Pressure treatment is a method to prevent wood rot, but it does have its downsides. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology explored treating wood using atomic layer deposition and found they could manage moisture content, mold growth, and thermal conductivity.
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Vitrification, an established solution for nuclear waste disposal, is considered stable once the waste is turned into glass. New research led by The Ohio State University shows this stability could be threatened if water contacts the metal canister containing the glass.
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Many glass recycling initiatives focus on crushing the original glass product and turning it into something else. However, you do not need to necessarily crush glass to reuse it, as numerous “bottle houses” around the world show. Take a look at a few of the famous ones.
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Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder designed a living building material cemented together with cyanobacteria-secreted calcium carbonate—offering possibilities for construction in resource-limited settings.
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Chicken litter is a good fertilizer due to a composition rich in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. However, transporting the residue is difficult because it crumbles. Researchers from Brazil investigate using ceramic additives to increase waste hardness for easier transport.
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Porous ceramics hold great promise as value-added products for waste materials because they can use ceramic and glass powders as starting materials. Two recent papers published in a special issue of ACT explore this idea by creating foam glass from waste.
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As the global batteries market expands rapidly in parallel with renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, manufacturers are looking for new sources of critical materials. Deep sea mining is one possibility—but at what cost to the environment?
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Spent grains from the beer making process are commonly used as animal feedstock. Researchers led by Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland offer a new, potentially more profitable recycling option—turn spent grains into high-value carbon materials.
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By incorporating electrospun nanofibers, The North Face’s new Futurelight gear is designed to be more breathable and lightweight than any other performance material currently on the market.
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The Basel Action Network is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing pollution dumping in developing countries. Learn what it is doing to prevent recyclers from exporting electronics overseas and find out how its e-waste sting operation in 2015 revealed a shocking betrayal.
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