This article highlights the amount of embedded energy in food waste while exploring ways to tackle America’s dual problem of hunger and clean energy.

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Curbside recycling services have not been uniformly successful throughout the country. While citizens support them, their traditional cost structure creates a moral hazard and therefore a market failure. Some cities have figured it out how to address this issue while others still struggle to provide a much needed service.

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Landfill mining is a rapidly growing area of waste management that is proving to be extremely profitable. About 50 miles east of Brussels, at Houthalen-Helchteren lies the Remo Milieubeheer landfill which dates back to the 1960s. It consists of industrial waste, household garbage and other things that landfills normally have – basically 16.5 million tons [...]

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Everybody is familiar with ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ which is present in the North Pacific gyre, one of the five gyres of our ocean systems. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 7,000,000 tons of garbage reaches the marine environment every year, approximately 80% of which comes from land. Plastic that [...]

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Zero waste, which focuses on sending minimal trash to landfills, is becoming a more popular topic among the sustainability crowd. The thinking goes that if we can are not constantly replenishing wasted raw materials, we reduce energy consumption and the pollution that goes along with it.

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Towards the end of my trip in Amsterdam to attend the Global Reporting Initiative Conference, I toured the city’s waste fired power plant (WFPP), which is a cornerstone of Amsterdam’s long-term sustainability plan. On a sunny Friday morning, I biked to the incineration plant, which is in the western dockyards of Amsterdam.  Just like anywhere else [...]

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By Leslie Caplan Reading about throughput makes me wonder if we could approach solving product or service needs by starting at what we now call the “end” of the throughput process or “the dump.” Let’s say companies were incentivized to change how they solved consumer and social problems by a government tax or regulation that [...]

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I came upon an interesting contraption on the exhibit floor at Waste Expo this week: a solar-powered trash compactor. It’s the brainchild of Needham, Mass.-based Big Belly Solar and uses a 30-watt solar panel that charges a battery that in turn compacts trash as it accumulates inside the bin. Waste Management recently partnered with Big [...]

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