Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

Whakatāne Airport says ash from Whakaari/White Island has severely impacted services.

Chief executive Mark Read said Air Chathams cancelled morning and afternoon flights in and out of Whakatāne on Tuesday due to the volcanic ash advisory.

Air Chathams’ Whakatāne services fly to Auckland, Paraparaumu and Whanganui.

Volcanic ash also impacted flights at Tauranga Airport in the last 24 hours.

Tauranga Airport manager Ray Dumble said it was forced to cancel the last four flights departing Tauranga on Monday night, along with the first four departures on Tuesday morning.

Tauranga Airport has since resumed services as normal.

The volcano was at alert level 3, denoting a minor eruption, and was seen releasing ash and steam over the weekend.

Forty-seven people were on the Bay of Plenty volcano when it erupted in December 2019, killing 22 and seriously injuring 25.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

New Zealand has been given the ignominious ‘Fossil of the Day’ award at the COP30 global climate summit, for its decision to weaken methane emissions policies.

It’s the fourth time New Zealand has received the dud award, handed out by climate NGO Climate Action Network International and designed to shame countries that block progress at the annual talks.

New Zealand was last named Fossil of the Day in 2023, for the National-led government’s decision to reverse the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration.

It has previously been given the award in 2022 for pushing to delay setting up a loss and damage fund to compensate poorer countries bearing the brunt of climate change-fuelled extreme weather, and in 2021 for the then-Labour government’s decision not to update New Zealand’s emissions target.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which warms the atmosphere for centuries, methane is a short-lived gas but has huge warming potential.

Reducing methane has attracted growing attention as an ’emergency brake’ on warming while the world works on technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and remove them from the air.

But in October, the government said it would lower New Zealand’s methane emissions target, after a review found that was sufficient to meet a controversial ‘no additional warming’ goal.

It also scrapped an earlier promise to introduce a price on agricultural methane by 2030.

Climate Action Network International said the weakened methane target was “not science-based”.

“It is certainly not consistent with the Paris Agreement or with the [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] principles of equity and responsibility.”

About half of New Zealand’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are methane emissions – mostly produced by agriculture.

Climate Change minister Simon Watts [ https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/environment/578698/climate-change-minister-defends-weakened-methane-emissions-target-ahead-of-cop30] defended the change in New Zealand’s methane policies before he headed to COP30, being held in Belém, Brazil.

He said reducing the size of New Zealand’s dairy herd was “not economically rational” and he believed methane-inhibiting technology being developed would be sufficient to meet the new target, without a methane tax.

Greenpeace Aotearoa spokesperson Amanda Larsson said the latest Fossil of the Day award was “embarrassing but it’s sadly not surprising”.

“Fossil of the Day is the award no country wants to receive, and today, the shame of receiving it is on Christopher Luxon’s Government, who are weakening the requirements for our most polluting industry to take action on climate change.”

Larsson said the change to the target followed agriculture industry lobbying and directly contradicted advice from the Climate Change Commission to strengthen the methane target.

The ‘no additional warming’ target – which aims to get New Zealand’s methane emissions back to 2017 levels, was an “accounting trick”, Larsson said.

“Other major livestock producers will be looking to us to see whether this approach is worthwhile. Our government has just lit the fuse on a global methane race to the bottom – once one domino falls, others will follow.”

Earlier in the week, University of Canterbury professor of physics David Frame told RNZ it was “a good idea” to work on methane, “but only if this is additional to [carbon dioxide] mitigation”.

New Zealand remains a signatory to the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to lower methane emissions by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030.

Frame, who served on the independent panel that was tasked with finding an emissions range consistent with ‘no additional warming’, said if the world as a whole adopted ‘no additional warming’ as a target, methane emissions would drop by four percent over the next decade.

“That would be progress compared with actual trends.”

New Zealand was not incentivising agricultural methane emissions reductions as well as it could, though.

“We should… explore a [low] price on methane emissions, because it’s among the best-justified and most effective policy approaches,” he said.

“This government may have ruled out a methane price, but governments are like buses – there are new ones along from time to time. Good ideas have a habit of hanging around until someone tries them.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Oil and water famously don’t mix – until surfactants get involved. These molecules act as tiny brokers between two opposites, one end binding to the oil and the other to water, allowing shampoos, detergents, creams and paints to form smooth, stable blends.

But most of the world’s surfactants come from sources with an environmental cost. “Currently 95 percent of surfactants are either derived from the petrochemical industry, so from fossil fuels, or from palm oil,” says Dr Jack Chen, associate professor of chemistry at Auckland University of Technology (AUT). “The rest are derived from food crops, which we want to avoid because it competes with food production.”

Chen and his team have found a new way to make surfactants from cellulose – the fibre found in plants – and in 2024 they launched a start-up, Dot Ingredients, to take their discovery beyond the lab.

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Currently, the nine-employee company is based in a lab at AUT. The particles are made here by first dissolving the cellulose, coaxing it into tiny spheres called nanoparticles, coating these nanoparticles in plant oil, and then finally peeling the oil from one half of the sphere to leave part of it oil-loving and the other water-loving.

Once a batch is made the team test them in the lab for their ability to form an emulsion – a stable mixture of oil and water.

Chen and the team have high hopes for their ‘celluspheres’ (their name for these cellulose particle surfactants) to be used in many different products and industries, but to start they are focused on the cosmetic industry.

“There’s a lot more demand, both from the surfactant producers, from the cosmetic brands, as well as consumers themselves, for greener and more sustainable ingredients,” says Chen. The industry’s higher margins also make it an ideal testing ground before scaling up for cheaper, higher-volume products like paints or detergents.

Even though they are tiny – a human hair is 50-100,000 times wider than a nanoparticle – these new particle surfactants are still larger than existing surfactant molecules.

Head of product Dr Victor Yim has been putting the particles to test in the lab by creating serums and lotions. Having previously worked in product development in a skin care company, Victor knows what to look for, and he’s interested in the differences between traditional surfactants, and their new, larger particle surfactants. “There’s a lot of exciting applications,” he says. “We can make something milky thin that molecular surfactants can’t really do as well.”

For now, they are sourcing cellulose from wood pulp – which is made from wood chips and used to make paper. Something they are investigating, with researchers at the University of Auckland, is whether they might be able to use waste from other industries instead. For example, could they use the cellulose in ‘grape marc’ – the leftover grape skins and stems from winemaking – thereby turning wine waste into a sellable sustainable surfactant.

Currently Dot Ingredients has funding support to get to March 2026, and scaling up production is the next challenge. “We’re still very small-scale, so 100 gram batches, but with the capacity to go up to one kilogram,” says Chen. “Our goal is that in two years’ time we’d be able to make 20 kilogram batches, and that’s enough to serve a couple of product lines in a cosmetic brand.”

They are also experimenting with different types of surfactants – positively or negatively charged, or both, and exploring temperature-responsive variations that could adapt their properties on demand.

While Chen describes himself as “primarily an academic with lots of ideas”, this start-up opportunity to bring something out of the lab into “reality” has energised him “I’m really, really enjoying this journey and it’s kind of sparked our creativity and we think we might have even other startups in the pipeline.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand