Sweden has a booming business in garbage, and a serious knack for recycling. As recently as last year, the country now recycles ninety-nine percent of its waste, with less than one percent of Sweden’s household garbage going into landfills.
Like many developing countries around the world, Indonesia is faced with a difficult and growing garbage problem. Trash leads to illness and diminished quality of life, and many Indonesians must also cope with the high cost of health care. In 2010, a doctor named Gamal Albinsaid devised a new idea to help people access badly needed health insurance and manage their waste and sanitation.
When water and sanitation facilities aren’t available, women suffer the most. Unfortunately for many women in Ethiopia, proper facilities just aren’t available in their communities which leads to adverse health effects for themselves and their families.
Human feces, garbage, trash, all the good stuff that we try to ship off or tunnel out end up somewhere. We are getting better and better at turning that garbage into an asset, and then applying it to international development. Check out 10 innovations that are repurposing waste in the list below… no poop jokes, we promise.
Would you wear clothes made out of crab shells? Or use a wallet made from salmon leather? They aren’t your typical materials, but a new Alaskan start-up called Tidal Vision is working to make them a norm in the fashion industry.
Come prepared with glass jars and reusable containers when you shop at this German grocery store, where plastic packaging is nowhere to be seen.
Approximately 40 million tonnes of electronic waste is generated globally each year, and due to the high cost of proper disposal, much of it ends up in landfills. Printer cartridges, like other electronic waste, do not break down easily and the leftover ink contains dangerous substances that can pollute the environment and cause health problems.
Every year, a huge amount of food is thrown away. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, about one third of all food is discarded before it is consumed, while at the same time, some 805 million people around the world stay hungry.
The Peepoo is a biodegradable bag with a lining that kills bacteria in feces, turning it into valuable fertilizer. It is a slim, elongated bag with two layers. The internal gauze layer is pulled over the rim of a Peepoo Kiti, a green cylinder offered with the product which provides a seat for the user.
The OECD estimates that upwards of 40% of municipal waste in India is simply not collected. Over the years, scientists and regional and municipal governments in the country have been collaborating on how to reduce the amount of non-biodegradable waste that blankets the country. This project is modeled after smaller-scale road paving initiatives that occurred in New Delhi and Bangalore …
