A South African Court has blocked the activities of oil giant Shell, who planned to investigate offshore oil deposits along the South African coast, close to the annual migratory routes of whales. An international petition to block Shell’s activities collected almost 450,000 signatures. 

Dolphins, seals, sharks and penguins frequent the South African coast, but it is whales that are the most prominent inhabitants of these waters. The great cetaceans migrate from the cold Arctic waters, and through June to November, the coastline acts as a stage for the pirouettes and jumps of whales, delighting whale-watchers near Cape Town.

From December 1, Shell wanted to search for oil or gas deposits along the entire eastern coast, from Morgan Bay to Port St Johns. An environmental disaster was announced, which was opposed by environmental groups and local populations, which finally led to the project being stopped. The oil exploration was considered “flawed and illegitimate” by the High Court of Makhanda, which ordered the multinational to immediately cease operations and pay all court costs.

Activists from Oceans Not Oil collected almost 450,000 signatures against the project, addressing the international petition to South Africa’s Environment Minister Barbara Creecy, and to Royal Dutch Shell.

“For five months, the vessel operated by the charterers of Shell Exploration…would have dragged up to 48 compressed air guns across 6,011 km² of the ocean surface, firing extremely strong shock wave emissions that penetrate 3 km of water and 40 km in the Earth’s crust below the seabed” explained the activists. “The ship would be active for 24 hours a day, firing shockwaves every 10 seconds. In the process, the marine life of the fragile Wild Coast, in panic, will be deafened and damaged.”

This would be a huge disaster for marine mammals, who rely on acoustics as their main communication channel.

“Marine mammals live in a medium that transmits little light but through which sound spreads well and quickly, even at great distances. This is why marine mammals rely on sound to communicate, investigate the environment, find prey and avoid obstacles”, explains the Interdisciplinary Center of Bioacoustics and Environmental Research of the University of Pavia. 

If animals for any reason cannot avoid a source of noise, they may be exposed to acoustic conditions capable of producing adverse effects, ranging from discomfort and stress to acoustic damage such as hearing loss. Exposure to very loud noises, such as explosions at a short distance, can produce physical damage to other organs as well as auditory ones.

An international research investigation led by the Polytechnic of Turin and the University of Melbourne explained that when there is too much noise, whales “speak less” and have difficulty communicating with each other.

The work, published in the scientific journal Royal Society Interface, studied the effects of man-made noise pollution among Minke whales in the North Sea.

Although, it was not purely animal-related or ecological reasons that led the South African judge to issue the ruling against the Shell project, Shell’s activities would have also affected the lives of the local indigenous population.

“Shell had the duty to consult with the communities that would have been affected by the seismic investigation”, ruled Gerald Bloem, “the population has the right on that stretch of coast also for a special spiritual and cultural connection with the ocean.”

The judge highlighted how destroying the current balance of flora and fauna would bring a huge impact on the livelihood of those who live in this area of South Africa, emphasising the impacts of extractive mining on delicate ecosystems that humans have interrelated with for millennia.

It is an encouraging development, and we hope this leads to similar rulings across the world.

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A worm that eats plastic, a recent discovery that could be a game changer for preserving the environment from the pollution of this now abundant and toxic material. This now ubiquitous material is found in seas,  soil, fish and we are even finding microplastics inside of us. 

But the larvae of the Zophobas Morio can eat and digest polystyrene in just a few days — the main polymer used to make plastic — which normally takes decades to break down naturally.

Scientists at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences of the University of Queensland in Australia started the research in 2017. In the experiment, the researchers divided the worms into three groups and the small larvae were fed different foods. The first group were fed wheat, the second polystyrene, and the third were given nothing. The results were published in the scientific journal Microbial Genomics. 

The results are that the worm eating the polystyrene grew more than the others, proving the worm can take energy from polystyrene thanks to the microbes that are inside them.

The discovery is exceptional and new studies will now start to understand how to exploit it. It is impossible to think of feeding all the plastic to millions of larvae. It is necessary instead to understand what is the process of degradation of polystyrene and to isolate substances that allow rapid decomposition. We can then use the system to get rid of a problem that poses a serious risk to the health of the planet.

The “super worm” has been proposed, in several nutritional studies, as an alternative food, for its high content of proteins and fats. But he has also been known for his “superpower”  of eating polystyrene. This was first noticed a few years ago by a group of Filipino high school students. Since then, this ability of the Zophobas Morio (its scientific name) has become a matter of study. 

Chris Rinke and researchers from the Australian University’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences have put this talent to the test. The life cycle of the larvae of Zophobas Morio, like all larvae, predicts that at some point they form a cocoon, become pupae, and resurface as an adult individual. In their case, a black beetle. This happens if they remain isolated. But if raised in large groups, larvae remain and continue to eat.

According to the results, presented in a paper published in the journal Microbial Genomics, “the super worms that fed on polystyrene not only survived but also took a bit of weight — says the team coordinator — this means that worms can draw energy from polystyrene, more likely with the help of microbes inside them”.

The researchers used a technique called metagenomics to find different enzymes inside the larvae that have the ability to degrade polystyrene and styrene. Although recent studies suggests polystyrene degrades in over hundred years in sunlight, the larvae can engage in the same process in just a few days.

Instead of filling giant tanks with millions of super worms that open their jaws waiting for a cascade of white polystyrene (fascinating idea but impractical), there are other possibilities, like chopping the material and then feeding it to the enzymes replicated thanks to the study. We could also grow the larvae’s intestinal bacteria in a laboratory and further test their ability to degrade polystyrene and “increase this process to a level required for an entire recycling plant,” said Jiarui Sun, a PhD student working on the project.  According to Rinke “the degradation products of this reaction can be used by other microbes to create high-value compounds such as bioplastics”.

Zophobas Morio is just one of the invertebrates that promise to help mitigate the problem of the billions of tons of plastic that are produced each year and dispersed in the environment around the world. The Tenebrio Molitor also has these abilities. In 2017 an Italian biologist (and beekeeper) Federica Bertocchini, from the Spanish Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria, discovered this caterpillar that eats polyethylene. It is the larva of the Galleria mellonella, called the “wax moth”.

All over the world, research institutes and companies are studying enzymes derived from insects and microorganisms found in compost and landfills that have the “superpower” of degrading plastic. We don’t know if this could be the turning point for the future, but after the damage we have done to our planet, it makes sense that the solutions to our current crises exist in the natural world.

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• A cup of coffee= 130 litres of water
• A bottle of coca-cola= 28 litres of water for ingredients and 7 for packaging
• A glass of bier= 74 litres
• Each one of your t-shirt= 2500 litres

You turn on a faucet and running water comes out. However much we want, whenever we want. And that’s the big problem. It creates the belief that water is available in an unlimited amount. However, this is far from the truth. 

Just think of the fact that the civilizations that managed to channel the water prospered, while those that failed to do so declined; and that by 2040, most of the world will not have enough water to meet the annual requirement. We really are at a point of no return.

Cape Town could be the first big city in the world to remain without water, but not only Cape Town: Sao Paulo, Melbourne, Jakarta, London, Beijing, Istanbul, Tokyo, Bangalore, Barcelona and Mexico City will come to day zero in the coming decades unless the use of water fundamentally changes. The fact that we all need water to survive makes the crisis difficult, but it can also inspire people to take exceptional action to solve it. 

That is what happened in Cape Town: day zero was supposed to be March 18th 2018, but then people started saving water and the date of day zero was postponed. In early 2018, water consumption in the city was less than half of what it had been four years before, and day zero was put on hold indefinitely. Since the city started talking about day zero, people had reduced their water consumption significantly and this is proof of what can be done if society puts its mind to it. The trick is to recognize the value of water before it’s too late.

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The other problem is that there is the belief that there is no shortage of water because the earth is “the blue planet.” We have 1.234 billion litres, but actually, 97 per cent of the water is salty and 2 per cent is trapped in the ice at the pole, so in reality, all mankind has access to is  1% of water to survive. In addition, that 1% is mostly underground, making it very difficult and expensive to access, so 90% of the world’s population has settled less than 10 km from a source of water such as rivers and lakes, in order to make it easier to access water.

On the other hand, the problem is that some cities manage to take too much water.

For example, Mexico City is practically sinking because more or less 50% of the water from the local aquifer is pumped, causing the city to start sinking into the ground because there is no longer any water to withstand the weight of the city. That means they’re likely to lose half of the water supply in the next 30, 50 years; NASA data shows aquifers in northern India will decrease by 110 million litres in just 10 years.

The rain and snow that irrigate crops and fill lakes and rivers are becoming increasingly scarce, due to climate change, which has caused droughts that make water increasingly less available. In addition, in this century, water consumption has increased seven times: there are simply too many people on the earth.  

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Humans need to drink almost 4 litres of water a day, but that corresponds to 8% of the drinking water each year. However, the major of potable water goes to agriculture, industry, food, and the products we use. Take, for example, Coca-Cola. 98% of the water is contained in all the ingredients used to make a bottle of Coca-Cola. 28 litres for ingredients and 7 for packaging. They need 74 litres of water for each glass of beer. One cup of coffee needs 130 litres. Each of your t-shirts costs 2500 litres. 

But nothing consumes as much water as meat production. Alfalfa is a common ingredient in animal feed and to grow 1 kg you need 510 litres of water. An average cow consumes about 12 kg of feed per day. Dividing, only 113 grams of burgers need 1650 litres. That’s a big problem because the world is eating more high-calorie diets with more meat, and that’s not sustainable. 

The real cost of water doesn’t end up in the cost of burgers. This is why fast foods have cheap burgers. The water is treated, and you give it a price as if there was enough. So, we end up using it in absurd ways and wasting it. Arid Southern California uses nearly $7.7 trillion a year to grow alfalfa from the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away. The amount they pay for it doesn’t even cover the shipping cost. Only a fraction of the water used by the South African wine industry would be enough for Cape Town faucets. India and China practice intensive agriculture in some of the aridest regions.

If water had a higher price, we would not grow crops that make no sense like in the driest places on earth and governments would decide to invest in repairing the water infrastructure and give it the right value.

Mexico City is experiencing an existential crisis with water, losing almost half of the amount of drinking water due to leaking pipes. We value water so poorly that we discharge two million tons of sewage and agricultural and industrial waste daily.

The more water becomes scarce, the more it becomes a kind of competition, with winners and losers, so water scarcity is leading more and more to conflict in the world: in north-eastern Nigeria, Lake Chad has dried up and livelihoods are exhausted; water scarcity is at the heart of the Darfur war, which in 2001 caused the death of hundreds of thousands of lives; some analysts say that the civil war in Syria was largely caused by a serious drought in 2006.

As tensions grow over drinking water, governments are considering an idea once thought unlikely: to create more. Ocean water desalination has doubled in the last decade, but the amount of water produced in a year is still less than 1% of world water consumption. Also because desalinating water means taking water from the ocean or brackish water that contains a lot of salt, from the subsoil, and treating it to make it drinkable water, and this requires a lot of money and a lot of energy. This would make more sense if the water were valued more economically. But it would also mean that water would cost more for everything. The price of consumer goods would skyrocket, and some companies could fail or make different decisions about where to locate their operations.

In 2010, the United Nations recognized water as a human right, associating more or less 60 litres of water per person per day, and beyond that, people should pay for water.

This would push for water conservation and water saving, but would also be a burden that must bring the most disadvantaged people. It could happen that we will end up treating water not equally, setting a price that wouldn’t guarantee human rights.

And the issue is that water is not like oil or like other goods on earth, because without water we die.

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Haarlem, a town a few miles from Amsterdam, is breaking headlines recently, as the town has decided that it will no longer permit the advertisement of meat from 2024. With a population of 160,000, Haarlem will become the first city in the world to implement a ban on meat advertising in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint.

The initiative, which was presented last year by Councillor Ziggy Klazes of the Dutch environmental party GroenLinks (“Green Left”), aims to encourage lower meat consumption and raise awareness of the issue of reducing greenhouse gases produced by farms due to the fact that 14.5% of all greenhouse emissions come from intensive livestock farming. 

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It is not only meat that will be included in the advertising ban. The town of Haarlem is also working on a wider list of products whose advertisements will also be banned due to their role in contributing to the climate crisis.

There are still a number of unclear points on how the ban will be implemented, but it is certain that before 2024 it will not be put into practice because only then will the licences granted to meat producers to advertise in the city expire.

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Despite this ban on meat being considered controversial, it is not unique. For decades, there have been EU-wide bans on smoking adverts as it has been declared a social and environmental problem. Similarly, this ban doesn’t eliminate one’s right to consume meat, but rather eliminates a channel of adhesion, and in return adds a channel of awareness. 

As Klazes told in an interview on Haarlem105:

“If people want to continue eating meat, well. But we cannot tell them that there is a climate crisis and at the same time encourage them to buy products that are the cause of this crisis”.

Klazes also said he hoped that the initiative would be imitated by other cities, and possibly also by the national government.

The city of Haarlem’s meat advertising ban has not been met with welcome arms by all. Sander van den Raadt, a local leader of the centre-right Trots party, criticized the initiative saying that it is a restriction on freedom of expression:

“It is extraordinary that the municipality of Haarlem organizes a large advertising campaign to tell people in the city that they can be themselves and love who they want, but at the same time if these like meat instead of vegetables will come a “paternalistic brigade” to tell them that they are wrong”.

Klazes defended the decision of the city council in a post on his party’s website, responding to criticism and those who claim that there is nothing wrong with advertising meat. 

According to Klazes, if this were the case, the advertising of meat products should tell the truth:

No skipping lambs and happy calves willing, so to speak, on their own initiative to jump on the knife for us. No. The ads should contain gory images of slaughterhouses, cows poked between the eyes, endless rails with dead chickens, and stables with sows and pigs on steel nets. [… ] The slogan could be “Flesh, not beautiful, but good”.

As far as we are concerned, it would not be a bad thing if the next step would be to publicize the daily lives of farm animals. Simply seeing the finished product, in all its splendour, really makes you think that there is no cruel hidden procedure but a normal known process. 

We also know that with new marketing strategies everything can seem tasty and palatable. That’s why this new step would be ideal as it allows for more conscious consumption. It is so important that consumers learn more about the process from the farm to the table, in order to decide if what they are eating is really worth it.

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The word sustainability refers to the possibility of satisfying our needs without compromising the needs of future generations. This concept is based on three pillars – environment, economy and society – and in wine this translates through certified sustainable, organic or biodynamic wines.

Pesticides, fertilizers and chemical herbicides, or rather, synthetic, have been used in conventional agriculture for decades, to defend crops from pests and to provide the nutrients that the vine needs. The massive use of pesticides in agriculture is not only highly polluting, but also impoverishes the soil, kills the microorganisms that populate it and disrupts its structure, causing landslides, erosion, and water retention difficulties. This creates a vicious circle in which more and more products are needed to make a destroyed soil fertile again. Pesticides are deposited on grapes, on the ground and penetrate the aquifers.

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As if that were not enough, there is no body of government that ensures the real sustainability of wine. Many wine brands declare themselves eco-friendly but that doesn’t equate to being green. We would even equate this “self-declaration” to greenwashing.

So, how to enjoy a good glass of wine while remaining faithful to our principles and the planet? Let us outline the steps for you!

What Exactly Is Sustainable Wine?

“There’s a lot of confusion about what sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wines mean,” says Meraviglia Diego Meraviglia, president and director of education at the North American Sommelier Association. “They often get mixed up and are used interchangeably, but they actually mean very different things.”

According to Meraviglia, whether a wine is considered sustainable depends on the farming and winemaking practices that vineyards follow. To be certified as sustainable, wineries and vineyards must meet certain eco-friendly standards, that run the gamut of composting waste to make fertilizer, conserving water, and reducing energy consumption and pesticide use.

We can mention LIVE, a nonprofit organization that certifies sustainable wine, depending on records for biodiversity, irrigation and fertilizer use, records of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as water management and employee health and safety. Other non-profit organizations that certify sustainable wines include California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, LODI Rules, and SIP. 

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What Does Sustainability in Vineyards Look Like?

In Sonoma, California, there’s Benziger Family Winery, one of the most sustainable vineyards in the U.S. The vice president of trade relations, Chris Benziger, declares that one of the ways to practice sustainability is by including more biodiversity. For example, Instead of spraying Roundup (a pesticide) to kill leafhoppers, they created a particular type of insectaries [plants that attract pests to keep them off crops], have birds to keep pests down, and they also use a water-saving system that allows water to purify itself naturally. “We filter our wastewater through constructed wetlands filled with diverse plants that scrub the water within the roots of the plants, purifying it. The water then collects in a second pond, where it is distributed throughout the property. We have recycled millions of gallons of water in this way.”. 

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How Is This Different from Organic and Biodynamic Wine?

Here’s what’s confusing: many sustainable wineries also follow organic and biodynamic farming practices. But not all organic or biodynamic wines are automatically declared sustainable.

The only body that can issue certified organic labelling on wine bottles is the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). To be certified USDA organic, the grapes used in the wine and the wine-making process must be organic; that means that not only are the grapes to be grown without the use of pesticides or GMOs, but everything that goes into the wine (such as the yeast used for fermenting) must be organic, too. According to Meraviglia, this means that the quality of wine suffers, because to make wine you have to do a lot of man-made things, but we think that’s worth it.

On the other hand, biodynamics is a holistic farming practice developed in the 1920s by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Based on the different phases of the moon, Biodynamics brings organic farming to the spiritual level. “You harvest grapes when the moon is in a certain position, and it [is believed to have] a direct effect on the wine’s character and behaviour. While [as said] biodynamics deals with the spiritual level, organic stops at the farming level,” Meraviglia says.

Demeter Association, Inc., is a nonprofit organization that certifies the biodynamic practices of vineyards and wineries, that must meet the strict standards set by the Association

How Can I Easily Buy Sustainable Wine?

So you are a wine fan and want to make the step towards sustainable drinking?

Before choosing, take time to learn more about where the wine came from and how the grapes are produced. The easiest way is to look for some of the above-mentioned y labels—such as LIVE—on bottles of wine when you shop.

So enjoy your next happy hour, now you know how to do it sustainably!

Best sustainable wine delivery services:

• Dry Farm Wines
• Thrive Market
• Plonk Wine Club
• Winc
• Tour Guide Wines

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Have you ever bought a t-shirt that you have worn once or twice at most?

So-called Fast Fashion, the production of clothes that are “consumed” within a few weeks, being thrown away or forgotten, is the cause of untold environmental damage, besides being a source of exploitation for millions of workers in developing nations.

Did you know that the textile industry has a greater environmental footprint than aviation and shipping combined? The main culprit rests on the creation of garments with an extremely small production cycle (from 15 days up to two traditional years, from conception to marketing.)

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But, even if fast fashion seems cheap, it is not: someone, somewhere is paying the price.

What is the problem with fast fashion? Fast fashion brings to the market clothes that capture a temporary fashion – and therefore the average life of these products is reduced to a few weeks

• 3 items out of 5 end up in a landfill
• textile manufacturing causes one-fifth of industrial pollution
• over 200 tons of water used in the production of only 1 ton of colored fabrics

Not to mention the conditions of the workers:

• 93% of workers in the sector do not receive the minimum wage
• 68% of fast fashion brands do not respect gender equality
• different substances used in the production processes are carcinogenic

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What can we do?
Here are 5 actions we can do to shop consciously:

1. to find out about the companies’ environmental/ethical profile
2. buy less clothes, but with a higher quality that last longer
3.  Don’t let clothes in landfills: resell, exchange, or reuse (an old shirt can become a rag)
4.  Stop following trends: fast fashion follows trends that last just one season.
5.  Pay attention to your washing practices to extend the life cycle of the garments.

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As the world population becomes more accustomed to living in urban areas, the need for greener transportation other than an electric automobil will increase. The waste of time, stress, and pollution are just some of the factors that are driving European cities to follow the example of metropolis like Amsterdam, where the use of bicycles is just one of the easy ways to combat pollution. Policies such as  Paris’s reduction of the maximum speed, Copenhagen’s lack of cars and abundance of bikes, free public transport in Luxembourg, and Pontevedra, where there are no cars: show the commitment of European metropolises to reduce car pollution.

1. Paris

Paris, “the city of 15 minutes”. This is the name of the project that drives the new goal of Paris: becoming a place where every essential service is reachable on foot or by bike. The lockdown was paradoxically helpful, allowing the city to transform 50 km of roads into permanent cycle paths. Even the maximum speed for cars has decreased from 50 to 30 km per hour in most of the city.

2. Copenhagen

1.44 million km. That’s 35 times around the world. That is, how much the citizens of Copenhagen pedal every day. To favor the increase of this percentage is the conformation of the city: 350 km of main roads in Copenhagen are made up of cycle paths, the infrastructure is huge and investments aimed at increasing these figures. Copenhagen will thus become carbon-neutral by 2025, an aim that the city will achieve by transforming 0 of surface in routes that you can be travelled by bike, foot or public vehicles.

3. Luxembourg

676 per thousand inhabitants is the share of cars that made Luxembourg the country with the record in the continent. This has motivated the implementation of free transport throughout the territory of the state.

Whether you are a Luxembourgian, a tourist or a border tourist, the state will offer you free transport throughout the country, thanks to the more than 200 thousand people who every day from France, Belgium and Germany enter the country, which that favored the state to make the decision to invest 4 billion in the railways by 2027.

4. Pontevedra

Now imagine your hometown, industrialized, but safe. And now imagine that you can walk or pedal freely without having worries about vehicles exceeding 40 km/h. That’s what happens in Pontevedra, the city without a car.

20 years ago, in 2001, the city of Pontevedra was pedestrian for 90%, cars can only move in a restricted area whose maximum limit is 30 km/h. CO2 emissions have thus decreased by 70% by improving quality of life, local trade and reducing road fatalities.

Referring to the italian average, a country where there are 663 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, you lose an average of over 10 working days every year, days that you could spend in every other way: on the beach? Reading? Hanging out? Everywhere, but not stuck in the traffic, cursing the yourself of half an hour before for deciding to go down that road.

So, what about you? Would you rather spend 40 minutes in the car with paperwork reminiscent of the office you have just left, or recuperate your energy with clean air after a day of work stress? The choice is up to you.

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