Zecar - costing 2p a mile!

Are electric cars the way to go in terms of reducing humanity's impact on the environment?

An important point to consider when thinking about such things must be the break-even point i.e. the point at which the amount of carbon emissions you have saved by using electricity overtakes the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture of the vehicle.

Hopefully with an increase in green electricity production surely electric driven cars are going to be a much more sustainable solution to land travel in cars.

A car produced in my native South Wales, the Zecar, now claims to be able to run for 2p for a mile. This is substantially cheaper than that of a petrol car, especially given the current crisis in terms of rising fuel costs. The Zecar costs £15,000 and will go on sale in the UK later this year.

Another benefit of the company is that the cars are manufactured in the UK- thus cutting down on the emissions used on import.

With plans to expand into vans, taxis and limos this company could really help cut greenhouse gas emissions in the future!

Food waste in the UK

One of the big problems when faced with such large issues as increased global warming, is being able to break the solutions into bite-size chunks so that the average person can actually begin to make a difference.

A recent study by WRAP - a business focused on reducing waste and boosting recycling, has shown that in the UK a third of all the food we buy ends up in the bin. This generates a total wastage of £10 billion a year.

This food waste obviously has serious consequences in terms of the amount of resources being ploughed into the growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating of food, a huge proportion of which are apparently being thrown away.

When converted into a carbon dioxide equivalents it appears that if this waste could be totally eradicated then it would have the effect of taking 1 in 5 cars of the road- a staggering statistic!

It is studies like this that can highlight areas where the average person can make a conscious effort to reduce their waste and with enough people doing so, then we can begin to make a real difference to the climate change that our carbon emissions are causing.

For the WRAP press-release click here and the Love Food Hate Waster campaign can be found here.

Budget 2008's plastic bag policy

It seems that the government obviously note plastic bags as a serious waste of global resources since plans included in the recently published Budget for 2008.

Alistair Darling said when delievering the budget:

"Given the damage that single-use carrier bags inflict on the environment, we want to be able to take action. We will introduce legislation to impose a charge on them if we have not seen sufficient progress on a voluntary basis.

"Legislation would come into force in 2009 and based on other countries' experience, it could lead to a 90 per cent reduction, with around 12 billion fewer plastic bags in circulation. The money raised should go to environmental charities."

It seems that the responsibility still lies with the supermarkets and other shops, very few of which have done anything up til now about. It seems that enforced reduction of single use plastic bags is the only way to solve the problem, as we have a stunning example of in Ireland.

Lets hope that these and the other fairly meager enviromental promises made in the Budget are actually carried out.

Food production's cost on the planet

Yesterday the BBC ran a really interesting 'cost of food' section exploring why the price of food is increasing.

One of the most interesting things for me were the shear numbers involved with the world's growing intake of meat products. The figure below (taken from the BBC) shows the increase of food intake in China per capita (a rise from 20kg to 50kg over the last 17 years) and the respective increase in resources that are needed to fund this increase; which obviously have a serious impact on the planet.



One interesting point that comes out of this diagram is the fact that we don't even have to look back as far back as the hunter-gathering neanderthals to see that our meat intake has far outgrown our requirements!

The implications of the increased food production for climate change are of course vast but only briefly touched upon in the BBC articles. As they mention, desertification is already accelerating in China and sub-Saharan Africa whilst the disruption of the water cycle causes considerable changes in other regions. This is not to mention the extra strain the production methods place on natural resources.

These BBC articles are definitely well worth a read especially as they help confirm my opinion that the quantities of meat that people eat, needs to be addressed. Hopefully, for the sake of the environment, this shift in thought will be made long before economic issues demand us to address the situation.