Researchers also find impact of bottled water on ecosystems is 1,400 times higher than that of tap water
The impact of bottled water on natural resources is 3,500 times higher than for tap water, scientists have found.
The research is the first of its kind and examined the impact of bottled water in Barcelona, where it is becoming increasingly popular despite improvements to the quality of tap water in recent years.
Continue reading...Production of chemical could help make recycling more attractive and tackle global plastic pollution
Plastic bottles have been converted into vanilla flavouring using genetically engineered bacteria, the first time a valuable chemical has been brewed from waste plastic.
Upcycling plastic bottles into more lucrative materials could make the recycling process far more attractive and effective. Currently plastics lose about 95% of their value as a material after a single use. Encouraging better collection and use of such waste is key to tackling the global plastic pollution problem.
Continue reading...Greenpeace investigation revealed British recycling left to burn on beaches and roadsides
Turkey is banning the import of most plastic waste after an investigation revealed British recycling was left to burn or be dumped on beaches and roadsides.
Greenpeace visited 10 sites in the southern city of Adana in March. Investigators found waste including British supermarket packaging in waterways, on beaches and in illegal waste mountains.
Continue reading...The secondhand clothing market is growing fast – and not just for adults. Meet the parents changing the way we’ll dress our children in the future
Erick Bouwer’s baby son Joshua was, to use a technical term, a whopper: 4.5kg, or almost 10lb in old money. “That was a big guy indeed, he’s 11 years old now and he still is,” says Bouwer, on the line from Amsterdam. Bouwer and his wife had nested assiduously before Joshua’s arrival, supplemented with presents from friends and family, but arriving home from hospital, they realised that none of the onesies and cute cardigans would fit their new arrival. Bouwer laughs, “We were, like, ‘OK, we’ve got a bunch of clothes here, but I hope we’ve still got the receipts.’”
A decade on, Bouwer’s “personal frustration” became a business, Circos. All parents know there is a relentless churn with children’s clothes, especially when your kids are growing fast: leggings are worn once and come back with holes in both knees; jackets fit snugly for a month before having to be retired. Bouwer, then a pricing strategy consultant, dug deeper. He found that, on average, parents use 280 items of clothing for their child before his or her second birthday. Items are typically worn for around two or three months. After that, only 15% of clothing is donated or recycled. Most of the remainder ends up in landfill.
Continue reading...The waste caught by fishing boats used to be thrown back into the sea but in Kerala it is now turned into black gold
For years, plastic caught by fishing communities on the Kollam coast in India’s southern state of Kerala was thrown back into the water, damaging aquatic ecosystems and killing fish.
But fishers are spearheading an innovative initiative to clean up the ocean – along with their daily hauls of fish, they pull in and collect the waste that gets enmeshed in their nets.
Continue reading...Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins
They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.
The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.
Continue reading...Cheap, hygienic and sustainable, the mattresses made by Indian fashion designer Lakshmi Menon also generate income for rural women
At the height of the pandemic in the Indian state of Kerala, fashion designer Lakshmi Menon, 46, heard that every new Covid care centre had to have 50 beds. Mattresses were in short supply. Every time a patient was discharged, the mattress had to be incinerated. “I thought: that’s a lot of mattresses and a lot of burning,” says Menon.
Menon’s solution was to collect the mountains of plastic pieces from factories that make PPE – all the little bits left over after cutting. Women then braid the bits into rope-like plaits 6ft long. The braids are laid out in a zigzag and the ends tied together. The result is a light, soft, washable, hygienic mattress for just 300 rupees (£3) – half the price of a normal one.
Continue reading...A Billy bookcase is made every three seconds. But with a third of people admitting to throwing away furniture that they could have sold or donated, does the cheap furniture boom have a heavy environmental price?
Jo Jackson remembers the day when it was clear that nothing was going to be the same for a while. It was mid-March and Made.com, an online purveyor of millennial-friendly furniture, had big plans for growth in the year of its 10th anniversary.
Continue reading...Carlsberg and Coca-Cola back pioneering project to make ‘all-plant’ drinks bottles
Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from “all-plant” bottles under new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership with major beverage makers.
A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.
Continue reading...Excavations reveal that rubbish left outside the city walls wasn’t just dumped. It was being collected, sorted and resold
They were expert engineers, way ahead of the curve on underfloor heating, aqueducts and the use of concrete as a building material. Now it turns out that the Romans were also masters at recycling their rubbish.
Researchers at Pompeii, the city buried under a thick carpet of volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, have found that huge mounds of refuse apparently dumped outside the city walls were in fact “staging grounds for cycles of use and reuse”.
Continue reading...With only one in 400 cups recycled, and even those barely ‘green’, the hunt is on for an alternative
Britain gets through 2.5 billion of them every year, and the number is set to increase. But despite a growing clamour for coffee chains to make their cups more environment-friendly, the vast majority are used only once, which critics say is a considerable waste of natural resources.
One company vying to produce a truly recyclable alternative claims that the UK’s caffeine addiction is responsible for the felling of a million trees a year. An independent study it commissioned suggests that almost 1.5 billion litres of water go into making the cups the UK uses annually.
Continue reading...Bacterial enzyme originally found in compost can be used to make high-quality new bottles
A mutant bacterial enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours has been created by scientists.
The enzyme, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, reduced the bottles to chemical building blocks that were then used to make high-quality new bottles. Existing recycling technologies usually produce plastic only good enough for clothing and carpets.
Continue reading...For 20 years Kamikatsu has led the way in the world’s second biggest producer of plastic waste
The residents of a remote village on the Japanese island of Shikoku have spent almost two decades reusing, recycling and reducing, united behind a mission to end their dependence on incinerators and landfill as the world struggles to tackle the climate emergency and the plastic waste crisis.
Although Kamikatsu, an hour’s drive from the nearest city, Tokushima, and 370 miles from Tokyo, has not managed to banish waste altogether, its heroic efforts have inspired other communities in Japan and further afield to take up the zero-waste challenge.
Continue reading...European commission says linear growth model of ‘take, make, use, discard’ has reached limit
Manufacturers of phones, tablets and laptops will face legal obligations to make their products easier to repair and reuse, under a far-reaching recycling plan from the European Union executive.
The European commission wants to drastically increase recycling of electronic goods, which are often difficult to repair, replace batteries or upgrade. Less than 40% of electronic waste in the EU is thought to be recycled.
Continue reading...The Garbage Cafe in Ambikapur, India, is helping to tackle the country’s plastic waste problem – and their novel idea is catching on
On bad days, when his employer made some excuse for not paying him his paltry daily wage, Ram Yadav’s main meal used to be dry chapatis, with salt and raw onion for flavour. Sometimes he just went hungry. For a ragpicker like him, one of the thousands of Indians who make a living bringing in plastic waste for recycling, eating in a cafe or restaurant was the stuff of fairytales.
But last week, Yadav was sitting at a table at the Garbage Cafe in Ambikapur, in the state of Chhattisgarh, over a piping hot meal of dal, aloo gobi, poppadoms and rice. He earned the food in exchange for bringing in 1kg of plastic waste. “The hot meal I get here lasts me all day. And it feels good to sit at a table like everyone else,” he said.
Continue reading...Save the Children urges people taking part in its charity event to source sweaters through clothes swaps and vintage shops
Save the Children is calling on people to hold clothes swaps and scour vintage shops rather than buy new Christmas jumpers, after research found that 95% of the novelty items for sale contained plastic.
The appeal for consumer “sustainability” comes ahead of the charity’s annual Christmas jumper day on Friday, when it encourages supporters to buy and wear festive pullovers. Research by the environmental charity Hubbub estimates that 12m jumpers will be bought this year, triggering huge amounts of plastic waste.
Continue reading...In the shadow of South Africa’s car industry, making use of discarded parts is a way of life – so Port Elizabeth’s Kevin Kimwelle makes a virtue of it
Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?
“You’re lucky you arrived on a Monday,” says architect Kevin Kimwelle as we drive through the twisting back streets of Port Elizabeth. “The municipality collects rubbish on a Monday … but later in the week, it’ll be a terrible mess.”
In South Africa waste collection is just one of the services that government struggles to deliver. A little under half of the country (41% of households) is without basic waste collection services, let alone recycling: as a nation, only 10% of waste is recycled, while 90% ends up in landfills.
Continue reading...Australian PM Scott Morrison received a full-blown welcome from the US president. Katharine Murphy was on hand for an inside account
Scott Morrison has made his first visit to the United States as prime minister. It was a trip that included a close encounter with the unpredictability of the Trump White House, a foreign policy pivot, and a backlash about a lack of climate policy action. Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy, travelled, with the prime minister. Here is what she witnessed:
Continue reading...PM trumpets his country’s achievements in address to UN general assembly
Scott Morrison signalled that Australia is unlikely to update its emissions reduction commitments under the Paris agreement before a speech to the UN in which he declared that the media was misrepresenting the country’s climate change record.
During a press conference before his UN speech at a recycling facility in Brooklyn, the prime minister said he wouldn’t characterise “misrepresentations” about Australia’s climate stance as fake news.
Continue reading...You sort your recycling, leave it to be collected – and then what? From councils burning the lot to foreign landfill sites overflowing with British rubbish, Oliver Franklin-Wallis reports on a global waste crisis
An alarm sounds, the blockage is cleared, and the line at Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, rumbles back into life. A momentous river of garbage rolls down the conveyor: cardboard boxes, splintered skirting board, plastic bottles, crisp packets, DVD cases, printer cartridges, countless newspapers, including this one. Odd bits of junk catch the eye, conjuring little vignettes: a single discarded glove. A crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten. A photograph of a smiling child on an adult’s shoulders. But they are gone in a moment. The line at Green Recycling handles up to 12 tonnes of waste an hour.
“We produce 200 to 300 tonnes a day,” says Jamie Smith, Green Recycling’s general manager, above the din. We are standing three storeys up on the green health-and-safety gangway, looking down the line. On the tipping floor, an excavator is grabbing clawfuls of trash from heaps and piling it into a spinning drum, which spreads it evenly across the conveyor. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes.
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