We are Updating our Climate Pledge 🌍
As we watch the world go through catastrophic changes because of man-made climate change, we are trying to do our bit to limit our carbon footprint and update our climate pledge.
We are going from planting 60 Trees per month to 168 with the incredible team over at Ecologi. If you haven’t seen what they do, we highly suggest visiting their website for more information on their projects worldwide to build a sustainable future for all of us.
Over the last year, the dramatic and sudden changes in the world around us has made us think deeply about what we want our company to stand for and what we as a collective can do. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more information on how UNBXD is changing and transforming its efforts with the input and help from all of our team.
Additional Projects supported this month through Ecologi:
Producing Energy From Waste Rice Husks in India.
The agricultural sector is particularly important in India, with well over half of the population generating an income from agriculture. The country is the world’s second largest producer of rice, accounting for 22.5% of overall world rice production, and this means rice production is a particularly important source of income for rural populations.
At the same time, India’s energy needs are rising fast, with growth in electricity demand and other energy uses among the highest in the world. Currently rural India largely relies on coal power plants, which not only emit CO2 but also contaminate local water sources and cause long-term health issues for employees.
This small project involves the implementation of a 5MW cogeneration power project powered by waste rice husks. The project is designed to meet growing electricity demands as local manufacturing infrastructure develops, without producing increases in fossil fuel energy usage.
Rice husks are the hard protective covering of grains of rice that are discarded when rice is harvested. The rice husks are transported from the nearby rice mills in the region to the project site, and are combusted in a boiler. The combustion produces high-pressure steam which is used to turn a turbine, which drives a generator to produce electricity.
The electricity produced helps to meet energy demands, and replaces electricity that would otherwise come from the largely coal-powered NEWNE (India’s integrated Northern, Eastern, Western, North-Eastern) grid.
Whilst biomass power and waste-to-energy solutions are often considered ‘bridge’ solutions, small projects like this one help to provide funding for sustainable development – as well as producing emissions reductions like the projected 28,442 tCO2e annual reductions from this project.
Cleaner Cookstoves in Zambia
Rudimentary stoves, used for cooking, produce several greenhouse gases through the combustion of non-renewable biomass. These emissions are damaging to the climate, and also greatly increase levels of household air pollution which causes health conditions in the population – particularly affecting women and children.
Ghana is the largest per-capita consumer of charcoal in West Africa, and charcoal is often used as biomass fuel for household cookstoves. There are alternatives such as gas stoves – but these are often too expensive to make the switch accessible to many families.
Traditionally, the majority of Zambian families cook on an open fire, utilising the ‘three rocks’ method for heating pots to cook meals. In this case, the non-renewable biomass used is wood fuel.
As well as the climate and health implications of these cookstoves, using large quantities of charcoal and wood as fuel cooking stoves causes deforestation and desertification when these fuel sources are collected from nearby.
