Waste

Back in the 70’s, Mad Magazine ran a satirical article proposing crazy new methods of dealing with garbage. One of them involved taking the trash, compressing it into cubes, then building things out of those. Flash forward to 2010, and a Houston company is doing almost that very thing, and with medical waste, no less. Sharps Compliance takes items like needles, syringes and lancets, and presses them into a pelletized building material called PELLA-DRX. Read More

As developing nations such as India and China continue down the road to prosperity, it’s not surprising that their citizens have been eager to spend their newfound wealth on material possessions. Makers of consumer goods are increasingly turning their attention to the developing world as a potentially huge market. All that consumption will ultimately lead to something else, however - a glut of worn-out, obsolete electronic products, chock-full of toxic substances. In fact, according to a new report from the American Chemical Society, by 2030 the e-waste generated by developing nations will be double that of the developed world. Read More

Just what, you may ask, is a gribble? It’s a tiny marine isopod, and it eats wood. For centuries, they destroyed wooden ships. Today, they continue to munch away on docks and piers. Unlike creatures such as termites, however, gribbles have no helpful microbes in their digestive system to help them digest wood - they themselves possess the enzymes necessary for converting it to sugar. British researchers are now suggesting that what works for the gribbles could also work for converting wood waste and straw into liquid biofuels. Read More

If you’re a fan of the original Back to the Future movie, then you probably liked the scene at the end where Doc Brown used some random household waste to fuel his time-traveling deLorean. Well, we’re now getting a little bit closer to that being a reality... sort of. While practical flying cars, time travel and cold fusion are still a ways off, the ability to power your car with garbage isn’t. Canadian biofuels firm Enerkem is currently working with the city of Edmonton, Alberta, to convert that city’s municipal waste into ethanol. This will lower the city’s greenhouse gas output, keep much of its waste out of the landfill, and produce a “clean” fuel Doc Brown would be proud of. Read More

Ever wonder what happens to discarded televisions and obsolete home computers, or do you prefer not to think about it? According to a United Nations study on recycling, the volume of disused electronic products, or “e-waste” as it is known, has risen dramatically as it coincides with growth in sales in developing countries. Read More

Toilets use a lot of water. And once they’re done with that water, well, it’s very... used. So, any time anyone can suggest a way of limiting water usage in toilets, Mother Nature wants to hear about it. Recently, Australian inventors Tom Trainor and Mark Hutton came up with a product that they claim uses up to 90% less water than a regular toilet. The EVOLUTE’s patented new technology offers a greener, drier alternative to our current “swimming pool for your poop” model. Read More

That heat emanating from your computer as you sit reading this article amounts to nothing more than wasted energy. And your computer is not alone. More than half of the energy consumed worldwide is wasted, most of it in the form of excess heat. But new research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) indicates it might be possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from computer processors to car engines and electric powerplants, and convert it into usable electricity. This kind of waste-energy harvesting might lead to mobile phones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in to mains power, or energy plants that produce more electricity for a given amount of fuel. Read More

In a world where concern for the environment is high on the agenda, it was only a matter of time before the laptop got a green makeover. Outstripping even the Bamboo notebook in eco-friendly credentials, designer Je Sung Park has pushed the concept to its limit and opened our eyes to the laptop of the future: a recyclable paper design. Read More

If the benefit to our environment isn’t enough to get some people to recycle, Georgia Tech’s Valerie Thomas has come up with the concept of offering a cash incentive enabled by “Smart Trash”. The concept involves a scanner integrated into a trash receptacle that automatically records what is being disposed of using Universal Product Codes (UPC) or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to the trash. This would not only allow recyclers to better sort the waste but could also provide a cash back channel to consumers recycling goods of value. Read More