Sustainability
Whether thousands of scientists are right and we are slowly changing the climate, poisoning ourselves with chemicals and wastes or not it still makes send to reduce our impacts on the planet that nurtures us and live more sustainably.
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| Basic Fossil Fuel Facts | Basic Fossil Fuel Facts is a web page that summarises the impact of fossil fuels and the urgent actions required in the opinion of Prof. James Hansen. The page is reprinted from a publically circulated letter by James Hansen as a private citizen to Chancellor Angela Merkel, Federal Republic of Germany dated 22 January 2008, with kind permission from James Hansen. Prof. Hansen is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute. The use of man made carbonates to sequester atmospheric CO2 as advocated by TecEco is not mentioned. |
| Biomimicry and Geomimicry | A broad summary of biomimicry and geomimicry. Describes the origins, business case, gives examples |
| Biomimicry and Geomimicry with Concrete | TecEco's contribution has been to provide a way of using carbonate building components from Gaia Engineering and its Eco-Cements that set by absorbing CO2 to together construct the built environment. Find out more here. |
| Carbon Cycles and Sinks and the Case for Man Made Carbonate | Carbon cycles and sinks are described and the case for a man made carbonate sink is numerically verified. |
| Changing Permissions and Rewards Systems to Get Ready for Carbon Trading and Meet the Sustainability Challenge | This page discusses ways to green concrete profitably and explains how prescription based standards and green point criteria as they are currently worded are a hinderance rather than help |
| Climate Change | Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities and the majority view of scientists is that they are causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. |
| Composite Materials of the Future | Materials in the future will more and more be composites made from waste and inert binders like those offered by TecEco. Find out more about how we can convert much more waste to resource on the basis of physical property on this page. |
| Earth systems science treats the entire Earth as a system in its own right, which evolves as a result of positive and negative feedback between constituent sub systems. | |
| Economics is the driving force behind biospheric and anthropogenic activity. This page describes economic systems. | |
| Embodied Energy | Embodied energy is the amount of energy that has gone into the making of a material or thing made with materials. Information about embodied energy in materials used to construct the built environment is provided. |
| Forest and Grassland Sinks | This page describes the importance of old growth forests and grassland for long term sequestration |
| Geomimicry | The term geomimicry is used by John Harrison to describe processes and technologies that mimic long term geological processes. Find out more about geological processes from the past and the correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2. |
| Life Cycle Analysis | LCA is a tool to determine the environmental impacts of products, processes or services, through production, usage, and disposal. Find all about LCA's here. |
| Materials | The flow of materials controls the underlying molecular flows (the study of moleconomics). Affected are emissions, lifetimes and embodied energies, physical properties such as specific heat and conductance, use of recycled wastes, durability, recylability and the properties of wastes returned to the biosphere and geosphere. |
| Planetary Engineering | Whether we like it or not we are de facto planetary engineers and must take this responsibility seriously. |
| Salinity and Pollution | We believe that freshwater salt and pollution must be decoupled and that the key to understanding this is the water dynamic. |
| Solutions to the Global Warming Problem | There are a number of competing technical solutions for global warming (whacky and otherwise) and this page gives details. |
| Sustainability Challenge | Our current economic activities are unsustainable as the depletion of our natural resources and the accumulation of wastes in our biosphere-geosphere are both occurring faster than the earth's ability to cope. Read about the sustainability challenge on this page. |
| Sustainability and Eco-Cements | Eco-Cement Concretes are environmentally friendly because in permeable concretes the magnesium oxide will first hydrate using mix water and then carbonate resulting in significant sequestration |
| Sustainability Information | This page contains articles and papers containing background information about sustainability, global warming etc. that you can download. |
| Sequestration in the Built Environment | We must find ways of getting the CO2 out of the air as well as reduce the rate at which we are putting it there. These ways will not be effective unless everybody everywhere is using them so they have to be economic. TecEco and other Global Sustainability partners believe that the logical solution is to sequester carbon as a building material in the built environment. Find out more on this web page |
| TecEco Cements and Sustainability | The new TecEco binder technologies are a breakthrough in that they change the technology paradigm, demonstrating that materials can make a big difference to sustainability by providing composites that can utilise wastes due to their low reactivity and high adhesion, have lower embodied energies and reduced net emissions. Eco-Cements set by absorbing CO2. Find out more. |
| The Implications of Gaia Engineering for the Cement and Concrete Industry | This page challenges the Cement and Concrete Industry to make cements without releases and concretes out of man made carbonate. It discusses the non performance of the Kyoto process and the Gaia Engineering solution |
| The Role of Soils in Sequestration | This page describes the importance of old growth forests and grassland for long term sequestration |
| The Techno-Process | The techno-process (see the sustainability challenge) describes the manner in which we take resources from the environment around us, how we manipulate and make materials out of what we take and what we waste. |
| The Water Cycle | The water or hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and water changes state and is stored as it moves through it. Human intervention is removing natural filtration processes and reducing the time it takes for water to return to the oceans resulting in less moisture on land, salinity and aridity. |
| Triple Bottom Line | The term ‘triple bottom line’ is used as a framework for measuring and reporting corporate performance against economic, social and environmental parameters. |
| Waste and Recycling | For greater sustainability it is obvious that we need to reduce, reuse and recycle in that order of priority because all recycling techniques consume energy for transportation and processing and some also use considerable amounts of water. |
| Water Shortages | The amount of water in the world is finite. The number of us is growing quickly and our water use is growing more quickly. A third of the world's population lives in water-stressed countries. By 2025, this is expected to rise to two-thirds. |
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