Despite the Auckland Council’s aims to reduce the city’s transport emissions by 40 per cent over three decades, the air on Queen Street is still “unbreathable”. An Auckland bus driver left his vehicle on Queen Street with the engine running for 13 long minutes last week. Ice-cream store Giapo chef Gianpaolo Grazioli caught footage of [...]

The deputy mayor of Auckland has accepted her supercity council has failed to keep up with international standards when it comes to sustainable, energy-efficient buildings. Penny Hulse was responding to pointed criticism from the New Zealand Green Building Council, which told the Auckland Plan committee on Tuesday that Auckland Council was lagging behind many other [...]

An Auckland high school is planning to use worm farms as part of a project to reduce its waste by 50 per cent before the end of the year. Western Springs College has received a $55,000 grant from the Government’s waste minimisation fund to set up six waste stations on school grounds, each with recycling [...]

At 8.30pm tomorrow people in New Zealand and around the world will celebrate Earth Hour – when power is turned off for an hour – as a symbolic gesture of a worldwide commitment to protect our planet. Last year, hundreds of millions across 128 countries, with more than a million in New Zealand alone, took [...]

Two award-winning Auckland documentary makers are calling on the public to help to fund a film about the contentious oil and gas extraction method known as fracking. Sumner and Thomas Burstyn are using the crowd-funding website Pledgeme to fund a film exploring all sides of a controversial oil-extraction story set to play out in Whatatutu, [...]

Companies changing to plant-based packaging are being criticised for “greenwashing” by environmentalists wanting to highlight misconceptions about alternative plastics. Many companies are switching from recyclable plastics to bottles and containers made from polyactic acid (PLA), a plant-based, compostable substitute, in a bid to minimise their impact on the environment. Yet critics say that because people [...]

A Kiwi winemaker looks set to clean up the dairy industry with a new invention that saves farmers money while keeping things green. Greg Morgan’s invention, Liquid Strip, removes solids from wastewater and converts them into a pellet or slug form. The invention works by passing unwanted liquids through a filter that uses patented technology [...]

AUT University is not saving as much energy as it could thanks to its IT structures and a lack of student and staff awareness. Many lab computers are left on and monitors blink away. Sunita Taneja, ICT student service and support manager, says that not all computers at AUT are managed by IT. Others are [...]

Unhappy ferry passengers may soon be able to breathe easily again – ferry company Fullers is testing chemicals to reduce the smell of sewage emanating from its boats at the Auckland Harbour. The company uses a pump system at the downtown ferry terminal to empty the holding tanks on its boats. But when the tanks [...]