On this week's Earth Beat, we air our clean linen in public, envision what highways of the future will sound like, and debate the potential of turning algae into biofuel.
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Dry Freedom!
We air our clean linen in public, talking about the right to dry our clothes outside. Some housing associations ban it, but forcing people to use dryers is expensive and bad for the planet. We talk to Steven Lake, the director of the documentary Drying for Freedom.
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India is following in America's footsteps – but in a land where clothes drying seems to be in people’s genes, will the dryer ever replace the clothes line? Chhavi Sachdev tells her story.
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Silent but deadly
Electric cars are too quiet - they produce such little sound that at low speed they are twice as likely to hit a pedestrian as combustion engine cars are. We should add sounds, says Lawrence Rosenblum, a perceptional psychologist at the University of California, Riverside.
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Paul Scott, Vice president of electric car advocacy organisation 'Plug in America' disagrees. He says it's crazy to add noise to cars after we spent so much energy cutting down on noise pollution.
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Wind turbines aren't much of a danger to pedestrians, so for now the Dutch are mostly working on ways to make them quieter. Thijs Westerbeek speaks to Dr Stephan Oerlemans about his new, less noisy design.
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Biofuels: still promising, but how promising?
Envirominute – Biofuels: the nuts and bolts
Biofuel from algae. Marnie speaks to Daniel Chinn, CEO of Seambiotic, an algae farm on the Israeli coast. Is algae a green gold and will we ever grow enough to replace the black gold, oil?
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The aviation industry is praying biofuel will redeem their reputation as carbon polluting baddies. But will it make much difference to carbon emissions or is this a mix of greenwash and wishful thinking. Paul Steele heads the International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s environmental initiatives.
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Jeff Gazzard thinks that the aeroplane companies are just paying lip service. His organisation, Aviation Environment Federation, has been monitoring the situation for 17 years and thinks that there are real flaws to the hopes of replacing kerosene with algae oil.
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Next week on Earth Beat: We find out how warmer temperatures are changing what farmers are growing, and we meet a farmer who sells his crops by the metre.























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