The British supermarket chain Tesco recently made news with the announcement that they had opened the “world’s first carbon-neutral supermarket”. The store, which was first announced in mid-2009, opened last month in the Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey. The building was constructed using a wooden frame built from sustainably-produced lumber, utilizes a 95% efficient combined-cycle heating and power plant, and has a built-in rainwater collection system to use for toilets and the store’s car wash. Tesco began making significant efforts toward reducing carbon emissions in their operations a couple of years ago, pledging to reduce their carbon emissions by 50% in some aspects of their business as soon as 2012.
On a much smaller scale than the massive retail presence of Tesco, a grocery in London called “Unpackaged” promises just that: no packaging of the goods sold in their shop. Their store is similar to the bulk food sections found in Whole Foods in the U.S.; customers are encouraged to bring their own refillable containers for dry goods, oils, and even cleaning products. Where packaging is unavoidable, they’ve made efforts to make sure that the packaging is recyclable, as you can see in the photo above. Needless to say, one little boutique grocery doesn’t make a huge impact the way a supermarket chain like Tesco does, but certainly retailers who can throw their weight around like Tesco or Wal-Mart could embrace this particular concept.
Over the last couple of years, many American supermarkets big and small have tried to get consumers to move away from one of the other scourges of landfills: plastic shopping bags. Just about every supermarket you go into now has reusable shopping bags featured prominently at the checkouts. The extent to which people actually use them is somewhat questionable; we must have at least a dozen reusable bags from all of the various supermarket chains in our area, and yet I’ll be damned if I can remember to bring them to the store with me when I go grocery shopping. Personally, I think the supermarkets could force the issue by charging a sufficiently painful fee for using plastic bags that would coerce the desired behavior, and probably nothing less than that will achieve the goal. But I digress. What I wanted to point out is that scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have developed a process for converting the HDPE and LDPE plastics used in those bags into…you guessed it…carbon nanotubes! YAY NANOTUBES!!! This “upcycling” process is not really ready for widespread application because it’s very energy inefficient, but if that issue can be solved, it could result in a very inexpensive process for reducing waste and providing a source of a fundamental material for many electronic devices.
Related Posts:
