Going Green Podcast, Video blog and Daily News

  It won’t be much of a surprise to anyone living in England that this has been the worst December for solar in 10 years, since I have been recording the weather and solo data. This year we’ve had high pressure over us with a significant amount of fog or low cloud or drizzle and we have barely seen the Sun at all which is why not surprisingly we’ve made our lowest solar gain in 10 years. So as we see out 2021 and welcome in 2022 let’s hope the weather turns a little better and that we get more solar this year than we did last year. The south of England did particularly worse this year. Looking at a three-year rolling average this is now spoil the rising trend by having a big dip in it. We wait to see what new technology 2022 will bring us in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and into production of solar and wind energy.

 Every new device seems to require more power and that power comes from lithium batteries. But these batteries are made from Lithium which needs huge amounts of energy to extract and other unfriendly materials like Cobalt and Nickel. Typically, Lithium is mined in one of two ways, in the huge salt flats of Chile and Argentina by using enormous amounts of water which has disastrous effects on the local wildlife, or mined as in Australia where the ore needs to be heated to over 1000C using huge amounts of energy, then leached with acid. Even the so-called green lithium found in Cornwall needs deep bore holes to be dug and then the few parts of Lithium extracted from similar materials such as Sodium and Calcium, then extracted with dilute acid. This extraction can be done by selectively sticking the Lithium to special beads. One extracted then Lithium then needs to be turned into Lithium Carbonate and then into the pure metal. The amounts of energy required to do this is often more th...

Manually hoeing out weeds has always been better than using pesticides. Now a German company is developing a robot with AI that can distinguish between crops and not and remove all the plants that are not crops, that is to say the weeds. The bot uses a rotary hoe to remove the weeds leaving the crop intact. The bot moves on caterpillar tracks around a field in all types of farm settings like orchards or vegetable fields using onboard lidar scanners removing all the weeds as it goes. The robot made by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation , is undergoing trials at the moment.  

  Have you changed any of your Christmas habits to perhaps make your Christmas a little greener like using recyclable wrapping paper and perhaps not giving plastic toys that will last for thousands of years. Perhaps you sort of using second-hand gifts perhaps of swapping out your Christmas turkey for a vegetarian option. Some recent surveys seem to show that quite a few people have opted for a greener Christmas this year. Perhaps it is also Covid that has meant more e-cards which means that the Christmas cards that can’t be recycled don’t get put into landfill. More computer games which are now downloadable send list to landfill although use up more electricity. Reusing the artificial Christmas tree for yet another year or even hiring a living Christmas tree and returning it to be later planted in the forest. The gifts that people have been buying seem to be now thought of as being greener and apps this is a good thing that has changed society.

  The same plastic made by different manufacturers may have very different properties when they affect cells an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Bayreuth have discovered that branding a particular plastic as toxic may not be as correct as they thought because different manufacturers plastic when it is broken down into nano size plastic particles may have different shapes and different sizes for the same polymer type and this can affect both its chemical and physical characteristics. It shows that at present we do not understand the differences in structure and how they can give quite contradictory results under supposedly identical conditions. Often the differences lie in the fact that different companies making a chemical like polystyrene might use different monomers or different conditions to create the polymers and this will therefore affect cells and organisms in different ways. This will certainly make the study of the effect of nano plastics on organisms v...

  Over the last 800,000 years it seems that the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere have been decreasing. Researchers at the Rice University have been studying air bubbles in the Antarctic ice and the best guess at what might be causing the very slight decrease in oxygen in the atmosphere is that as global warming causes the glaciers to melt and receive new rocks are exposed to the atmosphere and these oxidise taking up oxygen from the atmosphere. Before you start to panic the oxygen levels have only decreased very slightly. And this has been going on since the late Pleistocene. Generally, the levels of oxygen are not affected in the earths biosphere because that is a very balance system drawing in as much oxygen from the atmosphere as is produced however weathering on a global scale is the most likely geological process capable of us consuming enough of this excess oxygen to account for the decline. The global sea levels fell when glaciers were advancing and they are rising when th...

  This has been an argument that has been going on for a while. Is it better to buy a Christmas tree that has been absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then when you finish with it habit composted or is it better to buy a metal and plastic Christmas tree that requires quite a lot of greenhouse gases to be emitted in its manufacture but then using that tree for more than seven years and thus cutting down its share of its carbon footprint over many years. Perhaps the best way is to do the hire a Christmas tree or buy your own and bring it in every year the only problem with bringing it in every year is that after about seven years the tree won’t fit in your house. So if you want an artificial Christmas tree don’t keep it and use it for many years or better still buy real one and keep it for hire it.