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Month: June 2023

Why Are Eco-Conscious Corporations Interested in Remote Work?

Posted on by dishanth
Why Are Eco-Conscious Corporations Interested in Remote Work?

Why Are Eco-Conscious Corporations Interested in Remote Work?

Remote work has risen in popularity over the last few years and is maintaining its status for evolving reasons. Primarily, people are noting how it’s better for the environment. Eco-conscious corporations are jumping into remote work life to better align with their values.

Here are a few reasons why they’re interested in digitizing their workforces. Companies should consider several pros and cons when making the leap to remote work.

 

What Are Eco-Conscious Corporations?

Traditional corporations have various values and goals. They may prioritize making profits or expanding their consumer base to bolster success. Eco-conscious corporations also value those things, but these goals must operate within structures that minimize the company’s planetary impact.

Corporations stand to gain from becoming eco-friendly in many ways, and consumer base increases may be most influential in the decision to go remote. Research shows that 89% of consumers have made minor to complete sustainable lifestyle changes. They want brands that won’t compromise those values, opening a market sector businesses stand to gain from joining.

Is Remote Work Eco-Friendly? 8 Pros and Cons

Corporations that want to attract and retain sustainably minded consumers may become interested in remote work due to these benefits. However, they may also face a few challenges when making the green jump. Here are the most vital points to keep in mind.

Pro: It Eliminates Commuting Emissions

When people think about working a remote position, not dealing with a commute is likely the first thing that comes to mind. Logging on from home gives them hours of their free time back. It also means they don’t have to burn gasoline to drive every day.

Breathe London found that morning and evening emissions fell by 25% and 34%, respectively, when people began working from home. Eco-conscious corporations that let 50 people work from home full time eliminate 50 carbon emissions footprints weekly. The sum can significantly affect the planet, especially if the company has a sizable employee roster.

Con: Home Offices Require Individual Electricity

People need electricity to work from home. They must access Wi-Fi, turn on lights, and use their air conditioning or heating. All those things happen in one location when people work in a commercial office space.

Remote teams transitioning to online work see electricity usage multiply by however many living spaces become full-time home offices. Some workers may prefer to think of this as sustainable consumption because it limits a person’s environmental impact to only essential needs, minimizing their planetary effects. However, power becomes an issue when a company has many employees.

Pro: Digital Work Doesn’t Need Paper

Employees print things every day when they’re in a traditional office. They might need documents before a conference call, copies of a presentation or records in filing cabinets according to company filing policies.

Remote work doesn’t need paper. Everything happens through computers, so waste disappears overnight. Employees can keep their work lives entirely on their computers or use their preferred resources, like physical planners made with recycled paper.

Con: Remote Work Encourages More Water Usage

Offices always have numerous waterlines. They’re necessary for kitchen and bathroom sinks, plus lines to other appliances like refrigerators, dishwashers and coffee machines.

Virtual teams use water when working from home, too, but they might increase their water usage in additional ways. Remote workers can do dishes and laundry throughout the day instead of limiting those chores to a few times a week after work hours. It may mean using more water than before, increasing their dependency on the limited natural resource.

Pro: Workers Create Less Product Waste

Going to an office every day creates opportunities for single-use product waste. Employees may stop at a drive-thru for a single-use cup of coffee. The workplace kitchen might have free cutlery with individual plastic wrappers.

Those things aren’t a necessity for remote workers. They can make their coffee at home with reusable mugs and compostable filters. They’ll use their silverware to eat lunch and reusable containers for snacks.

The option to order food for delivery remains when people work at home. However, having immediate access to anything they could need in their kitchens makes remote workers less likely to purchase single-use products that go immediately into the garbage.

Con: Office Furniture Goes to Landfills

When a small business hires only remote workers when it launches, there’s nothing to lose. It’s different when an eco-conscious corporation becomes interested in remote work.

The company likely already has in-person office space in one or more locations. Transitioning to an entirely online workspace leaves those buildings empty. Trash-hauling teams may need to pick up unused furniture and electronics when the business moves out. It may go directly into landfills if the corporation’s leadership doesn’t have time to sell each piece individually.

Pro: Employees Can Make Their Food

Employees don’t always eat the food they bring to the office. They might forget there’s a company-sponsored lunch or free snacks for an upcoming holiday. By the time they get home, the food in their lunch box might not be edible anymore.

Free meals provided by corporations can also be too big for employees who dislike large lunches. Both scenarios result in wasting the natural resources required to prepare food. They contribute to the estimated 30%-40% of waste in the American food supply system, but they don’t have to be an unfortunate part of every worker’s life.

Remote employees can make exactly how much food they want and any kind they prefer while at home. They might even have groceries delivered to reduce impulse buys and eliminate another trip to town that burns gas. It’s another way remote work is eco-friendly and quickly becoming more popular with sustainably minded people.

Con: Home Office Upgrades Create Waste

People may upgrade their home office when they must spend 40 hours or more there weekly. The single-use plastics and styrofoam packaging that come with new furniture pollute landfills after the desks or chairs arrive at the purchaser’s home.

Construction waste could become a new issue as well. Someone may add a room to their house or renovate an existing space to create a home office. The excess waste caused by aerosol cans, unused drywall and leftover paint fills landfills, too. None of that is necessary for in-person work where optimized office spaces are already available.

 

 

The Future Is Remote and Eco-Friendly

There are numerous reasons why remote work is eco-friendly. It’s worth noting how it helps the planet and may create new environmental challenges. By understanding both, corporations and their team members can work together to make the least environmental impact when transitioning to fully remote schedules.

 

 

 

 

Source   Happy Eco News

Carbon Dioxide Livestock Feed

Posted on by dishanth
Carbon Dioxide Livestock Feed

Researchers may have discovered a protein substitute for livestock feed that is significantly less environmentally damaging than corn and soybean production. The researchers have explored the concept of synthetic nutrition, which means essential nutrients can be produced artificially, efficiently and with a small footprint. They have turned greenhouse gas emissions into an ingredient that could be used for carbon dioxide livestock feed.

The researchers captured carbon dioxide and combined it with renewable hydrogen to make methanol powered by wind and solar energy. With the material created, they applied a series of enzymes into an eight-step process which, after several combinations, created an amino acid called L-alanine. This amino acid makes protein and is an energy source for muscles and the central nervous system. It also strengthens the immune system and helps the body use sugars.

This isn’t the first time researchers have been able to transform carbon dioxide into food products. Researchers have found a way to convert carbon dioxide into starch that typically comes from corn which requires a lot of land, water and fertilizer to grow. The process they used was 8.5 times more efficient than photosynthesis, which the corn plant uses to convert CO2 and sunlight into carbs. Moreover, their process took only four hours compared to the 120 days required for corn to grow and generate starch.

These new processes of using carbon dioxide to minimize the use of corn and starch will bypass the problem of repurposing a climate-damaging waste stream. Although there are other ways to synthesize L-alanine protein, they require emission-intensive processes that require petroleum products. Using existing carbon dioxide will reduce the need for emissions and harmful products. It also decouples production from the land because less land will be needed to produce the same amount of L-alanine. It will also use significantly less energy as the energy required will be taken from renewable sources.

The demand for animal protein continues, so the need for carbon dioxide livestock feed will also rise. Researchers are developing solutions that utilize harmful and excess emissions that can be transformed into food for these animals. These new solutions will allow us to move away from excess land and water use and monocultures and help us create more biologically diverse environments.

 

 

 

 

Source Happy Eco News

Growing Food with Human Waste

Posted on by dishanth
Growing Food with Human Waste

Growing Food with Human Waste is Needed

A few projects are looking at growing food with human waste, including researchers from the Laboratoire Eau Environnement et Systemes Urbains just outside of Paris. They are switching out harmful synthetic fertilizers from being used on their wheat crops to urine-based fertilisers. And they are seeing positive results as the waste-based fertilizers provide organic matter that improves the soil.

Farmers in a small town in Tepetixtla, Mexico, use fertilizer made from human excrement to fertilize their crops. Growing food with human waste requires a composting process used to be hygienic and better for the soil and biodiversity. Moreover, growing food with human waste also saves water and reduces pollution because the excrement isn’t flushed into the sewage system.

In Vermont, the Rich Earth Institute runs a community program that turns human urine into fertilizer. The Institute conducts original research to examine the safety and efficacy of urine-derived fertilizers in agriculture. The program encourages community members to donate their urine to help them further their research. In 2021, 180 people donated their urine to the Rich Earth Institute.

In Kenya, the organization Sanivation developed a fecal sludge treatment plant. The plant can serve 10,000 people and produce 350 tons of fuel per month. This can be used as a cooking and industrial fuel, a sustainable option for charcoal made from fallen trees. Each plant ensures that water is safely managed, creates local employment, prevents environmental pollution and saves trees through their innovative biofuels.

In Switzerland, a company called Sanitation 360 developed a urine cassette that collects, contains, treats and concentrates the urine inside the toilet. The urine is then stabilized, dehydrated, and used directly as a fertilizer. The fertilizer includes the same type and concentration of plant nutrients in commercial fertilizers. By converting urine into a dried fertilizer, the flow of polluting plant nutrients to the environment can be minimized, which can help limit nutrient overload and dead zones in aquatic ecosystems.

Human excrement is one of the world’s most natural things, and it’s a shame that much of it is going to waste. While we may get queasy thinking about fertilizing our crops with human excrement, do we know what is in the currently used fertilizers? What is more natural and less environmentally damaging than something from our bodies? With more organizations and researchers finding new sanitary ways to use human excrement as fertilizers, this may become the new normal and the new way of food production.

 

 

 

 

Source  Happy Eco

Biomimicry in Sustainable Designs

Posted on by dishanth
Biomimicry in Sustainable Designs

Biomimicry in Sustainable Design

The construction industry is very energy intensive. Steel and concrete, both popular materials in construction, are very carbon-intensive in their production. Many of the emissions from concrete production are attributed to burning fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, which heat up the limestone and clay that becomes Portland cement. There is an opportunity for the construction industry to shape a nature-positive economy from the city to the building design and material and component levels.

The Mobius Project, a greenhouse designed by Iguana Architects, uses biomimicry in sustainable design by drawing inspiration from how ecosystems in nature work. They are committed to revolutionizing food production by turning waste into locally grown, low-carbon nutritious food. The biological waste can also be turned into methane to generate electricity for the greenhouse. In their closed cycle with zero waste, one organism’s waste becomes the next’s input. The idea for the Mobius Project came from observing the oak tree, which has the potential to reuse its output resources, including materials, energy and water.

The Eden Project, designed by exploration architecture, uses biomimicry in sustainable design with a giant greenhouse inspired by the biblical Garden of Eden. It was designed to resemble soap bubbles, carbon molecules, and radiolaria. The idea was that the soap bubbles would be optimally positioned in the sun to allow for complete self-healing. They also took inspiration from dragonfly wings for the best way to assemble steel pieces, allowing for a lightweight structure that required fewer carbon emissions to transport from place to place.

Designers have also looked at lotus leaves to decrease the need for protective finishings, which are usually toxic. The lotus leaf has tiny hairs covered with a waxy coating that allows it to stay dry. Water that hits the leaf will roll off the waxy nonpolar coating. This has inspired a protective coating for external areas that will repel water and dirt, which reduces the need for maintenance. Moreover, reducing the water accumulation in buildings will reduce deterioration mechanisms in infrastructures, such as steel corrosion, sulphate attacks, freezing and thawing.

Limestone-producing bacteria can be used to extend a building’s lifespan. Certain bacteria can produce limestone, filling the gaps and cracks that affect concrete structures over time. This can reduce the need to use new concrete for repairs.

Learning from nature and imputing the way nature works into our designs and in the construction industry can make our built environments more sustainable. There’s so much we can learn from nature; the more we discover, the more we can work toward reducing our impact on the planet.

 

 

 

 

Source Happy Eco News

According To New Study, Dust Absorbed By Phytoplankton Benefits Them

Posted on by dishanth
According To New Study, Dust Absorbed By Phytoplankton Benefits Them

Carbon prevention or carbon capture?

A significant amount of the conversation surrounding climate change concerns the release of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. While this is important, the priority is most concerned with reducing or eliminating fossil fuel emissions.

While achieving this goal is paramount in creating a clean, eco-friendly world, the topic of carbon sequestration has been under the radar until recently. When most think of carbon sequestration, they imagine carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or think of trees.

Both are valuable and productive carbon sequesters; however, they are not the only areas or mechanisms useful for reducing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Our world’s oceans are single-handedly the largest carbon sinks we have, and many marine organisms participate in this important process.

Phytoplankton makes up an important role in carbon deposition onto the ocean floor. In recent years, they have been thriving due to mass amounts of dust being created and deposited.

Carbon sinks and carbon eaters.

In the ocean, there are multitudes of different organisms sequestering carbon. Seagrass is one of the largest carbon sequesters and provides large habitats for other fish and marine animals to thrive in.

However, despite the outsize role that some marine organisms play in carbon sequestration, phytoplankton also makes up a key role.

Phytoplankton generally pulls up their nutrients from the ocean and use those nutrients to turn carbon dioxide into organic matter, which then gets deposited back onto the ocean floor.

Due to climate change-induced wildfires and natural disasters, phytoplankton have been thriving in recent years. According to a new study published in Science Magazine and led by Toby Westberry out of Oregon State University, there is a direct correlation between the amount of dust being brought into the ocean and the numbers and health of phytoplankton in the area.

They used satellite imaging to observe the differences in the coloration of the water before and after a major dust storm or wildfire occurred. They noticed that the water in the affected areas began to turn green, indicating larger numbers of phytoplankton.

The researchers also found that depending on the altitude of the marine environment, there is an observed difference in the health and numbers of phytoplankton. In lower altitude areas, there were fewer phytoplankton despite being healthy, and in higher altitude areas, there were more phytoplankton as well as being more healthy.

It all adds up.

Phytoplankton, while important, doesn’t make up as much of an impact on climate sequestration as one might hope. This is because dust-related phytoplankton growth only makes up 4.5% of the global yearly carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean. Though, in some areas, the amount of carbon absorbed can reach highs of 40% of the total amount.

Nonetheless, It is important to be aware of the multitudes of different ways carbon sequestration can occur. These systems are large and complex and take up many different forms. To address the issue of storing carbon and removing it from our atmosphere, we must understand it won’t be a “one-size-fits-all” approach that is successful. It will take multiple different mechanisms working together and complementing each other to save our world. Phytoplankton, it seems, will be playing an important role in this.

 

 

 

 

Source Happy Eco News

California’s Compressed Air Batteries

Posted on by dishanth
California’s Compressed Air Batteries

Engineers and scientists have been developing ways to store unused energy from renewable sources as the world moves from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We’ve seen different types of batteries making their mark, including lithium-ion batteries, pumped hydro, tanks full of molten salt or silicon and more. Now, California has found a way to move past lithium into an even more sustainable battery – compressed air batteries. Compressed air batteries do not require lithium which is expensive and environmentally damaging to dig up. They store energy like solar and wind and are a 24/7 source of clean power for homes and businesses.

In 2021, Hydrostor opened two new compressed air energy storage facilities in California, which provide almost twice the storage capacity. Their facilities use surplus electricity from the grid to run an air compressor. The compressed air is stored in a big underground tank until the energy is needed. When needed, the energy will be released through a turbine to generate electricity that is fed back into the grid. Reheating the air as it is fed into the turbine increases the system’s efficiency.

Hydrosor’s system is optimized for system sizes of over 100 megawatts with 5 hours up to multi-day storage duration. This is longer than the four-hour standard for lithium-ion. Hydrostor projects that it can produce 60% to 65% of the electricity it consumes, which is a larger energy loss than lithium-ion batteries or similar types of storage. Hydrostor says its systems will store up to 10 GWh of energy, providing between eight and 12 hours of energy over a full discharge at close to its maximum rate.

Earlier this year, California’s Central Coast Community Energy (3CE) approved a 25-year contract with Hydrostor to construct a compressed-air energy storage facility, making it the world’s largest compressed-air energy storage project. Two hundred megawatts of energy would help 3CE serve 447 000 customers between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara with 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030. This project will help California transition off fossil fuels without causing blackouts.

Compared to lithium-ion batteries that degrade and must be replaced every few years, compressed air batteries can store energy for decades without any loss of efficiency. Compressed air batteries are significantly more expensive than lithium-ion, but the battery’s longevity will outweigh the cost.

Hydrosor has figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when the air is compressed, which means no gas needs to be burned. The company also found a way to dig caverns out of rock rather than salt. These projects have been used elsewhere in places with underground salt domes, but they depend partly on natural gas to heat compressed air as it leaves caverns to make it more efficient. Digging caverns out of rock opens up the possibility of compressed air battery storage worldwide.

3CE’s partnership with Hydrosor will allow for California’s renewable energy to be clean and sustainable. These compressed-air batteries will protect the planet and the people of California and will be an example for other states to implement.

 

 

 

 

Source Happy Eco News

Milk & More to trial doorstep deliveries of refilled Coca-Cola

Posted on by dishanth
Milk & More to trial doorstep deliveries of refilled Coca-Cola

From next Monday (5 June), Milk & More customers in South London and some parts of the South will be able to buy one-litre bottles of Coke Zero which they will then be instructed to rinse and leave on their doorstep for collection.

The collected bottles will be sent off for washing and refilling; they can be refilled up to 20 times before they need to be recycled.

Milk & More already offers reusable glass bottles for several of its own-brand lines including milk, water, fruit juices and soft drinks. In total, it delivers 80 million refillable bottles each year already.

Milk & More’s chief executive Patrick Muller said: “Our customers want to be more sustainable, but they are busy people and need simple solutions to help them, so we are confident that they will welcome this trial as it offers them exactly the same service as they already have with Milk & More.”

The business is working with Europe’s largest Coca-Cola bottler, CCEP, on the new trial. It will run for a minimum of eight weeks and the hope is to reach 100,000 customers.

CCEP’s senior sustainability manager Jo Padwick said the trials will allow for the gathering of “valuable insights into how consumers respond to return-based trials in comparison to recycling”.

The Coca-Cola Company, globally, is notably aiming for 25% of its beverage sales to be housed in reusable or returnable packaging by 2030. It announced this target last year.

The Milk & More trials are being touted as the only way, at present, for UK-based customers to receive refillable Coca-Cola to their homes.

Pre-filled reusable Coca-Cola Company products have previously been offered via Tesco and Terracycle, under the Loop scheme. However, Tesco stopped offering Loop services last July.

 

 

 

 

Source  edie