Day: May 13, 2021

Hurtigruten Norway makes big move towards sustainability Hurtigruten Norwegian coastal fleet to cut CO2 emissions by 25% Go to Source Author: Gary Noakes…

Construction trade association SELECT has welcomed the new intake of MSPs to the Scottish Parliament and pledged to continue working closely with politicians of all parties to help the country recover and rebuild.
Alan Wilson
The campaigning organisation said that, as one of the country’s biggest employers, the construction industry has a key role to play as Scotland continues to navigate the post-pandemic landscape and create a more sustainable and inclusive sector.

< All Initiatives Affordable and Clean Energy LED Lighting AstenJohnson is working to replace all the lights in our plants with LED lights. This will result in 2/3 of electricity savings compared to the original lights. Clinton, SC Project Start: 2017 Project Completion: 2019 Results Energy savings of approximately 194,000 kWh per year. 440 lights replaced “The LED light bulb replacement project is certainly the largest project I have completed at Eagle so far. Moving to LEDs had a huge $25,000 cash incentive from our electric company and the estimated savings of $45,000/year really made it a no-brainer.” Dominic Angelo Badalmenti, Product Engineer at Eagle Nonwovens Solar Panels eupen, belgium In addition to the replacement of old light with LED lights, AstenJohnson Eupen installed solar panels on site in 2017. This initiative enabled AstenJohnson to increase the portion of green energy of total energy consumption. The panels installed can produce...

fter years of delays during the Trump administration, the EPA released its new climate indicators, which show Americans are already feeling effects on their health and safety.
Heat waves across the country are more frequent, more intense, and last longer. Wildfires are burning more land. The East and Gulf Coasts are flooding more often, while ice sheets are disappearing and sea levels are rising.

NETL’s 2021 Crosscutting Research and Advanced Energy Systems Project Review Meeting continues through May with seven days of presentations showcasing innovations to enhance the efficiency and reliability of electricity production and increase domestic supplies of rare earth elements (REEs).  During more than 80 virtual sessions between May 17 and May 26, 2021, engineers and scientists working on NETL-supported projects will also discuss research driving technologies to lower water use in energy production and advancing the use of sensors and controls to gain pivotal insights into optimizing power plant performance.  Additional sessions will explore projects devoted to simulation-based engineering to improve efficiencies and lower costs.

United announced today that it has teamed up with more than a dozen new environmental, nonprofit partners to advance sustainability efforts across the airline’s hub cities as well as Hawaii, complementing the airline’s commitment to become 100% green and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 100% by 2050.

Approximately one-third of long rivers remain free-flowing, and rivers face a range of ongoing and future threats. In response, there is a heightened call for actions to reverse the freshwater biodiversity crisis, including through formal global targets for protection. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets called for the protection of 17% of inland water areas by 2020. Here, we examine the levels and spatial patterns of protection for a specific type of inland water area—rivers designated as free-flowing. Out of a global total of 11.7 million kilometers of rivers, 1.9 million kilometers (16%) are within protected areas and 10.1 million kilometers are classified as free-flowing, with 1.7 million kilometers of the free-flowing kilometers (17%) within protected areas.

From the earliest days of Bitcoin, the famed cryptographer and computer scientist Hal Finney, a pioneer of early Bitcoin development and a close collaborator of Satoshi, tweeted his concerns about the long term CO2 emissions from widespread bitcoin implementation.
 
As Bitcoin adoption accelerates, the energy required to power the network has exponentially accelerated. In turn, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is contributing to climate change, leading to an increasingly negative perception from media, society, and governments.

Lighting accounts for nearly 20% of the total electricity costs of commercial buildings in the United States.1 Effective lighting systems involve the integration of lighting technologies with the building as a whole – across the lifecycle of a building. Green technologies and design strategies are more conducive to energy and financial savings, and improved human health, productivity, and satisfaction.

CEO Pete Davis built environmental technology startup GreenPrint with a keen eye for payments and financial transactions.  
The Emory University graduate started his career in Atlanta’s bustling financial services sector before choosing a desk at the Atlanta Tech Village to start GreenPrint in 2014.  
GreenPrint calculates the environmental footprint of client operations and provides a list of suggestions on how the company could be more sustainable in terms of carbon emissions, water usage, plastic waste and renewable energy. Davis says GreenPrint collects environmental data and analyzes goals similar to how a financial company may approach transactions and balance sheets. 

Building sustainable infrastructure for future generations has never been more important as populations expand, climate change threatens livelihoods, and the need for better-connected infrastructure grows more rapidly by the day. Skanska has always been committed to building what matters. Thanks to programs like Envision™, we have a solid roadmap for sustainability, and we are building projects that deliver meaningful social, environmental and economic benefits to our communities.

ou may assume you’re making a responsible, even laudable choice by sipping a glass of locally produced organic and biodynamic wine. And you may be. But so much more goes into a wine’s carbon footprint than simply how and where it was produced. 
A wine’s carbon footprint, as it turns out, has much less to do with vineyard practices—although those are indeed important for the quality of the wine and the health of its workers and surrounding community—than it does with how it’s packaged. 

The Antarctic ice sheet could suffer a chain reaction collapse as melting ice exposes land underneath, leaving less heat to be reflected away and causing temperatures to rise further and weather patterns to be changed, a study has warned.
Researchers used climate modeling and data for the Middle Miocene period – which was 13 to 17 million years ago – when carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures were similar to those expected at the end of the 21st century.

The sustainable apparel designer and merchandiser Merchant Tailor has joined forces with Ferdinand von Hapsburg, the APR racing driver, to launch the APR team kit, sourced from ocean plastic and other recycled materials. The collection of sweats, tees and caps celebrates Hapsburg’s recent gear change to offset his carbon emissions to a tenth of a tonne.
Merchant Tailor and Hapsburg will collaborate on a series of new sustainable collections, they said in a joint press release. The apparel designer has also announced the launch of its own brand 8SIX400, a sustainable, motorsport apparel collection made entirely from recycled materials. The number 86400 refers to the number of seconds in a 24-hour day.

The notion of overtourism captures the situation when tourism has grown out of proportion, either in terms of societal implications or natural impacts. It is the situation when tourism is not improving the quality of life for inhabitants but rather decreasing it and also when tourists are experiencing deteriorating service and a widening gap between what they pay for and what they get … With the current global halt of tourism due to COVID-19 the attention of researchers, policymakers and tourism entrepreneurs has swiftly moved away from overtourism towards the state of no-tourism and further how to re-start tourism in post-covid times.

In the continued effort to fight fast fashion and make the fashion industry more sustainable and environmentally friendly, American Eagle is rolling out its new limited edition jean collection in conjunction with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Jeans Redesign Project.
Made from 100 percent organic cotton, easy to recycle, and produced without any environmentally harmful chemicals, the collection is meant to put the planet first while simultaneously being stylish. American Eagle released a statement explaining its goal behind the collection and why it’s important.

In 1968, Garrett Hardin postulated that humans were doomed to suboptimal outcomes, due to the tragedy of the commons. Individuals behaving rationally would lead to overconsumption and thus, collectively suboptimal outcomes. He, and many who came after, argued that the solutions to this tragedy were either privatization of a resource, or alternatively government control and top-down regulation.
But decades of research have demonstrated that local communities have demonstrated the capacity to avoid this “tragedy” through the formation of institutions that are collectively designed, monitored, and enforced.

The World Motor Sport Council has approved P1 Racing Fuels as the exclusive provider for the series under a three-year agreement commencing in 2022 by an e-vote on April 19, 2021.
P1’s industry partners and in-house experts have worked to produce a fossil-free hydrocarbon-based fuel, with a blend of synthetic and bio-fuel components. It will be the first of its kind to be used in a FIA World Championship series, powering the high-performance engines.

Five Rice University engineering laboratories are part of a $33 million national effort to develop a wireless, fully implantable device that can control the body’s circadian clock, halving the time it takes to recover from jet lag and similar disruptions to the body’s sleep/wake cycles.
In this artistic illustration, a user with an NTRAIN implant and its accompanying external hub works in the field. The user inputs a desired time shift (due to shift work or travel across time zones). Based on cues from the body’s physiology, the external hub detects the user’s circadian rhythm and triggers the implant to produce precisely-dosed peptide therapies. (Image courtesy of Northwestern University)
Led by Northwestern University and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project will blend bioelectronics, synthetic biology and traditional electronics to create a “living pharmacy” that produces the same peptide molecules the body naturally makes to regulate…

Sustainability is an increasingly important philosophy in today’s business and consumer world. Now more than ever, our industry is being faced with higher expectations from interested parties on how chemical distributors and those responsible for the warehousing, transportation, storage, and related servicing of chemical products are meeting those sustainability challenges. 
A brief look at some of NACD’s members’ and Chemical Handl