London politics
fromwww.bbc.com
4 days agoNew bin rules begin in England but not all councils are ready
New rules mandate weekly food waste collections in England, but many councils are unprepared to meet the deadline.
The UK has about 1.59GW of currently installed datacentre capacity at just under 190 sites. If we add existing capacity to that which is planned to complete by 2030 and which has planning consent, we get 4.9GW.
tozero's proprietary acid-free hydrometallurgical process runs in a single cycle and produces materials pure enough to feed directly back into battery cell manufacturing without further refinement.
Shredded paper is especially difficult to recycle, so many programs will not accept it. Shredding accelerates fiber shortening and lowers the paper grade from high-grade to mixed-grade. Mixed-grade paper is still recyclable, but it ends up baled and processed into products like paper towels and packing paper.
Heathrow's annual sustainability report summarizing the year 2025 describes climate change as "an existential threat to aviation, to the planet and to us all personally." The report touts a few areas of interest, including adding zero-emission buses to the airport's fleet and reducing overall waste at Heathrow by 3%. The report also points to Heathrow using more sustainable jet fuel, with 3.1% of the flights taking off from the airport making use of such materials.
MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) systems are designed to continuously replace stale indoor air with fresh outdoor air while recovering heat that would otherwise be lost. In commercial and residential buildings, this technology provides several important advantages. First, it allows buildings to remain energy efficient without sacrificing airflow.
Environmental campaign group Foxglove stated that the NSIP designation allows the project to sidestep local planning and democracy, raising concerns about its potential carbon emissions.
The UK is entering a pivotal phase in the evolution of its digital economy as artificial intelligence (AI) shifts from experimental innovation to mainstream dependency. Platforms such as ChatGPT now attract hundreds of millions of weekly active users worldwide, while Microsoft 365 Copilot has been rapidly adopted across the enterprise landscape, with nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies integrating it into daily workflows.
Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was under real pressure from high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies. Deregulation is not an industrial strategy, the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.
Timber cladding has become a defining feature of contemporary construction across the UK. Once associated mainly with rural housing and architectural one-offs, it is now widely used across residential developments, commercial buildings, education projects, and urban regeneration schemes. Its appeal is often described in visual terms, but appearance alone does not explain its continued growth. Timber offers flexibility in design, a lower embodied carbon profile than many alternatives, and the ability to integrate effectively within modern wall systems when specified correctly.
In a balance of aesthetics, performance, and versatility, HIMACS shows a solid surface material of choice for many architects and designers. Taking a further step forward, the entire range of standard HIMACS sinks and basins is now officially SCS certified, containing a minimum of 8% pre-consumer recycled content. This certification enhances the material's technical and visual appeal by providing a more sustainable option without compromising quality or functionality.
Americans are likely to have spent a record $1 trillion-plus this holiday shopping season alone, and about $5.5 trillion in retail sales in all of 2025, according to estimates by the National Retail Federation. That includes many unhappy returns for retailers: And when it comes back to them, a lot of the $850 billion in returned merchandise is often cheaper to discard than to inspect, sort, and resell-adding millions of tons to landfills every year.
Common Wealth cited the example of the Warmer Homes consortium, led by Portsmouth city council, which was allocated 22m among 31 authorities over three years. This breaks down to about 450-650 homes per year, or 15-20 homes per local authority per year.
Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The British government has conceded it should not have approved a campus near London's M25 orbital motorway and that the decision should be quashed, following a legal challenge by campaign group Foxglove. The non-profit filed its challenge last year after the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government overturned Buckinghamshire Council's rejection of the Woodlands Park site near Iver. The local authority had blocked the project on grounds it would significantly alter the area's character and appearance.
The site in question is the subject of a legal challenge raised by tech justice non-profit Foxglove in collaboration with environmental charity Global Action Plan, who claimed the government was wrong to grant planning permission for the project without conducting an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) first. The project, known as the West London Technology Park (WLTP) development, is being overseen by developer Greystoke, which wants to transform the former landfill site (located within an area of green belt land) into a hyperscale datacentre.
Europe's supermarket shelves are packed with brands billing their plastic packaging as sustainable, but often only a fraction of the materials are truly recovered from waste, with the rest made from petroleum. Brands using plastic packaging from Kraft's Heinz Beanz to Mondelez's Philadelphia use materials made by the plastic manufacturing arm of the oil company Saudi Aramco. The Saudi state-owned holding opposes production cuts under the UN plastic treaty and is the world's largest corporate greenhouse-gas emitter (over 70m tonnes up to 2023).
Black plastic gets its color from carbon black pigment and is commonly used in food containers, such as meat or produce trays and take-out containers, as well as disposable coffee lids, plastic bags, and hard plastic items like DVD cases and planters. While plastic is one of the categories of things that we are encouraged to recycle - when we can't reuse or repurpose it - not all black plastic items can be recycled.
One of the greenest local councils in the country says it is cutting back on its net-zero schemes this year due to funding pressure. Islington Council has won praise for its ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions in the borough. Last year, the borough was ranked the best single-tier local authority in the UK for its actions on climate change, which include decarbonising its waste recycling centre, rolling out electric vehicles and carrying out a social housing retrofit programme.
Earth911 turns 35 in 2026. We invited Trey Granger, who worked at Earth911 from 2007 to 2014 as the site's first content editor, and whoe also oversaw expansion of the recycling directory, to share some of the highlights of the continuing journey to an easy to understand recycling system.Earth911 turns 35 years old in 2026 (but we don't look a day over 30). To celebrate, here are 35 fun facts about your favorite low-waste resource.
We can make changes to reduce our waste by precycling when we shop, reducing what we purchase, reusing items to get the most use out of them, and recycling when possible. But when we have items to throw away, please dispose of trash responsibly and don't litter. Let's reduce our waste and clean up our planet. It's our only home.