Home/Posts Tagged ‘petroleum’
Posts Tagged ‘petroleum’
Green living, Aug 25th, 2010,
I’d choose paper bags for my groceries, but since plastic bags are offered for free in shops and said to be not that bad for the environment, it’s hard to resist them. What is more eco-friendly: plastic or paper shopping bags? A: Neither. We have been conditioned to believe that paper bags are eco-friendly. Paper is made from trees, which are logged by clear-cutting methods. When the collected trees are dry, they are cooked into a pulp for many hours in a chemical mixture. The pulp is then washed and bleached; both stages require thousands of gallons of clean water….
Tags: biodegradable, bioplastics, chemicals, clear-cutting, eco-friendly, fertilizers, fossil fuel, GMO, paper bags, pesticides, petroleum, plastic bags, Pollution, re-usable, Recycling, shopping bags, TOXIC, transport
Pollution, Jul 17th, 2010,
A 15-hour fire raged from Friday night into Saturday after an oil pipeline explosion at a busy port in Dalian, China. It is not known what caused the pipeline – owned by the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. – to explode at the port, but the fire started after a large oil tanker unloaded its cargo. Though the fire has been put out, Chinese environmental protection officials warned that the area is still unsafe due to airborne chemicals. From an Associated Press report: State-run media said the pipeline blew up Friday evening and more than 2,000 firefighters worked overnight to…
Tags: China, Corp., Dalian, explode, explosion, fire, national, oil, petroleum, pipeline, port
Climate Change, Pollution, Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Jun 9th, 2010,
There are 3 basic things that are generally considered bad in the green world: plastics, BPA in plastics, and excessive CO2 emissions. Imagine if some of these things could be combined and used for the greater good. It seems unlikely, right? Well, guess what? Scientists are currently working on this very thing and they are making progress. Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have identified classes of organic chemicals that are capable of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and then be used to make BPA-free plastics. They discovered that “the coupling of epoxide with CO2 to…
Tags: BPA-free, capture, carbon dioxide, Climate change, co2, global warming, imidazolium, petroleum, plastic, research, Singapore
Climate Change, Green living, Science & Technology, Oct 26th, 2009,
“Yes, corn-based packaging is better than petroleum-based packaging for absolutely necessary plastics that aren’t already successfully recycled, and for packaging that cannot be made of paper,” he says. “But it’s not as good as asking, ‘Why are we using so many containers?’ My worry is that PLA legitimizes single-serving, over-packaged products.” –Martin Bourque, executive director of the Berkeley Ecology Center (smithsonianmag.com) Bioplastics are substances and products that mimic petroleum-based plastic, but are made from plant sources or biomass, such as cornstarch or vegetable oil. Some are biodegradable while others are not. But are bioplastics a good alternative to traditional plastics?…
Tags: biodegradable, biodegradable plastic, bioplastic, compost, composting, petroleum, plastic
