Feed aggregator

Vehicle manufacturer Tomcar Australia recently won an AusIndustry Innovation Award, at the same time as Toyota and Holden prepare to close their Australian production facilities.

Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers' Alliance are normally at odds on policy, but both criticise HS2

Existing gas generation in South Australia is expensive, inefficient, highly polluting, and controlled by just two market players. Battery storage is a smarter and cheaper option.

The sequel to 2001's ocean series is due to be shown later this year on BBC One.

Wind farms to show they can provide same system services - inertia and frequency - as coal and gas plants in major new trial in South Australia.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 20 February 1917

On Saturday a grey crow was perched on the topmost rotten branch of an oak beside the river, and was as communicative as usual. Perhaps it enjoyed watching the ice sheets floating past and hearing them scrunch as they piled together at the bend. Yesterday there were three paddling on the sloppy ice of the mere, still talking as they cleaned up the various bird remains. I thought the note was always repeated three times in quick succession, but as often as not four caws follow one another rapidly after each pause of a few seconds’ duration. The grey crow’s call is shriller than the carrion’s but deeper than the rook’s.

The thaw livened up the thrushes and starlings and started the dunnocks afresh: everywhere these little hedge-frequenters are shuffling their wings and trilling vigorously. The blackbirds, silent since last summer, immediately tuned up; I heard my first on Saturday, and to-day many are in excellent mellow voice. Herring gulls have not yet left the mere; they have been about for several weeks, for the first appeared long before the waters were ice-bound; they raised a joyous chorus yesterday, their full, clear calls sounding quite vernal. Like the crows, they consorted with the living blackheads and fed upon the dead ones. Near the bank a three-foot eel was embedded in the ice, and crow or gull had got through a weak spot, and reached a few inches of the fish, picking it to the bone.

Continue reading...

In the Selous Game Reserve you can see seven different bee-eaters. Each one sports impossibly beautiful colours

Bee-eaters are the supermodels of the bird world: slim, glamorous – and hopelessly out of reach for us mere mortals. But in the Selous Game Reserve, in southern Tanzania, you can see seven different species of bee-eater hawking for insects under sun-filled skies. Each one sports impossibly beautiful colours, outcompeting even the half-a-dozen species of kingfisher we saw here. On a game drive from Selous Impala Camp, in the heart of Africa’s largest wildlife reserve, we went in search of the “magnificent seven”.

The two commonest species, white-fronted and white-throated, may have similar names, but they are very different in appearance. The white-throated is, by bee-eater standards, almost austere: a plain, foliage green body topped with a black-and-white head.

Continue reading...

Endangered Irrawaddy dolphins and river communities are threatened by three new dams proposed for 'feasibility studies' along the Mekong River in Cambodia.

There has been a rapid increase in the amount of resources tied up in buildings. Shutterstock

The volume of natural resources used in buildings and transport infrastructure increased 23-fold between 1900 and 2010, according to our research. Globally, there are now 800 billion tonnes of natural resource “stock” tied up in these constructions, two-thirds of it in industrialised nations alone.

This trend is set to continue. While industrialised countries have lost some momentum, emerging economies are growing rapidly, China especially. If all countries were to catch up to the per capita level of the industrialised nations, this would quadruple the amount of natural resources tied up in the built environment.

In Australia, 70% of the buildings and infrastructure that will be used in 2050 have not yet been built. Constructing all of this will require a huge amount of natural resources and will severely impact the environment.

To avoid this, we need work to build more efficiently and waste less of our resources. Our buildings need to last longer and become the inputs of future construction projects at the end of their lifetime.

The impact of the expansion

Continuing the massive expansion of natural resource consumption would not only require vast quantities of new raw materials, it would also result in considerable environmental impact. It would require massive changes in land use for quarrying sand and gravel, and more energy for extraction, transport and processing. And, if we do not change course, more raw material use now means more waste later.

All of this will be accompanied by a large rise in carbon dioxide emissions, making it much harder to achieve the climate goals agreed in Paris. Cement production alone, for example, is responsible for about 5% of global carbon emissions.

Building sustainability

It is certainly possible to build more sustainably. This requires us to use natural resources more efficiently, reducing the amount of materials and emissions related to economic activities. One strategy for achieving this is to create a more circular economy, which emphasises re-use and recycling. A circular economy turns consumption and production into a loop.

Currently, only 12% of materials used for buildings and infrastructure come from recycling. In part, this is due to the fact that globally, four times more materials are used in building than are released as demolition waste. This has, of course, to do with the scale and speed at which some countries are building.

Yet the potential for recycling is very large. Buildings and infrastructure are ageing and in the next 20 years alone there could be as much as 270 billion tonnes of demolished material globally. This is equivalent to the volume accrued over the previous one hundred years. This material will either have to be disposed in landfill, at very high cost, or it could be reused.

As we noted, 70% of the buildings and infrastructure that will be used in Australia in 2050 have not yet been built. This signals massive investment in new materials but also very large amounts of demolition waste from today’s infrastructure.

The opportunity

There is a window of opportunity for more sustainable building if we decouple economic growth from increased use of natural resources. We can do this by improving quality and use of existing infrastructure and buildings, extending lifespans, using better design, and planning for recycle and reuse.

Better quality building materials and better design can extend the lifetime of buildings, resulting in lower maintenance costs and saving primary materials, energy and waste. Eco-industrial parks and industrial clusters as well as sharing of information about waste flows can establish new relationships among industries where the waste of one production process can become the input of another process.

This doesn’t just make environmental sense. There are potentially large economic gains to be had from more efficient use of resources. This includes increased employment, increased productivity and less need for government subsidies.

Achieving a transition to long lived buildings, infrastructure and products will require new business models and new skills. It depends on skilling and re-skilling existing and new workers in the construction and manufacturing industry. Some of these changes are not going to happen spontaneously but will benefit from well designed policy that rewards resource efficiency and sustainability.

But first, we need more information about stocks and flows of materials throughout the economy, to allow governments and business leaders to plan for the necessary innovation.

Heinz Schandl receives funding from United Nations Environment and the United Nations Commission for Regional Development (UNCRD). He is a member of the UN Environment International Resource Panel (IRP) and president elect of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE).

Fridolin Krausmann receives funding from the Austrian Science Foundation and the European Commission research fund.

Exclusive: Coral bleaching found near Palm Island as unusually warm waters are expected off eastern Australia, with areas hit in last year’s event in mortal danger

The embattled Great Barrier Reef could face yet more severe coral bleaching in the coming month, with areas badly hit by last year’s event at risk of death.

Images taken by local divers last week and shared exclusively with the Guardian by the Australian Marine Conservation Society show newly bleached corals discovered near Palm Island.

Continue reading...

Damian Carrington is half right (The war against air pollution has begun – and it will be fought in cities, 13 February) in that cities bear a terrible burden from air pollution and municipal action is critical to address it. However, city governments cannot succeed alone. Much of urban pollution stems from outside city limits and significant progress will only be achieved with policies that also require national, regional and even international commitment.

A significant part of city air pollution drifts in from regional sources like wood-burning rural households, coal-fired power plants, industries and the open burning of agricultural waste and rubbish. Commuters driving in from car-centric suburbs and transport between cities contribute to urban congestion and pollution too, stymying smart city initiatives like investments in public transportation and safer streets for walking and cycling.

Continue reading...

The US rocket company sends a cargo ship to resupply the International Space Station.

Retailers say demand is at its highest for a decade with popularity spreading from fruit and vegetables to other groceries

Demand for organic food is at its highest for more than a decade, according to major retailers.

That’s good news for an industry that was hit hard by the economic downturn but now seems to be returning to rude health as more shoppers say organic food is worth paying the premium for. This week the Soil Association will release its annual report on the state of the organic food market, which is expected to show that it has grown for the fourth consecutive year.

Continue reading...

The strategy to fix the Murray-Darling hangs in the balance as states and irrigators squabble over returning more water back to the river.

Globally, the impacts of climate change are going to contribute to human migration. Where it occurs, it should be supported so as to protect people’s communities, livelihoods, rights, and health, argues Dr Celia McMichael.

Audits carried out at more than 300 abattoirs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland find major hygiene failings in more than a quarter of meat plants

One in four slaughterhouses are failing to take basic hygiene precautions to stop contaminated meat reaching high street butchers and supermarkets.

An analysis of government audits carried out at more than 300 abattoirs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland identified major hygiene failings in more than a quarter of the meat plants. The failings could expose consumers to serious food poisoning illnesses such as E coli, salmonella or campylobacter.

Continue reading...

The long-planned space mission that seeks to detect gravitational waves is on course to be selected this summer.

RSPCA believes baby chickens came from commercial producer but were dumped by a third party

About 1,000 day-old chicks have been abandoned in a field. RSPCA inspectors said members of the public made the discovery of the newly hatched chickens in a field in Crowland, near Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire on Friday.

Many of the chicks are believed to be in good health, although some had died while others had to be put down due to their injuries, the animal welfare charity said.

Continue reading...

Citizen photos taken during August's total solar eclipse in the US will be spliced into continuous videos.

Long-dormant microbes are found inside giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves - and revived.