Topic

Emissions

Methane, carbon accounting and the measurement behind the numbers.

36 posts

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.

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.