Recycling

For 15 years, the manufacturer Exide crushed car batteries into small pieces at a recycling plant in Vernon, California, a city south of downtown Los Angeles. From there, the company sifted for lead — a neurotoxin that's often used in battery manufacturing, b…

A waste picker at work in Bangalore, India. Photo: Courtesy of The Body Shop Plastic waste has become an extremely hot-button issue of late, and for good reason: We're drowning in it.  According to Greenpeace, more than 90% of plastic produced is never recy…

Reprinted from Berkeley Lab Plastic is great until you no longer need it. Because plastics contain various additives, like dyes, fillers, or flame retardants, very few plastics can be recycled without loss in performance or aesthetics. Even the most recycla…

Plastic pollution in the world's oceans may have a $2.5 trillion impact, negatively impacting "almost all marine ecosystem services," including areas such as fisheries, recreation and heritage. But a breakthrough from scientists at Berkeley Lab could be the s…

If you throw your plastic bottles in the recycling bin, it may feel like you've done your part to conserve the environment. That effort could quickly be undone depending on where you live. As recycling becomes more expensive for local governments, many cit…

Plastics arent recycled nearly as much as wed like them to be, but a team from Berkeley Lab has developed a method to hopefully make that process easier. In a recently published study, these researches describe a new type of plastic that can be broken down at…

In 2016, a little UK based company, Plane Industries, launched on the market an incredible sofa made with materials coming from a dismissed Boeing 737 aircraft. Since then, this recycling adventure continued with other pieces from a large panel of civilian an…

Nobody wants to spend hours picking through a steady stream of garbage; this is why many recycling operations rely on automated systems to separate plastic containers, glass bottles, aluminum cans and mixed paper. But these systems have an imperfect track rec…

Dollywood mannequin recycling tackles throwaway society

Photograph by Steve Double Peltier cells are flat devices that draw heat from one side to the other through a thermoelectric principle called the Peltier effect. The cells are commonly used to pump heat away from CPUs or graphics cards, and are also found in…