Green Options » waste stream

The Latest Medical Innovation: Recycled TVs

Lisa Wojnovich — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:22:17 +0000

Researchers at the University of York have recently come up with a method of recycling that seems like it fell from the pages of a science fiction novel. They want to turn discarded television screens into components for biomedicine.

Java City’s Joe-to-Grow Program

Becky Striepe — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:00:18 +0000

We’ve written here before about how to get composting and about how organic matter in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas that’s stronger than CO2. The average person in the U.S. drinks around 3 cups of coffee per day. Americans consume over 2.4 billion pounds of coffee per year. That leaves a lot of spent grounds that could be headed right for the trash bin.

Java City is doing its bit to make a difference with its Joe-to-Grow program. Folks can pick up spent coffee grounds to use as fertilizer for acid-loving plants. On top of recommending that you sprinkle them on your garden, the Java City folks say that used grounds make a great repellent for ants, slugs and snails. They also recommend drying out the grounds and then sticking them in the fridge or closet to absorb odors, just like baking soda!

So what are some other uses for spent coffee grounds?

Terracycle + Office Max = Innovative Green Office/School Supplies

Paul Smith — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:53:50 +0000

Terracycle is most known for their reuse of plastic soda bottles as packaging for their Worm Poop gardening products. While these initial products are definitely to be commended, it’s their recent move into office and school products in conjunction with Office Max that stands to make an even more profound impact.

Many people spend a great deal of time working in offices, and to have a mainstream supplier actively promoting awareness about the value of using green office products will likely lead to many people that may not have previously found relevance in their lives to consider more deeply what they choose to purchase for their office, and perhaps other parts of their lives.

Why Office Max?

Why exactly did Terracycle, the scrappy company (literally, reusing scrap production waste in some products) decide to partner with the massive Office Max? Listen up green startups, this is important: They are able to go beyond their youthful excitement about all things green, and hear from people with decades of experience what consumers are actually buying, where they want things to be greener, and where the most impact can be made. And, having a large, deeply ingrained distribution network, Office Max can also allow Terracycle to more confidently venture into making new products, with a sharply reduced time on the development cycle. This plus being able to produce larger numbers right away leads to being able to keep their prices at an everyday level, so that a broad segment of the population can and will try them.

Review of innovative green office products from Terracycle

So where does that lead Terracycle? It leads them to start with 7 new products, and have several more coming soon, including paper made from Mango leaves. More on that below. I had the pleasure of trying many of them out, and here’s what I found:

Zero Waste

Philip Proefrock — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:12:39 +0000

In nature, there is no waste. Or, perhaps a bit more accurately, "waste" from any source becomes the feed for another. Everything is a raw material for some other process or system. Sometimes the changes are minor, as with the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in respiration, while at other times they are hugely transformative, such as the use of soil to grow into a structure like a tree.

We're glad to find opportunities to increase efficiency in systems, as a method of waste reduction. Capturing energy is an easy way of improving efficiency and reducing waste. Co-generation systems get double use by generating both electricity and heat, the heat being a waste product of the electrical generation system.

A wide range of companies are pushing to reduce their waste, and "zero waste" is a concept that is being discussed in more and more boardrooms. A recent article in the Boston Globe discusses how this idea is spreading.

In this perfect system, each unit of energy consumed would be somehow offset. Every industrial byproduct would reassemble into something useful and benign. Every beam of sunlight, scrap of garbage, and flush of the toilet would be pressed into service. No exceptions. Humankind would make obsolete the very concept of "waste."

This is the environmental philosophy of "zero waste," a total vision of sustainability for our eco-panicked age. "Zero waste looks at what nature has given us as a model," says Larry Chalfan, executive director of the nonprofit Zero Waste Alliance in Portland, Ore. "Everything at the end of its life, whether it's a flower or a dead body, is recycled; there are no toxic substances or 'waste' built up anywhere to cause harm to future generations. Everything is a resource to be used again."

I've recently written a couple of articles elsewhere, and Patrick wrote here last week, about using what are thought of presently as waste streams and turning them into useful products. The most audacious one is a group of researchers looking at turning cow manure into a construction board like fiberboard.

This sort of thing already goes on more often than you may think. Fly ash, a waste byproduct from burning coal, turns out to be a good ingredient to use in concrete. Not only does it take up some of the volume of rock and sand in the concrete — meaning that less mining, processing, and hauling of those materials needs to take place — but it also behaves like cement so that less cement is needed. This is especially beneficial because cement is very energy intensive to produce. Many green builders have been taking advantage of this, and often LEED-rated buildings will have fly ash content specified for the concrete used in them. Despite these advantages, fly ash is still treated as a waste product in some localities.

Fly ash is a great example to cite, but not everything will be locked into such straightforward combinations. Zero waste means more than simply finding an alternate use for every byproduct of every process. What is waste from one process needs to be seen as an opportunity, but reducing the materials needed in those processes is also part of the program. After all, it is better to be able to eliminate the packaging material for a product altogether than it is to have the packaging become a raw material for some other process.