We live in a world where it’s very easy to create waste but very hard to get rid of it. Unfortunately, so many of our home, office, and now home office needs often require us to use products that can contain pollutants and that we can’t easily dispose of — like canned air dusters for electronics. The X3 Hurricane Variable Speed Canless Air Duster by Canless Air Systems® is a great alternative to that canned stuff that does nothing good for the planet.

This system can replace 5,000 cans of traditional compressed-air duster that you’d use to clean large computers, server rooms, camera lenses and mirrors, high-end medical equipment, displays in retail stores, complex circuit boards, and more — and you don’t have to throw any used cans into the trash.

The X3 packs some serious speed so it gets the job done. We’re talking 260 miles per hour (way off the Saffir-Simpson scale) of speed, so no dust will go missed with this device. All that power might make you think it’s got to be a loud device, but it boasts a quiet design, allowing you to clean without disturbing anyone around you. It also has a variable speed trigger, so you can use as little or as much power as you need. The X3 Hurricane is rechargeable of course, so you can use it over and over again. And if your home is powered by clean energy, it becomes an even more sustainable option when you plug it in to charge.

You can purchase the X3 Hurricane Variable Speed Canless Air Duster for $119.99, a 25-percent reduction from its usual price of $159.

This article includes affiliate links. Earth911 will earn a share of any sales to help support our Recycling Database.

Simon Haeder, Ph.D., associate professor, analyzed data from an August 2023 survey of more than 2,000 dog and more than 1,400 cat owners to measure pet vaccination rates, perceptions of vaccines and support for pet vaccination requirements.

“Decreasing pet vaccination rates pose challenges to society for a number of reasons, including increased incidents of pet disease and death, increases in exposures for humans, the potential for further genetic adaptations of pathogens, as well as detrimental effects on veterinarians,” Haeder said. “Many individuals consider their pets as part of the family and increases in vaccine-preventable diseases may also affect the financial and emotional health of owners.”

The survey first asked respondents whether they owned a dog, a cat or both. Dog and cat owners were then surveyed about their pets’ vaccine status for five diseases each for dogs and cats. These included rabies for dogs and cats, canine parvovirus and canine distemper for dogs, and feline panleukopenia and feline Bordetella for cats. The respondents then responded with levels of support for vaccination requirements for each of the listed diseases. The survey also queried respondents about perceived safety, efficacy and importance of the various vaccines.

In addition to pet vaccine-specific questions, the survey asked respondents about their level of trust in scientists, support for human vaccination mandates for children, political ideology, religiosity, non-veterinary expenses and frequency of exposure of dogs to other dogs outside the household. Lastly, the survey measured perceptions of safety, efficacy and importance of human vaccines.

The survey found that an overwhelming majority of pet owners had vaccinated their dogs and cats against rabies, though cats were vaccinated less often than dogs. Other core vaccines had slightly lower, but still high uptake, while there appeared to be more hesitancy toward non-core vaccines. Core vaccines are generally recommended for all pets regardless of lifestyle.

Further analysis found that perceptions of importance, efficacy and safety of vaccines served as a reasonable predictor for vaccine hesitancy. Additionally, these perceptions show an association with attitudes toward vaccination requirements. Haeder’s analysis also found that pet owners without non-veterinary expenses such as boarding or training fees showed higher levels of vaccine hesitancy. Lastly, pet vaccination behaviors and perceptions appear to be less associated with political ideology than with human vaccines.

The findings of this study show a high level of confidence in vaccine safety, efficacy and importance for humans and pets. Additionally, the analysis found relations between vaccine hesitancy in humans and animals, with support for animal vaccine requirements being strongly associated with similar requirements for humans. This indicates the potential for spillover effects and the importance of further focus on vaccine hesitancy in humans and animals in research and public health efforts in the future.

“Concerns about growing hesitancy remain and should be taken seriously, for both pets and humans, before the United States falls below important thresholds to prevent major outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases,” Haeder said.

It’s not always easy to recycle at home in the United States. Our fractured system makes every community’s rules different. Following China’s 2018 ban on recyclable imports, many programs changed what they accept, and the pandemic cut down our options even more. As the recycling system rebounds, each of us can help by doing our bit to clean and sort recyclables.

Earth911 is working to track the rapidly changing recycling system, and you can help by curating local listings to help your neighbors (take the first step here). New recycling technology, revived investment in facilities that process plastic, metal, and other materials, as well as growing corporate interest in recovering materials and satisfying your demand for recycling options for the products you buy has set the stage for a U.S. recycling recovery.

But each of us needs to participate because if we do not make the effort to get materials into the recycling system there is nothing to recycle. A successful circular economy requires all of us to join in. We can also minimize our environmental impact by buying fewer single-use products and packaging, lowering the amounts of oil, raw ores, and paper used across society. Let’s get ready by setting up our home recycling system, and we encourage you to check the Earth911 recycling guides whenever needed.

Know the Local Rules

Unlike many European nations, the U.S. does not have a national recycling system or set of standards that define what we can and cannot recycle. Instead, every community can set its own rules, which are defined by whether materials are economically feasible to recycle. That means you need to track your local rules to understand what to put in your bin and what must go in the trash.

The Earth911 recycling locator can help you find your local recycling program’s website, or you can search your community solid waste management site for recycling information. Many programs offer downloadable posters that describe what is accepted and banned locally. It’s a great idea to print these out and place them where you separate your recyclables from the trash.

Take a moment to check the poster if you don’t know with certainty what can be placed in your recycling bin. After a few times consulting the poster, you’ll be able to recognize what’s accepted. It takes a few minutes at most each day to stay on top of your recycling, but building the habit does require some discipline. We suggest getting the kids involved, even making cleaning and separating recyclables part of their chores — you’ll be building a lifetime of good recycling habits for them

Create a Recycling Station

Local recycling operations are either “single-stream” programs that collect recyclables of all types in a single bin or “specialized,” which require separating paper, plastic, glass, and metals into separate bins. Which applies in your locality is easy to determine: Do you have one bin? If so, you are in a single-stream community and can place all accepted materials together into the bin. If you have multiple bins, well, you get the point.

Now, where do you sort your recycling? We recommend setting up a station near a sink so that you can rinse out bottles and cans easily. As a single-stream household, we have the recycling bin next to the kitchen garbage can, but you may prefer the garage or yard near where you keep your trash cans and recycling bins.

If you have access to composting services, keep your food scraps in the freezer and dump them in your bin — or your home compost pile — when the freezer space is full. The cold keeps the odor down and you won’t have to traipse back and forth as often as doing the compost work every day.

Remember the kids’ chores? Whether you have an in-house or out-back setup, have them visit the station once every day or so to sort and clean the recycling. Or, if you don’t have kids, set a reminder to do the recycling work at your preferred time of the day. It’s all about building habits that contribute to turning our one-way, trash-centric lifestyle into a circular system that reduces the need for mining or extracting and refining raw materials for the stuff you use.

Clean and Sort

A dirty can or bottle can contaminate the materials you and your neighbors take the time to sort. Rinse out bottles, giving the water a good swirl before pouring it out, and be sure to wash cans and glass containers before placing them in the bin.

Recycled materials also need to be dry before they go into the bin. At our house, we use a recycling bin as a drying rack, placing bottles and cans upside-down so that they can drip dry before we transfer them to the blue bin at the curb. You may want to take a different recycling approach in an apartment. Check your local recycling guidelines to see if you can leave the cap on or must take it off a bottle — both rules are in use and, despite efforts to create a standard, there is no system-wide rule. Follow the local rules, don’t wishcycle your way to recycling failure.

Accurate sorting is as important as cleaning materials because different materials cannot be combined in many recycling systems. If you are in a single-stream community, make sure that only materials that are accepted locally go in the bin. And if your program offers multiple bins, take the time to ensure that the right material is in the right bin.

Many colors of glass cannot be recycled when combined, so do not shatter and mix different color glass. Separate glass by color and, if your recycler does not accept glass or a certain color glass, consider dropping the material at a local transfer station. Following the China ban in 2018, many recycling systems stopped accepting glass at the curb but still take it at transfer stations when sorted by color.

At this step, you should also review what kinds of plastic you are recycling. For example, black PET (plastic #1) food trays are not compatible with clear and white plastics. Unfortunately, many communities are not currently accepting #5 plastic. If your recycling system does not accept certain plastic colors or foam meat trays, for example, you’ll need to find an alternative way to recycle it or toss it in the trash. If you do have to throw away a container, make a note and do not buy that product again. In fact, write a letter to the company saying that you will only buy their product when the packaging can be recycled in your local recycling bin.

Single-use plastic shopping bags were commonly accepted at grocery stores for recycling, but most programs are currently suspended due to the pandemic. They will be back and we encourage you to bundle up your bags for recycling when the system restarts.

Alternatives to Curbside

A regular trip to your local transfer station is probably necessary if you want to recycle more materials. For example, expanded polystyrene foam packing is not accepted in most curbside programs but can be dropped off locally. You can also take your e-commerce cardboard and other packaging to the transfer station — they are among the most recyclable things we can reuse. Most of the packaging labeled as “recyclable” cannot be placed in your bin but can be processed at a transfer station.

But wouldn’t it be great if the company that made the product or packaging would take back the material for recycling? More consumer and electronics product manufacturers are setting up national mail-in or drop-off recycling programs. Check the products you buy for recycling program information — it will typically be on the label, but you may need to visit the company’s website. If you cannot recycle something locally and there is no mail-in program, consider refraining from buying it until you have a convenient option. Again, write a letter to the company explaining why you are no longer buying the product.

If you still want to buy and recycle a product that is not accepted locally, take a look at TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Box options, which offer specialized recycling for a variety of material types, from home consumer goods packaging to office products. When the box is full, you simply mail it back for processing. It’s not cheap, but it will keep materials out of the landfill and in circulation in new products.

Track Your Waste and Recycling

To recognize your own progress, track your recycling. This can be an ornate or simple process. At our home, we do not weigh our recycling and trash, but some people do. Instead, we have a scale from 1 to 5, from small to large, and estimate the amount of recycled material versus trash we produce.

After starting out at a level “2” recycling volume, we progressed to consistently recycling at the “5” level and our trash quickly fell to one-third of its former volume. Just eyeball and record your results. It keeps you thinking about what you toss and what you recycle. This extends to the store where we can avoid buying unrecyclable products.

The rewards are also tangible financially. As we reduced our trash volume, we canceled a trash can (for which we were paying $30/month) and added a recycling bin (free). But the real benefit came at the checkout counter, where we now pay less for groceries and other products because we buy less and waste less. You could achieve a zero-waste lifestyle after only a few months of intentional effort.

Participate

The recycling system doesn’t work without our participation. But the recycling system will not change and expand to accept more materials without your participation in the planning process. Consider joining your local waste management board or county planning council committee that manages recycling programs.

Democracy is hard work, but the work pays off in material improvement in your life, the community’s health and well-being, and the planet’s health. Get involved and help ensure recycling success.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in May 2021, and was updated in December 2023.

Led by Audrey Looby from the University of Florida Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds working group collaborated with the World Register of Marine Species to document 729 aquatic mammals, other tetrapods, fishes, and invertebrates that produce active or passive sounds. In addition, the inventory includes another 21,911 species that are considered to likely produce sounds.

With more than 70% of the Earth’s surface covered in water, most of the planet’s habitats are aquatic, and there is a misconception that most aquatic organisms are silent. The newly published comprehensive digital database on what animals are known to make sounds is the first of its kind and can revolutionize marine and aquatic science, the researchers said.

“Eavesdropping on underwater sounds can reveal a plethora of information about the species that produce them and is useful for a variety of applications, ranging from fisheries management, invasive species detection, improved restoration outcomes, and assessing human environmental impacts,” said Looby, who also co-created FishSounds, which offers a comprehensive, global inventory of fish sound production research.

The team’s research, “Global Inventory of Species Categorized by Known Underwater Sonifery,” was published Monday in Scientific Data and involved 19 authors from six countries, funding from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and centuries of scientific effort to document underwater sounds.

“Understanding how marine species interact with their environments is of global importance, and this data being freely available is a major step toward that goal,” said Kieran Cox, a member of the research team and a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada fellow.

Most people are familiar with whale or dolphin sounds but are often surprised to learn that many fishes and invertebrates use sounds to communicate, too, Looby said.

“Our dataset helps demonstrate how widespread underwater sound production really is across a variety of animals, but also that we still have a lot to learn,” she said.

Breathable air, clean water, healthy forests and biodiversity all contribute to people’s well-being in ways that can be very difficult to quantify. “Natural capital” is the concept scientists, economists and policymakers use to represent the current and future flow of benefits the world’s natural resources bring to people.

“The big question is what do we lose when we lose an ecosystem?” said lead author Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, a doctoral student at UC Davis when the study was conducted and currently a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps. “Flipping the question: What do we gain if we are able to limit climate change and avoid some of its impacts on natural systems? This study helps us better consider damages not usually accounted for. It also reveals an overlooked, yet startling dimension of climate change effects on natural systems — its capacity to exacerbate global economic inequality.”

Profound inequalities

When countries lose natural capital, their economies suffer. The study found that, by 2100, climate change-induced changes to vegetation, rainfall patterns and higher CO2 result in an average 1.3% reduction in gross domestic product, or GDP, across all the countries analyzed. It further found profound inequalities in the distribution of these impacts.

“Our research found that the world’s poorest 50% of countries and regions are expected to bear a staggering 90% of the GDP damages,” Bastien-Olvera said. “In sharp contrast, the losses for the wealthiest 10% might be limited to just 2%.”

The authors said this is largely because lower-income countries tend to rely more on natural resources for their economic production, and a larger fraction of their wealth is in the form of natural capital.

Natural and economic values

For the study, the authors used global vegetation models, climate models and World Bank estimates of natural capital values to estimate the consequences of climate shifts on countries’ ecosystem services, economic production and natural capital stocks.

These estimates may be conservative, as the analysis considered only land-based systems — primarily forests and grasslands. Bastien-Olvera plans to address marine ecosystem impacts in future research. The study also didn’t account for disturbances like wildfires or insect-driven tree mortality.

Accounting for nature

The overall findings underscore the importance of creating climate policies that account for the particular values each country derives from its natural systems.

“With this study, we’re embedding natural systems and human well-being within an economic framework,” said senior author Frances C. Moore, an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “Our economy and well-being depend on these systems, and we should recognize and account for these overlooked damages when we consider the cost of a changing climate.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

“Thanks to the efforts of this research team, we now know that damage to ecosystems impacts human well-being in ways that are both measurable and wildly disproportionate across populations,” said Jeffrey Mantz, NSF program officer. “The results will be critical to abating economic losses in the coming decades.”

While global carbon emission reduction is imperative, local measures could be the key to the islands outpacing sea levels, they argue today in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

“Far from being doomed, in their natural state most coral atoll islands could adapt to sea level rise,” says Dr Sebastian Steibl from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, lead author of the study. “This paper is a global call to identify and quantify the best measures for restoring atoll island growth.”

The world’s 320 tropical coral atolls are made up of thousands of islands and are a treasure trove of biodiversity, homes to millions of turtles and seabirds. These islands are naturally growing up to 1 cm a year by accreting sediment — enough to outpace most predictions of sea level rise.

Ecologically restoring this natural process holds the key to climate change resilience for the islands, says the team of scientists, who are already trialling restoration methods on atolls such as Tetiaroa and Palmyra in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Aldabra in the western Indian Ocean.

While densely populated islands such as in the Maldives will still need human-engineered solutions most coral atoll islands are sparsely inhabited and excellent candidates for restoration, the scientists say.

“Restoration of atoll island ecosystems is a proven conservation action that can significantly improve the health of the surrounding coral reef habitat,” says island resilience scientist and co-author Dr Alex Wegmann from The Nature Conservancy in California.

The climate damage fund announced at COP28 is one potential mechanism for funding local restoration. “Funding restoration work would empower communities to take back ownership of their futures,” says co-author Professor James Russell, a conservation biologist at the University of Auckland

People living on coral atolls are largely ignored when industrialised nations negotiate responses to climate change. “Local knowledge alongside cutting edge science needs to be included in atoll restoration programs,” says cultural director of the Tetiaroa Society and co-author Hinano Teavai-Murphy, “because the traditional knowledge of Oceanian people has always been about respecting and preserving the connected marine and terrestrial systems.”

The interactions between protons and calcium ions in this process were previously largely unknown. An article in the journal Science by a team led by biophysicist Professor Rainer Hedrich from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, has now shed new light on this subject.

Using a sophisticated optogenetic approach, the researchers have discovered a previously unknown endogenous acid sensor in plant cells. And they have discovered in the guard cells of leaves that there is a calcium store that plays an important role in processing proton signals in cellular responses.

Why Such Simple Elements as Protons and Calcium Ions Act as Signals

In the course of evolution, cells have designed their metabolism to utilise energy-rich phosphates. This results in a problem: at the predominantly neutral cellular pH value, the valuable phosphates can be bound by calcium ions (Ca²⁺) and converted into an insoluble and therefore no longer usable form (calcium dihydrogen phosphate).

To avoid this, cells keep their internal calcium level very low; in their environment, however, it is 10,000 times higher. Outside the cells, the concentration of protons (H⁺) and therefore the acidity is also much higher. Due to this concentration gradient, both types of ions have a strong urge to flow into the cells — making them ideal for use as messenger substances.

“The stimulus-dependent opening of calcium and proton channels in the cell membrane results in a temporary intracellular increase in both messenger ions,” explains Rainer Hedrich. “The cells understand this as a signal, which they translate into a biological reaction using calcium- and proton-binding enzymes.”

Light Switch Controls the Flow of Protons Into the Cell

How do plant cells react to the influx of protons and the associated acidification of their cell plasma? Until now, this could only be investigated with great experimental effort and even then only indirectly.

This is now much easier thanks to an appropriately equipped thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), which Hedrich’s team has developed using optogenetic methods: A light-sensitive proton channel from a fungus, the channelrhodopsin KCR2, was optimised for use in plant cells. This means that protons can now be specifically sent into the cells in response to a light pulse.

Furthermore, they expressed KCR2 together with the genetically encoded pH reporter pHuji. This makes it very easy to measure the current pH value in the cell upon KCR2 activation.

Shouguang Huang, the first author of the Science publication, next scrutinised the guard cells of the new Arabidopsis mutant. “When I stimulated them with blue light for a second, they depolarised, just as I had expected from a light-activated proton channel,” says the researcher. During the subsequent experiments, the Würzburg ion channel specialists made a far-reaching discovery.

KCR2 Activation Acidifies the Cell and Causes Calcium to Rise

Their electrophysiological studies on guard cells showed that when the light stimulation began, the membrane potential immediately depolarised and the pH reporter pHuji signalled an acidification of the cell interior.

“However, we were astonished when the depolarisation and acidification continued for a good minute after the end of the light pulse,” says Hedrich. “This could only mean that the light activation of KCR2 and the acidification had activated the sphincter cell’s own ion channels.” These are the long-known guard cell anion channels SLAC1 and SLAH3, whose activation, however, also requires the presence of calcium.

Endoplasmic Reticulum as a Calcium Store

“Taking all the facts together, it could be assumed that the proton currents carried by KCR2 and the associated acidification of the cell interior must also have generated a calcium signal,” summarises the JMU professor.

His team was able to prove that the rapid acidification of the guard cells is followed by a calcium signal that lasts for 150 to 200 seconds. And they discovered that this calcium does not come from outside the cell, but is released from an endogenous store, the endoplasmic reticulum. This is a network of membrane tubes and cisterns that run through the cytoplasm.

Future studies will now focus on analysing the molecular nature of the H+-sensitive calcium channel of the endoplasmic reticulum and investigating its proton-activated on/off switch. Overall, these studies are important in order to better understand how plant cells react to external stimuli such as infections or drought.

But will the regulation really achieve its aims? The authors, including scientists leading large European projects on nature restoration and biodiversity, analysed experiences with other European environmental directives and policies, and evaluated the prospects of the NRL to be successful.

“The NRL avoids several pitfalls that often obstruct the implementation of European policies and regulations, showing that the Commission learned from past experiences” says Prof. Dr Daniel Hering from the University of Duisburg-Essen, first author of the study. “The regulation sets ambitious targets and timelines, and implementation steps are clearly laid out. It also saves time as it does not need to be transposed into national law.” At the same time, national implementation will be crucial for the NRL’s success. “While targets are precisely defined and binding, the steps to achieve them need to be decided by individual European countries and most of them are voluntary” says Prof. Dr Josef Settele from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), one of the study’s authors.

Key to the implementation will be the cooperation of nature restoration with land users, in particular with agriculture. “Intensive agriculture is still a key driver for biodiversity loss in Europe,” says senior author Dr Guy Pe’er. “But targets for agriculture and nature restoration could be coordinated, with opportunities for both.” Agriculture directly benefits from healthy soils and pollinator populations and from increased water storage capacity in the landscape that are all targets of the NRL.

The authors conclude that funds provided by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy need to be used for achieving the NRL’s aims: a statement to be intensively debated in science and application.

Overall, the authors provide a positive outlook for the NRL, but warn that ambitious national implementation and cooperation with economic sectors, such as agriculture, will eventually determine the success of nature restoration in Europe.