3 . 14 million liters of water get wasted every year, just through the water we leave behind in restaurants. Are you shocked? Yes, but what can you do with it? The same question concerned Garvita Gulhati. But unlike the rest of us, who gave a shrug and moved on with our lives, she refused to let the fire in her die down.

She started by setting up Why Waste?, a non-profit organization with the help of four friends in 2016. They worked with restaurants by persuading them to serve half-full glasses of water. The Glass Half Full concept aims to help prevent wastage of water left in glasses while also educating the public as well as restaurants about the need of taking care of the limited water resources.

However, persuading restaurant owners was challenging. Most owners said it was against the basic rules of welcoming guests to keep a half-filled glass at the table where customers sat. But Gulhati refused to give up and came up with new strategies to try to persuade restaurant owners and staff to change their ways. Several campaigns (活动) were organized in public spaces to increase awareness.

“So far, the campaign has been successfully launched by over 80,000 restaurants across India. People have become more aware and this simple step has helped save millions of liters of water across the country,” says Gulhati, adding, “Next time you eat out, make sure your glasses are empty before leaving the food joint.” Gulhati further says, “After launching the Glass Half Full campaign, we wanted to design a module, which would attract more people to save water.”

5 . In the United Kingdom, coffee consumption is on the rise. But beyond just fueling Londoners as they make their ways to work, coffee is also fueling their buses while fighting climate change.

It is reported that London’s buses will soon be powered in part by a newly developed biofuel, one that mixes diesel (柴油) with oils removed from spent coffee grounds, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (排放) from its bus transport system. Recycling technology firm Bio-Bean collects used coffee grounds from major coffee producers across the UK, and removes the oils from them. Then it’s mixed into B20 biodiesel, with 20% biofuel and 80% conventional diesel.

With B20, the buses don’t require any adaptions to run on it. Bio-Bean founder said that, if the UK could use all of the 500,000 tons of coffee waste it produced each year, it could power the city of Manchester for a year. London uses other biofuels to support its effort to cut emissions from its bus system. Coffee is just the latest source, joining used cooking oil and animal fat from meat processing plants, but those old coffee grounds have to go somewhere, and fueling the city’s labor force is preferable to sending them to a waste yard. Bio-Bean’s B20 is an easy way to save businesses money on waste removal, and using the biodiesel in buses cut carbon emissions by 80%.

Coffee waste is becoming an almost unlimited resource, considering London’s citizens alone create 200,000 tons of coffee grounds every year. As more and more Britons switch from tea to coffee, that number will only elevate. The use of coffee grounds as a biofuel source has the added benefit of improving air quality in the city but sadly, it does not give off the pleasant coffee smell one might expect.

6 . Erhai Lake in Dali city is the second largest freshwater lake of Yunnan province. It’s a famous attraction, as well as Dali’s main source of drinking water.

The lake used to be seriously polluted due to the rapid development of tourism and the local economy. Since 2018, local authorities have been building an environmental protection system for the lake, the Erhai Lake Ecological Corridor (生态廊道), to protect it from being polluted and to improve local ecosystem. The project contains five parts: a 129-km road around the entire lake, a pipe system to stop waste water flowing into the like, the removal of 1,806 families who lived within the protection area, the protection of the lake’s wetlands and ecosystem, and the construction of experimental fields for wetland research.

By the end of 2020, the road around the lake had been basically completed. A 12-km part of the Corridor has been open to the public for free since September 2020 for a test operation. The Corridor is described as a “pearl necklace” surrounding the lake, with the villages located along the shore of Erhai Lake being the “pearls”. These villages benefit from the project financially, as they are linked and gain access to transportation and tourism around the lake.

According to staff members of the project, the lake’s water quality has already improved a lot during the construction of the Corridor. More wild birds fly to the lake and there is less unwanted plants in the water. It is also providing a good sight-seeing place for both the city’s residents and foreign tourists.

A photography exhibition     1     (title) Blooming in the Sun is currently running at the September Art Gallery in Shenzhen and     2     (last) until September 30, 2022. The exhibition features     3     (photograph) of the Xihaigu area in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region. It is     4     largely mountainous region that     5     (identify) as the “most unfit place for human settlement” by the United Nations in 1972, due to its barren and dry land and fragile ecological environment.

The pictures on display are from four photographers—Xie Hong, Li Qiang, Hai Yang and HuGuoqing,     6     were once schoolmates majoring     7     photography at Wuhan University. They use cameras to record this remote and impoverished area from different angles,     8     (give) this place a new life. The drought brings harsh     9     (nature) conditions, but people still live     10     work here, just like the sunflowers blooming in the sun.

8 . The desire for ivory products causes the killing of an elephant, but as their populations continue to fall, the hungry black market has become creative to satisfy its greed. Now, ivory hunters are setting their sights on everything. One victim of this cruel practice is the hippopotamus(河马). A new study says that arise in demand for hippopotamus’s teeth is threatening them with extinction.

In many ways, it takes a lot of effort to kill an elephant. They are legally well protected in most countries where they range and international regulations are clear. Also, smuggling(走私)large pieces of ivory internationally is easily noticed. Hippos offer a cheaper and easier ivory option. The simple truth is that they are not high on the priority list of the international conservation community. A group of wild-living African elephants will either be tracked with radio collars(项圈) or will be the focus of long-term conservation research, ecotourism or law-enforcement efforts. Not so with hippos. Unlike their famous cousins, they don’t come with a protective environment, meaning hunters can take their time.

Most elephant populations are listed under the highest level (Appendix I) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, but hippos are listed under Appendix Ⅱ of it, meaning some trade impossible. We have created a situation where some hippos can be shot, but we have few effective ways to regulate the trade, leaving it wide open to abuse.

Having lived in Africa and worked in frontline conservation, I have seen the first-hand that in the name of art, no ivory-bearing animal is safe. I have heard the stories and seen the bodies of hippos killed by machine-gun fire, mouths open, bloody and toothless. People are working to stop this and many wildlife authorities do what they can, but until there is a real change in the demand for ivory, the hippo has joined the elephant in being in desperate need of our help.

9 . Antarctica is the highest, driest, and coldest place on Earth. It is also the remotest, a fact which demystifies its unspoiled environment. It is difficult for people to get there, and not a comfortable place for people to stay once they arrive. It is widely described as the last true wilderness on our planet.

The cold climate is responsible for maintaining the continent’s year-round ice fields: They never melt. Even though Antarctica receives more sunlight than the equator, the temperatures are lower because the ice sheet reflects the heat back into space. Thus, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was in Antarctica in July, 1983. Soviet scientists shivered (瑟瑟发抖) through temperatures that fell to minus 89.2 degrees Celsius.

Once completely inaccessible, Antarctica has more recently been playing host to adventurers seeking excitement, scientists interested in experimenting, and companies looking to exploit this wild zone for profit: gold, uranium and oil are just some of the valuable resources which lie beneath the continent’s icy covering.

For centuries, Europeans wondered about the existence of a South-pole continent, but no one actually knew for certain Antactica was there until 1820 when European explorers “discover” it. Since then, men have gone to Antarctica in search of adventure. Testing their abilities, several teams of explorers set out in 1911 to be the first men to stand at the South Pole.

Yet, Antarctica’s fragile and complicated ecosystem is threatened by its human visitors. Damage to the environment occurs as people come looking for resources beneath the ice, or carelessly leave their garbage behind. Currently, countries are working to ensure that the damage to Antarctica’s environment is minimized, and that the last wilderness on Earth will remain an unspoiled place.

10 . Microbiologists have designed a sustainable way to remove polluting microplastics from the environment by using bacteria. Initial design as it is, it paves the way for sustainably lowering plastic pollution levels and stop the “plastification”.

Bacteria naturally tend to group together and stick to surfaces, and this creates a sticky material called “biofilm”. Researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) want to use this adhesive bacteria character and capture microplastics in polluted water to form an easily disposable and recyclable blob(团) .

Sylvia Lang Liu, microbiology researcher at PolyU and lead researcher on this project, together with his team, has engineered a bacterial biofilm, which can fix and absorb microplastics floating around in the water, and make them sink to the bottom of the water. Then the researchers can separate the microplastics from the bacteria traps and get them ready to recycle.

Microplastics are the plastic fragments, usually smaller than 5mm, which are accidentally released into the environment during production and breakdown of grocery bags or water bottles, or during everyday activities such as washing synthetic (合成的) clothes or using personal care products with scrubbing microbeads in them. Microplastics are visually tiny, making it challenging to develop effective solutions to trap, collect, and recycle them.

Microplastics are not easily biodegradable (生物降解的), so they stick around for long and absorb and accumulate poisonous chemicals. They spread into wastewater and into the oceans, endangering marine animals and eventually threatening human health, Microplastics had been found in more than 114 species living in the water and also salt, lettuce, apples, and more in 2018 according to the International Maritime Organization.

“This is an innovative application of biofilm engineering l0 address the plastio pollution crisis,” said Dr Joanna Sadler, researcher at University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in this study. “One of the biggest challenges in dealing with microplastics is capturing such small particles. Liu and co-workers have denmonstrated an elegant solution to this problem, which holds great potential to be further developed into a real-world wastewater treatment technology.”