Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
New York's mandatory food-scrap programme nearly doubled collection in FY2026. It still captures 8% of available organics, and a second round of ticketing barely moved participation.
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 PBAT and PLA blend with TUV OK Compost Home certification. The disintegration is tested. The barrier performance and the microplastic question are not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Energy recovery has a legitimate place in a waste system. It sits below prevention, reuse, recycling and composting - and roughly a tenth of what goes in still comes out as ash bound for landfill.
A compostable label describes how a product behaves under specified industrial conditions. It is not a promise that your compost heap, or your recycling bin, can handle it.
Six nines of disinfection, 90% organics removal, reusable water and biogas — announced without an energy balance, a cost figure, or a recovery yield. A teardown of what the numbers do and do not say.
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.