Skip to main content

New Scientist falls for a bogeyman

In my book Ecologic I describe the concept of an ecological bogeyman. This is either something that sounds scary but isn't, or that sounds good but doesn't deliver. It's something where words fool us into thinking something is better or worse than it really is. A classic example is the way advertisers use the word 'natural', which instantly generates warm, cuddly feelings, even though in practice nature is rarely warm or cuddly.

A bogeyman that regularly looms up is the word 'biodegradable.' It sounds good and green, so it must be good for the planet, right? And the parent company of New Scientist magazine have fallen right into its trap. The Feedback section of the latest issue explains that New Scientist is wrapped in a biodegradable form of plastic. This will apparently 'degrade when subject to environmental conditions to produce water, carbon dioxide and biomass.' The biomass will probably then degrade further giving off methane.

So now, please remind me, why we want this wrapper to turn into greenhouse gasses, rather than lock them away for hundreds of years? Biodegradable plastics belong to an older generation of ecology when we were more worried about having enough holes in the ground than about climate change. Get your act together, New Scientist.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous6 April 2010 at 22:45

    Yes, methane is a green house gas….but is methane all that bad? How about captured methane which in a landfill is known as landfill gases (LFG’s)…is that bad? LFG’s can and are being captured to produce energy. Seems to me that using our trash to produce energy might be a good thing. By the way, the federal government mandates that all landfills capture LFG’s. There are better designed landfills known as “Bioreactor Landfills” which promote biodegradation. Bioreactor landfills are more efficient at capturing LFG’s. An added benefit to a bioreactor is that the life of a landfill is 20-30 percent longer than a normal dry-tomb landfill. There are no perfect answers for fixing our problems but doing nothing isn’t a viable answer either.
    Max
    http://www.ensobottles.com
    “Bottles for a Healthier Earth”

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brian Clegg7 April 2010 at 11:02

    Methane isn't just a greenhouse gas, it's 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 - and the fact is that it isn't being captured in the vast majority of landfills. But as it happens, the primary emission in this case is carbon dioxide, which I don't think even you can use!

    I usually delete comments that are blatent adverts, but I'll let you get away with it because I'm all in favour of captured LFGs.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
122 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more