Two design students have come up with an idea to turn the stretchy, plasticky parts of chewing gum into new wheels for skateboards, so the gum isn't wasted. It's the kind of idea that just might stick.
Lasso is a prototype for an in-home recycling system. Instead of dropping your recyclables on the curb, you'd put them in the machine, to be scanned, cleaned and broken down into the raw materials that companies buy to make new cans and bottles.
Millions of people are wearing masks these days to protect themselves and others. And researchers in Australia have found a way to reuse those single-use, disposable masks to make new roads.
Sometimes you go into space to land on the moon, and other times it’s for maintenance purposes. NASA is planning a mission to replace the toilet on the International Space Station.
The city of Pompeii was buried by Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago. And yet something there may sound very familiar to us today: the community had a pretty elaborate recycling system.
Falls on hard pavement can be very, very dangerous for some of us. That's why a research group called SAFERUP is trying to make safer, bouncier pavement.
A company called Carbios says it’s been using what it calls a “mutant enzyme” to break plastic down into the components to make new plastic in mere hours.
A project run by researchers at the University of Sheffield, is using foam taken from discarded mattresses to help Syrian refugees start hydroponic gardens in Jordan.
Toss an item into TrashBot and the system’s internal sensors figure out what the item is, and whether to recycle it or toss it out. No more recyclables in the trash, no more trash in the recyclables.
In South Africa, a construction company has started producing and using a more eco-friendly asphalt that contains plastic pellets that come from recycled milk bottles.
The Straw Vinyl project has lined up some high-profile bands to release limited-edition vinyl records that are made out of plastic harvested from old straws. Then your hipster friends can say they were into keeping straws out of landfills before it was cool.
