Tag • #recycling

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What a waste: New York City budget cuts eviscerate community composting groups

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 11 February - 17:00

City’s waffling on food scrap programs not only harms environment but also hinders participation in waste management schemes

Steven Roig was excited to land a job trucking and processing compost in May of last year. After graduating from a jobs training program called Green City Force , he had spent much of his adult life making New York City greener through his work on green roofs, urban agriculture and landscaping. He especially loved working in compost, being part of the team at Big Reuse that processed 10,000lbs of food scraps and yard waste from Brooklyn and Queens every week, helping the organic waste on its journey back to becoming healthy soil.

“It’s a lot of hard work, but I enjoyed collecting the scraps, processing them and seeing them go through all the different cycles,” he said.

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Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint can be worse than that of large farms

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 23 January - 19:14

Lots of plants in the foreground, and dense urban buildings in the background

Enlarge (credit: Bruce Yuanyue Bi )

A few years back, the Internet was abuzz with the idea of vertical farms running down the sides of urban towers, with the idea that growing crops where they're actually consumed could eliminate the carbon emissions involved with shipping plant products long distances. But lifecycle analysis of those systems, which require a lot of infrastructure and energy, suggest they'd have a hard time doing better than more traditional agriculture.

But those systems represent only a small fraction of urban agriculture as it's practiced. Most urban farming is a mix of local cooperative gardens and small-scale farms located within cities. And a lot less is known about the carbon footprint of this sort of farming. Now, a large international collaboration has worked with a number of these farms to get a handle on their emissions in order to compare those to large-scale agriculture.

The results suggest it's possible that urban farming can have a lower impact. But it requires choosing the right crops and a long-term commitment to sustainability.

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‘It’s kind of gross but we can do it’: How a community learned to go zero waste

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 7 December - 06:00

A pioneering city scheme is putting France’s ambitious waste-reduction policies into practice

When Alexandre Garcin dreamed up Zero-Waste Roubaix, it wasn’t sustainability he wanted to tackle, but the litter problem that plagued his city. In the middle of his campaign to become a city councillor, Garcin’s brainwave was simple: rather than cleaning up more and more trash off the city’s streets, why not produce less garbage in the first place?

After he’d won, Garcin sent out leaflets looking for 100 volunteers to participate in a free, year-long pilot programme that would teach them how to live waste-free – or, at least with less waste than usual. These familles zéro déchet , or zero-waste families, would receive training and attend workshops on topics such as making your own yoghurt and cleaning with homemade products, with the goal of halving their waste by the year’s end. Volunteers weren’t offered any direct financial incentives to participate – only the promise of helping solve the litter problem and protecting the environment.

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Call for UK ban on single-use vapes as more than 5m discarded each week

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 8 September, 2023 - 04:00

Exclusive: Fourfold increase on 2022 sees enough vapes discarded to create 5,000 electric car batteries

Five million single-use vapes are being thrown away in the UK every week, a fourfold increase on 2022, research has found, prompting calls for a ban.

This amounts to eight vapes a second being discarded, with the lithium in the products enough to create 5,000 electric car batteries a year.

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The French don’t need President Macron to tell us to make do and mend | Agnès Poirier

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 16 July, 2023 - 08:32 · 1 minute

The government should put its money into teaching every child how to knit and sew if it really wants to avoid fashion waste

‘In France, we have no petrol, but we have ideas.” So goes a popular French saying born in the 1970s during the oil crisis. Said differently, France is a champion of quirky initiatives that can feel both admirable and somewhat pointless. The latest in a series of eco-friendly measures taken by the French government is the “repair bonus” . Instead of throwing into the bin a pair of ripped trousers, a bag with a broken strap or a moth-eaten polo neck, the state will pay for them to be mended at your local cobbler or retoucheur (sewing workshops). From October and for the next five years, we will be able to claim back between €6-€25 of the costs of mending our clothes and shoes with artisans who have joined the scheme.

The hope is to help create a virtuous circle, change habits for the planet’s sake (700,000 tonnes of clothing is thrown away in France every year), sustain local artisans and even create jobs in what we now need to call the “ refashion ” sector. Three years ago, a similar scheme encouraged my compatriots to fix their old toasters or rickety washing machines, rather than dispose of them out of frustration. Legislators even obliged companies to revise their obsolescence strategy by publishing a “repairability index” for each item produced. Consumers can now buy new home appliances knowing in advance how easy (or difficult) they are to repair.

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Ready the Ig Nobel: Researchers incorporate used diapers into concrete

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Sunday, 21 May, 2023 - 11:00 · 1 minute

Image of a diaper folded up for disposal.

Enlarge (credit: Renphoto )

Government building rules and regulations can be outdated and misguided, insisting upon conventional building materials with prices that aren’t compatible with building affordable housing. The building codes suggested by the United Nations decades ago often preclude using local, lower-cost, and environmentally friendly materials.

Of late, certain researchers have speculated that they might be able to solve two problems plaguing burgeoning cities—a glut of non-degradable waste and dearth of building materials—by folding the former into the latter. Now, a team in Japan reports that used, sanitized disposable diapers can be incorporated into concrete and mortar, which would still meet Indonesian building standards. Low-cost housing is desperately needed there as the urban population continues to bloom and housing is scarce. Obviously, all of the people moving to the cities bring more waste there, as well.

Diapers are substituted for the fine aggregates that are normally used in making concrete. The team determined that mortar for structural components, like load-bearing walls and public road pavement, could only tolerate a maximum of 10 percent added diaper material. But mortar and concrete for nonstructural components, like non-load-bearing wall partitions and low-impact floor pavers, could tolerate having up to 40 percent of their aggregates swapped for diaper material.

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Yet another problem with recycling: It spews microplastics

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Sunday, 7 May, 2023 - 14:58

Yet another problem with recycling: It spews microplastics

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The plastics industry has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure . Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled . In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent . Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment.

Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater.

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Old smartphones should be usable as single-board computers, just as this one is

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 28 April, 2023 - 15:40

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

David Hamp-Gonsalves had two things quite a few people have these days: old phones lying around and a slowly building desire to get another Raspberry Pi for a quirky personal project.

The project this time was a personal music streaming server (detailed in full on GitHub ). While Pi inventories are slowly improving , they're still not quite what they were, as a glance at rpilocator shows . What is far more readily available is the old Samsung Galaxy S7 phone in your drawer. Hamp-Gonsalves had one with a broken charging port, and a friend had another one with a bad battery, and one transplant later, he had a test model.

You can read David's full post for the details (which we first saw at Hackaday ). The gist is that he tried three solutions, with varying degrees of fiddling and success, to get the Navidrome personal music service running:

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Best Buy starts selling mail-in tech recycling boxes

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 5 April, 2023 - 17:44

Customers exit from a Best Buy store During Black Friday sales on November 25, 2022 in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Enlarge (credit: Best Buy )

Best Buy today announced an expansion of its electronics recycling program that lets people send in electronics without leaving their home. The retailer is now selling prepaid boxes that customers can stuff with unwanted tech and send to Best Buy for recycling.

Customers can buy a small box (9×5×3 inches) for $23 that supports up to six pounds of unwanted electronics. The medium box (9×5×3 inches) is $30 and can support up to 15 pounds. Best Buy's announcement referred to this "nationwide service" as a "pilot program." We've reached out to the company about what sort of limitations that implies and will update this article if we hear back. As of writing, though, the boxes seem available for purchase.

Although Best Buy already has an in-store recycling program, the recycling boxes target people who might not live close to a Best Buy or have an easy way to get to one.

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