Tag: Waste

In Africa, group buying is making fresh produce more affordable. Meanwhile, a new startup in Germany is aiming to provide warm meals to those in financial need, while simultaneously reducing food waste in canteens. Students or those on a tight budget register on the app. After vetting, they can request food each day from a nearby canteen for a...

Wastewater from soybean production can provide fodder for fish. Meantime, a university research team from the US has been experimenting with wastewater from beer and potato production, as the sodium acetate it contains is a carbon compound offering a low-cost alternative to glucose. Like glucose, it can be a carbon source for the protein-rich microalgae Chlorella sorokiniana. The team...

Waste from wine production can be put to good use. But wine left in opened bottles is generally discarded after 3 days because of oxidation or loss of quality. That's $1.5 billion dollars of wine wasted each year in America alone. Enter a female founder and her startup's patented new solution. Her innovation comprises a silicon stopper lid and...

A robot can clean oceans by dropping harmful seaweed below the surface. Yet in Brasil, a research team has found a new use for sargassum, a rapidly-spread brown algae that stinks out beaches. The team mixed the seaweed with clay, using 20% sargassum in one batch and 40% in the other. These samples were compressed at temperatures of 800-1.000°C...

Robot boats are clearing Hong Kong’s waters, while intelligent bins monitor their own fill levels. For better recycling, a startup from Würzburg has created an analysis system used during waste sorting. It combines digital cameras and near-infrared sensors with artificial intelligence. Parsing images of the material flow, the AI detects both individual objects and additional properties such as weight,...

When combined, microorganisms and corn stover make a palm-oil alternative, while fermented sugarcane can be used to fry food. Japanese food, meanwhile, is often fried in batter: per restaurant, some 5kg of tempura dishes are left uneaten every day. The leftovers can catch fire if exposed to oxygen, and are thus mixed with water and refrigerated until discarded. But...

Sustainable background music makes most things easier. Even cleaning. And it could be better yet. A Belgian startup is using spent cooking oil and food waste to produce environmentally-friendly cleaning products. With the help of yeast organisms isolated from bumble bee honey, potato peel and vegetable scraps from the supermarket are fermented in a patented process. The resulting biosurfactants...

Beer can be brewed from industrial wastewater. Now a research team from Singapore is using the wastewater from soybean production to create sustainable feed for fish farming. Usually, feed is made from wild-caught fish (sometimes very wild-caught indeed!). The team cultivated a single-cell protein in a bioreactor over four months at 30°C using the protein-rich wastewater and the micro-organisms...