1 . Every year, about 25, 000 plastic tents are thrown away after festivals in the Netherlands. That’s enough tents to get you from base camp to the top of Everest (珠穆朗玛) if you set up a tent every metre of the way. These plastic tent not only cause a lot of pollution to the environment, but they also have to be dealt with.

Into this situation stepped the KarTent. It’s a good solution to the plastic tent problem. The KarTent is a cardboard (纸板) tent. It is put up for you at the beginning of the festival and when the festival is over, the makers pick it up, take it away and recycle it into other products. No more plastic, no more waste. The production of one KarTent produces half the CO₂ of a plastic tent. In the past, about thirty different materials were used to produce a tent. It may take hundreds of years to biodegrade (降解) the materials. However, to produce a KarTent, only one material is needed. It’s cardboard.

The tent is the brainchild of three Dutch businessmen: Jan Portheine, Wout Kommer, and Timo Krenn. After working on a cardboard beach hut, architect Jan started to look for other ways to use the skills he had learned, “In a meeting I met Wout and we found pictures of tents being left behind at festivals, and that’s how the idea started.”

Perhaps next time you’re at a festival you won’t have to look out across the sea of plastic, instead you’ll see the cardboard tents being neatly put into a truck and taken away to be recycled.

4 . E-bikes are becoming more and more popular. It opens cycling to older people, those with disabilities, people who live in hilly cities where regular cycling requires serious effort.

Three things are needed to make e-bikes popular—a safe place to ride, good affordable bikes and a secure place to park. Safety comes first. For bike lanes (车道) to work, the network has to be continuous, not just forcing cyclists into the middle of a busy street. It should be well protected so that the cyclists won't feel they'll be knocked down by cars. It's necessary to provide good affordable e-bikes to customers either in physical stores or in online stores. Only in this way can people consider buying one as their means of transportation. Parking remains an avoidable problem if we want to encourage more people to ride e-bikes. In Netherlands or Copenhagen, large bike parking lots at train and bus stations encourage varieties of transport. People can easily find bike parking everywhere. This is going to be needed in other cities too for e-bikes to really become a form of transportation.

As a matter of fact, people have found that e-bikes are effective transportation choices. A recent study shows that people who ride e-bikes increase their travel distance from 2. 1 to 9. 2 km per day on average. That is sure to do good to their health. It's also believed that if just 15% of a city’s population turn to e-bikes, it would reduce the carbon emissions (排放) from transportation by 12%.

All of these lead me to conclude that e-bikes are a far better way of dealing with transportation emissions than electric cars. They won't work for everyone, but they don't have to.

5 . Most of us are aware that we must take care of the environment, and the majority of us take steps to save energy and reduce waste and pollution. But recently, some “green truths” have been shown to be only half true, or even completely false.     1    

Eating local food is good for the environment.

It seems like common sense: eating local food should be better for the environment, because it does not need to be transported long distances and kept cold during transport.     2     It is the production of food, not its transport, that uses most of the energy and produces most of the greenhouse gases.

    3    

It depends on how long you spend in the shower and how large your bath is. If you spend more than eight minutes in a shower, you'll use as much water as in a bath—about 50 litres of water. Therefore, the key is to keep your shower time as short as possible.

Paper shopping bags are better than plastic ones.

Plastic bags cause litter and are a danger to wild animals.    4    It takes hundreds of years for plastic to break down, but much less time for paper. Because of this, people think paper bags are the better environmental choice.

However, making a paper bag uses four times as much energy as making a plastic bag and up to three times the amount of water. The process also produces more greenhouse gases.     5     So, take a reusable bag with you when you go shopping.

Environmental awareness is now part of daily life. But it’s worth checking common ideas and opinions to see what's really green.