Going Green Podcast, Video blog and Daily News

Stream restoration filters out pollutants from our local waterways and improves the health of the ecosystems that are within and around them. Researchers in Maryland found that the  homeowners in the least densely populated, and generally wealthier areas of their study region, were less willing to pay to restore streams, while those in the most densely populated areas, which tended to have lower incomes, were more willing to pay for restoration projects.  Stream restoration projects vary greatly with the  local environment , but they are all designed to improve the ability of a stream to absorb and process nutrient pollutants and prevent them from flowing downstream.

  Per- and polyfluorinated chemicals (PFAS) have very harmful effects on human health and the environment. They are still used in numerous everyday products. A team of researchers, from Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon investigated water samples from German and Chinese rivers affected by industrial point sources. They identified almost 60 substances that are overlooked by conventional analysis of well-known PFAS. Eight substances were detected in the environment for the first time. One fifth of the investigated blood samples from German children and adolescents were above the maximum safe level. They identified 86 PFAS – only about 30 of them are routinely analysed by specialized labs, eight substances have not been reported in the environment before. In the Xiaoqing River, the globally banned substance PFOA and traditionally non-investigated PFAS, such as chlorinated PFOA, were the most prevalent compounds. In contrast, replacement chemicals, such as hexafluoropropylene oxide-dimer acid ...

  The world is racing towards an electric vehicle (EV) rebirth because of issues ranging from environmental concerns to the high fluctuating oil prices that continue to push consumers toward alternatives to combustion engines. Today’s Electric Cars, however, is beyond anything nineteenth century drivers could imagine. From intelligent driving to proactive service and remote vehicle access, these new electrics cars can offer the safety and convenience today’s consumers crave. To push drivers toward “plugging in,” however, automakers must better educate them, as well as offer a uniquely “connected” driving experience. Equally important, they must embrace innovative business models and partnerships.

SUEZ recycling and recovery UK’s plans to develop the UK’s first carbon capture and storage plant from energy-from-waste at Teesside. SUEZ announced plans to develop a commercial scale carbon capture plant at its Tees Valley facility at Teesside in November 2020  The original project envisaged capturing the carbon dioxide from the facility’s flue gas emissions and transporting this to a geological storage site beneath the North Sea. SUEZ’s plans were given a boost last autumn when the East Coast Cluster, which covers the Teesside and Humber areas, was selected by the Government as one of the UK’s first two low carbon industrial clusters to receive support for deploying carbon capture utilisation and storage at scale.  Two carbon capture facilities would be created linked to the existing energy-from-waste plants at Haverton Hill. They would aim to capture 98% of all carbon emissions.

  Idenergie, a Canadian renewable energy company has unveiled a new hydrokinetic design turbine that harnesses power from flowing water and converts it to electricity. The river turbine converts the kinetic energy of the river current into  electricity. Its energy production depends on the  water velocity. So, the stronger the current, the more electricity the river turbine will produce. While solar panels and wind turbines have been put to the task in most use cases, both systems have limitations when it comes to power generation. While power output from wind turbines is highly dependent on wind speeds, solar panels are effectively non-generative for almost half a day. A turbine placed in water flow can generate power continuously, day or night. This turbine can generate between 4 to 12 kWh/day  depending on the water velocity available. Many of these types of turbines in the past have caused disruption to the habitats for aquatic animals and vegetation systems...

 Many new TV shows and movies use LED walls to create virtual environments. The Pandemic in the past two years, has transformed the entertainment industry, forcing studios to rethink the way productions are planned. Instead of costly scenes filmed on location, withal the costs of transporting staff all over the world to some exotic location to film a scene, all of this can now be done in the studio. This means smaller crews and smaller overheads and this has propelled these virtual productions into the forefront of the industry, allowing a team to create and environment, back in time, into the future and travel anywhere on a project without ever leaving the studio. These virtual sets which replace the traditional green screens can use 2D playback of photographic footage on LED walls, or 3D tracking that moves with the camera so the image changes like it would on a real set. Not only are productions saving a significant amount of money, they are also reducing the carbon footprint.

 In the summer of 1998, five of China’s longest rivers flooded, killing more than 3,000 people and costing the country at least 11.5 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion) in economic loss. These floods were in part caused by erosion and denudation of hillsides along major rivers, all caused by the clearing of forests to make way for arable and industrial land to feed the country. Even before the devastation was cleared, China banned logging in the basins of the flood-prone Yangtze and Yellow rivers and ordered trees to be planted on hillsides, as well as on some of the less successful cropland. The result is that the amount of forest in the world has increased by 25%, enough that the difference can be seen from space.  As well as acting as a large Carbon Dioxide Sink for the countries huge industry this huge investment in tree planting is slowing down the amounts of erosion, but as we have seen from last year’s floods in China still much more work needs to be done in investi...

  This is Chase Zero, the new high speed chase boat developed for the Americas Cup, by the New Zealand team. Part of the F1 Sail Grand Prix is to have a very small carbon footprint and so in this spirit a hydrogen powered chase boat has been created. This uses hydrogen fuel technology using a pair of 80 kilowatt fuel cells to power this catamaran at speeds of up to 60 mph without emitting any Carbon dioxide. The two 295 horse power electric motors can take this 33 foot catamaran, over 100 miles at an average speed of 40 mph. This catamaran is designed to foil much like the F1 catamaran sailing boats. It is hoped that this new type of hydrogen powered power boat could become the start of a hydrogen motor boat revolution.

  R esearchers from Durham University have proposed the use of Joule-Brayton pumped thermal energy storage system for the storage of grid electricity by the use of high-grade thermal energy. Pumped  Thermal Energy Storage  (PTES) is believed to have a relatively high  energy storage density  and low installation capital cost and have round-trip efficiencies between 40%–80%.  The most common TES for Brayton PTES is the packed bed storage, which uses cheap materials such as layers of gravel or other ceramic media inside insulated tanks. The integration of the storage media directly into the working fluid stream leads to good heat transfer and allows the entire system to operate at a single pressure. When energy demands are low the excess energy is used to heat up the TES and when energy demands are high the energy can be released and turned back into electricity, effectively making very cheap battery storage without the batteries. Additio...

  Philip and Philip Celebrate 1 year of Going Green with looking at how to "Invest in our planet" Earth day 2022 | Going green podcast #46

  Micro algae algae that can’t be seen with the naked eye but these can absorb carbon dioxide and produce oils that can be used as bio fuels. This is a carbon negative process and work undertaken by the institute of bio energy and bioprocess technology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that a genetic marker for a sensor of blue light can be used to regulate oil synthesis. This new technology called blue light induced oil synthesis could be a major breakthrough. Scientists have long known the oil production is part of the response of micro algal cells to environmental stress but the team have discovered that changing the light from white to then blue light results in the peak productivity of these oils rather than under constant white light. Zhang, P., Xin, Y., He, Y. et al. Exploring a blue-light-sensing transcription factor to double the peak productivity of oil in Nannochloropsis oceanica. Nat Commun 13, 1664 (2022 )

Microalgae are natural biocatalysts of hydrogen production. Their ability to convert solar energy to valuable compounds with minimal ecological footprint potentially places them as significant contributors to the clean-energy transition. Currently, algal hydrogen production, although promising, is not scalable because it is limited to oxygen-free conditions and is short-lived due to electron loss to other processes, mainly carbon fixation. Researchers from Tel Aviv University have shown that a strain of algae defective in thylakoid proton gradient regulation, called Dpgr5, bypasses both challenges simultaneously, leading to a prolonged 12-day hydrogen production in a mixed energy source environment in a 1-Litre setup. They found that Dpgr5 possess a repressed ability to fixate carbon and that this limitation is counterbalanced by an enhanced chloroplast-mitochondrion energetic exchange. This unique physiology supports the simplistic, yet robust and scalable, hydrogen production ca...

We see this in the headlines most days – protestors stop this and stop that. There are marches. There are blockages of roads and trains and oil terminals. Do these protests do any good. The idea is that they might raise some awareness – but largely people are aware. And more often than not these protests have the opposite effect. If you block and oil terminal because of the oil prices then the oil prices will probably go up. So what can be an effective way to voice your opinion. At the moment the Governments and Politicians are on our side – they need to be seen doing something. Writing to them has never been more worthwhile. Get them on the side of building a better greener future, because in the end it is them that make the decisions.

Rice University have discovered a chemical technique to turn waste plastic into an effective carbon dioxide (CO2 ) sorbent for industry. Researchers have found that heating plastic waste in the presence of potassium acetate produced particles with nanometer-scale pores that trap carbon dioxide molecules. Sites like power plant exhaust stacks can be fitted with this waste-plastic-derived material to remove enormous amounts of CO2  that would normally fill the atmosphere. They have found that polypropylene and high- and low-density polyethylene which are the main constituents in household waste work especially well for capturing CO 2  when treated with potassium acetate . Pyrolyzing plastic has been done before, but produces toxic waste, whereas this method using potassium acetate produces porous particles able to hold up to 18% of their own weight in CO2  at room temperature.

 There are just a couple of problems with solar energy the first is that you can only generate it during the daytime and much of the solar energy is lost in the atmosphere. The European Space Agency ESA is working on a concept of collecting the solar power in orbit where the sun is 11 times more intense then in Europe and then trying to beam this energy down to the ground for use. This would involve building satellites that can collect the solar energy but it also involves this idea of beaming power down to the ground. This beam needs to be very accurate very reliable and retain as much of the power as possible. Then the energy could be converted into electricity. So this idea is good in theory but in practise we need to find and efficient way of beaming the power down and safely capturing and converting it.

With the crisis going on in Ukraine and the need to replace Russian gas very quickly there are sources of energy that can do this. We could introduce vast solar farms generating more electricity than some of the new proposed nuclear power stations, however there is a lot of opposition to these solar farms from rural communities who fear the industrialization of the countryside. One of these sites is proposed by Sunnica’s in Cambridgeshire. This is for a large solar and battery storage facility of around 2700 acres however there is a lot of opposition from the local MPs Lucy Frazer MP and Matt Hancock MP to this Sunnica’s planned solar farm. At present this plan is in the consultation stage but already the local authorities are coming up with fairly weak excuses of why this site and others cannot be built. The objections are that these projects go too far and not in keeping with the nature of the local areas. So what do we do do we need this land to help support our food growing capabil...

  An article in the journal of the German chemical society has shown a system for making methane from carbon using a mechanochemical method that results in both a faster reaction rate and a new synthesis route. Most people are familiar with chemical reactions but this reaction uses a mill to crush carbon in the presence of hydrogen and as the carbon is crushed it reacts with the hydrogen using a cobalt catalyst at a very low temperature and exhibiting a very high selectivity, which gives a high yield of methane. As the carbon is crushed by the mill a reactive carbon species is created and this reacts with the hydrogen present forming methane. This carbon hydrogasification method could be a faster and cheaper way of turning carbon into methane for a very low cost. Many plants produce wood which can be easily converted into charcoal by pyrolysis and either this or perhaps coal could be used as a source to make cheap methane which does not involve fossil fuels .

 This week sparked a new wave of Environmental activism. The Group's idea is that, you switch off all of your electrical appliances, lights, or switch off at the breakers for 10 minutes, this effectively creates a 10 minute boycott of the privatised portions of our power supply, losing them up to an estimated £9m in revenue. this campaign is called the #bigpoweroff It happened on the 10th of April and is going to happen on the 16th of April at 7pm. this happened in Spain in 2019 and managed to cause lot of brown out leaving the electricity companies offer millions in concessions because they were in breach of their contracts of not supplying electricity to their customers. the last one didn't do much, we'll see what happens this weekend.

 The EU is currently planning on quadrupling its green hydrogen import plans for 2030 due to the rising costs of Gas and the War Russia is waging on Ukraine and all the sanctions imposed. Because of this there is now a huge potential for exports of green Hydrogen to the EU and other economic regions such as Japan and South Korea. Over the next five years we will be seeing a great change in the way the world uses fossil fuels. Before the Russian aggression there was a move from COP26 to move away from fossil fuels. The war has accelerated this growth of a green hydrogen requirement and a reduction in the remand for fossil fuels.  It is now up to some countries to move into the green hydrogen production market to become the new Saudi Arabia for the next 100 years. There are great opportunities for countries with the insight and money to invest in green hydrogen production on scale. Maybe the UK could once again become the power house of the world.

  Using air source heat pumps to heat your water makes sense, but now gas prices have gone up it is now becoming almost an essential way of heating a home’s water. Options for heating domestic hot water for most of the country in the past have come down to a gas boiler which most homes in the UK have or an electric immersion heater which is costly to run. There are two alternatives which are starting to take a market share. The first is solar hot water, a solar panel on the roof, which captures the heat of the sun to heat the water, and an air source heater which takes heat from the air and uses that heat to heat the hot water tank by just using a compressor. Now these systems are eligible for government grants and no Vat on new installations, the air source heater is making a good sense alternative to heating the water. These systems do use electricity but only enough to power the compressor and not supplying the heat, so these systems are quite efficient and can work when the t...

Britain is a country built on coal and iron or and surrounded by water and natural gas but anytime it seems that at least one of these as either run out or is not available. Many of our vintage railways with their steam engines run on coal. Yet in this country we are not mining coal anymore and this is a problem for these steam engines which need coal to run. The next supply source for high energy coal was Russia but this is now not available so other sources need to be found like Europe or maybe even bringing this in from Australia which is stupid considering the distances this coal will have to travel. Many of these steam engines need to run on high calorific coal which is now found widely in Europe, but I think many of these engines are going to have to now move onto different smokeless fuels one is being developed from mixtures of anthracite, coal dust and molasses and the initial results of this have been promising.

  Recent research has shown that a substantial fraction of shale gas in some cases more than 25% has been produced by the radioactive decomposition of organic matter.This mechanism had been dismissed but now this discovery could prove crucial for monitoring emissions near fracking sites to ensure that the potent greenhouse gas methane is not released into the atmosphere. A mixture of methane and smaller quantities of ethane propane and butane that makes up natural gas has been traditionally extracted from oil wells but now there is a need to extract these gases from other sources. Many of the deep shales found all around the world are also rich in radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium. The radiation of organic matter by these elements can produce the radiolytic gases which are ethane propane and some of the heavier alkanes.

The Royal horticultural Society have announced that they are now no longer classifying slugs and snails as pests they say that they play an important role in gardening in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I know as a gardener that slugs and snails jump through my runner beans as they come up but as well as doing this they do a really important job they get rid of a lot of unwanted material in the garden and they also provide food for birds, hedgehogs and frogs . From the 1 st of April slug pellets can no longer be sold or used in the UK as they provide a significant risk to birds and other mammals that may enter your garden as well as household pets. Metaldehyde pellets have long been used as bait to control slugs and snails but these pellets can severely poison other animals and so have now been banned. So how can you get rid of these slugs or snails well one way is to use upturned eggshells around your plants or to put rough sand around the plants. Or you can plant some of your fav...

  Department for Transport (DfT) proposals are for 22% of cars rolling off forecourts being fully electric-powered from 2024, and increasing to 52% of all cars by 2028 for this to happen. The targets for vans are 8% in 2024 and 34% in 2028. Is this likely and the answer is probably no as long as the price of the new cars remains high. The second-hand market in electric vehicles is really small so it is only the purchase new cars that can up the number of electric vehicles to half in five years. To many people the cost of electric cars is still far too high and only a dramatic drop will change the position. People like me have to be convinced. I have never bought a new car – driving it off the forecourt costs way too much and a second-hand car is better value for money. For me I need cheaper cars and ones with a similar range to a petrol or hybrid car to work for me.

 There is now a new way to remove micro plastics from waste water. The Fraunhofer Institute for laser technology has set up an ultrashort pulse laser in the kilowatt range that can create a filter with extremely small holes just 10 micro meters in diameter. The lasers use a multi beam process so they can drill 144 holes simultaneously so drilling millions of holes doesn’t take quite as long as drilling them one by one. Using this parallel drilling system they can create ultrafine filters that can manage to philtre out the microplastics found in wastewater which is an effective way of cleaning wastewater so that it can be used for human consumption. The team had managed to overcome the thermal damage problem so that filters can be created.

  Depending on your point of view carbon capture systems being used to prolong the life of fossil fuels may either be a good or a bad thing. As a good thing it means that the fossil fuels when they are manufactured and refined carbon capture systems can be used to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide give out as these are fossil fuels are prepared for use. Put the other point of view is that these carbon capture systems may keep fossil fuels going long after the date when they should have been removed from the world and plus increase the total amount of CO2 that is added to the environment.

 Between 2000 -2010 worldwide it was proposed that the number of coal plants to be built was 855. In the decade 2010-2020 of the 855 coal power stations to be built, only 189 were actually built and the rest cancelled. The reason for this is that Coal is now much more expensive to burn because f increased Mining and shipping costs. The price of renewables too has dropped. It is now cheaper to build a wind farm than a power station with the same power output. But in addition to this a coal power station will have the cost of the coal to power it to be supplied and the cost of running a wind turbine is just maintenance. The wind farm only produces power on windy days whereas the coal power station can produce power all the time. But installing more wind farms in different locations means that wind is more or less guaranteed. This sign could hopefully mean the demise of the coal power station within a few years.

  In order to limit climate change, fast greenhouse gas reductions are required already before 2030. Ethanol commonly produced by fermentation of sugars derived either from starch-based raw material such as corn, or lignocellulosic biomass is an established fuel decarbonizing the transport sector. A research Team from Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT) in Finland have developed a novel selective and flexible process concept for the production of ethanol with electricity and lignocellulosic biomass as main inputs. The process consists of several consecutive steps. First synthesis gas from gasification of biomass is purified by filtration and reforming and fed to methanol synthesis. The produced methanol is fed to acetic acid synthesis, together with a carbon monoxide-rich stream separated from the synthesis gas by membranes. Finally, acetic acid is hydrogenated to yield ethanol. The hydrogen is produced by water electrolysis and powered by green energy. Countries wit...

  The evidence is clear: the time for action is now. We can still can halve emissions by 2030.  Limiting warming to around 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43% by 2030; at the same time, methane would also need to be reduced by about a third. Even if we do this, it is almost inevitable that we will temporarily exceed this temperature threshold but could return to below it by the end of the century. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F), without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.” Do Governments have the will or backbone to do it? That is the real question.

  Researchers from VU Amsterdam, Deltares and Amsterdam UMC have demonstrated that plastic particles from the environment have ended up in the human bloodstream. The results have been published in the scientific journal Environment International. The blood was examined for the presence of five different polymers, which are the building blocks of plastic. The extent to which the individual polymers were present in the blood was also determined. Three-quarters of the test subjects appeared to have plastics in their blood. The research was the first to prove that plastic particles can end up in the human bloodstream. Earlier indicators for this came from laboratory experiments. The current research shows that people absorb microplastics from their environment in their everyday lives and that the amounts are measurable in their blood. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET – in drink bottles), polyethylene – lunch boxes, and polymers of styrene   - kitchen tools, were the most commo...

Ozone may be weakening one of the Earth’s most important cooling mechanisms, making it a more significant greenhouse gas than previously thought, research has found. A new study conducted at Reading University, has revealed that changes to ozone levels in the upper and lower atmosphere were responsible for almost a third of the warming seen in ocean waters bordering Antarctica in the second half of the 20 th  century. The deep and rapid warming in the Southern Ocean affects its role as one of the main regions for soaking up excess heat as the planet warms. The majority of this warming was the result of ozone increases in the lower atmosphere. Ozone – one of the main components of smog – is already hazardous as a pollutant, but the research shows it may also play a significant role in driving climate change in the coming years. Dr Michaela Hegglin, an Associate Professor in atmospheric chemistry and one of the study’s authors, said: “Ozone close to Earth’s surface is harmful to peop...

  A research team from Friedrich Schiller University, Jena has developed a molecular photosystem inspired by nature that generates hydrogen under visible light irradiation. Nature provides a system of photocatalytic enzymes to create hydrogen. This research team has tried to mimic this type of system to generate hydrogen under light excitation. They have used a special iron iron hydrogenase enzyme two mimic the photosystems but don’t use precious metals but instead rely on iron. This system is still in its research phase but is showing some promise. The system doesn’t work in water as yet but with further work they may be able to find water soluble alternatives in order to harness water as a solvent and make an effective light driven system for the production of hydrogen.

  The promised Fuel price rises arrive. The cost of Gas increases along with the generation costs of electricity. We can only wait with dread to see how all this will play out in the coming months. With many energy sites not coping I took photos of the meter readings. I time stamped photo might help later if needed. No VAT on new installations of renewable energy systems also arrive but be careful on reading all the small print as to what applies to what. The only alternatives seem to be installing a large hamster wheel in the house and power the house by having the kids run around on it.