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.

Recommended for you

The rise of private companies in the space industry is creating both opportunities and challenges. Image credit - Flickr/SpaceX, licenced under CC BY-NC 2.0

The business of space

Private companies are increasingly active in the space sector – from high-profile businesses such as SpaceX or Virgin Galactic to the nearly 3,000 small businesses that provide elements for the European Space Agency’s space programme. In March, Horizon explores the impact of this on research and innovation. We speak to a space law researcher about how to avoid the problems emerging from an increasingly crowded orbit, such as collisions. We look at how to minimise the environmental impact of satellites and delve into efforts to build a reusable European launcher for small payloads. We also look at the challenge of assembling, maintaining and repairing objects in space and the developments in space robotics that could help.

Could city congestion become a thing of the past? Image credit - Pixabay/ Al-grishin

The last mile

More than 30% of car journeys in Europe are under 3km long and could potentially be swapped for different, greener, forms of transport. In February, we look at alternative ways of getting people and goods around cities - a challenge known in the industry as the problem of the ‘last mile’. We speak to Karen Vancluysen of cities network POLIS, who says that cities may have to introduce some unpopular measures to change the way people move around, and we look at how soon commuters will be able to rely on automated shuttles to ferry them from door to door. We delve into the environmental problems caused by unsuccessful home deliveries and what can be done about them, and the new technologies that could change the way goods are delivered.

The current standard propellant for satellites based on hydrazine, which is highly toxic, so researchers are developing safer alternatives. Image credit - NASA-JPL/Caltech

Making satellites safer: the search for new propellants

Developing new propellants for satellites to replace toxic hydrazine would make launching and handling satellites safer but it also requires disrupting current systems, according to researchers.

Ground stones were a 'major evolutionary success' as they allowed people to unlock the energy in plants by making flour. Image credit - José-Manuel Benito Álvarez/Wikimedia commons, licenced under CC BY-SA 2.5

How Stone Age humans unlocked the glucose in plants

Early cave paintings of hunting scenes may give the impression our Stone Age ancestors lived mainly on chunks of meat, but plants – and the ability to unlock the glucose inside – were just as key to their survival.

Turning trash into treasure

Republish this content

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