For years, China has been the world’s plastic waste dump. Single use water bottles, yogurt cups, hummus containers, and countless other sundries we take for granted were shipped from developed countries to China for recycling.
The European Commission is proposing a ban on around 10 single-use plastic items that it says account for approximately 70 percent of all garbage in the European Union’s waters and beaches, including cutlery, straws, cotton buds, plates, some coffee cups, and stirrers, CNN Money reported on Monday.
It can be difficult to figure out what to do with your old electronics when you’re ready to move on from them, but here is one thing you should definitely not do: throw them in the trash. Discarded devices powered by lithium-ion batteries are basically fire bombs waiting to explode on unsuspecting sanitation workers.
A couple of years ago, scientists discovered an enzyme in a waste recycling center in Japan that digests plastic. During a recent experiment to understand how this enzyme works, scientists accidentally created a mutated version that breaks down plastic even better than the one found in nature. The discovery could go a…
If you don’t have access to a proper recycling facility, a talented blacksmith who goes by shurap on YouTube has found another way to recycle old batteries by turning them into a gorgeous Damascus-steel knife that also uses a recycled Maglite flashlight for its handle.
Your childhood NES that hasn’t booted up in a decade. Your stash of old flip phones that you’ve kept in a shoebox in the closet for “sentimental” value. That gallon bag of used batteries that you know you’re not supposed to toss in the dumpster, but after five years of carting them around from apartment to apartment,…
Building a robot that can replicate everything a human can do is both impossibly complicated and expensive. So, researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen are taking the exact opposite approach: building incredibly simple robots, on-demand, that only do what humans can’t.
Do you deliberately avoid visiting friends who live in multi-story buildings without an elevator? No one would fault you—having to climb even just a single flight of stairs is like being forced to workout against your will. But thanks to engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory University, stairs might one day do all the…
Reduce, re-use, and recycle are words to live by as we try to minimize humanity’s demand for our planet’s natural resources. But instead of sending your empty soda bottles off to be recycled, scientists from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany want you to build everything from chairs, to boats, to outdoor shelters
When the Olympic Games hit Tokyo in 2020, the Olympic organizing committee hopes the medals awarded to athletes will be made out of recycled smartphones and other gadgets.
You don’t need a million dollar Steinway piano to put on a captivating musical performance. You don’t even need a real piano, as Sami Elu proves, by hacking together recycled instruments, materials you’d find at a hardware store, and a bunch of unused chopsticks.
We’ve been pouring carbon into our atmosphere for over 200 years, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global climate. Now a start-up venture called Air Ink has found a good use for some of that extra carbon: a line of pens whose ink is made of recycled air pollution.
Time and time again we’ve cautioned you against buying coffee pod machines like the Keurig, but what if one is gifted to you? Instead of just settling for bad coffee every morning, you can do what Evan Booth did and rebuild it into something else, like a functional robotic bionic hand.
Haven’t cleaned your desk in years? At this point you’ve probably accumulated enough crap to recycle it all into something useful, instead of just sweeping it all onto the floor. YouTube’s MrGear has an easy-to-follow tutorial show you how to turn an old CD case, some soda cans, and various unwanted electronic bits…
When you think of the daily abuse that airplane seats have to endure, it’s a minor miracle they aren’t torn to shreds after just a week of air travel. The fabrics used for the upholstery must be just short of indestructible, so it makes sense to eventually recycle those materials into bags and packs that can easily…
Companies like New Balance have been using recycled plastic from water bottles to make shoes for years now. But Adidas is taking that idea one step further. Teaming up with Parley for the Oceans, its new Adidas x Parley sneakers are also made from plastics recovered from the ocean.
Last month, the internet flew into a frenzy over news that Apple recovered $40 million worth of gold from old gadgets last year. That story turned out to be wildly oversold. But our eagerness to celebrate a tech company’s recycling victory speaks to a disturbing truth.
Over the last year, Apple processed 90 million pounds of electronics that were unwanted or broken. It turns out they were nearly worth their weight in gold—a substance which is used heavily in electronics for its conductivity and resistance to corrosion.
