We are not angry, of course, what really happens is that air quality issue concerns us greatly in CARTIF. A few weeks ago, we attended a workshop entitled “Technical solutions for reducing emissions from mobility“, held in MAGRAMA (Spanish Ministry). The panel of speakers was made up of a related group of professionals from the mobility sector, in its broadest sense, and all of them exposed several experiences, technical solutions, problems and challenges for the future.
As we drew some conclusions and we heard data which need to be shouted from every corner (although they may irritate us!), we are inaugurating, with this blog post, a series where we are telling you what was said there (part I) to question our rights as citizens (part II) … is our well-being real?
Let’s start from the beginning. The conference opened with a kindly reminder to the assistants about the effects of poor urban air quality. This problem was the common theme of the entire workshop because it is a topic that cannot be forgotten, it concerns our health. Look at these figures: 33,200 people died because of urban air quality effects in Spain in 2013 (390,419 was the total) and 491,000 died prematurely in the EU-28.
With such a strong beginning, and without forgetting there is no exaggeration in these data, we are telling you some considerations:
1.Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) are being implemented in cities with the aim of improving mobility and make it more sustainable, or what would be the same, reducing individual transportation by internal combustion engine cars. At this point, the conclusion was unanimous, it should be asked to the municipalities to try to be more ambitious in their actions and one of the main axes of their policy should be to improve urban air quality. It seems clear that necessary management measures will be needed fundamentally. Do you know one of the recent initiatives of the Mayor of London? We love it.
2. It seems clear that new technologies in traffic management as long as to encourage car-sharing will be a help for mobility problems, but their actual impact is very limited. Let’s legislate them for the good of all.
3.Volkswagen emissions scandal was mentioned, of course. It was said that automotive industry has developed important improvements on vehicles during recent years, which have led to significant reductions in fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions (without addressing irregularities thereon). Nevertheless, improvements are still needed.
4. Up to now and according to sales figures, technologies for vehicles and alternative fuels cannot compete without economic incentives against the conventional ones. Once more, to promote Research and Development may be the key factor to achieve it.
5. Greater control over the actual condition of the vehicles and the identification of “big high-polluting cars” are necessary. During the conference, it was mentioned that there are already clear publications showing that a relatively small percentage of vehicles would be responsible for high rates of pollutants emissions, and not only among the oldest ones.
We know that to keep citizens calm is the main objective during this kind of formal conferences but, from our point of view, it should be more taxative and make clear that vehicles combustion engines and heatings mainly cause urban air pollution. And this issue leads us directly to the analysis of citizens’ daily activities.
“What is the weather like this weekend?”. We ask every week when Friday comes. “Sunny, but we can’t trust on weather” answers our colleague. “You’re right! It’s the climate change fault” both conclude.
In our previous posts, you have been able to know how CARTIF is working to help to mitigate climate change, through the development of new technologies and awareness. And let’s say that, if climate change is responsible even for our change of plans during the weekend, it’s time to know it a little better, to talk about when and by whom was discovered.
Eduard Punset has written an excellent introduction to this issue in his latest book and we have collected here an excerpt:
“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 was awarded jointly to Paul J. Crutzen (Dutch), Mario J. Molina (Mexican) and F. Sherwood Rowland (American), to warn the world of a thinning of the ozone layer surrounding the Earth, between twenty and fifty kilometers above our heads (…). They showed, to the disbelief of many people, that the Earth’s ozone layer was thinning in the region of the poles, especially in the South, over Antarctica, and the cause of this degradation was some gases that don’t exist in nature but, after their discovery, in the early twentieth century, were widely used in the industry as refrigerants and propellants (in aerosol). They are the chlorofluorocarbon gases, also commonly known as CFCs, included in many normal household items like in refrigerators, spray deodorants etc … What Nobel laureates discovered was that, despite being harmless to human health, these gases are so stable and stay in the atmosphere for very long times, long enough to reach the upper atmosphere, where UVB photons turn them into highly reactant catalysts. Ozone depletion is caused by the products of those processes” (extract from Carta a mis nietas: todo lo que he aprendido y me ha conmovido. Eduard Punset, 2015, published by Destino, in Spanish).
And although the alert came in 1974, yet it took a few years for society to become aware of the problemand to increase the knowledge about the possible greenhouse gases. Let’s look back to history.
It’s in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, where countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a frame for international cooperation that outlines how specific international treaties may be negotiated to set binding limits on greenhouse gases.
Three years later, the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) was held in Berlin and in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, in Japan, with the aim of providing policies and measuring plans for industrialized countries, to reduce emissions by 5 % in the period 2008-2012. In 1999, 84 Parties signed the Kyoto Protocol but to enter into force, the Protocol must be ratified, and this fact was a problem because there was no agreement on how to apply the rules. In 2001, George W. Bush announced that the United States of America was no longer intending to comply with the objectives set out in the Protocol and in 2005, it entered into force without the signature of USA and China, the world’s largest carbon polluters.
But it was necessary to keep on working and the COP15 arrived, in Copenhagen in 2009, a crucial event in the negotiating process, remembered as unsuccessful because it was closed with a minimal agreement that did not commit countries. It was in Doha, in 2012, where a new timetable to reach an effective universal climate agreement was set out, choosing 2015 as the deadline. And with this purpose, COP21 took place last December, in Paris, and it has been the first time that a legally binding and a universal agreement on climate have been achieved, with the aim of limiting their emissions.
“Never too late to do well”, says a Spanish proverb, so we are confident that a successful chapter has begun in climate change history. Let’s cross our fingers.
A few years ago, the magic company Pixar® showed us the story about the robot named WALL-E, who was designed to clean up an abandoned, waste-covered Earth far in the future, exactly in the year 2800. What we don’t know is if WALL-E knew the benefits of recycling, that is, the importance of giving a second life cycle to things and, above all, if he knew that all the collected plastics should put into the specific recycling bins. Maybe someone should have told WALL-E plastics are valuable materials characterized by an interesting potential to be recycled many times, without losing value or their functional properties.
Plastic production became widespread in the 50s and it has grown exponentially during recent years (Plastics Europe, 2015). Furthermore, according to Spanish web AEMA, about a third of the current plastic production corresponds to disposable containers that are thrown away after a year of use approximately.
“An efficient Europe resources” is one of the seven flagship initiatives as part of the Europe 2020 strategy, and, to use the post-consumer plastics resources effectively involves to be able to recycle them, whether:
Chemical recycling, that refers to operations that aim to chemically degrade the collected plastics waste into its monomers or other basic chemicals. The output may be reused for polymerisation into new plastics, or
Mechanical recycling, that refers to operations that aim to recover plastics waste via mechanical processes, like grinding, washing, separating, drying, re-granulating and compounding, producing recycled plastics ready to be used again.
And why is so important to promote these actions? Take a look at the following data, extracted from the new report about the future of plastics published by the World Economic Forum last January:
The best research currently available estimates that there are over 150 million tonnes of plastics in the ocean today.
Plastics production has increased twenty-fold in the past half-century and is expected to triple again in the next 30 years, achieving 1,124 Mt.
The plastics waste represents more than the 12 % of the total municipal solid waste, compared with 1 % in 1960.
After a short first-use cycle, 95 % of plastic packaging material value is lost to the economy.
If product components manufactured were reused and no waste was produced, € 625 million would be saved.
If all consumed water bottles in the US in a week were line up, they would do five laps around the planet.
While we are walking towards a future scenario in which the need for virgin plastic is progressively reduced, we should put more effort into R&D and optimizing new recycling techniques, improving their success rates.
We have already talked about the importance of awareness and the individual responsibility in our previous posts, therefore to learn about recycling and reusing, even in our homes, could be a good starting point for that. And what a better way to begin than by our children.
With this purpose and in collaboration with the Valladolid City Council, we have organized an event aimed at children on April 24, in the framework of the project LIFE COLRECEPS, with the aim of raising awareness about recycling, specifically about the plastic named expanded polystyrene (EPS), more known as styrofoam.
A sustainable polystyrene sculpture is going to be created during the event, in the form of mosaic, from a few pieces of styrofoam painted for the occasion by children participating… even they will be able to get a prize!
The aim is to show that technologies, such as the one that is being carried out in LIFE COLRECEPES, could enable infinite recovery for plastics and do not have to end up in landfills.
Follow us on our social networks to know more details about the event… and see you there!
When we work developing environmental technologies, to quantify the advantages to be obtained by using them can be an important added value. And if we put numbers, we are committed to communicate these numbers in an objective and traceable way, and it is when indicators, as environmental footprints, appear.
The most famous is the carbon footprint (after Armstrong’s footprint on the moon, of course!) but recently, another one resonates, the water footprint. This may be the least known member of the group so there are 9 things about it that, perhaps, you don’t know:
To sum up, we celebrate the World Water Day this month, and it is important to remind that the concept ‘water crises’ goes beyond a definition. The World Economic Forum called it in 2014 as the third overall risk worldwide, over climate change and food availability in the world… to give people pause, don’t you think?
At this moment you are visiting our blog and after reading the title of this post, you are thinking about finding a text based on the current social context, where the word “change” appears again and again. Not this time. Here, we want to present our skills and it is time for the environmental chapter today. And with the title of this post, we would like to defend the need for changing the air. Literally speaking.
News about air pollution appears in the media, as headlines, more often than we would like during the last months. But, what does the term mean exactly? If we begin with the definition, air pollution occurs when the air contains gases, dust, fumes or odour in harmful amounts. That is, amounts which could be harmful to the health or comfort of humans and animals, or which could cause damage to plants and materials. And if we finish with the epilogue, nowadays the World Health Organization is qualifying it as a public health emergency.
Although it is known the self-purification capacity of the air from natural resources, anthropogenic atmospheric pollutants concentration is increasing at a higher rate, especially during recent years, and the limits are being exceeded. For example, in large cities, current levels of air pollution cause direct (and serious) damages to the health of humans, animals and plants that live in it. This happens in Madrid, with its necessary traffic restrictions due to the frequent pollution peaks, or even in Valladolid, which could have suffered around a hundred days of poor air quality in 2015 (if we consider the limits established by WHO and taking into account the parameters which define it). And we can’t forget other cities around the world, where the situation becomes more troubling due to the high levels of pollution. New Delhi and Tiananmen photos are kept in our mind, always associated with a big gray cloud.
For this reason, environmental pollution is now one of the biggest technological, economic and social challenge, to be overcome by the society. In fact, CARTIFis working actively on the concept “Air Quality” and some technologies are being developed. A formulation design to be applied on asphalt paving for nitrogen oxide removal in urban environments is an example, as well as a new analytical technique for the quantification of dioxin in air. Moreover, we are committed to innovation, and we are working on proposals that include Nature Based solutions, that is, solutions that are inspired by, supported by or copied from nature, where ecosystem services could be used, for example, to reduce the nitrogen oxides concentration and to conserve and expand carbon sinks. Even to act as barriers to reduce particle air pollution and to regulate the humidity and temperature of the cities, improving, consequently, citizens well-being regard to health & comfort.
Let’s think about this issue, about the importance of the quality of the air we breathe, winds of change must necessarily reach. In our opinion, the formula for success is Research & Development & Awareness, and we bet (and work) on it.
And it is always important to remember that the role of people can be crucial to contribute to mitigate this problem, since motor vehicles are one of the largest sources of pollution.
Therefore, to choose options considered as sustainable mobility, like cycling, is an interesting alternative because, apart from improving the health of those who practice it, helps to keep air clean. Or car sharing to go to work. Or to include more, and better, green space in sustainable urban plans. It is also in our hands to be an active part of the solution… “Think globally, act locally”.
The first month of the year is coming and it is time for reflection. The year ended with us still having in our pockets the boarding pass of our virtual trip to a historic event for the climate, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21), held in Paris last December. And with its conclusions still ringing in our ears, we begin to understand that all of us, as citizens, have the opportunity to do our best to stop this global threat. And for this reason, the researchers at CARTIF step forward and get down to work, looking back for a moment, to remember the road traveled and, on that basis, define our environmental challenges for the new year.
2015 has been a time with lots of environmental milestones for CARTIF. Seven of our twelve ongoing LIFE projects have passed the middle of their execution and there are already very interesting results, with a huge environmental potential for the future (we will tell you in due time). Different waste management technologies, air pollution and Life Cycle Assessment smart tools have been some of our focus this year, along with other interesting international projects, which never forget to include environmental objectives transversely to the challenges they face.
And because the first month of the year is the period where people are filled with purposes, good intentions and To Do Lists, we have also proposed our own challenges, environmental challenges of course, and we want to share them with you.
To work ensuring respect for the environment through R&D should be a natural and routine practice, and we’ll contribute to it with our work whenever we can. We promise to reduce our carbon footprint in this new year, as well as our projects, and, consequently, moving towards environmental sustainability. Because, it is already known, the road is made by walking.
