Environment

Tesco Labels Food with Carbon Footprint

- Adam Clare

In Feburary the New Yorker looked into the complexity of carbon footprint labeling of food, and the article spent a lot of time looking at Tesco’s efforts. The most important point from that article (I think) is that it sometimes makes environmental sense to eat food shipped from other parts of the world. Eating locally is not always the best thing to do.

For British consumers eating environmentally will be easier now. Tesco is about to test their carbon labelling program. One of Tesco’s goals in doing this is to create an industry standard.

The retailer will put carbon-count labels on varieties of orange juice, potatoes, energy-efficient light bulbs and washing detergent, stating the quantity in grammes of CO2 equivalent put into the atmosphere by their manufacture and distribution.

Chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said: “We will give the carbon content of the product and the category average.” The labels should eventually allow shoppers to compare carbon costs in the same way they can now compare salt and calorie content.

The UK’s biggest supermarket first announced its intention to put carbon counts on up to 70,000 products some 15 months ago. It has since been working with the Carbon Trust to find an accurate method of labelling. “It has not been simple, but we are there,” said Leahy yesterday. Tesco will unveil the details of the scheme shortly, and the chief executive said he hoped the labels “will end up being a standard”.

Use Solar Power During the Night

- Adam Clare

Storing energy in batteries is expensive, not the best thing to the environment, and inefficient when used on a large scale. The inability to store solar energy over the long-term has been a problem for hte adoption of solar power generation. That is, until now. THe New York Times is reporting on some companies that have found ways to store the energy solar power plants use in a giant thermos.

At Black & Veatch, a builder of power plants, Larry Stoddard, the manager of renewable energy consulting, said that with a molten salt design, “your turbine is totally buffered from the vagaries of the sun.” By contrast, “if I’ve got a 50 megawatt photovoltaic plant, covering 300 acres or so, and a large cloud comes over, I lose 50 megawatts in something like 100 to 120 seconds,” he said, adding, “That strikes fear into the hearts of utility dispatchers.”

Thermal storage using molten salt can work in a system like Ausra’s, with miles of piping, but if the salt is spread out through a serpentine pipe, rather than held in a heavily insulated tank, it has to be kept warm at night so it does not solidify, among other complications.

A tower design could also allow for operation at higher latitudes or places with less sun. Designers could simply put in bigger fields of mirrors, proponents say. A small start-up, eSolar, is pursuing that design, backed by Google, which has announced a program to try to make renewable electricity for less than the price of coal-fired power

Put Your Fridge Outside

- Adam Clare

I’ve always found it fascinating that in Canada we don’t have a system in our houses that use the naturally cold air outside (during the winter of course) to cool our fridges. I’m not the only one who has wondered this.

World Changing has wondered this as well:

“…designed to provide such free cooling for walk-in coolers, freezers and cold storage warehouses. The system utilizes an electronic controller to finely tune the operation of standard refrigeration equipment, and this controller simply monitors the outdoor temperature and desired temperature settings and stops refrigerator evaporator fans when not needed, which also reduces the compressor’s refrigeration load. Proper airflow is maintained when the evaporator fans switch off by operating one or more energy-efficient circulating fans.”

Swedes Like it Green

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Vaexjoe, a town in Sweden, is looking to be the greenest city in the EU. They’re doing quite well already. It’s great to see that cities are protecting the environment as best they can with such enthusiasm.

While the European Union (EU) aims to raise its share of renewable energy consumption to 20 percent by 2020, Vaexjoe, a town of 80,000 people nestled between lakes and forests in Sweden’s south, can boast of already exceeding 50 percent — and 90 percent when it comes to heating.

Carbon dioxide emissions per inhabitant dropped by 30 percent between 1993 and 2006.

“It’s a lot but we’re not satisfied, we want to reduce them further,” says Henrik Johansson, an environmental expert at city hall.

In fact, Vaexjoe, which in 1996 set the ambitious goal of ultimately reducing its consumption of fossil fuels to zero, wants to halve its CO2 emissions by 2010 and reduce them by 70 percent by 2050.

Earth Hour Tomorrow

- Adam Clare

Earth Hour is tomorrow!

It’s a symbolic turning off of electric devices to show some respect for the environment. Everyone ought to join in and make earth hour a daily event.

On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.

With Sydney icons like the Harbour Bridge and Opera House turning their lights off, and unique events such as weddings by candlelight, the world took notice. Inspired by the collective effort of millions of Sydneysiders, many major global cities are joining Earth Hour in 2008, turning a symbolic event into a global movement.

Scroll To Top