Designing and introducing children to sustainable school lunches that are climate friendly, nutritious, affordable and culturally appropriate – lunches they enjoy – does that sound impossible? Researchers at Stockholm-based Karolinska Institutet have done it. Their study shows a new lunch menu resulted in a 40 percent reduction in climate impact with no increase in cost or decrease in consumption.
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Clean drinkable water is rare and precious. Of the waters that cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, roughly 97 percent is the saltwater of the oceans; just three percent is freshwater. Of that, only 1.2 percent can be used as drinking water; the rest is locked up in glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost, or stored too far beneath the surface to be retrieved. Much of the accessible freshwater has become polluted.
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Fire swept through a Rohinga refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar on Sunday leaving 15 refugees dead and more than 560 others injured. Bangladeshi authorities estimate that 400 people are still missing and 45,000 refugees lost their shelters and all their belongings in the devastating blaze.
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Europe invested a record amount in new offshore wind farms last year – €26.3 billion – despite the unexpected financial demands of the coronavirus pandemic. These fresh investments will finance 7.1 gigawatts of new offshore wind energy, enough to power 2.13 million homes. But that’s not many compared to the millions of homes in the EU’s future plans.
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To avoid serious water scarcity, future biomass plantations for energy production and carbon emissions control will need sustainable water management, researchers from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show in a new study. Otherwise, irrigation of biomass plantations may increase global water stress more than climate change.
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Every year, an estimated 25 million tonnes of cotton textiles are discarded around the world, about a quarter of all the textiles thrown out each year. In Sweden, most of the unwanted material goes straight into an incinerator and becomes district heating. In other places, cotton clothes usually end up in landfills, but now a new process converts them to sugar.
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“When we eat, our bodies convert food into energy that fuels our lives. But what happens to the energy stored in the 80 billion pounds of food thrown away annually in America?” asks Steven Ashby, director of the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. As part of advancing sustainable energy solutions, scientists at the lab he runs are converting tons of food waste into clean, renewable biofuel that could power cars, planes and trains.
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