How We Get To Next is a UK-based science and technology website that dedicates itself to finding inspiring stories about the people and places building our future. I’ve written a number of stories for How We Get To Next covering Government initiatives, technological developments and non-Government programs to help create a more sustainable future.
My collection of stories are below.
Could Seeds Planted by Fleets of Gardening Drones Repair the World’s Forests?
Published May 2015
Over the weekend, 35,000 volunteers in Ecuador broke the Guinness World Record for mass tree-planting. As part of the Ecuadorian government’s revamped environment policy, volunteers planted 350,000 new trees in an effort to reforest the country’s degraded tropical ecosystems.
With global deforestation rates continuing to increase, reforestation is becoming more important than ever. Forests are essential both for the protection of global biodiversity, as well as in acting as an ally in combating global climate change. Yet, as the Ecuadorian experience shows, replanting at the necessary scale is a difficult and time-consuming task. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to break world records every day, or even every month.
But what if we could plant trees faster, and maybe even cheaper? That’s what a new company, BioCarbon Engineering, has set its eyes on. After featuring in a Drones for Good competition in the United Arab Emirates in February, it has boldly claimed it can plant one billion trees per year using drones.
The Global Race Is on to Replace Roads with More Sustainable Materials
When you think of sustainability, you probably don’t think of roads — in fact, probably the opposite. Images of highways cutting through the countryside and congested streets are often used to highlight the unsustainable nature of modern industrialization.
The numbers tend to back up the images. The asphalt used in roads is responsible for 1.6 million tons of CO2 globally each year — around two percent of all road transport emissions. As Mark Harris writes in The Guardian: “Building and maintaining a single mile of freeway takes as much energy as 200 U.S. homes use in a year, consumes as much raw material as 1,000 households get through in 365 days, and generates more waste than 1,200 homes produce annually.”
Is there a way we can make the process more sustainable?
Food Sharing Apps May Reduce Billions of Pounds of Waste
Earlier this month, supermarket giant Tesco announced it would begin donating leftover food from its supermarkets to charities across the United Kingdom. Coming just months after the company faced controversy when a couple was summoned to court for “stealing” food from bins outside one of its stores, this seems to be a major — and important — shift. In donating leftover products, Tesco is becoming part of a trend toward using simple technology to reduce food waste.
To implement its plans, Tesco has signed up with the food distribution charity FareShare. FareShare operates across the United Kingdom, distributing leftover food to some 2,000 charities. Its CEO, Lindsay Boswell, explained that FareShare has actually been working with Tesco for a number of years now, collecting food wasted at the supply end of the market chain. To tackle the issue of waste food at the retail end, however, the two had to come up with a unique, technological solution — an application called FoodCloud.
France Mandates That Its Roofs Be Covered in Solar Panels and Gardens — Should We, Too?
Last week, the French government passed legislation mandating that the roofs of all new commercial buildings be partially covered by solar panels or rooftop gardens. The legislation was scaled back from its original vision but has still been dubbed a trailblazing approach to urban sustainability.
The roofs of our buildings provide a potentially surprising option for building more environmentally friendly cities. Solar panels have obvious benefits; they offer a way to use the top of a building to generate renewable energy. Beyond solar, in New York the White Roof Project is drawing on the millennia-old Mediterranean and Middle Eastern concept of painting roofs white to keep buildings cool. London buses apply a similar idea.
Rooftop gardening can provide a host of benefits, as well.