacts of radiation on the ecosystem,” Smith says.

[Related: Ultra-powerful X-rays are helping physicists understand Chernobyl]

What’s more, Japanese officials testing seawater during the initial release did not find recordable levels of tritium, which Smith attributes to the wastewater’s dilution.

But the first release barely scratches the surface of Fukushima’s wastewater, and Jha warns that the scientific evidence regarding tritium’s effect in the sea is mixed. There are still a lot of questions about how potent tritium effects are on different biological systems and different parts of the food chain. Some results do suggest that the isotope can damage fish chromosomes as effectively as higher-energy X-rays or gamma rays, leading to negative health outcomes later in life.

Additionally, experts have found tritium can bind to organic matter in various ecosystems and persist there for decades. “These things have not been addressed adequately,” Jha says.

Smith argues that there’s less tritium in this release than in natural sources, like cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and create tritium rain from above. Furthermore, he says that damage to fish DNA does not necessarily correlate to adverse effects for wildlife or people. “We know that radiation, even at low doses, can damage DNA, but that’s not sufficient to damage how the organism reproduces, how it lives, and how it develops,” he says.

“We don’t know that the effects of the water release will be negligible, because we don’t really know for sure how much radioactive material actually will be released in the future,” Mousseau counters. He adds that independent oversight of the process could quell some of the environmental and health concerns.

Smith and other proponents of TEPCO’s plan point out that it’s actually common practice in the nuclear industry. Power plants use water to naturally cool their reactors, leaving them with tons of tritium-laced waste to dispose. Because tritium is, again, close to impossible to remove from large quantities of H₂0 with current technology, power plants (including ones in China) dump it back into bodies of water at concentrations that exceed those in the Fukushima releases.

“That doesn’t justify that we should keep discharging,” Jha says. “We need to do more work on what it does.”

If tritium levels stay as low as TEPCO and Smith assure they will, then the seafood from the region may very well be safe to eat. But plenty of experts like Mousseau and Jha don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to say that with certainty.

The post This nuclear byproduct is fueling debate over Fukushima’s seafood appeared first on Popular Science.

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Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is getting a new supercomputer, Aurora, which its scientists will use to study optimal nuclear reactor designs. As of now, the lab is using a system called Polaris, a 44-petaflops machine that can perform about 44 quadrillion calculations per second. 

Aurora, which is currently being installed, will have more than 2 exaflops of computing power, giving it the capacity to do 2 quintillion calculations per second—almost 50 times as many as the old system. Once the unprecedented machine comes online, it’s expected to lead the TOP500 list that ranks the most powerful computers in the world. It was expected to start running earlier, but has had delays due to manufacturing issues. 

A more powerful supercomputer means that nuclear scientists can simulate the fundamental physics underlying the reactions with as much detail as possible, which will allow them to make better assessments of overall safety and efficiency of new reactor designs. Reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Here, a process called fission happens, leading to a series of nuclear chain reactions that produce incredible levels of heat, which is used to turn water into steam to spin a turbine that then creates electricity.

“Anyone out there that’s actively designing a reactor is going to use what we call ‘faster running tools’ that will look at things on a system-level scale and make approximations for the reactor core itself,” Dillon Shaver, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, tells Popsci. “[At Argonne] we are doing as close to the fundamental physical calculations as possible, which requires a huge amount of resolution and a huge amount of unknowns. It translates into a huge amount of computation power.”

Shaver’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the math that prevents reactors from melting down. That involves a deep understanding of how different types of coolant liquids behave, how fluid flows around the different reactor components, and what kind of heat transfer occurs. 

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

According to the Department of Energy, “all commercial nuclear reactors in the US are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.” And most active light-water reactors have a fuel pin geometry design, where large arrays of fuel pins (large tubes that contain the fuel, usually uranium, needed for fission reactions) are arranged in a rectangular lattice.

The next generation of reactor designs that Shaver and his team are investigating include wire-wrapped liquid metal fast reactors. The reactors are placed in a triangular lattice instead of a rectangular one, and are also layered with a thin wire that forms a kind of helix around the fuel pin. “This leads to some really complicated flow behavior because the [liquid metals like sodium] has to move around that wire and usually causes a spiral pattern to develop. That has some interesting implications on heat transfer,” Shaver explains. “A lot of time it enhances it, which is a very desirable thing” because it’s able to get more power out of a limited amount of fuel.  

However, with the advanced designs like the wire wrap, “it’s a little bit more complicated to pump the fluid around these wires compared to just an open model,” he adds, which means that it could take more input energy too.  

Another popular option is called a pebble bed reactor, which involves a series of graphite pebbles about the size of a tennis ball being embedded with the nuclear fuel. “You just randomly pat them into an open container and let fluid flow around them,” Shaver says. “That is a very different scenario compared to what we’re used to with light-water reactors because now all of the fluid can move through these random spaces between the pebbles.” Such a system has many benefits for low-energy cooling. 

With the newly proposed designs, the goal is to ultimately generate more power while putting less in. “You’re trying to enhance the heat transfer you get from it, and the price you pay is how much energy it takes to pump it,” says Shaver. “There’s an interesting cost-benefit there.” Some of the tradeoffs can be significant, and these supercomputer simulations promise to give more accurate numbers than ever, allowing upcoming nuclear power plants to work with reactors that are as efficient and safe as possible. 

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The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“​​A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

The post The EPA wants to tighten up their ‘zero-emission’ building definition appeared first on Popular Science.

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More than 4 million miles of roads crisscross the US. So it’s little surprise that roadkill makes up a big chunk of the country’s animal deaths: By 1998 it had surpassed hunting as “the leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land.” Today, wildlife officials in California are concerned that vehicle collisions are killing mountain lions faster than they can reproduce. Moose keep getting struck on roads in Alaska and even Connecticut. But while hit-and-runs with big mammals are gruesome and significant, they’re just one way roads are detrimental to nature. 

Grizzly deaths

In a paper published on September 20 in the journal Wildlife Monographs, scientists used GPS tracking and DNA data from fur samples collected between 1998 and 2005 to monitor the grizzly bear population in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, and study which variables affect their distribution—and their mortality. They found that the grizzly  population density was 2.6 times higher in areas with less than .37 miles of roads per mile of land. The reason? Roads drive bears away from areas that are filled with perfectly good food sources like huckleberry bushes, and increase the risks of deaths just by putting the creatures closer to people. 

[Related: Watch bobcats, bears, and even birds use fallen logs as bridges]

Southeastern British Columbia largely has dirt roads with low speed limits, says Michael Proctor, an independent research ecologist and lead author of the new paper, but you can still “see that bears get killed around forestry roads in the backcountry for a variety of reasons.” For one, the routes give people access to more wilderness—to the detriment of bears. The vast majority of grizzlies that are killed in the wild (both legally and non-legally) are shot within 1,600 feet of an open backcountry road.

Roadkill patterns

When we move from backcountry roads to more paved roads and highways, that’s when we see more vehicles hitting animals. The resulting collision rates are affected by a whole slew of variables. 

In a 2022 study in the journal Current Biology that included more than 1 million deer killed on roads in the US, researchers found that collisions are most likely to happen within an hour or two after it gets dark. “It’s kind of the coincidence of a period of the day when humans are driving a lot, and a time when animals are moving around a lot,” says co-author Calum Cunningham, a wildlife ecologist and postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Tasmania who studies animal-vehicle collisions in various countries. Ungulates like deer and elk are crepuscular, so they tend to be most active around dawn and dusk. “That’s kind of the perfect storm for creating very high periods of collisions,” Cunningham explains.

In their study, Cunningham and his team also noted that collisions were more common in places located on the eastern side of a time zone, where the sun sets earlier. A strategy like implementing pushing the clock back an hour all year, he says, would not only reduce these accidents, but save about $1.2 billion associated with injury costs, vehicle damage, and insurance. (Researchers say wildlife-vehicle collisions cause more than 9,000 injuries and 440 fatalities among Americans each year.) 

[Related: All the ways daylight saving time screws with you]

In another paper, Cunningham and colleagues found that moose collisions in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta ramp up during the winter likely due to low visibility, increased moose activity on roads (which are easier to walk on than snow-laden wilderness), and the difficulties of driving and controlling a car in the winter. More recently, researchers from the University of California, Davis calculated that cars kill about 70 mountain lions a year on California highways alone. That estimate is likely an undercount because it didn’t include incidences on city or county roads, and because many hit-and-runs with mountain lions go unreported.

A prevention plan

Fortunately, some interventions can bring down the number of large mammals dying on or near roads. Underpasses and overpasses have successfully slashed roadkill rates around the US, especially when fenced. And while overpasses can be quite expensive to build, Cunningham says, they are one-off costs that pay for themselves by saving collision costs over time. 

Another strategy includes reduced speed limits, even on a seasonal basis, Cunningham explains.  But that only works if drivers adhere to those limits, which often isn’t the case. More public awareness of the benefits of speed limit for wildlife and people could help increase animal survival, Cunningham says. 

Proctor, the grizzly bear researcher, wants to see more drastic change. “The solution is to close a portion of the roads,” especially in the backcountry where valuable food supplies are, he says. “But that’s a very unpopular idea and is challenging to do.” At the least, in places of especially high conservation concern, we need to be thinking about all the ways roads disturb elements of wildlife behavior, he notes. Though roadkill is a sobering sight, sometimes, the damage is far less visible.

The post Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill appeared first on Popular Science.

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Lego is abandoning an attempt to make its colorful, iconic building pieces from recycled plastic bottles just two years after first announcing one of the central facets of its ongoing sustainability push. Despite the setback, the Denmark-based company reiterated its commitment to reduce its overall environmental impact, and per the Associated Press, still aims to make Legos from sustainable materials by 2032.

Speaking with CNN on Monday, a Lego spokesperson claimed the company’s extensive testing had revealed that replacement requires additional production steps and investment into new equipment would actually produce more pollution than Lego’s current operations. The PET alternative also reportedly proved not as durable or safe as existing acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) blocks, and didn’t properly match Lego blocks’ trademark “clutch power.”

[Related: ​​Super Glue could make it easier to recycle plastic.]

The popular toymaker first announced a new block prototype based on a recycled plastic bottle compound called polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in 2021—part of a project to transition away from oil-based plastics which began in 2018. Even in the prototype’s reveal, however, the company cautioned it would be “some time” before builders could expect a more eco-friendly recycled brick to appear on store shelves. The formula reportedly required further testing and development before moving into a “pilot production phase” expected to take “at least a year.”

Unfortunately, this pilot phase appears to not only take longer than expected, but ultimately fail to produce a viable replacement for the oil-based bricks. According to AP News, Lego states it is “currently testing and developing Lego bricks made from a range of alternative sustainable materials, including other recycled plastics and plastics made from alternative sources such as e-methanol.” Made from hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide, e-methanol (aka green methanol) employs renewable energy to split water molecules during its energy production.

“We believe that in the long-term this will encourage increased production of more sustainable raw materials, such as recycled oils, and help support our transition to sustainable materials,” the company said via AP.

The backtracking comes barely a week after Lego CEO Niels B. Christiansen issued a statement ahead of the UN General Assembly reaffirming their company’s commitment to climate sustainability. The pledge included an aim to make the company carbon neutral by 2050 alongside a $1.4 billion investment in “sustainability-related activities.” The funding is reportedly earmarked for projects such as carbon neutral buildings, increasing renewable energy production and capacity across Lego stores, offices, and factories, as well as partnering with suppliers to “collectively reduce environmental impact.”

But while Lego’s PET project appears to have hit a significant hurdle, the company confirmed that a sustainable, sugarcane-derived version of polyethylene called bio-polypropylene made from sugarcane will still be used for certain parts of Lego sets, mainly accessory items such as trees and leaves.

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The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world. 

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory]

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Longer and more intense periods of El Niño and La Niña mean that the risks of extreme weather—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, drought—are heightened for most countries lying in the Pacific or flanking it. For example, El Niño pulls warm water farther east, so if tropical cycles (storms that tend to move westward) develop, they’ll have more time and distance to cover until they reach land. “While they’re traveling in the ocean, these tropical cyclones are energized by the heat and moisture from the ocean,” says Cai. By the time they reach countries to the west like North Korea, South Korea, Japan, or China, they could be more catastrophic than the tropical storms those places experience today.

Since “global warming is already making extreme events more extreme” like intensifying storms and weather patterns, Cai says, it’s a “double whammy.” 

But even the less dramatic effects of ENSO could still amount to damage. The fluctuations in ocean temperatures that ENSO brings, for example, can be dramatic and too quick for marine life like corals to adapt, says John Burns, a marine and data scientist at the University of Hawaii. “All that can exacerbate coral bleaching,” which has already been documented in Hawaiian reefs. 

And because creatures and systems are so intrinsically interconnected, this has resounding implications for a number of species and industries. Burns has created technologies that can reconstruct water habitats, and he’s used those models to study the implications of coral loss. “We’ve actually mathematically connected how these habitats influence the abundance of reef fish,” he says, “which are one of the primary sources of protein for the global economy, especially in Southeast Asia.” So not only will climate change and ENSO harm fish and fisheries, but that could also have ripple effects on tourism, as well as the local and global economies. 

In a recent report in the journal Science, climate researchers from Dartmouth College estimated that extreme El Niño events from 1982 and 1997 alone cost the global economy about $4 trillion to $6 trillion, respectively, in the following years. The authors also estimated that this current El Niño period could rack up $3 trillion in losses over the next five years. The damages aren’t just limited to buildings and infrastructure, Cai says: They include social pillars people may not even consider, like jobs, farmland, food stocks, and individual health. As a result, some countries and organizations are taking a proactive approach against El Niño. Peru, for instance, is dedicating more than $1 billion to prevent and contain the carnage it might bring.

[Related: The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems]

But there is time to bring ENSO and the Pacific Ocean back into balance, bit by bit. While it can be useful at times to consider these global changes on a large scale, it’s important to “recognize that solutions will be very locally based,” says Burns. Even if we project the overall trends, he explains, understanding how specific habitats will be affected and what solutions are feasible requires local and native wisdom and knowledge. 

“It’s a shame if we get dismayed by these larger-scale changes and come to a conclusion of ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” Burns says. “It’s definitely not that simple … and we need strategies that are place-based to protect these systems.”

The post When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows appeared first on Popular Science.

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A massive industrial plant in Belgium using 2,240 parabolic mirrors to harvest sunlight to create green heat is officially open. At 5,540 square meters (roughly 18,175 square feet), the site’s Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) platform and six-module thermal storage unit is the largest of its kind in Europe, according to manufacturing company Avery Dennison.

In basic terms, the facility takes sunlight, reflects it into heat-absorbing oil, and then utilizes the oil to help supply the plant’s thermal energy needs.

Over half of the entire world’s energy consumption stems directly from manufacturing industries—meaning that these companies must adopt sustainable infrastructures to avert climate change’s worst outcomes. The European Union, in an attempt to spur such reforms, passed legislation in 2021 which set net-zero emissions targets across all its industries by 2050. As such, Avery Dennison’s new attempt at progressing towards that goal leverages direct sunlight as a substitute for fossil fuel heating systems.

The installation generates the same thermal power that can be achieved using 2.3 GWh of gas consumption, but is expected to reduce the facility’s overall emissions by an estimated 9 percent annually. During the warmer summer months when less heat is needed, however, the new system is expected to offer 100 percent of any necessary demand.

[Related: Could aquifers store renewable thermal energy?]

To convert solar rays into heating fuel, the CST platform’s curved mirrors first reflect light towards a collector tube filled with an absorption liquid such as thermal oil. This heated oil is then stored within a specialized installation similar to a giant thermos, whose heat is distributed as needed and on demand like a battery. Scaling up to six “battery” modules totalling 5 MWh of thermal power storage ensures the system can emit high temperature heat whenever required.

Among other products, Avery Dennison manufactures adhesive tapes and labels for uses across the automotive, medical device, personal care, and construction industries. According to the company, most of the vast array’s generated heat will be directed into drying ovens used during the coating process of pressure-sensitive adhesive products.

“We have big ambitions to tackle climate change and achieve net zero by 2050,” Mariana Rodriguez, general manager of Avery Dennison Performance Tapes Europe, said via the company’s announcement. “To meet these goals we will look across our industrial processes and identify opportunities to implement new technologies that decarbonize and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.”

Thermal power storage is showing increasing promise as a cheap, sustainable way to meet industries’ heating needs. In recent years, new research indicates methods such as utilizing silica sand and even underwater aquifer water could offer effective means for housing thermal energy.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

For commercial fishers, losing gear is part of doing business. Fishing lines and nets break and wear out over time or have to be cut loose when gear snags on the seafloor. By one estimate, at least 50,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and traps disappear into the water globally each year. In California alone, as many as 14,000 crab traps are lost or discarded each season. Most of this material is plastic, and lots of it is still partially functional, meaning it can go on catching and killing marine life for centuries—a process known as ghost fishing.

For several years, scientists, fishers, and conservations have been eyeing a not-so-novel solution: biodegradable fishing gear. Made of things like microalgae fibers or biodegradable polyesters, this equipment can be broken down by aquatic microorganisms. Yet while these environmentally friendly nets offer benefits, recent field trials conducted largely in Norway and South Korea show that biodegradable nets catch significantly fewer fish than synthetic ones.

Benjamin Drakeford, a marine resource economist at the University of Portsmouth in England, puts it bluntly: “Biodegradable gear right now is not very good.”

In Atlantic cod fisheries, for instance, nylon nets catch as much as 25 percent more fish than biodegradable alternatives. One team of scientists attributed such shortfalls to biodegradable materials’ tendency to be more elastic and stretchy, potentially allowing fish to wiggle free.

But Drakeford and his colleagues wanted to look at the bigger picture: if biodegradable nets and traps reduce fishers’ catches—but they also lessen the environmental damage from lost and discarded gear—is that a financial hit worth taking? After all, fishers have a vested interest in keeping fish populations healthy. The scientists analyzed prior studies of biodegradable fishing gear’s effectiveness, then interviewed 29 fishers, boat owners, and representatives from fishing industry groups in England about their expenses, profits, and other financial details.

In conclusion, Drakeford and his colleagues write in a recent paper, an industry shift to biodegradable nets would not lessen the impacts of ghost fishing enough to offset fishers’ reduced catches. Biodegradable nets would leave more fish in the water and reduce rates of ghost fishing, helping fishers with future catches. But to make up for the reduced landings, fishers would need financial incentives.

But, the scientists say, if biodegradable gear can be improved, the benefits “over traditional fishing gear would grow exponentially.”

One big problem, the scientists reason, is that a certain degree of ghost fishing is currently locked in: the gear is already lost. Even if fishers everywhere replace their gear, the decrease in ghost fishing—and resultant bump in fish stocks—wouldn’t happen for years. So rather than improving their catch by cutting down on ghost fishing, fishers would be trading environmental sustainability for a lower catch without seeing much of an immediate benefit.

Brandon Kuczenski, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved in the work, suggests this lack of cost-effectiveness could be overcome with government subsidies.

Drakeford and his team’s analysis comes amid mounting concern over marine plastic pollution, which is pouring into the world’s oceans at alarming rates and is liable to haunt marine ecosystems essentially forever. Large pieces of plastic can choke and strangle marine life, while tiny micro- and nanoplastics—the inevitable result of plastic breaking down—can have more insidious impacts.

Geoff Shester, a campaign director for the conservation organization Oceana, says that while he endorses efforts to develop biodegradable gear, he thinks it would be easier and faster to implement a penalty and reward system to incentivize fishers to not lose or litter gear in the first place. Such a system, he says, would require registering and tracking all commercial fishing equipment.

“If you put out fishing gear, you should have to demonstrate that you’re getting it back,” he says. Right now, he adds, there is no penalty for fishers who lose their gear other than having to buy new gear. He thinks such a system could be more effective in reducing waste.

There is another option, too: holding net manufacturers financially accountable for plastic gear pollution and the costs to fishers of shifting to biodegradable gear. This concept, known as extended producer responsibility, is briefly discussed in Drakeford’s paper.

For his part, Drakeford believes biodegradable nets’ lower efficiency is a speed bump on the road to widescale adoption. He thinks the gear will follow the path of electric vehicles—getting better and better and better. In just a decade, he points out, the range of electric vehicles has doubled several times.

Drakeford sees some irony in the fact that switching to biodegradable gear is, in concept at least, not so much a leap forward as it is a step back.

“In the past, we used biodegradable materials to make crab pots and fishing nets and such,” he says. “We know the answer to this—we just need to go back to what we used to do.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The jury may still be out on plant-based meat alternatives’ economic and environmental viability, but experts largely agree that the seafood industry in its current form is untenable. Overfishing presents countless ecological problems, including plastic pollution and the potential for a wholesale collapse of marine biodiversity. Researchers have been experimenting with seafood alternatives for years, but one company is finally ready to bring its offering to market—and it represents a major moment within the industry.

Austrian-based food-tech startup Revo Foods announced this week that its 3D-printed vegan fish filet “inspired by salmon” is heading to European grocery store shelves—a first for 3D-printed food. According to the company’s September 12 press release, the arrival of “The Filet” represents a pivotal moment in sustainable food, with 3D-printed consumables ready to scale at industrial volumes. Revo Foods’ Filet is likely to be just the first of many other such 3D-printed edible products to soon hit the market.

[Related: Scientists cooked up a 3D printed cheesecake.]

“Despite dramatic losses of coral reefs and increasing levels of toxins and micro plastic contaminating fish, consumer demand for seafood has paradoxically skyrocketed in recent decades,” the company announcement explains. “One promising solution to provide consumers with sustainable alternatives that do not contribute to overfishing is vegan seafood. The key to success of these products lies in recreating an authentic taste that appeals to [consumers].”

The Filet relies on mycoprotein made from nutrition-heavy filamentous fungi, and naturally offers a meat-like texture. Only another 12 ingredients compose Revo’s Filet, such as pea proteins, plant oils, and algae extracts. With its high protein and Omega-3 contents, eating a Revo Filet is still very much like eating regular salmon—of course, without all the standard industrial issues. And thanks to its plant-based ingredients, the Filet also boasts a three-week shelf life, a sizable boost from regular salmon products.

“With the milestone of industrial-scale 3D food printing, we are entering a creative food revolution, an era where food is being crafted exactly according to the customer’s needs,” Revo Foods CEO Robin Simsa said via this week’s announcement.

While Revo’s products are currently only available for European markets, the company says it is actively working to expand its availability “across the globe,” with Simsa telling PopSci the company hopes to enter US markets around 2025. Until then, hungry stateside diners will have to settle for the Revo Salmon dancehall theme song… yes, it’s a real thing.

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Despite ample evidence to the contrary, heat pumps are still considered by some to be inferior to traditional gas and fossil fuel installations. A new study published on September 11 in Joule, however, offers even more credence to adopting the eco-friendly alternative, while also debunking some of the more persistent myths surrounding heat pumps. Even in extreme cold environments, heat pumps perform as much as three times better than fossil fuel options, the latest study found.

To understand how heat pumps work, imagine the opposite of a refrigerator—instead of a fridge sucking up its ambient interior heat and pumping that outside the container via its compressor, a home’s heat pump sucks in warmth for later use. Heat pumps’ sources generally either come from ambient outside air, or underground, such as via geothermal heat. The principle is largely the same as AC units, which operate on the same principles but in reverse. Either way, a team of Oxford University researchers working alongside the independent think tank, Regulatory Assistance Project, have ample evidence that pumps are much more preferable to pollutant-heavy standards.

[Related: Energy-efficient heat pumps will be required for all new homes in Washington.]

As The Guardian explains, the study aggregated data from seven field studies across the US, Canada, China, Germany, Switzerland, the UK. After analyzing the numbers, the team found that heat pumps operated two-to-three times more efficiently than gas and oil heaters at below zero temperatures. According to the findings, this makes heat pumps perfectly suited—if not superior—for homes across the globe, including in Europe and the UK.

Speaking with Canary Media, Duncan Gibb, study co-author and a senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, argued that the study supports their belief that “there are very few—if any—technical conditions where a heat pump is not suitable based on the climate,” at least in Europe.

That’s not to say that consumers wouldn’t benefit from switching to heat pumps in the US—far from it, actually. According to the team’s field studies, even some of the nation’s coldest regions in Alaska and Maine still offered more efficient heat pump performance than fossil fuel counterparts. Extrapolate that to the country’s generally warmer areas, and heat pumps generate even more bang for their buck.

The new information presents a stark counter to recent dismissals of the technology, which are often financed by those with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. “Even though heat pump efficiency declines during the extreme cold and back-up heating may be required, air-source heat pumps can still provide significant energy system efficiency benefits on an instantaneous and annual basis compared with alternatives,” the study’s authors argue in the paper’s introduction. And from their new data, they have the numbers to prove it.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In several quiet rooms in a marine lab in southwest France, dozens of Pacific oysters sit in large glass tanks, quietly living their oyster lives. Each morning, the lights come up slowly, carefully mimicking the rising sun, but at night the rooms never fully darken. The dim glow simulates the light pollution that increasingly plagues many marine species—even in natural habitats.

The results of the experiment, which were recently published, found that artificial light at night can disrupt oyster behavior and alter the activity of important genes that keep the animals’ internal clocks ticking.

Damien Tran, a marine scientist at the Paris-based French National Centre for Scientific Research, and one of the study’s authors, was surprised that even the lowest level of nighttime light that they tested—“below the intensity of the full moon,” he says—was enough to throw off the oysters’ circadian rhythm.

It’s especially remarkable, Tran says, when you remember that oysters don’t have eyes.

How oysters see is a bit of a mystery. While related bivalves, such as scallops, have eye-like organs, oysters likely use patches of specialized cells on their skin to detect light, though scientists have yet to identify the cells or figure out exactly how they might work.

In the recent study, Tran and his colleagues put four tanks of oysters in different rooms and exposed each to a different intensity of artificial light at night. The researchers compared the oysters’ responses with the responses of animals in a control tank that experienced complete nighttime darkness.

Tran’s colleague and coauthor, marine scientist Laura Payton, explains that shell movement is really the only oyster behavior that can be observed. The team fitted half of the oysters in each tank with electrodes to determine when the animals opened their shells—something oysters do to feed, breathe, and mate. In the control tank, oysters were most active in the middle of the day but started to close when the lights went out.

But exposure to artificial light at night caused the oysters in the other four tanks to stay open at inappropriate times, with activity peaking in the early evening. And while oysters have certain genes that typically turn “on” during the day and others that turn on at night, exposure to nighttime light eliminated the difference. For example, the oyster equivalent of a mammal gene that helps make melatonin is usually more active at night, but the researchers observed that the gene stayed highly active during the day, eclipsing the natural circadian rhythm.

In human terms, that’s called insomnia. In oysters, as Payton explains, this response could negatively affect their health, possibly making the animals more vulnerable to disease over the long term. Although, she concedes, many of the specific consequences have yet to be studied.

If oyster populations do suffer, so would the ecology and economy of many regions worldwide, where oysters filter water, protect shorelines from storms, and, as a commercially grown species, provide food and jobs to communities.

Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the research, says the results are compelling. But she critiqued the researchers’ choice to expose just one tank of oysters to each level of artificial light. That means there’s a chance that the study results were caused by something else in the tank, rather than the light alone, she says. Fobert doesn’t question that the changes in oyster behavior and gene expression were due to the artificial light, but having multiple tanks per light level would have made the study more robust, she says.

Nevertheless, artificial light at night is a growing concern for many marine species. Oysters in particular need our help, Payton says, because they can’t run away when their environment is disturbed.

Technologically, Fobert says, it’s completely in our power to improve conditions for the health and well-being of marine species that are affected by light pollution. “We have huge opportunities to get it right.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Studies increasingly show that changing weather patterns, extreme heat, and unpredictable storms are likely to pop up pretty much everywhere on the globe. According to recent research, it turns out that 98 percent of the world’s population has been exposed to higher-than-normal temperatures made twice more likely by carbon dioxide pollution.

The new findings come from a report from US-based climate research group Climate Central and follow reports that this summer has been the hottest three-month period recorded, and July alone was the hottest month on record. 

The latest report utilizes Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), which reveals how much climate change influences the temperature on any given day on the globe—so a level of 5 would mean this event was five times more likely to occur because of climate change. According to their findings, nearly half of the world’s population experienced at least 30 days between June and August with a CSI of at least 3. This means that the 30 or more days of extreme weather were made three times more likely due to climate change. 

[Related: July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years.]

At least 1.5 billion people (or around one in every five people) saw at least this level of climate-change induced heat every single day during this time period. 

“In every country we could [analyze], including the southern hemisphere, where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult—and in some cases nearly impossible—without human-caused climate change,” Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science, told Reuters.

Of course, not all locations saw the same amount of impact—79 countries in particular experienced at least half of their summer days at CSI level 3 or higher. Over half of these were UN-designated least developed (based on income thresholds, health and education indices, as well as economic and environmental vulnerabilities) countries and small island developing states. These countries typically contribute very little to climate change itself, in this case, culminating around 7 percent of total GHG emissions, according to the report. They also are at higher risk of climate-related disasters and still struggle to access funding to take mitigating measures. 

“In every place, if you start to push it beyond the temperatures that people experience on a regular basis, that’s dangerous heat because you’re not prepared for it physiologically. You’re not prepared for it in terms of your infrastructure,” Pershing told Scientific American.

[Related: US climate efforts look promising, but there’s more to do.]

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise year after year, and major fossil fuel companies and emitters have made minimal progress or backtracked on climate goals. As fossil fuel use continues to rise, so do their climate-warming emissions. 

“Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023,” Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.” 

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Once considered prohibitively expensive and inefficient, hydrogen fuel-powered planes are finally beginning to literally and figuratively take off around the world. Last week, the Germany-based startup H2FLY achieved a major industry milestone—completing the world’s first piloted electric aircraft flights fueled entirely by liquid hydrogen.

“This achievement marks a watershed moment in the use of hydrogen to power aircraft. Together with our partners, we have demonstrated the viability of liquid hydrogen to support medium and long-range emissions-free flight,” H2FLY co-founder Josef Kallo said in a statement on September 7.

According to the company’s official announcement, H2FLY completed a total of four flights using liquid hydrogen, one of which boasted over three hours of airtime. Unlike past tests, however, the company’s HY4 prototype aircraft this time around utilized liquified, cryogenically stored hydrogen (LH2) instead of pressurized gaseous hydrogen (GH2). The fuel source alteration reportedly allows for significantly lower fuel tank volumes and weights, thus boosting the aircraft’s range, as well as the amount of space that can be dedicated for payloads.

[Related: Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever.]

Even with only four test flights completed, LH2 fuel shows incredible promise in powering more-sustainable planes. Thanks to the strategic fuel shift, the company’s HY4 aircraft can hypothetically double its maximum range from 750 km to 1,500 km (466 to 932 miles), making it much more viable for medium- and long-haul commercial, carbon-emissions free flights. For comparison, a flight from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, is around 765 km; a flight from NYC to Tallahassee, Florida, is about 1,470 km.

As Electrek notes, H2FLY engineers boast a string of achievements over the years when compared to similar zero-emission aviation companies. The HY4 aircraft completed its maiden flight in 2016, and set new records when it achieved an altitude of over 7,000 during a 77-mile test run in 2022.

Atop the impressive test results, H2FLY explains its latest HY4 flights “marks the culmination” of Project HEAVEN, “a European-government-supported consortium assembled to demonstrate the feasibility of using liquid, cryogenic hydrogen in aircraft.” Apart from various business consortium partners, the project included funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, and the University of Ulm.

Moving forward, H2FLY aims to begin work on commercialization of its aircraft and fuel technologies. This will include the development of new fuel cell systems capable of providing full power ranges for emissionless flights achieving altitudes as high as 27,000 feet. Next year, the company also plans to open a Hydrogen Aviation Center at Germany’s Stuttgart Airport.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

In 2008, polar bears had the dubious distinction of being the first animal placed on the United States’ endangered species list due to climate threats, specifically the loss of Arctic sea ice. 

But that same year, President George W. Bush’s Interior Department adopted a new policy that prevented federal agencies from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears, despite those emissions being the main driver of the climate threat to the keystone Arctic predators. Every new ton of emissions leads to more melting of the sea ice that the bears live on. 

The policy-setting 2008 memo was written by Dave Bernhardt, a former fossil fuel industry lobbyist then working as solicitor for the Interior Department who would go on to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior. It required that the projected emissions impacts to polar bears from new proposals, like pipelines or drilling permits, be separated from the effects of historical cumulative emissions.

That set what seemed an impossibly high scientific bar at the time because researchers hadn’t yet fully identified the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from specific projects on threatened species. But science has cleared that hurdle, said Steven Amstrup, an adjunct biology professor at the University of Wyoming and co-author of a new peer-reviewed paper in Science that could help “close the loophole” in the Endangered Species Act by showing how emissions from new projects on federal lands result in more days during which polar bears can’t feed because of declining sea ice.

The paper establishes a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and cub survival rates using a methodology that can “parse the impact of emissions by source,” said Amstrup, also the chief science officer for Polar Bears International, a nonprofit conservation organization.

For example, the new paper notes that the hundreds of power plants in the U.S. combined will emit more than 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide over their 30-year lifespans. By calculating the amount of warming that carbon will drive, and the amount of Arctic sea ice that heat will melt, they estimate that those emissions will reduce polar bear cub recruitment in the Southern Beaufort Sea population by about 4 percent. By using that formula, they can measure how greenhouse gas emissions from a new project would affect polar bear populations, a calculation that wasn’t as clear when polar bears were listed as vulnerable. 

And the same type of analysis could be applied to measure the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on habitat and demographic changes for other species listed as endangered, Amstrup said.

Emerging Science Supports Climate Lawsuits

Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said a current legal challenge to the Willow oil and gas drilling project in northern Alaska uses a similar argument. 

“Our view is this,” Burger said. “Science supports drawing a causal connection from emissions from specific sources to climate change impacts in specific places. Studies like this one without question reinforce the argument.”

The specific impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are “particularly evident” when it comes to loss of sea ice and the impact on polar bears, the Sabin Center noted in an amicus brief submitted in support of plaintiffs challenging the Willow project, he said.

In the brief, the Sabin Center alleges that the Bureau of Land Management ignored the effect of greenhouse emissions on endangered and threatened species due to the “misconception” that science could not establish “causal links” between emissions and impacts to at-risk species. But since 2008, when the Interior Department’s memo tried to ban consideration of greenhouse gas impacts on listed species, research has made the causal connections more clear, he added. 

“What’s more, climate models and detection and attribution methods can be used to quantify the relative contributions of specific GHG sources to climate change impacts,” Burger wrote in the brief. In some cases, he said, it’s even possible to isolate the per-ton effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as was the case with a 2016 study showing that each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide results in the sustained loss of about 3 square meters of September sea ice in the Arctic.

A 2021 report from the Sabin Center summarizes the scientific findings about the impacts of climate change on endangered species, and the new study “provides useful new methodologies and evidence,” to describe those effects, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert and co-founder of the Sabin Center.

Scientists and legal scholars have been telling federal agencies for quite some time that the Bernhardt Memo is incorrect, said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity. There are pending lawsuits that have raised that point, but no rulings yet, and the new paper adds extra scientific support to such cases.

“It is a very big deal,” said Siegel, who wrote the petition for listing polar bears as endangered species in 2004. “It’s the first time scientists have actually done the analysis and published their findings in one of the world’s leading scientific journals.”

Amstrup did the original research for the U.S. government that supported the listing of polar bears, she said. The science was so clear that the George W. Bush administration had no choice but to list the species.

But the lack of any meaningful action to protect polar bears since then has been frustrating to Siegel.

“I’m feeling a lot of grief, and I’m feeling a lot of anger, like a lot of people,” she said. “But what keeps me going is that there is still time to make a difference. There’s nothing more important than the actions taken right now to reduce greenhouse pollution.”

She said the failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which implements the Endangered Species Act, to properly analyze the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears and other listed species is “a form of climate denial. It’s going against the science, and it is breaking the law.” 

“Hopefully the publication of this paper will finally convince the Biden administration to follow the science and the law,” she added.

In 2021, scientists and law professors petitioned the Biden Administration to rescind any rules that prevent agencies from considering the impacts of greenhouse gases. Failing to consider them “leaves the government blindfolded in its effort to protect threatened species,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University who signed the petition. 

Shaye Wolfe, climate director for the Center For Biological Diversity,said the polar bear is an example of how rules like Bernhardt’s memo have weakened climate action. Without such policies, which the Trump Administration tried to further enshrine in 2019 when Bernhardt was secretary of the interior, “agencies would have another mechanism to consider and reduce carbon emissions,” Wolf said.

“Greenhouse gases are no different from mercury, pesticides or anything else that accumulates in the land, air or water and harms species,” she added. “It’s simply ridiculous not to take them into account.”

Global Warming Increasing Mass Extinction Risk

Right now, there are 1,497 animals on the U.S. endangered species list and the best available science shows that nearly every one of them faces climate-related threats, as do 1 million other species on the planet. 

The number, distribution and density of species—biodiversity—is declining rapidly in an unfolding mass extinction that could equal dramatic die-offs recorded in fossil records and attributed to planetary system-changing events like ice ages, meteor crashes or intense, massive and persistent volcanic eruptions. 

The current wave of species declines and extinctions could have profound impacts on human societies. Food security will be threatened if pollinators, seed-spreading birds or important food fish disappear. About 4 billion people rely primarily on natural medicines for their health care, while about 70 percent of drugs used to treat cancer are natural or are synthetic products inspired by nature. 

And if global warming changes the reproductive cycles of fundamental organisms like plankton, bacteria and fungi, it would have a huge effect on how much carbon dioxide oceans, fields and forests remove from the atmosphere, potentially driving even faster warming of the climate. 

Some groups of animals have been particularly hard hit, with 40 percent of amphibians and about a third of corals and marine mammals facing possible extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations global biodiversity report, which acknowledged that “Nature is essential for human existence and good quality of life.” 

“Most of nature’s contributions to people are not fully replaceable, and some are irreplaceable,” the report added.

Seen as a global call to action, the report concluded that nature is deteriorating worldwide. “The biosphere, upon which humanity as a whole depends, is being altered to an unparalleled degree across all spatial scales,” the report noted. “Biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems—is declining faster than at any time in human history.”

There are numerous scientific red flags. A 2022 study showed that the current rate of ocean warming could bring the greatest extinction of sea life in 250 million years. And it’s also clear that the loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis must be addressed hand-in-hand, as a 2021 report from the United Nations noted. Global warming is an overarching threat to nearly all species, and if biodiversity collapses, some of the planet’s best natural mechanisms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow atmospheric heating will fail, the report explained.

Every Ton of CO2 Brings New Misery, and Not Just to Polar Bears

Research shows that Human activities are responsible for declining polar bear habitat and most of the damage to the rest of the life-sustaining web of ecosystems and species, and those activities often intensify each other’s effects. Land impacts like urban development and industrialized agriculture strip away carbon-sequestering vegetation and destroy habitat. Greenhouse gas emissions are making parts of the ocean too hot for many fish and melting the snow that sustains wolverines high in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States.

Research like the new study could provide scientific support to get more protection for the few remaining wolverines that depend on a deep mountain snowpack for denning, said Matthew Bishop, the Rocky Mountains office director with the Western Environmental Law Center. 

Climate models and observations show most of those snowfields retreating rapidly, making it crucial to protect any remaining pockets as climate refugia. But despite the models, the federal government claims it doesn’t know enough about how wolverines will respond to the shrinking snow to act on the science, Bishop said. 

“We know they are snow dependent species and that snow is going to be gone,” he said. “That’s enough and the court agrees, but the agencies keep coming back and saying they need to know more.” At some point soon, it’s going to be too late for wolverines and many other climate-sensitive species, he added. 

“When in doubt, any kind of uncertainty should err on the side of protection for the species, and doing what we can to limit all the non-climate stressors,” he said. “Let’s give them a chance to make it. Ultimately, it may not matter. But let’s do everything we can in our power to make sure they stay on the landscape.”

For polar bears, like for wolverines, that means protecting parts of their habitat that might persist for the next 50 or 100 years, even if the outcome beyond that is uncertain. But most of all, as last week’s paper in Science emphasized, it means cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately and quickly. 

Pairing a biologist and a climatologist for the new paper on how greenhouse gas emissions affect polar bears seemed a logical choice, said co-author Ceclilia Bitz, a scientist at the University of Washington, who studies the connection between climate, sea ice and wildlife habitat.

Focusing on the direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear habitat makes the paper policy relevant and helps paint a clear picture of the impacts of sea ice decline, she said.

“We’re saying that every additional 23 gigatons of CO2 that we emit as a world causes an additional day that the polar bears have to fast,” she said. “Currently we’re emitting about 50 gigatons per year as a planet.”

That increases the time polar bears go without eating by more than a day each year in each of their populations, she said.

“That’s huge. Imagine if you’re already hungry, going an extra day without eating,” she said. “It’s relentless. As humans, we’re emitting so much CO2 that it’s having these really perceptible and serious consequences.”

Amstrup said the new study gives people one more reference point for understanding the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Polar bears depend on thresholds,” he said. “If they fast for over a certain amount of days, they simply can’t survive.”

The findings again show how closely linked the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are, Siegel added. “They cannot be separated,” she said. “The survival of all life on Earth, including ours, is at stake.”

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Decontaminating water is as vital an endeavor as ever as pollution issues continue to flood the planet. Knowing this, researchers at the University of California San Diego just created the latest mind-bending tool to aid in future clean-up projects: a 3D-printed “engineered living material” made of seaweed polymers and genetically altered bacteria that breaks down organic pollutants in water.

As detailed via a new paper published in Nature Communications, the remarkable creation comes courtesy of a team working within the University of California San Diego’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). According to the project announcement, the team first hydrated a seaweed-derived polymer known as alginate. Meanwhile, the researchers genetically engineered a waterborne, photosynthetic bacteria called cyanobacteria to produce laccase, an enzyme capable of neutralizing organic pollutants like antibiotics, dyes, pharmaceutical drugs, and BPAs. The ingredients were then combined and passed through a 3D printer to produce a grid-like design whose surface area-to-volume ratio allowed the bacteria optimal access to light, gasses, and nutrients.

[Related: The US might finally regulate toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water.]

“This collaboration allowed us to apply our knowledge of the genetics and physiology of cyanobacteria to create a living material,” School of Biological Sciences faculty member Susan Golden said in a statement. “Now we can think creatively about engineering novel functions into cyanobacteria to make more useful products.”

To test their creation, the engineers introduced their decontaminator to water polluted by indigo carmine, a blue dye often used within denim textile manufacturing. The team’s grid-like, living tool managed to safely and effectively decolorize the water solution over the course of multiple days.

However, that still leaves the alginate-cyanobacteria mixture within the water. Replacing one foreign pollutant with foreign, synthesized bacteria doesn’t necessarily solve the larger problem of contamination. To solve this, the UC San Diego team further engineered their version of cyanobacteria to adversely respond to theophylline, a molecule similar to caffeine found in many teas and chocolates. Whenever the decontamination substance comes into contact with the molecule, the bacteria subsequently produces a specific protein to break down and destroy its own cells, thus getting rid of the substance.

“The living material can act on the pollutant of interest, then a small molecule can be added afterwards to kill the [cyanobacteria],” Jon Pokorski, a professor of nanoengineering and research co-lead, said in the announcement. “This way, we can alleviate any concerns about having genetically modified bacteria lingering in the environment.”

As useful as this living filer could already be in decontamination projects, the team hopes to eventually take their substance a step further by designing it to self-destruct without the need for additional outside chemicals.

“Our goal is to make materials that respond to stimuli that are already present in the environment,” Pokorski explained.

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Capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it, also known as carbon sequestration, is one of many methods to mitigate climate change. Carbon dioxide is usually stored in underground geologic formations or biologic forms like forests, soils, or oceans through various methods. In a new research, scientists found that applying basalt dust in croplands can effectively sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide at the gigaton scale.

When silicate rocks like basalt get in contact with rainwater, the chemical process of weathering occurs, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into products that are transported and then stored in the ocean. Natural weathering can be accelerated by grinding silicate rocks into fine particles and applying them to the soil, thereby increasing the surface area and absorbing more carbon dioxide. This process is called enhanced rock weathering (ERW). 

[Related: Blue carbon is a natural climate solution with big potential.]

“These particles undergo chemical reactions with CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions or stable mineral carbonates,” says Shuang Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University. “This process essentially locks away the carbon, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for an extended period.”

According to a study published recently in the journal Earth’s Future, applying 10 tons of basalt dust per hectare on almost a thousand agricultural sites around the globe can sequester 64 gigatons of carbon dioxide over a 75-year period. If this application is extended to all croplands, over 215 gigatons may be sequestered in the same period.

“The numbers point to ERW being a compelling strategy to achieve large-scale carbon sequestration,” says Zhang, who was involved in the study. He adds that it also has “several distinct advantages over alternative carbon capture strategies like afforestation or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).”

Afforestation, or introducing trees in unforested regions, is a greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy, but it might not be effective in every ecosystem. For instance, the carbon sequestration of afforestation is less effective than grasses in tropical savannas, and it may have limited potential in drylands. 

Meanwhile, the capacity of BECCS—which extracts bioenergy from biomass and stores its carbon dioxide emissions in underground geologic formations to prevent release—may eventually decrease because of the effects of climate change on crop yields and biomass feedstocks.

In comparison, ERW is compatible with existing farmland and is readily scalable by utilizing pre-existing agricultural infrastructure, says Zhang. The method also comes with ecological co-benefits. He adds that ERW can reduce the carbon footprint associated with fertilizer production, mitigate nitrous oxide emissions from the soil, improve soil pH levels and nutrient absorption, and increase crop yields as a result. 

“This twin capacity to ameliorate soil health while capturing carbon provides unique opportunities for agricultural modernization in economically developing nations, thereby extending its transformative potential,” says Zhang. However, some barriers stand in the way of large-scale deployment of ERW.

There are insufficient frameworks for the monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of carbon sequestration activities, says Zhang. For instance, “the impact of ERW byproducts on river systems and the associated carbon leakage has not been fully investigated, a gap that must be addressed to solidify financial incentives for ERW,” he adds. 

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology.]

The inappropriate handling of finely ground basalt during the application can result in airborne particulate emissions, thus posing a risk to local air quality. There is also potential for nutrient accumulation in water systems as weathered minerals from ERW flow downstream, which could exacerbate issues like eutrophication. Moreover, developing countries often lack the necessary infrastructure for large-scale processing and deployment of basalt, says Zhang. Addressing these issues is crucial before implementing ERW more widely.

Zhang suggests several ways to navigate these barriers. When it comes to research, regulatory standards for MRV can be crafted by the scientific community and ratified by relevant government agencies. Public investment can also focus on upgrading infrastructure and advancing agricultural systems, while the private sector can invest in technologies that enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of ERW.
Overall, exploring the potential of ERW remains worthwhile because its effectiveness as a carbon sequestration method may be resilient to future climatic changes. “Even under high emissions scenarios, the impact on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) rates is minimal, with an approximate increase of only two percent,” says Zhang. “This suggests that ERW would remain an effective strategy for carbon sequestration even as the planet warms.”

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Food delivery and take-out has had a renaissance in the past few years. Not only did it provide an economic lifeline to the restaurants amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also kept people safe and fed by limiting exposure to the virus. However, our to-go favorites often come with a huge side of waste. In 2021, over 400 million metric tons of plastic waste of all kinds was produced worldwide and the United States uses more than 36 billion plastic utensils every year. Plastic pollution is also expected to outpace the efforts to reduce waste and could even outpace coal’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

[Related: How to make your takeout order less wasteful.]

Plastic cutlery from delivery orders presents new challenges, but a study published September 7 in the journal Science found that the “green nudges” that encourage customers to skip asking for cutlery with take-out orders were very successful. They could even be a new policy tool in reducing single-use waste. 

“Few policies target plastic waste production at the consumer level, except charges on plastic bags,” co-author and EPIC-China’s research director and Hong Kong University Business School economist Guojun He said in the statement. “Our findings show that simple nudges can make a big difference in changing consumers’ behaviors and could become a tool for policymakers as they confront the immense challenge of plastic waste.”

According to the team, reducing single-use cutlery waste in the food-delivery industry is particularly important in China as the country is the world’s largest producer and consumer of single-use cutlery. Over 540 million Chinese citizens were active users of food-delivery services as of 2019, consuming more than 50 million sets of single-use cutlery per day. In an effort to reduce waste, policy-makers set a target of reducing single-use cutlery usage in food deliveries by 30 percent by 2025.

For the study, the team worked with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s online food-ordering platform called Eleme. The platform is China’s second largest food-delivery company, with more than 753 million users last year, and is similar to DoorDash and Uber Eats in the United States. The team evaluated the effectiveness of Alibaba’s green nudges to reduce single-use cutlery consumption. These nudges included switching the default selection on the platform to “no cutlery” and including green points as rewards for not using the cutlery. Green points could then be redeemed to plant a tree under the customer’s name (but that’s a whole other can of worms).

They studied each user’s monthly food-ordering history for two years through 2019 to 2021 in 10 major Chinese cities. Of these cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin had green nudges, while Qingdao, Xi’an, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Chengdu served as control cities without green nudges. They then randomly sampled about 200,000 active users who had placed at least one order between 2019 and 2020.

[Related: Are reusable takeout boxes worth the resources needed to make them?]

They found that changing the default to “no cutlery” and rewarding consumers with green points increased the share of no-cutlery orders by 648 percent, all without affecting Alibaba’s revenue.  If these green nudges were applied to all of China, the team found that more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery could be saved annually, eliminating 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste. It could also potentially save 5.44 million trees annually since it would reduce the need for wooden chopsticks.

“Other food delivery platforms, such as UberEats and DoorDash, could try similar nudges to reduce cutlery consumption and plastic waste globally,” said He.

In other places in the world, efforts to trim down on unnecessary plastic have sprouted as well. In June, the “Skip the Stuff” rule went into effect in New York City, which aims to reduce single-use cutlery and condiments. Restaurants have until June 30, 2024 to comply before risking potential fines. The United Kingdom has also set a ban on single-use plastic cutlery set to go into effect in October. The European Union banned single-use cutlery among other types of plastic pollution in July 2021.  

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The Department of Energy is providing a nearly $400 million loan to a startup aimed at scaling the manufacturing and deployment of a zinc-based alternative to rechargeable lithium batteries. If realized, Eos Energy’s utility- and industrial-scale zinc-bromine battery energy storage system (BESS) could provide cheaper, vastly more sustainable options for the country’s burgeoning renewable power infrastructure.

According to the DOE’s recent announcement, Eos Energy’s project could annually produce as much as 8 gigawatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity by 2026—enough to instantly power over 300,000 US homes, or meet around 130,000 homes’ annual electricity requirements.

Because renewable sources like wind and solar produce power intermittently, storage solutions are necessary to house the energy for later use. For years, lithium battery systems’ prices have decreased as their efficiencies increased, but the metal’s comparative rarity presents a challenging hurdle for scaling green energy infrastructure.

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid]

Unlike lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries, alternatives such as the Eos Z3 design rely on zinc-based cathodes alongside a water-based electrolyte, notes MIT Technology Review. This important distinction both increases their stability, as well as makes it incredibly difficult for them to support combustion. Zinc-bromine batteries meanwhile also boast lifespans as long as 20 years, while existing lithium options only manage between 10 and 15 years. What’s more, zinc is considered the world’s fourth most produced metal.

Per MIT, Eos’s semi-autonomous facility in Pennsylvania currently produces around 540 megawatt-hours annually, although it doesn’t operate at full capacity. The DOE’s conditional commitment loan—disbursed only after certain financial, technical, and other operating stipulations are met—could boost the Eos’ factory towards full-power.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

“Today’s energy storage market is nascent but rapidly growing and is dominated by lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate battery technologies, which typically serve short-term duration applications (approximately 4 hours),” the DOE explained in its announcement. “… Eos’s technology is also specifically designed for long-duration grid-scale stationary battery storage that can assist in meeting the energy grids’ growing demand with increasing amounts of renewable energy penetration.”

The DOE also notes that “over time,” Eos expects to source almost all of its materials within the US, thus better insulating its product against the market volatility and supply chain issues. While the DOE previously issued similar loans to battery recycling and geothermal energy projects, last week’s announcement marks the first funding offered to a manufacturer of lithium-battery alternatives.

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Travelers within Lagos, Nigeria, can finally board a light-rail line connecting two busy regions of the world’s worst metropolis for traffic. Although construction on Lagos’ Blue Line Rail began in 2009, years of funding issues delayed officials’ intended 2011 launch date by over a decade. Now, however, an estimated 150,000 commuters each day will be able to travel the 8-mile route in under 25 minutes—a stark improvement from the sometimes three hour long journey the same distance takes on Lagos roadways.

With over 24 million residents, Lagos has long suffered from notorious traffic issues. The Nigerian city’s infrastructure problems, greenhouse emissions, and overall dissatisfaction with roadways repeatedly earned it the moniker of the world’s worst region to travel—even when compared to similarly congested cities such as Los Angeles and Delhi.

[Related: A high-speed rail line in California is chugging along towards 2030 debut.]

According to Quartz, aspirations for a light rail line within Lagos date as far back as 1983, but decades of funding and civic issues prevented the project from moving forward. Meanwhile, the Lagos-based Danne Institute of Research estimates traffic congestion annually results in a loss of over $5.2 billion due to lost work hours from commuters spending a cumulative 14.1 million hours on the road per day. The World Bank estimates Lagos residents spend more of their household budgets on transportation costs than any other major African city.

Construction for the $132 million endeavor finally completed earlier this year, with official service starting on August 4. For the first two weeks, the Blue Line Rail will run 12 trips per day before upping the daily total to 76. A separate phase of the line will extend the total track line to roughly 17 miles, while Lagos intends to complete a Red Line Rail connecting eastern and western sections of the city by the year’s end. According to Lagos Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu speaking via Bloomberg, the second line is already 95 percent ready.

“A mega city cannot function without an effective metro line,” said Adetilewa Adebajo, chief executive of Lagos-based CFG Advisory, told Bloomberg on August 5. “However, Lagos needs not just the metro line. It has to develop waterways too, being a coastal city. It needs an integrated transport system. Those are what will be able to relieve the congestions in the city.”

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Much like the paper straws that were ushered in to reduce the use of single use plastic straws, paper cups may also be problematic for the environment. A study published in the August issue of the journal Environmental Pollution found that many paper cups are coated with a thin coating of plastic. This layer keeps liquids from seeping into the paper, but can emit toxic substances.

[Related: ‘Forever chemicals’ detected in paper and plastic straws.]

In the study, a team of researchers from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden tested the effect of disposable cups made from different materials on the larvae of the butterfly mosquito. The paper and plastic cups were placed in temperate water or sediment and were left to leach for up to four weeks. Then, the larvae were housed in aquariums that had the water or sediment that had been tainted by paper and plastic cups. 

The larvae grew less in the sediment regardless of the source of contamination.The exposure to the tainted water from both cup types appeared to hinder their development. 

“All of the mugs negatively affected the growth of mosquito larvae,” study co-author and ecotoxicologist and fish biologist Bethanie Carney Almroth said in a statement. 

Since paper isn’t resistant to either water or fats, the paper used to package foods and liquids needs to be treated with a top coat that protects the paper and user from what is inside. The plastic film is often made of a type of bioplastic called polylactide (PLA). Bioplastics are produced from renewable resources instead of much more frequently used fossil fuels. PLA is commonly produced from corn, cassava, or sugarcane and while it is often believed to be biodegradable, this study shows that it can still be toxic.

“Bioplastics do not break down effectively when they end up in the environment, in water. There may be a risk that the plastic remains in nature and resulting microplastics can be ingested by animals and humans, just as other plastics do. Bioplastics contain at least as many chemicals as conventional plastic,” says Carney Almroth.

Some of the chemicals in plastics are known to be toxic, while others are still unknown. According to the team, paper presents a potential health hazard compared to other materials and it is becoming more common as society shifts away from plastics and people become exposed to the chemicals in the plastic through contact with food. The team did not perform a chemical analysis to see which substances had leached from the paper cups and into the water and damaged the larvae, but they suspect it was a mixture of various chemicals. 

[Related: Plastic garbage in the sea is a life raft for pathogens.]

The carbon footprint of reusable plastic cups is tough to pin down, and scientists don’t know if they are better in terms of chemical leaching compared to their trashable counterparts. Some estimates find that a reusable cup must be used between 20 and 100 times to offset its greenhouse gas emissions when compared to a disposable cup, due to the high amount of energy needed to make these popular options durable and the hot water required to keep it clean. However, these reusable options do last longer and have better potential to offset the impacts of disposable cups. 

“When disposable products arrived on the market after the Second World War, large campaigns were conducted to teach people to throw the products away, it was unnatural to us! Now we need to shift back and move away from disposable lifestyles. It is better if you bring your own mug when buying take away coffee. Or by all means, take a few minutes, sit down and drink your coffee from a porcelain mug,” said Carney Almroth.

Currently, the United Nations is working to negotiate a binding agreement to end the spread of plastics.  Carney Almroth is a member of a council of scientists called the Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty (SCEPT) which contributes up-to-date scientific evidence to these negotiations. SCEPT is calling for a rapid phasing out of unnecessary and problematic plastics, as well as added vigilance to avoid the repeat mistakes of replacing one bad product with another.

“We at SCEPT are calling for transparency requirements within the plastics industry that forces a clear reporting of what chemicals all products contain, much like in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Carney Almroth. “But the main goal of our work is to minimize plastic production.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

In a sloping backyard in Vallejo, California, Nicholas Spada adjusted a piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a tripod, a briefcase, and a weather vane. The sleek machine, now positioned near a weathered gazebo and a clawfoot bathtub filled with sun-bleached wood, is meant for inconspicuous sites like this, where it can gather long-term information about local air quality.

Spada, an aerosol scientist and engineer at the University of California, Davis, originally designed the machine for a project based about 16 miles south, in Richmond. For six months, researchers pointed the equipment—which includes a camera, an air sensor, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—at railroad tracks transporting coal through the city, and trained an AI model to recognize trains and record how they affected air quality. Now Spada is scouting potential locations for the sensors in Vallejo, where he collaborates with residents concerned about what’s in their air.

The project in Richmond was Spada’s first using AI. The corresponding paper, which published in March 2023, arrived amid proliferating interest—and concern—about AI. Technology leaders have expressed concern about AI’s potential to displace human intelligence; critics have questioned the technology’s potential bias and harvest of public data; and numerous studies and articles have pointed to the significant energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with processing data for its algorithms.

But as concern has sharpened, so has scientific interest in AI’s potential uses—including in environmental monitoring. From 2017 to 2021, the number of studies published each year on AI and air pollution jumped from 50 to 505, which an analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health attributed, in part, to an uptick of AI in more scientific fields. And according to researchers like Spada, applying AI tools could empower locals who have long experienced pollution, but had little data to explicitly prove its direct source.

In Richmond, deep learning technology—a type of machine learning—allowed scientists to identify and record trains remotely and around the clock, rather than relying on the traditional method of in-person observations. The team’s data showed that, as they passed, trains full of coal traveling through the city significantly increased ambient PM2.5, a type of particulate matter that has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, along with early death. Even short-term exposure to PM2.5 can harm health.

The paper’s authors were initially unsure how well the technology would suit their work. “I’m not an AI fan,” said Bart Ostro, an environmental epidemiologist at UC Davis and the lead author of the paper. “But this thing worked amazingly well, and we couldn’t have done it without it.”

Ostro said the team’s results could help answer a question few researchers have examined: How do coal facilities, and the trains that travel between them, impact air in urban areas?

That question is particularly relevant in nearby Oakland, which has debated a proposed coal export terminal for nearly a decade. After Oakland passed a resolution to stop the project in 2016, a judge ruled that the city hadn’t adequately proved that shipping coal would significantly endanger public health. Ostro and Spada designed their research in part to provide data relevant to the development.

“Now we have a study that provides us with new evidence,” said Lora Jo Foo, a longtime Bay Area activist and a member of No Coal in Oakland, a grassroots volunteer group organized to oppose the terminal project.

The research techniques could also prove useful far beyond the Bay Area. The AI-based methodology, Foo said, can be adapted by other communities looking to better understand local pollution.

“That’s pretty earth shattering,” she said.

Across the United States, around 70 percent of coal travels by rail, transiting from dozens of mines to power plants and shipping terminals. Last year, the U.S.—which holds the world’s largest supplies of coal—used about 513 million tons of coal and exported about another 85 million tons to countries including India and the Netherlands.

Before coal is burned in the U.S. or shipped overseas, it travels in open-top trains, which can release billowing dust in high winds and as the trains speed along the tracks. In the past, when scientists have researched how much dust these coal trains release, their research has relied on humans to identify train passings, before matching it with data collected by air sensors. About a decade ago, as domestically-produced natural gas put pressure on U.S. coal facilities, fossil fuel and shipping companies proposed a handful of export terminals in Oregon and Washington to ship coal mined in Wyoming and Montana to other countries. Community opposition was swift. Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, set out to determine the implications for air quality.

In two published studies, Jaffe recorded trains in Seattle and the rural Columbia River Gorge with motion sensing cameras, identified coal trains, and matched them with air data. The research suggested that coal dust released from trains increased particulate matter exposure in the gorge, an area that hugs the boundary of Oregon and Washington. The dust, combined with diesel pollution, also affected air quality in urban Seattle. (Ultimately, none of the planned terminals were built. Jaffe said he’d like to think his research played at least some role in those decisions.)

Studies at other export locations, notably in Australia and Canada, also used visual identification and showed increases in particulate matter related to coal trains.

Wherever there are coal facilities, there will be communities nearby organizing to express their concern about the associated pollution, according to James Whelan, a former strategist at Climate Action Network Australia who contributed to research there. “Generally, what follows is some degree of scientific investigation, some mitigation measures,” he said. “But it seems it’s very rarely adequate.”

Some experts say that the AI revolution has the potential to make scientific results significantly more robust. Scientists have long used algorithms and advanced computation for research. But advancements in data processing and computer vision have made AI tools more accessible.

With AI, “all knowledge management becomes immensely more powerful and efficient and effective,” said Luciano Floridi, a philosopher who directs the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

The technique used in Richmond could also help monitor other sources of pollution that have historically been difficult to track. Vallejo, a waterfront city about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, has five oil refineries and a shipyard within a 20 mile radius, making it hard to discern a pollutant’s origin. Some residents hope more data may help attract regulatory attention where their own concerns have not.

“We have to have data first, before we can do anything,” said Ken Szutu, a retired computer engineer and a founding member of the Vallejo Citizen Air Monitoring Network, sitting next to Spada at a downtown cafe. “Environmental justice—from my point of view, monitoring is the foundation.”

Air scientists like Spada have relied on residents to assist with that monitoring—opening up backyards for their equipment, suggesting sites that may be effective locations, and, in Richmond, even calling in tips when coal cars sat at the nearby train holding yard.

Spada and Ostro didn’t originally envision using AI in Richmond. They planned their study around ordinary, motion-detecting security cameras with humans—some community volunteers—manually identifying whether recordings showed a train and what cargo they carried, a process that likely would have taken as much time as data collection, Spada said. But the camera system wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up all the trains, and the data they did gather was too voluminous and overloaded their server. After a couple of months, the researchers pivoted. Spada had noticed the AI hype and decided to try it out.

The team planted new cameras and programmed them to take a photo each minute. After months of collecting enough images of the tracks, UC Davis students categorized them into groups—train or no train, day or night—using Playstation controllers. The team created software designed to play like a video game, which sped up the process, Spada said, by allowing the students to filter through more images than if they simply used a mouse or trackpad to click through pictures on a computer. The team used those photos and open-source image classifier files from Google to train the model and the custom camera system to sense and record trains passing. Then the team identified the type of trains in the captured recordings (a task that would have required more complex and expensive computing power if done with AI) and matched the information with live air and weather measurements.

The process was a departure from traditional environmental monitoring. “When I was a student, I would sit on a street corner and count how many trucks went by,” said Spada.

Employing AI was a “game changer” Spada added. The previous three studies on North American coal trains combined gathered data on less than 1,000 trains. The Davis researchers were able to collect data from more than 2,800.

In early July 2023, lawyers for the city of Oakland and the proposed developer of the city’s coal terminal presented opening arguments in a trial regarding the project’s future. Oakland has alleged that the project’s developer missed deadlines, violating the terms of the lease agreement. The developer has said any delays are due to the city throwing up obstructions.

If Oakland prevails, it will have finally defeated the terminal. But if the city loses, it can still pursue other routes to stop the project, including demonstrating that it represents a substantial public health risk. The city cited that risk—particularly related to air pollution—when it passed a 2016 resolution to keep the development from proceeding. But in 2018, a judge said the city hadn’t shown enough evidence to support its conclusion. The ruling said Jaffe’s research didn’t apply to the city because the results were specific to the study location and the composition of the coal being shipped there was unlikely to be the same because Oakland is slated to receive coal from Utah. The judge also said the city ignored the terminal developer’s plans to require companies to use rail car covers to reduce coal dust. (Such covers are rare in the U.S., where companies instead coat coal in a sticky liquid meant to tamp down dust.)

Dhawal Majithia, a former student of Spada’s, helped develop code that runs the equipment used to capture and recognize images of trains while monitoring air quality. The equipment—which includes a camera, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—was tested on a model train set before being deployed in the field. Visual: Courtesy of Bart Ostro/UC Davis

Environmental groups point to research from scientists like Spada and Ostro as evidence that more regulation is needed, and some believe AI techniques could help buttress lawmaking efforts.

Despite its potential for research, AI may also cause its own environmental damage. A 2018 analysis from OpenAI, the company behind the buzzy bot ChatGPT, showed that computations used for deep learning were doubling every 3.4 months, growing by more than 300,000 times since 2012. Processing large quantities of data requires significant energy. In 2019, based on new research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, headlines warned that training one AI language processing model releases emissions equivalent to the manufacture and use of five gas-powered cars over their entire lifetime.

Researchers are only beginning to weigh an algorithm’s potential benefits with its environmental impacts. Floridi at Yale, who said AI is underutilized, was quick to note that the “amazing technology” can also be overused. “It is a great tool, but it comes with a cost,” he said. “The question becomes, is the tradeoff good enough?”

A team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and La Trobe University in Australia has devised a way to quantify that tradeoff. Their Green Algorithms project allows researchers to plug in an algorithm’s properties, like run time and location. Loïc Lannelongue, a computational biologist who helped build the tool, told Undark that scientists are trained to avoid wasting limited financial resources in their research, and believes environmental costs could be considered similarly. He proposed requiring environmental disclosures in research papers much like those required for ethics.

In response to a query from Undark, Spada said he did not consider potential environmental downsides to using AI in Richmond, but he thinks the project’s small scale would mean the energy used to run the model, and its associated emissions, would be relatively insignificant.

For residents experiencing pollution, though, the outcome of the work could be consequential. Some activists in the Bay Area are hopeful that the study will serve as a model for the many communities where coal trains travel.

Other communities are already weighing the potential of AI. In Baltimore, Christopher Heaney, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, has collaborated with residents in the waterfront neighborhood of Curtis Bay, which is home to numerous industrial facilities including a coal terminal. Heaney worked with residents to install air monitors after a 2021 explosion at a coal silo, and is considering using AI for “high dimensional data reduction and processing” that could help the community attribute pollutants to specific sources.

Szutu’s citizen air monitoring group also began installing air sensors after an acute event; in 2016 an oil spill at a nearby refinery sent fumes wafting towards Vallejo, prompting a shelter-in-place order and sending more than 100 people to the hospital. Szutu said he tried to work with local air regulators to set up monitors, but after the procedures proved slow, decided to reach out to the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis, where Spada works. The two have been working together since.

On Spada’s recent visit to Vallejo, he and an undergraduate student met Szutu to scout potential monitoring locations. In the backyard, after Spada demonstrated how the equipment worked by aiming it at an adjacent shipyard, the team deconstructed the setup and lugged it back to Spada’s Prius. As Spada opened the trunk, a neighbor, leaning against a car in his driveway, recognized the group.

“How’s the air?” he called out.

Emma Foehringer Merchant is a journalist who covers climate change, energy, and the environment. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Inside Climate News, Greentech Media, Grist, and other outlets.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Europe’s seven largest commercial truck manufacturers agreed in 2020 to cease producing diesel vehicles within two decades’ time, and have been aggressively working towards meeting that goal ever since. On August 31, one of those companies announced its latest potential tool in the emissions-heavy industry’s transition towards a more sustainable future. Instead of revolutionizing what’s underneath a semi-truck’s hood, however, Sweden’s Scania aims to take advantage of all the free real estate surrounding the tons of cargo in transit on roadways.

Per a release from Scania, the company recently partnered with Uppsala University and the energy company Midsummer to develop a 560-horsepower plug-in hybrid semi-truck prototype whose 60-foot-long trailer is wrapped in 100 square meters of solar panels. According to CleanTechnica, the additional solar powered boost could supply the truck with an additional annual driving range of up to 5,000 kilometers in Sweden—a promising figure, given the prototype’s location.

The Scandinavian nation isn’t exactly known for its endless days of sunshine. July in Stockholm, for example, only experiences clear skies a little over half the month on average—and that’s the highest rate for the entire year. November, by contrast, is cloudy nearly 75 percent of the month. But in this case, the overcast skies’ regularity works to the project’s advantage.

[Related: Does Hyundai’s rooftop solar panel change the fuel-economy equation?]

“We specifically wanted to see if it made sense in Sweden, because if you go to places such as Southern Europe, Australia or North Africa, there’s obviously a lot more sunshine,” explained Eric Falkgrim, a Technology Leader at Scania’s Research and Innovation department and the solar-powered truck’s project manager, in the August 31 announcement. “If it can work here in the less sunny and somewhat darker conditions then that would confirm the widespread validity of the project.”

Falkgrim noted that although the concept of slapping solar panels atop a semi-truck trailer may initially seem relatively simple, the logistics were anything but easy. “It’s a little bit of a wild and crazy idea because it comes with a lot of new hardware and software systemization and development, to make it safe to handle the transfer of power, and to handle [design] faults,” he continued.

Generally speaking, solar panels aren’t optimized for near-constant traveling. As such, it’s “fairly involved from a technical point of view,” said Falkgrim. Despite only recently starting prototype testing on Sweden’s public roads, he explained the project is “about seeing if the solution makes sense, and so far we believe it does.” Although such a design isn’t expected to become widespread on roadways for a few years, Scania’s initial testing shows the tech is not only feasible, but promising.

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At first glance, the McDermitt Caldera might feel like the edge of the Earth. This oblong maze of rocky vales straddles the arid Nevada-Oregon borderlands, in one of the least densely populated parts of North America. 

But the future of the modern world depends on the future of places like the McDermitt Caldera, which has the potential to be the largest known source of lithium on the planet. Where today’s world runs on hydrocarbons, tomorrow’s may very well rely on the element for an expanding offering of lithium-ion batteries. The flaky silver metal is a necessity for these batteries that we already use, and which we’ll likely use in far greater numbers to support mobile phones, electric cars, and large electric grids.

Which is why it matters a ton where we get our lithium from. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances today, suggests that McDermitt Caldera contains even more lithium than previously thought and outlines how the yet-to-be-discovered stores could be extracted. But these results are unlikely to ease the criticisms about the environmental costs of mining the substance.

[Related: Why solid state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

By 2030, the world may require more than a megaton of lithium every year. If previous geological surveys are correct, then the McDermitt Caldera—the remnants of a 16-million-old volcanic supereruption—could contain as many as 100 megatons of the metal. 

“It’s a huge, massive feature that has a lot of lithium in it,” Tom Benson, one of the authors of the new paper and a volcanologist at Columbia University and the Lithium Americas Corporation.

One high-profile project, partly run by Lithium Americas Corporation, proposes a 17,933-acre mine in the Thacker Pass, on the Nevada side of the border at the caldera’s southern edge. The project is contentious: Thacker Pass (or Peehee Mu’huh in Northern Paiute) sits on land that many local Indigenous groups consider sacred. Native American activists are continuing to fight a plan to expand the mine-exploration area in court. 

But not all of the lithium under McDermitt’s rocky sands ranks the same. Most of the desired metal there comes in the form of a mineral called smectite; under certain conditions, smectite can transform into a different mineral called illite that can sometimes also be processed for lithium. Benson and his colleagues studied samples of both smectite and illite drilled from the ground throughout the caldera. “There’s lithium everywhere you drill,” he says. 

Previously, geologists assumed that you could find both smectite and illite in a wide distribution across the caldera, but the authors only found the latter in high concentrations in the caldera’s south, around Thacker Pass. “It’s constrained to this area,” explains Benson.

That’s important. Benson and colleagues think that the caldera’s illite formed when lithium-rich fluid, heated by the underlying volcano, washed over smectite. In the process, the mineral absorbed much of the lithium. Consequently, they project the illite in Thacker Pass holds more than twice as much lithium than the neighboring smectite.

“That’s really helpful to change exploration strategy,” Benson says. “Now we know we have to stick in the Thacker Pass area if we want to find and mine that illite.”

Some of Thacker Pass’s proponents believe that would result in fewer costs and less damage from mining. Anyone who deals with lithium is, on some level, aware of the environmental costs. The recovery process produces pollutants like heavy metals, sucks up water, and emits tons of greenhouse gases. By one estimate, fitting a new electric vehicle with its lithium battery can result in upwards of 70 percent more carbon emissions than building an equivalent petrol-powered car (although the average electric car will more than make up the difference with day-to-day use).

That said, not all extraction is the same. There are two main types of lithium sources: brine recovery and hard-rock mining. Some of the lithium we use comes from super salty pools. Over millions of years, rainwater percolates through lithium-containing rocks, dissolves the metal, and carries it to underground aquifers. Today, humans pump brine to the surface, evaporate the water, add a slurry of hydrated lime to keep out unwanted metals, and extract the lithium that’s left behind. Much of the world’s brine lithium today comes from the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—one of the world’s driest regions.

Alternatively, we can directly mine lithium ores from the earth and process them as we would with most other metals. Separating lithium from ore typically involves crushing the rock and heating it up to temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Getting to those high temperatures often requires fossil fuels in the first place. This method is less laborious and costly than brine extraction, but also far more carbon-intensive.

[Related: Inside the high-powered process that could recycle rare earth metals]

McDermitt Caldera’s smectite and illite belong to what some lithium watchers see as a new third category of extraction: volcanic sedimentary lithium. When volcanic minerals containing lithium flow into nearby valleys  and react with the loose dirt, they leave behind lithium-rich sediments that require little energy and processing to separate.

With the new alternative, mining proponents claim they can drastically reduce the environmental impact of their current and future activities at Thacker Pass. And the research by Benson’s team seems to suggest that, if lithium companies probe in the right places, they might get rewarded more for their efforts.

But this is likely little comfort to lithium-mining opponents in Oregon and Nevada, whose criticisms will be considered as the Bureau of Land Management maps out drilling in the deposit. Their case parallels those of Indigenous Chileans who oppose lithium extraction near their homes in the Atacama and locals fighting a lithium mining project near Portugal’s northern border. Together, they’re fighting a world that’s growing hungrier for lithium, along with new ways and places to exploit it.

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Whether you’re working to create a romantic mood or trying to hex your ex, having a few candles around is a great way to set the scene. But all too often, a candle will reach the end of its useful life long before it’s actually run out of wax. Maybe you failed to trim your wick or prevent the dreaded tunneling that makes candles burn unevenly, leaving you with a lumpy mess that won’t hold a flame. Maybe you dropped a candle on the floor and don’t want the mess of wax scraps to go to waste. Even if you practice perfect candle-preserving etiquette, you’re bound to end up with at least a smidge of wax stuck to the bottom of your candle holder when all is said and done. 

If tossing bits of spent candles makes you feel guilty, there are ways to make your candle-buying habits more eco-friendly, like avoiding petroleum-based paraffins in favor of beeswax or soy, which have lower carbon footprints. But you can go one step further by recycling your candle scraps to make entirely new candles. The process is especially handy for making citronella candles to repel bugs naturally when you spend time outside. 

Stats

• Time: about an hour of active work, and at least 24 hours of resting time
• Cost: as low as 10 cents per candle
• Difficulty: easy

Tools

• Stove
• Saucepan 
• A glass or metal bowl, double boiler, or candle-making pot
• A shallow glass or metal baking pan
• Mason jar or glass measuring cup
• Popsicle stick, wooden skewer, or chopstick
• Kettle or microwave
• Cheesecloth or fine mesh strainer
• (Optional) oven mitts 
• (Optional) freezer 

How to melt old candles to make new ones

1. Harvest your used wax. You’ll need to separate the wax from the containers it’s stuck to so you can melt and reshape it. The exact process will depend on what candles you’re working with and what shape they’re in. Have candle scraps that are already free from their holders? You can skip this step entirely.

If your candles have melted into fragile candlesticks, try putting the candlesticks into the freezer for several hours before gently prying at the wax with a gentle implement, like a chopstick from a takeout order.

Otherwise, here is how to get wax out of candle jars, especially ones made of metal or glass: 

• Place the jars open-side-up in the shallow pan or baking sheet. You’ll want to sit the pan on something that won’t get damaged by heat. You can place it on your stovetop, a wooden cutting board, or an oven mitt to protect your countertops. 
• Boil a couple cups of water. 
• Pour some of the water into the pan so it surrounds the jars. Let the water get as high as it can without risking a dangerous spill. 
• Divide the rest of the water among the candle jars, leaving just a bit of space below the rim. 
• Leave this setup alone for about an hour. By then, the wax should have separated from the bottom of the jar, floated to the top, and cooled and hardened once again, making it easy to pull out. Put the wax aside to use later. 
• If some of the wax is still stuck, try jostling it with a popsicle stick or chopstick to loosen it, then repeat this process again. 

3. Prep your candle vessels. You can reuse old candle jars (just clean them with boiling water first) or use fresh tins from a candle making kit. 

4. Place your wicks. Most wicks come with double-sided stickers. Peel off one side and place the sticker in the center of a candle vessel. Unpeel the other side and stick the metal base of the wick on top. 

5. Melt your wax. This step is similar to the first step of regular candle making, but with the added concern of contaminants from the used wax. Your spent candles are bound to have bits of wick, metal wick-holders, and even ashy old matches stuck inside them. You don’t want any of that going into your new candles.

• Place your wax scraps into the pot or bowl you’re using as the top half of a double boiler.
• Fill your saucepan or the bottom of your double boiler about halfway with water (the exact amount isn’t important). Set it on the stove and place the container of wax scraps inside. If you’re using a bowl, you’ll want the bowl to nest inside the saucepan without touching the water or the bottom of the pan, so the water is simmering beneath it. Set the heat to medium. 
• Allow your wax to melt. This should take anywhere from five to 10 minutes, depending on how much you’re melting and what its composition is. Stir occasionally with your wooden implement to keep things heating evenly. 

6. Strain your wax. Your melted wax probably looks pretty gritty and gross. Straining impurities out will help your finished candles burn cleaner. They still might not be as clean as fresh wax when you’re done, which is why this recycling hack is especially great for DIY citronella candles—a little extra smokiness will just make them more effective against bugs. 

• Using a fine-mesh strainer or a piece of cheesecloth, strain the wax from the double-boiler into a clean mason jar or glass measuring cup.
  • Warning: If you’re using a glass or metal bowl instead of a candle-making pot or a double-boiler with a handle, make sure you use an oven mitt to protect your hands. Melted wax is hot!

7. (Optional) Repeat this process one or two more times, if desired. If wax starts to harden onto your measuring cup or mason jar, pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds to loosen the wax up again.

• Warning: Make sure no metal bits from the wax have ended up in the jar before you put it into the microwave! Microwaves can get electric currents going in metal, and metal objects with jagged or pointed edges can produce sparks that pose a fire hazard. 

Your wax will probably still look a bit murky after straining, especially if you’ve mixed colors. Prioritize getting all the metal wick pieces out. 

8. Add all the clean wax back into the double boiler so it melts completely.

9. (Optional) Add scents. If you want to make citronella candles, add five to 10 drops of citronella oil to the melted wax and stir. You can add other scented oils, too, including old perfume samples. Just make sure to keep the underlying smell of the recycled wax in mind. This is entirely based on your own sensory sensibilities. But for example, a pumpkin pie candle and an apple pie candle will probably combine to smell like baked goods. A pumpkin pie candle and a floral candle will probably just smell confusing and over-perfumed, because those scent profiles are very different and don’t tend to get paired together. A pumpkin pie candle and a smoky leathery whiskey candle might smell great, or it might be a chaotic assault to your senses! 

10. Pour your candles. If you need to hit the pause button after melting and straining your candles, you can simply take the double-boiler off the heat and allow the wax to cool. It will be ready to use whenever you want it. When you’re ready to pour your candles, reheat the wax using the same method detailed in Step 3. Then continue here:

• Remove your melted wax from the heat. If the vessel it’s in doesn’t already have a spout, consider transferring it to a glass measuring cup to make pouring easier.
• Slowly pour wax into each candle jar or tin. Leave at least half an inch of space at the top. 

11. Let the candles cure. Ideally, you should place your candles in a relatively warm spot so they cool down very slowly. This keeps them from splitting. As you can see from my photos, my air conditioning was a little too powerful for a smooth cooling process—they’d have come out prettier if I’d put them into the pantry.

Leave your candles undisturbed for 24 to 48 hours. They may appear hardened much sooner than this, but they’ll last longer if you wait until they’re fully set to burn them.

Should I only burn recycled candles outside?

Use your judgment on this one. At best, indoor candles risk introducing pollutants into the air, but they’re especially unhealthy if you see them burning black and emitting soot. Because recycled wax has already been through a few burns, it’s liable to already have some soot mixed in (especially if you have a terrible habit of dropping matches into your pillar candles like I do). The best and safest way to use recycled candles is for outdoor entertainment, which is why they make great citronella candles. But if your repurposed wax looks super pristine and burns as clean as your fresh candles, more power to you. 

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Treated radioactive water reserves near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are now slowly dispersing into the Pacific Ocean. The initial release is the first part of a decades’ long plan to handle the hundreds of millions of gallons accumulated since the 2011 meltdown disaster. Although numerous scientific organizations and experts deem the project extremely safe—the treated waters actually contain tritium isotope levels far below global contamination standards—residents near the nuclear plant have continuously voiced concerns about potential reputational damage to the local fishing industries.

These worries are not unfounded. On Thursday, China announced a wholesale ban on the import of all “aquatic products” from Japan, effective immediately. According to the Associated Press on Friday, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) president Tomoaki Kobayakwa stated the utility provider is preparing to compensate business owners affected by the ban.

[Related: Japan’s plan to release treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant is actually pretty safe.]

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated his plea for China to reconsider its import ban, urging them to consider the treatment plan’s numerous safety assessments. “We will keep strongly requesting that the Chinese government firmly carry out a scientific discussion,” Kishida added earlier this week, per the AP.

Final preparations for the controlled release project started on August 22, when one ton of treated water was transferred to a dilution tank containing 1,200 tons of seawater. Experts repeatedly tested the combined waters over the next two days to ensure safety. Then, experts ran 460 tons of the mixture into a mixing pool for discharge. From there, the decontaminated waters traveled an estimated 30 minutes through a 1-kilometer-long undersea tunnel, exiting into the Pacific Ocean.

In a news conference on Thursday, a Tepco spokesperson confirmed that the released water’s Becquerels per liter measurement was just 1,500 bq/L. The Becquerel is a standard unit for measuring radioactivity, and references one atomic nucleus decaying per second. Japan’s national safety standard is 60,000 bq/L.

As the AP reports, Tepco intends to release 31,200 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean by March 2024, barely 10 of the roughly 1,000 tanks awaiting treatment. Despite the seemingly large amount, that number is a literal and figurative drop in the bucket compared to how much irradiated water is stored near the Fukushima plant—currently filled to 98-percent of their 1.37-million-ton total capacity. The entirety of those storage containers must be cleaned and emptied in order to make way for the facilities necessary to decommission the larger power plant. The treated wastewater is expected to finish dispersing around 2035.

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Humans are predicted to go through nearly 175 million bags of coffee over the next year, totalling over 23 billion pounds of spent coffee grounds. For decades, most of that waste has been generally destined for landfills, the transport of which results in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. It stands to reason that these spent coffee grounds (after a cup of joe or two) offer a massive, untapped recyclable resource opportunity—and researchers at Australia’s RMIT University have potentially figured out just what to do with them.

According to findings recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, engineers have developed concrete that is almost 30 percent stronger than existing standards after mixing in coffee-derived biochar. To create the new, charcoal-like additive, the team employed a low-energy process known as pyrolysis, in which organic waste is heated to 350 degrees Celsius without oxygen to avoid generating carbon dioxide. Roughly 15 percent of sand used in traditional concrete was then swapped for the coffee biochar, offering not only a more resilient building material, but one that could take care of a massive food waste obstacle.

[Related: Dirty diapers could be recycled into cheap, sturdy concrete.]

“Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill,” Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch, a postdoctoral fellow and joint lead author, said in a statement.

Speaking with The Guardian on August 22, Kilmartin-Lynch explained although coffee biochar is structurally finer than sand, its porous qualities allows the cement to actually better bind to the organic material. While in its early testing stages, the coffee-concrete is showing immense engineering promise.

Replacing at least some of traditional concrete’s sand also offers a major additional bonus to the team’s innovation. According to the university, 50 billion metric tons of natural sand is annually used in construction projects across the globe—resulting in a huge stress on ecosystems such as riverbeds and banks. Minimizing sand mining in favor of recycled coffee grounds therefore offers an additional, positive environmental effect.

If further research and finetuning goes according to plan, essentially all spent coffee ground waste could be put towards new concrete projects.The research team now intends to explore practical implementation standards, as well as field trials in collaboration with outside industry leaders. Perhaps joining forces with both the diaper concrete engineers is in order.

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While the planet continues to endure scorching, unprecedented temperatures, a 60-square-foot shipping container is serving as a testing ground for passive, sustainable cooling solutions. As detailed in a new study published in the research journal Energies, an engineering team at Washington State University is utilizing the space to find and improve upon ancient cooling methods that don’t generate any forms of greenhouse gas—including water evaporation atop repurposed wind towers.

Buildings require roughly 60 percent of the entire world’s electricity, almost 20 percent of which is annually earmarked to keep those structures cool and comfortable. As society contends with climate change’s most ravaging effects, air conditioning systems’ requirements are only expected to rise in the coming years—potentially generating a feedback loop that could exacerbate carbon emission levels. Finding green ways to lower businesses’ and homes’ internal temperatures will therefore need solutions other than simply boosting wasteful AC units.

[Related: Moondust could chill out our overheated Earth, some scientists predict.]

This is especially vital as rising global populations require new construction, particularly within the developing world. According to Omar Al-Hassawi, lead author and assistant professor in WSU’s School of Design and Construction, this push will be a major issue if designers continue to rely on mechanical systems—such as traditional, electric AC units. “There’s going to be a lot more air conditioning that’s needed, especially with the population rise in the hotter regions of the world,” Al-Hassawi said in a statement.

“There might be [some] inclusion of mechanical systems, but how can we cool buildings to begin with—before relying on the mechanical systems?” he adds.

By retrofitting their shipping container test chamber with off-the-grid, solar powered battery storage, AL-Hassawi’s team can heat their chamber to upwards of 130 degrees Fahrenheit to test out their solutions while measuring factors such as air velocity, temperature, and humidity. The team is particularly focused on optimizing a passive cooling method involving large towers and evaporative cooling that dates as far back as 2,500 BCE in ancient Egypt. In these designs, moisture evaporates at the tower’s top, which turns into cool, heavier air that then sinks down to the habitable space below. In the team’s version, moisture could be generated via misting nozzles, shower heads, or simply water-soaked pads.

“It’s an older technology, but there’s been an attempt to innovate and use a mix of new and existing technologies to improve performance and the cooling capacity of these systems,” explained Al-Hassawi, who also envisions retrofitting smokestacks in older buildings to work as new cooling towers.

“That’s why research like this would really help,” he adds. “How can we address building design, revive some of these more ancient strategies, and include them in contemporary building construction? The test chamber becomes a platform to do this.”

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A massive cargo ship retrofitted with a pair of nearly 125-foot-tall “wing sails” has set out on its maiden voyage, potentially providing a new template for wind-powered ocean liners. Chartered by shipping firm Cargill, the Pyxis Ocean’s journey will take it from China to Brazil in a test of its two, rigid “WindWings” constructed from the same material as wind turbines. According to the BBC on Monday, the design harkening back to traditional boat propulsion methods could reduce the vessel’s lifetime emissions by as much as 30 percent.

Per an official announcement on August 21, Pyxis Ocean’s WindWings can save 1.5 tonnes of fuel per wing, per day. Combined with alternative fuel sources, that number could rise. During its estimated six week travels, the cargo ship’s sails will be closely monitored in the hopes of scaling the technology across both Cargill’s fleet, as well as the larger shipping industry. Speaking with BBC, one project collaborator estimated a ship using four such wings could save as much as 20 tonnes of CO2 every day.

[Related: These massive, wing-like ‘sails’ could add wind power to cargo ships.]

“Wind is a near marginal cost-free fuel and the opportunity for reducing emissions, alongside significant efficiency gains in vessel operating costs, is substantial,” explained John Cooper, CEO of project collaborator, BAR Technologies.

In addition to being a zero emission propulsion source, wind power is both a non-depleting resource as well as predictable. Such factors could prove extremely promising in an industry responsible for around 2-3 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions—around 837 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Less than 100 cargo ships currently utilize some form of wind-assisted technology, a fraction of the over 110,000 operational vessels throughout the world. Depending on Pyxis Ocean’s performance, the massive WindWings could help spur increased green tech retrofitting, as well as new builds already coming equipped with the proper systems.

Elsewhere, similar wind-based vessel projects are already underway. Earlier this year, the Swedish company Oceanbird began construction on a set of 40-meter high, 200 metric ton sails to be retrofitted on the 14-year-old car carrier, Wallenius Tirranna. According to the trade publication Offshore Energy, one of Oceanbird’s sails could cut down emissions by 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel per year.

“The maritime industry is on a journey to decarbonize—it’s not an easy one, but it is an exciting one,” said Jan Bieleman, president of Cargill’s ocean transportation business.

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On Earth Day last year, President Joe Biden called for the inventory, restoration, and conservation of mature and old-growth forests on federal, state, Tribal, and private lands. Forests are important in enhancing resilience to climate change, but they are also vulnerable to its impacts. The wildfires in 2020 and 2021 alone increased reforestation needs by over 1.5 million acres, highlighting how crucial it is to develop a plan to restore forests on a major scale.

In accordance with Executive Order 14072, agency-specific reforestation targets totaling over 2.3 million acres by 2030 were set on federally managed lands. There is also a goal to plant more than a billion trees over the next decade. However, a significant factor may stand in the way of these ambitious planting and restoration goals—the massive undersupply of seedlings.

Tree nurseries lack seedling availability and diversity

According to a recent study published in Bioscience, local tree nurseries lack the seedling availability and diversity needed to meet these lofty environmental goals. Authors from different institutions, including universities, US Forest Service research stations, and local departments of natural resources, analyzed more than 600 plant nurseries across twenty northern states and found that only 56 of them grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation. 

[Related: What successful forest restoration looks like.]

This scarcity is a product of several factors, like how few forest nurseries exist, says author Peter W. Clark, a postdoctoral associate in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Many state and federal nurseries have closed due to the inability to cover costs through nursery sales.

“The US Forest Service used to maintain 59 federally funded nurseries, but now there are only six, with only one serving the entire 20-state region we examined,” says Clark. Although private nurseries play a key role in supporting the market, publicly-funded nurseries produce important species for conservation and restoration purposes, he adds.

A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change identified 26 million hectares of natural and agricultural lands with reforestation potential across the contiguous US. The authors reported that reforesting this area by 2040 with 30 billion trees would require a 2.3-fold increase in current nursery production levels of 1.3 billion seedlings per year. In short, the number of tree seedlings produced each year must increase by 1.7 billion.

“Much research has emphasized that the volume of seedlings produced in US nurseries is far too low to meet reforestation targets,” says Clark. “We support these findings but add the finer point in that the types of seedlings are highly homogenous.”

He adds that nurseries operate in a free-market economy and tend to favor species that are more economically viable for sales—think conifer species for commercial timber purposes. It’s risky to maintain a broad inventory of diverse species that might not sell, especially since seedlings take one to five years to grow to be ready for resale. However, this dismisses the vast diversity of tree species needed to meet other ecological targets like carbon mitigation, ecosystem restoration, or assisted migration.

In the aforementioned Bioscience study, the authors found that commercially valuable tree species were commonly available, but the majority of other species were challenging to source and produced in low numbers. For instance, only two out of 56 nurseries sold red spruce, a culturally and ecologically important tree species in need of restoration, says Clark. About 800 seedlings were available for purchase, which can only reforest one to two acres. 

Limited seed sources or genetic diversity among the species is also an issue. “Even for northern red oak or eastern white pine, two of the most commonly propagated commercial tree species in the region, we found that seed was collected from less than one third of the available seed collection zones,” says Clark. “In other words, just a few trees were contributing to the genetic diversity of all nursery grown seedlings.”

Federal investment and workforce development can boost public tree nurseries and seed collection efforts

The federal government has invested $35 million to rehabilitate the aging National Forest System nursery and seed infrastructure, putting another $10 million to support state and Tribal nurseries and fund native seed partnerships. However, Clark says more public investment like grants, loans, and cost-share programs will be needed to expand forest nurseries and address the growing reforestation backlog. Funding to support research on producing species and genotypes that are better capable of withstanding the effects of climate change is also needed, he adds.

Seedling inventories often favor commercial species over the production of diverse, climate-adapted inventories because the former involves a lower financial risk, even though the latter has a higher reward in terms of ecological diversity, says Clark. “Although nurseries operate based on market demands, in the context of planting for global change, it may be better to simply invest in nurseries to supply seedlings just for the common good,” he adds. 

[Related: Tropical forests rebound on farm land blessedly fast.]

Increasing seed stock diversity is an important goal that requires increased seed storage capacity and a trained workforce of seed collectors, says Joe Fargione, science director at The Nature Conservancy. However, labor shortages and aging demographics among professionals in the field, like foresters, seed collectors, transport crews, and extractory staff, and nursery growers, are among the biggest limitations for scaling forest seed collection, says Clark.

To fill the skilled-labor gap and prevent the loss or degradation of institutional knowledge, recruiting new workers in these fields is necessary. “Funding and job-training programs may be needed to serve as economic drivers for job creation while potentially providing renewed access to nurseries in underserved areas,” he adds. Fargione says workforce development programs can ensure there are no bottlenecks in the supply chain.

Nurseries also need to ensure high-quality records of seed origin are readily obtainable for buyers so they can identify its adaptation potential under rapidly changing climatic conditions, says Clark. Forest trees are adapted to different climatic conditions, and they must be matched to the conditions of their reforestation or restoration sites. Developing a national seed-labeling standard and database with high-resolution records of source collections, such as latitude, longitude, and elevation, would improve seedlot selection, he adds. The Department of Agriculture currently has a Seedlot Selection Tool, but it is limited to the western US, Canada, and Mexico.

“By planting with an eye on diverse ecosystem functions, cultural needs, and climate adaptability,” says Clark, “we can meet multiple objectives that result in more resilient future forests capable of withstanding a greater degree of uncertain future conditions.”

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It’s relatively easy to collect water via harvesting fog—in fact, only a few square meters of meshing can collect upwards of several hundred liters of liquid per day. In many cities, however, these reservoirs of water are often contaminated by atmospheric pollution, thus rendering them unfit for cooking or drinking. 

Instead of relying on additional, and in many cases costly, cleaning methods, researchers recently considered the feasibility of an all-in-one fog moisture harvester and purifier. What resulted is an extremely promising, effective, and simple creation that not only offers users potable water, but potentially could clean up power plants’ steam emissions.

As detailed on August 16 in Nature Sustainability, a team of scientists has designed a closely knit metal lattice coated with a mix of polymers and titanium dioxide. The slick polymer component ensures water droplets can quickly collect and trickle down the net, while the titanium dioxide serves as a chemical catalyst to break down organic pollutant molecules.

[Related: Urban water crises often boil down to classism.]

To test out their design, the team artificially generated fog within a laboratory in Zurich which housed the new meshing. According to their measurements, their installation collected 8 percent of the ambient air’s moisture, while the titanium dioxide neutralized roughly 94 percent of added organic compounds. These extra pollutant molecules included both diesel droplets, as well as bisphenol A (BPA), a hormonally active agent most commonly found in everyday plastics.

“Our system not only harvests fog but also treats the harvested water, meaning it can be used in areas with atmospheric pollution, such as densely populated urban centers,” Ritwick Ghosh, an interdisciplinary social scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and one of the project’s researchers, said in a statement.

As an added bonus, the technology requires ostensibly zero maintenance or artificial power source. Instead, UV light reactivates the titanium oxide in a process known as photocatalytic memory. According to researchers, approximately 30 minutes of exposure to sunlight is enough to keep the titanium oxide activated for a full 24 hours—an important time ratio, given areas of extreme fog (unsurprisingly) don’t experience much sunlight.

The team’s new mesh isn’t limited to smaller scale use—researchers, including project lead Thomas Schutzius, envision installing the technology in power plants’ cooling towers. “In the cooling towers, steam escapes up into the atmosphere. In the United States, where I live, we use a great deal of fresh water to cool power plants,” Schutzius explained. “It would make sense to capture some of this water before it escapes and ensure that it is pure in case you want to return it back to the environment.” The researchers’ design performed equally as well at both small settings, as well as within a pilot plant environment, implying both personal and large scale solutions are possible in the future.

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Some of the most expensive and difficult-to-source materials found in smartphone screens and solar cells may soon be phased out for a cheaper, exponentially more common substitute. This substitute isn’t a new find—it is actually most often associated with kitchen appliances and motorcycles.

Whenever a company’s fridge, tool, or other item is advertised as “stainless steel,” they have chromium to thank. Manufacturers have long valued the hard, shiny metal’s anticorrosive properties, and adding it into steel allows it to resist degradation and tarnishing. Meanwhile, electroplating a thin layer of chromium atop another metal produces what is commonly known as chrome plating—think Harley-Davidson motorcycles, or hot-rod cars. Chrome can reflect as much as 70 percent of visible spectrum light, as well as 90 percent of infrared radiation.

According to findings recently published in Nature Chemistry from a team at Switzerland’s University of Basel, carefully substituting chromium into catalysts and luminescent materials also works nearly as well as their traditional noble metal components, osmium and ruthenium, but for a fraction of the cost. What’s more, chromium is 20,000 times more common within the Earth’s crust than either noble meta—both of which are nearly as rare as gold or platinum.

[Related: Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite.]

As The Independent explained on August 14, the team first inserted chromium atoms next to hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen within a stiff molecular framework. In this array, chromium was much more reactive than its noble metal counterpoints, while simultaneously keeping energy loss at a minimum during molecular vibrations.

When irradiated by a red lamp, the chromium compound also stored energy within its molecules for potential later use, much like a plant’s photosynthesis. “Because of this, there’s also the potential to use our new materials in artificial photosynthesis to produce solar fuels,” Oliver Wenger, research lead and a professor within the University of Basel’s department of chemistry, said in a recent statement.

Although previous research into noble metal alternatives investigated the potential of using iron and copper to some success, chromium initially appears to perform much better than either option. That said, Wenger concedes that “it seems unclear which metal will ultimately win the race when it comes to future applications in luminescent materials and artificial photosynthesis.”

Going forward, Wenger’s team hopes to scale their research to be tested in other applications, which could allow molecules to glow across the color spectrum to include red, green, and blue hues. Additionally, optimizing its catalytic attributes could further push it towards a viable alternative material to use in solar power arrays.

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Investing in carbon capture technology will be necessary for a sustainable future, but environmental advocates frequently stress that this alone is not a cure-all for pollutants. The DOE, for example, estimates between 400 million and 1.8 billion tons of CO2 will need annual sequestration to meet the nation’s net-zero goal by 2050. Meanwhile, critics are concerned fossil fuel companies could use carbon capture projects as an excuse to continue with business-as-usual—and a recent announcement may do little to ease their worries.

Last week, the US Department of Energy announced up to $1.2 billion in funding for the nation’s first commercial-scale carbon capture facilities designed to pull harmful greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere for underground storage. The two locations near Corpus Christi, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, will be the largest direct air capture (DAC) plants ever constructed. The facilities are estimated to annually remove over 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere—roughly equivalent to taking 445,000 gas-guzzling cars off the road.

[Related: Carbon capture could keep global warming in check—here’s how it works.]

Unlike other carbon capture equipment that pulls CO2 directly from pollution-emitting machinery and facilities, DAC setups are specifically designed to offset gasses generated by vehicles and airplanes, as well as remove legacy emissions. As Ars Technica noted on Monday, legacy emissions are those already released into the atmosphere over the last century or so and still greatly contribute to the planet’s current eco crisis.

Carbon dioxide emissions that last anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years in the atmosphere often originate from the operations of corporations like Occidental, a hydrocarbon and petrochemical manufacturer long considered to be one of 100 companies responsible for an estimated 71 percent of global emissions. In 2020, Occidental (often referred to by its stock symbol abbreviation, Oxy) announced the formation of 1PointFive, a subsidiary tasked with developing carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies.

“1PointFive’s mission is to reduce atmospheric CO2 and help curb global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2050 in alignment with Paris Agreement targets,” reads Oxy’s fast facts sheet for the company.

And according to the Biden administration’s August 11 announcement, 1PointFive will help oversee the development and implementation of the new carbon capture facility in Kleberg County, Texas. When completed, the South Texas DAC Hub reportedly will remove upwards of 1 million metric tons of CO2 alongside an “associated saline geologic CO2 storage site.” While undoubtedly a positive development in carbon sequestration efforts, 1PointFive’s origins illustrate the complicated landscape governments and climate advocates must deal with in the face of such steep environmental stakes.

[Related: Judge sides with youth activists in groundbreaking climate change lawsuit.]

The DOE did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing. When asked to comment on Oxy’s role in the planet’s climate crisis, a spokesperson directed PopSci to two previous press releases—one from last week regarding the DOE announcement, and one from 2022 concerning 1PointFive’s early role in the project.

“We are one of the largest oil producers in the US,” reads Occidental’s description in each press release, adding that, “We are committed to using our global leadership in carbon management to advance a lower-carbon world.”

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The global commercial fishing industry is a major contributor to Earth’s environmental crises and ecological destruction, but you’re unlikely to find many sustainable or vegan seafood alternatives next to the synthetic beef and chicken in grocery stores. That lack of options may soon change, however, thanks to 3D printers, mung beans, and microalgae.

At the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting this week, a team from the National University of Singapore presented the results of a newly synthesized mock seafood that could one day find its way into restaurants. After designing an ink composed of legume and microalgae proteins, alongside plant-based oils containing omega-3 fatty acids, researchers loaded their paste into a food-grade 3D printer, which then churned out small, calamari-shaped rings. The team then tossed their faux-seafood into an air fryer, and taste-tested their results. According to researchers, the end product is showing incredible promise for a new, healthy alternative to commercial seafood options.

[Related: Scientists cooked up a 3D printed cheesecake.]

Although some fishy plant-based alternatives are available to consumers right now, they frequently do not boast the same nutritional content as seafood. “Plant-based seafood mimics are out there, but the ingredients don’t usually include protein,” explains principal investigator and professor of food science and technology, Dejian Huang. “We wanted to make protein-based products that are nutritionally equivalent to or better than real seafood and address food sustainability.”

To improve their imitations, Huang’s team programmed their 3D printer to assemble their imitation calamari rings in concentric layers, thus allowing for a combination of different textures ranging from fatty and smooth, to chewy. This layered approach results in a more accurate mouth feel to their squid source material.

But calamari alternatives are only as good as they are sustainable, of course. Luckily, Huang’s new mock seafood is designed specifically with that in mind: Microalgae is nutritious, often “fishy” in taste, and extremely sustainable to farm. Mung bean protein, meanwhile, can easily be harvested from the waste product of starch noodle manufacturing. Although Huang’s team still wants to improve their creation before they begin consumer taste tests, they believe the results are already a promising step towards green seafood alternatives.

For Poornima Vijayan, a graduate student involved in the project, it’s a vital end goal. “I think it’s imminent that the seafood supply could be very limited in the future,” she says. “We need to be prepared from an alternative protein point of view, especially here in Singapore, where over 90 percent of the fish is imported.”

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A new high-speed railway system inspired by Japanese bullet trains could someday carry commuters between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. Announced on Wednesday, the partnership between Amtrak and a company called Texas Central aims to connect the two cities by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph.

According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to “several federal grant programs” to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region’s I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year.

[Related: High-speed rail trains are stalled in the US—and that might not change for a while.]

The trains traveling Amtrak’s Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan’s updated N700S Series Shinkansen “bullet train,” a design that first debuted in 2020. Bullet trains have operated in Japan for over half a century, and are now completely electric, as well as lighter and quieter than traditional railcars. Additionally, the transportation method generates just one-sixth the amount of carbon-per-passenger mile than a standard commercial jet, according to Texas Central’s descriptions.

“This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US,” Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement.

[Related: A brief, buttery ride on Shanghai’s maglev train.]

American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation “in the right circumstances.” If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050. Similar high-speed projects are also in the works to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles (though no track has actually been installed yet), as well as another that hopes to connect LA and Las Vegas, although repeated setbacks have delayed such endeavors.

“The US is really a very auto-centric country,” Ian Rainey, a senior vice president at Northeast Maglev, told PopSci in 2022. “… If you can get that sweet spot of big populations that are 100 to 300 miles apart from each other, I think you’ve got a winner for high-speed rail.” 

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The path to fusion power is getting a $150 million boost thanks to a partnership between Colorado State University and private laser energy company, Marvel Fusion. Announced on Monday, the new facility will be located on the CSU Foothills Campus, and is set to feature at least three, multi-petawatt laser systems designed to advance research in “clean fusion energy, microelectronics, optics and photonics, materials science, medical imaging, and high energy density science.”

According to Marvel Fusion’s August 7 statement, the development of laser fusion “is critical because of its ability to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of how energy is supplied globally.” Nuclear fusion has long been considered the Holy Grail of clean energy generation—the necessary resources are virtually unlimited, and produces vastly larger amounts of energy compared to other green alternatives. Unlike the nuclear fission reactions seen in traditional nuclear power plants, fusion involves forcing atoms together within extremely high temperatures to produce a new atom with a smaller mass.

[Related: In 5 seconds, this fusion reactor made enough energy to power a home for a day.]

“This is an exciting opportunity for laser-based science, a dream facility for discovery and advanced technology development with great potential for societal impact,” said Jorge Rocca, director of CSU’s Laboratory for Advanced Lasers and Extreme Photonics, in this week’s announcement.

Although the CSU-Marvel Fusion project aims to begin operations in 2026, it is likely still many more years before nuclear fusion energy can affordably be produced at scale; some experts estimate it could take multiple decades to reach the goal, if ever.

Still, researchers have significant gains towards sustainable nuclear fusion energy. In 2021, for example, a team in the UK generated a record-breaking 59 megajoules of energy in only five seconds via fusion technology—enough to power a home for an entire day. Earlier this year, the US government also doled out a number of grants earmarked to reignite research into cold fusion.

[Related: Cold fusion is making a scientific comeback.]

The overall prospects are tantalizing enough that major companies are investing heavily in fusion research. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a power purchasing agreement with Helion, a startup hoping to achieve sustainable fusion by 2028. As ambitious as that may sound, Helion’s aspirations have garnered the interest of other investors—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who contributed $375 million to the company in 2021.

Alongside the new partnership project, Marvel Fusion is working towards the construction of a prototype composed of hundreds of laser systems “capable of achieving fusion ignition and proving the technology at scale.”

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Solar power is getting its literal and figurative moment in the sun as much of the world is beset by unprecedented, deadly heat waves—thus requiring reliable energy sources to help keep things cool. According to Reuters on Monday, European countries in particular are experiencing the benefits of the robust, rapidly growing green energy infrastructure.

On July 24, for example, Sicily’s stifling temperatures topped 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The region’s solar grid, however, ensured the cooling demands could be met via providing over half of the excess demand totaling around 1.3 GW, per data from financial and infrastructure data provider, Refinitiv. This reliability was bolstered by the major increase year-to-year in the amount of solar energy comprising Spain’s entire electricity output—up from just 16 percent in 2022 to nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy production this year, reports Reuters.

“Without the additional solar, the system stability impact would have turned out much worse,” said power analyst Nathalie Gerl.

That same day, Greece’s solar photovoltaic infrastructure covered roughly a third of the nation’s 10.35 GW demand. Meanwhile, solar power has handled the entirety of Belgium’s additional energy demands during midday spikes—typically the time when temperatures are at their highest.

[Related: July’s extreme heat waves ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change.]

The US has yet to reach such a solar stride. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistics and analysis group, solar generation composed just three percent of all US electricity in 2020. At this pace, the EIA estimates one-fifth of US energy will come from solar infrastructure by midcentury.

The Biden administration has loftier goals. In 2021, the Department of Energy’s Solar Futures Study indicated that solar energy has the potential to support 40 percent of US electricity consumption while employing roughly 1.5 million people, all without raising consumers’ electricity costs. Such aims are vital as dire climatic events become the new norm for vast portions of the globe.

Regardless, solar grids and their accompanying wind energy arrays grew at their fastest rate in US history last year, for a combined total of 13 percent of all the country’s power, according to USA Today. “Ten years ago that would have been unfathomable. Six years ago, people would have been incredulous,” Dan Whitten, vice president for public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said at the time.

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Germany’s state-owned, $85 million hydrogen fuel-cell powered train system is shuttering almost exactly one year after its first public debute in August 2022. This doesn’t mean that the railways are reverting back to pollutant-spewing diesel engines, however. According to the country’s Ministry for Economic Affairs, Transport, Building and Digitisation, the lines will transition to electric battery-driven systems that are simply “cheaper to operate.”

As Quartz noted on Monday, Germany’s LVNG railway company first started planning diesel train phaseways all the way back in 2012, and began testing hydrogen fuel-cell trains in 2018. For years, the transition process in the Lower Saxony region was plagued by delays and logistical issues, such as retrofitting existing trains with the proper hardware and software.

At the time of its official rollout in August 2022, Stephan Weil, Minister-President of Lower Saxony, declared the project to be a “role model worldwide [and] an excellent example of a successful transformation made in Lower Saxony.” Weil added that, “As a country of renewable energies, we are thus setting a milestone on the way to climate neutrality in the transport sector.” By the end of the year, however, a state-commissioned study determined that hydrogen trains could be as much as 80 percent more expensive than other electric options. Last week, LVNG finally pulled the plug on its hydrogen fuel-cell plans.

[Related: Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever.]

Germany is still moving aggressively to address these issues while also attempting to maintain its goal to phase out all diesel trains by 2037. By decade’s end, for example, Lower Saxony officials plan to introduce 102 battery-electric trains alongside another 27 lines powered by catenary systems—overhead electricity lines that allow for constant power.

It’s unclear if or how Germany’s shift in railway plans could affect the many other hydrogen fuel-cell train projects across the world. Last year, for example, California approved over two dozen hydrogen trains, while Italy earmarked €300 million ($330 million) to convert many of its diesel trains to hydrogen power.

Other travel industries are also still steadily pushing forward with their own hydrogen plans. Over the summer, two US-based startups have conducted successful test flights of prop airplanes retrofitted to partially run on hydrogen fuel-cells. According to a recent report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, such retrofitted planes could generate as much as one-third less CO2 over its lifetime compared to green alternatives such as “e-kerosene” composed of carbon dioxide, water, and electricity.

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The use of shared light, low-occupancy vehicles like bicycles and electric scooters (or e-scooters) is growing steadily in the United States and has become an essential part of urban transportation networks. Only 321,000 trips were recorded in 2010, rising to 112 million in 2021. These “micromobility” vehicles are typically designed to travel distances that are too short for driving but too far to walk. Almost 60 percent of all car trips in 2017 were less than six miles, which demonstrates the need for such micromobility solutions.

The rental of dockless e-scooter systems, in particular, emerged that same year and was operating in 65 cities in less than 12 months. Ride-sharing companies like Bird, Lime, and Superpedestrian make fleets of e-scooter available for users to rent for short periods through their respective apps. Because e-scooters have no tailpipe emissions and can replace short car trips, they are often the more eco-friendly mode of transportation. However, e-scooters still have environmental impacts that must be considered.

The sustainability of e-scooters

Giovanni Circella, director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program at the University of California, Davis, says that the use of e-scooters in US cities “tend to have somewhat positive effects in terms of environmental sustainability” by replacing the use of more polluting modes of transportation such as private cars and ride-hailing vehicles like Uber and Lyft.

In 2018, the Portland Bureau of Transportation launched a four-month pilot program to assess how e-scooters can help the city’s transportation needs. Data revealed that 34 percent of Portland riders and 48 percent of visitors took an e-scooter instead of driving a personal vehicle or taking an Uber, Lyft, or a taxi. 

[Related: Could swappable EV batteries replace charging stations?]

E-scooters can also promote a culture of active travel and “get the critical mass to justify investments in bike lanes and other infrastructure projects that support the use of active travel modes,” says Circella. However, shared e-scooters have mixed impacts, and they can also replace trips that would have otherwise been made by walking, bicycling, or taking public transportation, he adds.

Although the pilot program revealed that a number of users replaced motor vehicle travel with e-scooter sharing, “it also found that scooter-sharing replaced some lower emission active transportation trips,” says Susan Shaheen, co-director of Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Data shows that about 42 percent of Portlanders would have taken lower-emission trips if scooters weren’t an option: 37 percent said they would walk and 5 percent would’ve taken a bicycle. Moreover, the operations of the program—which involves the deployment and retrieval of e-scooters every day—likely added motor vehicle trips to the transportation system, but it is beyond the scope of the study.

It’s important to understand the overall impact of e-scooters beyond the trips they replace and consider other factors like manufacturing and longevity because results can vary based on the assumptions and scenarios modeled, says Shaheen.

A study presented at the 2020 IEEE European Technology and Engineering Management Summit analyzed the environmental impacts of e-scooters under different scenarios, changing different variables like the lifespan, kind of batteries, type of vehicle used to collect them, the average distance per lifetime, and more.

[Related: The pandemic could make cities more bike-friendly—for good.]

In the best case scenario, where e-scooters last 24 months and have a swappable battery that is replaced by riding in electric vans, e-scooter sharing has a lower environmental impact than private cars, electric mopeds, and public transport busses, but is still less sustainable than trams, bicycles, and electric bicycles. However, in the worst-case scenario where the lifespan of e-scooters is only six months, they would have the worst environmental impact out of all. 

A 2019 study published in Environmental Research Letters also reported that ensuring e-scooters are used for two years decreases the average life cycle emissions significantly.

Overall, shared e-scooters are most sustainable when they are replacing personalized individual transport, but it’s possible that they are also catalyzing trips that would not otherwise take place, says Parth Vaishnav, assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Therefore, local governments should think carefully about encouraging e-scooter use, where to deploy them, and whether there are more effective ways of providing mobility, he adds.

How to make shared e-scooter systems more sustainable

E-scooters are a relatively sustainable mode of transportation, but they can become even greener. Shaheen says the public and private sectors can support e-scooter sharing systems by establishing solar docking stations where practical, using clean or renewable energy sources to charge e-scooters, and using electric vehicles to help with the distribution of scooters would be beneficial.

Switching to electric vehicles for the rebalancing and charging of e-scooters and opting for renewable energy has the potential to reduce the amount of fossil fuel involved in its lifecycle and operations. Most e-scooter companies have yet to explore these options. In 2019, Spin ran a 60-day pilot program and deployed dozens of solar-powered docking stations in Washington D.C. and Ann Arbor, but it’s unclear what the results were.

“The use of pricing and incentives to impact pick-up and drop-off behavior could also help reduce the need to rebalance the scooter network,” says Shaheen. This goes along with the recommendation of the aforementioned 2019 study to reduce collection and distribution distance to minimize the environmental impacts of e-scooters. It also suggests using more efficient vehicles, increasing scooter lifetimes, and charging less frequently. 

[Related: General Motors wants to predict when battery fires might happen.]

Policies may also help reduce the environmental burdens of integrating e-scooters into the transportation system. For instance, allowing e-scooters to remain in public areas overnight can already minimize the trips required to pick up fully charged e-scooters. E-scooter misuse and mistreatment also reduce their lifespans, so implementing policies against these acts would be beneficial. Vaishnav recommends demanding suppliers to produce more durable scooters.

In general, shared dockless e-scooter systems do increase mobility in cities for a number of people and have the potential to reduce emissions in the transportation industry. Concrete steps like ensuring a longer lifespan, switching to renewable energy for charging, and using electric vehicles to pick up and drop off e-scooters would help make them even more sustainable.

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On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family—many with RV garages—orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way. 

As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own. Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to keeping ornamental grass, lawns and golf courses lush in an arid region where water supplies are dwindling every day. Within a decade, and without immediate action to conserve, local officials predict that its water shortage will become a water crisis.

Utah is notorious for granting an unusual degree of grace to this sort of profligate water use. That may be changing, however, at least when it comes to the golf industry: In 2022, the city of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, effectively banned the construction of new golf courses, while early this year, state Rep. Douglas Welton, R, introduced House Bill 188, which could require golf courses to be more transparent about how much water they use.

In a city and at a time where something’s gotta give, will golf be the first to fall?

Minutes down the road from the Green Springs community, at the Dixie Red Hills Golf Course, I joined a group of older players staging behind the first tee. Before we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the rough that his friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t help but admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt said. Soon, the chatter moved to water. “When I was in Mexico, there was only enough water for three flushes. That could happen to us if we don’t pay attention,” Felt said. While Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d rather give up golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the rest of the community is so inclined. “This is a place where a lot of people do a lot of golfing,” Greg Milne said, gesturing toward the sprawl of St. George.   

“That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area.” 

This area’s mingling of desert and water has long attracted people. Southern Paiute bands lived near the Virgin River for a millennium or more before Mormon colonists arrived in the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the next century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little community off the I-15 that people would pass by on their way to California,” said Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for the city of St. George. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats test range blew radioactive dust onto the homes of the city’s 5,000 residents—dust that stubbornly clung to the valley’s reputation.

But in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area,” said Cowan. Since then, golf’s role in the regional recreation economy has burgeoned. The 14 golf courses in Washington County, including four owned by the city of St. George, attract nearly 600,000 visitors a year, generating $130 million dollars annually, according to Cowan. That puts golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in the area, though still below the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.

And, like those other industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water needs came under fire in Washington County in 2021 and again in the state Legislature this January, the industry flexed its influence. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Association, pulled strings at the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, killing the bill even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly targeted the sport. 

Generally, the golf industry tries to burnish its image by touting its economic benefits and highlighting its efforts to decrease water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the executive director at the Utah Section Professional Golf Association, said in a call with High Country News. “What the sport brings economic-wise is the story we want to tell.” In practice, those changes have come down to encouraging course operators to replace some turf with native plants. Other technologies, like soil-moisture monitoring and artificial grass coloring, which gives turf a deep green appearance with minimal watering, are being adopted, though strictly on a voluntary basis. Dehlin said his organization does not track how widespread these changes are.

Of the ten thirstiest golf courses in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned courses, including Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Club, actually increased their water use between 2018 and 2022. The mercury tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit here more than 50 days each year, so it takes an exorbitant amount of water to keep the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons annually for each course, or roughly eight times the national average. And if the region continues to grow at its current breakneck rate, existing water supplies—from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will be severely strained. That prospect has some local and state officials backing a proposed pipeline that would carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this corner of the Utah desert. With or without the pipeline, the region is likely to face severe water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan could require cities to cut their water use by up to 30 percent in a worst-case scenario. “And if you look about where they would cut their water usage,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District Manager Zach Renstrom, “it really would come to large grassy areas, such as golf.”

In a bid to avoid future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to reduce its water use now. Under Renstrom’s guidance, the city passed sweeping conservation ordinances early this year—the toughest in Utah, but still mild compared to those in Las Vegas. Three of the four city-owned golf courses now use treated wastewater for irrigation rather than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for the majority of its courses by 2008. Cowan said the city-owned courses are beginning to remove ornamental grass from non-play areas. So far this year, the county has removed more than 264,000 square feet of grass. While that may sound like a lot, it’s only about six acres across the entire county, or roughly 4 percent of one local golf course. Even with those measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah need to end: “I’ve had a couple of developers come to me recently and want to talk about golf courses, and I flat-out said, ‘I won’t provide the water.’”

For now, though, the county still has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all while stashing almost two years of reserves in a network of reservoirs. “We have a lot of water stored away,” said Ed Andrechak, water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation rules that Las Vegas has, he believes it could grow at the blistering pace it’s projected to over the coming years.

But Andrechak worries that, ultimately, a culture of profligacy will be the barrier to conservation, not money or technical know-how: “We just don’t think water rules apply to us here,” he said. Andrechak cataloged a number of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river under construction at the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Color community, which built around an artificial lake that Andrechak described as a “giant evapo-pond”; another three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing complex in Hurricane, and perhaps most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park will require 5 million gallons or more of culinary-grade drinking water annually for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a toilet bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hollow golf course next door gulps up 60 times as much water. “We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it,” Andrechak said. “That’s the culture.”

“We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it.”

This culture is enabled and even nurtured by policy: St. George’s water rates are among the lowest in the West, which results in bigger profits for course operators and more affordable green fees, but also disincentivizes conservation. “The whole idea has been to have low (water) rates to take care of the citizens by making golf affordable,” said Dehlin. “Having affordable water is important for the growth of the game and to keep our facilities in the conditions that we do. And that’s one thing about golf courses in Utah in general: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin said. “And yes, well-irrigated.” 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable. 

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It was the face that launched a thousand plastic straw bans. 

The video begins with a close up of the turtle’s head, its dark green, pebbled skin out of place against the stark-white boat deck. Robinson’s hands approach, moving the pliers toward the turtle’s nostril. The tool clamps down on the edge of something—A barnacle? A worm?—barely visible within the dark tunnel. The creature squirms and dribbles blood as the pulling begins. A long, thin object begins to emerge, inch by excruciating inch.

It was August 10, 2015, and marine conservation biologist Christine Figgener was collecting data for her Ph.D. a few miles off the coast of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She and a colleague, Nathan Robinson, were researching olive ridley sea turtles when they noticed a male had something encrusted in its nose. The pair decided to try to extract the object. Robinson flipped open his Swiss army knife’s pliers and Figgener grabbed her phone and began to film. 

“We had no idea what we were frigging looking at,” Figgener said in a newer, annotated version of the video. It wasn’t until one of the researchers cut off a piece of the object that they realized what it was: a four-inch piece of plastic straw.

“We couldn’t believe that such a mundane object that we really use on a daily basis … that we found it in the turtle’s nose,” she said—“that a tiny object caused so much suffering.”

When Figgener uploaded the turtle straw video to her YouTube account eight years ago, it went viral. For a few years, plastic straws were the trendy rallying cry for sustainability. In many ways, the campaign was a success story — one that elevated our awareness of single-use plastics to the point where it resulted in actual policy change. But upon reflection, not all the solutions that spun out of the anti-straw movement actually held water. In recent years, many environmental pundits have focused on the movement’s shortcomings. 

To many environmentalists fighting plastic pollution, anti-straw advocacy now feels passé—out of touch with the broader need to address all forms of single-use plastic. But the movement’s rise and fall still holds lessons for the activists of today. 

From soda bottles to yogurt containers, there is a lot of plastic pollution out there. So how did we end up so obsessed with straws?

The anti-plastic straw movement didn’t actually originate with Figgener’s turtle video. Back in 2011, a 9-year-old named Milo Cress found it odd that the restaurants he would go to with his mom in Burlington, Vermont, would automatically serve drinks with a straw, whether or not their customer wanted one. He approached the owner of Leunig’s Bistro and Café in Burlington, and eventually, Leunig’s became one of the first establishments in the country to ask customers whether they wanted a straw or not.

Eventually, Cress and his mom made some calls to straw manufacturers and estimated that 500 million straws are used and discarded by people in the U.S. every day. The environmental advocacy group Eco-Cycle published Cress’s findings, which in the years since have been cited by nearly every major news media outlet that has covered the plastic straw beat, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. (The credibility of that figure has since been questioned, with market research firms determining the figure to be between 170 million and 390 million a day.)

But the turtle video added just the right amount of injury to plastic insult. Figgener’s viral footage helped stir single-use plastic outrage into a frenzy. Celebrities called on their followers to #stopsucking, a social media campaign that aimed to “turn the plastic straw into environment enemy number one.” 

Thousands of restaurants joined the pledge and the idea took off, reaching the rare environmental threshold of actual policy change. In 2018, Seattle became the first big city in the United States to ban plastic straws. It was followed shortly by other major municipalities in California, New Jersey, Florida, and other states. That same year, companies including Starbucks and American Airlines jumped on the anti-straw bandwagon, the former announcing it would launch a new “sippy” lid for its cold beverages starting in 2020, allegedly diverting more than 1 billion straws per year.

But for all its success in getting people riled up about plastic pollution, much of that outrage seemed limited to, well, straws, which only make up a small part of the single-use problem. National Geographic calculated that of the 8 million tons of plastic deposited into the world’s oceans each year, only 0.025 percent is comprised of plastic straws. 

Some anti-plastic advocates began denouncing the straw bans as “slacktivism,” a type of activism characterized by a lack of commitment or effort. They said the bans gave people an overblown sense that they were making a difference in combating the plastics crisis. For example, anti-straw pledges didn’t seem as concerned with other types of plastic waste or the fossil fuels associated with every part of their life cycle. Even the anti-straw Starbucks sippy lids were actually made from polypropylene, a type of plastic that has a 3 percent recycling rate in the U.S. (The company claimed it was still an improvement, as the new lids could potentially be recycled. Plastic straws are too lightweight and thin to make it through the mechanical recycling sorting process.)

The anti-plastic straw movement also started getting pushback from disability advocates, who pointed out that some people need flexible straws to be able to drink liquids. Paper straws get soggy and fall apart more quickly, reusable straws made of metal are not easy to bend, and silicone straws are difficult to clean.

For the average consumer, functionality is often more important than sustainability, said Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator and consultant. “Our brains favor habits because they conserve energy. So if we are going against the current—a BYO straw for example—it’s hard for most people to do so unless highly motivated.” 

For restaurants that chose to continue to provide disposable straws, there were options beyond paper or plastic. Straws made with natural materials such as sugarcane and wheat are 100 percent biodegradable, but are inflexible and cost more to manufacture. As a result, many businesses looked to straws made from bioplastics — allegedly compostable plastics made from corn, sugarcane, agave, and other nonpetroleum sources. But according to Brandon Leeds, co-founder of SOFi Paper Products, bioplastics require specific disposal and processing methods, many of which aren’t always followed or clearly outlined, in order for them to decompose effectively. 

“Many businesses desire to adopt sustainable practices, and when they encounter these plastic-like alternatives, they may mistakenly believe that they can be environmentally conscious without truly moving away from the plastic aesthetic,” Leeds said. “The absence of stricter governmental regulations allows companies to take advantage of greenwashing tactics, making it difficult to differentiate genuinely sustainable options from those that are not.”

Buying into greenwashing, a term that refers to environmental “solutions” whose appeal is based on appearing environmentally friendly rather than actually being so, “can be an unconscious psychological defense in individuals to shield them from the fear and overwhelming [feeling] of climate change,” Davenport said. “There can be an unexamined story of ‘I’m doing my part’ because it is more soothing than feeling out of control with the harmful and terrifying trajectory we are on with climate change.”

Plastic straw bans are alive and well today, with new proposals still cropping up at the state and city levels. But eliminating plastic straws is no longer the go-to goal of the anti-plastic movement. Part of that is the result of the existing bans’ success: For many consumers, the absence of plastic straws has become normal, even mundane. Now, anti-plastic advocates hope to harness in new ways the outrage they once inspired. 

According to Jackie Nuñez, the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s advocacy and engagement manager and the founder of The Last Plastic Straw, the anti-plastic straw movement helped advance awareness and understanding of other single-use products. California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have all placed some form of ban on plastic bags. The U.S. Interior Department stated that single-use plastic products will be phased out of national parks and around 480 million acres of federal land by 2032. In 2022, the Canadian federal government implemented a single-use plastics ban that included bags, cutlery, food service ware, and stir sticks.

It’s not really the item, it’s the material that’s the problem, Nuñez said. “All plastic pollution is by design.” 

Some activists have attempted to call attention to the scourge of single-use plastics by staging ‘plastic attacks,’ in which protesters head to the grocery store and proceed to remove the plastic wrapping from the food in their carts and return the waste to the store. Since they began in 2018, the strategy has gone global. Plastic attacks have been reported in places including in Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Peru, and the United States. Some of the biggest demonstrations have drawn hundreds of participants.

The anti-plastic straw movement “triggered a lightbulb moment for a lot of people,” Nuñez said. “It ended up becoming a thing I call a gateway issue.”

The post Did plastic straw bans work? Yes, but not in the way you’d think. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Despite only recently taking to the skies, hydrogen-powered planes are already assuaging some skeptics about their role within a more sustainable airline industry. And while current prototypes won’t be making transoceanic flights anytime soon, their proofs-of-concept could guide better, more efficient, and larger craft in the years to come.

As Canary Media highlighted on August 2, two California-based startups’ have recently run multiple successful test flights for their experimental hydrogen gas fuel cell propeller planes. Both prototypes involve retrofitting existing turboprops to accommodate hydrogen fuel technology, albeit in slightly different ways to achieve different goals.

Universal Hydrogen’s 40-passenger Dash 8 prototype, for example, pairs an original jet fuel engine alongside a 1.2 megawatt fuel cell and 800-kilowatt electric motor. According to the company’s CTO Mark Cousin, the Dash 8 has successfully flown a total of nine times as high as 10,000 feet while at speeds upwards of 170 knots (195 mph). Meanwhile, ZeroAvia’s modified 19-seat Dornier 228 has flown 10 times at 5,000 feet while traveling at 150 knots without any issues. The company’s twin-engine turboprop includes one standard fuel setup, as well as a 600 kilowatt combination of hydrogen fuel cells and batteries.

[Related: This plane powered by hydrogen has made an electrifying first flight.]

Air travel has steadily rebounded following countries’ easing of COVID-19 lockdown precautions. While the numbers still aren’t pre-pandemic levels, they are expected to surpass them by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). All those additional planes in the sky come with carbon emissions—roughly 800 metric tonnes of it, as of last year. In order to ensure a sustainable future, the IEA estimates that nations need to keep those CO2 levels below 1000 metric tonnes through the decade’s end. Unfortunately, the organization currently deems the airline industry “not on track” to achieving the goal.

For years, industry experts largely agreed that hydrogen fuel airplanes simply weren’t economically or logistically viable, given issues such as hydrogen canisters’ space requirements and their overall power outputs. Over time, however, both Universal Hydrogen and ZeroAvia intend to transition to liquid hydrogen, which packs more of a punch while also taking up less canister space.

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test.]

Given the current technological landscape, flights that can completely run on hydrogen will still likely be restricted to shorter distance journeys, but that could still put a major dent in airline emissions. According to a new report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, even a retrofitted fuel-cell plane could generate one-third less CO2 over its entire lifetime compared to even “e-kerosene,” i.e. fuel made from water, carbon dioxide, and electricity.

“The question of how to create sustainable air travel has plagued the green movement for decades,” Dale Vince, an environmental entrepreneur planning to utilize ZeroAvia’s engine for passenger flights between England and Scotland, told the BBC in July. “The desire to travel is deeply etched into the human spirit, and flights free of C02 emissions, powered by renewable energy will allow us to explore our incredible world without harming it for the first time.”

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When you need a new piece of furniture, the first instinct may be to go to hit up IKEA. But buying secondhand is a sustainable, affordable, and stylish option. Not only will you keep used furniture from going to a landfill, but you’ll also save the resources and energy required to manufacture a new one. About 12.1 million tons of furniture and furnishings municipal solid waste were generated in 2018. 

Before going ahead with your thrift store or flea market purchase, make sure to scrutinize it for structural damage, repairability, and any future upgrades you may have in mind. After all, you want to go home with a piece of furniture that won’t require immediate replacement.

Check for signs of structural damage

When buying secondhand furniture, the first thing to do is to check for any damages. Ensure that its parts aren’t falling apart, it’s still functional, and can support adequate weight. 

Conducting a thorough check helps ensure that you don’t end up with a good-looking item that doesn’t serve its purpose anymore, says Jerri Hobdy, furniture designer and founder of MENO, a design studio and showroom in Denver. The feeling of being stuck with an item and wanting to get rid of it is “a slippery slope to the piece ending up curbside and eventually in a landfill,” she adds.

[Related: Host a sustainable affair with these environmentally-friendly tips.]

For example, if you’re buying a cabinet or a dresser, check if all the drawers open properly. Test the handles to ensure they’re not falling off. When it comes to arm chairs or couches, make sure there are no missing legs or broken springs, and that the piece can comfortably hold your weight. Try leaning on tables from different sides to see if it’s uneven. In fabric-covered pieces like sofas and chairs, inspect dark corners and run any card through the creases on the surface to check for bed bugs or their eggs.

If you love a piece but find some issues with it, consider whether the repairs required are easy enough and not too costly. Checking for damage seems obvious, but “sometimes the allure of a unique or on-trend find can distract us from how we actually will interact with the piece everyday,” says Hobdy.

Know what the furniture is made of

Proper furniture care prevents materials from weathering prematurely and maintains aesthetic qualities, allowing it to be passed on for decades, says Hodby. If you want your secondhand finds to last, you need to know exactly what it’s made of. Otherwise, you might not know how to take care of it properly, which can affect its lifespan. 

For instance, avoid using harsh chemicals like ammonia-based cleaners on wood veneer furniture because they can damage the finish beyond repair. When cleaning stains in a microfiber upholstery, use rubbing alcohol instead of water to avoid dried watermarks and spots.

Knowing the exact material is one of the challenges in buying furniture because there aren’t always material content tags like those you see on clothing, says Hobdy. “Most consumers don’t have visibility to a true materials breakdown even when purchasing new furniture, so it becomes more difficult to find out material details secondhand,” she adds.

Ask the retailer first if they have an idea about the material of the furniture you’re purchasing. You can also look it up online to try and look for more information about its material makeup. By scrutinizing furniture more closely, you can even set apart real materials from fake ones. Unlike fake and bonded leather, genuine leather has natural hide markings and the surface pattern isn’t completely uniform or repetitive. Meanwhile, solid wood tends to have carved detailing and a varied grain pattern, which you won’t see in laminate wood or wood veneer.

Durable materials that age well, like real wood and leather, are essential if you’re planning on treasuring a piece of furniture for years to come, says Deana McDonagh, empathic design research strategist and professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Assess its repairability

Repairability is an extremely important attribute of furniture, both in old and newly manufactured pieces, says Hobdy. If a piece of furniture is easy to repair, that means you won’t have to throw the entire thing away even if something breaks.

“The greatest opportunity to reduce waste in the furniture industry lies in creating more circular products and life cycles to help keep whole pieces out of landfills,” says Hobdy. “The more accessible a piece is to repair, the more likely that repair will happen, and the less likely an item is to become waste.”

To assess if a piece of furniture is repairable, check its material, finishing, fabrics, and components. The tools, labor, and specialty materials needed to repair furniture are often overlooked, says Hobdy. Solid wood and real leather are usually repairable.

[Related: Bendy, eco-friendly wooden walls were inspired by guitar curves.]

On the other hand, faux leather isn’t very repairable, and fixes to improve peeling and cracking don’t usually last. Broken strands of rattan can be fixed, but it might take some work or a specialist’s expertise. Knobs and handles from old dressers may be tricky to repair or replace, so check them well and see if matching a handle with existing screw holes will be relatively easy. 

Have a clear vision

Aside from checking the quality of materials and manufacture of the secondhand furniture, you should also think about how it will fit into your existing home environment, says McDonagh.

If a piece of furniture catches your eye but you’re not certain how it will fit in your current space or whether it will serve any real purpose, it might be best to hold off from buying. Be intentional with your purchase to ensure that the secondhand furniture—or an existing piece in your home—will not be thrown away needlessly.

McDonagh says you must also consider foreseeable events, like if you’re planning to adopt a pet, have a baby on the way, or are about to move soon. These factors would help you decide if a piece of furniture is a good fit for your lifestyle. If it is, then it would likely be in use for a long time.

“If you look after your furniture, your furniture will look after you,” says McDonagh. “Always treat your furniture as a part of your family. After all, it is looking after you 24 hours a day.”

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After over a century of illumination, incandescent light bulbs’ impact on American life is finally dimming. On August 1, a long-planned ban on most old-fashioned filament bulbs went into effect as part of regulators’ ongoing efforts to transition society towards a greener, sustainable future. Going forward, the vast majority of light bulbs must produce at least 45 lumens (a measure of brightness) per watt of electricity. Almost all filament options aren’t up to the task, meaning consumers will continue upgrading to far more energy-saving LED products.

There are a few exceptions to the new rule—mainly for items such as bug lights, ovens, and other home appliances. According to the Department of Energy, Americans are estimated to save over $3 billion on utility bills thanks to incandescent bulbs’ retirement. The new standards are also expected to reduce US carbon emissions by as much as 222 million metric tons over the next three decades—almost as much as 28 million homes generate every year. Apart from their energy conservation, LED bulbs also last between 25 and 50 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, dramatically reducing the amount of physical trash generated from lighting.

[Related: How bad are incandescent light bulbs for the environment?]

Congress first approved the years’ long industry shift in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration. In 2012, the plan’s first phase went into effect, requiring all new bulbs to use 28 percent less energy than existing incandescent options. The second phase was originally scheduled to begin in 2020, but was sidelined by the Trump administration as part of its over 100 environmental regulation rollbacks.

At this point, however, incandescent lighting’s phaseout is more symbolic than anything else—as The New York Times reported on Tuesday, most manufacturers and retailers have been cutting inefficient products for years in anticipation of the new efficiency standards. Meanwhile, LED bulbs have rapidly risen in popularity as their costs drop precipitously. According to the DOE’s most recent Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), almost half of all US homes now use LED products for most or all indoor lighting—a stark increase from just 4 percent of house owners in 2015. Meanwhile, incandescent and halogen bulb usage almost halved between 2015 and 2020 from 31 percent to just 15 percent. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) estimates that only a fifth of light bulb sales were incandescent products as of last year.

America’s lighting shift is long overdue, according to environmentalists. Europe enacted its own incandescent ban over a decade ago in 2012, and aims to kill off potentially toxic fluorescent lights as early as next month.

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A UK-based telecom giant is currently overseeing a massive logistical campaign to decommission its copper-based broadband and phone lines in favor of fiber connections. Doing so, however, will render its estimated 90,000 hefty streetside equipment cabinets obsolete. But instead of simply chucking the large housing units to the curb, the company hopes to upcycle the majority of them to help Britain’s ongoing transition to a greener future.

According to a recent announcement from BT Group, the telecom provider intends to retrofit as many as 60,000 of its ubiquitous, green broadband wiring containers into EV chargers in the coming years. Beginning next month, BT will conduct a slate of technical and commercial tests starting in Northern Ireland, with plans to expand to public trials by the end of the year.

[Related: 8.3 million places in the US still lack broadband internet access.]

“With the ban on sales of internal combustion engine vehicles coming in 2030, and with only around 45,000 public charge points today, the UK needs a massive upgrade to meet the needs of the EV revolution,” Tom Guy, managing director of BT’s innovation department, said in a statement. “The pilots are critical for the team to work through the assessment and establish effective technical, commercial and operational routes to market over the next two years.”

Although UK’s existing streetside EV chargers can be found across the country, the majority are concentrated in urban areas such as London and Birmingham. Last year, the government earmarked roughly £1.6 billion ($2.6 billion) to install at least 235,000 more strategically placed charge points by the decade’s end, although it is currently unclear if any of that funding will reach BT’s project. On BT’s end, there are still many factors to consider for such a sizable undertaking, including accessibility, cabinet locations, local engagement in planning, and funding options.

[Related: Volvo is the latest automaker to hop on the Tesla EV-charging bandwagon.]

As The Next Web notes, however, recent governmental analysis estimates the country is “10 years behind” its intended green energy infrastructure goals, with less than 40 percent of its emissions reductions supported by “proven policies and sufficient funding.” That said, it has made major strides in areas such as reducing reliance on coal—from 40 percent of all energy production in 2012 to just two percent in 2022.

BT’s announcement hopefully will be the first of many similar private company projects aimed at boosting the UK’s green energy transition. “Programs like BT Group’s are an incentive for other businesses and drivers to go electric,” Helen Clarkson, CEO at the non-profit Climate Group, told The Next Web at the time. “But we need the UK government to play its part.”

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Hannah Czerwinski’s office desk isn’t decorated like most. Between pictures of her baby and papers rest vials of perfectly clean, bright white bones. 

“This is Dougie,” she says, holding up a tiny glass jar of bearded dragon remnants. 

Dougie is just one of many dead animals in Czerwinski’s office. Her shelves are lined with glass jars of sharp canine and cat teeth, fine powdery ground-up bones, and even delicate bat bones. They’ve all been picked clean as if their bodies had been scavenged by vultures and then bleached like a sand dollar. They look like they could turn to dust from one touch. 

Czerwinski is one of around 20 employees at Bio-Response Solutions, the leading manufacturer of alkaline hydrolysis equipment worldwide. This equipment is used to reduce deceased humans and animals to liquid and ash, a method that is less energy intensive and polluting than cremation. The company is not an active funeral home and legally can’t process humans, but it does use deceased animals to show potential buyers how the equipment works. When her lizard companion passed away a few years ago, Czerwinski knew what to do. After he died, Dougie’s body was placed in one of Bio-Response’s pet systems and turned into liquid until all that remained were the bones that sit next to Czerwinski’s computer. 

Tucked away in an industrial park 40 minutes outside of Indianapolis, Bio-Response is the world’s biggest manufacturer of machines that liquefy bodies with water. They ship about 100 chambers each year across the globe—a mixture of pet and human machines—to provide a more sustainable, less fuel-intensive alternative to cremation. 

This process may sound macabre, but it’s not brand new. It is, however, becoming more attractive as people search for more environmentally sound death options. Alkaline hydrolysis, which Bio-Response calls aquamation, is just one in a growing list of options for consumers concerned about how their funerals may impact the environment. Other options include eco-burials, body composting, and mushroom mycelium suits. And while alkaline hydrolysis may not be talked about as frequently as the other, it’s legal in far more places, including about half of all US states for humans. 

The steps are a bit different for animals like Dougie. While the human machines can only treat one body at a time, in the pet machines, multiple small bodies can be treated simultaneously because the animals are separated by metal walls, so their bones don’t get mixed up. The machine is then filled with a mixture of hot water and a caustic alkali (a liquid or solid version of sodium and potassium hydroxides). Together, the two break down the body until all that is left are bones. 

Alkaline hydrolysis can sound scary, hence why it goes by so many names: aquamation and resomation being the two most popular. But really, the whole process can be understood by going back to basic chemistry. Think of a pH chart you might have seen on a science classroom wall. On one side, starting from zero, are acidic substances like lemon juice and vinegar. In the middle, at seven, is water, a purely neutral liquid. Then on the other side, things get basic. Ending at 14 are alkaline substances. Chemically, alkaline substances are the opposite of acids, but they, too, can break down organic compounds. 

Crematorium owner and Bio-Response machine user Philip Flores uses potassium hydroxide as his alkali, which is just a type of lye used in soap making. “It’s a salt that helps create alkalinity when mixed with water,” he says. “So when you have the warm and gentle flow of water introduced with this alkalinity, what happens is, aside from accelerating the decomposition process, it breaks down anything that’s organic, leaving behind the inorganic, which would be the entire skeletal structure.”

In as little as 16 hours, Dougie’s small scales were broken down this way, his decaying flesh submerged in a solution of around 200 degrees Fahrenheit until all that was left were the memories of his companionship, the bones that decorate Czerwinski’s office, and a non-toxic brown liquid that smells vaguely like an unkempt pet store. If Dougie had been a human, a metal hip or breast implant may have been left behind for the machine operator to remove after his liquified body had been drained from the chamber.

To Czerwinski, alkaline hydrolysis was the clear choice for her 10-year-old lizard companion. Right around the time Dougie was born, Czerwinski’s dad, Joe Wilson, had an idea that would revolutionize the death industry: creating an American market for body-liquifying machines. 

Body liquification takes off

Bio-Response officially got started on November 26, 2009, as the brainchild of Joe Wilson, who had previously worked in waste management for STERIS, a medical equipment company that focuses on infection prevention. For most, going to a medical waste conference sounds mundane, but on a crisp November day when Wilson attended one in Baltimore, he was blown away. 

In the early ‘90s, the late professor Gordon Kaye of Albany Medical College faced a problem: He needed to dispose of research animals that contained radioisotopes in a safe and economically feasible way. A colleague, Peter Weber had an idea. He took a sample rat, liquified it, through alkaline hydrolysis, and returned the resulting bone powder to Kaye. It was a breakthrough, particularly for the disposal of corpses used in research contexts. 

[Related on PopSci+: Meet the father-son team creating ‘humanure’]

Seven years later, Wilson took his seat at a conference presentation led by Kaye. “I learned that not only did alkaline hydrolysis dissolve tissue, but it destroyed cancer drugs, embalming agents, formaldehyde, other complex chemical toxins, and was sterile,” Wilson says. “The whole idea just caught me off guard.” It was a way to sanctify the dead without burning them.

Wilson wanted to make the method useful to more professions and industries. First, he built a towable alkaline hydrolysis unit that could be transported to farms for diseased livestock disposal. This was a success, but Wilson had more ambitions: He wanted to build something that could liquefy individual people. At the time, another manufacturer was making a human-sized alkaline hydrolysis machine in Scotland, though it was expensive. This is what Wilson challenged. One night in 2010, Wilson woke up at 3 a.m. with an idea and scribbled it down. “Other people had a Rolls Royce,” he says. “I wanted to build a Chevrolet for the industry.”

What he jotted down that night became the backbone of Bio-Response today. The company, founded by Wilson four years earlier, had been selling machines for pets, appropriately called PET machines, but this changed everything. “It was a real home run,” Wilson says. 

Human meets machine

Today, Bio-Response offers two options for human corpses with differing temperatures, although they custom-make machines for almost any-sized organism imaginable. “One machine went all the way up to the ceiling,” says Rob Graham, sales manager at Bio-Response.

The machines themselves are surprisingly quiet—and given the nature of the work, the mood in Bio-Response’s warehouse is surprisingly relaxed, too.. The team of builders and programmers, which Graham describes as a family, listens to music and rides around on scooters as they construct metal chambers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s like a tech startup, except instead of creating the latest AI craze, they build equipment to liquify dead people and animals. Soon, these machines will be installed in funeral homes to liquefy humans. But today, the shining silver cylinders are emitting steam as employees checked them for quality control before shipment to Las Vegas. 

Each machine fits one human at a time and, after being filled up with the alkaline solution, is tilted at an angle. This allows less water to be used as the body inside naturally falls into a crouching position when tilted. The machine hums for 16 to 18 hours before being drained, and the remaining bones are removed, dried, and ground into a fine dust that loved ones can take home. 

But then there’s the remaining effluent, which is a fancy way to say the brown, musty liquid made of the natural byproducts of decomposition, including amino acids, salt, and sugar. To say the liquid doesn’t smell would be a lie, but it’s nothing compared to the stench of a rotting body. Aquamation practitioners then drain this effluent into the wastewater system, the same place where all of the water from sinks, toilets, showers, and washing machines go. “People are concerned that what we’re doing is drinking dead bodies,” says Philip Olson, a death studies professor at Virginia Tech who is not affiliated with Bio-Response. “There are lots of things in our wastewater system; this might be one of the least to worry about.” 

Still, it does worry people, even when more traditional funerary methods process waste similarly. “During embalming, where a body is drained of blood, it is sent into the wastewater system,” Olson says. “It’s untreated.” In alkaline hydrolysis, while the waste ends up in the same place, it is treated. “It’s been sterilized by the nature of heat, which will kill anything that was living essentially,” Graham explains. There are also religious and cultural barriers to consider with aquamation as well. In the Catholic faith, alkaline hydrolysis is not an acceptable form of body disposal. This follows a history of opposition to cremation, which wasn’t allowed until the 1960s, despite the modern cremation movement beginning nearly 100 years earlier. But Wilson says strict Catholic approval isn’t stopping people. “Half the people that go through our machines are Catholics,” he estimates. 

Still, perception is changing. When anti-apartheid activist and Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu died in 2021, most of the world had no idea what alkaline hydrolysis was. But Tutu did, and he had chosen to go through the process upon his death. Although Tutu was not Catholic, Graham says his death changed minds. “That knocked down on the barrier tremendously given he was known right underneath the Pope,” Graham says. To date, Bio-Response has sold more than 400 machines in North America alone.

The ultimate decision

But with the many options people have for their final rites, why choose this one? Olson says there are two main reasons. The first is that customers perceive the process as gentle, which is preferable to many over sending their loved ones to be burned by flame. “I’m not exactly sure what’s gentle about caustic alkali, but that’s how people perceive it—like a warm water bath,” Olson adds. 

The second lies in its environmental benefits. Cremation uses about 30 gallons of fuel from propane or natural gas for one body, releases carcinogenic matter into the atmosphere, and returns a smaller percentage of ashes than hydrolysis. Traditional burial, too, has its downsides. In the embalming process, corpses are injected with two to three gallons of a cocktail of chemicals, including formaldehyde, mercury, and methanol. When a body is buried and decomposes, these chemicals can leak into our groundwater. “If you test the soil in a cemetery, most of that is toxic,” says Craig Klugman, a professor of death studies at DePaul University. 

Then there’s the matter of space. Cemeteries around the world are filling up, leading more people to opt for methods that reduce their bodies to dust. Alkaline hydrolysis, its proponents argue, offers an alternative to land use, while cutting carbon emissions by 75 percent compared to cremation. Still, Olson warns that the process of producing alkaline substances for these machines can be energy intensive, even if direct emissions from running the machines are much lower than alternatives.

[Related: Elden Ring’s corpse wax is real—sort of]

Of course, other eco-friendly options like human composting have been in the news for similar reasons. For now, this process is only legal in six states, but supporters hope it adds another option for environmentally friendly decomposition to the mix. 

Wilson doesn’t oppose other methods of decomposition. In fact, he says he doesn’t worry about planning out how his own body is disposed of. “I don’t care what they do with it—I’ll be dead,” he says. Still, he prefers alkaline hydrolysis for its sterility. “There are certain microbes or diseases that will not be destroyed in composting like they will in alkaline hydrolysis,” he notes. Those residuals could end up in groundwater depending on how the remains are disposed of or repurposed, though as Wilson points out, they should not pose a real health threat to the living.

Although more than half of US states have legalized alkaline hydrolysis for humans in non-research settings, Indiana, where Bio-Response is based, isn’t one of them. “I mean, we just approved alcohol sales on Sunday five years ago,” says Graham. “Plus, Indiana is home to the largest casket manufacturer in the world.”

In Wilson’s view, the Hoosier State will probably be the last to legalize this practice. And while the timing is uncertain, Bio-Response is thriving. They’ve quadrupled their output since 2017 and now send around 100 machines annually around the globe. “If all 50 states came on at once, we might lack quality trying to outpace ourselves,” Graham says. 

When he dies, if it’s in a state where alkaline hydrolysis is legal, Graham says he absolutely would choose it. “I hope I’ve made a friend that will let me ride through there,” he says. If that happens, Graham will be one in a growing group of Americans who end up churning in the warm waters of an aquamation machine until all that remains is a fine powder, a musty liquid, and memories. 

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Storing clean energy is as vital as harvesting it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of rechargeable batteries currently rely on rare earth metals like lithium, the mining of which is fraught with environmental and ethical issues. According to researchers, however, a promising alternative can be found simply by combining two of civilization’s oldest and most commonplace materials: cement, and the charcoal-like mixture known as carbon black.

As detailed in a new study published on July 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, engineers working together from MIT and the Wyss Institute recently discovered that properly mixing the two ingredients in electrolyte-infused water creates a powerful, low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later usage. With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging.

[Related: This rechargeable battery is meant to be eaten.]

Much like batteries, supercapacitors store and direct large reserves of electrical power. To do this, designers soak two conductive plates in an electrolyte solution before inserting a membrane between them. Once charged, the barrier then prevents ions from traveling between the positive and negative plates, thus storing the potential power for later usage.

In the case of researchers’ new cement-based material, however, its relatively high internal surface area is key to its supercapacitor potential. After combining highly conductive carbon black, cement powder, and water, researchers wait for their resultant mixture to cure. During this time, the water naturally creates tiny openings which are subsequently filed by the carbon to ostensibly create an internal, fractal-like network of wiring. Position two plates of this material atop one another and separate them by an insulating layer, and you have a novel supercapacitor at your disposal.

According to researchers such as paper co-author Admir Masic, the new material is as promising as it is poignant—cement usage dates as far back as 6,500 BCE, while carbon black was the ink authors employed to pen the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that, when you combine them in a specific manner, you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting,” Masic said in a statement.

The team envisions projects such as stretches of roadways imbued with the concrete supercapacitator material wired to nearby solar panel arrays. Similar to experimental projects already underwayin Europe, the streets themselves could then be harnessed to wireless charge vehicles as they ride atop the surface. But before they get to such a potentially revolutionary civic engineering project, researchers have to start small.

[Related: Get ready for the world’s first permanent EV-charging road.]

To initially test their new material, Masic and their colleagues first created a trio of tiny, 1 volt supercapacitator prototypes, each roughly 1cm in diameter and 1mm-thick. When wired together, the three conductors easily powered a 3-volt LED. Going forward, the team hopes to scale up their prototypes to a 12-volt example comparable to an EV battery, then a 45-cubic-meter supercapacitator capable of hypothetically powering an entire home.

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Government-owned land, previously home to Cold War-era atomic weapons manufacturing facilities, could soon receive new, green leases on life. According to an announcement on July 28, the US Department of Energy’s “Cleanup to Clean Energy” initiative has identified five sites across the US, totalling roughly 70,000 acres, to be potentially utilized for massive solar, wind, and nuclear energy projects.

As Reuters notes, some of these locations—such as Richland, Washington’s now-decommissioned Hartford Site—were first built in the 1940s to produce plutonium and uranium for the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs. Other locations such as New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), however, are much more recent projects. Established in 1999, the WIPP is the country’s only deep geologic nuclear waste repository, and includes over 185,000 containers filled with transuranic-contaminated “clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and other items” roughly 2,000 feet underground, according to its official website. Additional sites that will potentially receive green renovations include the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

[Related: What ‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t tell you about atomic bombs.]

“We are going to transform the lands we have used over decades for nuclear security and environmental remediation by working closely with tribes and local communities together with partners in the private sector to build some of the largest clean energy projects in the world,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in an official statement.

The DOE’s Cleanup to Clean Energy is part of federal agencies’ ongoing response to President Biden’s December 2021 executive order directing them to use 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2030. To help meet the goal, Executive Order 14057 directed officials to authorize the use of property assets including land “through leases, grants, permits, or other mechanisms.”

As the federal government ramps up such projects, private industry is also looking to renovate similarly outdated and retired sites on their own. Earlier this year, the company charged with demolishing the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan’s Van Buren county announced revamped intentions to restart the 800 megawatt facility. If successful, it will mark the first time a US nuclear reactor restarted after losing its fuel and operating licenses.

Although there are currently no detailed plans or construction timelines currently available, based on the executive order’s directives, it’s safe to say these DOE green renovation projects should be up-and-running by the end of the decade.

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Margarine has been the go-to vegan butter alternative for years, but there’s a new kid on the block that we actually can’t believe isn’t butter: Cultured vegan butter. 

If you stick to a plant-based diet—or are looking for ways to cut animal products out of your diet for health, environmental, or ethical reasons—this project is a great culinary experiment to try. 

Making cultured vegan butter at home does require some specialty ingredients. So depending on where you live and what grocery stores you have access to, it might not actually save you much money versus buying your own. Even so, the process is surprisingly easy and incredibly satisfying. You’ll feel like some kind of plant-based homesteader, and maybe even ready to tackle some more ambitious home fermentation projects. 

Tools

• Blender 
• Small saucepan 
• Stove
• An 8-ounce mason jar or larger (or a similarly sized glass bowl)
• Strainer 
• Measuring cup
• Measuring spoons 
• Scissors 
• (Optional) cheesecloth (or dish towel)
• (Optional) silicone butter mold

How to make vegan butter

1. Make a non-dairy cream. This will serve as the base for your DIY cultured vegan butter. I’ve tested this recipe using cashews and sunflower seeds, which have a somewhat neutral taste. Nuts with stronger flavors, like walnuts, should work.

If you have seed and nut allergies, you can skip the process of making your own cultured cream and use store-bought plain and unsweetened vegan cultured yogurt. Keep in mind that if it doesn’t mention probiotics or “living cultures,” you’ll still need to follow steps two and three before proceeding.

To make the non-dairy cream, follow these steps:

• Place the raw nuts or seeds in a saucepan and cover them with water. 
• Bring them to a boil over medium heat and let them simmer for about 15 minutes. 
• (Optional) Add a pinch of MSG to give the nuts some extra umami oomph.
• (Optional) Add a sprinkle of turmeric to the water if you want your butter to be yellow. Fair warning—it may turn out more margarine-y than a natural butter shade. 
• Drain the nuts. 
• Add the nuts to a blender with 1/2-cup of filtered water. 
• Blend until you get a heavy cream texture. Different kinds of nuts could result in different consistencies. If you don’t get the desired smoothness, you can adjust the mix by slowly adding more water.
• Finish by pouring your non-dairy cream into a glass bowl or mason jar. 

• Note: Do not use a metal container, as the material might react with the acidic fermenting cream, either messing up your bowls or changing the flavor of your finished product.

[Related: Don’t waste banana peels: Turn them into tasty vegan ‘pulled pork’]

2. Add the probiotics. Probiotics are what puts the culture in cultured vegan butter. Carefully open a capsule and add the powder to your non-dairy cream. Don’t overthink it—hold one end of the capsule in your fingertips and snip it down the middle with scissors. Repeat this with a second capsule and stir to incorporate. 

• Pro tip: If you don’t want to buy probiotics for this recipe, you can use a spoon of any cultured yogurt or kefir, or even whip up your own rejuvelac.

3. Cover your non-dairy cream and let it ferment. Use the mason jar ring, a rubber band, or string to secure a cheesecloth or dish towel over the cream. This will protect it from dust and bugs while still allowing it to breathe. Place the concoction somewhere safe, away from direct sunlight and extreme temperatures. A pantry is perfect. 

Give the cream between 24 and 48 hours to ferment. You can start taste-testing after 12 hours and stop the fermentation process whenever the flavor is right—you’re looking for a pleasantly tangy taste, like Greek yogurt.

• Note: Always use a clean spoon when tasting the cream and don’t double dip—you don’t want to introduce the wrong sorts of bacteria.  

4. (Optional) Pop your cultured cream into the fridge. Do this if you’re not ready to finish the butter right away. The cream may continue to develop more tanginess as it slowly ferments in the cool of the fridge. Use it within the next three to four days for best results.  

5. Measure half a cup of cultured vegan cream and add it to your blender. Then add the coconut oil and vegetable oil. For the latter, use something neutral, like sunflower oil, or something you like the taste of, like a good olive oil. Using unrefined coconut oil will work just as well, but the resulting butter will taste like coconut. 

Continue by adding the lecithin and salt. I’ve previously made this recipe using liquid lecithin, but this time I replaced it with two teaspoons of powdered lecithin. The latter worked fine, but I recommend sticking with liquid if you can find it. Powdered lecithin doesn’t affect the taste or texture of the final product, but it does make it look a little speckled. 

• Pro tip: If you end up with more cream than you need, you can pop it in the freezer and add it to a pasta sauce or soup. 

6. (Optional) Add coloring. If you used yogurt or didn’t add turmeric when making your vegan cream, you can add natural food coloring now. It will give it that classic dairy-butter yellow. The blog Full of Plants recommends a bit of carrot juice, but you can also experiment with plant-based food dyes and other colorful vegetables and spices. 

7. Emulsify the ingredients. Slowly blend the mixture—start with 30 seconds and continue with 10-second spurts until completely smooth. Be careful with blending too much or too long, as it can cause the emulsion to heat up due to friction and split.

Emulsification blends fats and water into a uniform liquid. Lecithin helps stabilize emulsions and gives your butter the creamy consistency you crave.

8. Pour your butter into a mold or container. You can use a silicone butter mold with a lid, which is great for minimizing potential spills. You can also line any loaf pan or plastic container with parchment paper to make unmolding easier. 

9. Let the butter set. Start by putting your butter in the freezer for one to three hours. Once it’s nice and solid you can move it to the fridge, where it should be the right consistency to eat and enjoy after three to four hours. 

[Related: The coolest way to keep food cool without electricity]

10. Enjoy your cultured vegan butter. Your butter is now ready to bake with, cook with, and spread all over your carbohydrates of choice. Keep your creamy concoction in the fridge, where it will be at its best for about a week. For long-term storage, you can freeze it. 

What is cultured vegan butter?

When you make cultured foods like sourdough bread, kombucha, and yogurt, you deliberately initiate the fermentation process by using a starter culture—a batch of the living microorganisms you want growing inside. 

Most dairy butter is not cultured but made from churning cream for a prolonged period of time, which makes the milk fats separate from the solids and glob together. Making cultured butter is similar, but you need to add bacterial cultures to the pasteurized cream and let it sit for a day or so to ferment before churning. Cultured butter stans love the tangy taste it often acquires, but the process also serves to amp up the buttery flavors you already know and love. 

[Related: A complete guide to vegan muscle building]

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For some drivers, electric vehicles sound pretty awesome—until it comes down to charging. Range anxiety is a real thing, and while there are around 32,000 fast chargers across the US that can refill your EV’s battery in half an hour or so, that’s still quite small compared to the more than 100,000 gas stations across the US as of 2017. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that there needs to be around 182,000 fast chargers across the country by 2030 to support the 30-42 million predicted EVs on the road.

When it comes to EVs and charging them, Tesla normally makes the biggest headlines, but this time other automakers are stepping up in an Avengers-style move. This week, a coalition of seven automotive companies—BMW Group, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group, and Stellantis NV—made a commitment to bring 30,000 fast chargers to North America. The first of these should come online by summer 2024, according to their announcement. 

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source.]

“To accelerate the shift to electric vehicles, we’re in favor of anything that makes life easier for our customers,” Mercedes-Benz Group CEO Ola Källenius said in the statement. “Charging is an inseparable part of the EV-experience, and this network will be another step to make it as convenient as possible.”

According to Reuters, each fast-charging machine costs somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000, making this endeavor one that could cost billions of dollars. Currently, Tesla has the largest network of fast chargers with 45,000 supercharging locations globally. 

Some of the companies involved with this new undertaking include companies such as GM and Mercedes that have already signed on to start using Tesla’s charging technology, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), starting in 2025. The others still have product plans using the Combined Charging System (CCS). The new stations, according to the announcement, will offer charging connectors for both systems. 

The announcement stated that the network “intends” to solely run on renewable energy, but a plan for this has not yet been disclosed. The chargers will be concentrated in urban areas and on highways.

“We think this is an important step forward,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told Reuters. President Joe Biden has previously stated goals to bring 500,000 EV chargers online by 2030.

[Related: EV adoption doesn’t lighten energy costs for all American families.]

Currently, the vast majority of EV chargers in the US are “level 2” chargers, which can take anywhere from four to 10 hours to completely charge a vehicle, according to the Washington Post. Owners of EVs frequently have those level-2 chargers installed at their homes. System malfunctions also currently run amok—a recent survey found that one in five EV owners have rolled up to a charger and were then unable to charge due to issues like system malfunctions. 

“We believe that a charging network at scale is vital to protecting freedom of mobility for all, especially as we work to achieve our ambitious carbon neutrality plan,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in the statement. “A strong charging network should be available for all.”

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Scientists agree that harnessing energy from renewable sources to power our lights, ACs, phones, stoves, and cars will be necessary to slow global warming. But wind farms across the world have increasingly been subject to protest by communities whose land they’ve encroached on. People in small towns across the US have raised concerns at zoning meetings about health issues and depressed property values. An Indigenous group in Norway says a wind farm will affect their ability to herd reindeer, a concern supported by climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

One of the most common concerns raised by protestors worldwide is how these turbines will affect their health. People say wind projects near their homes, different from the off-shore wind farms at sea, have caused a range of harmful effects on their bodies, including migraines, chronic pain, increased blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping. 

The chief concern of the protestors is how the wind farm, proposed by the multinational company Energix, would further entrench Israeli occupation over the Golan. But another main concern is how the turbines will affect their health. In the region, regulations must consider context and the circumstances in which the new site would be built, Druze leaders say.

Noise pollution and shadow flicker

The two primary health concerns with wind farms include the level of noise they emit and the flickering lights they create, called “shadow flicker,” Ollson says. Disruptions are created when the three-pronged turbines spin, emulating a slow, giant fan. Typically, governments don’t allow wind farms to send more than 50 decibels of sound to nearby houses, which is about as loud as the hum from a household refrigerator. 

The noise pollution could prevent those living nearby from sleeping properly. When people can’t rest well for a prolonged period of time, it can reduce their quality of life. They might feel both tired and sick, which could lead to trouble eating and exercising, among other problems, Ollson explains. However, research shows that turbines that hum at less than 45 to 50 decibels don’t have any statistical effect on sleep quality, he adds. 

Ollson points to one 2016 study from Canada that he says is considered the gold standard around the world. The government studied the sleep quality of 720 people who lived between 820 feet to about 7 miles away from a wind farm emitting a range of 20 to 46 decibels of noise. The researchers used actimeters, which are similar to fitbits, to track participants’ sleep quality. The study found no statistical difference between those living near the wind farm and those living a few miles away. “There’s some indication when we go over 55 or 60 decibels that it’s probably too close. But ultimately, we aren’t seeing that in jurisdictions that are [regulated] properly,” Ollson says. 

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms]

It’s unclear exactly how many decibels of sound the Energix wind project would wreak on Majd Al Shams, one of the few remaining Druze towns in the Golan. The farm is expected to be about 3,280 feet away from the neighborhoods, meaning the residents should be safe from noise. But farmers who work near the project would still be exposed—and there are more than 1,800 cottages that people visit regularly on the farming properties a few hundred feet away from the designated site, Wael Tarabieh, a project manager for Al Marsad, says. 

Other major health concerns from living or working around turbines are epileptic seizures, headaches, nausea, and general disturbance from shadow flicker, which occurs when the sun shines through the turbine’s spinning prongs, causing a shadowing effect that can sometimes be seen in homes and buildings. People can simulate shadow flicker by pointing a flashlight at a ceiling or desk fan: The dark shapes created on the wall are similar to what people living near a wind farm might experience, though at a significantly lower rate, given that the fan blades move much faster than a turbine’s does. A near universal standard across the world is limiting shadow flicker to 30 hours per year, Ollson says. This can be done by using computer programs to model conditions and choosing spots for turbines accordingly.

“We can’t find a correlation in these larger epidemiological studies” between shadow flicker and headaches or nausea, Ollson notes. And the turbines move too slowly to cause epileptic seizures, he adds. “What the majority of my colleagues in the field would say, is that shadow flicker isn’t a health concern, but it is an annoyance or nuisance. Imagine you’re sitting in your place tonight, and if I was standing at the wall and turning your lights on and off, in a slow fashion, for 20 minutes at a time. You would not enjoy that.” 

But in the Golan, some residents could experience up to one hour of shadow flicker per day during certain times of the year. This is because of the wind farm’s location and use of larger turbine blades, Israeli doctor Ofer Megged told Al Marsad for their 2018 report on the wind farm. The project has been modified several times since then—it’s unclear how many hours of shadow flicker the latest plan would produce.

All forms of energy have their drawbacks, Ollson adds. Oil refineries and coal plants, the main way the world has generated power for the past century, churn out air pollution, which has been linked to a much wider range of health problems, including increased risk of asthma, cancers, and heart disease. 

Winds of change in the Golan Heights

New construction needs to take native people, their history, and their current situation into context, explains Munir Fakher Eldin, an assistant professor and dean of the faculty of arts at Birzeit University in Palestine who writes about land rights. He calls the new wind farm in the Golan, where he is from, a form of greenwashing.

The Golan is known for its wealth of natural resources, such as water, wind, and potentially petroleum. The area is attractive for renewables because of an estimated wind speed almost double that of Israel’s coastal plane, vast open areas, and low population density, according to the Syria Report. Wind energy is a major component of Israel’s net zero goal, and the country plans for nearly half of it to come from the Golan. 

[Related: What companies really mean when they say they’re ‘net-zero’]

The Golan is already home to two wind farms, which are both near Israeli settlements. (Some settlers have also opposed the turbines, according to Tarabieh.) Israel also has plans to build a dozen more wind projects in the Golan to serve locals, both native and non-native. But the Energix project, first proposed in 2018, has received scrutiny from the Druze and become the subject of both protests and lawsuits for the past five years.

After Israel began to occupy the Golan in 1967, they expelled around 131,000 Syrians, which was about 95 percent of the population in the area, according to Al Marsad. Since then, the 1,800 cottages near the wind farm have served as a place for many to escape. “Our agricultural lands are not simply a place to cultivate the land. Actually, they are a kind of extension to our everyday life,” Tarabieh says. “Most of the people escape from [overcrowding in Majd Al-Shams] to the agricultural lands to spend the time with their family. People sleep in these cottages all the time … That’s why in our case, it’s really very dangerous. It’s not that people are afraid of or imagining something. It’s real, and we are all close to it.”

The new project would also subsume a quarter of agricultural land left to farmers, who were already stripped of most of their land more than 50 years ago. Settlements, military facilities, and national park acquisition put 95 percent of the Golan under Israeli control, according to Tarabieh. The wind farm would also limit how much Majd Al-Shams could grow. Mountains in the north, a ceasefire line in the east, and settlements in the west mean that the agricultural land to the south, where the farm is planned, is the only place the town could expand. A new residential zoning code also allows houses to be built much closer to the turbines, which could increase health risks from the wind farm, Tarabieh says.

Fakher Eldin and Tarabieh also think the development would affect residents’ psychological health. In a complaint echoed by those living near wind farms around the world, the turbines, which stand at about 680 feet tall, would ruin their land’s pastoral beauty. What’s different in the Golan though, they say, is the wind farm could serve as yet another reminder of how little control the native Syrian communities have over their home. “The land is part of people’s identity and sense of security, belonging, and communal safety,” says Fakher Eldin. “Basically we’re defending our right for reasonable existence on our land … The wind farm will feel like a suffocating presence.”

Update (July 28, 2023): The headline of this story has been changed from “Are wind farms low-key harming people’s health.” The article focuses on health concerns in some communities living around turbines, mainly in the Israel-annexed region the Golan Heights. Scientific reports and experts stress that most of the issues, which are far less severe than health effects stemming from oil refineries and coal plants, can be managed through proper siting and safety regulations. The political context in the Golan Heights, however, makes new wind farms more fraught for native residents.

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A major offshore wind farm provider has just completed the construction of three massive artificial nesting structures (ANS) along England’s East Coast. The trio of massive bird houses is part of an agreement to protect a local, endangered seabird—the black-legged kittiwake gull. According to an announcement from UK-based marine contractor Red7Marine, each structure can house 500 nests for the gulls. The contractor hopes they will provide researchers with the means to monitor the bird population’s health over the course of the farm’s entire lifespan.

One of wind farms’ central drawbacks are their impacts on local bird populations, particularly the effects of off-shore turbines on vulnerable seabirds. And while climate change undoubtedly remains these species’ biggest existential threat, mitigating these unintended byproducts of green infrastructure expansion is key to ensuring a responsible transition towards a sustainable future.

[Related: When wind turbines kill bats and birds, these scientists want the carcasses.]

That outlook was central to the approval of the UK’s Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm, which is the country’s first turbine project to require “ecological compensation,” according to sustainable technology site Electrek on Friday. Once completed in 2025, Hornsea 3 will provide roughly 2.85-gigawatts of power to the country—enough to power over 3 million homes. Before that can happen, however, the Danish wind farm company Ørsted partnered with Red7Marine and others to design and erect the new kittiwake apartment complexes.

The three ANS are located less than a mile off the coast of England, and required a pair of “jack-up” barges alongside a host of other tools to build. According to Red7Marine, a team of architects, engineers, and ecologists collaborated to design the artificial eight-sided nesting walls, which feature narrow ledges to replicate kittiwakes’ natural cliffside habitats. The main structure is also intentionally painted off-white to blend in with both the ocean and sky, while the interior is furnished with tables, chairs, and whiteboards for researchers visiting the locales. Each nest nook also includes sliding Perspex paneling to allow for unobtrusive monitoring of the kittiwakes.

“Kittiwake are listed as at risk from extinction and with climate change as a key driver to their decline, a move towards a green energy system could help considerably in the long-term conservation of the species,” Ørsted’s environmental manager Eleni Antoniou said in a statement provided to Electrek. “In the meantime, the provision of these structures will provide a safe, nesting space to enable future generations to raise young away from predators and out of town centers.”

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During the summer, cities can get really hot compared to surrounding rural areas—just look at New Orleans and New York City compared to nearby areas with fewer impermeable surfaces. This urban heat island effect happens because buildings and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes. Daytime temperatures in urban areas may end up being 1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than that in outlying areas.

But it’s not just the surface and air temperatures that can rise—the ground also warms up. Rising air temperature, combined with the effects of human activities and infrastructure, can cause subsurface heat islands under urban areas. This “underground climate change” is also affected by indoor heating and operating appliances in buildings that inject heat into the ground.

[Related: A new climate report finally highlights the importance of our decisions.]

Since soils, rocks, and construction materials can deform when subjected to temperature variations, a recent study published in Communications Engineering sought to assess whether subsurface heat islands can cause ground deformations that would affect the performance of civil infrastructure.

“The results of this study support that the ground deformations caused by underground climate change can be of sufficient magnitude to affect the day-to-day function and long-term durability of civil structures and infrastructures,” says Alessandro Rotta Loria, study author and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University.

Potentially excessive angular distortion, tilting, and/or cracking of structural members may affect the aesthetic and operational requirements of infrastructure. Luckily, these changes don’t necessarily represent an impact on their performance and don’t threaten people’s safety, says Rotta Loria.

How underground climate change affects the soil

Extreme changes in underground temperature under or near infrastructure impose temperature gradients that can promote pore water movement. The drying and wetting of soil is responsible for strains and deformations that can cause damage to structures, says Claudia Zapata, geo-engineer and associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.

“While this is not a new issue that geotechnical engineers have to deal with, longer periods of high temperature can promote more significant changes in moisture content,” says Zapata. “The unsaturated condition will extend to deeper areas, causing larger deformations than those allowable by building codes.” 

The impact is generally related to the soil type and the extent of drying or wetting, among other factors. For instance, sandy materials are not as prone to large deformations under climatic change conditions, unlike clay-heavy soils, says Zapata.

When analyzing the potential impact of structures, Rotta Loria says the distinct features of different cities and their infrastructure should be considered. Older and denser cities may generally experience a more intense underground climate change, which can translate to more significant effects on civil infrastructures.

[Related: Why some climate change adaptations just make things worse.]

“Major cities like New York City, which are densely built and rich in underground structures and heat sources, exhibit a particularly intense underground climate change,” says Rotta Loria. “For this reason, these cities may be particularly prone to structural and infrastructural operational issues in the long-term.”

Ground deformations caused by underground climate change develop slowly, but continuously, therefore it should be mitigated in the coming years to avoid unwanted effects on civil structures and infrastructures, he adds. 

Mitigating underground climate change in a warming world

Underground climate change presents an opportunity for urban planners and policymakers to “enhance the sustainability of urban areas worldwide,” says Rotta Loria.

For example, applying thermal insulation to underground building envelopes and enclosures can minimize the amount of waste heat that would be injected into the ground. Installing shallow geothermal technologies to absorb at least part of the heat from basements, parking garages, and tunnels to reutilize it in buildings and infrastructures for space heating and hot water production is also a major possibility.

[Related: Urban sprawl defines unsustainable cities, but it can be undone.]

A 2022 study published in Nature Communications said that recycling subsurface heat, which accumulates due to climate change and urbanization, is a sustainable alternative to conventional space heating methods for various sites. Subsurface heat recycling makes it possible to capitalize on warming climates while helping society move to a low-carbon economy at the same time.

Rotta Loria says that retrofit interventions aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and geothermal installations to reutilize subsurface waste heat are “two concrete and relatively straightforward mitigation strategies” that would hamper underground climate change and its effects on civil infrastructure in a warming world. With all the impacts that climate change is having, and will soon have, on cities, it’s best to act sooner versus later.

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After years of criticism for its outsize use of plastic, the world’s largest retailer appears to be making progress to reduce its plastic footprint.

Amazon announced in its latest sustainability report on Tuesday that orders shipped from its fulfillment centers used 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in 2022—an 11.6 percent decrease from the amount used in 2021.

The company attributed this decline to its expanded use of paper-based packaging, as well as an increased effort to ship items in their original containers—without adding any Amazon-branded packaging. Amazon has also stopped using nonrecyclable bags made of mixed materials, and on Tuesday it said it was “phasing out” padded plastic mailers—those ubiquitous blue and white envelopes studded with the Amazon logo—in favor of “recyclable alternatives.”

Eliminating padded plastic mailers is a “big, big deal,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president for strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, although he called on the company to set a concrete timeline for doing so. He called Amazon’s sustainability report “good news for the oceans,” since plastic film like the kind used in Amazon’s packaging is one of the most common forms of marine plastic litter and is the deadliest type of plastic to marine animals. 

Plastics have other impacts, too: They’re made of fossil fuels and are a major source of climate pollution, and they cause toxic chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is just 5 percent, meaning the vast majority of plastics are littered, burned, or sent to a landfill.

Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report is the first to include a quantitative estimate of the company’s single-use plastics footprint; previously, the company’s only other estimate came from a blog post last December. Before that, organizations like Oceana had to publish their own estimates and had called for greater transparency—sometimes through investor pressure. Over the past three years, shareholder advocacy groups have repeatedly filed resolutions demanding that Amazon disclose the amount of plastic it uses and reduce it by one-third by 2030. One resolution, co-filed in December 2021 by Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow, was supported by nearly half of Amazon shareholders.

Now, environmental advocates say Amazon appears to be on the right path—in contrast to many other major plastic users. Even companies that have signed onto a prominent pledge to reduce virgin plastic use have moved in the wrong direction: Over the past several years, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mars, and many others have reported an increase in the weight of their virgin plastic packaging.

Still, the 86,000 metric tons of plastic used in Amazon fulfillment centers is a lot, and Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said Amazon must move much faster to replace other types of plastic packaging—like non-padded plastic mailers—with reusable alternatives or packaging made from recycled paper. He called for third-party verification of Amazon’s single-use plastic reductions, and for the company to disclose more information about its plastics use: “What type of plastic is Amazon using?” Guernsey asked. “How much is designed to be recyclable?”

Guernsey also criticized Amazon for failing to make a forward-looking, time-bound commitment to reduce its plastics use. “I would like them to make a statement saying, ‘We’re phasing out single-use plastic. We’re Amazon, we can do that,’” he said. 

Littlejohn said Amazon should ensure that its plastic reductions manifest throughout the company’s supply chains. Although the numbers cited in Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report likely apply to the majority of Amazon orders—those shipped from the company’s fulfillment centers—they don’t cover those that are shipped from third-party sellers’ doorsteps. Amazon doesn’t disclose what fraction of its sales are shipped from third-party sellers.

Amazon declined to respond to a series of questions about its plastic use, but a spokesperson for the company said they “continue to prioritize materials that are recyclable and to find alternatives to plastic.” The spokesperson noted some of Amazon’s previously published progress, including the elimination of single-use plastic air pillows in Europe and Australia. 

Both Guernsey and Littlejohn vowed to keep campaigning for stronger action from Amazon. “Investors care about this,” Guernsey said. “The shareholder process has been incredibly important … and we’re going to continue to use it to pressure the company to reduce its environmental footprint.” 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/after-years-of-criticism-amazon-appears-to-be-cutting-down-on-plastics/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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On August 16, 2022, President Joe Biden signed what many have called the most important climate legislation in the history of the US—the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). After years of slow progress and resistance against policies that support the growth of clean energy and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the IRA finally looked like it could get the US back on track to Paris Climate Agreement goals. While the estimated decrease in emissions is notable, however, we’re still not on track to reach these lofty goals with the IRA alone.  

Eleven months after the enactment of the IRA, the Rhodium Group, an independent research group, published their annual Taking Stock report, this time including projecting the greenhouse gas reductions of the policy for the coming decades. What they’ve found is that the current policies, as of June 2023, put the US on track to decrease emissions 32 to 51 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. By 2030, the US is expected to achieve 29 to 49 percent reductions, which is a “meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations,” the authors write, but still not enough to hit Paris goals. 

[Related: ‘Humanity on thin ice’ says UN, but there is still time to act on climate change.]

The IRA largely takes aim at slashing emissions in the power and transportation sectors, and Rhodium’s analysis shows that these sectors are off to a good start. The report shows that in 2035 an estimated 63 to 87 percent of all US power generation could come from zero or low emitting plants, up from 40 percent in 2022. This, combined with the rapid growth of the electric vehicle industry, is poised to reduce household energy bills by $2,200-$2,400 per year in 2035 from 2022 levels, according to the report.

However, a challenge still lies in the industry sector of emissions reductions, where the law has a negligible impact on fossil fuel use from things like petroleum refining and steel production. “A bunch of these emissions are coming from burning stuff to heat stuff up,” Ben King, an associate director with Rhodium and lead author of the report, told the Washington Post. “We think there’s an opportunity to electrify those processes, but we’re still trying to crack the nut on those solutions.”

On top of that, continuing progress in power reductions would require an addition of 32-92 gigawatts of wind and solar power every year between now and 2035. According to the report, 32 GW of renewables is “roughly equivalent to the best year of renewable installations on record.”

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

The report goes to show that federal policies can only take the country so far—reaching Paris Agreement goals is possible with supporting policies at the state level. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, DC and 24 states (such as California, New York, and Oregon) have all adopted specific emissions reduction targets, but some states (like Texas, Georgia, and Ohio) still lag behind. 

“The IRA is the most substantial federal action the US has ever taken to combat climate change, but it was not intended to solve every decarbonization challenge in one bill,” the authors write. “A sustained stream of federal and state actions is the only way to close the US emissions gap.”

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The oldest known sundial was made in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, for telling the time as the sun passed through the day’s sky. Since then, we’ve upgraded our time-telling technology significantly—but the fascination with tracking the sun remains. 

Today, the sun’s power is often discussed as a means to create clean, renewable energy through solar photovoltaic and thermal cells. A recently announced permanent artwork in the city of Houston, Texas makes a way to celebrate sun-centered technology over the eons. Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano plans to build the world’s largest free-standing sundial which will simultaneously generate clean energy. The 100-foot-tall arch is expected to produce around 400,000 kilowatt-hours of solar electricity each year, equivalent to the demand of around 40 Texas homes. 

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano originally entered the idea, called the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time), in a Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) design competition for Abu Dhabi in 2019. The arch has found its new home, however, acting as an entrance to Houston’s Second Ward community. The sculpture acts as a giant clock, as different beams of light create geometric shapes corresponding with the seasons of the year and the hours of the day on the ground and surfaces of the arch. At night, the arch will be used as a stage for concerts and other community events. 

“The apparent movement of the sun in the sky activates the space with light and colors and engages viewers who participate in the creation of the work by their presence,” Mariano said in a release. “It is a practical example to illustrate the movement of the earth around the sun in a playful way.” 

The south-facing exterior of the giant arch will be linked with solar modules, which will allow the artwork itself to offset the power demand of the nearby community arts center Talento Bilingue de Houston. Over its lifetime, LAGI states that the artwork will be able to generate over 12 million kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to “pay back” the footprint required to create the artwork and it’s materials.

[Related: Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite.]

This isn’t the first, or likely the last, exploration of renewable energy as art. While some opponents to clean energy projects note the less-than-attractive appearance of solar panels or wind turbines lining the landscape, innovative projects can turn energy-generating projects into gorgeous murals to funky sculptures that double as charging stations. 

Robert Ferry, one of the Land Art Generator Initiative co-founders, hopes the Arco del Tiempo can hopefully act as “an antidote to climate despair” in one of the most climate change-impacted regions in the US. The installation is set to be completed in 2024.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

A bleary-eyed predawn traveler walking through the arrivals hall of Iceland’s Keflavik Airport blinks at a sight that’s hard at first to register: an enormous advertisement showing a shirtless man holding an infant. The man’s torso and visible arm show a swath of pucker-patterned skin. He looks half-aquatic, like a member of some superhero universe.

As it happens, this sleep-deprived analysis isn’t far off. The baby-holding man, Pétur Oddsson, is a power station worker. In 2020, he endured a 60,000-volt electrical shock; it left almost half his body covered in deep thermal burns that charred layers of his skin off. Such deep and extensive burns can be fatal—skin damaged in this way can’t make new cells to regenerate, and infections can easily set in. But Oddsson’s life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin—7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

Oddsson’s cod skin grafts are a marvel of medical technology. But they also represent something else: the manifestation of an unusual and ambitious experiment in environmental efficiency. The skin grafts are just one of a slew of products—including Omega-3 capsules, cold virus pretreatment sprays, and dog snacks—made from what was once Iceland’s cod catch detritus. They come largely from the efforts of 100% Fish—a project spurred by the incubator Iceland Ocean Cluster in collaboration with research institutes and private companies to determine how to repurpose byproducts from the country’s US $2-billion seafood sector.

So far, enterprising Icelanders have unlocked uses for almost 95 percent of a cod—a pretty recent jump forward. In 2003, people only knew what to do with about 40 percent of the fish.

Árni Mathiesen, the cluster’s senior adviser and the country’s former fisheries minister, says the 100% Fish Project has created jobs and manifested once-scarce domestically produced goods. It has also, adds Alexandra Leeper, the cluster’s head of research and innovation, provided lower-impact fish meal for a burgeoning aquaculture industry. Relatedly, 100% Fish is looking beyond cod, too. A company called Nordic Fish Leather is upcycling farmed salmon skin into leather for accessories and another, Primex, is extracting chitosan from the shells of wild-caught Atlantic northern shrimp, which can be used as a blood-clotting agent.

The cod skin grafts are the brainchild of Fertram Sigurjonsson, a chemist and the founder of biotech company Kerecis, which is part of the 100% Fish Project. The grafts come in several sizes—wide strips, for large wounds; glove shapes, for hands; and granules, which act like putty in smaller wounds—and have been used to treat thousands of burn victims, diabetes patients with open wounds, and women with infected C-sections. Doctors can perform some of these procedures with pigskin grafts, but those are harvested from animals engineered for the purpose. The fish skin, conversely, comes from cod caught for human consumption by fishermen in Sigurjonsson’s northwestern hometown of Isafjordur. (Fishermen who also own valuable shares in his company.)

Sigurjonsson says Kerecis currently transforms a mere 0.01 percent of Icelandic cod skins into grafts. But as demand grows, and as Kerecis’ research and development department determines more uses—they’re investigating breast reconstruction—he’s looking to expand.

By weight, a cod is about eight percent skin. Beyond making for good grafting material, cod skin is rich in collagen, a supplement for human skin, ligament, and bone health. Cod skin easily sheds this protein when it’s boiled in water with enzymes, says Hrönn Margrét Magnúsdóttir. She’s the founder of a collagen supplement and energy drink company called Feel Iceland, which uses collagen derived from 700 tonnes of fish skin per year.

Bones account for at least 35 percent of a cod’s weight. Icelandic companies have long dried fish heads and spines with the country’s abundant geothermal energy and exported them to Nigeria, where they’re the base of a protein-rich soup. But Margrét Geirsdóttir, a project manager at Matís, a food and biotechnology research institute that partners with the Iceland Ocean Cluster, says the unpredictability of that market has sent researchers looking for new applications—such as extracting calcium for supplements.

By far the most challenging holdouts to whole-fish use are the blood and eyeballs, says Geirsdóttir.

According to Icelandic lore, squeezing the liquid from a redfish eyeball onto a wound prevents infection. Matís scientists followed this up, studying whether cod eyeballs might have antiseptic properties. No such luck. They also had a project, says Geirsdóttir, to see whether the eyes contained valuable fats. They do, she says, “but it’s such a low amount and you would need to [extract] it by hand, so it’s not paying off.”

Fish blood, accounting for 10 percent of a fish’s weight, might be used to make products like those made from the blood of land animals, such as sausage filler, fish feed, or fertilizer. Yet Geirsdóttir says the hardest part about working with fish blood is collecting it. On a commercial fishing boat, cod are quickly bled to maintain their freshness. Convincing skeptical fishermen to invest in storing the fish intact means proving the endeavor is worthwhile.

There is an optimistic precedent, however. Fishermen once tossed cod livers overboard; now they’re an expensive delicacy that fishermen are happy to preserve. What changed? Several years back, Geirsdóttir says, fishermen began to see high profits from the sale of cod liver. “Then they started to see the value in it,” she says.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post No guts left behind: Iceland’s quest to repurpose fish waste appeared first on Popular Science.

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The shipping industry is important in linking together the global supply chain, but it’s fairly carbon intensive. Recent data suggest that shipping makes up around 3 percent of global carbon emissions, and there’s been much effort directed at making different parts of the process more green. 

Shipping giant Maersk has been investing more than $1 billion on ships that run on green methanol, which is derived from the methane that is produced by food waste in landfills. This week, a new container ship from the company that is powered by that type of fuel plans to set sail from South Korea to Denmark, according to a report from Fast Company, and will be the first ever to use green methanol. 

Some metrics about the ship, which doesn’t yet have a name: The vessel is 172-meters-long (around 560 feet), with a container capacity of 2,100 TEU and is designed to reach speeds of 17.4 knots.

CNBC estimated that each of these ships costs around $175 million. Maersk has 25 of these ships ordered, and is working to retrofit old ships to run on the new fuel, which means that they get new engine parts, and need new fuel tanks, along with a fuel preparation room and fuel supply system. 

[Related: Birds sometimes hitch rides on ships—and it’s changing the way they migrate]

The company’s vision for the next decade is to transform a quarter of its fleet to run on this fuel. While the green methanol will still generate some emissions as it’s used up, compared to traditional diesel, it can cut emissions by more than 65 percent. Maersk has figured out a couple of ways to make green methanol. Other than collecting methane gas from waste and turning that into bio-methanol, Maersk can also make green e-methanol (which combines captured carbon dioxide and green hydrogen) with renewable energy. Although it was reported last year by Quartz that Maersk was worried about finding enough green fuel for its ships, it has been signing deals with countries and companies to streamline the supply of green methanol and put these ships to work. 

Morten Bo Christiansen, who leads decarbonization at Maersk, said at the TED Countdown Summit last week that bringing down the cost is the next problem to tackle, as reported by Fast Company. But currently, the extra cost associated with green methanol compared to diesel is equivalent to consumers paying five extra cents for a pair of sneakers crossing the ocean. 

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The smartphone Fairphone 4 is finally available in the United States. The phone, lauded for its sustainability, is user-repairable and made with responsibly-sourced materials like Fairtrade-certified gold and aluminum from suppliers certified by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI).

Like many other smartphones, the Fairphone 4 has front and back cameras, an LCD touchscreen, Near Field Communication technology that allows contactless payments via mobile wallets, and even a fingerprint scanner. It also offers at least five years of software support, assuring users that they’ll be providing updates for years to come.

Given that smartphones are the most widely used electronic device around the world, efforts to reduce their environmental impact are important, says Gregory A. Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

[Related: Memory vs. storage: What to know when buying a new smartphone.]

Emerging trends and technologies often create consumer demand for newer models with better features, even though older phones still function. Smartphones are a significant electronic waste stream in the US with around 151 million products being thrown away annually, and only about 17 percent are properly treated and recycled.

The impact of smartphones on the environment

Smartphones may be small enough to fit in your pocket, but their carbon emissions likely surpass that of desktop computers, laptops, and LCDs. For instance, the iPhone 14 Pro contributes 65 kilograms of carbon emissions throughout its life cycle, which is equivalent to driving about 167 miles in an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle, says Keoleian.

About 80 percent of a smartphone’s carbon footprint is generated during the manufacturing stage. Mining, refining, and transporting precious metals consume a lot of energy, while the act of mining itself harms the natural environment. That’s why, Keoleian says there may be no such thing as a sustainable smartphone. “Every smartphone has impacts related to their manufacture and use, and opportunities exist to further reduce these impacts,” he says.

Consumers can reduce environmental harm by replacing devices less frequently or opting for refurbished phones instead, says Keoleian. Refurbished phones, or pre-owned devices that were restored to “like new” condition and verified to function properly, are cheaper as well. Refurbished iPhone 12 products, which completed full functional testing and come with their standard one-year limited warranty, cost about $120 to $240 lower than new ones.

Joy Scrogum, assistant scientist of sustainability at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, says that manufacturers make more money if consumers believe they need the latest smartphone models. For example, Apple and Samsung, the two companies that currently dominate the smartphone industry, both release new phone models every year. These often come with specs that were improved from the previous model: better camera system, longer battery, performance upgrade of the graphics card, and more.

[Related: Letting your favorite things gather dust is unsustainable—use them.]

However, Scrogum says this belief is not always reflective of reality. “Most people probably don’t use all the processing power or features of their current phone, let alone what they might find on the latest smartphone models,” she adds.

Smartphone users have to reassess whether they really need an upgrade. According to Scrogum, she bought her current smartphone when her now 18-year-old daughter started middle school. Although a few retailer apps are no longer compatible with the device, it’s “not a big deal” and the phone still functions well, she says.

“Would I like a better camera on my phone?,” says Scrogum. “Sure, but that’s not really a need. My phone still does everything I need it to do, and plenty of things I don’t really need, like providing games to play.” She adds that she’ll get a new phone when apps she regularly relies on stop being compatible with the device, but in that case, it’s not that the phone isn’t useful anymore—it’s because app developers stopped making the latest versions of their software compatible with the oldest devices still in service.

How manufacturers can practice sustainability

The best thing manufacturers can do to make devices more sustainable is to design them for repairability and upgradability, says Scrogum. Having components that can be easily removed and replaced is important because it allows consumers to fix issues and upgrade features without having to replace the entire phone.

[Related: Big tech companies are finally making devices easier to repair.]

“In other words, plan for durability rather than obsolescence,” she adds. “Keep in mind that phones which are designed to be easier to take apart for repair are also easier to disassemble at their end-of-life so components and materials can be reused or recycled.” 

Smartphones will also remain in service longer with more equitable access to the tools and information needed for repairs and upgrades. Scrogum says manufacturers can restrict access to replacement parts or tools to control repair through their own authorized technicians, but the cost or proximity to such service providers may be a barrier for some folks.

“When manufacturers make it easier for people to perform DIY repairs and modifications, or to use an independent repair service, they’re making repair a viable option for more people and supporting a more circular economy,” says Scrogum.

Policy support is also crucial. New York passed a Right to Repair law last year that covers smartphones. It ensures that the diagnostic and repair information for digital electronic products available to authorized repair providers is also made available by manufacturers to consumers and independent repair services. Companies like Samsung, Google, and Apple have also established programs allowing consumers and independent repair providers to buy official parts.

Policies requiring standardization of common components may also help consumers keep their smartphones around longer. The European Union recently passed legislation that requires a USB-C charging port for phones and other small- and medium-sized devices like tablets and e-readers by 2024. A mandatory universal charger was established to help reduce the generation of electronic waste. The rule also unbundles chargers with electronic devices, allowing consumers to forgo them when buying a new product and save about $280 million annually on unnecessary charger purchases.

“When in doubt, the ‘greenest’ device is the one you already own, or one previously owned by someone else,” says Scrogum. “We need to keep products in useful service for as long as possible.”

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