Recycling

The Dirty Truth About Where Your Old Electronics Go

We all know we should recycle our electronics, but we don’t really know what happens after we drop them off at the e-waste center. So filmmaker Alex Gorosh followed his old iPhones, all the way to Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the largest electronics dump in the world. It’s a place so dirty and dangerous it’s nicknamed “Sodom…

Here’s What Happens To Your Beer Can After You Recycle It

Hey! Friday night! Time to celebrate. With beer. Since we already know what happens to us once we’ve popped the top on a few too many cold ones—hello, hangover—let’s take a look at what happens to that can after you’ve pounded it; chances are, it will be less than a few months until it’s already…

MIT Explains How To Turn an Old Car Battery Into a Working Solar Cell

There are over 1 billion cars in the world, and the vast majority of them use batteries made from lead. As lithium batteries replace these old timers, eventually there may be many of the lead suckers sitting in landfills. Which is why MIT wanted to find a way to reuse them—by turning them into a…

13 Designs That Bring Reclaimed Airplane Parts Into Your Home

So you love flying. You love every type of aircraft. You would spend the whole day high above ground if you could. But that’s impossible, and when you return to your home or to your office, you want to feel at least a tiny bit of that sensation you felt at those high altitudes. Thanks…

A 3D Printer That Turns Coke Bottles Into Whatever You Can Imagine

Star Trek’s replicators were not only able to produce any food or products our far-off descendants wanted, they were also able to make it from any kind of waste products. It was the ultimate recycling scenario, one that the new Ekocycle Cube 3D Printer hopes to emulate by using a new filament made in part…

Genius guy transforms plastic bottles into super strength plastic rope

Look, I have no idea what I’m going to do with super strength plastic rope either but oh my genius, this recycler’s idea of turning plastic bottles into plastic rope is just brilliant. The video is perfect, he shows you the plastic rope, shows you what to do with it and then shows you how…

This Interactive Trash Bin Turns Recycling Into a Giant Game of Plinko

Recycling should be second nature now, but once you toss a plastic bottle into the dark abyss of a public bin, well—that’s it. Why give it a second thought? ReFILL is an interactive installation that gives a glimpse at the pile-up of would-be trash that’s destined for a second life; everything that goes in is…

Replacement Caps Upcycle Coke Bottles Into Water Guns and More

Products like the SodaStream let you make your own carbonated beverages at home without the need for yet another plastic bottle to be recycled. But the number of bottled Cokes bought around the world every day is still staggering, so to encourage consumers to upcycle those plastic containers, Coca-Cola created sixteen different replacement caps giving…

IBM Lab Accidentally Makes New Type of Super-Strong, Recyclable Polymer

Strong, durable materials are hard to recycle—they’re designed to stand up to abuse. But research chemists at an IBM laboratory just published their discovery of a never-before-seen family of polymers that’s super strong, self-healing, lightweight, and easy to recycle. And it was discovered completely by accident. Dr. Jeannette Garcia was mixing up a standard recipe…

Seed-Filled Caps Turn Plastic Bottles Into Tiny Gardens

If you’re looking for a more profitable way to recycle your empty plastic water bottles, forget about taking them to the curb every week. As long as your home gets a few drops of sunshine every day, you can turn them into tiny productive gardens with these Petomato bottle caps. Using them is not quite…

Your Old Phone Could Help Eavesdrop on Illegal Rainforest Loggers

How do you catch a logger in the dense, remote rainforest? For a long time, the answer has been satellites, which may sound high-tech, but actually means you’re looking at photos of deforested land days after the loggers have made their getaway. A nonprofit called Rainforest Connectionwants to turn old smartphones into solar-powered bugs that…

​This Manmade Island Floats On Over 150,000 Recycled Plastic Bottles

As part of the site’s ongoing Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Made series, MSN has a video about Mexico’s Richart Sowa, a former carpenter who became interested in ecological engineering and left his job to spend over six years building a manmade island made from mostly recycled materials. Over 150,000 plastic bottles bundled into mesh sacks…

A Rare Trip On The Floating Train Yard Of Hudson Harbor

The only two options that freight trains have for accessing the east side of the Hudson River are to cross a bridge in Albany—140 painstaking miles North of New York City—or to ride a rail barge across the Hudson through the highly efficient marine-rail operation run by NYNJ Rail in Jersey City. There used to…

You Can Recycle These New Circuit Boards by Dunking Them in Hot Water

It almost seems too easy. With government funding, a trio of British companies recently developed a new way to build circuit boards that makes them 90-percent recyclable. In fact, all you have to do to recycle them is dunk them in hot water and scrape off the circuits with a business card. The innovation was…

Venezuela Is Turning Thousands of Abandoned Cars into Houses

While many people think countries like Norway are leading the way with recycling programs, an ambitious new idea in Venezuela takes things to a whole new level. The country just announced that it will start recycling abandoned cars, motorcycles, and bikes in order to build houses from their raw materials. “We have sent 10,485 automobiles,…

Coke’s Arcade Machine Accepts Plastic Bottles Instead of Quarters

Sometimes all that’s needed to encourage people to recycle is a little incentive. That’s why pop cans and beer bottles have deposits, and why Coca-Cola built an arcade machine that runs on empty plastic soda bottles instead of quarters. Sure, it’s also a way to advertise sugar water, but that doesn’t make this recent initiative…

This Obsidian Mirror Was Once Toxic Chemical Waste

There are plenty of ways to deal with chemical waste: You could ship it across the ocean. Or pump in into Ohio. Or, you could use a Back to the Future-style process that “recreates the conditions inside a volcano” to incinerate waste. One byproduct of the process? A glassy synthetic obsidian. As part of a…

Apple Now Recycles Any Product You Give Back (and Gives You Credit)

Starting today, all of Apple’s retail stores will accept any of the company’s ageing products for recycling—and, if it looks resaleable, you might even get some store credit, too. The scheme is part of Tim Cook’s ambition to “leave the world better than we found it.” As of today, then, Apple will provide “free, responsible…

A toxic and deadly week in landscape reads. We learn how, remarkably, tourist poop is flown by helicopter out of national parks, how Silicon Valley exports toxic waste all over the country, how poison lurks in our old televisions, and how the land can just fall away in the form of Washington’s deadly mudslide. A…

How Implants and Prosthetic Limbs Get Recycled and Reused

Every year, millions of pacemakers, metal hips, and prosthetics outlast the bodies they’re designed for. But these medical devices could very well go on to have a second-life—in cars, wind turbines, and even another person. The implants are, after all, full of valuable metals like titanium or cobalt alloy. Cremation makes the metals easily recoverable,…