Tag: recycling

Many Amazon Returns Are Just Destroyed or Sent to Landfills

What happens when we return items to Amazon? “Perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload — and even destroyed or sent to landfill,” according to Marketplace, an investigative consumer program on Canada’s public TV:
Experts say hundreds of thousands of returns don’t end up back on the e-commerce giant’s website for resale, as customers might think. Marketplace journalists posing as…

Tesla Co-Founder Aims To Build World’s Top Battery Recycler

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel wants to build his startup Redwood Materials into the world’s top battery recycling company and one of the largest battery materials companies, he said at a technology conference Wednesday. Straubel aims to leverage two partnerships, one with Panasonic, the Japanese battery manufacturer that is teamed with Tesla at the…

100,000 Apple Devices Repaired, Resold: Apple Sues Canadian Recycling Firm

Slashdot reader spth writes: At a Canadian recycling firm hired by Apple to scrap about 600,000 Apple devices, 100,000 of them were actually resold to other companies that made working devices from the parts. Apple now sues the recycling company for the money made from the sale plus 31 million Canadian dollars. The recycling company claims that the devices were resold…

NASA Tests New $23 Million Titanium Space Toilet

NASA’s first new space potty in decades — a $23 million titanium toilet better suited for women — is getting a not-so-dry run at the International Space Station before eventually flying to the moon. The Associated Press reports: Barely 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and just 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall, the new toilet is roughly half as big as the two…

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. NPR: The industry’s awareness that recycling…

The Pringles Tube Is Being Redesigned Because It’s a ‘Recycling Nightmare’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The distinctive Pringles tube is being re-designed after criticism that it’s almost impossible to recycle. The current container for the potato-based snack was condemned as a recycler’s nightmare. It’s a complex construction with a metal base, plastic cap, metal tear-off lid, and foil-lined cardboard sleeve. The Recycling Association dubbed it the number…

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash

“Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives — and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that,” reports Wired. (Alternate URL…

Strange Bacteria Can Build Electricity-Carrying Cables in Mud

Bacteria in mud samples have been transformed into microbial fuel cells generating enough electricity to power a toy car — just part of a larger phenomenon that one chemical engineer had originally dismissed as “complete nonsense.” Science magazine remembers how Lars Peter Nielsen’s 2009 experiment at Denmark’s Aarhus University changed the way the world viewed bacteria:
At the start of the experiment,…

A new type of plastic may be the first that is infinitely recyclable

A plastic that can be easily broken down and remoulded into high-quality products should make recycling easier and reduce plastic waste entering the environment Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2252265-a-new-type-of-plastic-may-be-the-first-that-is-infinitely-recyclable/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…