TeardownOctober 8, 2026
Reclinker makes a cement route inside steel recycling
Reactivating demolition cement in an electric arc furnace uses existing infrastructure, but feedstock, standards and carbon boundaries still matter.
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Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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ExplainerOctober 5, 2026
AMP Portsmouth: mixed-waste sorting and biochar are two different proof points
The expanded system links recovery with carbon removal, but operating sorting capacity is not operating biochar capacity.
ExplainerOctober 2, 2026
Toray’s recovered carbon fibre: strong filaments are not a new aircraft wing
Chemical resin removal can protect fibre quality, but short-fibre products and structural composites answer different engineering questions.
ExplainerSeptember 29, 2026
Methane to succinate: why LLNL puts bacteria in a printed scaffold
A porous support tackles gas transfer, but a one-litre demonstration is not a landfill-ready chemical plant.
ExplainerSeptember 27, 2026
Indonesia's BRIN plan: waste to syngas, carbon nanotubes and captured CO2 — how each step works
BRIN is assembling AI sorting, gasification, plastic-to-nanotube conversion at 1,600 °C and calcium looping into one pipeline. Here is the chemistry of each stage and how much of it exists.
ExplainerSeptember 24, 2026
Compost biocovers: how bacteria turn escaping landfill methane into CO2
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.
TeardownSeptember 24, 2026
Republic Services' 250 electric trucks: real progress, wrong headline
Electric collection trucks work, and Republic has proved it at city scale. But they are about 1.5% of its fleet — and its landfills' methane dwarfs anything coming out of a tailpipe.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Myth-BustingSeptember 2, 2026
"It's just food — it rots away harmlessly in a landfill"
Food is a quarter of what goes into landfills and is linked to well over half the methane that escapes them. The reason is that a landfill is not a compost heap — it is the opposite of one.
TeardownSeptember 1, 2026
Biochar dominates the carbon-removal market. The durability is still modelled.
Biochar delivers the overwhelming majority of the world's issued carbon-removal credits because it is cheap and available now. The hundred-to-thousand-year permanence claim rests on inference, not observation.
ExplainerAugust 31, 2026
A raft of reeds cut a lagoon's methane by up to two-thirds
Wastewater treatment lagoons are cheap, common, and quietly among the largest methane sources in the water sector. A four-year Australian trial floated plants on one and measured what happened.
TeardownAugust 30, 2026
Vaulted Deep buries organic waste a mile down and sells it as carbon removal
The injection technology is real, permitted, and has been running since 2008. The gap between what has been delivered and what has been contracted is roughly seventy-fold — and the credits rest on a counterfactual.
ExplainerAugust 30, 2026
Two waste piles, one reaction: calcite and hydrogen at the same time
An Ohio State team pairs steel slag and coal ash with captured CO2, mineralises the carbon into calcite, and spends the heat that reaction gives off on splitting water. Here is the mechanism — and what the paper does not tell you.
ExplainerAugust 27, 2026
How collapsing bubbles and cold plasma break a carbon–fluorine bond
Two non-thermal routes to destroying PFAS were reported this week. Both work by concentrating the target at a bubble surface, and both prove it the only honest way — by measuring the fluoride that comes off.
ExplainerAugust 26, 2026
When a landfill "catches fire" without a flame
An Elevated Temperature Landfill is not a fire. It is a landfill where heat outruns the gas system, the methane-making microbes die, and chemistry takes over — without needing oxygen, which is exactly why it is so hard to stop.
ExplainerAugust 25, 2026
AI-designed zinc sponges for methane — and the gap before a landfill
A Chicago-led team closed the loop from data mining to synthesised, tested metal-organic frameworks for methane capture. Two new materials work at ambient conditions in a lab. Landfill gas is wet, dirty and nothing like a lab.
TeardownAugust 22, 2026
"Zero-emission" trash trucks arrive in Coconut Creek — what the claim leaves out
Six electric collection vehicles, billed as Florida's first fully electric residential fleet. The tailpipe number is real. It is also the only number the announcement gives you.
ExplainerAugust 20, 2026
Can aircraft waste become an aerogel?
Carbon-fibre epoxy composites are among the hardest materials to recycle, because the resin will not melt back. A team at NUS skips fibre recovery entirely and turns the whole waste stream — fibre and epoxy together — into a freeze-dried porous block.
Myth-BustingAugust 17, 2026
Paper cannot be recycled forever
Paper is one of recycling's genuine success stories — 68.2% recovery, the largest modelled share of MSW greenhouse-gas reduction. It is also finite at the fibre level. The loop is a cascade, not a circle.
TeardownAugust 14, 2026
75% recycled does not equal 75% circular
SABIC has launched a carbon-fibre-reinforced polycarbonate with more than 75% post-consumer recycled content, made from water bottles, CDs, golf shafts and turbine blades. The materials engineering is real. The circularity claim is doing more work than the data supports.
TeardownAugust 13, 2026
Divert's 2.5-million-pound food-to-energy claim: circular loop or scoped case study?
Divert and US Cold Storage say 2.5 million pounds of unsold food became renewable natural gas and fertiliser in 15 months. The operating facts are solid. The carbon accounting behind them is not published.
ExplainerAugust 12, 2026
Can a wetland be a wastewater treatment plant? The Fe-Mn biochar upgrade
A planted gravel bed is a reactor, not a garden. A new study swaps the gravel for iron-manganese modified rice-husk biochar - and reports strong nitrogen and phosphorus removal on wastewater too carbon-poor for conventional denitrification.
ExplainerAugust 11, 2026
The sewage lagoon that still leaks methane
A lagoon treatment train can strip pollution out of sewage and still push methane into the air. A paper published on 10 August measured one facility at roughly 2.0-2.3 times its reported estimate. Here is where the gas escapes.
TeardownAugust 6, 2026
"Two Indonesian waste-to-energy projects secured" - award, milestone, or conditional headline?
SUS ENVIRONMENT says it was selected as preferred partner for two Indonesian WtE projects. The announcement contains no capacity, financing, schedule or emissions data - and a Conditional LOA is not a project.
ExplainerAugust 6, 2026
Why landfill methane spikes when the weather turns
A two-and-a-half-year monitoring run at a New Jersey landfill estimated roughly five times the methane previously reported. The mechanism is seasonal, and it is not exotic.
TeardownAugust 5, 2026
Casablanca's $1.5B waste-to-energy bet: circular solution or combustion lock-in?
A 33.5-year exclusive treatment concession, three combustion lines and roughly 1 TWh a year. The contracts are signed. The financing, the emissions baseline and the recycling question are not.
ExplainerAugust 1, 2026
Electric Pulses, Bacteria, Biogas: A Three-Stage Loop for Biopharma Wastewater
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.
Myth-BustingAugust 1, 2026
Is Turning Plastic Into Hydrogen Actually Recycling?
The chemistry is real. The label is doing a lot of work. If the outputs are hydrogen gas and mineral carbonate, no plastic has been recycled — something else has happened.
ExplainerAugust 1, 2026
How Alkaline Thermal Treatment Pulls Hydrogen Out of Unsorted Plastic
A new PNAS study converts mixed PET, PE and PP into >90% pure hydrogen in one reactor — no polymer sorting, and most of the carbon never reaches the gas phase.