garbage

Simplehuman's line of products, from their bathroom organizers to their coffee pots, are all designed to make our daily activities faster, more convenient, and more efficient. With their fingerprint-proof rectangular sensor can, they're helping to make them more sanitary, too.

The sensor can is shaped much like the standard stainless steel hinge-top trash can, but it comes with an important germ-avoiding feature: The top opens automatically when you step your foot into the sensor zone that's at the bottom of the can. Not only do you avoid touching the can with your hands, but you also eliminate … Read more

The trash-powered car may someday see the light of day.

CleanTech Biofuels is developing a multistep process designed to take municipal solid waste from a transfer station and turn out ethanol on the other side.

The company recently purchased the equipment and found a site in Golden, Colo., to test it using trash, as well other agricultural and forest wastes, to make ethanol. On Tuesday, it said that it trying to identify a site near landfills and garbage haulers to construct a commercial plant.

Within two years, the company expects to move from a proof-of-concept plant to a commercial plant, … Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif.--It's going to take nearly a decade and a half, but cellulosic ethanol will overtake corn ethanol, according to an enzyme maker.

Cellulosic ethanol, in terms of volume, will surpass corn ethanol production in 2022, Joel Cherry, senior director of bioenergy technology at Novozymes, predicted at the Nordic Green conference taking place here at SRI International. That's 14 years away.

Cherry has a good vantage point into the subject. Novozymes makes enzymes for companies that hope to take wood chips and other vegetable matter and convert it to fuel. Thus, he's in constant contact … Read more

Talk about your low-cost feedstocks.

BlueFire Ethanol wants to set up a series of small ethanol refineries at the world's finest landfills. The company will convert organic waste--paper, vegetable scraps, etc.--into fuel and then sell it locally. The business revolves around the idea that the feedstock is worthless. Landfill operators pay about $6 a ton to get rid of their trash. By converting it to ethanol the operators eliminate this cost and can qualify for carbon credits. BlueFire operates the ethanol refinery and then sells the fuel.

The first plant, a 3.6 million gallon a year facility … Read more

Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton.

"We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic," said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. "There's no evidence it will end in a millennium."

A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific … Read more

The Gray Lady may someday arrive at your doorstep inside a "green" plastic bag.

A company that makes delivery bags for The New York Times and other major newspapers has designed a plastic bag to biodegrade within three months.

GP Plastics' PolyGreen bags are made with fossil fuels, as are their traditional polyethylene counterparts.

However, a chemical added during manufacturing enables the plastic to be digested by microorganisms. The bags are supposed to disintegrate within a few months outdoors or three years in a landfill when exposed to oxygen and ultraviolet light, leaving behind little but water, carbon … Read more

Three of the biggest makers of TVs have formed a company to help manage the wave of electronics waste set to swell with the onset of digital television. Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba have launched the Manufacturers Recycling Management Co. in Minnesota.

That state last year enacted a law making vendors responsible for their brands' discarded electronics. MRM contracts with third-party recyclers including CRT Processing and Materials Processing Corporation, which specialize in handling tired monitors and televisions.

Old televisions and monitors are laced with lead, cadmium, and toxic flame retardants, but careful recycling can recover valuable and reusable metals and plastics.… Read more

DAVIS, Calif.--It's like the Sanford and Son of green tech companies.

FiberTech Polymers takes old corrugated cardboard, plastic and other materials that don't make it to the recycler and turns it all into outdoor fencing, CEO Steven Mortensen told the audience at the GoingGreen conference taking place here this week. You can make other stuff out of it, too.

"We take this rejected material and turn it into a product," he said. "Our products will not rot, splinter or fade to gray...That's why you don't want it in landfills."

The … Read more

So it's not just us after all. For the record, we allergy sufferers aren't the only ones who are fixated on cleaning technologies. Gizmag says a recent survey claims that 60 percent of respondents would buy a self-cleaning garbage can and 59 percent want a stove top that can do the same. Oh, and while they're at it, 47 percent wouldn't mind a dryer that also folded laundry.

We wish the research stopped there. Gizmag goes on to include some other frightening hygiene-related statistics that are enough to make our thrice-shampooed hair stand on end: "… Read more