Tag: Recycling of Waste Materials

Let’s Call Our Present Moment on Earth What It Is: Obscene

It is springtime, and I want to turn to thoughts of love. In my case, love of this world, love of nature, love of our life in and as part of it. How I wish we all still loved that way. New York City’s winter leaf cover has been blown away and stuffed into large, […]

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California Tried to Ban Plastic Grocery Bags. It Didn’t Work.

Almost a decade ago, California became the first state in the United States to ban single-use plastic bags in an effort to tackle an intractable plastic waste problem. Then came the reusable, heavy-duty plastic bags, offered to shoppers for ten cents. Designed to withstand dozens of uses, and technically recyclable, many retailers treated them as […]

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Rare Earth Metals May Be Lurking in Your Junk Drawer

A vast and largely overlooked source of rare earth metals, materials critical for clean energy, could be in our homes, sitting in the back of our cabinets and junk drawers. A new study from researchers in China and the Netherlands estimates that reusing or recycling rare earth metals from old cellphones, hard drives, electric motors […]

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The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.

When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms. “Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling […]

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The Complicated Truth About Recycling

One of the most fundamental problems with recycling is that we don’t really know how much of it actually happens because of an opaque global system that too often relies on counting the material that arrives at the front door of the facility rather than what comes out. What we do know is that with […]

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So Thieves Nabbed Your Catalytic Converter. Here’s Where It Ended Up.

One morning in September, a truck disgorged its load of pulverized rock with a resounding bang inside Stillwater Mining’s metallurgical plant north of Yellowstone National Park. The mined ore contains platinum, palladium and rhodium, three of the earth’s rarest, most expensive metals — and vital components in the millions of catalytic converters that reduce polluting […]

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So Thieves Nabbed Your Catalytic Converter. Here’s Where It Ended Up.

One morning in September, a truck disgorged its load of pulverized rock with a resounding bang inside Stillwater Mining’s metallurgical plant north of Yellowstone National Park. The mined ore contains platinum, palladium and rhodium, three of the earth’s rarest, most expensive metals — and vital components in the millions of catalytic converters that reduce polluting […]

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