Monthly focus

Turning trash into treasure

01 October 2018

New ways of recycling and reusing products will reduce the amount of waste going into landfill. Image credit - Flickr/ Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Dumped waste, from used nappies to industrial by-products, have long wound up in landfills and can take hundreds of years to decay. In October we speak to the scientists figuring out how to keep such items in use to reduce rubbish and create a so-called circular economy. We learn about new efforts to mine industrial waste for the rare metals that go into making aircraft parts, pacemakers and bicycle gears, and find out about the culture shift needed to develop a zero-waste society. We also speak to the researchers building a biorefinery to turn soiled nappies into fertilisers and raw materials, and look at whether seaweed could become the next plastic.

Seaweed is one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet, at half a metre per day, and could solve the problem of non-biodegradable packaging. Image credit - Skipping Rocks Lab

environment

24 October 2018

Seaweed coffee cups could help ditch single-use plastics

A significant amount of the single-use plastics that we use ends up in our oceans. As people increasingly ditch these plastics, seaweed — also known as macroalgae — and microalgae could be the solutions to the world’s plastic food packaging problem. These are being used to develop everyday items, from edible water bottles to coffee cups to biofuels.

Recycling can be inefficient when parts such as dashboards from cars are too hard to dismantle, says Felipe Maya. Image credit - Felipe Maya

interview | industry

15 October 2018

In a zero-waste society, people will need to share and repair

Businesses and consumers need to stop thinking of products as things to own and move towards a culture of sharing and repairing if we are to fulfil the ambition of creating a circular economy, according to Felipe Maya, project and innovation manager at sustainable engineering firm Exergy, headquartered in Coventry, UK.

The hardest part about recycling used nappies is opening them. Image credit - Wagga Wagga City Council 2010-2018

environment

08 October 2018

Scientists want to use dirty nappies as a source of raw materials

Thousands of soiled nappies that were destined to clog Italian landfill sites or incinerators are being redirected to a recycling plant that is turning them into streams of high quality raw materials, in a new process that it is hoped will be replicated around Europe.

Magnetic fields are among the techniques being developed to extract metal particles from slags (stony waste matter). Image credit - Slag heap at Rammelsberg / Goslar by B.Nunold is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

industry | environment

01 October 2018

Discarded waste could be a treasure trove of rare metals

Miners could soon be scouring mounds of industrial waste to extract rare metals that are needed for products such as electronics, pacemakers, aircraft parts and bicycle gears.

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The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Image credit - Pxhere, licensed under CC0

On thin ice

When it comes to climate change, it is often said that what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. This month, with the COP24 UN climate change conference taking place in Katowice, Poland, Horizon looks north to the region of the world that is feeling the effects of global warming most acutely. We speak to Marianne Kroglund from the Arctic Council about whether it is too late to save the fragile ecosystems there and examine how studies of ice melt show that the world may still have a fighting chance of limiting sea level rise. We find out how the Arctic environment could be protected in the face of increased maritime traffic and look at the effect of melting permafrost – soil, sediment or rock that’s been frozen for at least two years – on the environment and local communities.

Many carbon capture, storage and utilisation technologies are still in their early stages of development. Image credit - veeterzy/ Unsplash

Capturing carbon

In its landmark report in October, the UN's International Panel on Climate Change said that every package of measures we choose to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C must include a way of removing carbon dioxide emissions from the air and reusing or storing them. This month, Horizon looks at what's being done to advance these carbon capture, storage and utilisation technologies. We talk to one expert who is trying to trap emissions from the cement industry before they are released, and find out how International Space Station technology is inspiring the capture of ambient carbon dioxide. We also investigate how captured CO2 can be reused, and examine just how safe it is to store the gas underground.

Cozmo robots and their corresponding tablets are being distributed to participants to take home so that they can interact with them for a week for an experiment being carried out by social robotics professor Emily Cross. Image credit - Ruud Hortensius and Emily Cross

From robotic companions to third thumbs, machines can change the human brain

People’s interactions with machines, from robots that throw tantrums when they lose a colour-matching game against a human opponent to the bionic limbs that could give us extra abilities, are not just revealing more about how our brains are wired – they are also altering them.

Increased maritime traffic raises the risks of oil spills in the Arctic. Image Credit - CC0 Public Domain

How to protect the Arctic as melting ice opens new shipping routes

Early this year, the Eduard Toll set a record: laden with liquefied natural gas, the tanker was the first commercial vessel to cross the Arctic in winter without an icebreaker.

Turning trash into treasure

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Seaweed coffee cups could help ditch single-use plastics

In a zero-waste society, people will need to share and repair

Scientists want to use dirty nappies as a source of raw materials