Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our...
Pharmaceutical waste continues to be a huge problem. To eliminate non-biodegradable and single-use plastics from the supply chain, more research is taking place around bio-based PET. It's made from ethylene derived from sugarcane which has a negative carbon footprint, using CO2 and releasing oxy...
774 parts per billion (ppb) [Source: IPCC]. While there isn't as much methane as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane can absorb and emit twenty times more heat than CO2 [Source
A byproduct of this interaction is methane gas, which gets vented into space. Meanwhile, reclaimed oxygen enters the ISS air supply [source: Starr]. While that's going on, drinking water gets recycled as some of these very mechanisms repackage exhaled air. Water is also reclaimed by ...
When left to rot, wood waste is actually an environmental hazard that generates methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. One solution is to ship the sawdust to a power plant designed to burn it. The heat is used to generate electricity. The idea is more than feasible, it's already in practice...
aPlants which occur where you do not want them are called weeds. Gases that occur where you do not expect or want them are considered stray gases. The most common stray gases are methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Stray gases may be naturally occurring, or they may be man-made....
emissions,such as methane and carbon dioxide produced by cattle,sulphurs and carbon dioxide produced by volcanoes,carbon dioxide produced by humans,carbon dioxide produced in the supply chain,carbon dioxide produced by businesses,ships or aeroplanes then the list becomes endless.But is it all bad?We...
To put these numbers into a bit more context, it might be helpful to just review the definition of a carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases (which includes carbon dioxide as well as methane) that are generated by actions — in this case to grow, ha...
Also, the energy generation through fossil fuels can create harmful gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide, which contribute to the greenhouse effect; the greenhouse effect is a natural process for warming the earth to a livable temperature, but when the burning of fossil ...
There is also a link between high air pollution levels and climate change. As the World Health Organization notes, "Reducing ambient and household air pollution can also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and short-lived climate pollutants, such as black carbon particles and methane, therefo...