It’s summer time! For students preparing their final exams, this means spending hours in the library with their textbooks. If there is one thing they will all agree on, then it is that textbooks contain a lot of bullsh*t. Although the scientific correctness of that statement can be questioned, it is now empirically proven it is at least true when it comes to climate change. Or rather, what YOU can do to stop it.
Type: Image
The drones that will plant 1 billion trees a year
Illegal logging, urban expansion, cattle farming and palm oil production… they all contribute to deforestation. And that’s problematic. Very problematic. The current rate at which forests are chopped down is 15 million trees per year or 36 football fields per minute. Yes, per MINUTE. Where the trees once sequestered atmospheric CO2, their removal leads to 17% of global carbon emissions, according to the UN. To reverse the effects of this mass murder of forests, reforestation at industrial scale is needed.
photo: ABC News/Dave Maguire
ReGen: the Tesla of eco-villages
Artist's impression of a ReGen village (photo: EFFEKT/ReGen)
What is the first thing you think about when you hear the term eco-village? Could it be that you envision a hippy-like commune, where people pass their days smoking pod and milking the cows? Then the ReGen village concept will surprise you. Envisioned by Harvard professor and tech-entrepreneur James Ehrlich and developed in collaboration with Danish architects bureau EFFEKT, this futuristic community concept went viral last year at the Biennale in Venice. It’s more than just some naive dreams: the first village is already under construction in Almere, a polder village 25 minutes from Amsterdam.
Artist’s impression of the neighborhood gardens (photo: EFFEKT/ReGen)
World’s largest floating solar farm symbolizes China’s leadership
photo: Sungrow
While Trump performed a piece of first-class alternative facts-stuffed theatre in Washington to announce he retreats the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, industry leaders from around the world discussed the latest innovations in solar technology at the Intersolar Europe summit in Munich last week. It is there that Chinese inverter* manufacturer Sungrow announced exciting plans for a new floating solar farm on a lake in the South of China. With an installed capacity of 140 MegaWatt, it will be the largest floating solar farm in the world, a record currently held by another farm of Sungrow that was opened earlier this year.
Sungrow workers assembling the solar panels on plastic buoys (photo: Adam Dean/The New York Times)
The Ocean Cleanup: getting rid of the Pacific garbage patch
Close-up of the Ocean Cleanup floating barrier (photo: The Ocean Cleanup)
Does the name Boyan Slat ring a bell? There is a good chance it does. The now 22-years old engineer from the Netherlands decided to tackle the huge plastic waste problem in our oceans, after encountering more bags than fish in a scuba diving trip in Greece when he was 16. He came up with an invention to clean up the ocean’s garbage patches, an idea that soon would capture the attention of many after a video of his TedX talk in 2012 went viral. What the young inventor proposed is, by all means, ambitious – and in the eye of some oceanographers straight away insane. Nonetheless, in 2013 Boyan Slat founded a company to realise his idea: the Ocean Cleanup was born. After he revealed some major design changes and an updated timeline during an announcement event Delft, the Netherlands, earlier this month, it’s time to have a closer look at how this young fella thinks he will make it happen.
Boyan Slat at the announcement event on May 11th, in Delft (photo: Pierre AUGIER for The Ocean Cleanup)
Tesla’s solar roof: too good to be true?
(photo: Tesla)
Elon Musk has been in the spotlight a number of times on my blog now, and once again he succeeded in creating a good portion of buzz in the cleantech world which I cannot let go unnoticed. Yesterday the Silicon Valley entrepreneur announced that Tesla is now taking online orders worldwide for their latest disruptive technology: the solar roof. Seen by Elon as the third leg of the stool of a sustainable energy future, next to Tesla’s Powerwall and electric car, first installations in the US follow later this year, while worldwide rollout begins in 2018.
Solar roof can be ordered for almost any country. Deployment this year in the US and overseas next year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 10, 2017
