Tagged: waste

Packaging generates a lot of waste – now Maine and Oregon want manufacturers to foot the bill for getting rid of it - News

Guest Author • Sep 10, 2021 •

• packaging,
• recycling,
• waste

Jessica Heiges, University of California, Berkeley and Kate O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley   Most consumers don’t pay much attention to the packaging that their purchases come in, unless it’s hard to open or the item is really over-wrapped. But packaging accounts for about 28% of U.S. municipal solid waste. Only some 53% of it ends up … Read More

Electric Cars’ Looming Recycling Problem - Guest Work

Guest Author • Feb 01, 2021 •

• Batteries,
• climate change,
• cobalt,
• electric vehicles,
• lithium-ion,
• recycle,
• waste

Perry Gottesfeld In September, Tesla announced that it would be phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, in an effort to produce a $25,000 electric vehicle within three years. If successful, this bold move will be an industry game changer, making electric vehicles competitive with conventional counterparts. But the announcement also underscores one of the … Read More

The Jiangcungou landfill – China’s sleeping giant - Tuhia ki te rangi

Guest Author • Dec 15, 2020 •

• China,
• emissions,
• landfill,
• leachate,
• rubbish,
• waste

Jim Missen Jiangcungou is home to a 700,00 square metre landfill, with the ability to hold 49 million cubic metres of municipal waste. Of China’s 1.4 billion populace it serves a mere 8 million and has reached its capacity 25 years early. The landfill in question is located in Shaanxi province and its sole user is the city of … Read More

Seven reasons to be wary of waste-to-energy proposals - Climate: Explained

Guest Author • Dec 11, 2019 •

• climate change,
• incineration,
• landfills,
• waste,
• waste-to-energy

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz I was in Switzerland recently and discovered that they haven’t had any landfill since the early 2000s, because … Read More

Why municipal waste-to-energy incineration is not the answer to NZ’s plastic waste crisis - Guest Work

Guest Author • Nov 14, 2019 •

• plastic,
• waste,
• waste-to-energy incineration

Trisia Farrelly, Massey University New Zealand is ranked the third-most-wasteful country in the OECD. New Zealanders produce five times the global daily average of waste per person – and they are getting more wasteful, producing 35% more than a decade ago. These statistics are likely to get worse following China’s 2018 ban on imports of certain … Read More

How should we manage the harm caused by tobacco product waste? - Public Health Expert

Public Health Expert • Jun 14, 2019 •

• cigarette butts,
• cigarettes,
• plastic,
• rubbish,
• Smoking,
• waste

Professor Janet Hoek and Emeritus Professor Philip Gendall Annual consumption of cigarettes now exceeds five trillion, with around four trillion butts littered every year. These cigarette butts cause major environmental damage and impose significant clean-up costs on local authorities. Although tobacco companies have framed smokers as responsible for butt litter, recent debate has focused on the tobacco industry’s role … Read More

Recycled rubbish - The Dismal Science

Michael Reddell • Sep 15, 2018 •

• landfill,
• plastic,
• plastic bags,
• waste

That’s the title of my former colleague Ian Harrison’s response to the government’s consultative document on getting rid of (some types of) plastic bags.  The consultation itself closed yesterday, but nobody supposes the consultation itself was remotely serious –  the irrational ban is going to happen anyway.  Having dug fairly deeply into the material used to support/underpin the consultative … Read More

A simple landfill calculation - The Dismal Science

Eric Crampton • Aug 21, 2018 •

• landfill,
• plastic,
• rubbish,
• waste

That this one comes up so often speaks poorly of our basic numeracy and sense of scale. There’s basically no chance that landfills expand to take up any substantial part of the country. This is the kind of back-of-the-envelope thing that everybody should be able to do in their head. Kate Valley services Christchurch. It has 1000 hectares … Read More

A quarter of all US food ends up in the bin - News

Jean Balchin • Apr 24, 2018 •

• consumerism,
• food,
• fruit,
• iets,
• irrigation water,
• New Zealand,
• product,
• US,
• vegetables,
• waste

I don’t know about you, but whenever I think of the United States and food, I imagine a heaped plate of chips, burgers and salad. Perhaps there’s a milkshake beside the plate too. I have a tremendous appetite, but even I know that I can’t eat everything. Huge plates of food leave behind huge piles of waste. US consumers … Read More

How to solve the ‘monster’ fatberg problem - Guest Work

Guest Author • Nov 09, 2017 •

• fat,
• fatbergs,
• grease,
• infrastructure,
• oil,
• sewerage,
• sewers,
• waste,
• water

By Alison Browne, University of Manchester and Mike Foden, Keele University.  Fatbergs – enormous solid masses of oil, grease, wet wipes and other hygiene products that congeal together to cause major blockages – are wreaking havoc on the sewers of cities around the world. A 130 tonne specimen described as a “monster” recently caused backups … Read More