waste-to-energy

Baltimore youth get another big win in fight against incinerator

A Baltimore County committee voted to end its contract with the company planning to build a waste-to-energy facility.

America sucks at recycling, so we’re burning trash again

Waste-to-energy plants promise to turn garbage into electricity. Too bad they're dirty and expensive.

Kansas City is making millions by using municipal sewer sludge to fertilize a farm

Last year the city used 9,982 tons of sewer sludge fertilizer on 1,340 acres of corn and soybean crops.

16-year-old scientist could turn Egypt’s plastic problem into a biofuel boom

What have you done for your country lately? Sixteen-year-old Azza Abdel Hamid Falad has figured out a way to make Egypt $78 million worth of biofuel each year. The key: an inexpensive catalyst that will turn plastic into fuel.

Antarctic moss eats 8,000-year-old penguin poop

Earlier this year, a slightly horrifying factoid made its way around the internet: Penguins poop so much that piles of their poop can be seen from space. But take heart, people who don’t like thinking about mountains of bird guano: It turns out that today’s penguin dung heap could be tomorrow’s source of nutrition for […]

A tire fire so big it can be seen from space

Tire fires are a nasty business, and in Kuwait yesterday, a fire broke out at a dump that held more than 5 million tires. The fire was so big that the smoke plume was visible from space: A tire fire this big is an environmental disaster. It won’t just pollute the air with hazardous materials […]

Denver zoo test-drives elephant-poop-powered vehicle

The Denver Zoo has to deal with a lot of waste. A good deal of that waste comes from visitors, but the zoo also produces hundreds of thousands of pounds of animal poo each year. Now, zoo engineers have found a positive use for it: They rigged up a poo-powered tuk-tuk. (A tuk-tuk is a […]

Soiled diapers can now end up as roof tiles

Babies! They use so much energy that the best thing you could do to save the human race from climate change might be to avoid having one altogether. But if you choose the reproductive path, at least the 6,000 poopy diapers that your offspring will produce in the course of his or her early years could have a second life as part of your house -- specifically, as the shingles tiling your roof.

Critical List: Energy Dept. picks more winners; natural gas boom comes to Ohio

The Department of Energy, always picking winners, you know? The first Quadrennial Technology Review, to be released today, favors technologies that could come into commercial use in 10 years — i.e. consumer goods you can spend money for. This could mean DOE favors EVs over new clean energy technologies.

This company, Renmatix, will probably make it under the wire, though. It says it has the right technology to make commercially viable biofuels from biomass and just opened a plant to forward development of the technique.

The natural gas boom comes to Ohio.

Although Beijing usually gets a bad rap on pollution, Central and South Asia are not great places to live if you like inhaling clean air, either.