Some of the most exciting designs emerging from the world of sustainable fashion are those utilizing uncommon materials. There are gowns sculpted with grass roots, sequins made from algae, and electrical wires woven into lace. Now, researchers and designers at Aalto University can add another unusual substance to that list: the remains of a 300-year-old wooden shipwreck.
In 2019, a hotel in the Finnish city of Oulu undertook renovations that uncovered a 17th-century vessel buried beneath a parking lot. Called the Hahtiperä wreck, the finding was the oldest of its kind in this region, prompting conservators to raise the seven-by-20-meter ship for preservation. A few fragments remained, though, and researchers from Aalto’s Bioinnovation Center seized the opportunity to save these bits from the trash.
After removing the outer layers, designers shredded and dissolved the wood into pulp. They then utilized their trademarked Ioncell process—developed in collaboration with Helsinki University—which recycles materials like paper, straw, and other textile waste into silky fibers.
Lecturer Anna-Mari Leppisaari was responsible for machine-knitting the undyed yarn into a pair of seamless dresses, one of which is on display at Oulu Art Museum for an exhibition about the future of fashion. A sleek A-line shape, the garment’s marbled pattern mimics that of wood grain. It weights less than a pound.
“Of course, a shipwreck is an exceptional case, but it’s also a story that makes people pause and appreciate materials in a new way,” lead designer Pirjo Kääriäinen says. “If something this beautiful can be made from centuries-old wood, why do we keep throwing away materials that could still be circulated and reused?”
The second dress will be on view in September for the university’s Designs for a Cooler Planet exhibition. (via The History Blog)
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Pull the sheets back from the numbers and the American mattress starts to look less like a product and more like a disposal problem. The United States throws out an estimated 18.2 million mattresses a year — roughly 50,000 every day — and only about 19% of them are recycled. The rest, more than four out of five beds, are landfilled or incinerated.
A mattress is one of the largest, bulkiest, and most expensive things you own, and almost none of it has to be wasted. Recyclers can recover 80 to 95% of a mattress — steel, foam, fiber, and wood that become new products. Yet the default path for most beds is a hole in the ground, and that default costs the typical household twice: once to buy the bed, and again to get rid of it. Most mattresses are built to last seven to ten years, so a single household will buy and discard several over a lifetime. The bed itself is the obvious expense: a new queen mattress averages around $1,500, and even budget models start near $400.
The hidden cost shows up at the curb. Getting rid of an old mattress averages about $100 and runs from $40 to $200 or more depending on how you do it. Junk-hauling services typically charge $80 to $250. Municipal bulk pickup is often free but can mean a two- to eight-week wait, and many landfills tack on a $20 to $40 bulky-item fee. For a household replacing a bed every several years, disposal alone quietly adds up.
Mattresses are built to resist compression, which makes them miserable landfill tenants. Each one can take up as much as 23 cubic feet of space even after compacting, and their steel springs tangle and damage the heavy equipment that operators use to manage the waste. Multiply that by tens of thousands a day and mattresses become a stubborn drain on landfill capacity.
The waste is also material that holds real value. A typical mattress contains roughly 25 pounds of steel and 9 pounds of cotton, plus foam and wood. Across its programs, the Mattress Recycling Council reports keeping more than 555 million pounds of steel, foam, fiber, and wood out of landfills by recycling over 14 million mattresses. Buried beds throw all of that away.
Where you live largely decides whether recycling is even an option. Four states — California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Oregon, whose program began January 1, 2025 — run extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs. A small fee on every new mattress funds free drop-off through the industry’s Bye Bye Mattress program. The access is meaningful: in 2024, 98.4% of California residents lived within 15 miles of a collection site.
Once a mattress is dismantled, up to 75% of its materials become new products. The foam and fiber go into carpet padding, springs are melted down as scrap steel, and box-spring wood is chipped into mulch or biomass fuel. Outside the four EPR states, though, recycling depends on a patchwork of private facilities, and most households still pay to haul a bed away.
The post 18.2 Million Mattresses Disposed a Year, and Most of Them Get Buried appeared first on Earth911.
The average American household uses about 150 pounds of glass containers each year, but more than two-thirds of that glass never gets recycled into new bottles. This isn’t because people aren’t trying. Glass is now the only common packaging material that costs recycling facilities more to process than they make from selling it, and the U.S. recycling system has been adapting to this problem for the past twenty years.
According to the EPA, the U.S. has recycled about 31 percent of its glass containers for the past ten years. In contrast, the European Union collected 80.8 percent of its glass containers in 2023. This gap isn’t because of how people act, but because of differences in infrastructure, policies, and the fact that glass is heavy, breakable, and not very profitable. As a result, glass no longer fits well in the single-stream recycling system most Americans use.
Cullet, which is the industry term for crushed and sorted recycled glass, is a permanent material. It can be melted and reused over and over without losing quality. Adding 10 percent more cullet to a furnace reduces energy use by 2.5 to 3 percent and lowers CO₂ emissions by about 5 percent. If a furnace uses only cullet, it produces about 58 percent fewer emissions than making glass from raw materials like sand, soda ash, and limestone.
These numbers show that glass should be valuable to bottle makers. However, manufacturers want cullet that is color-sorted, clean, and ready for the furnace, which is rarely what comes out of single-stream recycling facilities.
A 2017 analysis by the Closed Loop Foundation found that single-stream glass costs U.S. recycling facilities $150 million each year in equipment damage, transportation, and disposal. On average, a facility loses about $35 for every ton of glass it handles. For example, a transfer station in Washington, D.C. spends about tens of thousands of dollars a year replacing screen baskets damaged by glass shards. When trucks unload, glass shards also get stuck in paper and cardboard, making those materials less valuable.
This is known as the negative-value problem. The glass itself isn’t worthless, because high-quality cullet can be sold. But the way glass is collected usually produces a dirty, color-mixed load, so it often ends up being used as road base, landfill cover when ground into sand-like consistency and laid over the day’s waste, or just thrown away.
The current U.S. glass recycling shortfall is largely the story of two infrastructure decisions made decades apart.
The first decision was moving to single-stream collection in the 1990s and 2000s. This change increased overall recycling rates but mixed glass with other materials. As a result, glass often arrived at recycling facilities already broken, contaminating other recyclables and damaging equipment designed for paper and plastic.
The second decision was to close glass-only drop-off programs as city budgets tightened. Without dedicated collection routes, like the ones used in Italy, Belgium, and Germany to recycle 90 percent of glass containers, American glass no longer had a clean way to be collected.
The exception is the 10 states with container deposit laws. These states, known for their bottle bills, recycle about 70 percent of beverage containers, which is more than twice the national average of 33 percent. Oregon’s deposit system achieved an 87 percent redemption rate in 2024, the highest in the country. Glass returned through deposit programs is typically clean, sorted, and unbroken — exactly what manufacturers want.
Consumers end up paying for glass twice. First, the cost of the bottle is included in the price of products like wine, beer, sauce, or seltzer. Second, people pay municipal recycling fees through property taxes, garbage bills, or both. These fees cover the average $ 62-per-ton landfill tipping fee in 2024, plus the extra cost of glass contamination that affects other recyclables.
The exact dollar figure varies wildly by region. New York City’s Department of Sanitation has estimated curbside recycling collection at $686 per ton, a number that includes labor, fuel, and equipment that reaches beyond what households see on their utility bills, but shows up in tax rates.
In states with bottle bills, the economics are different for households. A 5- or 10-cent deposit can be fully recovered, and if the home doesn’t recycle, others can generate income picking it up.
Glass that would have cost the city money instead becomes a small refund for the household and a clean material for manufacturers. This system covers the cost directly through fees for using glass, rather than spreading it across all taxpayers.
Glass furnaces use a lot of energy compared to other packaging processes. Making 1 ton of container glass produces between 0.5 and 1.6 tons of CO₂, depending on the furnace’s efficiency and the amount of cullet used. Each ton of cullet used instead of raw materials saves about 0.67 tons of CO₂ and 1.2 tons of mined sand, soda ash, and limestone. soda ash, and limestone.
If you apply these numbers to the 6 million tons of glass containers that were landfilled in the U.S. in 2018—the most recent year for which the EPA provides data—the country misses out on about 4 million tons of avoided CO₂ emissions each year, plus more than 7 million tons of raw materials that could have been saved. This is a climate cost that the recycling rate alone cannot capture.
The Glass Packaging Institute and Boston Consulting Group have created a plan to raise the U.S. glass recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. It focuses on expanding deposit programs, building dedicated glass processing facilities, and moving away from single-stream collection where possible. Reaching this goal would nearly double the current recycling rate without requiring people to change what they drink or how often they recycle.
Seven states, including California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, have passed extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging. These laws shift the cost of recycling from cities to the companies that sell the bottles. Oregon started enforcing its program in July 2025, and Colorado, Minnesota, and Maryland will phase in their programs by 2028.
EPR is the policy most likely to change the economics of glass recycling in the next decade. When producers pay recycling costs directly, they have to deal with contamination from single-stream recycling, not the recycling facility. This makes dedicated glass collection much more appealing. The European experience shows that this approach works, but it has not yet been tried on a large scale in the U.S.
The post Glass: Recycling’s Negative-Value Problem appeared first on Earth911.
Increase in road deaths amid rise of e-bikes prompts Houten to test willingness of freedom-loving cyclists to slow down
As road deaths increase and cycle lanes overflow with e-bikes, the Netherlands is considering a cycling speed limit of 12mph (20km/h).
The government has started a two-week trial in Houten, near Utrecht, to gauge whether freedom-loving Dutch cyclists are willing to slow down – and whether they have any idea how fast they are going in the first place.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Posed by model; GabrielPevide/Getty Images
© Photograph: Posed by model; GabrielPevide/Getty Images
© Photograph: Posed by model; GabrielPevide/Getty Images
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on January 12, 2026.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Turning Waste Into New Products And Packaging With Overlay Capital’s Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh appeared first on Earth911.
Turn back the clock to our first conversation with David Katz, founder of Plastic Bank. He shares his vision for a regenerative society built on grassroots recycling programs that help low-income regions build resilient communities. The Vancover, B.C., startup compensates more than 30,000 plastic recyclers in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Egypt. To date, Plastic Bank has stopped over 99 million pounds of plastic waste — the equivalent of more than 2 billion plastic bottles — from entering the world’s oceans, and the pace of its collections is accelerating. The people who collect plastic are paid for the material they deposit at more than 511 Plastic Bank branches. Katz’s team has partnered with more than 200 companies, including Procter & Gamble, HelloFresh, L’Oreal, and Coca-Cola, to create circular economies in plastic packaging.
Their next goal is to capture 10 billion bottles, which still represents only 1.7% of the 583 billion produced in 2021, according to Euromonitor. David explains that a shift in mindset from extractive ownership to regenerative stewardship can break the economic mold and bring prosperity in regions where so much valuable material currently is treated as waste. Plastic Bank uses a blockchain-based data collection and reporting system that helps collectors track their earnings and which provides transparency and traceability for the plastic captured. Plastic Bank works with plastic recyclers to convert the collected bottles into SocialPlastic, a raw material for making new products. They sell plastic #1, #2, and #4 to industry to recover their costs. You can learn more about Plastic Bank at plasticbank.com.
Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on March 23, 2022.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Plastic Bank’s David Katz on Grassroots Recycling Solutions appeared first on Earth911.
Forty thousand miles of plastic waste wash through the global ocean every year, enough to wrap the Earth at the equator. But walk into the right store, and you can personally shorten that pipeline by a few feet, returning a pair of worn sneakers, a dead laptop, or a piece of furniture destined for the dumpster.
Some retailers have built genuine end-of-life infrastructure for the products they sell — not just a PR line, but real systems with documented results. The seven below have the numbers to back it up, updated for 2026.
Patagonia’s Worn Wear program remains one of the most comprehensive take-back systems in retail apparel. In 2025, customers made more than 137,000 trade-ins — almost 71,000 of them from return and warranty claims — and the online Shop Used feature launched in September 2024 has expanded the secondhand market significantly. Items deemed wearable are cleaned, repaired, and resold through Worn Wear; those beyond repair enter a recycling pipeline.
On the material innovation side, Patagonia partnered with Eastman in 2024 to process 8,000 pounds of pre- and post-consumer clothing waste through molecular recycling — breaking apparel down to chemical building blocks for reuse as new fiber. The brand has also moved aggressively on materials: by fall 2025, over 90 percent of Patagonia’s fabrics were recycled, organic, or traceable. Its 2025 Work in Progress Report disclosed that reducing hang tags by over 40 million pieces has avoided 170,000 pounds of packaging waste. The structural challenge — mechanically recycling blended fabrics — remains unsolved at industrial scale, and Patagonia acknowledges it openly.
Apple’s trade-in and recycling program sent 15.9 million devices to new owners through refurbishment schemes in 2024 alone. Devices that cannot be refurbished are processed by Daisy, Apple’s disassembly robot, which can now break down 36 models of iPhone into discrete components to recover aluminum, copper, rare earth elements, and other materials. A second robot, Dave, disassembles Taptic Engines to recover rare earth magnets, tungsten, and steel.
The material-recovery numbers are striking. In 2024, 24 percent of all materials shipped in Apple products came from recycled or renewable sources, up from 10 percent in 2019. Recycled aluminum accounted for 71 percent of the aluminum Apple purchased. The company avoided 6.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by using recycled and low-carbon materials in 2024, according to its 2025 Environmental Progress Report. Apple has also surpassed 99 percent on its 2025 goal to use 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets and 100 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries. Customers can drop devices off at any Apple Store or ship for free.
Best Buy has collected 2.7 billion pounds of electronics and appliances since launching its recycling program in 2009, making it the nation’s largest retail collector of e-waste. The program accepts most consumer electronics at more than 1,000 stores regardless of where items were purchased, collecting more than 400 pounds of product every minute stores are open.
The program has expanded: a mail-in recycling service now lets customers without easy store access ship old tech in purpose-built boxes. A home haul-away service launched for customers who cannot transport large items. Best Buy requires all recycling partners to comply with rigorous environmental management standards and holds them to regulatory compliance and responsible workforce practices. TVs and monitors carry a $25 fee; most other electronics — phones, laptops, tablets, cables — are accepted free.
Nike’s original Reuse-a-Shoe program launched in 1995 to recycle worn athletic footwear into Nike Grind material for surfaces and new products has evolved into the Recycling + Donation (RAD) service, now available globally.
The program accepts athletic footwear and apparel from any brand and inspects each item to determine donation or recycling eligibility. Wearable items go to nonprofit partners including Soles4Souls for redistribution to communities in need; worn-out footwear is ground down into Nike Grind, which goes into playground surfaces, running tracks, and new Nike products.
Part of Nike’s Move to Zero initiative, targeting zero carbon and zero waste across the supply chain, the Participating stores accept shoes of any brand — athletic footwear only; no cleats, boots, or sandals. Nike also runs Nike Refurbished, which cleans and resells gently worn or slightly imperfect footwear and apparel at select factory and community stores, extending product life before material recovery.
Staples pioneered national retail recycling in 2007 as the first U.S. retailer to offer a universal e-waste takeback program. Today the program accepts over 50 types of materials including computers, printers, phones, cables, batteries, crayons, and coffee machines from any brand. Since 2021, Staples has recycled 7,000 tons of e-waste and 19 million ink and toner cartridges, helping HP reach a milestone of 1 billion cartridges recycled.
Staples’ Easy Rewards program currently gives members 500 points (equivalent to $5 back) per month for tech recycling. Ink and toner cartridge recycling earns $2 per cartridge for members spending at least $30 on ink over the previous 180 days, up to a monthly limit. Staples uses certified recyclers whenever possible, and recycled toner material gets routed into road construction aggregate. The company accepts electronics in-store at customer service desks at all U.S. Staples locations.
Furniture is the United States’ largest category of discarded household goods, with Americans throwing away approximately 12 million tons of it each year. IKEA’s Buyback & Resell program addresses the problem at the point of sale: customers fill out an online form, receive a value estimate, and bring gently used IKEA furniture to any participating store in exchange for store credit. Items that pass inspection enter the As-Is section for resale; those that cannot be resold are recycled under IKEA’s zero-waste-to-landfill policy.
The U.S. program now runs in 33 stores and, as of 2025, accepts more than 5,000 product types, including tables, chairs, storage units, lamps, and kids’ furniture among many. Globally, IKEA’s circular initiatives contributed to a 24.3 percent reduction in the company’s climate footprint while revenue grew 30.9 percent. Sofas, mattresses, and modified products are not accepted. IKEA Family members currently receive 50 percent more in store credit through May 2026.
REI’s Re/Supply program sold nearly 1.4 million items of used outdoor gear in 2024, double the volume from 2019. The program accepts trade-ins of gently used REI-brand and name-brand gear including backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, and apparel. Members receive store credit; items are inspected, cleaned, and resold at a discount. Selling a used item through Re/Supply emits at least 50 percent less carbon than selling a new equivalent, even accounting for shipping, cleaning, and remerchandising.
REI also became the first major U.S. retailer to reach 90 percent operational waste diversion, achieving zero-waste certification in 2024 that audited and independently verified — ahead of Walmart and Target. Three of its distribution centers hold TRUE Zero Waste certification. In 2024, about 52 percent of the polyester and 45 percent of the nylon in REI Co-op products came from recycled sources. REI also charges brand partners a recycling fee to discourage individual plastic poly bags, and the majority of brands it carries have eliminated them as standard practice.
Editor’s Note: Originally written by Sarah Lozanova on April 10, 2017, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.
The post 7 Retailers With Impressive Recycling Programs appeared first on Earth911.
Americans threw away 12.1 million tons of furniture in 2018, the most recent year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measured the category. About 9.7 million tons went straight to a landfill. Less than half of one percent was recycled.
The jobs that support the fastest, cheapest way to keep that sofa or dresser out of the dump — paying someone to fix it — have been disappearing for a generation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts roughly 22,500 upholsterers still working in the United States and projects the occupation will shrink more through 2034. Refinishers, frame menders, and the small repair shops they anchored are vanishing alongside them.
Furniture’s waste problem and the collapse of the repair trades are the same story told from two ends.
The EPA’s 2018 Advancing Sustainable Materials Management report tracked the fate of furniture and furnishings, including sofas, tables, chairs, dressers, and mattresses, at end of life. In 1960, Americans discarded 2.2 million tons of these items per year. By 2018, the figure had grown 5.5 times, to 12.1 million tons, even as recycling rates for paper, metals, and yard trimmings climbed.
The results are discouraging:
Paper and paperboard, by contrast, are recycled roughly 68% of the time, and about 50% of aluminum cans are turned into new packaging. Furniture barely registers. The category was not designed for recovery: composite wood, polyurethane foam, polyester batting, springs, staples, and flame-retardant fabrics arrive at end of life as a tangled bundle that no current system can economically separate.
A 2024 Level Frames analysis of EPA waste data and consumer survey responses found Americans spend roughly $2,750 a year combined on furniture, decor, and trend-driven replacement, with more than a third of those purchases prompted by social media.
The replacement cycle has accelerated. The RE Store, a Bellingham, Washington, reuse retailer that has tracked the category for years, reports that flat-pack pieces from major retailers are typically engineered to last about five years, and design trends now turn over every 10 months or so.
A $150 particleboard dresser tossed when it is three years old costs the household $50 per year of use, before delivery, assembly time, or hauling fees on the back end. Then, they have to pay to have it hauled away or to drop it at a landfill.
For most of the 20th century, furniture was assumed to be repairable. Upholsterers, cane weavers, frame menders, and refinishers anchored a network of independent shops in nearly every American city. That network has thinned to a trickle.
BLS data from 2023 counts 22,519 upholsterers nationwide, with employment in the industry projected to decline through 2034 even as the overall workforce grows. Furniture refinishers and woodworking craftspeople are following the same downward arc. The culprit is particleboard, which can be used to make a side table that costs less than the labor to repair a comparable solid-wood piece; consumer expectations shifted accordingly and people got used to tossing, not repairing, their furniture.
The result is a market failure. EPA’s 0.3% recycling figure reflects a recycling system that cannot disassemble furniture profitably. Curbside programs cannot accept bulky composite goods, like a couch or end table. Few municipalities run dedicated furniture diversion programs. And the repair sector, which once extended product life, has been priced out of business.
Two retailers shape the modern category. IKEA accounts for about 7.5% of the global furniture market and recorded roughly 915 million store visits in 2025. Wayfair generated $11.8 billion in revenue in 2024, much of it from drop-shipped flat-pack goods. The category they popularized — engineered wood, foam, and laminate furniture, sold cheaply and shipped flat — has reshaped consumer expectations and what ends up in the landfill.
Particleboard and medium-density fiberboard (MDF) bind wood chips with urea-formaldehyde resins. Oklahoma State University Extension reports these boards continue off-gassing formaldehyde for months to years after manufacture, adding to indoor air pollution alongside volatile organic compounds in polyurethane foam and finishes. The same chemistry that makes the boards cheap to produce makes them impossible to recycle: no mill will accept resin-saturated chips as feedstock.
Upstream impacts are substantial as well. The World Wildlife Fund estimates illegal logging accounts for 15% to 30% of globally traded wood, with furniture among the largest demand categories. A figure circulating in industry blogs suggests that furniture accounts for “12% of global greenhouse gas emissions” is not supported by primary IPCC or peer-reviewed sources and is omitted here; the more defensible claim is that the sector is a meaningful, though not dominant, contributor to forest loss and embodied carbon emissions.
Globally, the European Union generates about 10.78 million tons of furniture waste a year, roughly matching the U.S. figure. The UK alone discards 670,000 tons — about 22 million individual pieces — and recycles only 17% of it. In both, most discarded furniture is judged to be reusable or repairable at the point of disposal.
Even in environmentally progressive Europe, policy responses are uneven. France runs a mature furniture-specific Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program in which manufacturers fund repair, reuse, and recycling networks.
No U.S. state has followed the EPR path for general furniture. The closest equivalent is the Mattress Recycling Council, which operates in California, Connecticut, Oregon, and Rhode Island under producer-funded laws that recover about 80% of a mattress’s components. California’s mattress fee were increased to $18 per unit in April 2026.
Furniture is one of the few household waste categories where individual action significantly outperforms recycling infrastructure, because the most consequential step happens before purchase.
12.1 million tons of furniture waste need not be a fixed feature of American life. It is a downstream consequence of design decisions, retail incentives, and the slow disappearance of a trade. Each of those is reversible, but only if the household, the manufacturer, and the policymaker each carry their share.
The post Fast Furniture and the 12-Million-Ton Reckoning appeared first on Earth911.
Ours is a throw-away culture. That even applies to houses. When homes or buildings are demolished to make way for a road, condo development or another house or building, the materials and contents are usually sent to the landfill. As with other characteristics of our consumer-driven societies, it’s wrong.
Many components — wood, concrete, bricks, metal, plastic, vinyl — can be reused, repurposed or recycled. It’s not a new idea, but it hasn’t taken off the way it should. In many jurisdictions, people have been able to apply for salvage rights, allowing them to take useful items from a home or structure slated for demolition. And “deconstruction” companies have been around for a while, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
In some cases, entire houses are moved to another location and fixed up rather than being demolished. Vancouver circular construction think tank Light House estimates about 20 per cent of demolished homes here could have been moved and another 60 per cent could have been deconstructed, with materials reused or recycled.
Some municipalities are finally seeing the value in keeping materials out of landfills, implementing bylaw and regulation changes to encourage salvaging and recycling. It’s about time!
Vancouver has some rules around recycling materials from house demolitions, depending on the age and character of the home, and offers a “Construction and Demolition Waste Toolkit.”
As a Tyee article reports, population growth in Vancouver meant tearing down 7,100 single-family homes from 2012 to 2023 and about 2,700 every year in the larger Metro Vancouver region to make way for multiplex housing such as highrise towers. About one-third of Metro Vancouver’s landfill is from construction and demolition.
The problem isn’t just the waste of good materials. A 2025 Australian study notes that disposing of construction and demolition waste in landfills “has been widely recognized as a source of leachate, containing toxic contaminants, which pose significant environmental risks.”
And the building and construction sector accounts for about 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with close to one-third of that from the energy used to produce materials for a building.
According to the CBC, “Replacing one building with another generates an entire building’s worth of emissions, which means that, from a climate perspective, it’s better to extend the lifetime of those materials and reuse them than discard them.”
The Tyee article highlights a Vancouver company, Vema Deconstruction, that claims to have saved from 135,000 to 225,000 kilograms of construction materials since its founding in 2022. It’s not just buildings that can be recycled. The Patullo Bridge that connected New Westminster and Surrey across the Fraser River was recently replaced, and steel, asphalt and concrete from the old bridge will be recycled.
Diverting construction materials has many benefits. As the City of Vancouver notes, “Recycling and reusing building materials has cost-saving incentives, saves trees, conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and supports affordable housing.”
Reclaiming wood is especially beneficial. It means no trees have to be cut down, leaving them to sequester climate-altering carbon dioxide, and for the numerous other benefits trees, especially old-growth, provide. The retained or reused wood continues to store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — when wood decomposes, it emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And it can cost less than cutting, transporting and processing timber.
Of course, deconstructing a home takes longer and usually costs more than demolishing and carting it to the landfill. That’s why government incentives and regulations are often necessary, as well as more avenues to sell reclaimed materials.
As with just about everything in our consumer-based societies, though, the economic system itself creates the problem. The bottom line rarely underlines the most environmentally sustainable path. Using more products, doing things quickly and discarding and replacing products and materials all generate more profit than conserving, reducing, reusing and recycling.
We need to aim for a circular rather than a linear economy. This means considering the entire life cycle of the goods we produce — designing products to create zero or minimal waste and pollution, keeping products in use through better design, repair, reuse and recycling and safely returning materials to the natural environment while using renewable energy.
Homes and buildings are a good place to start. Deconstruction should be mandatory.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
The post Don’t throw that home away! appeared first on rabble.ca.
24. That is the average number of electronic devices sitting in a typical American home right now. Phones in drawers, tablets behind the TV, chargers without their devices, and devices without their chargers. Most of those products are headed for a landfill or a shipping container, not a recycler.
Electronics are the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet, and U.S. households are an outsize engine. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that global e-waste reached a record 62 million tons in 2022, which is up 82 percent since 2010, and is rising five times faster than electronics recycling capacity. Americans produce roughly 46 to 48 pounds of it per person per year. Most of those discarded devices contain materials worth real money and environmental harms worth understanding.
The 2022 e-waste pile contained an estimated $91 billion in recoverable metals, according to the United Nations, including roughly $19 billion in copper, $16 billion in iron, and $15 billion in gold. About $62 billion of that value was lost to landfills, incinerators, or unregulated dumping.
Translate that into household terms. The metals in a single discarded smartphone include small but meaningful quantities of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and cobalt. Multiply by the 151 million cell phones, 40 million computers, 20 million televisions, and 23 million small appliances Americans throw away each year, and the unrecovered value runs into the billions for U.S. households alone.
The materials don’t disappear; they just stop circulating. Mining companies extract more virgin gold and copper from the ground while millions of pounds of the same metals sit on shelves in junk rooms and lie fallow in landfills.
The average U.S. smartphone replacement cycle has stretched to 3.64 years in 2024, according to Assurant; that’s up from under 3 years a decade ago, yet the underlying hardware can typically last 5 to 7 years with software support. That gap between when consumers upgrade and when the device actually fails is where most e-waste is born.
Behind the phones, a longer parade of devices is generating serious volume. Wearables, smart speakers, e-cigarettes, lithium-powered toys, and cheap rechargeable accessories now show up in municipal waste streams in quantities that did not exist a decade ago. The WHO documented more than 1,000 hazardous substances associated with informal e-waste recycling, including lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, all of which can leach from devices that are crushed or burned rather than processed properly.
The picture here is genuinely confusing, and reporting that pretends otherwise is wrong. The most-cited EPA estimate of consumer electronics recycling puts the U.S. rate at 38.5 percent, but that figure dates from 2018. More recent independent estimates put the actual U.S. rate closer to 15 percent, with global formal recycling at 22.3 percent in 2022. The gap between the two numbers reflects the difference between what enters a recycling program and what actually gets recovered as usable material.
The remainder follows three main paths. Some heads to U.S. landfills, where heavy metals contribute to leachate problems. Some is incinerated, releasing dioxins from PVC and other plastics. And roughly 90 percent of exported e-waste is processed in low- and middle-income countries, where informal recyclers — often including children — strip devices by hand or by burning. A systematic review in PubMed Central links e-waste exposure in children to reduced lung function, altered thyroid function, ADHD, and lower cognitive scores. None of that shows up on the product box when you buy it.
Households absorb the cost from two directions at once. They pay for new devices that replace working products, and they leave material value on the table when they discard what they own.
A reasonable estimate, using the per-capita value of unrecovered e-waste metals from the UN report and U.S. generation rates, puts the recoverable value sitting in the average American household’s old electronics in the range of several hundred dollars over a few years. That is metal the household paid for, embedded in devices the household paid for, and the household will not recover unless the device reaches a refiner that can extract it.
The cost on the other side — replacement spending — is easier to size at the industry level than the household level. The Consumer Technology Association puts U.S. consumer technology retail revenue at roughly $505 billion in 2024, which works out to nearly $3,900 per household when spread across the 131 million U.S. households tracked by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Even allowing for wide variation across income tiers, much of that spending replaces devices that were repairable or still functional.
The most consequential policy shift on e-waste in the past two years has been the spread of right-to-repair legislation. As of mid-2025, eight states have passed right-to-repair laws covering consumer electronics: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Washington, and Massachusetts. Oregon’s law, which took effect January 1, 2025, became the first in the country to explicitly ban “parts pairing,” the practice of using software to disable replacement components installed by independent shops.
These laws do not immediately reduce e-waste, but they change the economics. When manufacturers must supply parts, tools, and documentation to independent repairers, the cost of fixing a phone or laptop drops. When repair is cheaper than replacement, more devices stay in service. The Repair Association tracks more than 40 active bills across at least 20 states in 2025.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for electronics covers 24 states, but there is substantial variation in how well-funded and enforced those programs are. A patchwork is still better than nothing, but the absence of a federal framework means a device thrown away in one state may be treated as toxic and a device thrown away in another may end up in a regular dumpster.
The interventions here are tiered, with very different impacts depending on where you can act.
At home:
In your community:
Individual household action on e-waste matters, but it is not where the leverage lives. Changing product designs and recycling policy, both of which are moving slowly in the right direction, is the path to a more sustainable electronics industry. Your household choices buy time and recover value while the larger system catches up.
The post Electronics: The Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in Your Home appeared first on Earth911.
In a converted 18th-century chapel on the grounds of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a strange form creeps through openings in the architecture. One can imagine its clipper- and knife-footed tendrils scurrying across the floor as it spills from an upper aperture and even slithers around part of the building’s exterior. Its otherworldly genesis is at the hands of Nicola Turner, known for her monumental, contorted textile installations that often surge from structures and public spaces.
Turner’s solo exhibition, Time’s Scythe, comprises forms made of recycled wool and horsehair, which she hand-stitches inside of mesh to create the bulging, knotted forms. “This is Turner’s first large-scale installation to use pale wool and creates a different energy to her dark sculptures, moving away from their more melancholic character,” the gallery says.
Time’s Scythe continues through September 27 in Wakefield. If you go, check out LR Vandy’s provocative exhibition, Rise, which also continues into September. See more on Turner’s Instagram, and for more twisting, creature-like forms, might also enjoy the work of Kate MccGwire.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Giant Wool Form by Nicola Turner Heaves and Skitters Through an 18th-Century Chapel appeared first on Colossal.
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