Myth-BustingSeptember 20, 2026
Your Receipts Do Not Belong in the Paper Recycling
Thermal receipt paper carries a bisphenol coating. Put it in the paper stream and the chemistry ends up in recycled paper products.
Writing
Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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TeardownSeptember 20, 2026
BASF's ecovio Is Certified Home-Compostable. Two Data Sets Are Missing
A PBAT and PLA blend with TUV OK Compost Home certification. The disintegration is tested. The barrier performance and the microplastic question are not.
ExplainerSeptember 20, 2026
Amino Acid Salts Can Scrub CO2 Out of Biogas. Just Not Quite Enough
A Stuttgart process separates 92.3% of the CO2 from raw biogas using a benign solvent. Gas grids want methane above 96%.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
800,000 Tons of Recyclable Film and Not Enough Buyers
The US generates roughly 800,000 tons of recoverable polyethylene film a year. Twenty-seven reclaimers can process it, and fewer than half will take household film.
TeardownSeptember 19, 2026
The "AI Will Create 40 to 60 Times More E-Waste" Claim, Examined
The Basel Action Network's projection is arithmetically defensible and widely misread. Most of the forecast tonnage is not servers.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
California Recycles 37% of Its Carpet. That Number Took Fifteen Years
The first carpet EPR programme in the US now runs 174 drop-off sites and recycles 78.5 million pounds a year. It is also a lesson in how slowly EPR moves.
TeardownSeptember 18, 2026
Worn Again Has a Polycotton Recycling Plant. Half of It Is Running
Separating polyester from cotton is textile recycling's central unsolved problem. Worn Again's Swiss facility has module one commissioned and module two on paper.
ExplainerSeptember 18, 2026
A Wastewater Cell That Powers Itself and Pulls Fertiliser Out of the Stream
Temple and NJIT researchers built a treatment cell that generates seven times more electricity than it consumes while recovering struvite. At bench scale.
ExplainerSeptember 18, 2026
A Catalyst That Dissolves a Plastic Designed Never to Melt
pDCPD is a cross-linked thermoset with no recycling route. A ruthenium catalyst and a stirred solvent take it apart - and leave the carbon fibre intact.
Myth-BustingSeptember 17, 2026
Shredded Paper Is Paper. That Does Not Make It Recyclable
Most recycling programmes reject loose shredded paper, and the reason is mechanical: the strips are the wrong size for the machines that sort paper.
TeardownSeptember 17, 2026
Envetec Says It Can Recycle Biohazardous Medical Waste. What Is Actually Proven?
On-site shredding and disinfection that turns regulated medical waste into recyclable polymer flake. The disinfection is certified. Most of the headline numbers are not.
ExplainerSeptember 17, 2026
Quebec Made Blue-Bin Glass Good Enough to Become a Bottle Again
For decades half of Quebec's curbside glass was buried as landfill cover. A $20M optical-sorting upgrade finally gets it clean enough for the furnace.
TeardownSeptember 16, 2026
HBI's EVA3: Four Known Sludge Processes, Wired Into One. No Numbers Yet.
Hydrothermal carbonisation, gasification, energy recovery and phosphorus capture in a single automated plant near Treviso. The integration is the novelty — and the performance data is absent.
TeardownSeptember 16, 2026
Cairo's CanBank Machines Take the Cans. The Zabaleen Were Already Taking Them.
Two reverse vending machines in Dokki pay phone credit for bottles and cans — the exact fraction that has funded an informal collection economy for a century.
ExplainerSeptember 16, 2026
What Drips Out of a Landfill, and New York's Plan to Treat It
Rain moves through buried waste and comes out carrying PFAS. Municipal wastewater plants were never designed to remove it. New York proposes making landfills do it on site.
TeardownSeptember 15, 2026
Pirelli, Pyrum, BASF and Synthos: A Tyre Loop With an Accounting Step in the Middle
Four companies, six steps, and one link where the recycled content is attributed rather than physically traced. The pyrolysis is real. The loop is partly bookkeeping.
TeardownSeptember 15, 2026
EverestLabs Navigator: Agentic AI for MRFs, Announced by Press Release
Three stacked AI layers, a claimed 30 percent throughput gain, and one named customer. The architecture is plausible. The evidence is a launch announcement.
ExplainerSeptember 15, 2026
An Enzyme From a Compost Heap Cuts Polyurethane. Slowly.
A Danish team found a bacterial enzyme that cleaves untreated polyurethane foam and nylon with no pretreatment. Three days of it removed 1.4 percent of a shoe sole.
Myth-BustingSeptember 14, 2026
"It's Paper, So It's Recyclable": What Actually Happens to a Coffee Cup
A hot-drink cup is about 95% paperboard. The other 5% is a polyethylene liner, and that 5% is why most mills reject the cup outright — even when you put it in the right bin.
TeardownSeptember 14, 2026
Coway's Microbial Food Waste Disposer: 0.7 kg a Day and One Unverified Number
Coway has launched a kitchen unit that digests food scraps with microbes cultured from doenjang rather than grinding and drying them. The mechanism is genuinely different. The throughput ceiling and the missing data are the story.
ExplainerSeptember 14, 2026
The Sensor Under the Belt: How Magnetic Fingerprinting Finds a Hidden Battery
Litech mounts a flat sensor beneath an existing conveyor and reads magnetic signatures every millisecond, aiming to flag concealed lithium cells before they reach the shredder. The mechanism is elegant. The numbers are missing.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Terahertz Sorting: Seeing Through the Plastics That Near-Infrared Cannot
Near-infrared sorters are blind to black plastic and confused by multilayer film. Terahertz sensing sees through both. The physics is real; the belt speed and the detector price are not there yet.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Silex World and Magnet Recycling: The Chemistry Works, the Collection Does Not
Recovering neodymium and dysprosium from used magnets has been technically demonstrated many times over. Almost none of it happens, and the reason has nothing to do with metallurgy.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
AIST's ABCS Reactor: Splitting Digestion in Two to Stop It Souring
Japan's AIST reports a two-stage anaerobic digestion design that keeps acid production and methane production in separate vessels. The concept is decades old; the claim is that this configuration holds up at high loading.
ExplainerSeptember 12, 2026
Marine Microbes Turning Food Waste Into Protein: Good Biology, Unresolved Regulation
A Chinese research group reports converting food waste into single-cell protein using salt-tolerant marine microorganisms. The salt tolerance is a genuine engineering advantage. Feed approval is where this stalls.
TeardownSeptember 12, 2026
Aduro's Hydrochemolytic Route: Water-Mediated Plastic Conversion, and the Refinery Problem It Does Not Escape
Aduro says its water-based chemistry converts waste plastic and heavy oil at lower temperatures than pyrolysis. Even if that holds, the output is still a feedstock that a refinery has to finish.
TeardownSeptember 12, 2026
Kirin and JSW Put PET Depolymerisation Inside a Twin-Screw Extruder
Chemical recycling of PET normally means a stirred tank and several hours. Kirin and JSW have moved the reaction into a continuous extruder. If the numbers hold, the interesting part is throughput per unit of capital.
Myth-BustingSeptember 11, 2026
"Compostable" Is a Facility Spec, Not a Property of the Object
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
R3 Lithium in Covington: A $15M Series A Moving Into a $150M Building
R3 Lithium is taking over battery recycling capacity in Covington, Georgia that Ascend Elements spent far more to build. The asset is real. The question is whether the funding matches what refining lithium to spec actually costs.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
ReBioCycle's PLA Loop: What a Closed Loop Means When Nobody Publishes the Yield
An EU project says it has closed the loop on PLA — sorting, depolymerising and repolymerising bioplastic back to virgin-grade. The chemistry is sound. The numbers that decide whether it matters are missing.
ExplainerSeptember 10, 2026
Satellites Can See Landfill Methane Now. Detection Is Not the Same as Repair.
Orbital spectrometers have found large landfill methane plumes that operators reported as far smaller. The measurement gap is now well documented; the enforcement and engineering response is not.
TeardownSeptember 10, 2026
The Ocean Cleanup Says 50 Million Kilograms. Here Is What That Is a Fraction Of.
The removal figure is real and independently plausible. Set against annual plastic inflow to the ocean, it represents a small fraction of a single year — and the river interceptors are the part of the programme that actually scales.
ExplainerSeptember 10, 2026
Bacteria Built a Molecule That Grabs Gallium. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Siderophores bind metals with extraordinary selectivity because bacteria evolved them to scavenge iron. Repurposing that chemistry for gallium and rare earths in e-waste is elegant, and the cost per gram is the whole question.
ExplainerSeptember 9, 2026
Black Soldier Flies Convert Food Waste Fast. The Constraint Is the Law.
Larvae turn organic waste into protein in about two weeks with high conversion efficiency. Whether that protein can legally be fed to anything is decided by regulation, not by biology.
TeardownSeptember 9, 2026
Syntetica Wants to Recycle Nylon. The Feedstock Barely Exists in Recoverable Form.
Chemical depolymerisation of nylon 6 back to caprolactam is proven chemistry with decades of industrial history. The constraint has always been that most nylon in the world is blended into textiles that cannot be separated.
ExplainerSeptember 9, 2026
Carbonating Demolition Waste: How Old Concrete Absorbs CO2 Back
Crushed concrete reacts with CO2 to form calcium carbonate. Done deliberately, that upgrades recycled aggregate and stores a modest amount of carbon — and the modest part is where most reporting goes wrong.
Myth-BustingSeptember 8, 2026
"Infinitely recyclable" is a property of glass, not a description of what happens to it
Glass really can be melted and remade forever without losing quality. About a third of it in the US actually is. The gap between those two sentences is the entire story.
TeardownSeptember 8, 2026
"Plasma and lemon juice" recycles batteries — the headline is doing a lot of work
Rice University reports ~95% recovery of critical metals using citric acid. The chemistry is genuinely clever. The framing around it — the lemon, the 10% figure, the record — does not survive a close read.
ExplainerSeptember 8, 2026
Sewage plants are quietly mining fertiliser out of your wastewater
Three ions that a treatment plant desperately wants gone will, under the right conditions, snap together into a crystal worth selling. The same crystal also destroys the pipes. Here is the mechanism.
TeardownSeptember 7, 2026
The EU Right to Repair Covers Less Than the Headlines Suggest
The directive is a real obligation with real teeth. It also applies to a short list of product categories, and the biggest driver of e-waste volume — cheap devices with glued-in batteries — largely sits outside it.
Myth-BustingSeptember 7, 2026
"30% Recycled Content" Under Mass Balance Might Mean None in Your Bottle
Mass balance accounting lets a producer allocate recycled input to selected outputs. The molecules are real somewhere in the plant. They are not necessarily in the product carrying the label.
ExplainerSeptember 7, 2026
Biocarbon in Blast Furnaces: The Volume Problem Nobody Solves
Replacing metallurgical coal with pyrolysed biomass is chemically straightforward and physically constrained. The binding limits are biomass supply and the crush strength of the char, not the reduction reaction.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Acrylic Is the One Plastic That Really Does Unzip
PMMA depolymerises back to its own monomer at high yield with nothing more exotic than heat. It is the clearest existing example of true chemical recycling — and the reason it stays rare is collection, not chemistry.
TeardownSeptember 6, 2026
tozero's Acid-Free Battery Recycling: Strong Chemistry, Small Numbers
A pilot plant recovering lithium without mineral acid is a genuine contribution. The gap between pilot tonnage and the volume of batteries reaching end of life this decade is three orders of magnitude.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Microwaves and Deep Eutectic Solvents: A Gentler Route to Battery Lithium
Conventional battery recycling dissolves cathodes in hot mineral acid. Microwave-assisted leaching in a deep eutectic solvent does the same job at lower temperature, in minutes, with a solvent you can in principle reuse.
Myth-BustingSeptember 5, 2026
"Waste-to-Energy Is Clean Renewable Power" — No, and the Reason Is Arithmetic
Burning municipal waste for electricity emits more CO2 per unit of power than a coal plant. The climate case for incineration rests entirely on what the waste would have done instead, not on the electricity.
TeardownSeptember 5, 2026
374Water's PFAS Destruction Numbers Are Real. The Scale-Up Is Not Proven.
Supercritical water oxidation destroyed 42 PFAS compounds at 99.9993% in an independently reported Army Corps evaluation. Getting from that feedstock to raw municipal biosolids at 100 tonnes a day is a different engineering problem.
ExplainerSeptember 5, 2026
One Enzyme That Eats Bioplastic and Penicillin
A soil-derived enzyme called LCPH1 breaks down long-chain polyester bioplastics and cleaves the penicillin beta-lactam ring. It is much better at the second job than the first, which is the detail worth sitting with.
TeardownSeptember 3, 2026
Anferra Says Grinding Sludge Becomes Ferric Chloride and Hydrogen. Here Is What Is Missing.
A startup claims up to 90% iron recovery from steel grinding sludge, a saleable coagulant, hydrogen as a by-product and a negative carbon figure. Almost none of the process detail behind those numbers has been published.
ExplainerSeptember 3, 2026
Magnetic Microrobots for Microplastics: What the Numbers Actually Show
A magnetically driven MXene microrobot removes most microplastic particles from water and rather less from soil. The recovery figures are real; the retrieval and leaching questions are the ones that decide whether it ever leaves the lab.