6 . The Royal Mint has announced plans for a new factory where it will process electronic junk to extract precious metals for coins and gold bars. The factory will be the first of its kind in the world.

The Royal Mint is a Government-owned company that makes coins for the UK and lots of other countries. Most of its coins are made from cheaper metals, but the Mint sometimes makes coins and medals from precious metals like gold and silver. It also makes gold bars. Countries and banks like to keep gold bars because they are very valuable and their price doesn’t tend to go up or down suddenly.

The precious metals used by the Mint are mostly mined from the ground but now it plans to make use of the vast amounts of electronic waste (known as e-waste) that is thrown away in the UK each year. Many electronic devices use small quantities of precious metals such as gold and silver because they are good conductors of electricity. However, it is estimated that just 20% of old electronics are recycled worldwide. This is not just a waste; it can be dangerous, because when e-waste is buried in rubbish dumps, metals and chemicals can leak out and pollute the environment.

Currently, e-waste from the UK is sent abroad to be melted down to recover precious metals. The new factory will use chemical reactions to do the same job much quicker and using far less energy. The process can extract 99% of the precious metals from plastic circuit boards within a few seconds, and could provide the Mint with hundreds of kilograms of gold each year.

“Our new plant will see the Royal Mint become a leader in sustainably sourced precious metals,” said Anne Jessopp, the Mint’s CEO.

8 . In the far North, fire season usually doesn’t start until June, when snow has melted away and summer lightning storms sweep into the region. So scientist Sander Veraverbeke was confused when in May of 2016 he saw little patches of fire on some satellite images from Alaska and the Northwest Territories.

“I was like, what the hell is going on?” says Veraverbeke, an Earth scientist at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

What he saw on the satellite images were “zombie fires,” remains of burns from the previous year that somehow stayed alive, smoldering underground, through the long, cold winter.

Zombie fires aren’t an entirely new phenomenon in the Arctic; fire managers have noted occasional flare-ups in past decades. But Veraverbeke’s team found that their occurrences are tightly linked to climate change, happening more often after hot, long summers with lots of fire and suggesting that these still-rare events could become more frequent.

“The sheer fact that this is happening is evidence for how quickly the region is changing,” he says.

Like all forests, the wooded stretches of the Arctic sometimes catch on fire. But unlike many forests in the mid-latitudes, which thrive on or even require fire to preserve their health, Arctic forests have evolved to burn only infrequently.

Climate change is reshaping that mode. In the first decade of the new millennium, fires burned 50 percent more acreage each year in the Arctic, on average, than any decade in the 1900s. Between 2010 and 2020, burned acreage continued to creep up, particularly in Alaska, which had its second worst fire year ever in 2015 and another bad one in 2019. Scientists have found that fire frequency today is higher than at any time since the formation of boreal (北极的) forests some 3,000 years ago, and potentially higher than at any point in the last 10,000 years.

10 . Every year, an average American produces more than 250 pounds of plastic waste. Recycling is part of the solution, but many of us are confused about what can be recycled and what can’t.

Plastic film

At the store we find it covering vegetables, meats and cheeses. It’s common, but it can’t be recycled because it’s hard to deal with at the MRF (材料回收厂). The thin and soft film gets stuck around the equipment and can bring it to a stop.

Plastic bags

Plastic bags — like those used for bread, sandwich as well as grocery bags — create similar problems for recycling machines as thin plastic film. Therefore, most of the plastic bags end up in landfills and oceans.

Yogurt and butter cups

These containers often mix with other kinds of materials. It’s not possible to separate them. In addition, this type of packaging flattens out on the MRF’s conveying belt and can bring the equipment to a stop, too.

Beverage (饮料) bottles

These containers are firm. They don’t flatten out like yogurt cups and they’re made from one kind of plastic that recyclers can easily sell for making products such as carpet, clothing or even more plastic bottles.

Warning: Be aware that we cannot recycle as much as we want. For example, plastic bottles are a highly desirable product for recyclers, but just about a third finds their way into the MRFs. Therefore, it’s more important for us to reduce packaging.