Environmental news roundup

It's been a busy week for me and Brian, but unfortunately, none of the things that have been keeping us busy are really suitable fodder for the blog. So instead of highlights from our own life, this week's post will feature a quick roundup of interesting stories related to ecofrugality harvested from other corners of the Internet.

Story #1: A "True Price" Store

The main reason I came up with the concept of ecofrugality in the first place is that many people assume an eco-friendly lifestyle is costly. One one level, that's natural, since products and services labeled as green tend to come with a price premium. But if you look at these products and their mainstream equivalents more carefully, you realize that the eco-friendly products aren't overpriced; it's actually the mainstream ones that are underpriced. Their price tags don't reflect the true cost to society of producing them.

Take organic produce, for instance. If you look only at the price on the label, organic tomatoes look more expensive than conventionally grown tomatoes. But the conventional ones may require more water to grow, along with fertilizer and pesticides that harm wildlife and add to their carbon footprint. They damage the land, the water, and the atmosphere, creating social costs — destructive storms, wildfires, drought — that society will have to pay down the line. And yet none of these costs are reflected in their price tag.

Except now, they can be. A nonprofit called True Price has developed a system for calculating the "true cost" of various products, factoring in their social benefits and costs. Brands that want to do social good, such as Tony's Chocolonely, are working with True Price to measure and reduce the True Price of their products. There's now a store in Amsterdam, De Aanzet, where the True Price of every product appears on the label, along with the purchase price, so customers can make an informed decision about what to buy. And in the cafe at Deloitte's Amsterdam office, The Edge, customers can opt to pay the True Price for their cup of coffee or tea, with the extra money going to the FairClimateFund.

Story #2: Turning CO2 Emissions into Raw Material

At this point, it's pretty clear that if we want to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5C, we'll need to do more than cut our greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible. We'll also need to find ways to  remove a lot of the carbon that's already in the atmosphere. And two researchers at Johns Hopkins University have come up with an intriguing new way to do that: turning CO2 into pure, solid carbon.

Most carbon drawdown methods do one of two things. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) typically sucks up carbon and buries it deep underground — which keeps it out of the atmosphere, but also keeps it from being put to any practical use. And carbon capture and reuse (CCR) typically converts CO2 into some kind of fuel that releases the carbon back into the atmosphere when it's burned. That's an improvement over burning fossil fuels, since that releases carbon that was captured millions of years ago, but all it really does is reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere; in the long run, it doesn't actually take any out.

This method is different. It pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and turns it into solid carbon, which the researchers say can be used for all kinds of applications. Strong and lightweight, it can form bodies for cars; it can be incorporated into fabrics; or it can become biochar, a potent, eco-friendly fertilizer. 

Right now the researchers are a long way from being able to do this on a large scale. But they're planning to make a start by capturing the emissions from a single on-campus power plant and convert it all to solid carbon. If that works, it will serve as a proof of concept, perhaps leading to bigger and better things in the future.

Story #3: Plastic Upcycling

While we're on the subject of turning waste products into useful materials, there have been some positive developments in the field of plastic recycling. What makes plastic so difficult to recycle is that most methods degrade the plastic, making it weaker. So most plastic recycling is really "downcycling": turning plastic products into different, weaker products that typically can't be recycled themselves. You can turn plastic soda bottles into Trex boards or fleece jackets, but not into new soda bottles, because the recycled plastic isn't strong enough.

But this year, a startup called Novoloop seems to have found a way around this problem. Its founders, Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang, have developed a method called Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD) that can break down polyethylene (the stuff in soda bottles) into "chemical building blocks that can be synthesized into high-value products." 

They're starting with a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) material called Oistre that can be used in footwear, apparel, sporting goods, automotive and electronics. According to Novoloop, Oistre's carbon footprint is up to 46% smaller than conventional TPUs. So replacing existing TPUs with it will (1) reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change, (2) reduce the use of oil (and all the environmental harms of drilling) for producing virgin plastic, and (3) cut down on plastic waste, all in one fell swoop.

 

I realize that these three developments, though positive, are all fairly small. Compared with the scale of the problems facing the planet as a whole, each one is a drop in the bucket. But every drop helps. And with this big a bucket to fill, we can't afford to say no to any solution, no matter how small.