Going Green Podcast, Video blog and Daily News

Cardboard is 80% cheaper than a traditional wood or MDF set, it has a carbon footprint that's 90% lower, and it's 100% recyclable. Every year thousands of studio sets are built from wood and MDF, then dumped when the shoot is over. The waste is enormous but moving over to cardboard means that although the set is still scrapped it can be recycled. The wood used for the cardboard can be sourced from trees that are harvested for their branches, rather than chopped down entirely. This can provide a sustainable method that provides 100% recyclable materials. These sets are cheaper and less environmentally harmful than traditional sets and they also help save time during production. These cardboard sets are much lighter than wooden ones so can easily be moved by one or two people which can save time and money. The cardboard can also be moulded producing all types of set and props that don’t seem to be made from cardboard.  

  If you are producing an amount of greenhouse gases from a business or perhaps by flying on holiday then a website like gold standard is a place where you can go and purchase some carbon offsets. Websites like cool effect or gold standard allow you to purchase carbon offsets by investing in projects in different countries. Due to the buying power of different countries different projects are worth different amounts. So, you could invest $18 to try and help make efficient and clean cooking for Mozambique low-income households or you could spend $45 on the Nica Forest high impact Reforestation program. for your journey or your project, you can work out how many tons of carbon dioxide emissions you could produce and then you can buy into one of these projects by investing that money per ton of greenhouse gases. offsetting your emissions like this does mean that you are helping needy Projects elsewhere in the world as well as doing your carbon offsets. https://marketplace.goldstandard...

  If you look at the average yacht it is virtually unrecyclable and a staggering 250,000 tons of fibreglass are discarded each year just in Europe. But there is a new breed of yacht coming onto the market that are using new types of fibres and materials to make the yachts more recyclable. Glass fibre is being replaced by flax fibres and bio resins and these have low carbon emissions in their production. Another company is using fibres made from volcanic rock which are heated to a very high temperature and then extruded which make a material stronger than steel but one that uses still fairly little power compare with all other types of manufacture. Improvements in structural engineering has changed the shape of mini boat components making them lighter and using considerably less raw material. Raisins are still the problem and a French company has developed a thermoplastic resin that can be reused. Many companies are working on different ways to make boats more recyclable and this ca...

  A team at the University of Delaware is looking at turning some waste left over from the pulp paper industry called technical lignin and turning this into something useful. Technical lignin is a widely available resource about 100 million tons of technical lignin waste is generated annually and currently is only used to be burnt for heat or sometimes added to tyres as a filler. The team has demonstrated that it’s possible to turn this lignin into bio-based 3-D printing resins and high-performance plastics. Changing lignin into a useful product used to require high pressures and the use of solvents which made the cost of doing anything with this lignin prohibitive. Research team found that they could replace methanol which was the traditional solvent in lignin deconstruction with cheap glycerine so the process could be done at normal atmospheric pressure. The glycerine breaks down the lignin into useful chemical building blocks that we can be used in many other types of processes....

In todays podcast we look at the idea of Environmental, social and corporate governance Scoring or ESG score. it grew out of a investment practice called Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). ESG investing and analysis, on the other hand, looks at finding value in companies—not just at supporting a set of values. Why is this important, the reason is that Aviva Investors, has put the directors of 1,500 companies on notice and that it is willing to seek their removal (from their investing group) if they fail to show enough urgency in tackling issues including the climate crisis and human rights! But how does a company show what its doing to Investors, by generating a Environmental, social and corporate governance score! Additionally with Investors wanting Green companies to invest in, they need to know how green a company is. At COP21, The Paris Agreement Capital Transition Assessment (PACTA)was created to be a free, open-source methodology and tool, which measures financial portfolios...

  Each year individual countries report their methane emissions by sector to the UN in accordance with the UN framework Convention on climate change a recent funding by NASAs carbon monitoring system has allowed scientists to build up a new series of maps detailing the geography of methane emissions from these fossil fuel productions. Using all the publicly available data from 2016 the research team has plotted a fuel exploitation emission map which you can see below. The maps show where all the emissions have occurred based on the location of coal mines oil and gas wells as well as pipelines and refineries and fuel storage. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas trapping in about 35 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Showing this map may give countries a good idea who needs to do some work.

  Until very recently DHL has been charging for its go green option for delivering mail but now it’s going to offer this to all its customers four letter mail transport at no extra charge. Any of the unavoidable carbon dioxide emissions will be offset. The company has set climate protection at the core focus and they already have the largest fleet of electric delivery vans and electric powered bicycles providing the industry’s most climate friendly mail and parcel delivery service. In 2020 DHL managed to deliver 6.5 billion letters which translated to an offset of over 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

  The “Quest” plant in Alberta, Canada, which is owned by oil giant Shell, has been talked about as a thriving example of how Carbon Capture Systems should work, however, a recent investigation by the watchdog group Global Witness, has showed that whilst 5 million tons of carbon dioxide had been sequestered at the plant since 2015, other processes at the same plant released 7.5 million tons of greenhouse gases because that carbon was not captured. Bad PR for the plant since the plant as a whole emits more than it captures. Just 48% of the plant’s carbon emissions were captured, according to the report. This is far short of the 90% carbon capture rate promised by the industry for these types of projects in general. Royal Dutch Shell plc have said that the plant is only designed to capture about a third of the Carbon Dioxide emissions. If we are going to get anywhere soon then all companies need to aim higher at the 90% capture rate.  

  Several major investment companies re telling the companies that they invest with to step up on sustainability or face the consequences of inaction. Aviva Investors, which has £262bn of assets under management, is setting out its expectations in a letter that will be sent to 1,500 firms in 30 countries this week that it does or might invest in. Last year 280 firms changed their practices after pressure from Aviva Investors, it is hoped that more will be forced to focus on issues such as biodiversity and human rights, alongside existing priorities like climate change and executive pay. The investment companies believe that this move makes good business sense at a time when the public is increasingly expecting companies to behave ethically.

  Japan is now importing liquefied hydrogen in an aid to boost their carbon dioxide free and greenhouse three economy. Especially design ship called the Susio Frontier is now shipping liquefied hydrogen made in Australia to Japan. The Australian government is healing their hydrogen industry as a means of lowering emissions and producing greater energy and producing more local jobs. Japan has limited options for onshore wind projects and has been looking for many years for ways to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions. In previous articles with shown that burning ammonia which is made with hydrogen can reduce the emissions of Japan is called fired power plants. Using this system Japan would slash its emissions while shifting them to Australia. The hydrogen Australia is using steel made from coal. There is no policy pressure or economic reasons why Japan would buy low emission expensive hydrogen when it gets the same benefits by buying cheap high emission hydrogen. Looking at the carbo...

  A micro plastic is defined as a tiny piece of plastic less than 5 mm in diameter these particles have previously been found in the lower region of the troposphere called the boundary layer where the friction between the air and the air surface has been relatively low. Now it’s just been discovered that these micro plastics can travel in a higher altitude of the trough of fear but doesn’t have any of these friction affects called the three troposphere. The very high wind speeds allow these micro plastics to travel very long distances. These tiny particles of plastic are excellent at collecting viruses and other pollutants as they move. Scientist have collected samples of micro plastics in the Pyrenees which is 3000 m above sea level and a found that this contains amounts of these micro plastics. Some of these micro plastics were from the ocean picked up by winds. Many of these particles were between five and 20 µm in diameter. This size of particles can easily be inhaled and poten...

  In this episode we look at the Mayor of London plan to ease traffic congestion to improve air quality and reduce air pollution About 40,000 deaths in Britain each year are linked to air pollution with most of the pollution coming from traffic congestion. Therefore the Mayor of London has proposed some changes to the congestion charge to help pay for air pollution reducing measures. We explore that getting rid of cars would prevent traffic, but would not help the people living in metropolitan areas, perhaps reducing traffic, by introducing cycle lanes and bus routes will help but who would pay for this

  Hydrogen can be made from solar energy splitting water and this is CO2 free however the Sun doesn’t shine all day and most systems to produce hydrogen involve some carbon dioxide emissions in some processes 1 kg of hydrogen would produce almost 30 kg of carbon oxide. A Kyoto University led team are developing a novel hydrogen plant design that can use biomass and solar energy and produce very low carbon dioxide emissions. They capture sunlight using special mirrors called heliostats that focus light onto receiver at the top of the tower structure this can reach up to 1000°C. This heat is transferred from the receiver into a gasifier where wood chips are intensely heated in the absence of oxygen. Rather than burning by combustion the wood chips are converted into a mixture of gases that contain a large proportion of hydrogen. The residue is solid carbon.

  Investment firms are buying up Welsh Farms to grow trees on. Climeworks in Iceland is grabbing Carbon Dioxide from the Air and sequestering it under ground. New research is coming out almost by the day with new ideas and projects on how to store Carbon dioxide or grab it from this process or that process. The big money is here in these Carbon Capture Technology projects where huge amounts of money is to be won. Soon everyone will need carbon capture credits to offset their business and with an ordinary person needing several tens of hundreds of trees per year and companies needing far, far more, the race is one for the investment companies to make their millions making everyone else pay for their Carbon Capture Credits. Photo Planting New Trees Philip M Russell

  To be fit for recycling plastic must be at least 96% pure by its polymer type. This means that the plastic has to be separated to an almost pure product in terms of chemical composition and only then can it be recycled. Current systems are not as effective as one might think. In collaboration with Vestforbrænding, Dansk Affaldsminimering Aps, and PLASTIX, researchers from the Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering at Aarhus University have now developed a new camera technology that can see the difference between 12 different types of plastics. The technology makes it possible to separate plastics based on a purer chemical composition than is possible today, and this opens up for completely new opportunities to recycle plastics. The technology has been tested at pilot scale and is planned to be implemented at PLASTIX and Dansk Affaldsminimering Aps in spring 2022.  Martin L. Henriksen et al.; "Plastic classification via in-line hyperspectral camera analysis and uns...

  Port of Newcastle is regional Australia’s global gateway, north of Sydney, and has the deep channel and the road and rail landside capacity to manage super-sized container ships. With 4,400 ship movements per year, the Port of Newcastle is also rated as the largest coal port in the world, exporting an average of 165 megatons of coal a year. The Port of Newcastle has signed a deal with Iberdrola for a retail power purchase agreement (PPA) that provides the port with large-scale generation certificates (LGCs) linked to the 113 MW Bodangora wind farm near Dubbo, New South Wales. Iberdrola additionally has the 190 MW Avonlie Solar Farm project near Narrandera, in southern New South Wales, and is developing the 320 MW Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park (PAREP) in South Australia. The AUD 500 million project will combine 210 MW of wind with 107 MW of solar to generate an estimated 900 GWh of renewable energy annually, enough to power about 180,000 Australian ho...

  Out in Western Australia there are two laws. These are state laws and aboriginal laws. One of the gas companies operating in Western Australia uses this loophole to pay only a small amount of money to the national government and because it’s oilfield and gas field is on aboriginal land it pays the natives there to work for them to have facilities set up for them and this costs the gas company millions of pounds less in Australian dollars. It’s a loophole that they use so that they can produce large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases but not have to pay for these omissions. And the aboriginal people are complaining because they are still laughing all the way to the bank. It seems to Australia thinks it’s in a different situation for the rest of the world when it comes to the future of energy production.

 Could you manage on Refills? #justonebottle is a campaign to just try to use one bottle of something per year. Each time you run out then you take the bottle to the shop and refill from their large container. Does it work? Well you have to find somewhere near you that does this - I can’t. I can travel 5-10 miles to do this but the petrol expenditure and the carbon dioxide used would far far out weigh the savings. The cost of refills also seems to be higher than buying the original goods in their container. So until the cost of the container can be removed from the cost of the goods and there are lots more outlets doing this for a reasonable cost, then this idea is going to have limited take up.  

  Researchers at the University of Sheffield have proposed a new scalable process to take calcium carbonate and reacting it with aqueous sodium hydroxide at room temperature and pressure is producing calcium hydroxide and sodium carbonate and no production of carbon dioxide gas. This means of creating calcium hydroxide and by generating sodium carbonate doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide gas. This system may be beneficial for the decarbonisation of limestone but whether it can be adapted to cement production on a large scale still waiting to be seen. The technology to produce sodium hydroxide by electrolysis of seawater uses quite a lot of electricity. But, this also generates a significant amount of toxic chlorine gas although this is used in the chemical industry primary studies show that there may be a significant surplus of chlorine produced. But one of the benefits of producing sodium hydroxide in this way is the production of pure hydrogen.

  The photodegradation of carbon-based organic substances has been known for a long time but it’s been limited by very long treatment times. Now students at KAUST have demonstrated that this photodegradation treatment can be dramatically accelerated by the use of high intensity light pulses generated from a xenon flash lamp. Organic micro pollutants (OMP’s)which can be pharmaceutical chemicals hormones compounds in personal care products and industrial chemical additives can be harmful with as little as a few nanograms per litre and these have been continually released into waterways by wastewater treatment plants the researchers have found that high intensity pulse light allowed many of these OMPs to be decomposed at extraordinary degradation rates the team is working to improve the systems efficiency and throughput so that it can be scaled up for a full size treatment works. Photo  KAUST; Hassan Tahini

  Philip and Paul self certify that this Podcasting is CFC free as they discuss "What is greenwashing?" Seen companies marketing their goods with Eco Buzz words? this marketing ploy is called greenwashing, it trying to convince customers that the company is making positive environmental choices.   The Statement "this podcast is CFC free" is a easy example of greenwashing. a claim that is true, wholesome and environmentally friendly. but if you think twice about it, Most/all podcast are CFC free because they don’t use any CFC to make them, its an easy claim to make but doesn’t make actually make any difference to climate change, this is the problem with greenwashing.   The term greenwashing was first coined in the 1980s in an essay by environmentalist Jay Westerveld. In this essay, he criticized the hotel industry’s “save your towel” movement for preying on guests’ environmental sensibilities. While this movement was disguised as a way for guests to help hotels conse...

 When you don’t have much space for wind and solar and you have water which means that you can’t bring in cables from other countries then countries like Japan have turned to other means of trying to bolster their coal-fired power stations. Japan is using ammonia mixed with the coal at power stations produce a more efficient system. Burning ammonia produces no carbon dioxide however it does produce large amounts of nitrogen oxides which is 298 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The system uses ammonia which is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. Most of the hydrogen comes from oil or gas and requires a large amount of electricity to produce it. Used in steam turbines which are only 38% efficient, this is probably one of the best green washing explanations we have seen so far. Photo JERA

  An American company Rye Development, are intending to build a long duration electrical storage project using a closed loop pumped hydropower system. This is in Kentucky which is not known for its renewable energy generation. It has a low amount of wind and solar power. One of the big problems with renewables is energy storage and this company is proposing a water battery whereby large volumes of water can easily be stored in a high-level reservoir and then released into a low-level reservoir. When electricity is made and not used then the extra electricity can be used to pump the water from the lower reservoir into the higher reservoir typically at night wind the wind is blowing and the demand is low. The company also plan to install significantly more solar and wind farms. This is probably a good sign since Kentucky is one of those great call orientated American states.

Photo ​​David Maurice Smith/The New York Times/Redux http:// goinggreenpodcast.blogspot.com http:// myrenewableenergy.org/News.html #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #environment The Adani Group, owned by India's second richest man, has started to export high quality, low sulfur   coal form the Carmichael mine, which it owns in Australia after successfully winning a seven-year campaign to stop it exporting coal. The company hope to export 10 million tonnes of coal per year to India to feed its need for Coal, providing up to 70% of the country's electricity. Australia will do well from the deal in collecting significant taxes from the sales of the coal.

  On a windy day sea wind farms produced more energy than can be used. On a calm day the demand is greater than the supply. There is a need to somehow store the excess energy when it is produced and store it so that it can be used on days when the demand is greater than the supply. There are many projects working on this and ocean grazer is feasible one. The Ocean Battery is a scalable, modular solution for utility scale energy storage that is produced by renewable sources such as wind turbines and floating solar farms at sea. Ocean Battery is a pumped hydro system in a box that provides eco-friendly utility scale energy storage up to GWh scale. The mechanism is based on hydro dam technology, that has proven itself for over a century as highly reliable and efficient. To store energy, the system pumps water from the rigid reservoirs into the flexible bladders on the seabed. Now the energy is stored as potential energy in the form of water under high pressure. When there ...

  Vattenfall and Feenstra have launched a simple and affordable heat pump system that could be an easy replacement for traditional gas central heating boilers. The all-electric solution will first be rolled out in the Netherlands this year, with the aim of introducing it to countries with a need for this type of solution in the future.  The similarities between Dutch and British gas central heating mean these high temperature heat pumps could be suitable for UK housing in suburban and rural areas. They could enable households to swap out their existing gas boilers without needing to go to the additional expense and disruption of changing the rest of their heating system or installing additional insulation at the same time. Many homes in the UK and the Netherlands are currently heated using a central heating boiler, that uses natural gas to heat the water, which then flows through a network of pipes and radiators. Alternatives such as an electric heat pump use electricity to pu...

  There is a well-known chemical reaction that has rocks are weathered or as water erodes rocks that carbon dioxide is absorbed and it’s estimated that approximately 1 Gt of carbon dioxide is absorbed every year by this natural weathering process. Man-made pollution generates about 35 Gt of carbon dioxide every year. Some researchers have proposed that if pulverised rock were put into the sea this would simulate the natural weathering process and if this process was scaled up significantly approximately hundred giga tons of carbon dioxide could be sequestered every year. This could significantly reduce the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and reverse global warming. But there are problems. Although the initial chemical process is straightforward what is unknown is about all the other factors. How would biodiversity be impacted where would these minerals be deployed? How much would this process cost? Would there be any unintended consequences to this action? And possibly the ...

  Researchers at the University of Wollongong (UOW) in New South Wales, in collaboration with scientists from the  ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science  and the  Australian National Fabrication Facility , have discovered a form of graphene, known as Edge Functionalized Graphene (EFG), which is both highly conductive and processable, and promises that it could improve both the cost and efficiency of lithium-ion batteries. EFG which is found as nano-sized platelets could be used as a valuable carbon additive for a variety of electrochemical devices. EFG was initially discovered back in 2017, but researchers subsequently had to determine what the material “actually is” in order to simplify the manufacturing process. The new material should enable companies to improve their battery materials’ electrical conductivity, and therefore improve the quality. EFG is made by a simple and highly scalable production process that yields this unique material.

  Philip and Paul start the year by looking at Planting a tree to offset Carbon emissions | Going Green Podcast Season 2 Episode 1 We look at if a climate change prevention strategy of planting a tree to offset carbon emission. Recently in wales an investment company is set to offer tree planting as a way for companies to offset their carbon emission. Locals welsh farmers are unhappy with this due to the idea that having a forest would be ruining the landscape.... Surely this should be the other way around. In other news, we look at rewilding project that are happening in the UK, like a herd (4) of European bison is being re introduced to the UK (Kent) as well as the oyster seeding of rivers in the UK.

  Researchers at Oregon State University have found that a new metal organic framework, that can be loaded with a common industrial chemical propylene oxide can catalyse the production of cyclic carbonates from the CO2 produced from factory flu gases. In this way carbon dioxide can be harvested from many industrial chimneys. This new three-dimensional lanthanide based metal organic framework produces these cyclic carbonates from biogas, a mixture of carbon dioxide methane and other gases which are found in the decomposition of organic matter. The material is in organic - inorganic hybrid material made up from positively charged metal ions surrounded by lanthanide metals and tetra carboxylate linkers.   These linkers form a repeating structure that look something like a cage and these nano-sized particles absorb gases like a sponge. The new substance is very stable in water and at high temperatures which makes it ideal for use in chemical chimneys. The carbonates that are produ...

 As most of the countries are talking about or even starting to get rid of the coal fired power stations China has just completed its first thousand megawatt power station which is the biggest of its kind in China. The central government run China energy investment Corporation said that this new power station is the worlds most efficient with the lowest rates of coal and water consumption. This is just the first of for such generating units that are being produced in the Shandong province and will power various cities by long distance ultra high voltage grids. Beijing has pledged to start reducing coal consumption after 2025 which will allow all their plans to considerably raise capacity further in the next four years. China is expecting to see a 9% year-on-year increase and China is responsible for more than half of the global coal-fired power generation. So by 2025 China is expected to have added 150 GW of new coal fired power stations bringing the total to 1230 GW power.

  New studies funded by NASA have found that emissions of carbon dioxide are being absorbed by the southern ocean. In this process there is an up welding of cold water from the deep ocean once at the surface this much colder but nutrient rich water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with the help of millions of phytoplankton before sinking again and taking the carbon dioxide with it. Computer model suggest that up to 40% of the human produced carbon dioxide in the ocean worldwide is absorbed from the atmosphere into the southern ocean making it one of the largest and most important carbon sinks on our planet. The NASA studies have used airborne measurements since 2012 and over this time they have seen a drop in carbon dioxide concentrations as the planes have descended through the atmosphere. They have also detected high turbulence near the ocean surface suggesting the exchange of gases. From the data they have worked out more than 530 million metric tons of carbon is being...

  Plans are well underway for several rewilding projects in 2022. One of the most interesting of these is to introduce some bison into Kent. Already two bison Rangers have been appointed and four bison are due to be delivered early this year. Plans are well underway for several rewilding projects in 2022. One of the most interesting of these is to introduce some bison into Kent. Already two bison Rangers have been appointed and the bison are due to be delivered early this year. It is hoped that these large herbivores will knock down trees and clear space for new plant growth and will aid the return of other species. Pigs will also be brought in to turn over the ground to root up seeds which will also bring in other endangered species. The introduction of the bison is headline news since these creatures have not been in the UK for the best part of 1000 years but there are other rewilding project going on such as introducing wild oysters, and many farms are turning over less producti...

  New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other’s performance by up to 15%, unlike horizontal wind turbines that disrupt each other if placed too close. A research team from Oxford Brookes University led by Professor Iakovos Tzanakis have undertaken an in-depth study using more than 11,500 hours of computer simulations to show that wind farms can perform more efficiently by substituting the traditional propeller type Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs), for compact Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs).  This study shows that future wind farms should be vertical which will increase the efficiency of the wind farm and also produce more electricity. Using computational methods   they have shown that vertical wind turbines put together in an array the front row facing the wind can convert 50% o...

 After a year on year rise, 2021 was the worst year for solar we have experienced since we started using Solar Panels 10 years ago. The 3 year moving point average graph shows that the solar output took a dramatic dip this year. The weather was generally very cloudy here for much of the summer and we recorded the lowest sunshine figures for several months, only April being an above and well above month. But the point of the 3 year moving point average does still show an upward trend albeit with a dip or two which is expected with weather.