According to government data, the recycling rate of waste from households in England was 43.4 percent in 2022 — the most recent information available.

The rate was down from the previous year, when 44.1 percent of households recycled their waste.

England is the only United Kingdom nation whose recycling rate did not show improvement in 2022, reported The Guardian. The lowest rate for that year was in Scotland at 42.1 percent, but that was an improvement from the year before.

“It is deeply disappointing to see recycling rates have fallen, and to see the buildup of litter and fly-tipping in our cities, towns and villages,” said Mary Creagh, circular economy minister, as The Guardian reported. “The new government will move towards a zero-waste economy to increase recycling rates, draw in billions from private sector investment and create thousands of green jobs.”

In England, the weight of “waste from households” was down by 7.2 percent — from 23.1 million tonnes to 21.5 million tonnes — between 2021 and 2022, the statistics showed.

The recycling rate in Wales was 56.9 percent due to Welsh households having had food waste containers for over a decade, and local authorities prioritizing the improvement of recycling rates in the country. In some areas, the rate of recycling was 70 percent.

Northern Ireland’s recycling rate was also higher than Scotland and England at 49.2 percent.

In the rest of Europe, recycling rates were higher than in the UK. The household rate in the European Union was 49 percent, with the bloc’s minimum target set at 50 percent.

Germany had the highest recycling rate in the EU — 68 percent in 2021.

Bottle recycling was delayed in the UK this year — nearly a decade after the plan was initially announced.

Of the 191.2 million tonnes of waste generated by the UK in 2020, England was responsible for 85 percent.

“These statistics should be a wake-up call for the new government. Our recycling system is falling behind while mountains of waste are dumped, burned or shipped off to poorer countries. It is being undermined by huge volumes of cheap virgin plastic flooding the market. We need a bold new approach which focuses on reducing the amount of waste we produce in the first place,” said Rudy Schulkind, a Greenpeace UK political campaigner, as reported by The Guardian. “This November, the final round of negotiations on the global plastics treaty offers a last-chance saloon to tackle plastic pollution. We need a strong, legally binding global target to cut plastic production.”

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Chinese scientists have developed a transpiration energy generator capable of creating electricity using lotus leaves. The generator could turn nearly all leaves on the planet into a continuous and sustainable source of energy.

The researchers said their discovery of the leaf transpiration’s hydrovoltaic effect provided “fresh perspective for advancing green energy technologies,” as the South China Morning Post reported.

The research team said their lotus leaf transpiration generator (LTG) had the ability to power small electronic devices. It could also be used to create electricity networks using plant power.

Hydrovoltaic electricity is reliant on the movement of water and its interaction with solid surfaces. A steady supply of water is often required for current devices, which creates geographic limits, since the devices need to be close to bodies of water like rivers.

“Hydrovoltaic electricity generation, being demonstrated through various forms of water movement, holds great promise for advancing green energy technologies. However, the natural transpiration of plant leaves, as the largest water flux on land accumulating immense latent energy, has rarely been directly harvested,” the scientists wrote in the study. “Here we present a living leaf transpiration generator using a lotus leaf, enabling direct harvest of latent energy via leaf transpiration. The leaf transpiration generator demonstrated sustained all-day electricity generation, featuring an open-circuit voltage of 0.25 V and a short-circuit current of 50 nA, which was effectively amplified in series or parallel connections.”

The study, “Hydrovoltaic electricity generation induced by living leaf transpiration,” was published in the journal Nature Water.

Transpiration in plants involves water moving through the roots to their leaves before evaporating.

“Transpiration is basically evaporation of water from inside plant leaves. Studies have revealed that transpiration accounts for about 10% of the moisture in the atmosphere, with oceans, seas, and other bodies of water (lakes, rivers, streams) providing nearly all of the remaining amount,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. “During a growing season, a leaf will transpire many times more water than its own weight. An acre of corn gives off about 3,000-4,000 gallons (11,400-15,100 liters) of water each day, and a large oak tree can transpire 40,000 gallons (151,000 liters) per year.”

The team estimated that the harvesting of transpiration energy from plants has the potential to produce 67.5 terawatt hours of power globally each year, reported Interesting Engineering.

The researchers said that with technical advancement and continued research, the power generation method could become widely used and commercially viable.

Though the process is still in its early stages, the research team is working on understanding the role of plant transpiration in power generation, enhancing the contact between electrode and plant and integrating LTG with renewable sources of energy like solar and wind.

The authors said the study “uncovers the unprecedented hydrovoltaic effect of leaf transpiration,” as the South China Morning Post reported.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1053 banning all plastic bags at grocery stores in the state beginning in 2026.

In 2014, California passed a ban on plastic shopping bags, but a loophole allowed shoppers to still be able to purchase bags made of thicker plastic for a dime apiece.

A decade later, the choice will no longer be, “Paper” or “Plastic,” but “I brought my own,” “Paper” or “No, thanks.”

“Plastic bags create pollution in our environment and break into microplastics that contaminate our drinking water and threaten our health,” said State Director of California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) Jenn Engstrom in a press release from PIRG. “Californians voted to ban plastic grocery bags in our state almost a decade ago, but the law clearly needed a redo. With the Governor’s signature, California has finally banned plastic bags in grocery checkout lanes once and for all.”

Plastic bags not only pollute the environment, often almost immediately following their use, but break down into tiny toxic plastic pieces called microplastics that have found their way into drinking water, posing a threat to public health.

When California banned plastic grocery bags in 2014, they were the first state in the country to do so. But stores were still allowed to provide “reusable” and “recyclable” plastic bags at checkouts. Unfortunately most of these thicker plastic bags were not reused or recycled, exacerbating the state’s plastic waste problem.

The law did drastically reduce the total number of bags, but their thickness meant more plastic in the trash, reported The New York Times. In 2021, for every 1,000 people in the state, plastic bags weighing 5.89 tons were discarded, a CALPIRG analysis found. Seven years earlier, the same number of people had binned 4.08 tons.

According to CALPIRG, plastic bags are typically only used for 12 minutes, then thrown away. After their brief useful life, they end up in landfills and oceans, where they stay for hundreds of years, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and posing a risk to marine life who ingest and get caught in them.

“Nothing we use for a few minutes should pollute the environment for hundreds of years,” said Laura Deehan, Environment California’s state director, in the press release. “Finally, with this necessary update to the bag ban, plastic grocery bags will no longer be a threat to sea turtles, birds, and other wildlife in California.”

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In March of 1979, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant — which was powered by two pressurized light-water reactors — experienced a cooling malfunction that caused part of the core of the second reactor to melt, releasing radioactive material into the environment.

Constellation Energy has plans to reopen Three Mile Island, and Microsoft has agreed to buy power from it for 20 years.

Recent United States government zero-emissions energy incentives have spurred owners of closed-down nuclear plants to consider reopening them, reported Pennsylvania’s WESA.

Activists are asking the government of Pennsylvania to stop the reopening of the plant.

The second nuclear reactor was shut down following the disaster, but the remaining reactor continued to operate until 2019, when it was closed for economic reasons, The New York Times reported.

In need of increasing amounts of electricity to power the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) at a growing number of data centers, Microsoft has contracted to purchase as much power as possible from the controversial plant for the next two decades.

Constellation Energy has plans for a $1.6-billion refurbishment of the first reactor with a tentative restart in 2028.

In an interview with NPR, Bill Gates sought to alleviate concerns about the shuttered plant’s safety.

“The safety case for this design is incredibly strong just because of the passive mechanisms involved. People have been talking about it for 60 years, that this is the way these things should work,” Gates said. “There’s no high pressure on the reactor. Nothing that’s pushing to get out. Water, as it’s heated up, creates high pressure. And we have no high pressure and no complex systems needed to guarantee the safety. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the best in the world, and they’ll question us and challenge us.”

Facing competition from growing solar and wind power and inexpensive natural gas, 13 nuclear reactors were closed between 2021 and 2022, reported The New York Times.

Nuclear power has been getting a second look from states and businesses seeking to take advantage of its ability to produce consistent electricity without dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.

A tax credit was recently approved by Congress to help keep existing nuclear reactors operating for years.

Workers at Constellation have been inspecting Three Mile Island’s closed reactor for indicators of decay or corrosion and said its main power transformer would need to be replaced and it would need to restore its cooling systems and turbines.

The plant will also need 600 workers to operate the site. The restored reactor would generate 835 megawatts of power — enough for more than 700,000 homes.

A recent poll of Pennsylvania residents found that 57 percent were in support of reopening Three Mile Island “as long as it does not include new taxes or increased electricity rates,” The New York Times reported.

Others are opposed to restarting the nuclear plant under any circumstances. Protestors gathered outside the gates of Three Mile Island last month with signs commemorating the accident.

Physicist Edwin Lyman, a critic of nuclear power with the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed concern that safely restarting a reactor after it having been out of commission for such a long time could end up being more of a technical challenge than anticipated.

“No one’s really done this before,” Lyman said.

Sasha Luccioni, AI start-up Hugging Face’s top climate executive, commented that a single company acquiring such a large amount of energy highlights the seemingly boundless energy needs of AI.

“It doesn’t address the core issues that are making the current practice of AI unsustainable by definition,” Luccioni said, as reported by The Washington Post. “Instead of monopolizing decommissioned nuclear power plants, we should be focusing on integrating sustainability into AI.”

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), levels of released radioactive materials at Three Mile Island were low enough to not be expected to have negative impacts on health, but some of the area’s residents have contested that claim, WESA reported.

Joyce Corradi of Concerned Mothers and Women said restarting the nuclear reactor was unacceptable.

“This is not a pro- or anti-nuclear issue to us. This is a health and safety issue,” Corradi said.

Following the shutdown of a nuclear plant, its owner must decommission the site within 60 years, during which time regular NRC inspections are required.

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