There's $67 billion in critical minerals sitting in your trash can right now. Old laptops, dead drills, that printer you keep meaning to throw out. The piles of waste outside old mines hold even more. By some estimates, between e-waste recycling and mine tailings, America already has nearly all the
I was a teenager on a cruise when I first saw ocean pollution up close. Late at night, I heard a noise over the railing. I looked down and saw crew dumping garbage into the ocean. A stream of trash stretching off toward the horizon. That image stuck with me.
Caribbean beaches are ankle-deep in slimy, smelly seaweed. Wave after wave of sargassum is blanketing shorelines from Barbados to Cancún. It traps sea turtles. It smothers coral reefs. And it drives tourists away from islands that depend on them. This seaweed isn't just crashing weddings on the beach.
CORRECTION: the original version stated that silver "price has tripled in the past three years." It's demand that tripled, not price. As renewable energy installations multiply across the globe, the first generation of solar panels, wind turbine blades, and lithium batteries is reaching the end of
Plastic is firmly established in our daily lives, but it’s only existed for about a century or so. As we consider the long-term harms of rapidly accruing pollution, it begs the question…would it be so bad to finally break up with plastics? And is it even possible at
“Yeah, the plastics and metals come at the bottom there, and then the glass comes at the top here.” -Suvi Sharma “That is insanely cool.” -Matt Ferrell “I know, having been, having worked in solar manufacturing for so long, it's, yeah, we still just love watching this thing,
Thanks to a 70% drop in price since 20101 and plenty of government subsidies, solar panels have become an integral part of the utility grid, as well as many home rooftops. However, this renewable energy technology isn’t all sunshine. There’s shadows looming over its bright future. There’s
The 3R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle has been drilled into our heads as the way forward towards a sustainable future. The plastic industry focused heavily on selling us that recycling was the perfect solution to the plastic waste problem. Yet, plastic recycling has turned out to be ... trash. Literally. In
This week I take a look at recycling batteries and avoiding e waste. With everything from mobile phones to EVs requiring something like a lithium ion battery to power it, and only 5% of lithium ion batteries getting recycled, I thought it was a good time to take a look at one of the looming environm