By Catherine Noonan Unless you’ve been on a social media blackout for the last two months, you will have probably heard about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. It outlines the effects that 1.5°C of global warming would have on our planet and society, compared to a more dangerous 2°C, as well as the changes that will be required to keep temperatures within the safer limits. Unsurprisingly, we have a lot to do in a very short time! One protective measure involved in all the analysed pathways (potential future concentrations of greenhouse gases) is carbon-dioxide removal or CDR. This refers to removing CO2 from the atmosphere to offset emissions. So far, the large-scale success of CDR has not been proved.
A company called Carbon Engineering has been refining a technique to produce carbon-neutral fuel in British Columbia. Their ‘AIR TO FUELS’ technology uses CO2 from the atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make a liquid fuel that could power cars and planes, just like the fuel we currently use. Naturally, the production plant they are currently building will run on renewable energy. In June 2018, they published a paper in Joule showing that their fuel could be produced on a commercial scale for as little as $100 per ton of CO2 captured. This price could become competitive when heavy ‘carbon prices’ are applied to CO2 emissions, as explained in National Geographic’s article on the company. Although a carbon-neutral fuel would be miles better than fossil fuels, it would obviously not lead to a net removal of CO2 by the time the fuel is burnt. To achieve ‘negative emissions’, captured carbon must be stored away, ideally underground. There are already some natural carbon sinks – forests, peat bogs and wetlands – but expanding these enough to have the required impact would take up land needed for other purposes. Artificial methods for large-scale removal include: direct air capture (DAC), bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECSS) and enhanced weathering. Direct air capture does what it says on the tin, capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere using chemical filters and sorbents. BECSS essentially involves burning recently-living organic material as fuel and extracting the carbon from emissions at the power plant. Enhanced weathering speeds and scales up the natural process of silicate rocks reacting with CO2 from the atmosphere to make an alkaline solution. It could carry the added bonus of counteracting ocean acidification. Climeworks, another carbon-capturing company, has fourteen DAC plants built or being built in Europe. Most of the carbon is used in industries – agriculture, energy, food and beverages. A 2017 pilot plant in Iceland, however, has been demonstrating capture and storage, which they intend to market to countries, businesses and even individuals to offset their own emissions. Their mission is ‘to capture 1% of global emissions by 2025’. They do however admit that there is currently not enough money in the industry. CDR may once have been seen as a backup in the case of a climate catastrophe. Now, knowing that some level of CDR will be necessary to follow any of the IPCC’s 1.5°C pathways, we are relying on it to avoid the dangers of the 2°C scenario. The further we overshoot our carbon budgets, the more urgently we need capture and storage solutions. Considering that we may soon need this technology to save us from droughts, famine, floods and general disaster, there is worryingly little investment or progress in research. As is usually the bottom line with climate change: there is hope…but it requires action.
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By Wiam Machmachi A growing number of people around the world are becoming more aware and preoccupied with the increase of plastic pollution and its impact on our oceans, wildlife and human health. When you think that all the plastic ever produced still exists, plastic recycling is replaced with the word ‘downcycling’, as recycling suggests that the continuation of plastic production is what is keeping plastic around, giving some a false sense of sustainable living. Once we throw our used plastic in the bin, it is collected and sent to landfills, and some of it is sent into water systems, ultimately reaching the oceans, where plastic outnumbers sealife with a 6:1 ratio.
On top of being ingested by marine animals and birds, causing them to die, studies have found that BPA plastic is consumed by humans and absorbed by the body, and is linked with risk of cardiovascular disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer etc. This gives us just a small idea of some of the consequences of our, at times, quite careless lifestyle. When you talk to people about the impact of our garbage they have different reactions, but many of them seem to have a tendency to place the blame on “governments not doing their jobs”, “on some people not recycling” or even on “the previous generation”, but the truth is that this is the responsibility of every individual. We need to shift our mindset from just being consumers who buy and throw away things to being environmentally-aware consumers who keep in mind the consequence of everything they choose to buy. As a consumer myself, I need to start thinking about where everything I buy (or at least some things) will end up after I no longer need them. It’s incredible the positive impact you can have by just refusing a straw everytime you are offered one. If current trends are sustained, by 2050 plastic will out-weigh fish in the waters, and that’s not a World anyone would want to live in. Governments around the world are becoming more and more aware of the damage and responding with new regulations and bans, with more than 200 cities worldwide placing a ban on disposable plastic bags and other plastic-made products. More can be done by governing bodies, however, and each one of us can make a change just by doing something simple like using a personal refillable water bottle instead of buying a plastic one each time you’re out and by just avoiding disposable plastic products (more than ⅓ of all produced plastic ). While reading around this topic and realising how very small changes to my lifestyle could help reduce the problem, I decided to avoid non-reusable plastic bottles and see where this would take me. After a couple of months, I not only stopped buying plastic bottles but I would also avoid other disposable plastic products. I have become slightly more aware of the potential extent of my actions. In the end, it made me a much healthier person and it saved me loads of money too, which is always great. An increasing amount of people are adopting a more #environmentallyaware approach to consumerism and paving the way to what I like to call Consumerism 2.0. There are many blogs and websites that give tips on a more plastic-free lifestyle, but my personal advice would be to just read around the topic to become more aware and make small gradual changes in your life to help the situation. Just being more aware and opening conversations on the matter will, in itself, bring you a step closer to being #environmentallyaware consumers, and will finally bring us all into a more sustainable society. |