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A significant percentage of UK household waste is waste food.
Now it is true that better planning, better reuse can greatly reduce this. However only food that is uncooked can be put in a compost heap. The UK produces about 5 million tonnes of food waste year. If this was collected it could reduce emissions dramatically, as well as potentially creating significant biogas for power generation.
Continue reading “In the UK the government has mandated waste food collection by 2023 – but no funding”In the UK we have incredibly stringent rules on recycling. Indeed, there are regular suggestions about giving people smaller bins so that we send less rubbish to the dump.
If this is the case, why is so much of our recycling simply being burned?
Continue reading “The UK sorts our rubbish at higher rates than anywhere else in the world, so why is so much being incinerated”Humans eat between 1-2kg of food per day, so each person consumes roughly 1.2 tonnes a year. That means that one billion tonnes of food could feed half of China or India or alternatively the next 3 biggest countries – the USA Indonesia and Pakistan.
Another way of thinking about it, is that if humanity ceased wasting food tomorrow, there would be enough to feed the whole planet completely.
Continue reading “Humans throw away roughly 1 billion tonnes of waste food per year – yet 1 in 9 go hungry”The European comission is considering a rule which would essentially ban ne internal combustion engine cars from 2025, only 4 years away. The industry as obviously attacked this, in part by pointing out the rules demanding that all cars be practically clear of emissions by 2025 will rule out clean fuels such as liquid hydrogen.
Continue reading “Could the EU bring forward the end of new combustion engine cars to 2025?”At the current time, we have a highly inefficient system. There is no requirement as to how long technology is required to last. In the past, that has perhaps been less noticeable, as the advance in the capabilities has been so fast, that an upgrade generally became desired long before the product wore out.
However, there has been an alarming trend which has seen manufacturers removing manuals to allow products to be serviced, and or sealing parts of the product, so that batteries cannot be replaced or in some other way making DIY fixing hard or impossible.
Continue reading “The EU is bringing in laws that require products to last for a decade”Thames water in London UK is hoping to use excess heat from sewage treatment plants to provide the warmth needed for 2000 homes in Kingston-upon-Thames.
What normally happens, is that once the water has been fully treated, it is returned to the river. The problem with this, is that the water is at a higher temperature than the river, and this is not good for its ecosystem.
Continue reading “Using sewage to heat homes?”A new system can transform thousands of hills in the UK into large batteries. A team of engineers have developed a system which would allow Hydropower to store and release power within gently sloping hills and without the huge dams currently needed.
The idea of these small hydropower systems, is that we could build many of these tiny dams for far less than just a few large ones. More importantly, it would come with far less negative issues to those that come with historic large dams (for instance the proposed dam which threatens the future of 8th great ape species the Tapulani Orangutan).
Continue reading “Could many hills in the UK become the batteries of tomorrow?”At the beginning of January an new agreement was signed by 50 countries who pledged to protect 30% of the earths land and oceans. The intention of this agreement is to stem the flow of extinctions that human activity has been causing for the last few centuries.
The hope is that this agreement can form the basis of a larger agreement at the UN, building on the early commitments from nations such as Nigeria Pakistan Costa Rica Canada and many more.
Continue reading “Paris agreement for nature?”Over the last half a century, the number of deer that live in the UK has climbed pretty much continually.
In many parts of the country, the number of deer are controlled by regular culls. However, during the pandemic these have not happened, and that now means that 2 culls in a row have been missed.
Continue reading “The number of wild deer in the UK is soaring because no one is eating them: bring back wolves?”I wrote about a month ago about a deep coal mine in Cumbria that was green-lit. Thankfully this foolish plan was reversed.
At a time when many fossil fuel extraction locations around the world will have to stop working without exhausting the resource, the idea of starting a new one is ridiculous. Particularly stupid is to decide to do this, the year that the UK is to host a climate conference – with the purpose of agreeing more cuts.
Continue reading “After foolish coal mine is cancelled MPs are angry”