landfills

Recycled Orchestra turns garbage into beautiful music

Cateura, in the Santa Ana neighborhood of Paraguay's capital Asuncion, is a slum. The residents live on a massive landfill, picking through the refuse for items to recycle and sell. A place where a violin would be worth more than a house, is, perhaps, the last place you'd expect to find an orchestra.

But that changed the day that garbage collector (now luthier) Nicolas "Cola" Gomez picked up the shell of what looked to him like a violin.

He took it to Favio Chavez, who was working on a recycling program and had opened up a music school for local kids, and together, they started creating musical instruments: violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates. … Read more

'CBS Early Show': Don't take out the trash, live with it

How far would you go to demonstrate your concern for the environment? One California man is so concerned about how much garbage we generate that he's decided to live with it...literally.

"Here's the basement. Um, obviously, all the bottles -- don't hit the top one 'cause it dominoes down, it gets a little ugly," Dave Chameides tells CBS Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman.

Since January, Chameides has saved all of his trash in his basement.

"Pretty much every time someone hears that I'm saving all my garbage in the basement for … Read more

Cellulosic ethanol to surpass corn...in 14 years

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

BlueFire: Making ethanol at the landfill

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

Give your old gadgets new life

Think before you toss your broken cell phone in the garbage.

And your old CRT television or desktop monitor, for that matter. Three million tons of electronic waste go into landfills every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and much of what's thrown away is either in good condition or at least fixable.

Many options are available from manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell and retailers like Staples that voluntarily take back broken-down tech and recycle or refurbish it.

If that's too tough to figure out, there are third-party companies that are dying for your old tech toys. … Read more