All Questions

The purpose is to reduce heating costs as much as possible in winters, where the temperature rarely drops below -5 degrees Celsius (23 F) at nights and 0 degree Celsius (32 F) daytime. To me, internal ...

The sun doesn't shine brightly enough everywhere and is sometimes clouded. Winds don't blow always and are expected to become, overall, even weaker (that's what the IPCC report says anyway). Can ...

I'm interested in electric cars and a specific model I'm interested is not equipped with a heat pump.... but does have AC. The discussion across the internet usually cites cost as a reason they did ...

I suppose a 5kWh storage would be more than enough for a minimalist house with solar energy system. Lithium-Ion electric car batteries would do the job, but they are too expensive and I am not sure ...

This question is most probably meaningful when there is a lot of area to build a single house. The main purpose is to keep the heat inside in winters, where it rarely drops below -5 degrees Celsius. ...

We generate "green hydrogen" using electrolysis of water which is powered by Renewable energy sources like Solar Panels, Wind mills, Hydro power etc. When we obtain such hydrogen and store ...

Makeup, especially mascara is best removed with a bit of oil. However it turns out if cotton pads are used like this repeatedly, oil stains set in and will not be removed with washing at 60 degrees ...

Emissions from landfills, mostly CO2 and CH4, are significant. Could layers of glomalin-enriched soil placed over the heap help contain part of these emissions? Landfill Emissions https://www....

I thought in Europe at first instance, but still open to other options. The idea is: Buy a land at good price with some space Build home from scratch Grow own organic food (vegetables and few ...

I've seen plenty of articles about gas stoves and the impact on indoor air quality. Specifically, there are reports of much higher CO2, NOx, PM 2.5 particulates, and formaldehyde, relative to electric ...

Considering self-sustainable living in a bear country (like the wilderness of Canada) can the dogs be used to protect animals and fruit trees against bears? I'm reluctant to the invasive methods like ...

I'm a vegan, and a lot of times vegan frozen food (and maybe other food) packaging can be this thick plasticy non-recycable material. Some example brand food images are the following: Morning star ...

I read that clothes shed more fibers in top-loaded washing machines than in front-loaded ones. Does that also apply to horizontal top-loaded ones?

How can paper recyclers know how many times a given input paper has been recycled? I've read that paper can be recycled "up to 6 times." I'm imagining a paper recycling plant that gets a ton ...

I’ve always thought that the bowls from restaurants like Chipotle Mexican Grill were fully compostable. However, after seeing articles like this one and this one, I’m not sure sure. According to these ...

What should I pick for sportswear if synthetics are bad (microplastics)? It's not a pleasant experience to sweat in cotton clothes (whether organic or not).

Say I need to stock up on some shower gel. What would be a lesser evil pick? 1 huge 5L bottle of liquid soap that uses cheap crappy pseudo-apple-and-jasmin perfume that will pollute the drain water, ...

I have a few glass candle jars that I'm thinking about cleaning and recycling. But I've read that candle jars might be made from different kinds of glass, and some glass should not be recycled. Your ...

I'm trying to figure out my daily dilemma: whether it's less polluting to take a diesel ferry that hops me over the river (roughly 160 m) or to drive my electric vehicle (EV) on a 15 km detour to take ...

Sometimes I have multiple batteries I want to charge, but I don't want to charge them all simultaneously. There are three scenarios for this: My power source isn't strong enough to charge all the ...

Consider the following setup: Solar panel (0.5 m2 / 12V / 100W) Solar inverter (12 volts DC → 120 volts AC) LED TV (32" / 55 watts) no batteries / no grid-tie Assume the solar panel is ...

I'd like to go solar with a couple of our battery-powered tools without a) charging the batteries with DC directly, as they're expensive batteries with their own fancy AC chargers, or b) spending ...

I have an outdoor fire pit in my backyard. The fire pit is about 3 feet in diameter and is similar to ones you might find at a camp site. My family and I enjoy using it purely for recreation. I’ve ...

Yesterday the theme of the Extinction Rebellion protests was HMRC and Barclays over funding of fossil fuel industries. While their focus is on the government contracts, moving individual accounts ...

Recently I am facing a dilemma: I am living in The Netherlands and in this area it is encouraged to separate out plastic trash for recycling. Usually my plastic trash consists of food packages and ...

I was thinking about buying carbon offsets, but when I started looking into what kind of projects would be funded, I noticed that all the projects listed had already been completed. This seems to be ...

I've noticed that carbon offsets are usually sold by the tonne of CO2 equivalent, without any information about when that offsetting will occur. Given the urgency of the climate crisis (between 1.5º ...

I would like to know if a batery of an eletric car is easily recyclable.

I live in the traditionally temperate Pacific Northwest, but after the heat waves of summer 2021 I'm thinking about giving up and finally buying an air conditioner. But I've heard that air ...

I live in the Pacific Northwest which has seen some serious heat waves this summer, so now I'm looking for more ways to keep cool. Aside from air-conditioning, I'm interested in passive techniques to ...

I remember seeing many news articles and posts on social media saying that a single container ship pollutes as much as 50 million cars. Is this true? How could that be possible? https://tech.slashdot....

I recently removed some goldenrod that had started to take over the pollinator habitat in my front garden. In researching plants that will do well to replace it, I'm having trouble determining what ...

For purely hypothetical discussion, I was asking myself how big electrical production increase would be needed for a first-world country when switching all cars from fossil fuel to EV only. I made the ...

How is lumbering bad for the climate? Don't final products still store that carbon? What do those calculations mean (example [ch. 3], methodology [ch. 4])? The report says it doesn't include in-use ...

Greenpeace is against GMOs, but some argue that it helped alleviate the hunger problem in developed countries through improved yields. Is advocating against genetically modified seeds anti-science? Is ...

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification is supposed to be granted to "responsible" producers of timber, but Greenpeace doesn't see much difference between certified and non-...

I came across this interesting infographic from the U.S. Department of Energy: They provide a figure of 12 to 30% efficiency of a gasoline vehicle converting fuel energy into forward motion (or ...

More and more attention is being paid to the harmful impacts of textile manufacture. Some suggest that rental subscription models could do the trick and reduce the scope of the problem. It's not ...

am trying to find out how I can get yogurt or sour cream in an eco friendly way. I know the films on the supermarket plastic pots are currently not recycled, so that's not great... If I start a yogurt ...

I live near a nature reserve, it is a combination of moors, fields and forests. (containing animals like deer, snakes, frogs, foxes, sheep, goats, cows and a large variety of bugs) But since last ...

What is blue, green, and grey water (example)? Is green water only rainwater? I came across words like "mostly rain", "predominantly rain", etc., so it's not only rain, is it? And ...

Synthetic fibers make up the largest share of total apparel production and are expected to become even more common. They also, it seems, contribute to microplastic pollution more than anything else. ...

Tell me please about this murky concept of Potentially Disappeared Fraction (PDF). First, why is it written as "PDF.m2.yr" instead of PDF/m2*yr. Second, what is it, how to interpret it? How ...

What with fast fashion, loads of clothes are dumped in landfills, especially, I guess, in the US, given its humongous consumption of fiber goods. They are organic matter and therefore supposed to emit ...

Livestock and manure produce 5,8% of global GHG. But releases from agricultural soils (N2O), crop residue burning, and rice cultivation (all are associated with plant farming) generate 8,9%. So is ...

Why don't they make playgrounds generate electricity (at least, not on a large scale)? It's a pity that all that energy of children horsing around goes to waste instead of being harnessed. You could ...

After all those scary stories about microplastics (I think you don't need references on that one), I was surprised to discover plastic solutions being suggested, even promoted you can say, in ...

I was under the impression that this was a global phenomenon since at least 50-70 years or so, but apparently not? Basically, I went to the Swedish Wikipedia article for "Pant": https://sv....

This is similar to, but more general than this question and referring to from scratch buildings. I've seen Create an Oasis with Greywater and it's an awesome resource to build a DIY system. The ...

I've been trying to think of creative ways to save on water usage, and one way I thought of was to collect graywater from showers or washing dishes to use for flushing the toilet to reduce # of ...