Consumer & Gadgets

Earlier this month, regulators flagged power price rises in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Like many people, you’re probably wondering how you can minimize the financial pain.

Lithium-ion batteries are the most widespread portable energy storage solution—but there are growing concerns regarding their safety.

South Africa’s electricity utility Eskom has made it clear that “loadshedding”—rolling scheduled power cuts—isn’t going to end any time soon. This reality, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement during his annual state of the nation speech on 9 February 2023 that tax incentives for solar power use are imminent, mean that many people are considering alternative electricity supply systems for their homes.

Natural gas furnaces not only heat your home, they also produce a lot of pollution.

Soaring energy costs are a major factor in Australia’s cost-of-living crisis. The conventional wisdom is people will reduce their energy use in response to rising prices—and this may be the case for the most vulnerable households. However, our research published today suggests rising costs of living are more likely to increase household energy use as people economize by doing more at home.

In recent years, video streaming has increased significantly. While every German spent an average of 42 minutes a day watching online videos on YouTube, Netflix, Facebook or other platforms in 2019, a year later it was already 55 minutes—in the group of 14- to 29-year-olds even 130 minutes.

When it comes to enhancing the sustainability of plastic beverage bottles, consumers are willing to pay a bonus for bio-based alternatives—the more so when the alternative is visually distinctive. This follows from research by Ph.D. candidate Maria Zwicker as part of the RIBIPOL project where novel rigid bio-based polyesters are being developed for potential large scale applications, such as beverage bottles. Her findings have been published in the January issue of the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption.

In the effort to reduce plastic waste in the restaurant industry—single-use takeout containers, specifically—University of Michigan researchers compared the lifetime environmental impacts of single-use and reusable food containers.