Collaborate Disseminate
With awareness of the damaging effects of plastic pollution growing all the time, the search is very much on for greener alternatives. Japan’s NEC Corp has today made commercially available a material it hopes can be a part of the solution, introducing… Continue reading NEC mass produces plant-based bioplastic that breaks down in four years
We’ve been hearing more and more about eco-friendly biodegradable plastics, made from cellulose nanofibers. Although those fibers are typically harvested from wood waste, new research shows that they could also be obtained from mega-plentiful used coff… Continue reading Another possible use for coffee grounds: Biodegradable plastic
Whether it’s entangling marine animals, clogging their guts when they eat it, or forming giant floating “garbage patches,” oceanic plastic waste is a huge problem. There may be new hope however, in the form of what is claimed to be a better type of mar… Continue reading Plant-based plastic biodegrades in the ocean
Skin-worn flexible electronics show great promise, in applications ranging from health monitoring to gesture control. The devices could soon also be more eco-friendly, as scientists have recently developed a method of making them from fish scales.Conti… Continue reading Fish scales may find use in sustainable electronic skin
If you’ve ever taken a coast-to-coast car trip across the United States, the one thing that’s sure to impress you is the mind-bogglingly immense amount of corn that we grow here. If you take the northern route — I’ve done it seven times, so I know it by heart — you’ll see almost nothing but corn from Ohio to Montana. The size of the fields is simply staggering, and you’re left wondering, “Do we really eat all this corn?”
The simple answer is no, we don’t. We grow way more corn than we can eat or, once turned into alcohol, …read more
Popcorn! Light and fluffy, it is a fantastically flexible snack. We can have them plain, create a savory snack with some salt and butter, or cover with caramel if you have a sweet tooth. Now Cornell University showed us one more way to enjoy popcorn: use their popping action as the mechanical force in a robot actuator.
It may be unorthodox at first glance, but it makes a lot of sense. We pop corn by heating its water until it turns into steam triggering a rapid expansion of volume. It is not terribly different from our engines burning an air-fuel …read more
Continue reading Hold the Salt and Butter, This Popcorn Is For a Robot
The amount of stuff we humans throw away is too damn high, and a bunch of it harms the ecosystem. But what are you gonna do? [Sam Smith] thinks we can do better than shoving most of it in a landfill and waiting for it to break down. That’s why he’s building The Metabolizer. It’s a series of systems designed to turn household trash (including plastic!) into useful things like fuel, building materials, and 3D prints.
The idea is to mimic the metabolism of a living organism and design something that can break down garbage into both useful stuff and …read more
What do you get when you combine oven-baked mussels and sugar beets in a kitchen blender? No, it isn’t some new smoothie cleanse or fad diet. It’s an experimental new recyclable 3D printing material developed by [Joost Vette], an Industrial Design Engineering student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. While some of the limitations of the material mean it’s fairly unlikely you’ll be passing over PLA for ground-up shellfish anytime soon, it does have a few compelling features worth looking into.
For one thing, it’s completely biodegradable. PLA is technically biodegradable as it’s usually made primarily of cornstarch, …read more