As three of the busiest modern cities around the world, it should come as no surprise that London, New York, and Paris are buzzing with traffic noise.
Now, interactive maps have been developed by climate charity Possible as part of its Car Free Cities campaign, revealing just how intense this noise can be in parts of the three cities.
Unsurprisingly, areas with busy roads and those near airports tend to have the highest levels of noise pollution, while areas with
The global ‘plastic flood’ has reached the Arctic, scientists warn, with microplastic pollution in the polar region now as bad as anywhere else on Earth.
A new study suggests that debris from fabrics, personal care products, packaging and other everyday materials is blighting the pristine wilderness, after being carried north to the Arctic Ocean by waves, winds and rivers.
Large quantities of microplastic can now be found in the water, on the seafloor, remote beaches, in rivers, and even in
Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human placenta. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to
Paula Brooks, who lives in the Ransom Place section of Indianapolis, is affected by pollution from a nearby highway.Faith Blackwell/Undark
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Paula Brooks stands in front of her two-bedroom house on Camp Street in Indianapolis and glances south, she sees brightly painted
Steel production accounts for around seven per cent of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions. There are two reasons for this startling fact. First, steel is made using metallurgic methods that our Iron Age forebears would find familiar; second, it is part of seemingly everything, including buildings, bridges, fridges, planes, trains, and automobiles. According to some estimates, global demand for steel will nearly double by 2050. Green steel, therefore, is urgently needed if we’re to confront climate change.
To understand steel, you need
