landfill

Plastic bags are a common target for environmentalists. They can take up to 1000 years to decompose while contributing to your carbon footprint, and often end up floating around the air and landing in nearby lakes and ponds. But a high school student from Canada has discovered a way to break down plastic bags in mere months.

All landfill trash decomposes over time and releases methane, a greenhouse gas, into the air. At landfills across the county, new technology is being developed to capture that gas, treat it and send it where it can be used as fuel. At Three Rivers Landfill in South Carolina, landfill gas travels 17 miles through a pipeline to Kimberly Clark"s Beech Island facility, where it helps to power the manufacturing plant.

A very bright yound student has successfully completed his first round of experiments looking for microbes and proper environmental conditions that will decompose of plastic bags in 3 months time rather than 1000 years time. The results are VERY promising.

With all the bad news surrounding methane and landfills, one wouldn’t expect to hear about an innovative source of energy.

We throw away about a third of the food we buy, which is crazy given rising food prices and a global food shortage. So what do we throw away and why, and how can we solve the problem?

Basel Action Network, a part of the non-profit Earth Economics, criticized 1-800-Got-Junk for failing to guanratee that its free electronic waste recycling program would not send toxic materials to developing countries.

The garbage is a place we tend to put all kinds of things we don’t know what to do with, and things we’re unaware should be put elsewhere. Perhaps the reason we don’t know the answers to many “trashy” questions is because we’d just rather avoid the topic.

An ongoing series about how to design a system to share goods that you probably shouldn't be buying -- clothes swaps, DVD and game rentals, freecycling and other networks. The more people share, the less they buy, so these systems let you reduce energy consumption and cut back on landfill use. Big self-promotion disclaimer -- I'm the author of this series!

70% of office waste is recyclable, but we only manage 7.5%. Maybe we've made it too easy to throw stuff away - would confiscating all our trash cans make us reconsider our habits?

A non-profit in South Florida is turning the concept of food recycling into something huge. Farm Share collects culled fruits and veggies and distributes them to the hungry...at a rate of 15-20 million pounds per year.

Garbage is the product of how we have decided to produce things and run our society. 94 per cent of the inputs, the raw materials and energy that go into a product, never make it into the output, the finished item. In other words, we make way more garbage than we make stuff; it's just "easier" that way. And of course, most of the stuff we make is garbage. But there are other options.

Where do you put 22 million tons of trash? In the UK we still send 77% of our garbage to landfill, despite it being the worst possible way to deal with it. But what are the effects, and what are the alternatives?

Foreign visitors to Moscow are often impressed by the armies of street cleaners and garbage collectors that toil year round to keep the roads and sidewalks of the city scrubbed and free of leaves and litter. But what remains a mystery to visitors, and many Muscovites alike, is what happens to the waste once it is removed.

So far there has been only one solution to dealing with Moscow's waste: transport it to regions outside the city and dump it into vast landfill sites. But recent figures suggest that this solution will not work for much longer.

Eleven McDonald’s restaurants in South Yorkshire are taking part in a new recycling scheme to use waste generated from the restaurants as a source of energy. During the scheme refuse will be collected from the restaurants, treated at a state-of-the-art energy recovery facility and converted into electricity and heat.