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Stopping recyclable materials entering landfill could save money and generate new jobs in the waste sector, according to the government.

While visiting the Bywaters Materials Recovery facility in Bow, the environment minister Hilary Benn said that new proposals would be based on the joint consultation between Department for the Environment, Farming, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Welsh Assembly Government on how best to use materials that could otherwise end up in landfill.

The materials considered in the paper include paper and card, food, textiles, metals, wood, garden waste, glass, plastics and electrical and electronic equipment.

Mr Benn highlighted that processing waste could create new markets for recycled products and recovered materials. For example, 100,000 tonnes of aluminium packaging goes to landfill each year, even though just a tonne of aluminium cans is worth over £800.

Jobs are likely to be generated with the expansion of a waste sector equipped to deal with mixed materials, the government claimed.

The proposals follow the launch of another consultation paper on reducing the amount of biodegradable municipal waste and the creation of a new strategy to deal with hazardous waste, also announced this week.

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The UK government has put forward new proposals to ensure that the environmental claims made by manufacturers on their product labels do not mislead consumers.

It has updated its Green Claims Guidance to help businesses who want to make statements about their environmental credentials to do this in a fair way that can be easily understood by consumers.

A consultation has been launched to help consumers identify goods and services that are genuinely green, allowing them to make more informed purchasing decisions.

The government will also look at ways to ensure that energy-using products, such as televisions and washing machines, meet minimum performance standards and that they are accurately labelled according to their energy usage.

Environment minister Dan Norris said the updated Green Claims Guidance will “make it easier for people to do the right thing by the environment” by protecting them from “misleading and confusing claims”.

It comes after eight major UK retail groups made a pledge to take energy inefficient televisions off their shelves ahead of the introduction of Europe-wide regulations in July 2012.

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Researchers at three UK universities are working on a new project that aims to turn carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.

They are hoping to develop porous materials that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into chemicals for fuel, after being offered funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Led by the University of Bath, the project will also involve scientists from Bristol University and the University of the West of England. 

It is hoped that the new materials could be used to line factory chimneys and soak up CO2 emissions before they are released into the air.

Dr Frank Marken, senior chemistry lecturer at Bath, said this process, which would be powered by renewable solar energy, would be more energy-efficient than existing carbon capture techniques.

“Current processes rely on using separate technology to capture and use the CO2, which makes the process very inefficient. 

”By combining the processes the efficiency can be improved and the energy required to drive the CO2 reduction is minimised,” he explained.

Researchers in France are also working on the development of green fuels.

Using a reactor found in plasma televisions, they are devising a process that can turn waste materials into ultra-clean biodiesel.

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Billions spent developing the Canadian tar sands over the next 15 years could be instead be used to support projects that could secure long-term clean energy supplies for the UK.

A report published yesterday (March 15th) from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) argued that the £250 billion to be spent to be spent producing oil from the Canadian tar sands could also fund projects to accelerate the UK’s transition to a low carbon economy.

According to the authors, the money could ‘transform’ the UK’s power sector, with £264 billion being enough to make the UK meet its target of 15 per cent renewable energy by 2020.

The study also highlighted that the tar sands project is not guaranteed to bring in huge revenues.

“Companies that make big investments in tar sands risk big future losses by focusing on a business area that is only profitable if emitting carbon is cheap, oil prices are stable at a high level, and there is a large market for the oil produced,” claim the report’s authors.

“It has been conservatively estimated that £35.5 billion of UK pension assets are
invested in shares in UK oil and gas.”

Last month, Shell announced that it will continue producing upwards of an additional 100,000 barrels a day from tar sands, despite international protests from activists and environmental groups.

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Joint measures to cut emissions and improve air quality could save the UK around £24 billion, according to a new government report.

The Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) published the paper last week outlining new ‘cost-effective’ initiatives to meet EU targets on reducing air pollution.

Defra’s chief scientific adviser, Bob Watson, said: “We’ve seen time and again that dealing with environmental problems in isolation is neither effective nor efficient. We need a coordinated view which confronts the complexities involved and seeks to maximise the co-benefits of actions.”

Studies cited in the report found that air pollution and climate change derived from the same sources. Recent success in improving air quality was attributed in part to reductions in transport emissions.

One of the conclusions of the report is that promoting “non-combustion renewable sources of electricity, promoting the use of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and reducing agricultural demands for nitrogen” is key to better air quality in the future.

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This year Earth Hour is on the 27th March.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world came together on March 28 2009 to make a bold statement about their concern about global climate change by doing something quite simple – turning off their lights for one hour.

WWF’s Earth Hour^TM symbolises the concept that, by working together, each of us can have a positive impact in the fight against climate change.

Check out out the 2009 Earth Event here.

Kate Connolly in Berlin

Ethical consumers less likely to be kind and more likely to steal, study finds.

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, “green products do not necessarily make for better people”. They added that one motivation for carrying out the study was that, despite the “stream of research focusing on identifying the ‘green consumer’”, there was a lack of understanding into “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality and [how it] affects behaviours outside the consumption domain”.

The pair said their findings surprised them, having thought that just as “exposure to the Apple logo increased creativity”, according to a recent study, “given that green products are manifestations of high ethical standards and humanitarian considerations, mere exposure” to them would “activate norms of social responsibility and ethical conduct”.

Dieter Frey, a social psychologist at the University of Munich, said the findings fitted patterns of human behaviour. “At the moment in which you have proven your credentials in a particular area, you tend to allow yourself to stray elsewhere,” he said.

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By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Governments need to crack down on illegal tiger trading if the big cats are to be saved, the UN has warned.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Doha, Qatar heard that tiger numbers are continuing to fall.
Organised crime rings are playing an increasing part in illegal trading of tiger parts, CITES says, as they are with bears, rhinos and elephants.
Interpol is working with CITES to track and curb the international trade.

Last year, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said the global black market in wildlife products was worth about $10bn per year, making wildlife the third most valuable illicit commodity after drugs and weapons.

Conservationists also point to China’s tiger farms as a threat to the wild animals.

Although China does not officially permit the sale of goods from these farms, in practice several investigations have revealed tiger parts are being sold.

Campaigners warn this perpetuates a market into which wild tiger parts can be sold, often commanding a higher value as products made from wild animals are perceived to be more “potent.”
Just before the CITES meeting opened, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) called on traditional medicine practitioners to abandon the use of tiger parts.

“We will ask our members not to use endangered wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, and reduce the misunderstanding and bias of the international community,” said WFCMS deputy secretary Huang Jianyin.
“The traditional Chinese medicine industry should look for substitutes and research on economical and effective substitutes for tiger products.”

A resolution before the fortnight-long CITES meeting calls for greater co-operation between regional enforcement authorities to cut down the tiger product trade, and to ensure that breeding operations are “consistent with the conservation of wild populations”.

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By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News

Fertilising the oceans with iron to absorb carbon dioxide could increase concentrations of a chemical that can kill marine mammals, a study has found.

Iron stimulates growth of marine algae that absorb CO2 from the air, and has been touted as a “climate fix”.
Now researchers have shown that the algae increase production of a nerve poison that can kill mammals and birds.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say this raises “serious concern” over the idea.
The toxin – domoic acid – first came to notice in the late 1980s as the cause of amnesiac shellfish poisoning.

If the end goal is to use it to fight climate warming, then we have to understand the consequences for marine life
Dr William Cochlan
San Francisco State University

It is produced by algae of the genus Pseudonitzschia, with concentrations rising rapidly when the algae “bloom”.
Now, its presence in seawater often requires the suspension of shellfishing operations, and is regularly implicated in deaths of animals such as sealions.

Domoic acid poisoning may also lie behind a 1961 incident in which flocks of seabirds appeared to attack the Californian town of Capitola – an event believed to have shaped Alfred Hitchcock’s interpretation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds in his 1963 thriller.
Carbon focus

Over the last decade, about 10 research projects have investigated iron fertilisation, with mixed results.
But only two of them measured domoic acid production, and only then as an afterthought, explained William Cochlan from San Francisco State University, a scientist on the new project.

“We had a number of major aims in this work; but one of them was to ask ‘do you normally find the species of algae that produce domoic acid, are they producing domoic acid, and will production be enhanced by iron?’,” he said.
In studies conducted around Ocean Station Papa, a research platform moored in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean, the answers to all three questions turned out to be “yes”.

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A new report from the government has suggested that marine energy holds the key to the UK’s low carbon transition. 

The Marine Energy Action Plan has laid out proposals to harness marine renewables and create thousands of new jobs in the sector.

Recommendations include developing guidelines for new technologies and establishing a nationwide group to strategically coordinate the industry.

It is thought that electricity generated through marine energy could provide power to 15 million homes in the UK and save up to 70 million tonnes of carbon.

The sector could also create some 16,000 new jobs.

Energy minister Lord Hunt said: “Harnessing the power of our seas will help us reduce our carbon emissions, provide clean, green, secure and reliable energy, create jobs and provide export opportunities. 

”This Action Plan sets out our vision for what marine energy can do for the UK and what we need to do to make it happen.”

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