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PHELPS — Over the last week or so, people who take their returnables to Coon’s Cans locations in Phelps and Geneva have likely been disappointed — or perhaps angry — to drive in and see a closed sign on the door. The owner of both sites understands her customers’ frustration. However, she believes that anger should be directed at a different company, TOMRA, which has a contract to pick up cans and bottles regularly from her sites and other area redemption centers — but has not been doing so. “Both of my stores have been closed temporarily due to TOMRA’s...

Microbe communities found in the stomach of cows can break down plastic, potentially offering a sustainable way to help reduce litter, a study has found. Specifically, the organisms come from the rumen — the first and largest of the four compartments that make up the bovine stomach.... ...The team found that the microbes from the cows' rumens were capable of breaking down all three plastics — PET, PBAT, PEF — with the powdered versions, with their greater surface areas to attack, unsurprisingly breaking down faster than the films. Moreover — compared to the results of similar studies conducted using single...

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - A new law that takes effect on Jan. 1, 2022, will dramatically change what you can and can't recycle in the state of California. According to SB 1383, any person or business that creates garbage will have to recycle all their organic food waste. "It really brings a lot of material under the umbrella of what must be recycled," says Ken Prue, the City of San Diego's Deputy Director of Environmental Services. Prue says people will no longer be allowed to throw away food scraps or other organic material. Instead, they'll have to go into the...

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere — in phones, laptops, tablets, cameras and increasingly cars. Demand for lithium-ion batteries has risen sharply in the past five years and is expected to grow from a $44.2 billion market in 2020 to a $94.4 billion market by 2025, mostly due to the boom in electric cars. And a shortage of lithium-ion batteries is looming in the U.S.Former Tesla CTO and Elon Musk's right-hand man, JB Straubel, started Redwood Materials in 2017 to help address the need for more raw materials and to solve the problem of e-waste. The company recycles end-of-life batteries and then...

Last month, the world celebrated Earth Day. Earth Day is an annual event that was created to promote environmentalism. It was first held on April 22, 1970 and is now celebrated globally by over 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. In the years since the creation of Earth Day, we've seen the topic of environmentalism become extremely politicized on the left.But conservatives, like the rest of the country, support a cleaner environment. We’re just interested in mainstream practical ways to accomplish it – ways that build on core strengths of our nation including personal responsibility and free-markets.Instead of...

Source: P Photo/Charles KrupaAmericans like to believe our resources are as unlimited as the possibilities for our future. That may be true. Ideas like “peak oil” – which seemed on the verge of winning acceptance just a decade ago – have petered out as science and engineering have pointed the way to discoveries of energy deposits so rich the nation has become a net energy exporter. More than that though, America has made tremendous gains by learning to use the resources we already produce more efficiently. These gains are a winner for everyone, producers and consumers alike. This is certainly...

Maryland lawmakers advanced a bill Monday that would prohibit stores from providing plastic bags to customers starting July 2022. An iteration of this legislation passed the House and was voted out of the Senate Finance Committee last year, but it did not reach the Senate floor due to the abbreviated legislative session. With an amendment from Del. Brian Crosby (D-St. Mary’s) that would allow orchard farmers to provide plastic bags to customers for its fruits and vegetables, the Plastic Bag Reduction Act, sponsored by Del. Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore City) and Sen. Malcom Augustine (D-Prince George’s), moved out of the House...

By John F Di Leo - The following are facts. There are innumerable issues in the world of public policy which are opinions, but there are also hard facts. Society often does itself a great disservice by conflating the two. Treating a fact as if it were mere opinion can be even worse than treating an opinion as if it were fact. THE EARTH The earth is not a static planet; our climates change, our weather changes, from day to day, from year to year, and from century to century, through no fault or effort of our own. Sunspots and...

Former Rep. Anthony Weiner is getting a second chance as the CEO of a recycling company that's based in Brooklyn. Weiner, who served 21 months in prison for sending explicit messages to a minor, took over as CEO of IceStone USA located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He admits it's not something he saw coming. "A year ago maybe, I wasn't thinking, 'Boy, I would like to talk about environmentally sustainable countertops,'" says Weiner. "Now it's my passion." The company focuses on recycling and giving products a second chance. Weiner says reactions to his new position have been mixed. "I've...

Wind energy companies will have the option of using decommissioned wind turbine blades as backfill material when reclaiming surface coal mine sites soon, thanks to a new bill signed into law earlier this year. But first, the state needs to set the rules. ... The blades.. are made of fiberglass. Fiberglass is a tricky material that can’t be recycled or easily repurposed. And as utility companies look to replace aging wind turbines, the machines’ blades are being buried in stacks at a handful of landfills around the country, ... old mine sites to suddenly become a landfills, which could affect...

People living in Denmark will need to sort their recycling into ten different containers, under a new deal that aims to cut 0.7m tonnes of emissions and make the country’s waste sector carbon neutral by 2030. Denmark’s climate minister Dan Jørgensen said that, with the average Danish resident throwing away 800 kg of waste into general recycling a year, people in the country were worse than the European average, which is 490 kg. […] Under the agreement, which has the support of all parties except for the Danish People’s Party and the New Right Party, Denmark’s municipalities have half a...

Supplies of speciality metals like lithium, neodymium and indium could become restricted unless recycling rates improve. That's the message from the first two of six reports prepared to assess metal supply sustainability for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 'Scientists should anticipate the possibility that they may not have the whole periodic table to work with in future,' says Thomas Graedel, who led the Global Metal Flows Working Group that compiled the studies.  The report series won't deliver overall supply and demand projections until nearer to the 2012 Rio Earth Summit. Nevertheless Graedel, who is also director of Yale University's Center for Industrial Ecology...

HIRSCHFELD, GERMANY - Scientists in Germany have come up with a method for extracting the precious element germanium from plants. The element is a semi-conductor and was used to develop the first transistor because it is able to transport electrical charges extremely quickly. Nowadays, silicon-germanium alloy is indispensable to modern life, crucial in making computers, smartphones and fiber-optic cables. Transparent in infra-red light, germanium is also used in intelligent steering systems and parking sensors for vehicles. Yet although germanium is present in soil all over the world, it is difficult to extract, and most supplies currently come from China. Now...

Recyclable items are going straight to landfills during the coronavirus pandemic as area haulers move to protect workers at facilities where they say maintaining 6-foot social distancing is impossible. “Some of the waste processing and recycling work we do is labor-intensive, involving hundreds of employees working in sort lines handling materials,” Alex Oseguera, a director of government affairs for Waste Management’s California operations, wrote in a March 18 letter to the city of Newport Beach. “While we have already instituted measures designed to protect our employees at these facilities — both office staff as well as those involved with operations...

Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws? This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades: Why do they want us to recycle our garbage? The two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset. Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some...

Hundreds of thousands of Broward County residents will have to stop recycling newspapers, pamphlets and other mixed paper because people have been tossing too much garbage into their recycling bins. McCormick said the reason is twofold: First, she said Broward (with a population of nearly 2 million) is putting trash in the recycling bin, causing contamination rates of 30 percent. That means paper that could be recycled is getting mixed with dirty diapers, bowling balls and leftover spaghetti. Unable to clean it enough to sell it, the paper gets sent to the landfill anyway. “The mixed paper that is finding...

Baltimore County residents' have had their perceptions about where their glass ends up shattered. Over the weekend, news broke that the county—which does not include the City of Baltimore—has not been recycling the glass it's been collecting as part of its recycling program. For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead. "There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, store here.

For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products. That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard. Since then, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia—other...

The first-ever highway partially made of reclaimed plastic was inaugurated in Mexico on Nov. 13. The 2.5-mile stretch of highway in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico used 1.7 tons of recycled plastic, or the equivalent of 425,000 plastic packaging units, according to Dow Plastics Technology Mexico. "The advantage of using recycled plastic products is that they can be used on all types of highways, not only in high-performance products, which can extend the life span of any paved road," Paula Sans, Dow Mexico's director of packaging and specialty plastics, said in a release. The newly paved stretch of...