Read the full story at Treehugger.
Restaurants are creating more of it, but people are wasting less at home.
Day: May 15, 2020
The Big Picture 2020
Read the full story and see the pictures at bioGraphic.
Each year, the California Academy of Sciences’ renowned BigPicture Photography Competition celebrates some of the world’s best photographers and the year’s most striking images. Judged by an esteemed panel of nature and conservation photography experts, including Suzi Eszterhas, Tony Wu, and bioGraphic contributing photo editor Sophie Stafford, the competition’s winning images and finalists highlight Earth’s biodiversity and illustrate the many threats that our planet faces. Each photo, in its own way, inspires viewers to protect and conserve the remarkable diversity of life on Earth. Below, we present the winners and some of our personal favorites from this year’s competition.
Coronavirus shutdown not yet helping air in Michigan’s most toxic ZIP code
Read the full story from Bridge.
While Beirut’s skies turned blue and Venice’s canals ran clear, southwest Detroit’s infamous pollution hasn’t measurably improved since Michigan’s COVID-19 shutdown took effect.
Poop sleuths: MSU studies Detroit wastewater for next coronavirus outbreak
Read the full story at Bridge.
It’s common knowledge that coughing or sneezing when sick can spread disease. But humans also shed viruses in our waste, which means municipal sewage could provide clues to containing viral outbreaks.
Coronavirus causing huge difficulty for the recovered paper sector, says Recycling Association
Read the full story in Envirotec.
The coronavirus outbreak is hitting the vulnerable recovered paper sector hard according to The Recycling Association. Over the past few years, the international market for recovered fibre has received a number of blows and this has proved challenging for the UK in particular.
Life cycle assessments guide sustainability
Read the full story in Food Technology.
Life cycle assessments (LCAs) quantify environmental impact. For the food industry, packaging LCAs are commonly combined with food LCAs to provide a more complete picture of the impact that packaged food has on the environment. Packaging LCA determination methods differ and include forensic, comprehensive, and streamlined versions that can be combined with food LCAs and other data into system LCAs.
Inside Eastman’s moonshot goal for endlessly circular plastics
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
At first glance, the sprawling industrial site, covering roughly 900 acres in Kingsport, Tennessee, appears to be just another chemical manufacturing facility. There are hundreds of buildings and countless miles of pipes, conveyors, distillers, cooling towers, valves, pumps, compressors and controls. It doesn’t exactly look or feel particularly noteworthy.
But something extraordinary is going on at this Eastman chemical plant: two breakthrough processes to turn waste plastics of all kinds back into new plastics, continuously, with no loss of quality.
‘Meandering’ restores twists and turns on Lambert Creek in Ramsey County
Read the full story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
A portion of Lambert Creek prone to flooding in eastern Ramsey County is being reshaped into a meandering stream, the latest attempt to restore metro area rivers that have become polluted ditches.
The aim is to attract more wildlife and produce cleaner water but also reduce flooding that threatens nearby Vadnais Heights neighborhoods.
Circular Economy, Renewables & Energy Efficiency
Read the full story at Environment + Energy Leader.
By using existing resources, reducing inefficiencies in the production process and looking into waste or byproducts in innovative ways, the world’s leading providers of pulp and paper materials can progress toward business circularity. This can lead to many benefits, including energy reduction, water efficiency,lower GHG emissions and more efficient production processes.
What’s Bad for Bees Could Be Bad for Marine Life, Too
Read the full story in Hakai Magazine.
Over the past two decades, farmers hoping to ward off pests have increasingly turned to planting seeds that come straight from the supplier pre-coated in neonicotinoids, a controversial class of insecticide chemically related to nicotine. With the insecticide built into the seeds, farmers no longer have to spray their fields with toxic chemicals, theoretically reducing the risk to non-target species.
But as it turns out, neonics, as they’re also known, do impact other species—most famously honeybees, the steep decline of which has been linked to the insecticides. That discovery led the European Union to ban neonics in 2018. However, they remain widely used in the United States, as well as in Canada, though with some restrictions. Now, Haley Davis, an undergraduate student studying toxicology in marine ecosystems at Hollings Marine Laboratory in South Carolina, and her colleagues are raising yet another reason to be concerned about the insecticides. Neonics dissolve easily in water, they say, and could be harming marine life.
Davis and her fellow researchers presented the results of their examination into the effects of imidacloprid, a common neonicotinoid, on coral and reef-dwelling species that are vulnerable to runoff from coastal agriculture at a scientific meeting in February.
