Inkjet printers may be an inexpensive way to print out holiday snaps, but they can be fragile machines and end up at the city dump well before they hit kindergarten age. Italian maker Michele Lizzit has designed a way to make use of spent printers to build an operational 3D printer for just €10.
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Sixteen years after a controversial biodegradation plan allowed 1,000 truckloads of orange peels to be unloaded onto a barren, deforested area of Costa Rican land, researchers have found a lush, overgrown forest with richer soil and more tree species than the adjacent land that was untreated.
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Over 810,000 office chairs are disposed of annually in the UK alone. Concerned by that waste, product design student Thomas Howell-Jones came up with a way to help keep them out of the landfill – he's using their back rests to make hard-shell backpacks.
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According to researchers at Queen's University Belfast, around 20,000 metric tons of aluminum foil is tossed away in the UK each year – enough to stretch to the Moon and back. This prompted chemistry researcher Ahmed Osman to look for new ways to put all that waste to use.
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For some time now, crumbs of rubber from ground-up tires have been used to produce a more resilient form of asphalt. Researchers from the University of British Columbia are taking things in a different direction, however, by using polymer fibers obtained from old tires to make concrete stronger.
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While it is already possible to recycle carbon fiber, the material is often broken down using high temperatures and harsh chemicals. Scientists at Washington State University, however, have developed what they claim is a more eco-friendly and efficient process.
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Isolated communities often lack garbage disposal infrastructure, meaning it’s hard to either truck out the trash or process it on-site. The Trashpresso is designed to lighten the load a little, as a semi-portable, solar-powered plant that turns trash into tiles.
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Ask a smartphone user how to improve them, and it's a safe bet that longer battery life would top the list. Batteries with silicon anodes could help boost that, and now a team has shown that these batteries can be environmentally friendly too, sourced from glass bottles headed for the scrap heap.
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When it comes to clothing, being both environmentally-conscious and fashionable can be tricky. Old clothes can be given away, of course, but they still ultimately end up in the landfill. That's why scientists have devised a method of essentially "melting down" old clothes to make new material.
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Discarded electronics (or e-waste) brimming with valuable and toxic components is building up in landfills around the world, and it’s notoriously tricky to recycle. Now, researchers have a new way to tackle the e-waste issue: freeze it, grind it into “nanodust” and then sort it out.
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