Delivery vehicles are major greenhouse gas emitters but new software reroutes trucks with real-time data and machine learning
Brad Lorge began his entrepreneurial journey helping charities more effectively coordinate the collection of food from supermarkets and warehouses.
Now the software engineer is the co-founder of Premonition, a logistics optimisation firm helping online retailers and shipping companies meet heightened consumer expectations and develop more sustainable supply chains.
Two tug boats towed the 17,000-tonne Transocean Winner drilling rig back out to sea, after it ran aground during bad weather on 8 August
A 17,000-tonne oil rig that ran aground in the Outer Hebrides has been safely towed off the rocks by two tug boats.
A Stornoway coastguard spokesman confirmed to the Press Association that the Transocean Winner drilling rig was “safely off the rocks and now under tow” at 10.10pm on Monday.
Pumping heat from our cars and buildings into the outside world adds to climate change, increasing the need to stay cool
Air conditioning was a luxury in Britain 40 years ago, but the long hot summer of 1976 changed that. The scorching heat that summer lasted two months and most people sweated it out indoors with only open windows and electric fans for ventilation. After that, air conditioning no longer seemed so extravagant and its popularity soared.
Air conditioners consume huge amounts of energy, though, and that’s adding to climate change. The US uses as much electricity to keep buildings cool as the whole of Africa uses for all its electrical needs. That power largely comes from polluting power stations, adding to the warmer climate.
A $26m settlement between Wen Hair Care and consumers who suffered hair loss calls attention to a regulatory gap in personal care products
Last week brought news that Wen Hair Care, a celebrity endorsed “sulfate-free” shampoo and conditioner line is preparing a $26.5m settlement after a class action lawsuit over thousands of complaints of hair loss and skin rashes.
George Monbiot is right: wholesale destruction of wildlife is obscene (The grouse shooters aim to kill, 16 August). Why no grousing, then, on the imminent destruction of the diverse habitats and endangered species, including many red list birds, on the west coast of Cumbria? Why no grouse about the collateral damage in obsessive pursuit of the “biggest nuclear development in Europe” at Moorside? The environmental destruction planned is on a scale the most bloodthirsty grouse hunter could only dream of. Marianne Birkby Radiation Free Lakeland, Milnthorpe, Cumbria
• This morning I entered my local Morrisons supermarket to be greeted by a large display, just inside the entrance, selling multipacks of filled chocolate bars. The sign above said “Back to School”. Selling high sugar goods is one thing, but encouraging the purchase for children is quite another (Report, 22 August). Shame on Morrisons. Roger Frisby Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire
Temperatures in south could reach low 30s by midweek but could be 10 degrees cooler in rain-hit north
South-east England is set for more hot weather while parts of the north are on flood alert.
Following heavy rain in North Yorkshire, water has been gushing on to roads from White Scar Caves in Ingleton, in the Yorkshire Dales national park. Video footage from the scene shows cars driving slowly through deep floodwater.
McKinsey & Company and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimate in their report, The New Plastics Economy, that 95% of the value of global plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost. This huge sum of money is being buried in the ground or swept out to sea.
The vision of this report – a global economy in which plastics never become waste – is bold and has the potential to bring transformative change to the entire world. I believe it will be low-income countries that lead the way to this new plastics economy.
The developed world, especially the United States of America, is notoriously inefficient, illogical, and wasteful when it comes to the management of our waste. We spend millions of dollars transporting trash from one place to another. Our recycling rates are dismal. We pay 10-40% of the retail price of a good to cover the cost of packaging that we immediately throw out. Even the name ‘waste management’ is misleading. It implies that our trash is useless and it needs to be managed. In some cases this is true – chemo waste, for example, is some nasty stuff – let’s manage that. But plastic packaging is not waste. It is a raw material. It’s a resource that we bury in the ground, while simultaneously drilling deep into other parts of the ground for oil so that we can make more virgin plastic, which we’ll use once before burying in the ground again. It’s so ridiculous it’s almost laughable. This data visualisation that depicts the growth of landfills across our country is startling:
Source: SaveOnEnergy.com
Single stream recycling isn’t much better than landfills. It results in low-quality recycled content, requires expensive infrastructure to separate it, and encourages the self-fulfilling prophecy that Americans are too lazy to separate anything and therefore we must make recycling as easy as possible. Assuming bad behaviour is not an effective way to change habits. The apathy our country can afford around recycling is enormous.
This is why low-income countries are going to leapfrog us into the circular economy. Just like telephone poles don’t exist in places that never had landlines and instead went straight to cell phones, landfills are archaic and outdated infrastructure that low-income countries won’t have to invest in. I predict that they will directly implement more innovative solutions to ensure that resources stay useful.
In America, we are so far removed from our waste that we never have to think about it for longer than it takes us to bring it to the curb once a week. Do you know where your trash goes? Do you know where the closest materials recovery facility is to you? In America, garbage is out of sight and out of mind.
In places like Haiti, there isn’t the infrastructure or the money to move trash around for hundreds of miles to reach a landfill. In fact, there are only a few dumps for the entire country. There is no municipal recycling or single stream vs. separated. When you are left to deal with your own waste, you tend to give food scraps to animals, burn it, or throw it down a ravine away from your home. The buildup of waste contributes to an increase of communicable diseases, slum mentality, and harms ecosystems. Solutions for waste in these places are needed now. There isn’t time to wait for the government to find funding for a fleet of garbage trucks or to build landfills. Juxtapose this with a population that needs income opportunities and you have the motivation necessary to change behaviour and habits.
When the Thread team began working in Haiti, recycling was a foreign concept. It has been amazing to see how much easier it is to create a cultural shift around recycling in a place that had no preconceived notions of what recycling means. In Haiti, plastic = money. It’s not recycling, it’s livelihood. It is a product. If the market demands that plastic to be separated, or cleaned in a certain way, or to have labels or caps removed before being sold, that happens.
You encounter bias against recycled content in production in industrialised countries. Thread’s production team has had to negotiate and persuade vendors to work with 100% post-consumer recycled content. Virgin material is easier, but recycled material isn’t impossible, which is what you are often told. To qualify for Global Recycling Standard certification, a product needs only 20% recycled content included in its material makeup to qualify for certification. When will we start holding ourselves to the kind of standards that force real change and require ingenuity?
Participation in the circular economy will allow low-income countries to become global leaders in innovation. There are opportunity and money in waste. It’s going to be countries like Haiti that are going to pull the rest of us into a new way of managing it.
Car rental company has joined conservative organization that fights environmental rules with prewritten legislation, the Guardian has learned
It’s not easy enough being green for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
Though the auto rental service has trumpeted tree-planting initiatives and its fleet of hybrid vehicles, the Guardian has learned that Enterprise recently became a paying member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the business consortium that sends legislators prefabricated drafts of laws tailored to obscure scientific discovery that might damage its members’ revenues, and help those members avoid environmental regulations.
As the National Parks Service turns 100 this week, we look at how receding ice, extreme heat and acidifying oceans are transforming America’s landscapes, and guardians of national parks face the herculean task of stopping it
After a century of shooing away hunters, tending to trails and helping visitors enjoy the wonder of the natural world, the guardians of America’s most treasured places have been handed an almost unimaginable new job – slowing the all-out assault climate change is waging against national parks across the nation.
As the National Parks Service (NPS) has charted the loss of glaciers, sea level rise and increase in wildfires spurred by rising temperatures in recent years, the scale of the threat to US heritage across the 412 national parks and monuments has become starkly apparent.
Madhya Pradesh state chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan targeted on Twitter after being shown carried aloft by his entourage
A senior Indian politician has been widely mocked after photos showed police officers carrying him through ankle-deep muddy water while inspecting deadly floods in the centre of the country.
Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh state, was shown wearing crisp white trousers and white shoes as he was carried aloft through the flood water in a field, trailed by his entourage.
