A new exhibiton of photographs showing life in some of the most remote communities in the world is taking place in London, amidst warnings that climate change may well wipe out ancient ways of life within years. Ragnar Axelsson has spent 25 years capturing the lifestyles of traditional innuit hunters ad fishermen in Greenland andhis new exhibition ‘LAST DAYS OF THE ARCTIC’ runs until March 11th at the Proud Gallery in Kings Road, Chelsea, London. www.proud.co.uk. And the very next day Climate Week begins in the UK and there will be more on Climate Week here soon.
Meredith Alexander, Ethics Commissioner for the London 2012 Olympics, is leaving her post saying she cannot sanction the involvement of Dow Chemicals as a sponsor. Dow remain embroiled in a worldwide row over the Bhopal chemicals disaster at the Union Carbide plant in India in 1999. The Commission for Sustainable London appear to have agreed to the £7 million deal, despite the fact that 3,500 people died when the within days of the Bhopal chemical gas tragedy and campaigners say more than 20,000 more have died since. Dow has a greed to withdraw branding from Olympic stadium panels.
Marks & Spencer (M&S) has signed a pilot agreement with energy storage and clean fuel company ITM Power to deliver what it claims is the UK’s first hydrogen fuel powered vehicles. The trial forms part of M&S’ ongoing Plan A Initiative which sets out a number of sustainability ambitions, including a target of sourcing 100% of its energy from renewable sources.
Food manufacturers have welcomed EU proposals to deliver a coordinated strategy to halve the amount of food waste by 2025. The European Parliament has asked the Commission and member states to draw up plans to tackle the problem. Nearly 50% of edible and healthy food is wasted every year in the EU by households, supermarkets, restaurants and the distribution chain. The EU says food waste currently amounts to around 89 million tonnes a year and could climb to 126 million tonnes in 2020 if no action is taken. Unilever Food Solutions has developed a waste toolkit for catering venues and restaurants to help food service operators control their costs better. The toolkit breaks down the cost of commercial food waste and contains guidance on how establishments can carry out waste audits. It includes a briefing sheet for managers, guidelines for staff and menu ideas to use frequently wasted ngredients. Unilever drew up the toolkit in response to its latest World Menu Report, which highlights the growing problem of food waste when consumers dine out. According to the research, over half the food produced in the world today is wasted as a result of inefficiencies in the human managed food chain. We have just updated our ‘information pages’ at http://www.agreenerfestival.com to include more content on food, starting with a extremely interesting article by Hannah Claxton who previously worked in the music industry and now describes herself as a ‘trainee farmer’ – with a determination to produce sustainable food. And more from Climate Week on food here http://www.climateweek.com/eat-low-carbon/
A Perthshire landowner and contractor have been handed fines of £9,000 and £900 respectively at Perth Sheriff’s Court for illegal waterworks in the River Tay, Scotland to enable gravel extraction. As a result of investigations by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), landowner Thomas Steuart Fothringham and contractor McIntosh & Robertson, run by John McIntosh, were found guilty of carrying out engineering works by building grey bank protection (river bank protection using artificial materials) on the south bank of the River Tay without a license. According to SEPA, the engineering activities could have caused “huge adverse impacts on the water environment” as a result of silt into the river.
Edie.net reports that UK retailers will have to extend their takeback schemes for e-waste under new rules governing the WEEE Directive which have effectively strengthened producer responsibility requirements. The recast of the directive, which was approved by the European Parliament means that large stores selling electronic items – with a floor space of over 400 square metres – will be obliged to take back small items of WEEE free of charge, regardless of whether a customer makes a purchase or not. In addition, manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment will continue to contribute financially towards meeting tougher reprocessing targets, although they will benefit from a cut in red tape, with simplified registration and reporting requirements.
Sony Corporation has exceeded its waste minimisation targets across all of its global business sites, achieving a 54% reduction rate in 2010 set against a 40% objective. The electronics giant is now embarking on a number of pioneering initiatives to take its ambitions further. Out in Korea, Sony has launched a zero electronic waste campaign in collaboration with the Korean Government and various recycling companies, signing a memorandum of understanding with a national council of green consumers. Across Europe Sony says it is also reducing waste.. Recycling levels have increased from 73% in 2000 to 99% in 2009, meaning that 99% of the waste generated by Sony Europe’s manufacturing facilities is now either reused or recycled.
Northern Ireland will be bringing in a 5p levy on plastic bags from next year. A similar move in the Republic of Ireland which currently has a 18p levy per bag led to a 90% drop in plastic bag use. The Northern Ireland levy will rise to 10p in 2014.
Supermarket giant Tesco is back tracking on its support for carbon labelling of its products. The chain says the labels, which it launched with the Carbon Trust four years ago, is frustrated at the lack of take up by other retailers and the time it takes to organise reports the Grocer magazine. Tesco displays the label on around 500 products and is one of more than 100 businesses currently using it.
Edie.net reports that London’s police force has begun installing solar PV on its buildings as part of carbon cutting drive. The latest installation on the a Metropolitan Police Service’s building has seen solar PV panels installed on the roof of Lewisham station, in south east London. So far, including Lewisham, three of the Met’s buildings have had PV installed on roofs. The National Trust is also supporting solar power industry by commissioning renewable energy consultants Dulas to deliver its biggest solar panel installation yet. The works at the National Trust’s Grade 1 listed villa Llanerchaeron, Wales is expected to generate up to half of the electricity the property requires, with installation reaching completion before the cut to Feed In-Tariffs (FITs) came into force last month.
Plasterboard manufacturer British Gypsum has reached zero waste across all of its UK production operations, resulting in the closure of an internal landfill site. The company has implemented a comprehensive waste reduction programme at its Kirky Thore manufacturing facility and is now recycling all of its gypsum waste. It has since closed and restored a nearby landfill site where the waste was previously sent to. The programme reduced the amount of production waste going to landfill from an average of 5,000 tonnes per month in 2004 to zero in just six years.
The average UK family home is comfortably warm at 17.3C a rise of more than 5C since 1970 according to figures from University of Salford Retrofit 2012 conference which showed the average temperature at risen by just over a degree C a decade since the 70s. Another challenge is that expectation of personal comfort in the home had risen, with the public’s definition of ‘comfortable’ home temperature rising from 12C in 1970 to 17.3C in 2008.
As the Environment Agency continues to urge businesses to reduce their water use, drinks giant Coca-Cola has unveiled how it will continue to hit “stringent” targets to reduce water usage in its first digital Global Reporting Initiative. As part of the ‘Reasons to Believe’ sustainability report, which follows GRI sustainability reporting guidelines, ‘water stewardship’ is one of four key areas focused on by Coca-Cola. And car giant Ford has revealed that it has invested Euro 2.3m in its five-year water reduction strategy.
Pioneering technology using microbubbles could solve the difficulties of harvesting algae for use as a biofuel, according to scientists. The technique, developed at the University of Sheffield, builds on previous research in which microbubbles were used to improve the way algae is cultivated. Algae produce an oil which can be processed to create a useful biofuel. Until now however, there has been no cost-effective method of harvesting and removing the water from the algae for it to be processed effectively.
The rise of mixed plastics collections in the UK is starting to pose serious material quality problems for reprocessors, according to new research, According to a technical guide from WRAP, increasing amounts of mixed plastic packaging are diluting the presence of PET and HDPE bottles, making it difficult for plant operators to extract these polymer types to a high enough standard. The cost of this fall in quality in turn is now being passed onto local authorities through a reduction in the price they receive for their plastic bottles, and this trend is likely to continue until more infrastructure capable of sorting bottles from mixed plastics comes on-stream.
Bearing in mind that many scientists are wary about making long term predictions about climate change, and with a spate of exaggerated headlines trumpeting dangerous climate change science, the need to for accurate scientific evidence into climate change has never been more important. But it now seems that the effect of methane on climate change has been seriously underestimated as scientists have failed to take into account the gas’s reaction with airborne particles called aerosols according to new research from NASA. The ever nearing Copenhagen 15 conference on climate change conference will be looking primarily at carbon dioxide emissions but other greenhouse gases which include methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons are also important in climate change – and some are far more dangerous than CO2 and even more worrying is the fact that they may have more negative impacts than had been previously thought. Drew Shindell, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York explained that molecules of methane gas, the second most important greenhouse gas “undergo chemical changes and once they do, looking at them after they’ve mixed and changed in the atmosphere doesn’t give an accurate picture of their effect”. Dr Shindell said “For example, the amount of methane in the atmosphere is affected by pollutants that change methane’s chemistry, and it doesn’t reflect the effects of methane on other greenhouse gases,” said Shindell, “so it’s not directly related to emissions, which are what we set policies for.” Molecule for molecule, methane was thought to be 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but focus has remained on CO2 as it is s much more abundant than methane and the predicted growth rate is far greater. However the research shows that Methane has 33 times as much effect on climate change compared to CO2, up from 25 times used in standard estimates, although methane breaks down much more quickly than CO2 (which is also largely unreactive). Dr Shindell told the Times newspaper (October 30th 2009) “for long term climate change there is no way round dealing with CO2 – it’s the biggest thing and lasts hundreds of years – but if we were to have a concerted effort to deal with non CO2 we would have a very large impact on the near term”. And whilst Dr Shindell agreed that current efforts should focus on CO2, the new research also casts doubt on current predictions on rises in global temperature. Current IPCC predictions are that the world will warm between 1.1C and 6C by 2100. 2C is seen as the global tipping point after which irreversible damage will be done to the planet. The research also casts doubts on whether carbon trading schemes will be effective if they focus only on CO2. Sources of methane include agriculture, gases escaping from landfill and fossil fuels. According to Professor Mark Maslin of UCL, one source is likely to be the release of the planet’s methane hydrate deposits. These ice-like deposits are found on the seabed and in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the far north. “These permafrost deposits are now melting and releasing their methane,” said Maslin. “You can see the methane bubbling out of lakes in Siberia. And that is a concern, for the impact of methane in the atmosphere is considerable. It is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.” A build-up of permafrost methane in the atmosphere would produce a further jump in global warming and accelerate the process of climate change. Even more worrying, however, is the impact of rising sea temperatures on the far greater reserves of methane hydrates that are found on the sea floor. It was not just the warming of the sea that was the problem, added Maslin. As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering underwater landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea-bed. Again there would be a jump in global warming. “These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years,” he said. “If we control methane, which the U.S. is already starting to do, then we are likely to mitigate global warming more than one would have thought, so that’s a very positive outcome,” Dr Shindell said. “Control of methane emissions turns out to be a more powerful lever to control global warming than would be anticipated.”
The government of the Maldives is holding an official meeting underwater to highlight the threat of climate change. The low-lying country is one of those most at risk from rising sea levels and in attempt to flag up the issue, the cabinet planned to converse using divers’ hand signals while President Mohamed Nasheed, a qualified diver, is to sign a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. The President also plans to hold a press conference underwater following the meeting.
A senior Chinese advisor has said that the country should not be expected to reduce it’s greenhouse gas emissions because this would compromise it’s economic growth. Speaking at the launch of a new report on China’s prospects for low carbon growth, Dai Yande, the Deputy Chief of the Energy Research Institute made it clear that developing nations should not be forced to compromise economic growth because of climate change targets. With the Copenhagen UN summit on climate change fast approaching, China is clearly signalling that it is the developed world that needs to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions – as it is nations like the USA, members the European Economic Community, Japan and Australia who consume 80% of the world’s resources and create 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. A co-author of the Report, Professor He Jiankum said that China faced huge obstacles in moving to a low carbon future because it was still developing – and said that “there are a huge number of cities to be built. They will consume a large amount of steel and cement. This means that emissions will not be reduced for some time”. With massive investments needed for sustainable power sources such as solar and wind power, current projections show that China will increase greenhouse gas emissions to a peak some time in 2030-2035.
The UK Government have announced plans to quadruple the number of wind turbines in the UK and will force through planning applications in order to meet planned CO2 emission cuts of 34% by 2020. The move, which has been criticised by the business community for being economically inefficient and by some environmentalists for blighting landscapes and communities, will see more than 4,000 onshore turbines built by 2020 (many in beauty spots or highhly visible on high land) with a further 3,000 turbines offshore. Energy experts point out that wind is an intermittent source of power and Environmental groups have asked the Government consider that windfarms need to be sensitively sited. The CBI have argued that the cost of turbines can be three or four times as much as other power sources and if fossil fuels are to be slowly phased out then the cleanest and cheapest alternative is nuclear power – with coal powered generator plants with carbon capture as an alternative.
