Arnaud Gissinger

Headline tree-planting counts measure seedlings in the ground, not living forest years later. Wrong species, wrong site, no aftercare, and monocultures mean large shares of planted trees die — yet the numbers are routinely used to claim climate and biodiversity impact.

Clothing banks look free but are secretly funded by selling the reusable fraction, mostly exported. When export demand collapsed and ultra-fast-fashion flooded banks with unsellable items, each container flipped to a loss — causing operators to quietly withdraw, ending the servic

Data centres consumed ~415 TWh in 2024 (~1.5% of global electricity), growing ~12%/year, with AI the primary driver. The IEA projects demand more than doubling to ~945 TWh by 2030. Computing is one of the few sectors where emissions are set to grow, straining grids and climate go

Across tropical forest nations, most clearing is illegal and tied to cattle, soy/palm, land-grabbing, and mining. It is profitable, remote, hard to police, and weakly enforced when political will lapses — progress is real but reversible.

Specific streets and low points flood repeatedly in heavy rain — from clogged drains or drainage never sized for today's storm intensity — causing recurring property damage and access hazards that stay below the threshold for major capital fixes.

In heatwaves, cold snaps and outages, isolated elderly, mobility-limited, and medically dependent residents are often invisible to neighbors and services — so danger is found only after a missed check-in, while privacy concerns make a naive registry its own hazard.

Dense, low-canopy, dark-surfaced neighborhoods run several degrees hotter than nearby areas during heatwaves, concentrating health risk and energy costs — and the burden falls hardest on low-income districts least able to adapt.

Rail passengers, workers and drivers across national networks face frequent suicides on tracks and platforms — roughly 2,500/yr in Europe and 4–14% of some countries' total suicides — a highly lethal, largely preventable method whose deaths are also systematically undercounted.

Coastal, island, and remote communities sit beside seawater but lack safe drinking water. Conventional desalination (RO, thermal) requires reliable power, capital, trained technicians, and supply chains they don't have — and discharges brine that harms local ecosystems.

Discarded packaging, cigarette butts and other small waste builds up along roadsides, trails, parks, rivers, beaches and the ocean — harming wildlife, degrading shared spaces, and costing the public hundreds of millions a year to clean up.

From 1946–1990, ~14 nations dumped 200,000+ barrels of radioactive waste into the deep ocean under a

Utility-scale solar needs roughly 5–7 acres per MW, putting large arrays in direct competition with farmland, habitat, and communities. Local siting conflict and permitting friction — not raw land scarcity — are what throttle deployment speed.

A company founded for social or environmental purposes is structurally fragile: founders age out, investors demand returns, and acquirers can buy the mission away. Without a binding ownership structure, purpose is the first thing cut when money or control changes hands.

Shampoo, body wash and liquid soap are sold almost entirely in single-use plastic bottles that are rarely recycled. The format persists because plastic is cheap, light, unbreakable and water-resistant and supply chains are built around it, so nothing has displaced it.

Organic food waste is roughly a third of household residual waste. Mixed with general waste it is heavy, wet and costly to truck and burn. France made household biowaste sorting mandatory in 2024, but curbside bins, routes and treatment add cost that source diversion can avoid.

Evidence of which civic interventions actually work is scattered across PDFs, news and council minutes, and rarely stored in comparable form. A community facing a problem others already solved cannot find that record, so it re-invents the fix and repeats avoidable mistakes.

An open platform structuring civic problem-solving as a shared graph: issues split into sub-issues, each issue gathers competing solutions, and every solution collects case studies with real outcomes, costs and metrics. Semantic search and voting keep it navigable and honest.

Install full-height platform screen doors (PSDs) — floor-to-ceiling barriers with sliding doors aligned to train doors — to physically seal the platform edge and eliminate track access at stations. This intervention has the strongest evidence of any rail-suicide measure.

Have municipalities procure textile collection as a paid service (service contract or per-tonne gate fee), like glass or biowaste, so the operator is paid to collect and divert tonnage and resale revenue just lowers the price — moving commodity risk from the fragile operator to t

Every tool in this space estimates differently, so numbers are not comparable across teams or vendors. A shared specification expresses software carbon as a rate — emissions per functional unit such as a request, user, or training run — so results can be compared and tracked over

A fixed, on-the-spot financial penalty raises the expected cost of littering. Consistency and visible enforcement matter more than fine size — a high penalty that is never issued deters nobody. Works as a backstop alongside infrastructure and behaviour-change measures, not as a s

Set the EPR support per tonne to the measured end-to-end cost of collecting, sorting, and disposing of textiles, indexed to rise automatically when resale revenue falls — so collection is a cost-recovered public service funded by producers, not a bet on the export price.

Use deep-learning protein design (RFdiffusion) to computationally create small, ultra-stable proteins that bind and neutralize conserved venom toxins, manufacturable cheaply by microbial fermentation without animal immunization — as low-cost broad-spectrum antivenom components o…

Scale the EPR fee by recyclability (bonus for durable mono-fibre garments, malus for disposable blends) and add a per-item levy on ultra-fast-fashion volume. This funds reject processing and pushes producers to design for sortability — shrinking the unsellable fraction at source.

A municipality buys laying hens from regional breeders and gives them free or subsidised to registered households with gardens. The hens eat kitchen scraps, diverting biowaste at source, and give eggs in return. Run as a complement to curbside collection, not a replacement.

Upgrade trusted existing community buildings with solar and battery storage so they stay powered during outages and serve as dependable heating/cooling refuges. Gives at-risk residents a known fallback that doesn't depend on being checked on.

A shipping-container RO plant powered by solar PV and battery storage, producing ~75,000 L/day for ~25,000–35,000 people, operated by trained local staff and partly funded through water sales. Capital cost ~US$0.5–0.57M; ~20-year service life.

Install rain gardens, permeable surfaces and other sustainable drainage (SuDS) across the catchment to soak up rainfall where it lands, cutting peak runoff to overwhelmed drains. Most effective as a dispersed, upstream-weighted network.

Form a standing community Flood Action Group — backed by a flood charity — to systematically log flood hotspots, sustain engagement between events, and act as one coordinated voice to the councils and water companies that otherwise diffuse responsibility.

Porous fired-terracotta modules, kept wet by solar-powered pumps and fans, cool passing air by evaporation — creating comfort pockets at bus stops, plazas and courtyards with no refrigerants and minimal energy. Effect is large in hot, dry air but collapses in humidity, and every

Use varespladib (PLA2 inhibitor), marimastat (SVMP inhibitor), and DMPS/dimercaprol (Zn2+ chelators) as cheap, heat-stable, species-agnostic first-line treatment that buys time before or alongside antivenom, particularly in the pre-hospital window.

Install half-height automatic platform gates (1.2–1.5 m) where full-height screen doors are too costly or structurally infeasible, reducing platform suicides substantially—though less than full-height, since the barriers can be climbed.

Systematically identify recurring trackside black-spots and install fencing, mid-track barriers, and access restrictions at those locations — accepting a documented risk of displacement to nearby unfenced sites.

Install blue LED lighting on platforms as a low-cost, easily retrofitted calming/deterrent measure aimed at reducing suicides — an approach with large but heavily contested effect estimates that should not be treated as equivalent to physical barriers.

A black-lined basin of saltwater under a sloped glass cover: sun evaporates the water, it condenses on the glass and runs off as distillate. No moving parts, no consumables, repairable with local materials — but output is ~4–6 L/m²/day, so area demand is the binding constraint.

Sell shampoo/soap as a concentrated liquid (or tablet/powder) that the customer dilutes with tap water at home. Removes most of the shipping weight and volume while keeping the product a liquid the customer already knows — preserving brand control over the final formula.

Plant and steward trees, prioritizing the specific streets that heat-mapping shows are hottest and have least canopy. Trees cut surface and air temperature through shade and evapotranspiration, and also reduce stormwater runoff.

Combine more and better-placed ashtrays, free pocket ashtrays, public awareness that filters are plastic, and modest enforcement — sustained as a coordinated program rather than a one-off, typically halving butt litter where measured.

Construct recessed 'suicide pits' in the trackbed below platform level, giving a person on the track survivable space beneath a passing train. Reduces fatality of attempts without deterring them — a lethality-mitigation complement to other prevention measures.

Use CCTV analytics/AI to detect at-risk behaviour (loitering at platform ends, letting trains pass, trackside intrusion) and alert staff in real time — technically promising but without empirical evidence of reducing suicides in practice.

Reintroduce passive cooling from traditional hot-climate design — shaded streets, courtyards, underground air channels — and pair it with heat governance: naming and categorizing heatwaves so the public treats heat as seriously as storms.

Work with news media to adopt and enforce responsible suicide-reporting guidelines — no method/location detail, no sensational or repetitive coverage, sign-posting help — to suppress imitative clusters, the best-evidenced non-physical rail-suicide intervention.

Systematically test which existing polyvalent antivenoms already neutralize orphan-species venoms via antivenomics and preclinical assays, then pursue label extensions — expanding effective coverage without developing new products.

For code you operate, sample the energy drawn by CPU, GPU and RAM during execution, multiply by the carbon intensity of the local electricity grid, and log the resulting CO2 estimate next to other run metrics so it can be tracked and reduced.

Replace dark, heat-absorbing roofs and pavement with high-albedo reflective surfaces — cool roofs, light-colored or coated pavement — to reflect sunlight rather than retain it. Acts fast and scales through building codes and repaving cycles.

Stabilise antivenom supply with guaranteed-volume pooled procurement, donor/government subsidy, WHO prequalification, and regional manufacturing — so effective, region-matched antivenom stays commercially viable and reaches clinics affordably.

When a generative model is called through a provider's API, hardware cannot be metered. Estimate per-request energy and CO2 from model size, token counts, and data-centre assumptions using a life-cycle method, giving API consumers an impact figure they otherwise cannot obtain.

Produce and distribute lyophilised (freeze-dried) antivenom with a multi-year ambient shelf life so it can be stocked at rural health posts and remote clinics where refrigeration is unreliable or absent.

Where coastal advection fog is dependable, vertical mesh nets passively strain water droplets from wind-driven fog into reservoirs — no energy, no membranes, no seawater intake. Cheap and low-tech, but geographically constrained and historically prone to social/ownership collapse

Replace volunteer committees with a professional maintenance company on a performance contract: hotline, guaranteed repair times (~3 days), preventive maintenance, and a stocked parts supply chain — funded by pooled mobile-money subscriptions and results-based payments tied to up

Combine community health education (discouraging traditional-healer delay, teaching safe first aid) with organised volunteer rapid transport — e.g., motorcycle networks — to get envenomed patients to an antivenom-equipped centre within the window that determines survival.

A femtosecond-laser-textured aluminium panel wicks seawater uphill across its face, absorbs ~92% of sunlight to evaporate it, and uses the coffee-ring effect plus salt creeping to push crystallised salt to the panel edges — self-cleaning, no membranes, no chemicals, no electricit

Reframe not-littering as an expression of who people already are — local pride, group identity — rather than an environmental instruction. Aimed at the demographics most likely to litter and delivered through broadcast and social media at scale.

Split voting from economic rights: put voting stock in an irrevocable purpose trust whose deed binds the company to its mission, and give non-voting economic stock to a mission nonprofit so profits fund the cause. The company stays for-profit but can never be sold away from its p

Get certified against a published social/environmental standard (e.g. B Corp) as a public, audited signal of commitment. Cheap, requires no ownership change, useful as a complement — but it locks nothing: it's voluntary, revocable, and the first thing dropped when it conflicts wi

A central plant chills water and pipes it underground to many buildings, replacing individual AC units. It rejects waste heat away from street level, cutting energy use per unit of cooling and the anthropogenic heat that feeds the urban heat island.

Teach and normalise an outdoor ethic in which visitors carry out everything they bring in — including micro-litter and food scraps — sustained through education, signage and partnerships with land agencies and outdoor organisations.

Encase low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste in resin, bitumen, or cement, drum it, and sink it on the deep abyssal plain — relying on the ocean's vast volume and assumed stability to dilute any eventual release below harmful levels.

Sell a tiny veto share (~1%) to an independent purpose foundation that holds no economic stake but permanently blocks two actions: selling the company for owners' personal gain, and extracting profits as dividends or capital gains. Founders keep full operational control; the lock

Embed the cause inside a product people already use daily (a search engine, a current account, a consumer good) and route its profits to the mission. Impact then grows with ordinary adoption and ad/transaction revenue, not with donor cycles or grant rounds.

Run a consumer service (e.g. ad-funded web search) at a profit, ring-fence the surplus for vetted reforestation partners, and lock the pledge into a mission-protected ownership structure so it can't be quietly cut during downturns or ownership changes.

Shape the cues that drive littering: keep spaces visibly clean (a clean place signals 'nobody litters here'), and pair 'most people don't litter' (descriptive) with 'littering is not OK' (injunctive) messages, which together change behaviour more than either alone.

When a sale can't be stopped, negotiate an independent 'social mission' board into the acquisition agreement—with defined authority over values, advocacy, and brand integrity held separately from the parent's commercial control. Only as strong as courts will enforce it, but bette

Fund local partners to restore native species on degraded land — not carbon-rich habitat that doesn't need trees — with multi-year aftercare and satellite-plus-field monitoring. Report trees alive over time, not seedlings planted.

Require retailers to charge a small mandatory fee per single-use carrier bag at checkout. Even a small charge cuts bag use and bag litter by around 80%, nudging shoppers toward reusables — a low-cost policy with fast, measurable results.

Where land was recently forested, protect and prune regrowth from surviving roots and seed banks (assisted/farmer-managed natural regeneration) rather than transplanting nursery seedlings — far cheaper, with site-adapted species. Intact standing forest should take priority, as it

Redesign bins to capture more litter: make disposal a small game or 'vote', place and size them where litter actually occurs, and use fill-sensors so they don't overflow. Turning the right choice into the fun, convenient choice measurably cuts nearby litter.

Organise volunteers to remove litter at scale — through recurring community cleanups, fitness-linked litter-picking (plogging), and 'adopt a stretch' stewardship. Removes existing harm, builds an engaged constituency, and can feed monitoring data.

Manufacture antivenom as a defined cocktail of recombinant human monoclonal antibodies targeting conserved toxin families (3FTx, PLA2, SVMP, SVSP), replacing dozens of narrow regional polyclonal sera with a small number of broad-spectrum products split roughly by neurotoxic-elapi

Add a small refundable deposit to drink containers, repaid on return. The financial incentive drives return rates above 90% and is the best-evidenced single intervention for container litter, cutting it roughly 40–80% across many jurisdictions.

Prohibit specific high-frequency, low-value single-use plastics — straws, stirrers, cutlery, plates, expanded-polystyrene food containers, balloon sticks — removing the item from the market entirely so it cannot become litter.

Make the companies that put packaging on the market pay for its end-of-life and cleanup, and reward less-wasteful designs. Shifts cost and design incentives upstream to the producers who created the litter, rather than onto taxpayers.

Use camera surveys (handheld, vehicle- or drone-mounted) with machine-vision models to automatically detect, count and classify litter over large areas — producing objective, repeatable density data to target action and rigorously measure whether interventions worked.

Replace or overlay road/path surfaces with load-bearing PV panels that vehicles travel over. Every real-world pilot has under-delivered or failed: flat orientation, traffic wear, and 8–360× higher cost versus equivalent off-road panels make it a cautionary approach rather than a

In heavily used or fragile areas, require visitors to pack out all waste — including human waste — and provide the means (issued pack-out kits, locking trailhead bins), turning the Leave No Trace ethic into an enforced condition of access.

Run recurring beach and waterway cleanups where volunteers log every item by type on a standardized card or app, building a comparable marine-debris database that identifies hotspots and supplies evidence for upstream policy (bans, deposits, producer responsibility).

Lay PV in the gap between rails (removable panels, e.g. Sun-Ways) or integrate cells into replacement sleepers (e.g. Greenrail), reusing sealed rail corridors without new land. More promising than road-surface PV because trains pass intermittently rather than braking and grinding

Turn survey-derived dump-site boundaries and drum positions into an authoritative georeferenced layer that is mandatory input to seabed licensing, nautical charts, and marine spatial plans — so mining, trawling, and cable projects are routed around the zones by default.

Let anyone photograph and geotag litter via an app that records type, material, and brand into an open database. Crowdsourcing builds real-time, street-level maps revealing hotspots and brand-level evidence for producer accountability.

Mount conventionally tilted, air-cooled panels on land a corridor already occupies — highway embankments, medians, canopies over lanes, tunnel roofs, noise barriers, and canal covers — reusing committed right-of-way while preserving the properties that make PV cheap and productiv

Collect paired water, sediment, and biota samples at graded distances from breached drums, measuring dump-specific radionuclides (cobalt-60, niobium-94, caesium-137, americium-241) to separate dump-derived signal from fallout background — with fixed reference targets enabling rep

Use an AUV to fly lawnmower tracks over the dump zone and build georeferenced photo-mosaics locating individual drums, then send a crewed submersible or ROV for close visual assessment, radiometry, and sampling of selected targets. Two tiers make partial coverage of a 14,500 km²

A central facility fills standardised containers to order, labelled per household; a carrier delivers full units and collects empties on the same stop for cleaning and refill. Filling only on order closes the contamination window and the swap removes dispensing friction.

Launch refill in hotels and multi-unit buildings before going direct-to-consumer. These give free route density (many units per address), a rational B2B buyer not fragile consumer goodwill, contract-based predictable demand, and a cheap place to prove the cleaning economics.

A direct-to-consumer refill service combining concentrate (no water shipped), fill-to-order labelling, ad-hoc orders batched against a cutoff so routes can collect empties, and a closed loop. Made durable by skipping the 30 to 50 percent retail margin and by customer retention.

A treaty regime that first moratoriumed (1983) then permanently banned (from 1993) the dumping of radioactive waste at sea, shifting from case-by-case permits to blanket prohibition. It is the approach that actually stopped new drums entering the ocean.

Install a shared coop serving many households or an institution (school, retirement home) instead of giving hens to individual homes. Residents bring food scraps, a rota or staff care for the hens, and eggs are shared. Reaches gardenless households and spreads the care burden.

The municipality does not distribute hens. It subsidises coops with a rebate and runs free chicken-keeping classes so residents keep their own backyard hens that eat food scraps. This avoids the authority's animal-welfare liability and fits where keeping hens is already legal.

Train station and on-train staff to recognise, approach and engage people showing signs of suicidal crisis (e.g. Samaritans'

Recover dumped drums from the deep seabed using ROVs, lifting rigs, and sealed containment vessels, then transfer them to managed onshore storage — removing the waste from the marine environment rather than leaving it to decay in place.

Pair two-tier satellite monitoring (an annual census plus near-real-time alerts, ideally radar where cloud is heavy, published openly) with a funded, empowered enforcement body that acts on alerts through inspections, fines, embargoes, and seizure of clearing equipment.

Attack the economics, not just the act: zero-deforestation buyer agreements (Soy Moratorium, G4 cattle deal), rural credit conditioned on compliance, a property registry (CAR), and blacklisting the worst-offending municipalities so cleared land loses market and credit access.

Bind the measures with a standing interministerial action plan (PPCDAm) covering land-use planning, monitoring and sustainable production, funded by a performance-based mechanism (the Amazon Fund) that pays out only after verified reductions and draws sustained donor finance.

Convert itemised cloud billing and usage records into energy and emissions figures using published hardware power coefficients and region-specific grid carbon intensity, producing a per-service, per-region footprint across multiple providers.

Install crisis-line signage, supportive messaging, and direct-connection help-points at platforms, bridges, and known hotspots, delivered by operators in partnership with crisis services. A low-cost baseline layer; standalone effect on rail suicide is modest and under-evidenced.

Where track runs close to psychiatric institutions, add targeted fencing, barriers, or routing/siting changes to break the physical proximity that makes those sections hotspots for patient suicides — a driver generic network-wide measures leave unaddressed.

Establish protocols linking mental-health services and rail operators — sharing elevated-risk periods (e.g. around discharge), agreeing alerting and safety-planning for patients near rail — so clinical risk information translates into targeted operational vigilance.

Align suicide-classification practice between railway-operator (ERA) records and national mortality statistics — resolving the 'undetermined intent' gap through shared coding rules and record linkage — so the true rail-suicide count is visible for prevention and evaluation.

Benchmark models on the same hardware for the same tasks, then publish results as star-band ratings on a leaderboard with a shareable label. An ENERGY STAR-style signal makes efficiency legible to non-experts and usable in procurement, pressuring providers to disclose.

Every emissions estimate multiplies energy by a carbon-intensity factor, but annual national averages miss regional and hourly variation. An API exposing live, historical, and forecast intensity—both average and marginal—per zone and per hour lets any tool convert energy to accur

CommunityFix.org was designed and built solo as an open-source civic-tech project. The premise: the bottleneck in local problem-solving is not a shortage of ideas but the absence of a structured, shared place to record…

AI Energy Score, launched in February 2025 at the Paris AI Action Summit by Hugging Face, Salesforce, Cohere and Carnegie Mellon University, benchmarks models on standardised NVIDIA H100 hardware across 10 tasks and ass…

WattTime, founded in 2014 by UC Berkeley researchers and a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Institute since 2017, provides Marginal Operating Emissions Rate (MOER, in pounds of CO₂ per MWh) via API in real-time, forecast, a…

Electricity Maps ingests data from TSOs, market operators, and government agencies via an open-source parser system, applies a flow-tracing algorithm to produce consumption-based (rather than production-based) carbon in…

The Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification reached ISO accreditation as ISO/IEC 21031:2024 in Q1 2024. It defines software carbon as a rate: SCI = (E × I) + M per functional unit R, using a rate rather than a tot…

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is a provider-native emissions tool included as a deliberate contrast to open-source multi-cloud approaches. It reports both location-based and market-based scope 2 emissions computed on an…

Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) is an open-source, multi-cloud tool launched by Thoughtworks in March 2021. It reads itemised billing and usage data from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Alibaba, converts it to energy using he…

EcoLogits is an open-source Python library that estimates energy and multi-criteria environmental impacts of generative AI API calls. It patches provider Python client libraries (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, Cohere, G…

Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) attributes energy to individual processes, containers, pods, and nodes in orchestrated environments, exporting results as Prometheus metrics. It draws power readi…

CodeCarbon is an open-source Python package that estimates CO2 from code execution. An EmissionsTracker (used as a context manager or decorator) samples CPU energy via Intel RAPL, GPU energy via NVIDIA NVML, and RAM e…

Launched in 2010, the Network Rail–Samaritans partnership deployed a multi-component programme across the GB national rail network: gatekeeper-style staff training ('Managing Suicidal Contacts'), targeted work at design…

After a sharp rise in suicides on the Vienna subway following its opening, the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention introduced media-reporting guidelines in 1987 and worked with journalists to change how subway s…

Blue LED lights were installed at platform ends across Japanese stations. Before-and-after panel data studies (14 treated stations, neighbouring and control stations, 2000–2013) reported large decreases in suicides and…

Drainage pits recessed into the trackbed beneath London Underground platforms give a person on the track survivable space beneath a passing train. Where present, they roughly halved the fatality of attempts — but by des…

Mid-track fencing at a Swedish hotspot station reduced suicides at the treated location by 62.5%, but control stations on the same rail line saw a 162% increase over the same period — the clearest documented case of geo…

Platform screen doors installed across the Hong Kong MTR were associated with a 59.9% reduction in railway suicides, with no evidence of substitution to unsealed platforms. The lower reduction compared to other cities p…

Using monthly panel data from 94 stations over 2008–2017, suicides in the Shanghai metro declined by 90.9% after platform screen doors were installed. The study found no significant evidence of displacement to railway s…

Platform screen doors were installed across Seoul metropolitan subway stations and evaluated using 10 years of monthly data from 121 stations with Poisson regression. Full-height PSDs achieved near-complete elimination…

A ~32 km solar-canopy cycle highway runs down the median of a six-lane motorway between Daejeon and Sejong. Panels are mounted as a roof over the cycle lane — angled for optimal efficiency and air-cooled — rather than e…

Along the Jinan–Weifang expressway in Shandong, a reported 68 MW corridor-integrated solar system mounts conventional panels on slopes, medians, tunnel roofs, and service-area canopies — not on the running surface. This…

Bankset Energy tested sleeper-clip PV panels at Deutsche Bahn's Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) test field, claiming ~0.1 MW per km and announcing 200 MW across 1,000 km in Saxony in 2018. No independent verification of the…

The "solar sleeper" variant of the rail PV concept: Greenrail integrates PV cells into replacement sleepers cast partly from recycled tyres and plastic (~35 t of waste repurposed per km), so the sleeper itself generates…

The first removable inter-rail PV system on a line open to traffic. In April 2025, Sun-Ways installed 48 panels (~18 kW) along a 100 m active stretch near Buttes, Neuchâtel, using a Scheuchzer track machine that unrolls…

SolaRoad opened a 72 m solar cycle path in Krommenie in October 2014 (later extended to ~90 m), operated by the SolaRoad consortium (TNO, Province of North Holland, and partners). Because the load was limited to cyclist…

Colas opened a ~1 km "Wattway" solar road (~2,800 m² of resin-encapsulated PV cells bonded onto an existing road surface) in Tourouvre-au-Perche, Normandy, in December 2016, co-developed with the French National Institu…

The most publicized test of surface-embedded PV. Solar Roadways Inc. installed ~30 hexagonal PV tiles (~13.9 m²) in a public square in Sandpoint, Idaho, funded by ~US$2.2M in Indiegogo crowdfunding plus US Department of…

Using the deep-learning method RFdiffusion (with ProteinMPNN sequence design and AlphaFold2 filtering), researchers de novo designed small (~100-amino-acid) proteins to bind three-finger toxins from elapid venom: short-…

In four villages of southeastern Nepal (population ~62,000, Jhapa/Morang region), where most neurotoxic-envenoming deaths occurred in the village or during transport, a study team combined community health education (di…

A counter-example to the FAV-Afrique collapse: effective, region-matched African antivenom developed and sustained through public-academic partnership rather than a purely commercial market. EchiTAb-G (ovine, monospecif…

FAV-Afrique was a polyvalent antivenom covering ~10 snake species across sub-Saharan Africa, considered safe and effective. Sanofi Pasteur halted production in 2010 (last batch made 2014, expired June 2016) after sales…

PANAF-Premium is a freeze-dried polyvalent antivenom requiring no refrigeration, with a manufacturer-stated ambient shelf life of approximately 4 years. A preclinical study evaluated PANAF and a 'Panafrican' ICP product…

Rather than develop a new product, researchers tested whether an existing polyvalent antivenom (PANAF-Premium, Premium Serums & Vaccines) already neutralizes the venoms of medically important sub-Saharan African snakes…

BRAVO was a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled phase II trial of oral varespladib-methyl plus standard care (including antivenom) versus standard care plus placebo, run in emergency departments in India (Puduc…

Researchers isolated broadly-neutralizing IgG antibodies from the memory B-cells of a human donor (Tim Friede) who had self-immunized with escalating venom doses from 16 lethal elapid species over ~18 years. Two antibod…

From 1949 to 1982, European states — the United Kingdom in large majority, alongside France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and others — sank 200,000+ drums of radioactive waste encased in resin, bitumen or cemen…

The regulatory action that ended radioactive-waste sea dumping. Under the London Convention framework, parties adopted a voluntary moratorium on radioactive-waste dumping in 1983, which was converted into a permanent, l…

The environmental-sampling arm of NODSSUM 2026, establishing the first multi-compartment baseline at the site. Alongside drum inspection, the team collected water, sediment and living-organism samples to study the dispe…

Second NODSSUM campaign (close-inspection tier): building on the 2025 AUV wide-area map, ~30 scientists used the crewed submersible Nautile to make 20 dives beyond 4,700 m onto zones of interest identified in the prior…

First NODSSUM campaign (wide-area survey tier): the AUV Ulyx — on its first scientific deployment — flew lawnmower tracks over the abyssal plain at ~6 m above the seabed, acquiring high-resolution imagery assembled into…

An open space on the edge of King's Lynn, Norfolk, was planted with around 6,000 trees in plastic tree guards, intended to create a carbon sink. Reporting found that almost all trees died. Three compounding errors were…

On 11 November 2019 ('National Forestation Day'), Turkey's government ran 'Breath for the Future,' planting roughly 11 million saplings at over 2,000 sites in a single day. At Çorum, volunteers set a Guinness World Reco…

Ecosia funds local partner organisations in biodiversity hotspots and degraded land across 35+ countries; partners grow, plant, and nurture trees through establishment. The program uses 900+ diverse native species, expl…

Ecosia (Berlin, founded 2009) earns ad-click revenue from search results syndicated via Bing/Microsoft and Google, and channels its surplus into reforestation by paying local planting and restoration partner NGOs across…

Freetree was Ecosia's browser extension that monetised online shopping via affiliate commissions (revenue paid by merchants for referred sales) and channelled proceeds into Ecosia's tree-planting programme. Launched in…

Ben & Jerry's is a counter-example to steward-ownership: a case where mission protection relied on a contract and an independent board rather than an ownership lock. Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry's for $326 million in A…

On 14 September 2022, the Chouinard family transferred 100% of Patagonia into two new entities, splitting control from economic rights:

Etsy was certified by B Lab as a B Corporation from 2012. After its 2015 IPO, retaining certification required converting its Delaware C-corporation legal form to a public benefit corporation (PBC) by a 2017 deadline. U…

Ecosia is a Berlin-based search engine founded in December 2009 that uses advertising profits to fund tree-planting and climate initiatives. In autumn 2018, founders Christian Kroll and Tim Schumacher—concerned about mi…

Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000. Co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield could not block the sale (shareholders voted to accept), so they negotiated an independent board into the share-purchase agreement w…

On 14 September 2022, the Chouinard family transferred 100% of Patagonia into two new entities, splitting control from economics. The Patagonia Purpose Trust received all voting stock (2% of total shares) via an irr…

In October 2018 Ecosia GmbH (Berlin, founded 2009) adopted steward-ownership via the veto-share ('golden share') model, with the Purpose Foundation as the independent holder of approximately 1% of shares. The founders p…

Keep America Beautiful — founded in 1953 by packaging and beverage manufacturers — ran the 1971 "Crying Indian" PSA ("People start pollution. People can stop it."), achieving enormous cultural reach. The campaign is wid…

California municipalities began banning single-use carryout bags from 2007 onward, with statewide policy following. A 2019 peer-reviewed economic analysis (Taylor, R. L. C., *Journal of Environmental Economics and Manag…

A controlled field experiment by Cialdini and colleagues at Petrified Forest National Park tested anti-theft signage on visitor paths where marked pieces of petrified wood were placed. A sign stressing a negative descri…

Texas Adopt-A-Beach, run by the Texas General Land Office, has operated since 1986 on the Texas Gulf Coast. Volunteer groups commit to ongoing cleanups of assigned beach segments, with state-level coordination providing…

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council deployed Hubbub's Ballot Bin across the town, installing 21 voting ashtrays in litter hotspots. The council reported a 46% reduction in cigarette-butt litter, demonstrating the concept re…

Hubbub deployed the Ballot Bin — a wall-mounted two-slot cigarette receptacle framed as an opinion poll — on Villiers Street, London, as the original proof of concept under the Neat Streets project. Smokers stub out in…

Ellipsis Earth deployed camera-based machine-vision surveys to provide objective before/after litter density and composition data for Hubbub's Ballot Bin and Big Ballot Bin interventions in the UK, serving as the measur…

Litterati is a citizen-science app originating in San Francisco in which users photograph litter; AI assists in tagging each item's type, material, and brand into an open database. The brand-level data has been used in…

OpenLitterMap was started by Seán Lynch in Cork, Ireland in 2017 as an open-source, open-data platform modelled on OpenStreetMap. Users photograph and geotag litter via an app, recording type, material, and brand into a…

The Texas General Land Office launched its Adopt-A-Beach program in 1986, assigning volunteer groups ongoing responsibility for specific shoreline segments along the Texas Gulf Coast. The state agency coordinates logist…

The International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), run by Ocean Conservancy since 1986, mobilises volunteers worldwide to clean coasts and waterways while logging every item collected on a standardized data card (now the Clean Sw…

In the Grand Canyon river corridor, the National Park Service mandates that all river trip permit holders pack out all trash and solid human waste using portable toilet systems. Compliance is enforced as a condition of…

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy applies Leave No Trace principles across the ~2,200-mile Appalachian Trail through on-trail education and signage, promoting pack-it-in-pack-it-out norms among one of the US's highest-t…

Established in 1994 by the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics in partnership with the National Park Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and US Fish & Wildlife Service. The programme delivers the…

From October 2023, England banned the supply of plastic plates, bowls, trays, cutlery, balloon sticks, and expanded-polystyrene food and drink containers. This followed an earlier ban on straws, stirrers, and cotton-bud…

The UK introduced a mandatory single-use carrier-bag charge progressively — Wales (2011), Northern Ireland (2013), Scotland (2014) and England (2015). The MCS Beachwatch citizen-science beach survey recorded a steep, su…

New York's 1982 container-deposit law was expanded in 2009 ('Bigger Better Bottle Bill') to include bottled water (PET containers). This legislative extension to a new container type provides a replicable model: an exis…

The first US bottle bill, enacted in Oregon in 1971, placed a refundable deposit on beer and soft-drink containers. Within two years total roadside litter dropped ~39% by count, and by 1979 beverage containers had falle…

Keep America Beautiful's Cigarette Litter Prevention Program operates through a national network of local affiliates that install ash receptacles at transition points, distribute pocket/portable ashtrays, run public rem…

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council installed 21 Hubbub Ballot Bin voting ashtrays across the town from 2017, replicating the format at municipal scale beyond the original London proof-of-concept. The council reported a ~46…

The original "Ballot Bin" — a wall-mounted ashtray framed as a two-option poll (the debut question pitted Ronaldo against Messi) — was deployed by Hubbub on Villiers Street in central London in 2015 as part of the Neat…

Litter Free India (Ploggers of India), led by Ripu Daman Bevli, scaled plogging nationally from 2016 by rebranding community cleanup as a fitness activity ('plogging') and running a national 'Plog Run' campaign. Growth…

Plogging began in Stockholm around 2016 when Erik Ahlström started picking up litter during his commute, then founded Plogga to formalise the concept. Sharing sessions on social media drove organic, self-organised repli…

An eight-week 2023 pilot of the "Big Ballot Bin" — a general-waste version of Hubbub's cigarette voting bin — placing voting bins at litter hotspots in Manchester (and Southampton), with KFC as a partner. People "vote"…

Switzerland's litter cleanup costs approximately CHF 200 million per year, historically spread across a patchwork of differing cantonal and municipal fines. A federal initiative led by Parliament and the Federal Office…

Texas's anti-litter campaign was launched in 1986 by the state transport department (TxDOT) after research identified the typical roadside litterer as a young male (18–35) who did not perceive littering as a problem. Ra…

TerraCool is a ceramic evaporative cooling (CEC) system developed at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) around 2022. It uses hollow terracotta modules with a geometry optimised for a high surface-area-to-internal…

bloc° is a 2025 industrial-design bachelor's thesis by Andrin Stocker and Luc Schweizer at ZHdK. It is a modular, solar-powered evaporative cooler built from stackable 3D-printed single-fired terracotta bricks. Each bri…

The first CoolAnt "Beehive" was installed in 2017 at the Deki Electronics factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, to relieve workers exposed to Indian summer heat combined with diesel-generator exhaust. Architect Monish Siripu…

Marina Bay is served by what operators describe as the world's largest underground district cooling system, operational since 2006 and built into a master-planned new downtown. Central chilled-water plants supply connec…

In June 2022 Seville launched proMETEO Sevilla, the first system in the world to tie heat-wave forecasts to health outcomes and to name and categorize heat waves the way storms are named. A three-tier categorization wei…

In 2021 Miami-Dade County appointed Jane Gilbert as the world's first Chief Heat Officer — a dedicated municipal post to coordinate extreme-heat response across agencies that otherwise treat heat as no one's specific re…

After a 2010 heatwave killed 1,344 people, Ahmedabad built South Asia's first Heat Action Plan (2013) — a governance-led response combining color-coded early-warning red alerts pushed to residents, hospital "heat wards"…

Phoenix coated 36 miles of residential roadway and a parking lot with a light-gray reflective "CoolSeal" treatment and conducted a multi-year evaluation with Arizona State University — the largest cool-pavement deployme…

Begun in 2018 as part of Paris's Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy, "Les Cours Oasis" depaves asphalt schoolyards and replaces them with trees, permeable ground, shade and water features, then opens them as nei…

Since the 1960s 'Garden City' vision and now the 'City in Nature' / Green Plan 2030 strategy, Singapore grew green cover from 35.7% (1986) to roughly 48% even as urban density rose. Key mechanisms: mandatory greenery re…

Launched in 2016 to counter urban heat island effects and severe air pollution in the Aburrá Valley, Medellín built 30+ interconnected 'green corridors' (corredores verdes) along road verges, streams, parks and hillside…

#FreetownTheTreeTown is a community-driven reforestation program in a rapidly urbanising coastal city that lost roughly 12% of its canopy per year between 2011 and 2018, raising landslide and flood risk. Community growe…

First large-scale solar desalination plant, built in the Atacama Desert to supply freshwater to a saltpeter/silver mining community and its draft animals using highly saline mine effluent (~140,000 ppm) as feed. The ins…

Large-mesh fog collectors installed on El Tofo mountain piped water to the coastal village of Chungungo, averaging ~15,000 L/day at peak. The system ran from 1992 to ~2002 before total abandonment: no local maintenance…

A women-led NGO (Dar Si Hmad) built the world's largest operational fog-water harvesting system on the fog-rich slopes of Mount Boutmezguida, on the edge of the Sahara, where groundwater is failing under drought. Vertic…

A containerized solar-PV reverse-osmosis plant installed in 2018 in Kiunga, a remote coastal fishing community south of the Somali border, where residents previously relied on brackish, contaminated water. Solar panels…

Laboratory and rooftop proof-of-concept of the femtosecond-laser-textured superwicking black aluminium interfacial crystallizer (ABF-STIC) using real ocean water from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. A 7-day co…

PlayPumps International installed merry-go-round handpumps intended to lift groundwater as children played, with maintenance funded by advertising revenue on storage-tank billboards. Backed by approximately $60M from th…

A professional maintenance company on performance contracts replaced volunteer community management across two Kenyan counties. Communities call a hotline; "smart handpump" sensors (accelerometer + GSM) flag failures re…

When Le Relais suspended its national collection on 15 July 2025, the Pays Fléchois (Sarthe) lost its textile drop-off service. The local partner (Monde Solidaire in neighbouring sud-Sarthe) had ended its collaboration…

On 15 July 2025 Le Relais suspended collection across its national network of roughly 22,000 containers — about 70% of France's used-clothing collection — in a funding standoff with the eco-organisme Refashion. The Haut…

When the resale-export collapse pushed French sorting operators toward insolvency in 2024–2025, the EPR-funding lever was used — repeatedly and reactively — to keep the chain alive. Refashion released a €6m emergency en…

The Communauté de communes du Mont des Avaloirs (CCMA), a rural intercommunalité in northern Mayenne, ran voluntary textile collection through containers operated by Le Relais at bring-points. All textile containers wer…

The Amazon Fund is a performance-based forest finance mechanism created in 2008 and managed by Brazil's development bank BNDES. It disburses money only after INPE verifies that deforestation has fallen below a baseline,…

When Lula took office in January 2023, his government reactivated IBAMA as the lead enforcement body, ended the previous administration's gag order on agents, and roughly tripled the agency's resources. Acting on INPE's…

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Homefill is a refill shop in Olde Town Arvada, Colorado, owned by Kim Whitehead. It sells personal-care and home products in bulk — shampoo, body wash, lotion, sunscreen, cleaning products, cooking oils — which customer…

Marriott International, the world's largest hotel chain (7,000+ properties across 30 brands), announced in 2019 that it would eliminate single-use small plastic toiletry bottles of shampoo, conditioner and bath gel from…

California Assembly Bill 1162, authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2019, prohibits lodging establishments — hotels, motels, resorts, bed-and-breakfasts and vacation rental…

Algramo ("by the gram" in Spanish) operates a refill model in Santiago, Chile, built around reusable packaging with an RFID chip. Customers buy products such as cleaning liquids by the gram into a reusable container; an…

Alongside its France rollout, Loop ran reusable-packaging pilots in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Japan. The original model was a standalone e-commerce service: products shipped to consumers in a reusabl…

Loop, TerraCycle's reusable-packaging platform, is an explicit modern milk-round: products are sold in durable containers that are collected, cleaned and refilled rather than recycled. Loop launched at Davos in 2019 and…

Blueland launched in 2019 as a direct-to-consumer brand built on the concentrate principle: cleaning products are ~90%+ water, so it ships dry tablets and powders that the customer dissolves in tap water inside a reusab…

Minneapolis is piloting resilience hubs that incorporate solar energy and battery storage in three disadvantaged communities. The hubs are existing community buildings upgraded to keep power, and therefore heating/cooli…

Nashville has pursued green-infrastructure flood mitigation — depaving, tree planting, and rain gardens — as part of its response since the catastrophic 2010 flood. This case study is included specifically for its hones…

Project Sponge supports community Flood Action Groups in Slough, facilitated by the National Flood Forum. Two groups operate: the Chalvey Flood Action Group (established 2023) and the HCB (Huntercombe, Cippenham, Burnha…

A purpose-built rain garden was installed beside the roundabout on Barnes High Street to reduce surface-water flood risk on paved urban areas. It absorbs excess water from storms and heavy rainfall, easing pressure on l…

Los Angeles, where average temperatures run nearly six degrees hotter than surrounding areas, adopted cool-surface measures alongside a measurable temperature target. Its Sustainable City pLAn set a goal to reduce the l…

After Newark recorded 103°F in June 2025 — breaking its previous June high by six degrees — New Jersey launched a $5 million Urban Heat Island Mitigation Program through the Board of Public Utilities, funded by the stat…

Seville revived a roughly 3,000-year-old passive-cooling technique, channeling air through underground galleries (a qanat-style system) to pre-cool it before delivering it to buildings and public space. The city has lon…