Three sailors and a scientist are getting ready to sail 11,000 miles across the Pacific…on a boat made entirely of recycled plastic bottles.
Sounds like the opening of a bad joke, but the 60-foot catamaran is currently being constructed from more than 12,000 plastic bottles on a San Francisco pier. Each of the bottles has been pressurized with dry ice powder, which sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and makes the bottles rigid enough to withstand the endless seas.
The vessel, dubbed The Plastiki, will be launched in April and is expected to take more than 100 days to reach Sydney, stopping in Hawaii, Tuvalu, and Fiji along the way. The permanent crew members will be able to sleep in the watertight cabin made from recycled PET, and the passengers will rotate in throughout the voyage.
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As if there isn’t enough economic incentive to dispense with credit cards these days, a new card issued by Discover Financial Services [ed. note: no relation to DISCOVER, though they own Discover.com] now adds an environmental perk as well.
A new biodegradable credit card, released in December, will break down when exposed to microorganisms into carbon dioxide, water, and a mild salt. The New York Times reports that the card is made of biodegradable polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, and bears the same durability as a traditional plastic credit card. Yet it will decompose in a microorganism-filled environment, which the company says can be just about anywhere, including water, soil, a compost heap, or even a landfill, because the microbes operate anaerobically.
With 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the U.S. as of 2006, the ability to decompose will surely ease the burden on landfills, which have their fair share of other plastic to deal with. The trick behind the card is a secret that BIOPVC, the company that created it, will not give up, but they say no toxic PVC remains once the microbes break down the plastic. A Columbia University professor took a stab at how the process works, and said it can be activated by coating PVC with a material that attracts fungi, or alternatively one that attracts rather than repels water, which contains microbes that will then break down the PVC. (more…)
Used rubber tires and discarded glass have been recycled into asphalt for some time. Now, add old electronics to the creative, eco-friendly ingredient mix for the production of new road materials.
Researchers in China have developed a process to recycle electronic hardware into a material that makes “high-performance paving material that is cheaper, longer lasting, and more environmentally friendly than conventional asphalt.”
Where most people see a global environmental crisis, the research team in China saw opportunity. Electronics are discarded by the millions of tons every year, and they contain toxic metals that make disposal difficult, hazardous, and controversial. The researchers report in a new study, however, that electronic circuit boards also contain glass fibers and plastic resins that would strengthen asphalt paving.
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This holiday season, Santa’s toy bag will again overflow with plastics. From Legos to Barbies to the Nintendo Wii, most toys today are made from non-degradable and non-renewable plastics derived from fossil fuels. Now a company is developing a bio-plastic that’s made from trees. Could ARBOFORM, or liquid wood, cure us of our plastic addiction?
Liquid wood is made mostly of lignin, one of the three major components of wood, the other two being cellulose and hemicellulose. Lignin is discarded during the paper-making process. A few years ago, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany took the lignin and combined it with natural fibers like natural fibers made of wood, hemp, and flax and natural additives such as wax to produce plastic granules. The resulting material was tough, melt-able, and mold-able, and has already been used to make car parts, hunting rifles, and golf tees. But there was one major problem: It stunk from the sulfurous substances that are used to extract lignin from wood and make it non-water-soluble.
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Feathers aren’t just for dusters anymore. The latest in green architecture may come from the chicken coop. Filipino scientist Menandro Acda has been developing a new low-cost building material made of cement and chicken feathers.
There’s no shortage of free feathers to use: Six percent of a chicken’s weight is feathers, and the Philippine poultry industry produces 40 million chickens per year. The disposal of feather waste is a huge problem. The keratin protein that makes feathers sturdy (it’s also found in hair and butterfly wings) takes a long time to degrade in landfills. Burning the stuff releases greenhouse gases. So why not use all that fluff to build houses?
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