All Questions

Are there any HFC-free air conditioners on the market? How about refrigerators? Given the massive warming potential of HFCs I would expect there to be more information on how to avoid HFCs and on what ...

Our groupmates have a research topic that includes making a plastic pellet. We have to think of an alternative way to produce plastic pellets out of melted HDPE plastic bags since we're still students ...

I am looking for specific studies on the life cycle of cloth diaper versus disposable diaper. The municipality I work for wants to establish a compensation program for parents who want to choose a ...

According to this Wikipedia article (Dutch) there is a rule of thumb that the energy output of a solar system is 850 to 1000 kWh per year per Wp. However, this takes the grey climate of the ...

I do not have time to do a good job composting so the "Food Cycler Platinum Indoor Food Recycler" seems like a good idea despite its price. Does it release CO2 or methane? Does it consume so much ...

My local municipality has a "Waste Watchers" program that provides resources for reducing the quantity of waste sent to landfills. One of their tips is to use cloth napkins instead of paper napkins. ...

How would you rank the following in terms of damage to the environment: Pencils (regular) Mechanical Pencils Single-use ball point pens. Refillable ball point pens. Fountain pens The eco-friendly ...

I just came across the concept of STES - Seasonal Thermal Energy Storage and more specifically BTES - Borehole Thermal Energy Storage. (Example project) I wondered if anyone had built a small scale ...

I was reading about wake models. However it is unclear to me how they are used to model wind turbines. Could anybody explain me what are wake models and why it is important to predict wakes in wind ...

What level of light intensity (lumens) do you need across a solar panel in order to obtain an incident-light to energy-output efficiency of 15%?

So I've recently gotten into foraging and found a site called eattheinvaders.org that encourages people to eat invasive species. One of the most invasive species here in California is the common ...

For a building that is centrally heated by local fuel combustion (i.e. heating within the building rather than district heating), one may distribute the heat throughout the building using as a energy ...

Referring to hydro electricity generation, a lot of what we produce is wasted as the buyer buys only the minimum generation. What would be the appropriate measure to use that excess energy? Is ...

I just came across a school project to build a hanging compost bin: Lakeview Compost Bin. The benefits of composting have been a frequent topic here, but I'm wondering what purpose is served by ...

So many of our products have stickers/tape on them, i.e. boxes, glass and plastic. I have been removing stickers/tape from boxes (except amazons recyclable tape) but do I need to be doing this for ...

So many know that single use plastic water bottles break down with repeated use. Well the other day, I decided to buy a reusable water bottle. I am on a budget and picked up a Nike Hyperfuel 32oz. Its ...

I recently moved into an older house with a natural gas-burning forced hot air furnace. There are no records of the ducts being cleaned, and based on the layer of black grime I can see, they are quite ...

I'm looking for a ballpark number. Obviously fodder can include more than just one crop (e.g., barley/corn or hay/straw), and that's why I am having trouble finding a figure. Aside, I found that an ...

Cooking oil is very important to get a good taste. Is cooking with palm oil healthy?

There's a lot of fuss about reducing plastic usage, and one of the main reasons seems to be that otherwise it will end up in the environment, particularly the ocean. But if I dispose of the plastic ...

The food industry grows animals for meat, but some parts cannot be sold. What is the final use of bones from the different animals grown industrially? pigs, beef, poultry.

My idea of a device for harvesting energy from wind, waves and especially storms is introduced in the manuscript below. If used in reality, this device will harvest significant amounts of energy from ...

I always thought, that burning wood, would be bad for the total CO2 in the atmosphere until I heard it being pitched as "renewable energy". Now I am slightly unsure. The logic goes like this: Wood ...

I am thinking about buying a christmas tree but I want to know if that is or isn't good from a sustainability viewpoint.

My family has several table-top humidifiers (the cool-mist/nebulizer kind) in the house that we use a lot during the winter. Distilled water is recommended for using in humidifiers because the ...

To help grow lots of trees and ecologically friendly gardens, I've bought lots of bags of soil over time. There are better, more local sources of soil/mulch/compost, but nevertheless I go the route of ...

I recently bought a home with many appliances approaching 20 years old. As I expect that many of them will fail over the next several years, I want to get a head start on replacing them (since last-...

There's lots of benefits and threats to forest, and given our current, pervasive, and severe ecological challenges, forests are more important than ever. However, it's not obvious what the best ...

Some time ago I saw a documentary/infotainment program on television where they said that on average storing 1TB of data in the cloud costs 41 kWh of electricity per year. There was no further ...

Anything single-use is suspicious in terms of sustainability, especially if it goes to the trash afterwards and is not recyclable. Considering that, and the disproportionate use of paper towels by the ...

I thought the idea of LED is, that the light bulb has a very long life and uses very little electricity. I have not invested in full LED lighting but tried the LED bulbs, you screw in your normal ...

I have heard that employees who work in organizations or buildings with a focus on sustainability are more likely to make more sustainable choices in their personal lives and homes. For instance, if ...

When it comes to quick and temporary labeling of bins and storage things, a strip of tape written on can be very useful. Painters tape, masking tape, duct tape are all occasionally used for this ...

Carbon emission trading is supposed to use market mechanisms to make carbon-intense processes less attractive. Unfortunately, the EU market is flooded with emission certificates, such that the ...

I am looking to calculate the CO2 emission of an average male human while arguing/debating. It is my understanding that the amount of CO2 emitted will be based on the respiratory rate of any given ...

I started to write a comment under the question Is there an efficient way to dispose of credit cards? about the dangers of burning PVC, because this can lead to dangerous chlorine compounds in the ...

I have about 10 credit cards which I ended up not using for various reasons and I feel bad for having to throw them away in the trash, this is the case for many other things, but seems quite ...

I'm trying to determine if investing in a couple of Tesla Powerwall units to store solar energy is a wise financial decision. My energy cost is $0.1649/kWh. The installed price of the two Powerwall ...

I was talking to some friends and one of them claims that it is more efficient to combat global warming by cutting the trees and replanting them because a growing forest consumes more CO2. (Firstly, a ...

We all know IKEA is known for affordable, stylish, and easy-to-assemble home goods. I've furnished my apartment with several products but was recently questioning if I should continue to purchase to ...

A research done in my city's main train station showed 400,000 UFP particles per cubic centimetre. I am looking into printing pamphlets and wanted to inquire how does spending half an hour in a 400,...

While shopping for bath tissue at the store today I saw Seventh Generation brand with this information on the label: Seventh Generation 100% recycled bath tissue minimum 50% post-consumer recycled ...

I am new in Germany, and I am failing in recycling, thus I couldn't help but posting here, asking for help, let me know if this is off-topic! My bottles are: Plastic bottle of orange juice Glass ...

Is it possible to subject plant leaves to bacterial digestion to harness methane production therefrom. Is so what are the limitations.

Looking briefly at the recent IPCC report it presents a number of pathways for keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees celsius by 2100. These follow a spectrum from enormous reductions in consumption ...

I will soon be moving into a new home with a very old electric clothes dryer. I expect that before too long it will fail and need replacing. I would like to replace this with a more efficient model. I ...

I work in a few schools where children have been taught to turn off the monitors to save energy. Unfortunately, this is all that they turn off. Every Monday morning I find 30+ computers running with ...

Whenever oil booms, wind booms too. Whenever oil production crashes wind crashes too. The US added about 5GW or 2 million barrels of oil equivalent this year of wind and 300 million barrels of oil in ...

This may sound like a weird question, but the other night I was about to throw away a plastic package which didn't have any recycling information on it, and I hesitated before throwing it in the waste ...

Is it more efficient to heat a bedroom with whole house's forced-air natural-gas burning furnace, or only an electric space heater in the bedroom? For a very location-specific application, electric ...