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 moon

Fifty years after humans first set foot on the moon, Earth’s only permanent natural satellite is back in the news with China’s successful landing on the moon’s as-yet-unexplored far side. This month, Horizon looks at how Europe is contributing to moon research. We hear from the European Space Agency’s director of human and robotic exploration about their plans to send a robot and then humans to the lunar surface in the 2020s, and speak to the scientists trying to fill the holes in our understanding of how the moon was formed. We also hear how we could solve the puzzle of where water on Earth originated by analysing volatile substances from the moon, and take a look at the methods and facilities being developed to protect precious extra-terrestrial samples from human contamination.

The European Union has 24 official languages and many more minority and unofficial ones. Image credit - Pxhere, licensed under CC0

Language lessons

The languages we speak and how we speak them are an integral part of our identity, shaping not only how we see the world but also how people see us. In January, Horizon puts language under the spotlight, kicking off the month with a look at Europe’s minority languages and how to preserve them. We also delve into the social and cognitive aspects of language use, finding out how accents arise and how they affect people’s perception of the speaker, and discovering how ageing affects linguistic capacity in bilingual people – and vice versa. We also speak to researchers looking into the language impairment dyslexia and potential options for early diagnosis.

An ant has the navigation skills to cover hundreds of metres in a single day and still find its way home. Melophorus Bagoti ant. Image Credit - Antoine Wystrach

Studying ant cooperation is revealing how brains work together

As a child, you almost certainly at one stage spent hours watching ants move about from their nest. Maybe you dropped a piece of food and watched as a group of ants came and picked it up, carrying it home in an impressive display of cooperation.

New findings suggest that if the moon formed after a giant impact after water had had been received, it should have gotten a share of that water. The question is - where did it go? Image Credit - ANDY SMITH ASTRONOMY

The moon’s water: where did it come from – and where did it all go?

Fragments of moon rock brought back from the lunar surface by astronauts on the Apollo space missions are providing new insights about where our planet’s life-giving water came from.

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