Richmond School are at the top of the Environment A-list

A group of Year 10, 11 and 12 students from Richmond School in North Yorkshire are working on raising awareness of the environment in their local area. A lot of Climate change awareness is done on a much larger scale but good things come in small packages. The group has been working together since December 2009. So far they have been working on what environmentally friendly things will be included in their new school and had talks from the Green Party, T.R.Y (Transition Richmond, Yorkshire), and a Swale dale National Park Ranger about what is being done already in their local area.
They are currently working on things to include in a window display in the Ken Warne’s in Finkle Street in Richmond. The display will be about Activism and the arts. They are asking students in their school to create things such as poems, art work, models and creative writing. The theme for the display will be “Our town in 2020”. Group leader Arlene Garnett said “The project is to use the Arts to express environmental concerns. We have been offered the TRY window at Ken Warne’s for a display on Rich in the year 2020.” They are also looking for songs, drama and dance for assemblies in school.
The group has also been doing a site audit of the school in order to get signed up to Action Aid 10:10 – Powerdown. The aim of this will be to cut the schools emissions by 10% over a year. They are now signed up to the project and are working out how they will manage to do it. If they have success with that they can get a visit from the Carbon Trust who will survey the school. They will then be given advice on how to reduce their carbon footprint even more.
A lot of environmentally friendly features are included in the new school that is being built. These should include some sort of environmentally friendly power such as solar panels and the new hall has windows that open and close according to the heat in the room. The group has been for a tour round what is currently being worked on in the new school and have put questions to the builders and planners who are working on it.
The groups work so far shows that work on environmental issues can be worked on in smaller groups and on a smaller scale than some of the deals trying to be reached on reducing CO2 levels. After all it will be our future it will effect.

Newspaper Vs News site: Which is greener?

In the UK alone we buy millions of newspapers every day. Each day the Sun and the Times newspapers are bought by 4.5 million of us, but would reading online newspapers and news websites decrease how much we contribute to Climate Change when reading the news? The Sun's website gets 1.3 million people browsing it per day. If everyone who buys those two newspapers looked on the website for the Sun, surely we would do less harm to the environment, or would we?

We may save a lot of paper but unless we burn all the newspapers, it's not going to do much harm to the environment. The average computer uses up to 500 watts and a CRT or LCD monitor uses a maximum of 150 watts. This will use a lot of fossil fuels but not everyone has access to the internet or even a computer. According to information released in September 2009 by internetsworldstats.com, there are 46,686,900 internet users in the UK. News websites such as BBC News and Sky News get thousands of visits every day.

Producing newspapers isn't all that harmful to the environment, but transporting them is a big problem. According to the Royal Mail, there are at least 12,134 branches of the Post Office in the UK. There are hundreds of post vans delivery news and other private transport firms who collect and deliver to newsagents. How many people then drive to the newsagent to collect their papers is unknown, but at least most local deliveries are by young people on foot or bicycle.

There's no clear winner when deciding which form of news reading is more environmentally friendly, as we don't have all the information to back it up. However, in my opinion, newspapers are more environmentally friendly because of the amount of fossil fuel used in providing the electricity to run a computer. What do you think? Feel free to comment with your views.

Europes energy could be completely renewable by 2050

According to a report released on Monday earlier this week Europe’s energy could be all renewable by 2050 and 40 percent of global energy demands by 2050. A "super-smart" grid that will be powered by solar farms in North Africa, wind farms around Europe and the North Sea, hydro-electric from Scandinavia and the Alps and a mixture of biomass and marine energy could make carbon based fuels such as fossil fuels no longer needed.

About 50 percent of Europe’s fuels are imported fuels. This means using more fuel to import them. According to projections this could increase to 70 percent. in the next few decades. The report said this change in the type of energy we use is needed to stay within the limit of two degrees Celsius to at least limit the effects of Global Warming.

The EU is sticking to it's promises of a goal to supply 20 percent of it's energy needs with renewable energy by 2020. This is what the European Commission reported earlier in March. In my opinion I think that it's a good idea but I wonder where all the solar farms and wind farms will be put without destroying some of the environment first. There’s plenty of land to put them on but they just need to find it. What do you think?

A poem about the environment by Freda Vitty

Who Cares?

Study the environment? 

It’s not so cool. 

They’re just not interested 

The kids at school. 

They don’t seem to realise 

Learning about earth 

Just might make the difference 

And prove its worth. 

It’s now in the present 

We need to act. 

It’s our gift to the future. 

Let’s face the fact 

If we don’t save energy 

What began with a bang 

May fade out with a whimper 

Let’s start a gang 

With science and knowledge 

A gang that’s aware 

A global gang to show the world 

We really do care.

How to make your computer and gadgets more environmentally friendly

We all use PC’s pretty much every day but we don’t realize all the different ways that we can save energy to help stop Climate Change while using computers.  By using sites like Blackle or Ecofree.org you can save at least twenty-five watts. You may think this is nothing and won’t help but if everyone does this it will help quite a lot. Other ways to lower energy usage while browsing the web or just on the computers are to go into the System and Maintenance section in Control Panel and then select Power Options. You can then set this to Balanced, Power saver or High performance (Only on Vista). This will lower the energy usage of your computer. Blackle.com was started in January 2007 by Toby Heap. The Blackle home page shows the number of megawatt-hours that have been saved by using the site.

Darren Yates who is a technology journalist did a test which concluded that when displaying light things on PCs such as Google LCD monitors save more energy than CRT monitors. Just this month Sony has launched an eco-friendly mini laptop. The new Vaio W Series is so green it doesn’t even need an instruction manual. Despite them being eco-friendly the notebooks still have a high definition 10.1 inch screen and a maximum of   250 gigabytes of storage.

Although if you want a computer that will definitely be eco-friendly I would go to Epeat.net which has a list of computers and companies and how green they are. Surprisingly Apple meets all the requirements for EPEATS criteria. Also if you’re wanting something that will be able to do simple tasks like browsing the internet and editing document and you like Apple and Mac operating systems and gadgets then why not try the iPod touch or iPhone because compared to an Apple Mac they use a very small amount of watts. The iPod or iPhone use 0.7 to 2 watts but the Mac Pro uses at least 115 – 263 watts. Plus on January 22nd it was reported that Apple were experimenting with trying to power the iPod and iPhone on solar power. They have been thinking of putting some small solar panels behind the screen. This will be something to look forward to.

On the other hand there are a few new operating systems that look as though they may be an improvement to power usage. These include Windows seven and the iPad but the iPad isn’t released in the UK until March 2010. The new iPad uses about 2.5 watts per hour.

It seems that Apple have found greener ways of using computers but Microsoft and other companies are still catching up with Apple. I’m in favour of Windows as I have Windows Vista myself but Apple is a long way ahead with green technology.

Apple aren't the only ones going for green tech though. In 2007 another American computer company called Lenova released the ThinkCentre A61e which apparently only uses forty-five watts. It's also twenty-five percent smaller than earlier ThinkCentre PCs. It's also compatible with the Solar-PowerPC II which is a solar power charger. The solar panel is one-hundred and ten watts and if the battery of the device being charged is fully drained it will take approximately ten to twelve hours to charge up in direct sunlight.

The PC is made up of approximately ninety percent recyclable and the computer itself is made up of ninety percent reusable materials and its EPEAT rating is Gold. Overall there are many ways to be environmentally friendly when on your computer or portable device and some are still in development. I hope this is some use to you and hope you will start using these tools as well.