1 . About 40% of all food grown in the world goes uneaten each year, according to a World Wildlife Fund report from last year. And when food ends up in landfills, it produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases. So it’s no surprise that the app Too Good to Go designed to be opposed to this problem—by giving consumers the opportunity to purchase leftover, out-of-date or ugly food at discount prices—has become increasingly popular in recent years.

Users of the Too Good to Go app can search for local restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores—and purchase surprise bags filled with whatever food is left over at the end of the day. The bags range in price from about $3 to $5, but they’re stocked with food about three times that value. So customers are also getting a steep discount.

Too Good to Go first launched in Europe in 2015 and opened in the US in October 2020.Today it’s available in cities including Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Philadelphia. And the app saves 300,000 meals a day from ending up in landfills around the world.

Besides saving meals from ending up in the trash, Too Good to Go’s primary aim is to increase awareness of food waste, eventually encouraging consumers to effect policy change in their local communities.

“The whole food chain is wasting food. So we need to help,” said Lucie Basch, co-founder of the app Too Good to Go.” But for us, starting with the consumers and raising awareness with a super simple app that anyone can download and start using today was really the opportunity to make a difference for us.”

2 . As the world struggles to deal with climate change, some companies are working to capture(捕捉) polluting carbon dioxide(CO₂) from the air.

The heavy use of fossil fuels(化石燃料) over the last 150 years has released massive amounts of greenhouse gases, like CO₂, which have caused the Earth to warm up.

Scientists say large amounts of CO₂must be removed from the atmosphere and stored. Plants and trees do this naturally. But there’s so much CO₂in the atmosphere that just planting trees and protecting forests won’t solve the problem. And, when plants and trees die, the carbon they’ve stored gets released again. That means humans need to come up with ways of removing carbon from the air and storing it. This is called Direct Air Capture(DAC).

A company called Heirloom has just opened the first DAC plant in the United States. Heirloom’s process uses limestone, a common rock, to capture CO₂. The company heats up the limestone to separate out the CO₂, which is then locked away in concrete. Heirloom uses renewable electricity to produce the heat, so the process, though expensive, doesn’t produce more CO₂. The new plant can remove 1, 000 tons of CO₂a year. That’s a tiny amount compared to how much carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere. But the company says it hopes to remove a billion tons per year by 2035. Graphyte, another US company working on DAC, collects unwanted plants and wood products and dries them completely so they can’t break down. Graphyte then smashes them into small bricks and buries them deep underground.

Not everyone is excited about carbon removal. Some experts worry that it will take too long for DAC technology to become powerful enough to make a difference. Others worry that focusing on removing carbon could take attention away from more important climate actions, like switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

3 . Reducing food waste is easy — just ask the students at a school in Wood bridge, America, who have become experts at sorting their lunchtime trash (垃圾). Since the fall of 2019, they have actively participated in a successful food-waste diversion program that not only saves money but also contributes to reducing the amount of trash that heads to landfills.

Actually, this program plays a crucial role in facing up to the challenges of climate change. By reducing food waste,the school minimizes the amount of trash sent to landfills, thereby reducing harmful methane emissions (沼气排放). The school’s program is making a significant impact. Each month, it moves over 1,300 pounds of food waste, resulting in an estimated reduction of 772 pounds in CO, emissions and the production of 180 kilowatt-hours of energy, according to Blue Earth Compost in America.

At school, when students are done eating lunch, they head to an appointed section — a row of desks, garbage cans and containers — where they sort their trash. Leftover liquids, such as juice or milk,are emptied into a big basin on the floor. The juice containers and plastic water bottles are placed into another container to recycle. Additionally, prepackaged, unopened snacks such as bags of carrots as well as produce such as apples and bananas are “rescued” and placed into a big basket with a handwritten “Donations” sign taped to it to send to the town’s senior center.

The benefits extend beyond environmental awareness. The program reduces trash-carrying costs as less weight goes into the trash bins,making it easier for cleaners to manage. The students also find this planet-friendly practice enjoyable and meaningful, considering it a small game that contributes to a bigger cause. This initiative proves that collective efforts, even on a smaller scale, can lead to significant changes, not only in waste reduction but also in educating a generation committed to preserving our planet.

9 . Have you ever imagined what will happen in the ocean when an earthquake happens underground? If you’ve ever felt a big earthquake or seen one on television, you know that it has the power to shake the ground and move large buildings. When a great earthquake happens under the ocean floor, the earthquake’s large energy is transferred (转移) to the water above it, creating a series of water waves called a tsunami (海啸). The word comes from the Japanese words tsu (harbor) and nami (wave).

Normal ocean waves have an average wavelength (波长) of about 100 meters and an average height of about 2 meters, while a tsunami can have a wavelength of 193 kilometers or more. Travelling at up to about 800 kilometers per hour in the deep ocean, a tsunami might be at a height of as little as 0.9 meters, which makes it almost impossible to be noticed, even for a ship in the area.

As a tsunami approaches (靠近) a coastline, things begin to change greatly. As it approaches shallow (浅的) waters, the wave speed drops below about 80 kilometers per hour. The wavelength also decreases much, but amplitude—the height of the wave—increases greatly, leading to the huge wall of water along coastlines, which causes great damage to coastal areas.

About 80% of tsunamis happen in the Pacific Ocean. Tsunamis cannot be prevented, but areas that experience tsunamis regularly have developed tsunami warning systems to give as much advance warning as possible to people who live along the coastline. For example, there are tsunami warning signs and warning sirens (警报器) on the top of nearby hills along Japanese coastlines. And many Japanese coastal communities have built tsunami walls, floodgates and others to stop or change the direction of water from incoming tsunamis.