A Department of Energy-sponsored report estimated in 2014 that the US nuclear industry would produce 94 percent less fuel waste if big, old reactors were replaced with new smaller ones.

Of all the potential fixes for the climate crisis, none has captured hearts and minds quite like tree planting.If newly planted forests aren’t properly cared for and monitored, the trees can die and any carbon they stored will be released back into the atmosphere.

Its neighbor Belgium currently sources nearly 40 percent of its electricity from nuclear power but has committed to closing down its seven remaining reactors by 2025.Critics of Europe’s nuclear shutdowns say losing reliable sources of low-carbon energy is the last thing we should be doing when we need to reduce emissions.

“People use town during the day but at night, hyenas come from natural areas around town into the city to feed on carcass waste left out by people,” Sonawane says.

When a curator from the Science Museum in London asked Deonie and Steve Allen whether they would like their work to be added to the museum’s permanent collection of artifacts, they jumped at the chance.

“Most of the communities don't have the facilities to do proper plastic recycling,” says Susanna Fuller, vice president of operations and projects for Oceans North, an environmental organization that earlier this year published a groundbreaking report examining waste in Arctic Canada.

One engine was burning standard petroleum-based aviation fuel from a Texas refinery, while the other was running on gas produced entirely from leftover cooking oil and grease from a factory in Los Angeles.

But new modeling published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside of major cities.

The researchers demonstrated that with the right catalysts, both of these reactions work extremely well and produce a mix of hydrocarbons with properties similar to that of jet fuel.

That number will continue to spike up to 74 million metric tons by 2030, almost double the amount recorded in 2014.E-waste, which includes batteries, appliances, phones, screens, and cables, might seem like junk at the end of its lifecycle to the people tossing it out, but those items contain traces of valuable components like iron, copper, and gold.

Regardless, Athey and her colleagues landed on a startling figure: A single pair of jeans may release 56,000 microfibers per wash.This landed them at an even more startling figure: Those two plants alone could be unloading a billion indigo denim microfibers per day into the lake.

To power something that energy hungry, he says, means “the mass of the battery would be significantly greater than the mass of the vehicle.” Instead, the company is looking at applications where it is either impossible or impractical to regularly change a battery, such as sensors in remote or hazardous locations at nuclear waste repositories or on satellites.

While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels.

“The job of the model was to integrate the data that we could collect for all of the different geographical archetypes around the world,” says Bailey.

Its economics are supposedly simple: A company has to make more money on the resulting recycled material than what it costs to gather plastic waste and process it.So it’s more tempting than ever to just pump out more virgin plastic and let the recycling industry languish.

If oil, and therefore plastic, is cheap to begin with—and the coronavirus crisis has thoroughly cratered the price of oil—it doesn’t make economic sense for a company to process and sell recycled materials if they end up being more expensive than the virgin plastic another company is making.

For natural materials, breaking down isn't an issue, as microbes have evolved ways of digesting them to obtain energy or useful chemicals.The microbes that currently digest PET break down that ring as well, making them unsuitable for recycling.

Since early March, Sinnott-Armstrong has been making the rounds of the Bay Area’s wastewater treatment plants, collecting samples that may offer clues to Covid-19’s spread around the region.

On this episode of the Gadget Lab podcast, WIRED science writer Matt Simon joins Mike, Lauren, and Arielle to talk about where microplastic comes from, how it gets into our bodies, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Instead, spent fuel rods are sitting at 95 nuclear plants around the country in either “fuel pools,” where the waste cools down for a few years after the rods finish producing energy, or in special steel-and-concrete casks that sit above ground like nuclear garbage cans.

Figure 2: Community Emissions Profile for Cotonou, Benin (Source: EDGE Cities) Some recommendations include the promotion of solar rooftops, public transportation, green building standards for new construction, energy performance labels for existing buildings, improved solid waste and waste water treatment, and vehicle electrification.

Like most municipal recycling programs, those cities contract with Duong’s company to collect and sort recyclable waste at its materials recovery facility, where they are baled and sent to end-market processors.

“You may think burning plastic means ‘poof, it’s gone’ but it puts some very nasty pollution into the air for communities that are already dealing with high rates of asthma and cancers.” Hugging the western bank of the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Chester City was once a humming industrial outpost, hosting Ford and General Motors plants.

The Water in Your Toilet Could Fight Climate Change One Day Organic matter sits in open-air tanks where microbes feed on it and release CO2 as a byproduct.

The Bank has been working with the Maldives to increase the use of renewables and has invested in a $16 million solar power project on the islands of Male and Hulhumale in the Greater Malé region.

Best case: insects that eat something people don’t , or can’t —solving a recycling problem while freeing up land to grow food for humans instead of human prey.

The 25 current members include manufacturers, consumer goods companies, retailers, converters and waste management firms, along with leaders in government and intergovernmental organizations “Compared to alternatives like glass and steel, plastics provide dramatic reductions in energy use, material consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s time to solve the problem of plastic waste in our environment and oceans,” concluded Lashier.

As we gather contributions from public and private stakeholders around the world, here’s where the conversation on transport and climate stands so far: Waste-to-energy technologies offer a promising alternative to more traditional renewable energy.

The World Bank has been actively supporting countries develop strategies, policies, infrastructure, and capacities in their solid waste management sectors. Japan is a global leader in the development and application of environmental policies in the solid waste management sector.

Reclaiming and bringing into production some of India’s wastelands could partially offset some of the projected crop production declines expected because of climate change.