Marcus Tay's List: Environmental Info

• plastic can pack a one-two punch by both clogging an animal’s stomach and poisoning it with chemicals that have concentrated in the plastic
• loating transportation device that allows alien species to hitchhike to unfamiliar parts of the world, threatening biodiversity.
• pproximately 10 percent of generated waste,
• plastic’s chemicals often sink into nearby land, contaminating groundwater.
• Eight percent of world oil production goes to manufacturing plastics.

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• avoiding one unit of end-user electricity use avoids three units of primary energy use, due to the inefficiencies of generating electricity. Therefore, end-user efficiency should be valued right alongside clean power generation.

  • Important why we should avoid end user inefficiency
• It would be similar to emissions trading, but instead of caps on emission from power generation, building owners would calculate the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions their buildings use (adding up all their electricity, oil, gas, and other energy use), and there would be a cap for an allowable amount of CO2 emission per square meter of building. This would not replace normal emission trading. The integrated EETS system would have an efficiency cap-and-trade market in addition to the power generation emission cap-and-trade market, working in parallel.

  • What is Intergrated Emissions and Efficiency Trading scheme for buildings
• in existing emissions trading schemes, "A project only qualifies... if it can prove that the emissions reduction would not have occurred without the project. In its strictest sense, this means that the project must not have been financially feasible without carbon credits." This causes the unintended consequence of not encouraging financially sustainable strategies for environmental sustainability.

  • Clause of additionallity in current emissions trading scheme
• True sustainability needs to be commercially viable as well as ecologically helpful: isn't it a much better use of taxpayer money to launch an industry that will become self-sustaining rather than spend money on things which would never be economically feasible by themselves? Obviously the scale of our environmental challenge is large enough that we can't limit ourselves to money-making schemes--we need to pump money into every technology that works--but it would be foolish for us to skip over the low-hanging fruit in favor of more expensive, slower, and less proven strategies. That is effectively what we are doing with the emissions trading schemes that exist now.

  • Problem with current emissions trading scheme - not putting into schemes that will be self sustaining economically.
• an industry where the people paying for a building's energy use are not the same people who built the building, where first cost is nearly always at odds with life-cycle cost. A cap-and-trade scheme is perfect for an industry like this, because it introduces a new feedback loop that counteracts (an

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• es for transport did not add up emissions from well to wheel; instead, it considered only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving.

  • Transport sector only take notes of the fuel burnt, not considering the extraction and everything else.
• ivestock sector by adding up emissions from farm to table, including the gases produced by growing animal feed; animals' digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods.

  • Livestock sector emissions take account of the entire lifecycle
• es for transport did not add up emissions from well to wheel; instead, it considered only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving.
• leading authorities agree raising animals for food accounts for about 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., while transportation creates an estimated 26 percent.

  • Contradiction between transport and livestock figures shows elsewhere
• Pierre Gerber, told CNN he accepted the comparison with transport data was inaccurate.

  • One of the UN report author agree
• or -- transport -- and I accept this comparison is now a little doubtful."

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• • Major areas of opportunity cover up to 75 % of resource reduction prize. 
    
    Food waste is number 2!

• • 100 energy units of natural gas at source
   
  • 40 energy units remaining due to conversion to electricity
   
  • 35 energy units remaining due to transmission losses
   
  • 2 energy units remaining due to conversion to light

• • Education Doesn't work
• 970s, a researcher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University named Scott Geller and colleagues conducted a workshop in residential energy efficiency and then measured its impacts. A newspaper advertisement recruited 40 participants on a first-come-first-served basis, and the workshop lasted three hours. Before and after the workshop, subjects took surveys measuring how much they knew and cared about energy efficiency. The change was significant -- participants significantly knew and cared more about the issues after the workshop than before

• use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with a brown or green stripe.

  Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is to prevail, environmental officials say.

  • Even with High tech soln, people still need to be educated about what can be recycled

• private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.

  “It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.

  • Companies will move faster than individuals

• In response, Mr Wang said: "There's nothing wrong with plastic bags, so long as we reuse them.
   
   "Any proposals to ban plastic bags irks me. In Singapore, we burn our rubbish, so whether it's bio-degradable or not, it doesn't make a difference; and secondly, because we encourage residents to bag their rubbish, so sanitation is maintained."

• Currently, Singapore uses about 2.5 billion plastic bags a year for bagging   their shopping. This translates to 1.7 bags per person each day - better   than Taiwan's 2.4 and Hong Kong's 3.7. But NEA wants to bring usage down   to the levels in such countries as Australia (1.0), the United States (0.9)   and Ireland (0.8)

• Singapore consumes 2.5 billion plastic bags a year, which is equivalent to 625 bags per person annually.

• so to understand the problems from as many angles as possible,” said Ms Shah. Approximately 33% of the 2,500 respondents polled indicated that they waste all or some of the plastic bags given out for free at supermarkets. The statistic of 8.5% of the respondents who reported recycling plastic bags showed a usage pattern where plastic bags are not being reuse