Research is yielding strategies for making plastics greener and more sustainable. But without support as they scale up, new versions will struggle to compete with well-established synthetic plastics.
Looking through semitransparent cells – one day these could be big enough to make windows.
UNSW
Solar windows would need to trap enough light to generate power, while letting through enough to keep buildings light. Thankfully, newly developed semitransparent cells offer to do just that.
With some tweaks to the recipe, cement and concrete can be made kinder to the planet.
Postman Photos/Shutterstock.com
Cement has a huge greenhouse footprint, largely because the chemical process by which it is made releases carbon dioxide. But there are several different ways for cement to green up its act.
Imagine a wind turbine, but underwater, not fixed to the seabed, and able to work 24/7.
The Kariba dam on the Zambezi River produces most of the electricity used in Zimbabwe and Zambia, supports extensive fishing and tourism industries and protects hundreds of thousands of people from floods.
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Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series…
Battery costs can make up a quarter of the cost of an electric car such as this Tesla Model S.
Shal Farley/Flickr
At the heart of the current debate around energy is the question of storage. In cars, how to build batteries that run for hundreds of kilometres; in electricity, storing energy from solar panels for when…
There is increasing talk of electrification of the UK’s railway network. But electrification is an expensive business, requiring much new hardware including masts, wiring, substations and so on. Such an…