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