It’s not a simple problem and it doesn’t have a simple answer — but here’s what we can do.
Pee, Poop, and Perspiration Will Be Useful in Traveling to Mars
Astronauts’ waste will not be wasted.
Astronaut poop could one day be recycled into Marmite-like food
I never liked Marmite.
The challenges of waste management in the shipping and transportation industry
Individuals and businesses can send and receive shipments from almost anywhere. But there’s a hidden cost.
Americans aren’t only wasting the most food — they’re also throwing out the best bits
The worst of both worlds.
A fifth of the world’s food is lost to waste and over-eating
The world grows enough food. The challenge lies in controlling waste and protein distribution.
How to store food and cut waste: simple tips with a big impact
Do you know where you should keep mushrooms in the fridge? What vegetables are you allowed to keep outside? Find out after the jump.
Cooking nuclear waste into glass and ceramic materials could provide safe, efficient containment
Vitrification is the way to go.
New method developed to create biocrude oil from wastewater
From your toilet to the gas tank.
Rotterdam’s new sharks will eat all the trash in the port’s waters
Not really Jaws but they’ll do the trick.
Adidas to award first 50 pairs of recycled ocean trash sneakers
The company has chosen to award the shoes via a raffle system on Instagram
Our best bet at stopping food waste is to be more responsible, not more efficient
Humans are throwing away an insane quantity of food, both in the developed and in developing countries. While in the latter case this can be attributed to economic and technological constrains, the former is primarily consumer-driven. And the sum of individual choices adds up to major impacts on a global scale, a new study finds.
Renewable plastic made from CO2 and waste agriculture
Making bottles to meet America’s demand for bottled water uses more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year. Instead of petroleum, Stanford researchers have found a creative way to make plastic for bottles sourced from CO2 and inedible plants like waste agriculture or grasses.
Give ugly veggies and fruits a second chance – they’re just as tasty
According to the United Nations, 20 to 40 percent of fresh food is thrown away by farmers because they don’t look as appetizing as they should to sell. Besides looking a bit crooked, twisted or shrugged, these fruits and vegetables are perfectly edible and taste no different than the perfectly shaped ones you’re always on the lookout for in the supermarket.
Do you know how much water goes to make your food?
Approximately 3.8tn cubic metres of water is used by humans annually with 70% being consumed by the global agriculture sector, according to a report issued by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME). Strikingly, up to 50% of all food is thrown away before it gets the chance to reach consumers, often out of frivolous reasons. In terms of water that’s 550bn cubic metres that go to waste each year. At the same time, approximately 795 million people in the world are chronically malnourished and 1 in 10 lack access to clean water. While policy makers should take more notice and take measures to curb waste, there’s much you can do yourself to cut on waste. Eglė Plytnikaitė, an illustrator from Vilnius, Lithuania made some insightful drawings showing how much water goes into some of the most popular foodstuff.
You’re flushing a goldmine down the toilet, literally
At a recent meeting of the of the American Chemical Society, researchers proposed a novel source of valuable metals: waste water. They proposed a method that could be used to extract valuable metals like gold, silver or titanium which end up in waste water plants via the city’s sewage.
Solar powered toilet locks greenhouse gases and increases crop yields
One of the 16 teams involved in a collaborative project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that aims to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation recently unveiled their innovative design: a solar-powered toilet that treats solid waste by effectively carbonizing it. The concentrated solar power delivers high energy in
Don’t blame Tesco for mass food wastage, get creative and make your weekly shop go further
Tesco recently hit the news once again in a whirlwind of controversy as it was revealed that the UK supermarket giant wasted 28,000 tonnes of food in the first half of 2013. As most of us would guess, the common wastage culprits were the typical items we’re all guilty of forgetting about, failing to use or allowing to go pass
Significant breakthrough in biofuels
I was writing a while ago that major biofuel production is not really that far away and the good news is things seem to be moving in that direction. The importance of biofuels has been underlined as a possible solution to fight the crisis, but the big problem was that creating such alternative fuels required too big amounts of power,
‘Green Gasoline’ from sugar
This month, two independent teams have announced that they have succesfully converted sugar-potentially derived waste from agriculture and non-food plants into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other chemical substances of high importance. Randy Cortright, a chemical engineer at Virent Energy Systems of Madison, Wisc. announced that carbohydrates and sugars can be processed into a number of substances used as petroleum,