South Africa’s first set of solar-powered traffic lights in the Cape Town suburb of Ottery have received positive feedback from everyone from the municipality to motorists, Delivery magazine reports. The lights have been such a success that people have been asking for them to be installed elsewhere, said the National Energy Efficiency Agency’s Barry Bredenkamp. [...]
Retail chain Woolworths has announced that 30 percent of its in-store signage is now made from renewable raw materials and contains recycled fibres from post industrial and post consumer waste. The company says it began using recyclable board for store signage and displays in 2006 as an ecological alternative to the standard plastic commonly used [...]
The African Development Bank Group has announced that it plans to invest $814-million in biodiversity conservation and natural resources management in the Congo Basin. The Congo Basin contains the second largest remaining humid tropical forest in the world, but it is threatened by commercial logging, mining and large-scale commercial hunting for bush meat and ivory. [...]
Virgin Atlantic’s first commercial biofuel flight this week failed to impress Britain’s environmentalists. Some even dismissed it as a “nonsensical” publicity stunt. The Boeing 747 flew from London to Amsterdam using a 20 percent biofuel mix of coconut and babassu oil in one of its four fuel tanks Climate change campaigners don’t rate biofuels highly [...]
It may look like a giant kiddies balloon, but the object pictured above is in fact state-of-the-art concentrated solar photovoltaic technology for which Cool Earth Solar, a California-based company, has reportedly just received $21-million dollars in funding. Concentrated solar systems use lenses or reflectors to concentrate sunlight onto solar cells, which reduces the amount of [...]
German billionaire Hasso Plattner, co-founder of software giant SAP and owner of the Fancourt golf estate in George, announced a R350 million venture capital fund in Cape Town recently. Among the Hasso Plattner Africa fund’s preferred investment areas are clean technologies, such as renewable energy and energy-saving concepts. Germany’s MAN Ferrostaal, described as a global [...]
