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Plastic is a material with many advantages. But when plastic ends up in the wrong place it becomes a problem. To raise public awareness about this issue, Electrolux aims to gather plastic debris from vulnerable marine habitats – and produce a limited number of vacs out of it.

Check out the ‘Vac from the sea’ video here.

The maker of various home appliances is creating a limited number of vacuums made with plastic gathered from oceans and seas, through its Vac From The Sea initiative, to bring attention to how much plastic is ending up in floating around in marine environments and harming animals.

Not only does plastic that is in oceans kill birds and other creatures, but plastic out in the sea breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time, bringing with it worries that as fish and other animals eat the bits of plastic, that trash works its way back up the food chain until it ends up on our plates.

The issue of plastic waste in the ocean has now been documented and tracked by a number of groups and awareness initiatives, like 5Gyres and the Plastiki expedition, but this is the first time a company has fused that issue with its products.

Along with awareness of plastic in the ocean, Electrolux is using the campaign to note that the supply of recycled plastic on land is much lower than the demand, noting that is that plastic staying out of the waters, it would more easily find its way into recycled-content consumer products.

Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/06/29/electrolux-ocean-garbage-new-vacuums#ixzz0usIYENaj

Related Eco Pic’s, Articles & Video

• Other ECPOTD Plastiki pictures
• Pacific Ocean Contains 100 Million Tons of Garbage
• Voyage confirms plastic pollution.
• Voyage to Study Plastic Island
• A water sample from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The team at Eco Picture Of The Day, EPOTD, have put together a selection of pictures which represent what happened and is happening in the Gulf Of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

This has been a massive disater which is slowly being contained.

Click here to see the pictures they have collected.

By Fred Pearce – New Scientist

ASIAN pollution is a global problem. Millions of tonnes of soot, sulphur dioxide and other pollutants are fast-tracked into the stratosphere each year by the summer monsoon.

“The monsoon is one of the most powerful atmospheric circulation systems on the planet, and it happens to form right over a heavily polluted region,” says William Randel of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The stratosphere begins about 12 kilometres up, above the troposphere where weather systems like the monsoon develop. Most pollution stays below the boundary between the two. However, by using satellite instruments to track hydrogen cyanide, a minor but telltale ingredient of the pollution, Randel and his colleagues found “pipes” of polluted air moving through the boundary.

They think that the exceptional updraughts of air inside the monsoon’s giant clouds can bust through and send pollution deep into the stratosphere (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1182274). This is where the planet’s ozone layer sits, filtering out ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

The findings will trigger a radical rethink about the state of the stratosphere. “Received wisdom has been that gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides don’t make it into the stratosphere,” says Peter Bernath of the University of York, UK, a member of the research team. “Nitrogen oxides in particular are of concern,” he says, because they can destroy ozone. Sulphur dioxide can shroud the planet in a cooling haze.

John Pyle, a specialist on the ozone layer at the University of Cambridge, agrees that the research raises key questions. “How much will the transport of pollution change in the future, as emissions increase or the monsoon changes?” he says. It’s unclear whether climate change will weaken or intensify monsoons.

In the lower atmosphere, pollutants like sulphur dioxide “rain out” of the air within days. But in the stratosphere they can stay aloft for years, spread by fast winds known as jets, meaning the threat is global. The effects may have already been unwittingly detected: researchers recently noted an increase in sulphate particles in the stratosphere around the globe, which could be linked to China’s rapid industrialisation over the past decade.

>>> Please read the full article here

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.

By Victoria Gill

A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes – or a large forest’s worth – of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say. Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released. US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, US. Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the “forests of the ocean”.

Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew. “Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon,” he said. “And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that’s removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere.” He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.

“And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. “If they die where it’s deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years.”

In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years. Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.

When whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.
Dr Andrew Pershing, University of Maine. But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem. Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could “sequester” the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.

He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks. Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.

Dr Pershing said: “These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they’re fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die].”

Read the full article at BBC News

By Jeremy Paxman

Our grandchildren will know us by our discarded cans of Coca-Cola and packets of Walkers crisps

It’s the real thing, all right. That plastic jewel glinting in the verge among the emerging daffodils is a plastic bottle. Probably an empty Coke one.

An organisation called Litter Heroes (surely the most unglamorous club in Britain?) has done something rather useful. They have traced where the crud that morons in cars chuck out of their windows originally comes from. No surprise to discover that the worst-offending brand is Coca-Cola (4.9% of all litter), followed by Walkers Crisps (4.1%) and McDonald’s (3.6%).

And what does Coca-Cola say by way of apology? A company spokesman “acknowledges” the report. How very gracious of him. He goes on to blather that its bottles “carry the Tidy Man and Recycle Now logos”. Well, that should do it.

There is more fatuous wittering from McDonald’s, which even has the nerve to attempt a tone of wronged outrage, saying that “in 2009 we spent over ¬£2m on staff labour alone” picking up litter. That’s ¬£2m out of a turn over of more than ¬£2bn in Britain.

Anyone who walks anywhere in this filthy country knows that what the 39 volunteers from Litter Heroes discovered is true. No one in their right mind talks any longer about a “green and pleasant land”. A beautiful country is being submerged under a rising tide of rubbish.

Worst of all is the fact that whereas paper bags biodegrade, plastic bottles and confectionery wrappers last for generations. Our great-grandchildren will still be living among the gaudy wrapping of the chocolate bar we excreted last month.

The poor saps who have to act as apologists for the fizzy-drink and junk-food manufacturers never use the obvious argument because it would ¬≠insult their customers. Why don’t they try the tactic of US gun ¬≠manufacturers, who say: “It’s not guns that kill, it’s people”? Of course, it’s not the boss of Coke or Cadbury chucking the company products out of the car window; it’s some oaf who doesn’t understand that in tidying up his private space he’s making the shared space filthy.

The turning of verges into rubbish tips is a symptom of the “everyone for himself” attitude that has come to dominate in the last 50 years. What can we do? Local councils are supposed to have a statutory duty to clear up litter, but are largely useless. Ditto the national government. The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves. At least future generations won’t lack evidence of the kind of people we were.

Read the full article at the guardian website

Copenhagen Summit Summary

Between the 7th and 18th December the MoreEco Team have posting news, videos, pictures summaries from COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference which is taking place at Bella Center in Copenhagen.

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A Copenhagen Accord it is

Day 12 Summary

Day 11 Summary

Important Climate Change Websites

COP15 – Latest Videos – The Cube, Kids from Age of Stupid and The Limos

Day 10 Summary

Day 9 Summary

Climate Change Skeptics

This is About Us

Day 8 Summary

Talks in Chaos

COP15 – More Video’s

Weekend Summary

Day 5 Summary

Day 4 Summary

COP15 – More Pictures

Day 3 Summary

Andy Cato Blogs for Act on Copenhagen

Day 2 Summary

Day 1 Summary

The Impact of Global Temperature Rise – Interactive Map

COP15 – Pictures

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In a week that sees the final round of preliminary talks on a new UN climate treaty, where delegates seem to be focusing on emissions in 2020. Myles Allen argues that they must not lose sight of the much greater challenges that lie beyond 2020 or they risk wasting another decade in the battle against dangerous climate change.

On Thursday, 22 October 2009, a single tonne of anthracite coal was unveiled in the Science Museum in London as part of a new exhibition on climate change.

Not, you might think, anything particularly remarkable about that, except that this is not any old tonne of coal: it will be, as close as we can estimate it, the trillionth tonne of carbon to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide since industrialisation began in the 18th Century. The Science Museum, London, and University of Oxford are committed to looking after it for as long as it takes, and solemnly escorting it down to a power station or wherever it can be used most efficiently when total carbon emissions from human activity reach one trillion tonnes. If, that is, that time ever comes.

The trillionth tonne matters because carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. Once released, it continues to influence the climate more or less indefinitely unless active measures are taken to scrub it out again, which is not something anyone knows how to do on any scale. Over the past couple of decades, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have risen by an average of 1.6% per year Emissions since 1750 comprise of just over half a trillion tonnes of carbon (you can keep track of the number, and the countdown to the release of the trillionth tonne, on the trillionthtonne.org website).

This is estimated to have caused just under 1C (1.8F) of global warming (other things affect global temperature as well but, as it happens, their effects more-or-less cancel out over this period). So if we release another 500 billion tonnes, we commit the Earth to a most likely warming of about 2C, which is widely regarded as the threshold for dangerous climate change, and a rubicon that governments of G8 countries and other major economies pledged this year not to cross. Over the past couple of decades, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have risen by an average of 1.6% per year, even allowing for the occasional blip like the collapse of the Soviet Union and this year’s recession.

Emissions from deforestation have continued steadily. If these trends continue, which is a relatively conservative “business-as-usual” scenario, we will release the trillionth tonne sometime in the 2040s – a date that is steadily advancing, as the underlying trend is for faster growth in recent years. Emissions resulting from human activity are expected, on balance, to add to the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the future, so if we are to keep the overall warming to less than 2C (or, for that matter, retain any hope of carbon dioxide levels eventually recovering back down to 350 parts per million, or avoid dangerous levels of ocean acidity), we cannot afford to release the trillionth tonne, ever.

What can you do?

Clearly, reducing your carbon footprint helps. Emitting carbon more slowly buys time, which we will certainly need. But to solve the problem in the long term, we need to reduce net emissions, in effect, to zero. Campaigners say atmospheric carbon must not pass 350 parts per million You can’t do this on your own, no matter how heroic a consumer you are. You could reduce your lifetime carbon footprint to zero – by making your home zero-carbon, never use a car and grow your own food – and save the world from dangerous climate change for just a mere two seconds.

So the most important thing you can do is make sure your government recognises the importance of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions in climate policy. At a previous round of negotiations, in Bonn in June, a group of us presented an open letter to the negotiators urging them to acknowledge the need to limit cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide. We did not call for a specific cap: just an acknowledgement that the principle would fundamentally alter the focus of future negotiations. The aim would no longer be to ration out emissions; the aim would be to ban them, just as we banned CFCs. We didn’t save the ozone layer by rationing deodorant.

As far as we can tell, that request fell on deaf ears: “This was not the focus of the negotiations at present.” Odd, when cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide are the principal determinant of the risk of dangerous long-term human-induced climate change. And next time you are in London, drop in to the Science Museum to pay your respects to the trillionth tonne. Please read the full article here: BBC.co.uk Image from same source: BBC.co.uk

BeMoreEco has signed up to 10:10 - an ambitious project to unite every sector of British society behind one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010.

By signing up to 10:10 you commit to support the national drive to reduce Britain’s emissions steeply in 2010. That means urging your staff, suppliers and customers to sign up to cut their own emissions by 10%, helping to distribute our tags, and doing everything you can to reduce your own operational emissions

HOW CAN THE UK CUT 10%?

The simplest way to tackle your 10% cut is to use the 10:10 10 point checklist below;