Earth Day 2019: Apple’s recycling robots and efforts to end single-use plastic

More than one billion people are expected to take part in Earth Day activities on April 22, with companies including Apple and Etihad also jumping on board.

Earth Day 2019 comes amid calls for government action on climate change. 

First held in 1970, Earth Day is credited as helping to launch the modern environmental movement through its mission to “diversify, educate and activate” people across the globe about environmental issues.

The 2019 event follows the release of a landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October, showing time is running out to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Read the story from The New Daily by Isabelle Lane - “Earth Day 2019: Apple’s recycling robots and efforts to end single-use plastic.”

The village that fought and lost a war against the new water merchants

The tiny gold-mining village of Stanley sits quietly - most of the time - on its plateau in the foothills of Victoria’s north-east high country, its vineyards and groves of walnut and orchards of apple, stone fruits and berries quenched by pure water from beneath the ground. 

David McIntyre , Stanley nut grower, is concerned about water mining in the district.

There’s a little Athenaeum - the old fancy name for a community library - at the crossroads at the centre of town.

Its fine collection of books date to a time when gold miners and their families felt the need for tranquil retreat from the often vulgar doings on the wild diggings. The first librarian was appointed in 1863.

Late last year and right through the summer, Stanley’s Athenaeum hosted an exhibition called “Water and Mining: Water management on the goldfields”.

It told the story of how “water merchants” of the 19th century made fortunes by diverting the flow of the Nine Mile Creek - Stanley’s old name - to serve diggings down the hill.

Read Tony Wright’s story in The Age - “The village that fought and lost a war against the new water merchants.”

How healthy soils make for a healthy life

The next time you bite into an apple, spare a thought for the soils that helped to produce it. Soils play a vital role, not just in an apple’s growth, but in our own health too.

Soil can be replaced in just a few
years or take an entire millennium.

The formation of soil, pedogenesis, is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of soil coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium.

But with soils around the world under threat, we’re in danger of losing their health benefits faster than they are replaced.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Professor from the University of Melbourne, Deli Chen, and a research fellow, also from University of Melbourne, Ee Ling Ng  - “How healthy soils make for a healthy life.”

Plunge in global mining stocks kind to climate change activists

The $1.4 trillion lost in global mining stocks since 2011 exceeds the total market value of Apple Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Google’s parent Alphabet Inc.

When you’ve spent a decade building new mines from the Andean mountains to the West African jungle, it’s bad news when a downturn in China, your biggest customer, shows no signs of stopping. Investors have been unforgiving and concerns that it will only get worse pushed the Bloomberg World Mining Index to an 11-year low.

Read the Bloomberg Business story - “Mining's $1.4 Trillion Plunge Like Losing Apple, Google, Exxon.”

(Extraction, mining by another name, is a significant contributor to climate change and so if we are serious about mitigating the effects of our seriously disrupted climate system, it’s imperative that we, in some way, limit or control our mining affairs. Climate change will not be resolved without some pain and so this restructuring of the world’s mining stocks is just one of the many aches we will have to deal with – Robert McLean.)

Cook urges climate change deniers to get our of Apple stock

Apple has a less than envious reputation in relation to paying its taxes, despite that though it is active in doing what it can to mitigate climate change.

Mashable tells us in a story headed: “Tim Cook to climate change deniers: get out of Apple stock” that the technology company is big on finding solutions to fossil fuel powered energy.
The Apple CEO is taking the company down a path to solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower.

“We want to leave the world better than we found it”, Cook said.