Recycling is kind of the cool thing to do these days, which will have to do until we get better at the “reduce and reuse” parts. You may dutifully recycle your plastic beverage containers on a weekly basis, and if you’re following the local guidelines, you’re probably dutifully removing all the bottle caps before they go in the bin. But why?

Why are all these bottle caps going in the trash? Why can’t they be recycled, too?

Well, the bottle caps can be recycled. Most any plastic can be recycled, but it gets tricky because of all the different kinds of plastic. In order to melt together, two pieces of plastic must be nearly identical in molecular structure. If they don’t mix together, the resulting plastic will be useless for manifacturing. For that reason, any plastic recyling process must be kept pure.

The different types are clearly marked with a Plastic Identification Code. The PIC number is usually found on the bottom of the bottle, inside the recycling-arrows-triangle-thingy. Soda and water bottles are type 1, which means polyethylene terephthalate. That kind of plastic will not mix with the type 4, low-density polyethylene, bottle caps. The bottle label must also be separated, as it is probably type 7, the catch-all “other” category.

Recycling depots ask that you remove all bottle caps for a multitude of reasons. First, they don’t have to transport all the leftover liquid still sealed in the bottle. Second, the bottle caps can get stuck in processing equipment. Third, a sealed bottle could explode during processing. And finally, they don’t want to remove the cap themselves.

Not that they are lazy. It’s a profit=driven decision. In order to make money recycling, when your cut is pennies per bottle, the system has to move fast. The time it takes to pick up a bottle, remove the cap, and set it aside may not seem like much, but multiply that by a thousand a day and we’re talking a serious efficiency hit.

So, most often, the bottle caps end up in the trash simply because they are a hassle to deal with. However, they are just as recyclable as the bottles. In my neighbourhood you can collect your bottle caps in a separate container and bring them to the depot for recycling. The local processing company donates proceeds from the recycled material to a children’s charity. Ask your local bottle depot if they can do anything with your caps.

• Source: Plastic Recycling – Wikipedia

I’ve already made my case for being skeptical towards global warming and climate change hysteria. The single biggest influence on the earth’s climate is the sun. It’s a burning ball of gas that is bigger than a million earths, and counts for 99.8% of all matter in our solar system. It’s kind of a big deal.

Researchers at the US National Solar Observatory are warning us that the sun might be taking a few years off. The sun has its moods, that tend to last about 11 years. These solar cycles are marked by the flow of plasma which determine the amount of solar flares and sunspot activity generating blasts of radiation. The more sunspots, the hotter it gets here.

From 1645 to 1715 the earth was at its coldest since the last great ice age. It’s known as the Maunder Minimum, referring to the lowest numbers in observed susnpots since they had started watching. The Maunder Minimum also corresponded with “The Little Ice Age” that brought a record cold winters to the northern hemisphere. The Baltic Sea froze over. Londeners held frost festivals on the Thames river. People in New York could walk across the harbour from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Back to current news, the NSO research trends seem to indicate that we could be heading into a solar cold-snap with the next cycle. They are expecting unusually low sunspot activity, which could lead to 30 years of cooler-than-average temperatures. The plasma flow that signals the beginning of new cycles doesn’t seem to be present, so it could mean a missing cycle, or perhaps just a delayed start. I’ve heard nothing about the possibility of a sun baby.

It could also mean a significant pay cut for a lot of environmentalist hype-mongers.

• Source: Next solar cycle could be a no-show – Science News

Nuclear power has a bad reputation. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima in Japan bring up the worst fears of tapping atomic energy. However, I feel optimistic about the future of nuclear power generators as a solution to our energy and pollution woes. So does France, apparently, which is generating 77% of its electricity from nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants are, in fact, giant steam engines. Electricity is generated by turbines, turned by steam pressure, which is created from heat caused by nuclear reactions. The reaction in question is fission… when an atom splits in two and a massive amount of energy is released.

The energy potential in 1 gram of uranium is equivalent to 3 tonnes of coal. When an atom absorbs a loose neutron it becomes unstable and splits into two atoms. The splitting releases huge amount of energy, and one to three extra neutrons which will likely find another uranium atom and cause it to repeat the process. If this reaction is left to escalate we have an atomic bomb explosion, but when it is carefully controlled, inside a machine we call the “reactor”, that same power is released in moderation to heat water into steam.

Current nuclear reactors are very picky eaters, only working with one specific isotope of uranium. (an isotope is, essentially, a specific “flavour” of an element depending on the number of neutrons) However, researchers figure that by 2020 new reactors will be in production to harness more power from  more common radioactive fuel, boosting efficiency 50 times over. (I’ve heard it said that the fear of nuclear energy has hampered funding for reactor development over the last 50 years, but progress is coming slowly)

Nuclear power reactors themselves generate zero greenhouse emissions, but there are some tiny emissions in the total life-cycle which includes mining uranium and refinement. All in all, nuclear power generates 3.3 grams of CO2 per Kilowatt-Hour of power. Compare that to 400 and 700 grams per KW-Hr for natural gas and coal plants, respectively. These figures come from European energy company Vattenfall, which shows nuclear energy contributing less greenhouse gases than even hydro and wind generated electricity.

Now, the big downside to nuclear power is radioactive waste. It’s not a lot of waste, but it poses some tricky problems. This waste needs to be kept away from the ecosystem for 100,000 years before it will deteriorate to natural radioactivity. Spent fuel, which is a pellet about the size of your fingertip, is first held in a pool of water until the most radioactive particles cool down. That takes about 20 to 40 years. Long term storage takes the material hundreds of meters underground in a time-capsule of  radiation containment.

Human engineering has never done anything that has been meant to work for 100,000 years, so this long-term storage does raise many concerns. However, there are examples of radioactive containment happening naturally on earth for the last 1.7 billion years… so that’s a good track record.

My vision of the future doesn’t include flying cars, but it does have a lot of electric cars, and it seems to me that nuclear generated electricity is our best bet for getting ourselves cleaned up.

• Source: Everything you wanted to know about nuclear power – University of Melbourne

These days any weather report worth its salt will include the UV index number. I think we all understand the practicality of it. The higher the number, the higher risk of sunburn. But personally, that superficial understanding doesn’t satisfy my curiosity.

I also get to brag a little, as the UV Index in a Canadian invention, circa 1992. Many other countries picked up on the idea. It’s now been taken over and standardized by the World Health Organization.

We’re talking about ultraviolet radiation here, which got a mention last week regarding its spot on the spectrum of electromagnetic waves. There are three types of UV radiation, conveniently called UVA, UVB, and UVC depending on the wavelength. Each one affects us differently.

UVA: These are the longest waves, and thus can more easily pass through stuff. As such, nearly 99% of all UV radiation that gets through the ozone layer is UVA. UVA causes immediate tanning, and long term wrinkling and skin aging.

UVB: While making up only 2% of ultraviolet radiation reaching earth, this is the bad guy. The cause of skin cancer! Last year I wrote about how a sunburn modifies your genes!

UVC: Our ozone layer pretty much completely blocks UVC radiation from reaching us. Let’s hear it for the ozone, ladies and gentlemen!

Now, the UV index is a rating of how much UV radiation is hitting the earth on a given day.It’s calculated based on a number of factors specific to your area.

1. Sun height – Midday in mid-summer would have the sun looking straight down on you, meaning the least amount of atmosphere between you.
2. Latitude - Your position on the globe affects the angle of the sun.
3. Cloud cover – Well that seems obvious!
4. Altitude – The higher you are, the less atmosphere to protect you. Being 1000 meters above sea level equals a UV increase of about 10%.
5. Ozone – The ozone fluctuates, so it can be absorbing more or less UV on any given day.
6. Ground reflection – Depending on the colour and surface, you could be getting UV bounce-back. Snow will reflect 80% of UV waves.

At night, in the dark, the UV index would be zero. While there’s no upper limit to the scale, 10 would be “extreme”… blue sky, mid summer, sun directly overhead.

I’ll wrap up with a note about sunscreen. Specifically that big SPF number on the bottle. You may know it means Sun Protection Factor. That number is determined with a simple lab test.

They round up some pasty looking people and test how long it takes for their bare skin to burn under a controlled dose of UV light. Then they apply the sunscreen to another patch of skin, and measure the time to burn again. If the original burn happened in 3 minutes, and the sunscreened burn took an hour, that means the natural skin protection increased by a factor of 20. (3 minutes x 20 = 60 minutes) Thus, it gets labeled as Sun Protection Factor 20.

• Source: Ultraviolet Radiation – World Health Organization
• Source: Ultraviolet Index – Wikipedia

P.S. The illustration above was inspired by the random words found in robot-proof captcha security things. (where they ask you to decipher a blurry word… in my case “climate iseight”) Captcha Art is kind of an in thing to do these days. The drawing then reminded me I’ve been wanting to do a story on the UV index for a while.

Generally I try to avoid writing about politically-charged topics because the facts are difficult to navigate. Every potential source article may or may not have an agenda skewing its figures. My own goal for today is to do my part to help with some education about the food we shove in our collective faces, but I’m having to tread carefully.

There are a lot of organizations/people offering calculations of the “true” cost of a hamburger. I’ve found number ranging from $50 to $200, or just a non-quantified list of side-effects from the beef industry. In an effort to be conservative with my facts, I’ll just say that your 99 cent hamburger costs more than 99 cents.

One third of the grain crops in the world (this being the very same world with a shortage of good farming land) goes to feeding livestock. It takes about 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.

Grazing land for cattle is the leading motivation for cutting down forests (most notably the rainforests of Brazil and India). I don’t like the hype around “global warming”, but this is a concern. Cows produce more greenhouse gas than our automobiles, while simultaneously needing to remove our leafy green air filtering friends from the face of the earth.

Livestock are injected with 50 percent of the antibiotics used in the world. To me, the troubling part is that these are largely preventative measures. Which means, for the most part, these antibiotics are unnecessary. What it does is give the bacteria the chance to interact and evolve to become immune to these antibiotics requiring new, stronger antibiotics. (the microbial arms race)

The last consideration I’m going to mention is water use. Not only the amount of water running through the livestock production system but the gross amount of pollutants that are flushed out the other end. Taking 8 percent of global water use, and leaving behind a third of all nitrogen and phosphorous pollutants.

Unfortunately, all this back-end stuff is not showing up in that 99 cent hamburger price tag. Somebody else, and most often somebody far away from you, is footing the bill.

Here in Canada we were the first to put strong health facts on cigarette packages, showing pictures of lung cancer and other negative considerations of the product within. I’m curious what would happen if the same thing would be required on the hamburger box.

• Source: Livestock impacts on the environment – UN Food & Agriculture

This post is part of “Blog Action Day“, wherein over 7000 blogs will be posting on the topic of climate change. The goal is to raise awareness of the issues and concerns of the global environment. I have a hunch that my post is not quite what they had in mind.

I’ll come right out and say it: I am not at all worried about global warming. I don’t believe it’s a crisis, or even a concern. The current state of fear and sense of impending doom has been nurtured by the media, who are just trying to sell newspapers. I don’t deny that the global temperatures are rising, but it’s not a problem. Here’s some hype-free facts about climate change…

The leading cause of global warming is the sun. The giver of all life. Obviously, it has the biggest impact on everything here on earth. Like most humongous balls of burning gas, it’s not a static thing. It moves, it changes. A scientific paper form March 2008 determined that 62% of temperature change has been the result of the sun, caused by short-term fluctuations and long-term solar cycles.

The earth also has it’s cycles. In the time of the dinosaurs, carbon dioxide levels were 2 to 4 times higher than they are now, but things have cooled off a few times since then. About 125,000 years ago, at the peak before the most recent ice age, global temperatures were much higher, and the sea level was 20 feet above current levels. Still, things froze up yet again.

We only really started keeping track of temperatures around 1850. Studies of Greenland ice cores, which offer a timeline of weather going back a few millenia, indicate that the northern hemisphere circa mid 1800s was the coldest period in about 8,000 years. So the average temperatures would have nowhere to go but up. The point being, rising temperatures are not a crisis. We’re just on a natural upswing.

In 2007 all the world heard reports about the University of Illinois study revealing that Arctic ice was at it’s lowest levels in 30 years. Nobody seemed to mention the bit in the same study that mentioned the Antarctic ice down south was at record highs.

I don’t understand why people love doom and gloom news stories so much, but I do hope I’ve encouraged you to take a peek beyond the hype. There are some serious environmental concerns we should be dealing with rather than fretting about the multi-millennial ebb and flow of climate cycles.

• Source: http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ (This is a massive resource of scientific research presented plainly. You don’t have to take my word for it.)

It’ may be a blasphemous thing to say, but I’m generally not gung-ho about recycling. Sure, all the cool kids were in the grade five “Earth Club”, but after that I started to feel like it was more hype than truth. Paper biodegrades and, with properly managed forests, is a renewable resource. Plastic doesn’t recycle very well, and the smarter plan is to reduce it, and move to the newer eco-friendly plastic compunds. But aluminium, on the other hand, remains the poster-boy of recycling.

Most importantly, aluminium is totally recyclable. There is no loss in the process of melting down soda cans. The recycled aluminium is identical to freshly mined aluminium. If no more cans were tossed into landfills, and usage remained the same, it would be a closed loop system with no need for any more aluminium mines. The infinite re-cycle. Eco-bliss.

The cost of mining aluminium is very high compared to recycling. Aluminium comes from bauxite ore, and it takes a heckuva lot of electricity to refine that into pure sheet metal. Recycling aluminium saves 95% of that energy, plus the negative impact of mining and transporting the ore. Hello efficiency!

If you’re thinking “Hey, we should make more stuff from aluminium!”, I say “Hey, you’re smart!”. Aluminium is the third most abundant element on earth after silicon and oxygen. Australians would be happy too, since their country has 40% of the world’s bauxite reserves.

As a side note, if you’re thinking “Hey, how come you keep calling it aluminIum instead of aluminUm?”, I say “Hey, you must be an American!”. (this blog is written in Canada… much to the dismay of my spell-checker) The -ium ending (like titanium, magnesium, etc) is used thoughout the world, except the United States where through popular usage it’s been changed to aluminum. I guess it’s a southern drawl thing. I also like how they say iron… “ayrrrnn”.

• Source: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aluminum