Writing

Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.