biomass - SprintBio - Distibutors of environmentally friendly boilers, burners and heat pumps

An article in The Scotland on Sunday about burning wood for heat. Instead of using fossil fuels such as oil, wood is sustainable  and is considered carbon-neutral – it gives off CO2 when burned, but no more than it has already absorbed during its lifetime.  The article looks at high efficient wood fuel stoves and boilers.

read the article on Eco Living

The Biofuel vs. food debate is a relatively new issue. After all, we have become used to thinking of environmentally friendly policies as an inherently desirable and beneficial thing for both people and planet.

However, recent months have seen a controversial debate raging over the ethics of using Biofuel (which requires land otherwise used for food production to grow fuel crops) as an alternative to standard petrol. The simplistic Green=Good thinking of years gone by is truly over…

As the western world seeks to address climate change and reduce the environmental impact of its dependence on cars, many of the world’s poorer countries are facing a much more immediate problem: how to feed their starving populations.

This week Josette Sheeran, of the UN World Food Programme, warned that, as a result of rising food prices, there are now 100m extra people across the world who cannot afford to buy the food they need to survive - who did not need help six months ago.

Her speech at a London conference on Biofuels was followed by a pledge from Gordon Brown to assess the viability of pursuing Biofuel policies, in the wake of rising food prices and increasing third-world hunger.

The problem is that modern Biofuel solutions to climate change often involve the use of food crops, such as wheat or corn, to produce a petrol alternative. Even if produced from non-food crops, Biofuel production inevitably reduces the quantity of land employed in food production. At a time of rising food prices and rapidly increasing global population, many see this as a reckless avenue to explore.

However, there is another issue at the heart of this problem which perhaps does not always receive the attention it deserves. The best way to introduce it is with a few figures:

Last year’s global grain harvest totalled 2.1bn tonnes (beating all previous records by just over 5%, despite poorer harvests in many countries such as Australia).

Current rate of year-on-year global population growth: 1.3%.

Something is clearly not right when the global grain harvest is up 5%, and yet the world gets hungrier, despite a population increase of only 1.3%. Let’s look more closely at that 2.1bn tonnes of grain…

Of the 2.1bn tonne harvest, roughly 60% was used to feed the world’s population (while only 3% went into Biofuel use). Now, though the current food crisis is currently impacting millions of people, as little as 2.5% additional grain would be enough to alleviate the problem (according to UN FAO figures). So where is the rest of the harvest going?

The problem is this; approximately 760 million tonnes (equivalent to 36% total production) was used last year to feed our ever-increasing appetite for meat – by feeding livestock reared for the meat industry.

This represents a huge inefficiency in our global food resource allocation, and makes the aforementioned Biofuel debate seem rather less significant. Even if all Biofuel policies were scrapped tomorrow, this problem will surely only be offset for the few years it takes for our increasing meat demand to apply sufficient pressure to grain prices again.

George Monbiot, in his Guardian column this week, did a great job of highlighting the sheer scale of the issue with an excellent article. Unfortunately, the UK is a relatively small player in the global meat market, and with China’s average consumption increasing by a factor of 2.5 over the past 27 years it seems that we are only moving in the wrong direction on this front.

A few months ago global grain stockpiles hit a 36 year low, falling to just 57 days worth of consumption. Farming methods are improving all the time, and total global harvests have rarely been better. Despite this, our harvests simply cannot satisfy both the richer world’s appetite for meat and the poorer world’s need for the little food they rely on to survive.

In the UK at least, we have been made well aware of the environmental implications of many aspects of our day-to-day lives, including everything from buying imported fruit to using energy-saving light-bulbs. Surely it’s time public attention was turned onto this pressing issue.

It is ridiculous to expect that we stand any chance of turning everybody into a vegetarian any time soon. However the message is nonetheless pretty simple: eating less meat is probably the most ethical environmental consumer decision one can make today. If there is any chance of us moving away from our over-reliance on meat (which is actually unhealthy in the quantities consumed by the average Western adult - but that is another story) we could not only improve our own personal health, but also alleviate the starvation and suffering of millions.

Eating less meat is actually easier than many people think, plus it saves money, and, perhaps most importantly, it represents a direct contribution to improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest people.

Dejan Levi

This is about a developement in South Tyneside, as part of its commitment to sustainability, the house builder is installing a bio-mass central heating system in the new community resource centre. This will use wood pellets to heat part of the building, thereby reducing carbon emissions.

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Philip Wolfe outlines the REA’s scenario for meeting the 2020 targets and discuss the various options available, while suggesting the best way forward for UK

New opportunities in centralised energy generation

There are still several opportunities for large scale power and heat, which are not fully exploited by the present policies. Because of our historical focus on electricity, heat applications have been neglected – even heat used to drive electricity generation. This means that power stations typically waste perhaps 65% of their energy as heat. Such inefficiency is unacceptable in an energy constrained world, so there is a case for obliging new thermal power stations to be located where the heat can be captured and used through combined heat and power (CHP). The Biomass Task Force concluded that 7% of the UK’s heat energy could come from biomass. The government should now bring forward effective policy measures to turn this into reality. I would project that about 40% could be in the form of larger scale heat and CHP projects.

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