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Recycling plastic costs councils – and us – millions every year. It’s time refilling old bottles hit the mainstream

While Boris Johnson is busy reducing the size of Europe, his father, Stanley, is appealing to Europe to help us reduce the amount of rubbish we create.

This month, Environmentalists for Europe, the cross-party group co-chaired by Johnson senior, called on the EU to ban non-returnable bottles. Instead, the group said, consumers should be charged a 20p deposit, refundable when they take back the bottle. Or we should make all plastic bottles refillable.

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June 2016

Mellissa Bradley - Water Sensitive SA

Mellissa Bradley is the Program Manager with Water Sensitive SA and is an experienced Adelaide water sensitive urban design practitioner. Mellissa is a strong advocate for the creation of more liveable cities and towns through the delivery of urban growth and infill development that delivers best practice water sensitive urban design. Mellissa has a unique combination of experience in engineering and planning, together with a history of developing and implementing capacity building programs for local government in catchment and urban water management. With more than 20 years experience working in the fields of engineering design, development assessment, policy development, environmental management and construction management, Mellissa understands the support that industry needs to ensure water sensitive urban design is commonplace within our urban landscape.

Cast: AdelaideSBN

EU departure offers a chance to banish past overfishing and incoherent regulation, says head of industry group, despite warnings exit could hurt fisheries

Scottish fishermen’s representatives were adamant on Tuesday that Brexit would be good news for the 5,000 strong fleet, despite warnings that the uncertainty surrounding the UK’s departure from the EU could hurt fisheries.

Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said that leaving the EU would give fleets “the ability to recover proper, sustainable, rational stewardship through our own exclusive economic zone for fisheries”, comparing the situation with Norway and Iceland, which share many key North Sea fishing grounds and are not members of the EU, though they are in the European Economic Area (EEA).

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Off Portugal’s Algrave coast are the islands of Armona, Deserta and Culatra and the waterways of Rio Formosa natural park. The islands’ inhabitants have been in a court battle for the right not to demolish their houses there, which the authorities say are damaging the environment
• Photographs by John Gallo, winner of the RPS Joan Wakelin Bursary 2015

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Whoever leads negotiations on leaving the EU faces big choices - any new food policies must have health, the environment and justice at their heart

Food barely featured in the referendum, but years of jibes about Eurocrats controlling our food standards, and myths about bent bananas, left their mark. Food politics will now come to the fore in ways most consumers might not like.

This was predicted by the few studies which bothered to look at this vital area of UK life. The academic reports on Brexit unanimously anticipated not liberation but a period of turmoil and dislocation in the food system.

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Climate and energy secretary says while decision to leave will make UK’s role harder, the government’s commitment remains the same

Brexit will make it harder for Britain to play its role in tackling climate change, the UK energy and climate secretary has said.

But Amber Rudd said that the UK remained committed to action on global warming and Whitehall sources have told the Guardian that on Thursday she will approve a world-leading carbon target for 2032.

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Despite pressure from students and staff, Harvard leaders have refused to divest

One morning in the summer of 2014, I found myself in the city of Tacloban in the Philippines. The city and surrounding area had been devastated less than a year earlier by Super Typhoon Yolanda. Thousands had been killed; bodies were found for months afterwards.

As part of an international research collaboration, I was interviewing government officials and others throughout the Philippines to assess how to improve preparedness for and response to climate-related disasters. I had already interviewed survivors in cities and villages across the country about the impacts of extreme weather. (And, incidentally, a few weeks later, I would contract dengue and chikungunya—two mosquito-borne diseases aided by climate change in their ongoing spread.) With my prior experience, I thought I was prepared for what I would hear that morning, but I wasn’t.

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Australian conservationists spent five months obtaining permissions and planning for a captive breeding programme for the Bramble Cay melomys. But when they arrived on the rodent’s tiny, low-lying island, they discovered they were too late.

The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet.

But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who uncovered the rodent’s fate had planned to capture individuals and bring them back to the Australian mainland to start a captive breeding programme. They were just too late.

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Environment and climate groups publish final scorecards rating main political parties as Australians prepare to vote

If ever there was going to be a climate change election, surely this was going to be it.

As May came and the election date was announced, the implications of the global Paris agreement between more than 190 countries just months earlier were still resonating – the world was moving away from fossil fuels and the challenge to keep global warming well below 2C was agreed.

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Report is the first to examine the impact of artificial night-lighting on the seasonal behaviour of plants on a national scale

Light pollution is causing spring to come at least a week earlier in the UK, a new study has revealed.

The report, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that budburst in trees occurs up to 7.5 days earlier in brighter areas, with later-budding species being more affected.

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St Dominic, Tamar Valley A handsome South Devon bull has now joined them, so the cycle will continue

A herd of South Devon cattle again graces the fields opposite home. For 30 years the land, with distinctive beech trees on a hedge and an old, freestanding oak, was used mainly for a succession of cereal crops, with annual and ever dearer costs of ploughing, sowing, spraying to control weeds and moulds, and harvesting by combine and straw baler. Marauding pigeons from nearby woods were shot and once there was a mysterious double corn circle that caused consternation and wonder.

Over the past few years the new tenant has resown the former arable fields with grasses that have thickened up with regular topping (cutting) and sheep grazing. This year, strong post-and-wire fences have been reinstated against the hedge-banks, and a cattle crush or pen has been installed for sorting the animals and for the obligatory TB tests.

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Lenore Taylor explains what each of the major parties plan to tackle the problem of greenhouse emissions. While the Coalition is planning to review its plans after Saturday’s general election, Labor is promising two new emissions trading schemes and the Greens have are advocating that Australia source 90% of its power from renewable sources by 2030

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Mines typically follow a set path from prospecting, to development, to extraction and finally closure as the finite resources are exhausted. But does that really need to be the end of the mine’s productive life?

All mines generate waste, one type of which is known as “tailings”. Often these solid wastes are stored at or near the mine site itself. Mine site rehabilitation can be expensive, and often the burden falls on the taxpayer rather than the mining company.

However, this burden could be minimised if mining companies change their perception and start to view these disused materials not as waste, but as potential resources. Tailings dumps can be gold mines – literally, in some cases.

The opportunity

Society’s appetite for commodities is shifting in favour of critical or strategic metals such as lithium, indium and cobalt. These metals are vital to support the rapidly diversifying electronics industry.

For example, earlier this year the Indian government announced an ambitious plan for all vehicles to be electric by 2030. Hitting this target will require a lot of lithium – a crucial component of batteries.

Australia is currently the world’s top lithium producer, offering a much-needed boost to Western Australia’s mining sector in particular. But maintaining this position is tough, because building new mines can cost anything between A$150 million and A$2 billion, on top of exploration costs.

But you don’t necessarily need a brand-new mine to get lithium, thanks to new techniques that allow lithium to be recovered from much lower-grade materials. Instead of being simply dumped, mine tailings can be re-mined. Through this process, characterisation of these wastes will allow for tailor-made, environmentally conscientious management strategies to be developed to handle the lower-value byproducts.

This can also help protect the environment from these often toxic wastes. Many of Australia’s 50,000 abandoned mines contain reactive sulphide minerals such as pyrite. These can leach acid into the environment in a process known as acid mine drainage (AMD), potentially costing more than A$100,000 per hectare to clean up.

Acid mine drainage in Western Tasmania. Anita Parbhakar-Fox

Revisiting mine tailings can not only increase the working life of existing mines, it can also potentially breathe new life into long-abandoned mine sites.

There are two main reasons why this might be preferable to developing new mines. First, mining costs are reduced, as these materials have already been extracted from the ground. Second, the older the mine, the greater the proportion of the target commodity that is likely to be left over, because many older mining techniques had lower recovery rates than today’s technology.

For example, the historic Baal Gammon mine in northern Queensland once produced copper, tin and silver, but acid drainage from the disused site now poses a risk to the nearby Jamie Creek and Walsh River. But analysis of the waste boulders shows that they are rich in tin and indium, both of which can be recovered using today’s metallurgical techniques. This would have the added benefit of removing the sulphide compounds that threaten the local waterways.

Similarly, Tasmania’s Zeehan lead-zinc field contains more than 100 legacy mine sites, many of which – such as the Silver Spray mine – are affected by AMD. Again, characterisation of the waste rocks that contain AMD-forming sulphides shows that they also contain significant amounts of indium.

In neither of these cases has a mining project been established to recover these metals – surely a missed opportunity.

Queensland’s abandoned Croydon mines contain sulphide-bearing waste rocks. Anita Parbhakar-Fox

There are signs that re-mining tailings could make more financial and environmental sense than other rehabilitation options. One example is Tasmania’s Old Tailings Dam, which contains mine waste piled more than 30 metres deep between 1962 and 1982.

While many rehabilitation options have been considered, including flooding the tailings or covering them with vegetation, the technical challenges have been considered too great. Yet the pyrite-rich tailings also contain up to 3% cobalt, which is worth well over US$23,000 per tonne.

It may even be possible to retrieve almost all of the cobalt by using bacterial oxidation. This process was initially developed to release gold from pyritic rocks, and is regarded as a greener processing technique.

Elsewhere in Tasmania, a similar project is under way to recover gold, and another is proposed to recover tin from mine tailings. Overseas, mine tailings reprocessing projects are planned as far afield as South Africa and Bolivia.

With technology improving just as the mining sector’s economic fortunes dip, firms have more incentive than ever to comb through their trash in search of treasure. Treating waste as a potential resource could help the industry rise from the ashes of the downturn, while helping the environment too.

Anita Parbhakar-Fox receives funding from The ARC Transforming the Mining Value Chain Industrial Transformation Research Hub.

ONE STEP CLOSER: Researchers say a safe and effective vaccine against the Zika virus is a step closer after two successful trials on mice.

Solar thermal technology uses the sun's heat to generate electricity, or heating. Beyond Coal & Gas Image Library/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Recently Sandfire Resources, a gold and copper producer based in Western Australia, announced its new solar power plant will soon start powering its DeGrussa mine. By replacing diesel power, the 10-megawatt power station, with 34,000 panels and lithium storage batteries, is expected to reduce the mine’s carbon emissions by 15%.

This is an exciting development because it realises an important potential that has long been recognised but not exploited. Two of Australia’s greatest resources – solar energy and minerals – are, as luck would have it, both highly concentrated in the same parts of Australia.

In this case, solar energy is being used to power the mine, but there is also great potential for solar energy to be used to convert the minerals to chemicals and metals.

In metal production, most greenhouse gases are generated when carbon (often coal) is used to produce metal from the rocky ore. Some of this carbon is used in the actual chemical reactions, but a large proportion is just providing energy for the process.

Replacing the carbon energy source with renewable or other lower-emission energy has the potential to dramatically lower the greenhouse gases associated with metal production.

For example, in iron production, more than 400kg of coke and coal is use to make every tonne of iron. Using renewable energy as a heat source could reduce this carbon input by up to 30%.

The next revolution

Currently, Australia’s use of solar energy is largely limited to homes, for hot water and solar-powered electricity. But solar energy has great potential for regional Australia too.

Mines are often isolated. There is typically limited natural gas and electricity supply, and in remote areas energy supply is limited to liquid fossil fuels. This is exactly the potential being exploited by Sandfire Resources at its mine facility 900km north of Perth.

Recent studies by CSIRO have identified the potential to use solar in high-temperature processing of ores such as bauxite, copper and iron ore. This process would use concentrated solar thermal (CST) energy as a heat supply. This heat can also be converted to electricity, known as concentrated solar power (CSP).

This is different to the solar photovoltaic technology used in Sandfire’s solar power plant (and rooftop solar panels), which converts sunlight directly to electricity.

Solar thermal energy works best at temperatures between 800℃ and 1,600℃ – which can be achieved with existing technology that concentrates the sun’s heat. This is currently too hot for converting the heat to electricity, which generally operates below 600℃.

But processing minerals can make use of these high temperatures, because the heat is used directly for chemical conversion, rather than first being converted to electricity.

It is this rationale that is driving research, at the University of Adelaide, into producing alumina using concentrated solar energy and, at Swinburne University, into producing iron from ore.

We have tested a range of temperatures and mineral mixes, and have produced iron products similar to commercial-grade iron products. We envisage a solar iron-making plant operating in Western Australia and value-adding to our iron reserves before being shipped overseas.

We expect this could reduce energy and emissions by 20-30% compared to current iron-making processes, by replacing carbon-based fossil fuels with solar energy, although carbon would still be used in the chemical processes.

Whether this is cost-effective will depend on the manufacturer, as the saving in energy and carbon will need to compensate for the high capital cost associated with high solar fluxes.

Concentrated solar energy is still relatively expensive. The Australian Solar Institute estimated in 2012 that the cost of electricity from concentrated solar was approximately double the current cost for conventional energy, reflecting largely the high capital cost of solar systems.

This gap can reasonably be expected to close with increases in the scale of operations (lowering manufacturing costs) and in regulatory pressure on conventional power sources.

It may be a way off, but the small step by Sandfire Resources could be the start of a revolution in the Australian minerals industry.

Geoffrey Brooks and his co-workers have received funding from ARENA for work into solar thermal processing and Cartwheel Resources for evaluating the potential of solar thermal processing of iron ores.

New report says Flint water crisis is not an anomaly, as analysis reveals 5,363 water systems – providing drinking water to 18 million – breached federal laws

More than 18 million Americans are served drinking water by providers that have violated federal laws concerning lead in water, with only a tiny proportion of offenses resulting in any penalty, a new report has found.

The toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is “not anomalous”, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report states, with widespread violations of national rules designed to protect people from lead, a known neurotoxin that is harmful even in small doses.

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Fears had been raised that EU referendum would result in deadline being missed but sources say carbon budget will be agreed

Ministers will this week approve a world-leading carbon emissions reduction target for the early 2030s, the Guardian understands.

Fears had been raised by green groups and industry that the EU referendum would cause the UK government to miss a deadline on Thursday for accepting carbon targets from its statutory climate advisers.

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Nasa has conducted a second round of test on a booster which is designed to send human beings deep into space.

The UK Science Minister, Jo Johnson, says that world class research will "endure" following the Brexit.

The overall awards winners have been announced in the 2016 Atkins Ciwem environmental photographer of the year competition, an annual international showcase for thought-provoking photography and video that tackles a wide range of environmental themes. A shortlist of 60 images has also been chosen from more than 10,000 entries for an exhibition that will run at the Royal Geographical Society, London, from 29 June to 22 August 2016.

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