Mountains of Garbage in Russia are Being Turned into Fashionable Accessories
99Recycle is making accessories and school supplies out of garbage in St. Petersburg.
99Recycle is making accessories and school supplies out of garbage in St. Petersburg.
Making plastic bricks, 5 times stronger than concrete, Nzambi Matee runs Njenge Makers in Nairobi, where she turns plastic waste into bricks.
Berlin has opened B-Wa(h)renhaus—a department store that sells only recycled products to promote reuse and fight the throw away culture.
LEGO now has a prototype brick made from recycled plastic that lives up to company standards for the iconic building toy.
62% of Americans polled would rather hoard plastic for possible reuse than throw it away, and half are looking to use less plastic.
Over the past 30 years, the charity Good 360 has redistributed over $7 billion dollars worth of products to the poor. The online marketplace makes it easy and profitable for corporations to donate unused surplus to charities, rather than storing it or shipping it to a landfill.
On the third floor of an old meat-packing plant is a humid hothouse filled with rows of greens and sprouts, even exotic white strawberries. Nearby, in large barrels swim dozens of tilapia, fish native to tropical regions. The Plant is a leading example for urban vertical farming using old warehouses, where plants and fish are raised symbiotically, with a closed-loop system that uses all waste toward the production of food.
Looking at a warehouse full of discontinued door knobs, the folks at Union Hardware in Maryland wondered what they could possibly do to put all those products to better use. So, in 2011 the third-generation, family-owned business began a project to bring to life Vincent Van Gogh's masterpiece Starry Night using the tools of the hardware trade -- door knobs, levers and plates.
Startups like Food Cowboy, founded by Richard and Roger Gordon, see wasted food as a business opportunity. Some, like CropMobster, are using Craigslist or Twitter so that people who have crops or surplus they can't use, can post the availability to others who can divert it to better use.
You can recycle and help others in need directly, at the same time.
What a creative idea: Joanne Ussary bought a used Boeing 727 for $2,000. It cost $4,000 to move and $24,000 to renovate. The plane, hoisted onto a cliff overlooking the beach and touting beautiful wooden flooring, looks like a half-million dollar investment.
On the third floor of an old meat-packing plant is a humid hothouse filled with rows of greens and sprouts, even exotic white strawberries. Nearby, in large barrels swim dozens of tilapia, fish native to tropical regions. The Plant is a leading example of urban vertical farming using old warehouses, where plants and fish are raised symbiotically, with a closed-loop system that uses all waste toward the production of food.
French paper artist Junior Fritz Jacquet created this fantastic series of weird masks made from toilet paper rolls. Inspired by the craft of origami, each mask is made from a single paper roll which is folded and squished into an expressive face.
Rapper and clothing entrepreneur Pharrell Williams is a key investor in Bionic Yarn, a highly durable fiber composed of organic cotton wrapped around a core of recycled PET from plastic bottles, which has been woven into shoes, canvas bags, jackets and shirts by such companies as Timberland, and Cole Haan.
UK-based designer Yu-Chang Chou hopes to help stem the flow of single-use packages - like Amazon.com boxes - through a new design that can be reused 200 times. He calls it the Repack bag. Once the package is emptied, it can be folded and tossed in a nearby mailbox to return to the post office for someone else to buy and use.
Emily Nunez and her sister have led military lives since birth. While attending a social entrepreneurship event as a senior in college, Emily realized that there were tons of surplus military gear being routinely thrown away that could be recycled into something reusable. She came up with the idea of turning tents, sleeping bags and parachutes into messenger bags.
Ecover, the green cleaning brand, said on Thursday it will use plastic waste retrieved from the sea to create an entirely new type of sustainable and recyclable plastic bottle. The Belgian company is working with plastic manufacturer Logoplaste to combine plastic trawled from the sea with a plastic made from sugar cane ('Plant-astic') and recycled plastic, in what it is calling a world-first for packaging.
Clothing company Patagonia is asking people not to buy its outdoor sportwear and gear unless the really need it. The company may be the first ever to ask customers to formally take a pledge to reduce consumption and be partners, along with eBay, in the effort to keep products out of the landfill or incinerator.
Larsen Jay is a man who knows the power of flowers and the joy they can bring. After being confined in a hospital and sharing his many bouquets with patients whose rooms were empty of color, he created Random Acts of Flowers to repurpose leftover and discard flowers in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Leon Delong figured out that Seattle's office buildings were discarding toilet paper rolls at the end of the day that were small but still had a quarter of the paper. It bothered him, so the retired man asked the janitors to collect the stub rolls, rather than throwing them away. Then Leon delivered them to food banks.
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