Welcome back to some more good news!

This week was crazy in the environmental world, with a lot of negativity surrounding the Los Angeles fires and the upcoming environmental changes under Donald Trump.

Despite this, we’ve had some good news in cleaning up our water systems and reducing the energy consumption for industrial applications, had a success story in holding a corporation responsible for their environmental recklessness, and have a feel-good story about Bucharest coming together to help save the stray cat population!

Science

Cattails - Our Solution to Excess Saltwater Runoff?

• Megan Rippy, a researcher at Virginia Tech, is exploring the impact of native plant species on salt pollution

• Urban road de-icing with salt leads to saltwater runoff into stormwater systems

• This causes stress to plants that cannot tolerate highly saline environments

• New findings are showing that some plants, like cattails, can mitigate the saltwater problem

• While not 100% effective, they will play a role in the final solutions for removing saline runoff

Business

Reducing the Industrial Carbon Emissions

• Problem: In industrial scenarios, the typical way to separate gases or liquids is through heat

• This accounts for around 10% of the global energy consumption

• Zachary Smith, an MIT chemical engineer, has founded Osmoses, a company that seeks to filter molecules based on size at room temperature

• In his lab, he is now focused on solving problems like “water purification, critical element recovery, renewable energy, battery development, and carbon sequestration”

  Read more at MIT News

Politics

Organization Fights Back against Sewage Giant

• Save Windermere, founded by Matt Staniek, have won a lawsuit against United Utilities, a water treatment company serving North West England

• Save Windermere is an organization committed to saving Lake Windermere (North England) from sewage waste dumping

• Staniek sued to gain access to the data on the treated sewage, which United Utilities tried to block

• Recently, United Utilities dropped the defense and Save Windermere has won the suit!

• United Utilities are estimated to have dumped 140 million liters of waste into Lake Windermere

Activism

Trading Plastic Waste into Cat Food 🐱

• Due to the cold weather, stray cats in Bucharest are at high risk of freezing to death if not well-fed

• Sache Vet Association of Bucharest has set up solar powered vending machines that dispense cat food in exchange for plastic waste

• When people dispose of a plastic bottle in the machine, it will deposit some food into a bowl for stray cats

• Encourages proper disposal and stray cat survival

Thank you so much for reading!

If you like the content you’ve been reading, I would encourage you to introduce us to your friends who are also into climate news! We all need some positive news these days.

~ Dhanvi