Environmentally-friendly

As electronic devices are becoming outdated at an increasingly fast pace, e-waste continues to be a huge problem. That's why scientists have started producing "wooden" semiconductor chips that could almost entirely biodegrade once left in a landfill.

In tropical countries such as the Philippines, there are plenty of rice husks ... and also plenty of termites. A group of engineering students recently decided to use the former to address the latter, by creating termite-resistant particleboard from rice husks.

Boeing is at it again, continuing its on-going ecoDemonstrator test program by ramping up a series of flight tests with a modified 757 airliner. The lengthy tests will assess new methods to advance efficiency, cut noise and lower carbon emissions.

If you're trying to save power, you generally don't leave your lights on all night. With a few exceptions, however, that's what cities do with their streetlights. A Spanish team is addressing that situation, with a stand-alone streetlight that runs off of both solar and wind power.

A new method of recycling plastic does away with water and only consumes half the energy of previous systems. At the same time, it produces plastic pellets of equal or better quality,  resulting in an environmentally friendlier process that also promises to be significantly cheaper.

The 2016 Mazda Miata will be the first vehicle to incorporate parts made from a new bioplastic developed by the automaker. The plastic is based on plant-derived materials instead of petroleum, and doesn't need to be painted.

While we hear a lot about the wonders of materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, nanofibrillated cellulose (aka: Cellulose NanoFibrils, or CNF) also shows a lot of promise. Thanks to a new more practical production technique, it may soon start showing up everywhere.

Almost a year ago, Boeing announced that it was looking into running airliners on a mixture of jet fuel and "green diesel." Now, the corporation followed through on that plan, flying its ecoDemonstrator 787 flight test airplane on the fuel blend.

One man's waste is another's man's bus fuel, so the saying might now go. Indeed, next time people in the UK go for a number two, they could be powering the number two bus. Geneco's new Bio-Bus is powered by gas generated via the treatment of sewage and food waste.

Researchers have been able to take the cellulose in sawdust and convert it into hydrocarbon chains. These can be used as an additive in gasoline or as building blocks to create plastics, rubber, nylon, insulation foams and other materials normally made from ethylene, propylene and benzene.

Increasing numbers of people are outfitting their homes with sustainable technology, and the resulting boom in sustainable building is driving new levels of architectural innovation. Gizmag highlights ten remarkably innovative sustainable houses.

If you're a major aerospace company and you want to assess a variety of environmentally-friendly technologies for use in your airplanes, do you spread those technologies out across several individual planes? Not always. Boeing puts them all in a single aircraft known as the ecoDemonstrator.