https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/leaf-coalition

 

Tried to paste article but not working.

Cross the Nullarbor in an electric car made in a factory

using electricity from a coal-fired generator.

....or take your own generator to save waiting, waiting, waiting in the long, long queue.

 

 

 

 

Carbon Emissions are Down Due to COVID19

Earlier this month we mentioned the surprising climate change benefits of the Coronavirus. While social distancing has definitely resulted in some social and economic challenges for many, it also seems to be improving our air quality since travel has decreased across the board significantly. Researchers in New York are reporting early results, saying that carbon monoxide levels produced by cars has decreased 50% in comparison to this time last year. China and Italy have also reported significant air pollution decreases since the outbreak.

The Manta’ Sailing Vessel is Designed to Feed on Plastic Waste for Power–While Cleaning OceansBy Andy Corbley -May 3, 2021 Manta rendering, The SeaCleaners

A professional yacht racer, annoyed by the constant sightings of floating mats of plastic garbage in coastal waters, has designed an ocean-cleaning sailboat that is powered by the waste it collects.

The 56-meter (184 feet) Manta is the first offering from racer Yves Bourgnon’s SeaCleaners Project, and would be one of the largest waste-collecting vessels on the seas, according to Reuters.

At the end of the film Back to the Future, Dr. Emmet Brown has famously managed to replace his plutonium-powered generator with one which uses ordinary garbage. Like the DeLorean in the movie, the Manta uses garbage to power an electric motor that works in conjunction with the sails to propel the large catamaran.

In between the three pontoons, conveyor belts scoop up trash as small as 10 millimeters, over which the Manta glides, while three trawl nets drifting behind (to a depth of 1 meter, thereby avoiding sea life) add to the onboard collection. This trash is then fed into a processing machine where crewmen sort it before moving it into an incinerator that shreds and melts the plastic—and even uses the heat and gases—to power a turbine to creates the electric power.

MORE: Scientists Make Microplastics Breakthrough, Devising Method to Trap And Remove Them

Paired with solar panels lining the decks and a wind turbine that harvests power from the wind coming off the sails, the Manta would be 70% self-sufficient in terms of energy, allowing it to sail around sucking up 3 tons of waste an hour, without almost ever needing to return to harbor and refuel or offload plastic.

There’s also room onboard for a scientific laboratory, allowing marine biologists and chemists to study the effects of plastic on the ecosystem.

Unveiled purely as a concept, the SeaCleaners want to put a working prototype on the waves by 2024. Bourgnon believes that if 400 of the vessels were made, they could eventually remove 33% of the ocean’s plastic pollution.

 

Here is the video of the catamaran:

https://youtu.be/s4B43cE_toE

 

New Mexico is known for its adobe dwellings, Kyoto for its wooden temples, and now, in rural Nigeria, there are villages making waves for their plastic bottle houses.

Discarded plastic bottles can be found along too many miles of Earth roads—and in Nigeria, one of the most populated African countries, there are enough to create a new sustainable construction business.

In fact, there are now houses being built with discarded plastic bottles that are filled with sand and set into a wall via a lattice pattern. The homes are offered for lower prices which helps rural villages.

And, this greener construction method is strong and durable, able to withstand earthquakes—and even bullets.

Called bottle-brick technology, Al Jazeera reports that the walls are 18-times stronger than regular bricks.

In the central state of Kaduna, the project employs out-of-school or jobless youth filling bottles with sand before stacking them amid a glue of traditional mud technology, and securing the outside with a net. The result looks quite striking and can cost a third less than traditional housing in the region, with raw materials being almost free.

As many as 14,000 plastic bottles will go in to making a house, and staff at the Development Association for Renewable Energies are hoping to pitch the project to the Nigerian government in order to secure some additional funding and expand the enterprise.

One thing is certain, the harvesting of bottles from rubbish-strewn roadsides is benefitting the neighborhood and the planet.

(WATCH the Al Jazeera video…)

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/brick-bottle-houses-in-nigeria/?

A Colorado woman has spent 23 days picking up 126 bags of trash across the country.

Having over a month off from her job at a campus recreation center, 24-year-old Stefani Shamrowicz decided to take a trip to help clean up the environment.

She’s now driven over 70 hours through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York—cleaning up everything from pee-filled bottles to lawn ornaments.

“About 80 per cent is drinking bottles and face masks have been pretty common,” said the Fort Collins local. “I’ve found a few fast-food toys and a tire with a pair of cowboy boots in it.”

Stefani said her aim isn’t to shame, but rather encourage people to do what they can.

“When I post it’s never ‘this is disgusting or we’re awful,’ it’s ‘hey I’m cleaning up this city’ and keeping a positive light on it,” she said.

“I’m not going to be able to pick up everything, but if everyone starts picking up some on walks or runs, that’s where the magic is.”

Collecting anywhere from one to 16 bags at a time, Stefani’s been discouraged when she felt she wasn’t doing enough.

“There was a place that had an ocean of trash and I pushed out four bags, but then I broke down because I realized how much there was and it felt like four bags didn’t do anything,” she said.

But she remembers to just do what she can, especially since she surpassed her goal.

“My monumental day was bag 100 in Ohio on day 16,” she said.

“I dedicated that to my parents because they raised me to be this independent person and have been very supportive on the trip.”

People donate $10 a bag for Stefani to clean up in their name, which she uses for lodging and gas. The person’s name is written on how many bags they’ve donated towards and Stefani posts a picture on her Instagram when they are filled, thanking them for helping clean up the city she’s in.

People online and in person have responded positively to the project.

“I’ve had people send me pictures of bags of trash they picked up,” Stefani said.

“I was walking on the beach in Florida, and I started doing a bag, these two ladies saw me and nonchalantly started helping me fill the bag.”

With her job resuming June 1, Stefani is now back home but she has so many good things to say about her unique U.S. road trip.

“There’s litter everywhere, so I’m just happy to be able to make a little bit of an impact everywhere I go,” she said.

“I’ve been to 23 national parks in the U.S., so me cleaning up this litter is a huge thank you for all the joy and good times national parks and nature in general has brought to my life.”

Mr. Trash Wheel’ Gobbles Up 15 Tons of Trash Every Day From Harbors – And More Cities Are AdoptingYouTube/CNET

For years, the ambiguous yet contented face of Mr. Trash Wheel has been an icon of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The googly-eyed trash collector has been gobbling up millions of pounds of the city’s river-borne garbage for years, and led to the creation of several water-wheel allies like Capt. Trash Wheel, and Prof. Trash Wheel.

The idea for some sort of garbage collector came from local inventor John Kellet, who would walk across the footbridge spanning the Jones Falls stream that feeds the Baltimore harbor—and be disturbed on seeing the unabated flow of garbage floating towards it.

Kellet looked around to see if there were any potential solutions to the problem, but found none. He would end up not only giving the harbor a more sparkling, trash-free appearance, but one of the city’s biggest celebrities and social media icons—though he admitted it wasn’t his idea to put googly eyes on the barge.

GNN reported in 2017 that Mr. Trash Wheel rotates based on power drawn from the river’s current. If not enough electricity can be generated from the river alone, the wheel uses solar energy instead.

Kellet, who runs Clearwater Mills, also makes specially designed cages to fit into storm drain outfalls—which is the source of most of the garbage pollution into the harbor.

His idea has been so successful that several other organizations are building their own Mr. Trash Wheel. Coming soon to the Gwynns Falls River in Maryland is Gwynda the Good Wheel of the West, while Oakland, California is building one called Trasharella.

The first international Mr. Trash Wheel is coming to Panama, with “Mrs. Wheel” or “Doña Rueda.”

“I never envisioned we would have googly-eyes on this machine, with a name for it and a beer [named after it], and the trash wheel t-shirts and a trash wheel fan club and a trash wheel fan fest, it’s kind of beyond my wildest dreams,” said Kellet in the documentary on CNET.

Behind the Mr. Trash Wheel brand is one of the most important concepts of modern pollution theory—that rivers deposit the bulk of the garbage existing in the oceans. Non-profit The Ocean Cleanup, which operates sophisticated green energy river trash interceptors, explains on its website that one thousand of the world’s rivers source 80% of all the trash found in the ocean.

The documentary suggests lobbying your local politicians into installing a Mr. Trash Wheel by sending them some of the facts—such as the technology’s ability to collect 38,000 pounds of trash per day—or even the fact that it has the ability to become a social media influencer for your city.

There seem to be many posts missing on this thread????

In an interview, famed astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained that we already have flying cars, in a way, because tunnels and overpasses allow cars to access the third dimension.

Rendering/Solar AquaGrid

By that logic, India has invented ‘flying solar panels,’ which are being suspended above irrigation canals to cut down on the evaporation of precious water droplets by providing shade from the sun’s evaporating heat. It’s also a clever way to cut down on habitat loss, too, by placing panels in already-dedicated man-made spaces.

Now, California is eyeing the benefits derived from several successful canal installations in India. With the world’s largest irrigation canal network, and 290 days of average sunshine, California is uniquely positioned to ease its own severe water shortages with this emerging innovation of canal-covering solar farms.

UC Santa Cruz has investigated this method for use in California and estimates that—on top of generating green energy—it would save 63.5 billion gallons of water from evaporation annually, a massive windfall for a state that sometimes rations water and which regularly suffers from droughts.

However the story begins in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2014, when a pilot project covering 750 meters of canal space led to the creation of an entire canal-topped solar plant in Vadodara District, and another one totaling 100 megawatts off the Narmada River.

Researchers in India found that the water running beneath the panels cooled them, too, preventing overheating and resulting in an average efficiency increase of between 2-5%.

YouTube– REC Solar panels over canals in India

Brandi McKuin and her colleagues at UCSC wanted to model the pros and cons of covering the Golden State’s 4,000 miles of canals in solar panels, including using three separate techniques to measure water savings, and choices of construction methods that would be the most efficient to scale. (The most value conducive method of construction was thought to be steel cables.) Their results published in Nature Sustainability model a sunny future.

They believe that spanning California’s canals with solar panels could create a cost savings—from water conservation, real estate costs, aquatic weed maintenance, and enhanced electricity production—which outweighed the increased cost of building the more complex solar array.

Furthermore, the state uses diesel-powered water pumps to drive the flow of the canals, which could be replaced to the tune of 15-20 generators per megawatt of solar.

Roger Bales, a coauthor on the paper put it simply, saying, “This study is a very important step toward encouraging investments to produce renewable energy while also saving water.”

Corporate Cane Toad Award 2021: Rio Tinto and Mayur Resources receive Australia’s most toxic award JUL 09, 2021 Rio-Tinto-2.jpgRio Tinto and Mayur Resources were awarded the Corporate Cane Toad Award for their roles in contributing to environmental destruction and/or human rights violations worldwide [1]. The winners were announced at a ceremony in Melbourne after a month of public voting in which over 1000 people voted for the six companies nominated. Rio Tinto was voted the most toxic company for its decade long failure to clean up mines in Bougainville and recent destruction of Indigenous cultural sites in Australia. Mayur Resources received the second most votes from the public and the Cane Toad Award for pushing to open up a new polluting coal mine in the Pacific [2]. Both are Australian mining resource companies. “The Corporate Cane Toad Award names and shames Australian corporations implicated in Human rights violations and environmental destruction worldwide. People voted to crown Rio Tinto and Mayur Resources the country's most disgusting award and are demanding change” said Sam Cossar, Friends of the Earth’s Economic Justice campaigner. “These inaugural Cane Toad Awards help draw attention to the ongoing problems of unethical and unacceptable corporate behaviour, and remind us of how much stronger our laws need to be in protecting human rights, including the rights of First Nations peoples, and the environment” said Luke Fletcher, from Jubilee Australia. Some of the largest and most influential Australian companies in the world were nominated for the awards by impacted communities and civil society organisations. These included ANZ - for financing climate-wrecking fossil fuels, BHP - for its involvement in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, The Just Group - for the lack of public support to garment workers through the COVID-19 crisis, and Resgen - for its attempt to build a coal mine in South Africa. “Women are disproportionally impacted by poverty, and the Corporate Cane Toad Award shows that Australian companies, whether through their action or lack of action, are driving deeper poverty, injustice, and gender inequality around the world” said Katherine Tu from ActionAid Australia. The award comes at a time when Australian companies are facing increased scrutiny over climate change commitments and riding roughshod on communities’ right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent both in Australia and overseas. Friends of the Earth, Jubilee and ActionAid Australia, the organisers of the Corproprate Cane Toad, demand new binding rules from the government to ensure companies respect Human Rights, women's rights and the environment. For more information See the Corporate Cane Toad website for each companies nomination cases details @ https://canetoadaward.org/

From 1 July 2021, EPA will have increased powers to prevent harm to the environment from pollution and waste.

There are penalties for releasing balloons into the environment.

Under section 115 of the Environment Protection Act 2017, fines are:

up to six penalty units ($991) for a personup to 30 penalty units ($4956) for a company.

For a series of balloon releases, and if taken to court, penalties are:

up to 100 penalty units ($16,522) for a personup to 500 penalty units ($82,610) for a company.

If your activities, such as using helium balloons, pose a risk to the environment, you must take steps to minimise the risks.

 

Yes PlanB have worried about this for years. Years ago I went with my son to do coastal beach clean up and he kept saying what are all these things, and they were shriveled up balloons, we picked up heaps.

Wildlife 'win' as Queensland government moves to acquire land for Currumbin eco-park from developers

Almost 150 hectares of southern Gold Coast land is to be transformed into one of the largest eco-parks in the country through compulsory acquisition from the defiant owners. The state government has announced on 17 July 2021 it will begin the process to acquire 148 hectares for the Currumbin Eco-Parkland, locally known as Martha's Farm or Martha's Vineyard.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-17/currumbin-eco-parkland/100300886