All Questions

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?

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 ...

I'm considering to put up a small moss wall in my workplace. What benefits or shortcomings should be considered regarding inhabitants' health and environment impact of a moss wall? Update: It's an ...

I've recently read they are classified as "clean energy", and some nations do not count the CO2 emissions it produces towards a national CO2 quota/limit. At this point I am a little confused. Won't ...

This time of year, on my commute home through the forest, I need a bright headlight for me and other humans (and some wildlife) to stay safe. However, research suggests that night lights kill many ...

Given the current situation in Hong Kong Polytechnic University, with 50 survivers (protesters) being besieged by more than 500 polices located at every intersection of streets nearby, and even drains/...

As of 2018, there were over 341,000 wind turbines around the world. In the U.S. alone, a projected one million homes will have roof-top solar PV by 2020. This does not include commercial or utility ...

Recent research has shown that landfills (garbage dumps) can be major emitters of methane. The largest methane emitters in California are a subset of landfills, which exhibit persistent anomalous ...

After adding plant matter to vermicompost, it kinda just sits there for a while, attracting fruit flies and growing mould. Would it be better to try to turn the compost so that the new matter is at ...

Currently, hairdressers around the world throw away tonnes of human hairs after they have given someone a new hairstyle. I know people sometimes donate their hair, which can be used to create wigs. ...

I have an array consisting of ten solar panels wired in series as shown in the figure below: My problem is that during some winter months (Oct - Dec maybe), in the afternoon, the sun is so low that ...

I am looking for an example or a case with arguments that would justify converting cattle ranches into plant farms (e.g., wheat, apple, or anything non-meat). The advantages should be in a more ...

I am looking for some examples of cities or regions that initially suffered from poor economy, unemployment, pollution or any environmental problems, but they turned to green technology and ...

This post deals with the design of a taxi rank and how to reduce the pollution created by idling and edging foroward. A few answers suggested that making the taxis switch to hybrids, or even better ...

I am looking at ways in which a heavily polluting taxi rank near a train station could reduce its pollution footprint. My first thought was that the pollution was mostly down to idling and I am ...

I have asked a few people whose cars are idling if they mind switching them off to reduce pollution. One response I get from quite a lot of people is that they need to keep the car running to enable ...

Today I heard a news story on local radio about a farmers protest campaign in Hamburg (Germany). Currently in Germany the discussion about sustainability, climate change and environmental protection ...

I'm trying to create a formula that would show: If every citizen in the world had an average carbon footprint of X.X kg per month, global temperatures could rise by X.X degC by 2050. I know there ...