I missed this last month: France has launched an initiative to reduce textile waste by paying people to repair their clothes instead of throwing them out.
Starting October, people will be able to claim between €6 and €25 of the cost of mending clothes and shoes. The money will come from a €154 million fund and is meant to support businesses in offering more apparel repair services.
can i be perfectly frank? i'm useless at self-promotion & nobody knows about my web design business; so...before i tear it all down, i'm giving it one last push here.
if you need a website to promote you or your organisation - a great idea in a world where you have increasingly less control over your social media info - i produce lo-fi, future-proof, sustainable #websites with an emphasis on quick-loading, energy-efficient, impactful #design. #webDev#sustainability https://kathimmel.org/
A newly released collection of maps show how much land in US cities is used as parking lots.
According to The Parking Reform Network, Wichita KS is 35% parking lot while Las Vegas, NV is 32% and San Bernadino, CA is a brain-melting 49% parking lot.
Imagine the possibilities if people decided to take back most of that land from empty parked cars and use it for housing and green space instead? 🌳 🚶♀️ 🚴 👨👩👦 🌲
Your periodical reminder that all clothing is hand made by humans, usually underpaid!
Polyester doesn't breathe and sheds microplastics when manufactured, worn and washed!
Cotton farming takes immense amounts of water and pesticides!
Viscose can be made from recycled fibres & waste cellulose, but it's a fairly toxic process!
Linen is more ecological to grow but expensive!
This morning, a VPS hosting a small e-commerce site (powered by WooCommerce on Ubuntu 22.04) experienced another out-of-memory issue. A colleague (one of the developers) urgently called me, asking to upgrade the VPS due to excessive load.
I pointed out (again, as has often happened in recent weeks) that a VPS with 32GB of RAM (!!!) and 16 dedicated cores (!!!) should not run out of memory with just five simultaneous visits to a small e-commerce site. We host much larger and busier websites on much smaller VPSs. There's likely a WordPress module with a leak, or some interaction between modules causing this issue.
The response: Okay, but just add more RAM and power to solve it.
The illusion of "infinite resources" in the Cloud has led to poor development habits. Sometimes I wonder how much energy and resources we waste (and pollution we generate) due to a lack of basic optimization.
Researchers at Stanford University have published a new study in the journal Energy & Environmental Science that claims 145 of the world’s nations could switch to 100% renewable energy in a few years using renewable energy technologies available today.
The research team says switching to renewable energy would create more jobs than would be lost and save consumers trillions of dollars.
"Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret
Last month, #OpenAI chief executive Sam #Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (#AI) industry is heading for an #energy#crisis."
Scotland has launched a trial to encourage greater use of the rail network and get people out of the cars.
For 6 months there will be no peak-rate fares, only the cheaper off-peak fares.
'The ambitious project, which is a first of its kind in the UK rail industry, will support the Scottish Government’s ambition to achieve net zero, providing more people with the opportunity to use trains as their primary form of transport'
"Software-related CO2 emissions account for 4-5% of global emissions. This is equivalent to the emissions of all aviation, shipping, and rail combined."
The Coca-Cola Company is the largest consumer-facing global seller of plastics, producing 134 billion – almost one quarter (23%) – of the world’s PET plastic bottles.
Decided to be more active here, so let me reintroduce myself! I'm a zooarchaeologist researching #Farming and #Food of the past. I study animal and plant remains 🐐🌾, apply biochemical analyses 🧪, and want to use this knowledge of the past to contribute to #Sustainability today 🚜 #Archaeology#SciComm#WomenInScience#Animals
New blog post on user support frustration, its causes, and how we could build the "infrastructure of equanimity" in #opensource, including ideas for potential cross-project tools & practices.
Shout-outs to @davidism, Heidi Waterhouse, @offby1, @jacob, Nicole Harris, @bernard, + @georgia for work & conversations that I built on in this piece.
An academic colleague, a bio-engineer who builds artificial heart valves, just said to me that he likes this sort of engineering because it’s about repairing and maintaining existing systems (the human body) rather than just building new widgets. It had never occurred to me that a far better attitude to what engineers are for already exists in the engineering world. I think that all engineers working on anything related to climate should also have this attitude. #engineering#sustainability
You'l find data features on: Publicly accessible
Free of charge, Social
Environmentally friendly production, Organic, Seasonal, Vegetarian
Environmentally friendly packed, Unpacked, Zero waste
Fair trade
Short transport distances, Regional
Sharing, Lending
Repair
Reuse
Recycling
Community, Participation
Fascinating article from IEEE Spectrum that discusses the carbon footprint of software and how we can both measure and improve it: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-software
The benefit is not only less carbon, but following some of the principles that are outlined can decrease costs and improve efficiency.
The article references tools such as Firefox Profiler and Ecograder as well as an open source Sustainable Software Engineering course.