Latest news with #environmentalImpact
BBC News
13 hours ago
- General
- BBC News
South Elmsall waste site to stop operating over 'putrid smell'
Plans to extend the life of a waste recycling facility have been rejected after more than 400 residents complained about a "putrid stench".Wakefield Council said an application to keep the site at Hacking Lane, in South Elmsall, operating for another 10 years had been Environment Agency (EA) said it was also taking enforcement action against operator Minore after a planning inspector said excessive amounts of hazardous material stored at the land had created multiple health George Ayre said the site had "caused misery for the local community and blighted the local environment". He said the council would work with the EA to "hold Minore accountable for the impact this is having on residents, as well as the local environment".Resident Mark Benson said the announcement was a "welcome result" but was "not the end"."There are days when we feel like prisoners in our own homes, unable to enjoy our gardens or open our windows due to the unbearable stench outside," he said. Minore, also known as Mineral Processing Ltd, has been ordered to remove around 180,000 tonnes of material and cease any more dumping following the outcome of a public this month, planning inspector John Dowsett dismissed the company's appeal against EA enforcement action, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Dowsett upheld the regulator's claims that public health was at risk due to a foul smell, dust and litter coming from the site at Hacking report said the facility also posed a risk to nearby watercourses, including Frickley Beck.A revocation notice issued by the EA will come into force on 4 July. Minore must also cease all activities allowed under its permit and take steps to remove waste from the company previously said it plans to eventually transform the land into a country park, to include a wildflower meadow, wetland, ponds and public open space.A spokesperson said: "Currently the site is excavating materials and processing them, which is not in contravention of the notices issued by the EA but in compliance with them." Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Illegal peat harvesting is still taking place on a large scale, EPA report finds
Illegal commercial extraction of peat on a large scale continues to be widespread in Ireland, with a flourishing export trade worth €40 million a year, an EPA investigation has found. A total of 38 large-scale operations are engaged in illegal peat extraction in a sector that 'does not operate within planning or environmental laws', the report, published on Wednesday, concludes. 'Local authority enforcement performance in this area is patently inadequate,' it finds. The EPA has investigated 38 sites across seven counties – Offaly, Kildare, Laois, Westmeath, Roscommon, Longford and Sligo – where large-scale commercial peat extraction is being carried out without any of the necessary authorisations from local authorities. READ MORE The worst county was Westmeath, with eight illegal sites, followed by Tipperary and Roscommon with six each. [ Ireland worst in world for wetlands depletion over past 3 centuries, global study finds Opens in new window ] These illegal operations are contributing to an export trade of 300,000 tonnes of peat annually, valued at almost €40 million, the report says. The EPA has carried out 170 enforcement inspections between 2021 and 2024, including legal actions at District Court and High Court level against operations on areas greater than 50 hectares. These actions have resulted in cessation of illegal extractions on several peatlands, while a number of actions remain live before the courts. The products being extracted are milled peat used as compost and large sod peat – used in horticulture – as well as 'wet peat extracts' used in mushroom production. Dr Tom Ryan, director of the EPA Office of Environmental Enforcement, said: 'Operators engaged in unauthorised peat harvesting activities are in flagrant violation of environmental law. They are destroying our precious natural environments, and this needs to stop.' 'The environmental damage caused by large-scale peat extraction operating outside regulatory control is catastrophic for the environment,' Dr Ryan said. 'It results in destruction of vital ecosystems for biodiversity, loss of important carbon sinks ... and decimation of an irreplaceable cultural and scientific amenity and resource.' Peat extraction is subject to several legal restrictions in Ireland, and many sites have not received the required permissions. Photograph: EPA Bord na Móna was an excellent example of appropriate engagement with environmental regulations working, he said, including compliance with EPA licensing requirements, minimising of negative environmental impacts of peat harvesting, and securing of the rehabilitation of harvested peatlands. Local authorities have primary responsibility for regulating all commercial peat extraction. The EPA said it will continue to use its powers to ensure local authorities fully implement and enforce environmental requirements. The report notes appropriate regulation of peat harvesting can provide important protections for the environment. Bord na Móna had lawfully operated nine different peatland complexes across 11 counties under EPA licence until 2020, when these operations ceased. In accordance with their licence conditions and with support of the Peatlands Climate Action Scheme, Bord na Móna is engaged in rehabilitation of those peatlands, with almost 19,000 hectares rehabilitated by the end of 2024, 'bringing them back to life, allowing nature to take its course and the peatlands to flourish again', the report states. [ Turf cutters warn of confrontational scenes after EU Commission move Opens in new window ] The EPA has gathered evidence of expensive machinery, complex drainage systems, extensive rows and stacks of cut peat and, in some cases, large warehouses on sites. Large-scale commercial peat extraction can only take place if it is granted planning permission. In some cases, an EPA licence is also required. For peat extraction from on an area greater than 50Ha, extraction needs an EPA integrated pollution control licence as well as planning permission and an environmental impact assessment (EIA). There is a ban on the commercial sale of peat for solid fuel heating and restriction of peat-cutting for other purposes, such as horticulture. Environmental groups have highlighted that very few, if any, plots have the required permits or would be eligible for them because they would fail at the EIA stage. Peat extraction was targeted for phase-out on environmental and public health grounds, as turf-burning causes air pollution and bog-stripping undermines the natural environment.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Deep sea mining decision already made, Cook Islands opposition leader says
Cook Islands nodule field - photo taken within Cook Islands EEZ. Photo: Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority The Cook Islands' opposition leader believes the government has already decided it wants to pursue deep sea mining despite the science being inconclusive. Tina Browne has called for a pause on "the aggressive promotion of mining" by her government. However, she said she was fine with exploration and exploitation - the actual mining - if it is deemed environmentally safe. When asked how this position differed from the government's, she said, "The feeling that we have is that, while we want to tread cautiously and have the data available and the decisions made for safety, the government is promoting it in such a way that it has already determined it is safe." The Cook Islands is currently exploring the possibility of developing the industry but has not yet begun the actual mining. The Seabed Minerals Authority (SMA) is the government body in charge of deep sea mining in the Cook Islands. SMA's knowledge management director John Parionos said the National Environment Service is responsible for managing the process before an environmental project permit is issued. "This process is clear and legally mandated," Parionos said. He said it included the provision of a detailed environmental impact statement by the companies. While the authority and the National Environment Service have commissioned a strategic environmental assessment. "The [strategic environmental assessment's] purpose is to inform policy, not authorize any particular project to proceed to commercial minerals harvesting or other mining," Parionos said. "The results of the [strategic environmental assessment] thus far are encouraging but show key areas of uncertainty." Tina Browne Photo: Cook Islands News Browne said she did not want to be driven by the economic benefits of mining. "I want us to apply a lot of common sense and wisdom to the whole thing and not just be driven by the need to get money," she said. "We say that we are doing this for the future of our children, the children are saying, 'Well, there's not enough of us at these consultation meetings. "It's the same old elderly adults who are leaving us soon, we should be the ones to have a say in what we want for our future'."
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why Low-Precision Computing Is The Future Of Sustainable, Scalable AI
Lee-Lean Shu, CEO, GSI Technology. The staggering computational demands of AI have become impossible to ignore. McKinsey estimates that training an AI model costs $4 million to $200 million per training run. The environmental impact is also particularly alarming. Training a single large language model can emit as much carbon as five gasoline-powered cars over their entire lifetimes. When enterprise adoption requires server farms full of energy-hungry GPUs just to run basic AI services, we face both an economic and ecological crisis. This dual challenge is now shining a spotlight on low-precision AI—a method of running artificial intelligence models using lower precision numerical representations for the calculations. Unlike traditional AI models that rely on high-precision, memory-intensive storage (such as 32-bit floating-point numbers), low-precision AI uses smaller numerical formats—like 8-bit or 4-bit integers or smaller—to perform faster and more memory-efficient computations. This approach lowers the cost of developing and deploying AI by reducing hardware requirements and speeding up processing. The environmental benefits of low-precision AI are particularly important. It helps mitigate climate impact by optimizing computations to use less power. Many of the most resource-intensive AI efforts are building out or considering their own data centers. Because low-precision models require fewer resources, they enable companies and researchers to innovate with reduced-cost, high-performance computing infrastructure—thus further decreasing energy consumption. Research shows that by reducing numerical precision from 32-bit floats to 8-bit integers (or lower), most AI applications can maintain accuracy while slashing power consumption by four to five times. We have seen Nvidia GPU structures, for instance, move from FP32 to FP16 and INT8 over several generations and families. This is achieved through a process called quantization, which effectively maps floating-point values to a discrete set of integer values. There are now even efforts to quantize INT4, which would further reduce computational overhead and energy usage, enabling AI models to run more efficiently on low-power devices like smartphones, IoT sensors and edge computing systems. The 32-Bit Bottleneck For decades, sensor data—whether time-series signals or multidimensional tensors—has been processed as 32-bit floating-point numbers by default. This standard wasn't necessarily driven by how the data was captured from physical sensors, but rather by software compatibility and the historical belief that maintaining a single format throughout the processing pipeline ensured accuracy and simplicity. However, modern systems—especially those leveraging GPUs—have introduced more flexibility, challenging the long-standing reliance on 32-bit floats. For instance, in traditional digital signal processing (DSP), 32-bit floats were the gold standard. Even early neural networks, trained on massive datasets, defaulted to 32-bit to ensure greater stability. But as AI moved from research labs to real-world applications—especially on edge devices—the limitations of 32-bit became clear. As our data requirements for processing have multiplied, particularly for tensor-based AI processing, the use of 32-bit float has put tremendous requirements on memory storage as well as on bus transfers between that storage and dynamic processing. The result is higher compute storage costs and immense amounts of wasted power with only small increases in compute performance per major hardware upgrades. In other words, memory bandwidth, power consumption and compute latency are all suffering under the weight of unnecessary precision. This problem is acutely evident in large language models, where the massive scale of parameters and computations magnifies these inefficiencies. The Implementation Gap Despite extensive research into low-precision AI, real-world adoption has lagged behind academic progress, with many deployed applications still relying on FP32 and FP16/BF16 precision levels. While OpenCV has long supported low-precision formats like INT8 and INT16 for traditional image processing, its OpenCV 5 release—slated for summer 2025—plans to expand support for low-precision deep learning inference, including formats like bfloat16. That this shift is only now becoming a priority in one of the most widely used vision libraries is a telling indicator of how slowly some industry practices around efficient inference are evolving. This implementation gap persists, even as studies consistently demonstrate the potential for four to five times improvements in power efficiency through precision reduction. The slow adoption stems from several interconnected factors, primarily hardware limitations. Current GPU architectures contain a limited number of specialized processing engines optimized for specific bit-widths, with most resources dedicated to FP16/BF16 operations while INT8/INT4 capabilities remain constrained. However, low-precision computing is proving that many tasks don't need 32-bit floats. Speech recognition models, for instance, now run efficiently in INT8 with minimal loss in accuracy. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification can achieve near-floating-point performance with 4-bit quantized weights. Even in DSP, techniques like fixed-point FIR filtering and logarithmic number systems (LNS) enable efficient signal processing without the traditional floating-point overhead. The Promise Of Flexible Architectures A key factor slowing the transition to low-precision AI is the need for specialized hardware with dedicated processing engines optimized for different bit-widths. Current GPU architectures, while powerful, face inherent limitations in their execution units. Most modern GPUs prioritize FP16/BF16 operations with a limited number of dedicated INT8/INT4 engines, creating an imbalance in computational efficiency. For instance, while NVIDIA's Tensor Cores support INT8 operations, real-world INT4 throughput is often constrained—not by a lack of hardware capability, but by limited software optimization and quantization support—dampening potential performance gains. This practical bias toward higher-precision formats forces developers to weigh trade-offs between efficiency and compatibility, slowing the adoption of ultra-low-precision techniques. The industry is increasingly recognizing the need for hardware architectures specifically designed to handle variable precision workloads efficiently. Several semiconductor companies and research institutions are working on processors that natively support 1-bit operations and seamlessly scale across different bit-widths—from binary (INT1) and ternary (1.58-bit) up to INT4, INT8 or even arbitrary bit-widths like 1024-bit. This hardware-level flexibility allows researchers to explore precision as a tunable parameter, optimizing for speed, accuracy or power efficiency on a per-workload basis. For example, a 4-bit model could run just as efficiently as an INT8 or INT16 version on the same hardware, opening new possibilities for edge AI, real-time vision systems and adaptive deep learning. These new hardware designs have the potential to accelerate the shift toward dynamic precision scaling. Rather than being constrained by rigid hardware limitations, developers could experiment with ultra-low-precision networks for simple tasks while reserving higher precision only where absolutely necessary. This could result in faster innovation, broader accessibility and a more sustainable AI ecosystem. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Travel Weekly
6 days ago
- Business
- Travel Weekly
Cruise industry navigates a new wave of port taxes
Cruise destinations are increasingly turning to taxes on ships or passengers to raise revenue to address the impacts of overtourism. Hawaii, Norway, Mexico and Skagway, Alaska, have all finalized new taxes on ships calling at their ports in recent months. The taxes are sometimes overtly earmarked to help the destinations recover costs associated with the post-pandemic flood of tourists, including their impacts on the local natural environment. In Hawaii, the tax revenue from cruise ships is being earmarked for environmental causes, be it park management or climate-resilient infrastructure. And in Norway, municipalities that want to implement the nation's new 3% tourism tax, which includes a cruise tax, will only qualify if they can show that tourists have caused strain on their municipal resources such as roads or park facilities, according to Forbes. While the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association helped negotiate a lower tax rate for Mexico's new cruise tax, CLIA is fighting back by filing a lawsuit challenging Skagway's levy and is threatening to sue Hawaii. "If the cruise industry failed to challenge this surcharge, other states and municipalities could feel unconstrained in adopting similar unlawful surcharges, leading to exorbitant and ultimately untenable cruise fares," a CLIA spokeswoman said. Economics meet quality of life When introducing these taxes, destinations play a balancing act: They want to remain welcoming to tourists to reap the economic benefits, but they also want to keep the local residents content, said Jungho Suh, who teaches management at George Washington University. "The power to attract tourists or visitors to a local travel destination stems from the local community's welcoming hospitality, their friendliness, their kindness to visitors, which are deeply rooted in the local community's overall well-being," Suh said. "Their well-being has been negatively affected by the overtourism issues, especially since the beginning of the post-pandemic era. That's where the policymakers and lawmakers come along, to find that optimal point by understanding the sentiment and consensus of the local community, tourists and commercial cruise lines." In general, tourists entering a city by cruise spend less on land than other types of travelers, said Robert Rosen, a law professor at the University of Miami who teaches a course on the legal environment of the cruise industry. Taxes could be a way to make up for that lack of tourist revenue coming in despite thousands of people coming off of a ship, said Daniel Guttentag, director of the Office of Tourism Analysis at the College of Charleston. Since those paying the taxes are not residents and don't vote locally, lawmakers may sense fewer political repercussions than taxing their constituents, he said. Politicians "want to make sure they are able to be voted in again," said president Anthony Hamawy. "So, hey, let's go for the tourists. It's a softer hit." Cruise line consequences Since cruise lines have other options for visitation, they may begin to avoid taxed destinations. "There's a great deal of competition to get cruise ships to dock," Rosen said. "In Latin America, Mexico will compete with Guatemala. In the Caribbean, all the islands are competing with each other. So to impose a tax creates a disincentive to visit your country." CLIA was blunt about "unintended consequences for the local communities," including "lower spending by cruise guests when their cruise fare costs more and reduced visitation by cruise ships." Taxes may also incentivize cruise lines to dedicate more days to their private destinations or as sea days, said New York University's Richie Karaburun, a clinical associate professor at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality. When they can't avoid taxes, they'll either absorb the fees or pass them along to customers. The latter is more likely, he said. "If it's only one destination that adds in $5, $6, they might eat it up," he said. "If all of a sudden four ports added $6, that's $24, and if you look at it, that's $24 times 5,000 people each week. I don't think any cruise line could actually eat this up, and in the end, they're just going to have to put that back into their pricing."
