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Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) has announced plans to recover all its packaging by 2020 and has insisted that the economic slowdown has not diluted its commitment to sustainability.
The news comes after the company published its 2008 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report, in which it outlined its intention to recycle 98% of the waste at its European facilities.
CCE has already reduced the weight of its aluminium cans by 5% – an innovation that could result in an annual saving of up to 15,000 tonnes of aluminium – and, after successfully recovering almost 125,000 tonnes of packaging in 2008, the company is currently more than halfway to achieving its 2010 recycling target of 200,000 tonnes.
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Two years into development, innovative startup enables path to energy independence; Unveils proprietary production system capable of supplying unlimited quantities of renewable fuel at costs competitive with fossil fuels.
Cambridge, Mass.—July 27, 2009—Joule Biotechnologies, Inc., an innovative bioengineering startup developing game-changing alternative energy solutions, today unveiled its breakthrough Helioculture™ technology—a revolutionary process that harnesses sunlight to directly convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into SolarFuel™ liquid energy. This eco-friendly, direct-to-fuel conversion requires no agricultural land or fresh water, and leverages a highly scalable system capable of producing more than 20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually—far eclipsing productivity levels of current alternatives while rivaling the costs of fossil fuels.
“There is no question that viable, renewable fuels are vitally important, both for economic and environmental reasons. And while many novel approaches have been explored, none has been able to clear the roadblocks caused by high production costs, environmental burden and lack of real scale,” said Bill Sims, president and CEO of Joule Biotechnologies. “Joule was created for the very purpose of eliminating these roadblocks with the best equation of biotechnology, engineering, scalability and pricing to finally make renewable fuel a reality—all while helping the environment by reducing global CO2 emissions.”
Joule’s transformative Helioculture process leverages highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and CO2 to usable transportation fuels and chemicals. The scalable SolarConverter™ system facilitates the entire process—from sunlight capture to product conversion and separation—with minimal resources and polishing operations. This represents a significant advantage over biomass-derived biofuels, including newer algae- and cellulose-based forms, which are hindered by varying obstacles: costly biomass production, numerous processing steps, substantial scale-up risk and capital costs.
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Some scientists fear climate change will adversely affect the monsoon season.
It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable.
In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.
There are places reeling from drought, yet at the same time there are areas that have been hit by torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides in a very short span of time.
This has made the lives of millions of people difficult and has left them increasingly worried for the future.
Very little of the arable land is irrigated, and local populations depend on monsoon rainfall for agriculture.
Crops in the region are dependent upon the annual monsoon rains.
The monsoon clouds have weakened in several parts of the region and the variable and erratic rains have left weather forecasters scratching their heads.
This failure of the monsoons to behave as expected has led to the question of whether climate change is to blame.
Experts differ on whether these changes are directly linked to climate.
“This year’s monsoon behaviour cannot yet be attributed to climate change as it is still within the observed natural variability of the monsoon,” said Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
“Our assessment of climate model simulations for the current and the next century indicate no significant deviation until the middle of the 21st Century. Thereafter, the monsoon rainfall will continue to increase by 8-10% from current levels.”
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India has resisted the external imposition of climate change law – and with good reason. But its about-turn is to be applauded.
Here’s the best news I’ve seen all year: India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.
Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.
I think there are several reasons for this, not all of them discreditable. The first is that Indian people and governments have rightly perceived that when it comes to acting on climate change, most developed countries are all leaf and no plums. They make grand statements (remember the G8 meeting) about the need to cut emissions, but in most cases they haven’t been translating them into domestic policy (the UK is now an exception). With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.
Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England’s industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India’s. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India’s future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.
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German carbon capture plan appears to be a victim of ‘numbyism’ – not under my backyard.
It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.
But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.
The scheme appears a victim of “numbyism” – not under my backyard.
Opposition to the carbon capture plan has contributed to a growing public backlash against renewable energy projects, raising fears that Europe will struggle to meet its low-carbon commitments. Last week, the Danish firm Vestas blamed British “nimbies” opposing wind farms for its decision to close its turbine factory on the Isle of Wight.
Many countries continue to use coal for generating power as it is the cheapest and most readily available fuel in the world. It will probably power the development of China and India. But coal is also seen as the dirtiest fuel. So, Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany, launched in a blaze of publicity last September, was a beacon of hope, the first scheme to link the three key stages of trapping, transporting and burying the greenhouse gases.
The Swedish company, however, surprised a recent conference when it admitted that the €70m (£60.3m) project was venting the CO2 straight into the atmosphere. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”
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From Shetland to the Isle of Wight, feelings run high as plans to transform the UK into a low-carbon economy hit further trouble.
Shetland, where plans for Europe’s biggest onshore windfarm have been blown off course by formal objections. Photograph: Patrick Dieudonne/Getty Images.
Europe’s largest onshore windfarm project has been thrown in severe doubt after the RSPB and official government agencies lodged formal objections to the 150-turbine plan, it emerged today.
The setback adds to the problems facing the government’s ambition to install 10,000 new turbines across the UK by 2020 as part of its plan to cut the carbon emissions causing climate change.
The proposed 550MW windfarm, sprawling across the centre of Shetland’s main island, would add almost 20% to existing onshore wind capacity. But the objectors say the plans could seriously damage breeding sites for endangered birds, including a rare wader, the whimbrel, which was unexpectedly discovered by the windfarm developer’s own environmental survey teams. Other species at risk include the red throated diver, golden plover and merlin.
The RSPB heavily criticised the proposal from Viking Energy after initially indicating it could support the scheme. The RSPB also claims now that installation of the turbines could release significant carbon dioxide from the peat bogs affected, undermining the turbines’ potential to combat global warming.
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You will need a brolly on holiday in the UK in August – the Met Office is issuing a revised forecast for more unsettled weather well into the month.
It is a far cry from the “barbecue summer” it predicted back in April.
The news will raise questions about the Met Office’s ability to make reliable seasonal forecasts.
But the organisation has defended its record, saying people have already forgotten the hot weather experienced across many parts of Britain in June.
It also highlights the absence of the sort of major floods that blighted 2007 and 2008; and the largely fine weather for the Wimbledon tennis championship, the cricket Tests and the Open golf.
The Met Office also says temperatures have been around or above normal, and that the end of August might be better again.
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ExxonMobil invests $300 million in Synthetic Genomics to develop algae biofuel.
Two of Craig Venter’s recent passions have been combing the Earth for microbes and other minute critters that reveal the diversity of life, and creating and redesigning life itself through synthetic biology.
Growing green: Synthetic Genomics and ExxonMobil are collaborating on the development of photosynthetic algae to make biofuels.
Never thinking small, Venter also has not been shy about blending research and commerce in his quest to finance and further his projects. In the 1990s he created Celera Genomics with over $1 billion in financing to compete with the public project to sequence the human genome.
There comes a point, he once told me, when projects need the king-size resources available in the private sector to scale up and implement. In this case, the goal is to produce a viable alternative fuel to petroleum and–just possibly, he insists–to reduce the fresh carbon spewed in the air when petroleum is burned.
Last week, ExxonMobil announced a commitment to invest $300 million over five to six years in Synthetic Genomics, which Venter founded and now leads as CEO, and to spend an additional $300 million on a complementary internal algae program.
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Dye-doped DNA nanofibers can be tuned to emit different colors of light.
By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibers, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors of light–from blue to orange to white–depending on the proportions of dye it contains.
DNA light: Coating an ultraviolet LED with DNA nanofibers containing dyes creates a bulb that emits bright white light.
The researchers, led by chemistry professor Gregory Sotzing, create white-light-emitting devices by coating ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with the material. They are even able to fine-tune the white color tone to make it warm or cold, as they report in a paper published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
The new material could be used to make a novel type of organic light bulb. The light emitters should also be longer-lasting because DNA is a very strong polymer, Sotzing says. “It’s well beyond other polymers [in strength],” he notes, adding that it lasts 50 times longer than acrylic.
The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes. The key is to keep the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other. When UV light is shined on the material, one dye absorbs the energy and produces blue light. If the other dye molecule is at the right distance, it will absorb part of that blue-light energy and emit orange light.
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Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.
Sun catchers: This is the latest design of a system for focusing sunlight on a Stirling engine to generate electricity.
Credit: Sandia National Laboratories/Randy Montoya.
The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company’s latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The projects are part of a resurgence in what’s known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. “It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn’t there,” says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.
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