As much of the developed world, Malaysia has long been beset by vast and ever-accumulating amounts of electronic waste. Malaysians produce a million ton of e-waste each year, while globally we are on course to produce a staggering 50 million metric tons of e-waste by next year. By 2014, the huge piles…
The planet is warming. The polar ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. We are in for an impending environmental meltdown (literally). But there is not much we can do. Or is there? What if we could refreeze the ice at the Arctic artificially? Say, we could do that by building…
This one is a biggie. A new wind turbine, that is. A company in Denmark has unveiled a giant wind turbine that can generate 216,000kWh (kilowatt hours) in a single day. MNI Offshore Vistas Wind has built the prototype turbine at Østerild, a national test center for offshore wind turbines, and has already…
The Netherlands has long been associated with the harnessing of winds. Windmills, which dot the countryside across the European nation, have been used for centuries. Winds were harnessed to mill grains and to pump water out of low-lying lands into rivers beyond the dikes so fields could be farmed. These days, though, winds in the Netherlands power…
A brand-new sports complex in Penang has top-notch facilities, including easier access for the disabled. Better yet, it’s now officially the island’s first sports center that’s fully eco-friendly. The City Sports Complex in Relau, which boasts an Olympic-size swimming pool, 10 badminton courts and two gyms, has been built so as to incorporate…
When it comes to the quality of their products, there is little that separates Apple and Samsung. When it comes to their energy footprints, however, there’s plenty of difference that sets the two hi-tech manufacturing giants apart. That is according to Greenpeace, which has just released a report on how eco-friendly the…
Turning carbon dioxide to baking soda. That’s what a chemical plant in India does. Sound like a swell idea? It should because it is. The Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals plant, located in the industrial port city of Tuticorin, plans to convert some 60,000 tons of its own CO2 emissions into baking…
Clean energy is on its way up globally with more and more nations transitioning to renewables in their energy packages. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s still too little too late. According to a new study conducted by Duke University, in the US, we will need to adopt green…
Batteries. Don’t we constantly need them to power all those seemingly indispensable gadgets in our lives? The trouble, of course, is that most of them tend to contain plenty of toxic substances… and that they don’t last all that long so they invariably end up on trash heaps, thereby posing constant…
A large pool of untapped energy is right under our feet… or can be. Engineers in the US, as we have reported on Clean Malaysia, have devised a new type of floor that converts your footsteps into renewable energy. Not to be outdone, officials in France have built the world’s solar-powered road that…
If we needed any more proof that solar power is the way to go, here it comes: solar energy is now officially the cheapest form of electricity in 58 low-income countries. According to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), solar power is able to do better than coal and natural…
Palm oil cultivation has been a scourge on Malaysia’s environment, but if a small company has its way, the industry will become rather more sustainable. The director of Aqua Ecotech Sdn Bhd (AquaEco), Andrew Liew, says the company has invented a “green tech” palm oil system, which is the “first proven and…
We continue to pump vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. The more we do that, the worse the planet’s prospects get because global temperatures will rise as a result of CO2’s heat-trapping molecules. Yet certain living organisms will thrive….
Ocean waste has plenty of legs, and not in a good way. There is just so much of it in our seas that our oceans are on the verge of drowning in all that waste. Now the German sportswear manufacturer Adidas has come up with an idea: Why not turn some…
First came Elon Musk’s electric Tesla cars. Now come the maverick billionaire entrepreneur’s solar roofs. Big deal, you might say. Solar roofs have been around for quite some time, after all. Yes, but these roofs are solar roofs with a difference. Musk says his new solar-powered roofs come with fancy…
We tend not to think much of floors – certainly not when it comes to power generation. There they are under our feet so we can walk on them, but they hardly spring to mind when we think about generating clean energy for homes and offices. For that we have…