It's not just about bike lanes

Bike lanes are all well and good, but the rules and regulations governing our roads favour cars over bicycles. They may result in deaths that could have been prevented. for most Australians, hopping in the car is the default travel mode, even for short local trips. In contrast, in many affluent European and Asian countries, bicycles are the vehicle of choice. It has long been recognised that urban planning and transport policies in Australia encourage car use and discourage cycling and walking. But what has been less well-recognised is that our road safety policies and practices are also car-oriented. This is arguably a more serious bias, because it results in unacceptably high levels of death and serious injury among unprotected road users such as cyclists. Australia prides itself on having achieved a relatively low traffic crash fatality rate of 6.8 fatalities per 100,000 population. World's best practice (3.8 fatalities per 100,000 population) is not that far away, and we aspire to achieve it. But Australia's overall fatality rate hides an inconvenient truth - our cyclist fatality and serious injury rates are several times higher than world's best practice, and increasing. Cycling accounts for about one per cent of daily trips in Australia, but cyclists comprise two per cent of road transport fatalities and 15 per cent of serious injuries. Serious injury rates for cyclists are increasing as bicycle use increases (by 47 per cent from 2000 to 2007), while for most other road users rates are steady or declining. The relative risk of injury per kilometre travelled is several times higher for a cyclist than for a person in a car.

Warming seas could smother seafood

Seafood could be going off a lot of menus as the world warms. More than half of a group of fish crucial for the marine food web might die if, as predicted, global warming reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in some critical areas of the ocean - including some of our richest fisheries. The prediction is based on a unique set of records that goes back to 1951. California has regularly surveyed its marine plankton and baby fish to support the sardine fishery. "There is almost no other dataset going back so far that includes every kind of fish," says Tony Koslow of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who heads the survey. The survey records also include information on water temperature, salinity and the dissolved oxygen content. Koslow's team studied records of 86 fish species found consistently in the samples and discovered that the abundance of 27 of them correlated strongly with the amount of oxygen 200 to 400 metres down: a 20 per cent drop in oxygen meant a 63 per cent drop in the fish. There have been several episodes of low oxygen during the period in question, mainly in the 1950s and since 1984. Global climate models predict that 20 to 40 per cent of the oxygen at these depths will disappear over the next century due to warming, says Koslow - mainly because these waters get oxygen by mixing with surface waters. Warmer, lighter surface waters are less likely to mix with the colder, denser waters beneath. Of the 27 species most affected by low oxygen, says Koslow, 24 were "mesopelagic": fish that spend the daytime in deep, dark waters below 200 metres to avoid predators such as squid that hunt by sight. There are 10 billion tonnes of mesopelagic fish globally - 10 times the annual global commercial catch - and they are a vital food for other fish and marine birds and mammals.

Nappy recycling centre to open

The UK's first ever plant for recycling nappies is to open today. The facility, which will also recycle feminine hygiene and adult incontinence products, is the first of five planned over four years by Knowaste, an organisation which specialises in absorbent hygiene product (AHP) waste recycling. Knowaste said the first site in West Bromwich will use state-of-the-art technology to recycle AHPs, sterilising and separating the materials to recover plastic and fibre that can then be used for making new products, such as roof tiles or plastic components and fibre based construction and commercial tubes. Roy Brown, chief executive officer of Knowaste, said: "This first site in West Bromwich represents the beginning of a £25 million overall investment in the UK, that will produce capacity for handling about a fifth of the AHP waste stream - equating to a saving of 110,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. "In the UK, more than one million tonnes of AHP waste is generated annually, much of which is landfilled. A significant proportion of which is produced by the commercial sector and we are proud to be working with some of the Midland's and nation's leading AHP collection companies already."

Source: Green Times