Carbon dioxide removal
Swiss company, Climeworks, has the world’s largest carbon capture and storage plant in Iceland since September 2021. Its name is Orca.
“To truly enable global net zero, we need carbon dioxide removal solutions, such as direct air capture and storage to neutralize our unavoidable and historic emissions. Critically, we need to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air by 2100 to keep global warming in check.”
What is carbon removal technology?
Carbon removal is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away so that it can no longer contribute to global warming.
The carbon removal plants are powered using waste heat and electricity, producing “negative emissions” – removing more carbon dioxide than they put out.
Climeworks’ mission is to protect our planet and ensure a liveable future for generations to come. “To maximize our chances of achieving this, the world needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”
Find out more in the following:
SMEs – Our carbon removal service for small – medium businesses who want to help the world reach net zero and support our scale-up.
Enterprises – Our carbon removal service for enterprises seeking high-quality carbon removal for their net zero strategy and beyond.
Individuals – Our carbon removal service for individuals who want to reduce their impact on the planet and contribute to our scale-up.
Fashion industry
At a time when I’ve rediscovered jeans – all bought with donations given at my sister’s charity ‘swappage’ event – a shocking statistic means that I won’t ever be buying jeans from a store again.
It takes approx. 7,500 litres of water to make a single pair of jeans, equivalent to the amount of water the average person drinks over a period of seven years.
Annual ‘clothes swappage’ in aid of MacMillan Cancer Support
Apple’s Mother Nature video this year had in its employee report that the company is phasing out leather in their iPhone cases. The view that leather is an environmentally friendly material is being challenged. Demand for leather helps maintain meat and dairy production, which are considered to have high environmental costs.
The fashion industry is widely believed to be the second most polluting industry in the world. As for carbon emissions, the industry is responsible for more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.
“Fast fashion” is a big culprit in encouraging people to frequently buy and discard clothes. The trend is responsible for a plethora of negative social, economic and environmental impacts therefore it’s good to see ethically responsible fashion brands popping up, although the clothes can be cost-prohibitive.
Check out the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, a UN initiative created to promote projects and policies that ensure that the fashion value chain contributes to the achievement of sustainable development goals’ targets.
Recycled Heat from Data Centres is Warming Homes
Denmark is one of the cooler Nordic countries and there, the internet is being used is helping to warm people’s homes
Every time we upload a selfie, chat online or stream a video we are transmitting data to and from a Server. We virtually store all these files in the Cloud and they have a physical backbone keeping it all running smoother: a data centre.
Odense Data Centre is providing 24/7 services for Meta applications Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger – pictures, videos stories – and this requires huge amounts of energy. This produces a lot of heat, and it can feel like being in a sauna and in many data centres, the heat given off is lost or wasted. In Odense DC, the hot air is trapped behind the servers and then put to use.
What happens to the heat coming off the servers here?
The heat goes up to the roof to where there are cooling units and when it reaches the rooftop, the hot air flows through almost 200 heat exchanges. Cold water from a district heating system in the city is swapped for warm water, a heat exchange with warm elements exchanged for cold.
Residual cool air is left over from this process and that’s used to help cool all the hot servers.
Heat is transferred to households.
A pump station across from the data centre is filled with different coloured pipes carrying water: red for hot, blue for cold. When the station receives the heat, it is elevated from 27 degrees celsius to 70 to be able to put it in the district heating grid. District heating is a community-wide heating system that’s common in Scandanavia. Odense is the 3rd largest city in Denmark, with almost 200,000 residents and approximately 100,000 households and this plant is providing heat for more than 10% of these.
No boilers needed – how great is this!
There’s no need for a boiler because the heat is coming from the pipes and payment is based on usage.
Brands embracing sustainable practices
I want to live in a cleaner, greener environment where I am breathing in air with minimum pollution, not fumes from big engines and chimneys.
Done right, brands taking sustainability, empathy and better living as good business practice will score well in terms of ESG.
Every company affects, and is affected by, the environment. Graduates seeking work in 2023 are interested in a potential employer’s attitude and actions in relation to climate change issues. They are curious about the employer’s relationships with its workforce and may ask what environmental actions are being taken to reduce emissions.
