How Electric Bikes Can Cut Delivery Emissions in Cities

Companies in the shipping industry are using green hydrogen as “low-carbon” fuel to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. It’s created by using renewable energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then mixing the hydrogen with green methanol or ammonia.

As part of a larger shift toward transparency, the shipping industry is exploring blockchain technology through a collaboration between Blockchain Labs for Open Collaboration and Frontier Sky. Together, they applied blockchain technology – in this case, apps on their smartphones – at every step of the shipping process, to verify the contents, contracts, and delivery of the process. The industry moves around $4 trillion in cargo annually, and in the global shift to decrease emissions, such technology may be a way forward.

A utility company in Framingham, Massachusetts, worked with climate advocates to build a unique geothermal heating and cooling project that spans a whole neighborhood. A group of residential and commercial buildings share the infrastructure necessary to harness stable underground temperatures for heating and cooling, which reduces their greenhouse gas emissions and energy bills.

A direct carbon capture plant in Iceland sucks carbon dioxide out of the air, mixes it with water, and pumps it underground to help combat climate change. When the mixture reaches the basalt bedrock, it causes a chemical reaction that turns the carbon into a solid so it can be stored underground in the porous rock.

Thermal storage technologies are lowering businesses’ energy costs and carbon emissions while reducing strain on the grid during peak times. Two hotels in California implemented a system that makes ice when energy demand is low and uses the ice during peak demand times to cool the building.

In the name of social responsibility and to lower their carbon emissions, businesses in Omaha, Nebraska, are installing solar panels to supplement their electricity supply.

Gree Energy helps food processors in Indonesia overcome the financial barriers to installing anaerobic wastewater treatment plants. These plants turn methane emissions into biogas to be used as electricity or thermal energy. The company plans the builds, finds uses for the biogas, and establishes revenue to fund the projects.

In Gateshead, England, Lanchester Wines keeps its storage warehouse at a stable temperature year-round using geothermal heat from an abandoned coal mine nearby. The water that naturally floods the mine is geothermally heated below ground, then a heat pump system pulls that water to the surface to transfer that heat to the warehouse.

Taos Ski Valley, a ski resort in New Mexico, is now CarbonNeutral certified due to practices like reduction of emissions and on-mountain energy use, and investment in carbon offsets.

Climeworks, a Swiss start-up, is using technology to suck carbon out of the air and turning it into stone, essentially cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere permanently. Their plant in Iceland is able to turn 50 tonnes of carbon to stone per year. While that amount of carbon won’t solve the climate crisis, they are expanding their work to other countries and are launching a personal carbon removal subscription service as a way for the travel industry to help offset the carbon that they emit each year.