The Right to Repair movement calls for manufacturers to give consumers the ability to repair their own devices. Fairphone, a social enterprise company, designs and produces smartphones that are easily repairable and have minimal environmental impact.
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Extracting rare earth elements from e-waste can be difficult. The Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute and other labs are collaborating to develop new recycling methods—and one method is set for commercial production of rare-earth oxides.
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From an environmental sustainability standpoint, which is better: glass bottles or aluminum cans? Turns out, the answer is not so clear-cut.
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Microplastic pollution is a threat to marine ecosystems. A research collaboration between several Australian and Chinese universities created carbon nanosprings that can break down microplastics into compounds that dissolve harmlessly in water.
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The smartphone industry is often considered to have an increasingly negative impact on the environment. But an opposing argument that smartphones are the heroes, rather than villains, of this story exists as well. How could that be?
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In Ras al-Khaimah, the northernmost emirate of the United Arab Emirates, the government’s waste management agency is running a program to divert waste from landfills. Part of that program includes using camel excrement as fuel in cement production.
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Many farmers believe agriculture and solar farms present an either-or situation. Research on agrivoltaics, or the practice of co-locating PV infrastructure and agriculture, suggests instead the two could be mutually beneficial.
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As mobile carriers push ahead with plans to release 5G networks, NOAA, NASA, and other parts of the scientific community warn that frequencies currently planned for use in 5G could interfere with weather forecasting.
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The next summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo in 2020. As part of its Games Sustainability Plan, Japan recycled almost 80,000 tons of electronic devices to collect enough metal to create 5,000 Olympic medals.
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More than 360 people from 31 countries traveled to Toronto to attend GFMAT-2 and Bio-4 on July 21–26. This year marks the first time the two conferences were held jointly.
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