Green Options

The the year round demand for items like cherries, mangoes, almonds and pistachios is far out-pacing world-wide production, leading to the perception of a shortage of pollinators.

As much as I love the coming onslaught of electric cars, they use lots of materials that currently have almost no recycling infrastructure — especially when it comes to their batteries. The numbers vary by the type of lithium-ion battery used, but on average, for every 100 miles of pure-electric range, a lithium-ion battery needs to contain about 15 pounds of lithium.

Although the developed world has had robust systems in place for a long time to deal with the recycling of lead-acid batteries (in the U.S. more than 95% of battery lead gets recycled), the lithium-ion battery has a long way to go to catch up. Granted, lithium-ion batteries are not nearly as toxic as lead-acid batteries and so the urgency of developing a recycling infrastructure is virtually non-existent. In fact, lithium-ion batteries are classified by the U.S. government as non-toxic and “safe” to throw away in the regular trash.

A huge increase in China’s demand for rubber is leading to the destruction of vast swathes of the country’s precious old-growth forests, and could cause irreversible environmental damage.

The shocking findings have been revealed in a new study by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science’s flagship conservation institute, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG). The team have discovered that China is producing a third more rubber than it was in 2007 to feed its booming automobile and tyre industries, which has led to an astronomical rise in the number of rubber plantations.

According to one of the scientists, “We will soon hit the wall in an ecological credit crunch. This is hardly a viable investment.”