Trash Collecting Water Wheel

baltimore inner harbor water wheel

Picture: Baltimore City

The Inner Harbor Water Wheel collects trash and debris at the outfall of the Jones Falls River, intercepting it before it enters Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Since it began operating, in May 2014, the water wheel has removed over 250 tons of trash from Baltimore’s waterways.

The machine funnels debris using two long booms and lifts it onto a wide conveyor belt. The refuse is then deposited in a dumpster on a separate platform. The wheel powers a conveyor, which lifts the trash from the river. When the current isn’t going quickly enough, the solar-powered pumps below the wheel push up water and get it spinning again.

The water wheel is part of the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative, which aims to restore Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, making it swimmable by 2020. A second wheel is being crowdfunded.

See & read more:  1 / 2 / 3 / 4. Thanks to Tim Joye.

Related: Boat Mills

Mobile Foundries for Aluminum Can Recycling

mobile foundry for aluminum recycling

“In São Paulo, the vast majority of recycling is done by individuals called catadores. They collect discarded drink cans in their carts to recycle for money to help support themselves. London-based Studio Swine took to the streets to create a project that would help catadores get much more money for their work.

The duo behind Studio Swine made an improvised mobile foundry to smelt the aluminum from the cans. They then pressed locally-found objects into sand found at a nearby construction site to make molds. After pouring the liquid aluminum into the molds, the team had created interestingly-shaped stool seats. Each stool requires around 60 cans to produce. This may sound like a lot, but a catadore can collect thousands of cans in one workday.”

See & read more: Mobile foundry gives recyclers a creative income stream.

A Washing Machine for Life

washing machine for life 2L’Increvable (which means indestructable in French) is the concept of a washing machine whose lifespan is fifty years. Gone are the days when your washing machine had an abrupt end of life after 5 years of use because of a single bearing.

With L’Increvable you change each component when needed. You don’t have to be a handy(wo)man: the Increvable website guides you through each component maintenance thanks to well-documented tutorials and each new component is delivered with proper tools.

You buy the washing machine in flat-pack form and then you assemble it yourself : it gives you the opportunity to get to know the machine. The traditional 30 kg (60 lbs) of cement ballast are replaced by a water tank. The latter is automatically filled during the first use of the machine. This means that the machine can be made lighter again when it needs to be moved.

By removing all highly technical and hardly replaceable parts from the structure and built with such specifications from the ground up, the Increvable is destined to be easily manipulable by the mere user. The missing technologic parts (i.e. touchable screen) do change the User Experience in a very fundamental way, giving maybe to some of us a certain old school feel to the tech but adds several dozens of years before obsolescence as a result.”

See & read more: 1 / 2 / 3. Thanks to Christopher Santerre.

A World Made of Rotor Blades

public seating rotor blades close

Almost a quarter of a million windmills worldwide will need to be replaced by 2030. The rotor blades are made of valuable composite materials that are difficult to recover at the end of their energy generating life. New generation rotor blades made of glass or carbon fibre composite material have average lifespans of between 10 and 25 years. Recycling of glass fibre composite is possible though complex. Recycling of the more highly valued carbon fibre composite is currently impossible. In many EU countries landfill of carbon composites is now prohibited. Thus, many rotor blades at the end of their wind turbine life are currently shredded and incinerated. At current growth rates, by 2034, there will be about 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually, worldwide.

The Dutch firm Superuse Studios has found a solution to the growing mountains of waste generated by the wind industry: making use of end-of-life rotor blades in design and architecture. The realised projects demonstrate the technical applications and potential for blade made designs and architecture. In their second life as design and architectural elements, rotor blades could be used for a further 50-100 years, or more. Blade made designs are durable, iconic, compete economically, and reduce the ecological footprint of projects in which they are used. [Read more…]

Animals as the Answer to Recycling Food waste

Mountains of food scraps end up in landfills every day. While northern countries glorify attempts to facilitate this trash-to-treasure process using state-of-the-art technologies, Bobbili, a town in Northeast India, adopts a tech-free solution – a park using animals for solid waste management.

animals recycling food waste

Livestock at waste management park in Bobbili, India

[Read more…]

Furoshiki: Zero-Waste Shopping in Japan

In a time when cloth-making was one of the most advanced technologies, a piece of square cloth was all that a man needed to carry goods around. Japanese call it ‘Furoshiki’, a square cloth that with different wrapping techniques can basically transport anything. With its name meaning ‘bath spread’, Furoshiki is a traditional kind of wrapping cloth made of natural materials like silk and cotton. It is believed to date back to the 8th century. What was at first used to wrap up noblemen’s clothes in bathhouses gradually transported goods and gifts.

Furoshiki zero waste shopping in japan

Click to enlarge. More pictures here.

Modern bags might have outshone Furoshiki, but recent years have seen its comeback as a green alternative to shopping bags, thanks to the ‘Mottainai Furoshiki’ initiative by Yuriko Koike, Japan’s Minister of the Environment, in 2006. “It’s a shame for something to go to waste without having made use of its potential in full,” said Koike. Like what beauty label LUSH has followed to produce, the modern Furoshiki Koike upheld was made of recycled PET bottles that, as the Minister put it, “can wrap almost anything in it regardless of size or shape with a little ingenuity by simply folding it in a right way.”

The above graph demonstrating different wrapping techniques went viral on the internet. A wave of shops emerged to sell fancy furoshiki. The Minister’s statement holds some truism because a furoshiki does wrap up almost anything of all shapes and fragility – from vegetables to bottles, from wine glasses to eggs, from a baby to a dog. Besides its diversity, Furoshiki is a great alternative to adopt also because of its portability, leaving almost no room for excuses like ‘I forgot to bring my own bag’. Most of the time very decorative because Japanese treat it as an artistic craft, a furoshiki makes a great scarf, headband or pocket square.

ren wanLight and small, it comfortably fits in your pocket or day bag, whilst some furoshiki clothes are big enough to a bag whose form you can change every other day. A personal experiment proves that it helps encourage shoppers to opt for less- or un-packaged options. To avoid unnecessary packaging I visit local grocery stores for unpackaged tomatoes and to the plastic bag addicts’ surprise, it is very easy and light to transport. Just think about how one piece of cloth has the potential to replace all shopping bags. Does it not make it one of the smartest solution to shopping bags and excessive packaging?

This is a guest post by Ren Wan, a writer and sustainability advocate who is based in Hong Kong. She runs JupYeah, an online swapping platform, is a managing editor for WestEast Magazine, and blogs at Loccomama.