The first time I’ve been in Italy I was amazed by so many scooters. Old, new, it doesn’t matter because you see them in different colors at every corner. I even heard people calling Rome as the scooter-capital of Europe.

A classic Vespa scooter. Photo by the-spidernet

But there seems to be a problem. The Italian government is keen on keeping a healthier air in their cities and one of the measures they are taking is paying owners to change their old scooters with new ones. Obviously the 2-stroke engine emits much more harmful pollutants than a new generation 4-stroke model and add the fact that there’s no catalyst and you have a big polluter.

This is why authorities will offer a 300 Euro bonus when buy a new scooter and ditch your old one. Of course, if you live in Italy.

Source

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Charles Moore is an oceanographer that spent over a decade investigating the Pacific Ocean. On February 23 he returned from a 5 weeks successful research voyage with terrifying results. Apparently a “garbage island” twice the size of the United States located, located between California, Hawaii and Japan is full of plastics and is held in place by underwater currents.

Warning Sign for Water Quality - picture by Heal the Bay

The samples Moore took from the 2.5 million square miles plastic dump showed that there’s 6 times more plastic than plankton. It’s a a fivefold increase in the amount of plastic between 1997 and 2007. The most common things found are consumer leftovers like plastic bags, bottles and their caps, fast food wrappers or toys.

As GreenTechBlog mentions this kind of pollution can cause damage in many ways. Millions of fish and birds die ever year because they consider plastic as food or we could be faced with an accelerating global warming because the CO2-sucking plankton may not grow naturally anymore. Another important effect is that marine life could be contaminated with PCBs and other toxins plastic contains.

Plastic pollution is a serious problem but considering the size of it Moore said that there’s no technological solution to clean the ocean life. The Pacific plastic dump is unfixable he said so the only thing we can do is to prevent from adding more.

The answer? Easy. Get yourself twenty 80-ton batteries that look like small buildings, were designed by the Japanese and have a life expectancy of 15 years. Enough right ?

Xcel Energy is the company who’s trying to store the energy from its 11-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota and store it on such batteries that will discharge 1 megawatt of power, enough energy for 1,000 homes. The main concern with the wind is that the speed is always changing so the system had to be designed to charge the batteries while the wind blows and when the speed goes down the batteries will help even out the flow of electricity to the grid.

Xcel Energy is the first company that added batteries to a wind farm to capture the power and help with peak power demands.

via Sustainablog

Aside the architecture in Barcelona, the next thing that impressed me was the railroad system they have in place. It gets on time, you don’t have to check in or check out and it’s fast.

Renfe is the company that invested in the new high speed train network in order to take you from Barcelona to Madrid in just two hours and a half which is much faster than a normal flight. Another advantage is the fact that if it’s a windy day or heavy rain an airplane may not be able to take off.

400 passengers will be able to travel with the new AVE S103 (pdf link) that can hit speeds of up to 350 km/h and produces four time less pollution than an airplane. The cost of a trip is going to range between $30 and $80 depending on the class you’re traveling.

The Spanish Government is prepared to spend over 80 million Euros to develop their high speed inter-city railroad so that it can take you across Spain no more than 30 miles from your final destination. Rumors say that the AVE system will also be extended to France with a line going from Barcelona to Paris any time soon.

Add to all these the fact that Renfe will reimburse your ticket if the train is 5 minutes late and I can already see how flying short distances might die.

via Inhabitat