“Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve their soil. It’s a little more finicky to apply, and certainly less familiar. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: It can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.”
From Wired.
“Twice a day at milking parlors all over New Zealand, the world’s biggest dairy exporter, sheds are hosed down to wash away cow dung into large manmade ponds.
In an attempt to recycle the water in the lagoons, two local scientists — Keith Cameron and Hong Di — began testing the addition of polyferric sulfate, a chemical that’s been widely used in wastewater treatment to separate liquids from solids. The process worked, but that didn’t prove to be their most interesting finding.
When the pair of soil and physical sciences professors at Lincoln University ran checks to monitor for any impact on greenhouse gas emissions, they made a startling observation: Methane emissions from the wastewater had decreased by more than 90%.”
From Bloomberg.
“An industrial park alongside the River Lea in the London suburb of Chingford might not be the most obvious place for a quiet revolution to be taking place. But there, a team of entrepreneurs is tinkering with a modest looking steel container that could hold a solution to one of the world’s dirtiest industries.
Inside it are thousands of cherry-sized pellets made from quicklime. At one end, a diesel generator pipes fumes through the lime, which soaks up the carbon, triggering a chemical reaction that transforms it into limestone.
With this invention, Seabound, the company behind it, hopes to capture large amounts of carbon directly from the decks of cargo ships..
a Seabound unit can capture 78% of all the carbon from the exhaust that is pumped through it, and 90% of the sulphur, a toxic air pollutant.
The latest prototype is being built to the dimensions of a standard 20ft (5.9 metre) shipping container, so that it can seamlessly slot in with cargoes on deck.”
From The Guardian.
“The Ocean Cleanup, the international non-profit with the mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, today announced, at the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC), its plan to rapidly expand its work to intercept and remove ocean-bound plastic pollution.
The 30 Cities Program will scale the organization’s proven Interceptor™ solutions across 30 key cities in Asia and the Americas, aiming to eliminate up to one third of all plastic flowing from the world’s rivers into the ocean before the end of the decade.
This evolution follows five years of learning through pioneering deployments across 20 of the world’s most polluting rivers and represents a key next step in the organization’s mission and the global fight against ocean plastic pollution.”
From The Ocean Cleanup.
American Chemical Society | Pollution
“Mercury (Hg) is a highly toxic metal of global concern, with its anthropogenic emissions strictly controlled by the Minamata Convention on Mercury. The effectiveness of this convention is evaluated by global atmospheric Hg monitoring among other indicators. However, it is uncertain to directly link anthropogenic Hg emissions to atmospheric Hg concentrations mainly due to legacy Hg re-emissions. Here, we reconstructed the past atmospheric Hg concentrations and isotope compositions using the annually resolved (1982–2020) leaves of Androsace tapete at Mt. Everest, Tibetan Plateau. Our reconstruction indicates that the atmospheric Hg concentrations increased from the early 1980s to 2002 (3.31 ng m–3), followed by a large (∼70%) decline until 2020 (0.90 ng m–3). The declining trend of atmospheric Hg concentrations resembles those observed at North Hemisphere background sites, particularly in Chinese rural areas.”
