Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
Where a landfill is too small or old for gas collection, a layer of mature compost can host methane-eating bacteria that oxidise up to 35–40% of escaping methane — for around $48,000 an acre.
White-rot fungi evolved to digest wood. The same enzymes attack dyes, oil and some plastics, and their cell walls soak up heavy metals. A 2026 review maps what works — and where the evidence runs thin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Photocatalysis usually arrives as a powder you then have to fish back out of the water. Fixing the catalyst to a resin bed turns it into something closer to a treatment step: water in one end, oxidised organics out the other.
Shah Alam is turning food waste from 2,000-plus premises into fertiliser in three to four days. That speed is not magic — it is source separation, moisture control and managed aerobic biology. Here is what happens inside, and the data the report leaves out.
A BITS Pilani system disinfects pharmaceutical wastewater with electric pulses, digests the organics biologically, and turns the leftover sludge into methane. Here is the logic of each stage.