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If all goes well, a cleaner and more cost-effective solar recycling process could reach the market right as the first wave of solar panels hits the waste stream. “As we’re ramping up clean energy manufacturing, producing more clean energy tech, thinking about recycling at the end of life becomes even more important,” says Diana Bauer, acting deputy director of the Advanced Manufacturing Office at DOE.
How the sunlight-controlled CO2 separation installation works. Credit: Shiming Zhang, Renmin University of China.
In a study published in the journal Green Energy & Environment, a group of researchers from Renmin University of China propose a new method to capture CO2 using sunlight as the energy source and modified sawdust as the CO2 absorbent
Clockwise from upper left: the Pantheon in Rome; Boston City Hall; Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK airport; Zaha Hadid’s Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Dubai. Photo: Getty Images
Today, cooking one ton of cement yields nearly a ton of CO2, and concrete plants pump out nearly 8 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. Since an ever-growing population can’t wean itself from its primary building material, warding off climate change is going to require a cleaner way to make it.
For reference, the current “tallest tree” in the world is said to be Hyperion at roughly 380 feet tall. Today we will focus on trees (with measurements given) from the 1800’s that stood over 400 feet tall (and take a look at their unique photographs).
Studio Drift deconstructed a VW Beetle into its constituent materials
“I think they’re some of the most important architects working today because they don’t believe in demolition,” McGuirk said. “The sheer waste of embodied carbon and energy is ludicrous.”
Residents of Iqaluit, the capital city of Nunavut, have been without clean drinking water since last week. Photo by Timothy Neesam / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“Unlike most southern Canadians, we have faced chronic, large, and growing municipal infrastructure gaps for decades,” wrote Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), an organization representing Inuit in Canada, in a forward to the report. “We currently have little to no direct decision-making involvement in the recycling, reduction, or diversion of the paper, cardboard, plastics, hazardous materials, and e-waste filling our landfills, threatening our freshwater supplies and locally harve
On 4 October WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson visited Holcim’s Lägerdorf plant in Germany, together with Claudia Grotz of Siemens Gamesa and Chair of WindEurope’s Sustainability Working Group. They met the Geocycle team who are using wind turbines blade waste to generate heat and ash to help make cement. It’s currently the only such cement plant in Europe that’s using blade waste.
The organic content of blade waste is recovered as thermal energy while the mineral fraction of the waste is integrated as ash in the matrix of the cement clinker the plant produces. This reduces the carbon footprint of cement production and makes it more resource efficient. This is because the blade waste substitutes (partially) for fossil fuels in the incineration process and for other materials in the clinker production process. One tonne of blade waste reduces CO2 emissions by 110 kg and saves 461 kg of raw materials.
The story of Harvard suggests that lax U.S. laws around shell companies and real-estate purchases, in addition to a broader lack of regulatory oversight, may be putting America’s heartland in the crosshairs of elites like Kolomoisky. It’s a reality of global corruption that U.S. lawmakers are only just starting to grapple with: As money-launderers and illicit financiers hide their money in the American Midwest, they’ve become part of the story of the decline of small-town, blue-collar America.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, approximately 11 million tons of asphalt roofing shingles are disposed of each year, contributing to over a million tons of waste produced by the roofing industry and companies are increasingly looking for methods to both offset their carbon footprint from re-using single-use products and find environmentally-friendly sourced products for their businesses. Landfills across North America are already over-crowded. Single-use asphalt shingles do not biodegrade or decompose and will sit in landfills for hundreds of years.
More than 90 per cent of the 230,000 tons of construction waste ReEnergy accepted in 2019 came from out-of-state, according to its annual report. After processing, ReEnergy said it sent 93 per cent of the imported trash to the Juniper Ridge landfill, which while owned by the state is operated by a private company, New England Waste Service of Maine, a subsidiary of Casella Waste Systems. Casella collects a “tipping fee” from ReEnergy for taking its waste. Fees for construction and demolition debris vary, but range from US$33 to US$95 per ton, according to the state’s environmental agency.
Gershow Recycling Corp. is asking Brookhaven Town for approvals to build a waste transfer station near Long Island Rail Road tracks. Credit: Barry Sloan
“Any sustainable waste plan must include efforts to actually bring down waste,” said Abena Asare of Brookhaven hamlet, a member of the Brookhaven Landfill Action & Remediation Group. The community group supports alternatives to landfills that they say disproportionately are sited in minority and low-income communities.
SQ4D’s completed proof of concept and demo home. SQ4D says it is the world’s largest permitted 3D printed home at 1,900 square feet.
“The cost of construction is 50% cheaper than the cost of comparable newly-constructed homes in Riverhead, New York, and 10 times faster,” said Stephen King, the Zillow Premier agent who has the 3D house listing. The 3D printed house will include 1,407 square feet of living space and will be built with concrete.
be responsible and protect ecological environment, GETTY
If you are donating a “whole house” the house will be relocated off your property. Otherwise you are donating pieces of the house. Material destroyed in the deconstruction is not part of what you get credit for in valuing your deduction.
“I know it might seem small to you but to get two pallets of napkins I’m not gonna have to buy napkins for two years from the Salvation Army and we serve more than 300 meals a day,” said Captain Andy Miller, the area commander of the Salvation Army in Tampa.
This option focuses on reduction and diversion of construction and demolition waste, including gypsum wallboard, treated wood, reclaimed asphalt shingles, carpet tiles and construction plastics. The RFA has more information.
“By effecting a step change in how we use and reuse resources, the move to a circular economy will deliver major environmental and economic benefits and is an essential element of making net zero a reality.”
Christmas trees put out in the trash in Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
“By recycling them and returning them to the earth, we reduce our waste costs and create a valuable resource,” he said.Options include composting your tree, recycling it into chips, feeding the green to goats, turning it into a barrier to protect dunes from erosion, or even cooking, using pine needles like herbs.
Hemp is lighter than traditional aerospace materials (such as aluminium and fiberglass) and therefore requires a lot less fuel to reach a high altitude. Most importantly, hemp is non-toxic, sustainable, requires way less water and land to grow than cotton, and compared to steel or carbon fibre, has almost no environmental impact.
Aspen City Council has committed funding for a comprehensive waste management plan to provide incentives for recyclable and compostable materials to be diverted from the landfill.
She also told the council that unlike other communities that may benefit from a public-private warehouse that could give construction materials a new life, the local market is not in the mood for second-hand materials. “The concept of taking someone else’s used building materials and using it in a new construction project, the audience for that is limited,” Chapman said.
“In general, we’re just trying to be strategic with how waste is handled and processed on-site so that it’s safe, we’re compliant to regulations, and people really take pride in the Yellowknife landfill.”
More than 20 million tonnes (or megatonnes, MT) of waste was generated in 2017 from the construction and demolition industry – more than a third of Australia’s waste production. And nearly all of it is sent to landfill.
Conor set up a camping chair as part of a peaceful protest (Image: Jake Loader)
Demolition work at the University of Sheffield’s Social Sciences building was brought to a halt for two hours after a resident sat in a camping chair on the site in protest against the “deafening” noise levels.
John Jackson, senior vice president of the Cushman & Wakefield/Grant Street Associates real estate firm, also testified that reusing the buildings for office and commercial purposes didn’t make sense financially.
Researchers have developed a new type of rubber polymer that can be combined with various waste materials and repeatedly recycledfranckito/Depositphotos
This allows the material to be shaped into tubing, coatings, bumpers, insulation, and many other things you’d normally find made of rubber. But the important thing is that this isn’t the end of the story. Once these products have worn out or are no longer needed, they aren’t just thrown away – the rubber can be ground up into powder, placed back into a mold, and recycled into something new.
The building on May 7, when demolition had begun on the rear addition. Photos by Brent Warren.
“We believe value should be placed on the fact that it is the last of the original grand homes and apartments that originally stood on 18th St.,” the letter reads. “We’ve supported efforts to demolish buildings for the child care center expansion but do not believe a surface parking lot is reasonable justification to entirely erase our history.”
HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Concrete mixing machines line up at the construction site for high-rise buildings on April 10 in Kolkata, India.
The construction industry — from the mining and smelting of raw materials to dealing with the waste from demolished structures — has a huge environmental footprint that is often overlooked. It produces 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a staggeringly high number, four times the emissions of the whole aviation sector.
“What’s allowed to disposed of — the materials management — we want to use the science and the data to properly regulate it,” Brinchek said. “We are the receivers of the material, not the generators.”
A demolition crew tore down 184 W. Utica St. on Feb. 27. The green light by the city came two days after the Buffalo Preservation Board voted unanimously to landmark the 1907 building designed by Albert Schallmo, an architect who worked on the acclaimed Blessed Trinity Church on the East Side. (John Hickey/Buffalo News)
“The irony here is while the demolition was happening on West Utica, on the front page of the Buffalo paper that day was a quote from director Guillermo Del Toro saying that the whole reason he selected Buffalo to film ‘Nightmare Alley’ was because of the quality of the architecture in our city,” Howard said.
Household waste in Kamikatsu must be sorted into no fewer than 45 categories. Photograph: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images
Household waste must be separated into no fewer than 45 categories, before being taken to a collection centre where volunteers ensure items go into the correct bin, occasionally issuing polite reminders to anyone who forgets to take the lid and label off a plastic bottle or remove nails from a plank of wood.
Advanced sensors and AI that can detect quickly and determine accurately what can be used among CDW and efficient robotic sorting could aid circular construction by vastly improving the recycling of a wide range of materials. The focus should be on the smart dismantling of buildings and ways of optimising cost-effective processes.
Put simply, logging is not a carbon solution. All told, the logging industry is the largest fossil fuel emitter in our state. In 2016, the Oregon Global Warming Commission reported that the wood products sector itself contributed 50% more pollution than the transportation and energy sector combined.
Illustrations: Above, the symbol for the Embedawatt, as envisioned by AARCH staff; and below a Medium Sized House Energy Chart courtesy of Jerry Jenkins (from Climate Change in the Adirondacks).
Assuming the new house is more energy efficient than an existing house, it still takes an average of 40 years for an energy efficient new house to recover the energy and carbon expended in the construction of the house (Empty Homes Agency, 2008).
“After our demolition contractor started pulling the outsides of the building off, (we) discovered there was a log cabin in there,” said council president Frank Dombroski.
“We’re seeing these forests disappear overnight. It’s happening so fast, and there’s very little old growth left in this part of B.C. It’s an environmental crisis that’s no less tragic than the loss of coral reefs and tropical rainforests.”
One of the historical houses on E. Huron St. that could be demolished to make way for a new College of Pharmacy building. Natalie Stephens/Daily
“There haven’t been any proposals submitted to purchase, and if that remains to be the case, over the summer they would be demolished,” Broekhuizen said.
Half of the 100.6bn tonnes of materials were sand, clay, gravel and cement for building, plus minerals quarried for fertiliser. Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy
The lion’s share of the materials – 40% – is turned into housing.
Deforestation is one factor contributing to unprecedented consumption of materials in recent years. (Photo: World Bank Photo Collection/Flickr/cc)
Half of the materials used each year are clay, gravel, sand, and other materials used for construction, and about 40% of the materials used are turned into housing—yet according to the Homeless World Cup Foundation, an estimated 100 million people worldwide are homeless and as many as 1.6 billion people have inadequate housing.
Nearly 100 opponents of the proposed waste facility on Allens Avenue in Providence raise their hands in silent protest at the Jan. 21 meeting of the City Plan Commission. (Tim Faulkner/ecoRI News)
During the rally, City Council member Pedro Espinal described how the addition of about 200 trucks per day heading to and from the proposed waste-processing facility would impact the five schools in neighborhood. “This facility will only increase the pollution and contaminants of South Providence,” Espinal said.
Roughly 80% of the plastic recyclables collected throughout Halifax, Nova Scotia are now being processed by Goodwood Plastic Products Ltd so they can be turned into building blocks.
If the research pans out, it would allow future astronauts to construct off-world settlements without needing to carry expensive, heavy building materials with them all the way from Earth — a game-changer in the plan to colonize space.
