The Dark Side (1)

The Dark Side (1)

1. How green are electric vehicles?

https://www.nytimes.com

Most electric cars sold today tend to produce significantly fewer planet-warming emissions than most cars fueled with gasoline. But a lot depends on how much coal is being burned to charge up those plug-in vehicles. And electric grids still need to get much, much cleaner before electric vehicles are truly emissions-free.

2. Millions of electric car batteries will retire in the next decade

https://www.theguardian.com/

Even though electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing emissions, they also contain a potential environmental timebomb: their batteries. These batteries require not only large amounts of raw materials, including lithium, nickel and cobalt – mining for which has climate, environmental and human rights impacts – they also threaten to leave a mountain of electronic waste as they reach the end of their lives.

3. The Truth About Soy and the Environment

https://allplants.com/

There's a strong link between the increase in soy production and deforestation in South America. When considering greenhouse gas emissions relating specifically to deforestation, 29% of Brazil's emissions are due to soy production, while the other 71% is down to cattle ranching.  Contemplating deforestation in Brazil it's important to look at the whole picture, especially how the cropland used to grow soy interacts with other land uses and what the beans themselves are used for.

4. The Environmental Impact of Soy

http://www.gittemary.com/

The huge expansion of the crop produced for soya has serious downsides. As the global demand for soy increased huge areas of natural land were, and continuously are, conved into soy plantations, causing large-scale deforestation. This results in massive losses in biodiversity, as well as massive water contamination, and spikes of rising carbon emissions due to soil erosion.

5.  Is eating soya causing damage to the planet? 

https://www.theguardian.com/

The US Cornucopia Institute recently published Behind the Bean, a not very cheery look at the soya protein industry, but one with a useful scorecard for products  It found that "natural" soya products are often processed using hexane, a neurotoxic petrochemical solvent.

6. Is Tofu Really Worse Than Meat For The Environment?

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/

According to the Carbon Trust, tofu made with soya from the deforested land in the Brazilian rainforest will have a carbon footprint twice that of chicken (so long as that chicken is not fed on that same deforestation soya). Uncertified South American soy can come with a heavy environmental cost. For now, most soya in the world is consumed by livestock. But if we all start replacing meat with tofu, it doesn’t solve the problem of soya consumption, only shifts the source.

7. Dying to be green: Are mushroom coffins the secret to an eco-friendly death?

https://edition.cnn.com/

According to the non-profit Green Burial Council, In the US alone over 4 million gallons of embalming fluid are used every year for burials, Embalming fluid contains toxic ingredients such as formaldehyde, which can leach into the ground. Cremation has its own issues, releasing considerable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and possibly heavy metals if present in the body.

8. Dutch inventor's mushroom coffins turn bodies into compost

https://phys.org/

The traditional coffin with varnished wood and metal handles is used, the process normally takes more than ten years. The casket made from mushrooms itself will meanwhile disappear within 30 to 45 days. It's actually an organism, so it's made from mycelium which is the root structure of mushrooms. They're the biggest recyclers in nature"."This is the most natural way to do it... we no longer pollute the environment with toxins in our body and all the stuff that goes into the coffins but actually try to enrich it and really be compost for nature."

9. Does electric vehicles really reduces the impacts on the environment?

https://www.energysage.com/

When evaluating the eco-friendliness of an electric vehicle, you also need to take the "well-to-wheel emissions" into account. This is an overarching term that includes greenhouse gas and air pollutants that are emitted to produce and distribute the energy being used to power the car. Electricity production results in a varying amount of emissions depending on the resource. While “being green” in the act of driving your electric vehicle is a start, if your primary goal in purchasing an electric vehicle is to reduce your greenhouse gas and pollutants emissions, you should also prioritize using zero-emissions electricity wherever possible.

10. Is Tofu bad for the environment? 

https://www.theguardian.com/

The recent publication of a report called "How Low Can We Go?" conducted for WWF-UK and the Food Climate Research Network by a research team at Cranfield University, Murphy-Bokern Konzepte and Ecometrica, repod that As vegetarians and vegans have long realized, a meat-free diet can often mean relying heavily on foods impod from abroad. But the report does seem to conclude that, even knowing that meat substitutes such as tofu and Quorn are a less efficient option than lentils and chickpeas, it is still worth pursuing a meat-free diet if emissions reductions are our goal.