mteb/BrightProSustainableLivingRetrieval huggingface dataset:
Homescale designs for plastic incinerators?

I'm under the impression that it's better to burn the plastic and maybe get a bit of energy from it than disposing it somewhere only for it to deteriorate into many microplastic particles.

That said, I no longer believe in industrial scale solutions designed to deal with metric tons of waste that need to be mass transported by trucks.

I'm aware that plastic can't be just thrown to a campfire for it to burn completely to carbon dioxide without leaving both solid residues or uncombusted gases. Are there attempts to build small scale (home) incinerators which would be able to burn them thoroughly?

Any links to a paper or a final product is welcome.
How to get rid of half a can of durable water repellent spray (similar to 3M Scotchgard)

(Cross-posted, together with additional questions, to a post on the /r/Anticonsumption sub-Reddit.)

I have an 8 ounce (~200 g) can of Foot Locker ultra fabric & leather protector spray. I guess this is a durable water repellent chemical concoction, similar to 3M Scotchgard. I think the can may still be half full, or more. I now know that these kinds of products often contain PFAS "forever chemicals", and are not very good for the environment. Therefore, I think it might not be a good idea for me to use up the rest of the contents of the can.

What's the most sustainable way for me to get rid of what's left?

A.) Should I put it out in a box at the curb labelled "Free", and let someone else take it? They may spray it on garments which eventually end up in landfill. Later on, landfill leachate can contaminate groundwater. (Source.)
B.) Should I try to sell it for US$1 on a local classifieds website?
C.) Should I offer it to the staff at a local outdoors store, who otherwise might buy their own can?
D.) Should I take it to a hazardous waste drop-off point here in Toronto, and ask them to send it for incineration? Unfortunately, normal hazardous waste incineration (perhaps 2200 °F may not be hot enough to destroy PFAS.
E.) Should I keep the product, and re-spray my winter coat (which is no longer water-repellent)?
F.) Should I do something else?
What is the difference between biodegradable and compostable plastic?

I read this and still don't fully understand the difference. Which decomposes faster? Do they mean biodegradables don't need "certain" conditions so they are good to go into a bin (or a hole in your backyard)? Or do they mean biodegradable plastic leave some non-soil residue behind?

Plastic that is compostable is biodegradable, but not every plastic that is biodegradable is compostable. Whereas biodegradable plastic may be engineered to biodegrade in soil or water, compostable plastic refers to biodegradation into soil conditioning material (i.e., compost) under a certain set of conditions. In order for a plastic to be labeled as commercially “compostable” it must able to be broken down by biological treatment at a commercial or industrial composting facility. Composting utilizes microorganisms, heat and humidity to yield carbon dioxide, water, inorganic compounds, and biomass that is similar in characteristic to the rest of the finished compost product. Decomposition of the plastic must occur at a rate similar to the other elements of the material being composted (within 6 months) and leave no toxic residue that would adversely impact the ability of the finished compost to support plant growth. ASTM Standards D6400 and D6868 outline the specifications that must be met in order to label a plastic as commercially “compostable”. There are currently no ASTM standard test methods in place for evaluating the ability of a plastic to compost in a home environment.
Temperature for hot water cylinder

I live in an apartment in the UK. There's an electric "hot water cylinder" (storage tank) to heat water for tap usage. (Not for heating, there are electric radiators for that.)

This hot water cylinder has a thermostat where you can set a temperature from 40°C to 70°C, and whoever installed it set it to 70°C. 70°C seems wasteful to me, 40°C would be enough for my use. Presumably the higher the temperature and the more electricity it uses?

However the manual warns that the thermostat should not be set lower than 60°C to "prevent bacteria growth". Is this a valid concern in practice, or is it more like some kind of abstract health & safety disclaimer? I mean, I'm not going to drink that hot water, I just use it to wash stuff.
For airlines that have "vowed to offer carbon-neutral flights" how do they say they plan to actually make some flights demonstrably carbon-neutral?

CNN's June 20, 2022 Boeing unveils new 777 'ecoDemonstrator' test jet includes the following sentence near the end:

Many airlines have already vowed to offer carbon-neutral flights and explore alternative fuels to reduce pollution.

Question: For these airlines, how do they say they plan to actually make some flights demonstrably carbon-neutral?

Maybe I'm presumptuous, but implicit in my question is that amongst the PR for these future carbon-neutral flights there will be some level of transparency and accounting, but right now I'm just curious how they say explain that carbon-neutral flights actually exist, presumably without shifting the carbon impact to other flights.
What is the most economical and convenient inner insulation for winters?

The purpose is to reduce heating costs as much as possible in winters, where the temperature rarely drops below -5 degrees Celsius (23 F) at nights and 0 degree Celsius (32 F) daytime.

To me, internal wall insulation seems to be a better solution than the external one. Because I think the air inside will heat up more quickly that way, which -seemingly- would be more comfortable than waiting for the walls to warm up.

in another question, one community user (@Móż) mentioned strawbale for insulation. After a quick search I saw that it can be used as building material. But it is weak against moisture and mold.

So, considering factors like:

Health (should be made from a healthy material)
Material cost (should be as cheap and abundant as possible)
Robustness (should stay intact with time and mild accidental impacts)
Moisture resistance (should be resistant to moisture inside the house, maybe can be dealt with a proper but thin coating)
Organisms (should not allow organisms like mold or insects to grow inside)
what do you think would be the most economical and convenient inner wall insulation solution for winters?

P.S. It would be nice if you include the other important factors that come to your mind.
Charging only one battery at a time, automatically

Sometimes I have multiple batteries I want to charge, but I don't want to charge them all simultaneously. There are three scenarios for this:

My power source isn't strong enough to charge all the batteries simultaneously. For example, maybe I'm off-grid using a small inverter. Charging batteries sequentially rather than all at once
I want to keep several gadgets with batteries charged above 20%, but I want to avoid keeping them all at 100% in order to maximize their longevity.
I am connected to the grid but I'm trying to minimize my peak demand because I'm paying a peak demand tariff.
All my batteries have their own AC adapters, so I'm looking for something like a 120V power bar that has smart control of the outlets.

Is there anything on the market like this? I'm not even sure what to call this product category. I know there are "smart" power bars, but they mostly seem only useful for remote control, and that's the opposite of what I'm thinking of here (I want something that works unattended.)

Ideally I'm looking for something that can do any/all of these functions:

Ensure that only one power socket is energized at a given time. (Software developers describe this as "mutual exclusion")
Keep one socket energized until the power demanded drops below a threshold, then automatically energize the next socket.
rotate power to each socket on a timed schedule anywhere from minutes to days. (Bonus if the schedule can also be programmed with intentional blackout windows.)
If there is no product like this on the market, what would be a reasonable way to DIY something like this?
CO2 emissions from outdoor fire pit

I have an outdoor fire pit in my backyard. The fire pit is about 3 feet in diameter and is similar to ones you might find at a camp site. My family and I enjoy using it purely for recreation. I’ve been trying to limit my carbon footprint, and in doing so, wondered how much a fire in the fire pit contributes to it. We usually have about 2 to 3 logs, and a handful of sticks. So what’s an estimate for how many pounds of CO2 are released every hour of from an average sized camp fire? Are there other gases released other than CO2 that are harmful to the environment?
Electricity need to switch all cars from fossil fuel

For purely hypothetical discussion, I was asking myself how big electrical production increase would be needed for a first-world country when switching all cars from fossil fuel to EV only. I made the calculation myself for the country I live in (Italy, though the reasoning in principle would be valid for any chosen country), but the result is somehow unconvincing to me. So I would like to share my reasoning here and read you comments about it. Please note this is a very rough estimation, so please point out lack of precision in the calculation only when really matters to the general result, keeping in mind this is a very high level calculation.

In the examples I will reference data from 2019 which are the most recent complete dataset I was able to find.

The annual consumption of fuel for transportation was 7.3 million metric tons in gasoline and 23.8 million metric tons in diesel. The energy content is 46.9 MJ/kg for gasoline and 45.8 MJ/kg for diesel. The energy content sums up to about 344 PJ and 1090 PJ respectively. Converting to Wh (for easy comparison with electric consumption data) the total is just short of 400 TWh.

I found out that the efficiency of an internal combustion engine mounted on a vehicle is something around 20% - 35%, so I assumed an average value of 30% for the sake of simplicity. So the real energy that goes to motion is around 120 TWh. The efficiency of a full electric vehicle seems to me to be around 75%, so the electricity needed to charge that hypothetical EV fleet would be a little less than 160 TWh.

In the same year 2019, the electricity consumption in Italy was 320 TWh. So the conclusion of all this reasoning is that a country should roughly add 50% of its electrical production to support a full transition to electrical mobility.

Instinctively this seems way too much: have I made any serious error in my assumptions or calculations? Or is this basically a correct conclusion?
How would a garden adapted to drought look like?

Hypothetical question, since I neither have a garden, nor live in a region seriously affected by drought (yet).

In context of the current drought along the western US coast, experts and scientists ask citizens to save water, e.g. by not watering the gras, or even completely removing it (source: last paragraph of this german news article https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/feuer-oregon-101.html).

This left me wondering, how such a garden could look like, especially since vegetation has a cooling effect. I am thinking about a few (fruit) trees, maybe some pots with plants adapted to dry/hot climate, some low bushes and otherwise mostly bare dirt, e.g. like the mediterranean Garrigue.

Are there any concept studies out there, or maybe even real examples?
Determining carbon reduction vs cost of various home upgrades

I've done some amount of upgrades to my house to reduce my overall carbon emissions, and reading online there are all kinds of suggestions for doing even more:

Replace my natural gas water heater with electric
Put solar panels on the roof
Buy wind energy credits
Other kinds of carbon offsets
Geothermal
Don't replace my electric oven with gas (which I had been thinking about, since I hear how great they are for cooking)
And of course I only have a limited amount of money to spend on this, so I'm trying to determine which action gives me the best bang (most carbon reduced) for my buck.

But I almost immediately run into a problem. Even just looking at that first one - "Replace my natural gas water heater with electric" - I can easily determine what the cost would be, but figuring out the carbon impact of that is tricky. I live in Colorado which is moving towards wind power, but still has some coal plants. How much carbon is my natural gas water heater emitting now? How much carbon would an electric water heater emit (when you take into account the carbon emitted to generate the electricity)?

Another example - my house was built in the 1970s so it doesn't have a lot of the energy-saving features built in to more recent houses, and I had an energy audit done that identified a lot of small items (nothing big). For example, where the tops of my walls meet the ceiling joists there are lots of tiny air gaps. Sealing those would be quite expensive, but might be worth it depending on how much energy I would save.

Is there a resource (or resources) that would help me figure out how much carbon would be reduced by each possible action? Please note that I'm not looking for common knowledge or general lists, I'm really trying to drill down and determine for my specific house, what are the exact (or approximate) impacts of each possible action? I realize that answering that question for each action will require specific information about my house and situation, I'm hoping that somewhere online there are calculators that would help me understand the impact of each action.
Soil Restoration Issue - How to deal with thousands of small pine stumps?

Background:
Just acquired a 4-acre lot in Southern Virginia. It was recently cleared of a ton of small (roughly 6-foot-tall) pine saplings that look like they were mechanically planted. I am not entirely sure. There were as many as 10 saplings in every single square foot and they were clearly choking each other out. The saplings are gone now, and I am trying to figure out what steps to take to begin restoring the land for gardening, animals, carbon accumulation, food forest, all the permaculture/sustainability life goals. The main issue now is I have 4 acres of pointy ½ inch to 2-inch wide stumps. It is almost impossible to walk the property without tripping on a stump and goring yourself.

Question:
What is the best way to begin restoring farmland by removing thousands of ½ inch to 2 inch wide pine stumps?
How much additional CO2 emissions will result from recent changes to US vehicle regulations?

From the Guardian, March 31, 2020: Trump to roll back Obama-era clean car rules in huge blow to climate fight (emphasis added):

The Trump administration is rolling back the US government’s strongest attempt to combat the climate crisis, weakening rules which compel auto companies to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. [...] The changes to Obama-era regulations will allow vehicles to emit about a billion more tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide – equivalent to roughly a fifth of annual US emissions.

Some are claiming that this change will directly result in the full billion tons of added emissions. But just because the requirement has changed, does not mean that automakers will automatically change the mileage or emissions controls on the vehicles they are producing. This is confirmed later in the article (emphasis added):

The Obama administration required auto companies to make vehicles 4.7% more efficient each year. The Trump administration initially wanted to freeze any progress on fuel efficiency past 2020. But its final rule, written by the EPA and the Department of Transportation, sets an improvement rate of 1.5% per year – or an industry average of 40.4 miles per gallon by 2026. That’s far less than the 2.4% per year by which the industry has said it will increase standards without any regulation.

Is there data or estimates on what the actual increase in emissions will be as a result of the new rule? Apparently the auto industry is capable of exceeding the current standard with no regulatory pressure, but will it now move the opposite way?
Why aren't all nuclear plants running at their full installed power to decrease emissions?

Looking at the electricity map I can see that many countries operating nuclear power plants are not running them at their full installed power, e.g.:

Sweden: 5.54 GW of 9.10 GW capacity
France: 38.00 GW of 63.1GW capacity
Meanwhile, countries like Denmark are running coal and biomass power plants and exporting power with a relatively high carbon footprint to Sweden:

Coal production 220 MW of 1.94 GW capacity
Export to Sweden 1095 MW
And France itself is still running gas power plants:

Gas: 2.69 GW of 12.2 GW capacity
What is the reason for this? Would not it make sense to ramp up the nuclear power to lower the emissions?
Why not use scarce California water for almond milk?

Many argue that we should not drink almond milk as it uses scarce water. (e.g. https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/shopping-guide/soya-non-dairy-milk). However given that consuming almond milk helps finance removing carbon from the atmosphere, would it not be defensible to consume it? For example in California, the water shortage does not drive species into extinction not does it deprive people of necessary access to clean water. But it could mean less industrial animal husbandry and less area of green lawns. I think less water to such purposes is no problem and means we probably should step up consumption of almond milk, especially in areas where water shortage is more of a nuisance and not an ecological or social issue.
Is Lithium mining any better for the environment than fossil fuel extraction?

A friend of mine is adamant that the extraction of lithium for batteries (and the creation of battery cells themselves) is a very environmentally-damaging procedure, potentially even more-so than oil (open-cut mines vs oil wells), and that this is only going to get worse as more and more EV cars hit the roads, age, and need their batteries replaced.

What mechanisms are involved in the creation of Li-ion batteries? How does it compare to the extraction and processing of fossil fuels in terms of environmental impact/emissions?
Can residential rooftop solar arrays be cheaply extended over time?

I am looking to install rooftop solar on my house some time this year. I have a decent amount of roof space and very little shading so I should achieve fairly ideal conditions for it.

A lot of the companies I've researched appear to offer full "systems" ranging anywhere from 4 to 30 panel installations (with various associated prices) but what I'm unsure about is how extensible a typical solar array is.

Let's say I choose to install 5 panels today. Could I 'extend' my system relatively cheaply with another 5 panels next year, only paying for the panels and some labour to attach them to the roof? Or would this require almost as much work (and cost as much) as a completely new install?
Are oil and natural gas inherently linked?

I've heard a lot of people push for natural gas as a fuel for generating electrical power. However, oil is said to be a very dirty fuel. Aren't oil and natural gas harvested from the same sources? The cost of each can of course vary, but to what extent will total oil production and total gas production be linked in the future? If countries take measures to make oil more expensive and natural gas cheaper, won't they cancel out?

Bonus question (if applicable): Is there any company that only produces natural gas, not oil?
How more efficient are low surface temperature radiators than traditional boiler systems?

I've recently come across low surface temperature radiators (E2 technology) as a form of heating. Unlike a traditional water radiator they operate at 30 - 50 C instead of 75 C. Small fans pull air across thin radiator fins to convect the heat around the room rather than use pure radiation. The heat source can be from a heat pump, whereas traditional radiators use boilers.

This brand brochure says it delivers 3.5kW in fan boost mode at 50C, and 1.98kW at 30C. This model uses 14 1W fans.

Here's a typical model from a different company

E2 technology radiator

There are claims that they are over 12% more efficient than traditional radiators. Is this reasonable?
EU Real Driving Emissions testing (RDE) - does it factor in real driver behaviour and the inefficient driving habits they often exhibit?

Drivers often floor it at the lights, a large number switch off their start/stop systems, they might idle for an hour to listen to the radio, exceed the speed limit and exhibit other inefficient driving behaviour.

Do the European Union's RDE tests factor in real world driver behaviour or do they only demonstrate the emissions of real world best practice driving?
Why don't mineral water cans carry a deposit label?

I've been putting in the recycling bin all our "sparkling water," "mineral water," and unflavored Canada Dry cans. But then I wondered if I could return them to the grocery store for deposits. Apparently not -- New York State says if there's a deposit, that information needs to be clearly displayed on the can; the can makes no mention of a deposit.

Why is there no deposit on these cans?
How could I use egg yolk from boiled eggs?

Both my wife and I avoid eating yolk (as much as possible). I know I can find some uses for raw yolk but I am not sure if the yolk from boiled eggs can be put to good use, other than forms that involve eating them (directly or indirectly).

While at it I'd like advice on putting to good use the raw yolks too. We eat about 30 eggs in a week. One of the challenges would also be storage before processing them in any way. Thoughts and ideas?

We have container based plants (avocadoes, tomatoes, peppers, flowers) and so gardening uses are welcome too.
Plastic incineration vs discarding considerations

Firstly, let me say, I am not pro-either. I just hear about people trying to save the environment (and putting an end to bad municipal 'dump site' behaviour) by rather burning their trash. This is especially true for plastics.

While I try to avoid plastic in general, what are the environmental impact when considering both? To me, it sounds like a lose-lose both ways.

This knowledge could help me swing people who engage in this, in my area.
Comparing train station pollution with smoking

A research done in my city's main train station showed 400,000 UFP particles per cubic centimetre.

I am looking into printing pamphlets and wanted to inquire how does spending half an hour in a 400,000/cm^3 environment compare with smoking when it comes to lungs damage. It can be a rough estimation, something along the lines of: "Spending half an hour in those conditions is equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes".