Tag: waste

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Shell is once again backing off from a pledge

Increasingly, it seems Shell is a company which repeatedly makes pledges when the light is on them, and then backs away, when no one is looking any more.

In the summer, they dropped a pledge to turn 1 million tonnes of plastic a year, back into oil. They now say that this goal is unfeasible. Advanced, or chemical recycling, involves breaking down plastic polymers into tiny molecules, ready to be reformed into something else. The most common method is called pyrolysis – which uses heat.

They first used pyrolysis in 2019, when they made oil using this process in a Louisiana chemical plant. It should be noted, that this uses so much energy, it is likely to be worse for the worlds climate than continued use of virgin plastics (this is not to say that we should, but that this is not a viable solution). Shell has suggested that this pledge is impossible as a result of not enough plastic waste coming back to them, but as hundreds of millions of plastic is created each year, this seems rather a cop-out.

They are not the only company to back away, but they are the latest. It should not be possible to get off the hook by simply making a declaration, but instead should require them to do something else that will have a similarly positive impact on the world

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Do not buy a hydrogen boiler!

The UK watchdog (amongst many other groups) have concluded that hydrogen boiler is a stupid idea. It is true that its only waste product is water and oxygen, but the cost of making the hydrogen is very high.

Should there be large quantities of hydrogen sitting around, then this might make sense – burning hydrogen is generally a very clean fuel. The problem is, that it is almost impossible to store or transport it without loosing much on route, and it is incredibly expensive to split water – the current form for the vast majority of the hydrogen on the planet. Fossil fuel companies are keen, because their old methods can extract and split hydrogen, but it will mean large carbon emissions as well, so is useless – there is a reason that it is called grey hydrogen. Green hydrogen is the only kind that will give us any profit as a world.

So why is the government supporting the switch (alongside gas focused industry). The department for energy security and net zero stated this week that the gas network ” will always be part of our energy system”. I am not sure why anyone would look at it, given an air-source heat pump is likely to be around price parity, and ground source heating even cheaper.

Installation, at the cheap end will be far cheaper than a heat-pump, but this will be more than made up for over the lifetime of the device. Furthermore, with the grants currently available, you are far better off going straight to a heat pump. This is a waste of time and money, and it would not be remotely surprising, if you had to remove it before the end of its life,as it would be costing too much

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The end of Whaling in Iceland, end of an era, or sensible financial move

Whaling went on for centuries, in many parts of the world. One of these was Iceland, where due to the latitude, it is often hard to grow much food. Iceland did not end whaling when it was banned by the international community, and since then have hunted and killed around 1800. They returned to hunting fin whales last year, but what is clear, is that not only do the Icelandic people not want to eat the whale meat, but there is little hunger for it elsewhere in the world. Indeed, whaling is incredibly expensive, and has only stayed afloat through government support.

Whales are essential to the worlds oceans, both through their fertilization through their waste, and the vast amounts of carbon that they sequester over their lives. For the foreseeable time we need every living whale we can have, in the fight against the damage which humans are doing to the planet.

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Is the COP conferences a waste of time, if climate change deniers are able to lead it?

At the current time, countries in the region in which the COP is held will chose a president. In theory, that is fine, however, in practice if this is going to continue then the middle east should be banned from hosting the conference.

So, what precisely did Sultan Al Jaber say, which was so troubling?

Firstly, he claimed that a ‘phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves'”.

He then claimed that there is ‘no science’ to suggest phasing out fossil fuels is the only way to achieve 1.5C.

After being laughed at, over this utterly insane statment, he suggested that the comment had been misinterpreted. It should be noted, that this was in response to a question from a woman, which he was relatively rude about.

Do you think this woman misunderstood?

He even had the gall to suggest that the misrepresentation was undermining his desire to reduce carbon emissions (perhaps if this is true, it can start with his huge fossil fuel company can show this?). More than 100 countries are already supportive of this.

The worlds uptake of electric cars must accelerate. This is partly underway – last year around 67 million cars were sold, but 14% of these were electric, up from just 9% the previous year. The uptake is accelerating.

It should also be noted that apart from extreme heat in the UAE, continued global warming will also damage the UAE in extreme ways. The UAE economy is 0.5% of the global economy, in the end, places like this may refuse to accept the end of oil, and will have to be bankrupted, as cars move to 100% and many other industries clean up their act.

 

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Humans throw away roughly 1 billion tonnes of waste food per year – yet 1 in 9 go hungry

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”
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The EU is bringing in laws that require products to last for a decade

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”
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