Can urban mining help to save the planet?
“When we talk about urban mining, we’re talking about mining what we have already made and brought into an urban context.”
recycling
Facing Mexico’s zero-waste challenge
Grassroots organizations in Mexico are promoting inclusive recycling by helping usher trash pickers, or pepenadores, into the salaried workforce. In the endeavor, they draw on positive experiences around the developing world.
Throwaway people or valued environmental service providers?
By collecting and separating reusable or recyclable materials of their own accord, unsalaried waste pickers relieve the growing burden of mismanaged municipal solid waste.
Nothing wasted: Industry as an ecosystem
When we learn from the way nutrients are constantly broken down and repurposed in natural systems, we find opportunities for a circular economy everywhere.
What a Waste
Why not make the economy circular, with waste from one process feeding into other production processes, thus dramatically reducing the need both for resource extraction and for the dumping of rubbish? We should mimic nature: it’s a central ideal of the ecology movement, with roots in indigenous wisdom worldwide.
What Will we Do with all those Solar Panels when their Useful Life is Over?
But the solar panels generating that power don’t last forever. The industry standard life span is about 25 to 30 years, and that means that some of the panels installed at the early end of the current boom aren’t long from being retired.
Paaduks: Shoes with Soul
What does it take to upcycle any waste material into a product that is beautiful, serves a basic function and will prevent that material from ending up in a landfill for a few more years?
New Lives for Old Objects
In Montreuil, the Collecterie resource center is fighting waste by recycling trash—and generating jobs.
Recycling in the Anthropocene
Individualized recycling is a start but it is not doing nearly enough.
Talkin’ trash: Are we literally throwing away energy?
In Germany only about 1 percent of all municipal waste goes into landfills. This compares with about 68 percent in the United States. The U.S. could recycle more and turn much more of the residual waste into energy.
Leading San Francisco’s Quest To Recycle All Trash by 2020
San Francisco, the first urban area in the nation to mandate recycling and composting and begin outlawing items like Styrofoam food containers, aims to completely eliminate the trash it sends to landfills by 2020.
The Aztecs of Mexico: A Zero Waste Society
While technological innovation is often seen as the answer to modern waste problems, what can we learn from the historical methods used by great ancient societies such as the Aztecs of Mexico?