All Questions

Looking at the https://www.electricitymap.org/ I can see that many countries operating nuclear power plants are not running them at their full installed power, e.g.: Sweden 5.54GW/9.10GW France 38....

A few days ago I got a hand mill since at times I have enough free time to grow grain. Problem is that to test sourdough I got whole wheat grain for animal consumption, it was the only wheat grain ...

Many argue that we should not drink almond milk as it uses scarce water. (e.g. https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/shopping-guide/soya-non-dairy-milk). However given that consuming almond milk ...

I am looking for a source that shows the development of the shares of renewable energies in the electricity production in Europe. I only found statistics about the share for the end energy consumption ...

A friend of mine is adamant that the extraction of lithium for batteries (and the creation of battery cells themselves) is a very environmentally-damaging procedure, potentially even more-so than oil (...

I am actively looking to donate to organisations that plant trees and, as far as I know, there are several websites that allow you to do that. Some offer the possibility to follow the tree's life ...

This week, the UK announced that sale of gasoline and diesel cars will be banned by 2035. This new policy moves the date up by five years, and also includes hybrid vehicles. From 2035 on, only ...

I have seen some reports saying that electric cars, because they are heavier and put more strain on the tyres, will create more particulate pollution than a petrol car. Is this true? and if so what ...

There seem to be two broad approaches to the climate crisis. One centres around technological progress, where efficiencies, a gradual switch to renewables, and CCS enable a broadly similar model of ...

If heavy metals are present in water would they precipitate to the bottom of a container if the water is left decanting long enough? This would be in order to reduce water contamination when no ...

I have an off grid powered house powered by 6 x 12v batteries all hooked up in parallel. I also have 4 x 150w 12v solar panels all hooked up in parallel too. Things were good however I decided to move ...

As I’ve wandered in many places, I have often encountered abandoned railways, or railways still in use surrounded by hundreds of discarded spikes. It makes sense in most places for scrapyards to be ...

According to Wikipedia, natural gas is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, but commonly including varying amounts of other higher alkanes, and sometimes a ...

My entire family and I are all planning to move to Alaska in early April, and I'm looking for areas where it is closer to be able to do subsistence hunting and fishing, with land we can buy to build ...

There are many figures regarding how much CO2 is emitted per passenger and per km. However, I have not been able to find anywhere how much CO2 would an airplane emit if it has to carry an additional ...

The conference rooms in my office have projectors mounted on the ceilings, typical of many offices. During the day, several meetings will be scheduled in the rooms, with perhaps five to ten minutes ...

I recently bought a band brake for a home built wind turbine and was thinking of mounting it on the shaft and getting a cable from the brake to the ground so I can stop the blades in case of ...

I am curious, what people could do with a small piece of land like their home backyard (say originally it is a regular lawn smaller than 20m^2, in temperate continental climate (so pretty harsh)) to ...

In the United States, I know that paper and plastic are often not recyclable if they are greasy. Can I recycle metal that has vegetable grease on it surface? I'm thinking of canisters that once ...

Every year during June-October, it rains and a few months later after the rainy season there is a lot of grass growing in the empty sites in my residential colony. So all the grass is cut, piled up ...

Everyday, we dispose of our trash using plastic bags. This prevents the trash (especially liquids) from leaking out and contaminating our garbage disposal systems. Obviously, things such as paper bags ...

Over on Politics.SE there's an interesting discussion about "grid parity": "If grid parity has already been reached, why is it so expensive to switch to renewable energy?". The discussion has ...

I assume the energy for electric buses and trains comes from the same sources. But a train doesn't need to carry it's power supply along, contrary to a bus. However, there is more infrastructure that ...

I've just received two quotes for installing a rooftop solar system at my residential address (near Sydney, Australia). This caught my eye: Company 1: Panel: 22 x ET panels 300w Inverter: Growatt 5 ...

What are the gotchas in comparing the prices of similar objects to determine sustainability? Costs to some degree are measures of effort, of resources used, of labour spent. Of the lost opportunities ...

I am looking to install rooftop solar on my house some time this year. I have a decent amount of roof space and very little shading so I should achieve fairly ideal conditions for it. A lot of the ...

I've heard a lot of people push for natural gas as a fuel for generating electrical power. However, oil is said to be a very dirty fuel. Aren't oil and natural gas harvested from the same sources? The ...

Are there any detailed studies of the carbon footprint of pet food production? There are plenty of articles asserting that meat in cat and dog food is a major source of carbon emissions (e.g. from ...

I have a personal pollution monitor that has been recording higher levels of VOCs the last 18 hours or so and I'm trying to understand and consider the reasons for this. I live in a fairly busy city (...

Does using paper napkins have a high carbon impact?

I plan on installing 12V 100 Ah LiFePO4 batteries, but since they are so expensive, I might buy from different vendors. The batteries have the same chemistry, voltage, and amperage, but are from ...

I'm kicking around the idea of creating a local offset program. My question is: what is the time basis for offsets? Best seen with an example. Say I build a solar PV system that costs $10,000 and ...

When using biomass for energy, two popular options are reactors and gasifiers. The first uses anaerobic micro organisms to convert the biomass to fertilizer and a methane rich gas mixture. The second ...

We (I'm in EU, Netherlands) are trying to reduce CO2 emissions, and many other regulations (nitrogen, pfas) have been devised to make sure we don't make our planet uninhabitable for humans. But I don'...

As a sustainability advocate I've always assumed that composting toilets were "better" than septic systems in almost any application. However I've been reading up a bit on both system types (see ...

My city has a catchment area for water but due to drought conditions it's getting lower and lower in current capacity, and water restrictions have been placed into effect for residents and businesses ...

My city council has pledged to try and be carbon neutral by 2030 as part of the Global Covenant of Mayors and are investigating ways to achieve that. I'd like to bring forth an idea to replace our ...

I just joined a waste minimization board in my office and one of the area we discussed was the use of plastic cutlery in our canteen. While the best option in my opinion would be to remove all single ...

I am wondering what are the positive as well as negative impacts on CO2 emissions from using cloud software like Google Sheets, in comparison to traditional software that run locally or on a local ...

I wonder how much carbon dioxide is captured per annum in the EU at the moment. In this article (p. 5), one can read that the two largest CCS facilities in Europe currently capture around 1,55 Mt/y. ...

I have a rudimentary understanding of volts and amps. (Volts is like pressure and Amps are like the bandwidth of that pressure.) So just reasoning about it, I imagine charging to be an event where the ...

Why are there no energy star certifications for portable fans? From what I understand no portable electric heaters have the certification because using a portable heater is not efficient at all. ...

Allied to the question: How does cold weather affect electric vehicles? How does hot weather affect electric vehicles, particularly when the atmospheric temperature is above 30 C and closer to 40 C,...

Beneficial electrification From the National Resources Defense Council “Beneficial electrification,” a new catchphrase in the energy world, refers to the growing recognition that using clean ...

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, US where our winters are cold -- for January and February, the average low is around -10C, with extremes regularly dipping below -20C. I currently have a 20-year old car....

In the U.S., the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) provides some great resources for examining the potential of solar PV systems, such as PVWatts and the National Solar Radiation Database viewer. ...

I walk my dogs twice a day, pick up their poop with small disposable bags, and throw the bags in the first municipal trash bin I come across. They will presumably end up in a landfill. I previously ...

I am looking for a simple "methodology" to roughly estimate the carbon footprint associated with buying a new e.g. toaster. More precisely, I would like to have clues to deal with such a situation: ...

The electricity where I live is pretty expensive at about almost 30 cents a KWh, so I'm considering setting up a solar system. I got 3 100 Watt Polycrystalline solar panels a while ago, pretty cheap. ...

I recently did some carbon footprint calculations for the organization I work for. I used conversion factors I found at the Dutch CO2 emission factors website. This website lists standard emission ...