Notes taken by Patrick Reany
17 Ideas To Tackle The 2 Billion Tons Of Trash We Make Every Year - S1 Marathon Paper (YouTube video)
Company owner: Felix Bock.
Recycling single-use items.
Vancouver, Canada: Recycling chopsticks: 100,000 chopsticks thrown out a day. One local company is converting them into shelves, furniture, etc. Drivers pick up bags of them from various local restaurants, who are glad to be rid of them. The end products are sold at a profit, generating a business that employs local people and keeps a lot of waste out of landfills.
The used chopsticks are cleaned and compressed in machines that were invented by the company's owner. The world is in the place of sufficient technological prowess that a small-company owner can take an idea for a small one-off machine to be built and there's a company out there somewhere that can probably build it.
Every good recycling or upcycling idea that works in one locale might work in a thousand other locales, employing local people as they go. Often the business procedure is to mix together high-tech processing machines with tradition craftmanship.
Kanpur, India. Founder: Ankit Agarwal
Flower waste from Hindu temples in India are transformed into incense sticks. The process is labor intensive, but it employs laborers. The flowers are used for the incense sticks, the rest is used for other purposes. The alternative is for the flowers to polute the rivers.
Monterrey, Mexico
The production company buys the avocado seeds from a guacamole company, which doesn't know how to use them economically itself.
Avocado pits are transformed into bioplastics. Bioplastics are more quickly biodegradable. They are composed less of petroleum products and more of biologic matter. After going through a number of processing steps the resulting soft product comes out as a long, thin sheets of substance that can be easily cut or stamped into various shapes, such as for eating utensils, coffee lids, etc.
There are problems to solve though. Bioplastics are a bit more expensive than petroleum equivalents, and the waste from bioplastics can contaminate standard recycle efforts.
algae flip-flops -- Oils produced from algae are used as the sole for a flip flop shoe. At worst, the shoe will decompose in about a year under normal conditions. Plastic alternatives. It turns out, that there is a growing need for algae farmers.
Biogas made from rotting plant matter. It's first chopped up and then shredded. Anaerobic bacteria will decompose the plant mass. Burying the gases is better than letting it go into the atmosphere. The biggest downside to this technology is that natural gas is still cheaper in some countries.
New York: Ecovative champions a technology of growing large mushrooms that can be made into veggie bacon or biodegradable styrofoam substitute called micro composite, which could help reduce one of the largest contributors to landfills. Mycelium is the living roots of mushrooms. Their products are used as packing materials for electronics. The products are formed by use of molds used to shape the product to the desired form. The mycelium will grow on agricultural waste. micro composite will biodegrade in just a month, unlike styrofoam, which could last for centuries. 200,000 pounds of mycelium per year. Milo is their leather substitute product. Low-fat bacon substitute.
Uganda: Texfad: banana stalks are being shredded to use the fibers to make rugs. one ton of bananas creates two tons of waste stalks and leaves. Weaving a rug is otherwise by a traditional loom and is labor intensive. These techniques have been around for a long time, but it's time to spread the technology to wherever bananas are grown commercially.
Paris, Fance: Old bread can be recycled to make new bread by first pulverizing it and then adding it to a new bread dough. To make this pulverized bread, a new machine was invented by engineers. [That's innovation.] In other places bread is recycled for natural gas or for making beer.
Aukland, New Zealand: Circuit boards are recycled to remove their gold. This company uses microscopic organism that absorb precious metals. Certain fungi and bacteria will bond with certain metals, allowing a form of extraction or separation from the matrix of goop. From this point in the process, the sporry matrix is burned off, leaving precious metals ash behind. This stuff is sent off for final reduction to gold and other metals. This is perhaps the beginning of efficient and cost-effective ways to deal with global E-waste (electronic waste).
Cali, Columbia [Lifepack]: Shredded pineapple waste is crushed and mixed with paper and then compressed to form disposable, biodegradable plates. On a good day, that's 10,000 plates. They also make food containers. Their raw material is from a nearby pineapple processing plant.
Delft, Netherlands [Bob Hendrix, Loop] --- mushroom coffins! Mushroom mycelium are mixed with moist sawdust, then it's place in a mold to make a coffin. The mushroom fills in the empty spaces and in a week out comes a pale white coffin. The material is strong and rigid. Regular burials of bodies and wood coffins are environmentally damaging to the soil. But the process of bio-remediation, by which mushrooms will recycle almost anything it encounters. They will even chemically bind heavy metals into a form that is less toxic to the environment.
Salvador, Brazil --- The recycling of pop can pull tabs into designer handbags. They are first cleaned, then separated for painting, and then they are woven into patterns. Ironically, this technique of recycling pop tabs was long established in Brazil already. Approxately 180 billion soda cans are produced annually. This small industry is able to give meaningful work to disenfranchised workers.
Ethical Fashions employ people who might not be able to find work otherwise to produce fashionable products that are not heavy exploiters of the environment. Bottletop bags are sold in London.
Hong Kong; Stockholm, Sweden --- The processing of old clothes (or almost any fabric) into new clothes. In India, clothing production leftover scraps are converted into mattress stuffing or insulation. The old garment is first sanitized, then a worker removes extraneous parts from it (buttons, zippers, tags, etc). Next, it's shredded and mixed with cotton fibers. This is processed in a machine to produce a fiber-web. Next, this is extruded into long cords of fabric and finally spun out onto spindles to be used for making new garments, which is made by a computer-controlled garment maker.
Sarasota, Florida: Reef constructors made of a special pH designed concrete that will not harm ocean life, but will encourage reefs to grow on them. To go one step higher, the cremated remains of someone are placed inside the reef hemispheres before they are lowered to the bottom.
Vancouver, Canada & Eskilstuna, Sweden. Furniture sent to landfills has nearly doubled from 35 years ago. Ikea wants to make all of its products from recycled materials. And add a buyback policy for taking back reuseable furniture, and then it is resold from a special part of the Ikea store. --- Eskilstuna, Sweden runs a mall that only sells recycled items, which would have been placed in a landfill, which is right next door. It's like a giant Goodwill. Sweden is a very green-minded country, that recycles so efficiently, it needs to buy waste from other countries to keep its green industries going. Citizens sort their waste into seven categories by different colored bags, this helps autosorting to do its job efficiently.
Miridian, Mississippi: Green algae is converted to plastic. Algae needs to be removed from its natural living spaces before it dies and decomposes and then releases harmful chemicals into the water it's in. Bloom invented a machines that can filter the algae out of water. The harvested algae is converted into pellets. These pellets are then sold to companies that use them to make items that would have otherwise been made of plastics. A common use of the pellets is to make foam.