Category: Sustainability
Stop Flushing Down Fertility! The Case for Recycling Human “Waste”
By Sonja Muriel Plüss
A nutritious breakfast, the morning coffee, and soon follows the call to the toilet. If you are like me and live in a place with a sewage system, all it takes is a flush for the discharge to be gone from our worlds and we can move on with our morning rhythms.
The Uptake of Earth Observations for Environmental Services Assessments
Photographing the earth from space means more to us now than ever before. Space data feeds the increasing number of models, tools, products, and services that have mainly been created for breaching connectivity gaps and preventing natural disasters.… Read More
Associating Solar Energy and Combined-heat-power (CHP) Systems in the Urban Environment
District heating (DH) systems represent a major contribution to local energy production, especially considering countries where heat energy play an essential role in ensuring comfortable conditions for urban activities. Generally, in the urban environment DH becomes part of a regional or local CHP network that is combined with electricity production in CHP plants.… Read More
Should 11.4 million EUR of Dutch Aid be Redirected as the Current Project contributes to Poverty and Environmental Degradation in the Bay of Jakarta?
By the end of this year, the Dutch government will have spent 11.4 million EUR in aid on a project that does not adhere to the Dutch standard of Official Development Aid (ODA) and violates the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by destroying the livelihoods of local fisher communities as well as the environment. … Read More
Yarsagumba Extraction: Issues in Conflict, Sustainability, & Resource Sovereignty
Yarsagumba is a caterpillar-fungus fusion. It forms when parasitic mushroom spores infect and mummify moth larvae under the soil. Twig-shaped fungus sprouts from the head of dead caterpillars, emerging just centimeters above the earth for harvesters to find.… Read More
Will We Witness a Global Fight for Sand?
The extractive industries sector – which broadly encompasses enterprises that are involved in the extraction of raw materials from the earth – is an integral part of the global economy given both the amount of revenue it generates and the number of people whose livelihoods are dependent on it.… Read More
How Can Technologies Attenuate the Environmental Impacts of Lithium Extraction?
Lithium, a commodity of the green economy
In this green economy era, lithium has become the symbol of a new consumption paradigm, more ecofriendly and less impactful for the environment.… Read More
Guano Extraction and Indigeneity
Bird poop – the original fertilizer
For thousands of years, indigenous populations have used different forms of fertilizer to grow crops. In Latin America and Oceania, the use of excrement, eggshells, and carcasses of seabirds, bats, and seals has helped crops flourish even in poor soil.… Read More
The environmental impacts of Cryptocurrencies
More and more frequently we hear words such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero and Ethereum, digital-based medium of exchange known as ‘cryptocurrencies’. Most often, we hear about the beneficial potentials of cryptocurrency, such as that of not being controlled by any central authority, but working primarily as a decentralized, peer-to-peer network of exchange, recorded and produced by the cryptocurrency community as a whole (Krishnan et al.… Read More