Waste and Recycling

Electric cars save carbon dioxide emissions over their lifetime. There are a significant number of fossil fuel producers and combustion engine car produces who will fudge their numbers and suggest the battery cars are actually worse for the environment than fossil fuel cars. As you can imagine this is false. Electric cars are zero emission …...

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. …...

Making new glass from cutlet (small glass pieces) saves significant energy. This is partly because it needs a lower temperature to melt. While it is true that much of the materials that go into glass are not in short supply, it is still more sensible to reuse, particularly if your energy requirements are lower. Apart …...

The average UK household has a footprint of around 20 tonnes. Now it is true, that this is well below USA emissions as that is for 4 people – so average emissions of around 5 tonnes per head. However, with relatively small adjustments, this can be cut dramatically. 12.3% of emissions come from heating, and …...

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?

I have written in the past, about a discovery made on a Japanese dump back in 2016 of a plastic eating enzyme. By working in the lab, scientists have been able to speed this process up 6 times, such that full recycling is thought to be possible of plastics within 2 years.

it would appear that the UK and the USA addiction to plastic is worse than any other countries in the world. As well as general waste the USA also comes between third and eleventh (depending on what’s included) in terms of the amount of their plastic that ends up in the marine ecosystem.

I have written in the past about a fascinating type of bacteria that was found on a Chinese rubbish stump number of years ago. Plastics are a fantastic material because they breakdown very little, therefore giving strong materials for not much money. The problem is that many of the uses that these plastics have been …...

The UK transport and environment department have created a tool to help do the check for people. Unlike the ice assessment which calculates the carbon cost of  making the electric car, but left out the cost of making the ice car (why such an unfair comparison wasn’t laughed out of existence,  I don’t understand) this …...

The Persian Leopard The Persian Leopard is only found in a few countries and only in very few small numbers. However the fact that it still clings on means that it is far easier to recover this species than it would be were the last few to have disappeared. This is similar to the Amur …...