World Wide Waste Season 1 Marathon

in a world filled with garbage power plants run on rotten vegetables plastic is made from avocado pits computer parts are a gold mine these are the big ideas on how to tackle the two billion tons of trash people produce every year hey this is worldwide waste people throw out 100 000 chopsticks every day here in vancouver but now this local company is upcycling them into shelves cutting boards and furniture can it help reduce the massive amount of single-use items in restaurants around the world we visited chop values headquarters in canada to find out chop value drivers pick up used chopsticks from over 300 restaurants around vancouver a couple times a week typically about 100 kilograms a day up to 150 pre-covered it was more closer to like 300 kilograms a day the restaurants part with them for free after they got in i believe all 5000 pairs being recycled and reused so it's a great thing [Music] the real work begins at chop value hq the founder felix bach calls this place a micro factory just like a micro brewery curious visitors can come in and see how small batches of tiles get made and this is how the process looks like from raw material to end product first they sort the chopsticks on the custom-built shaker table these neat stacks are easier to work with then they dip the sticks into a water-based resin that provides a protective coating before they roast in a massive oven for five hours the 200 degree heat kills all the germs smells like a bakery they need to get separated again so they can be spread out evenly for the next step you can take your frustration out on the day inside here they're weighed precisely this batch will make chop values thinnest tile so about 560 grams then comes the big squeeze a hydraulic machine also invented by box team compresses the chopsticks with hundreds of pounds of pressure the heart of the process that densifies like a cake a mat of chopsticks into a new uniform engineered material which is the base modular tile used for all of our end products the tiles can be sanded and assembled into furniture and also cut into smaller products like coasters or even domino pieces this desk sells for just under a thousand us dollars that's about three times what you'd pay at ikea but comparable to the price of a desk made from solid wood this piece is made from about ten thousand chopsticks chop value also takes custom orders we could do large countertops or boardroom tables or pretty much anything like that since 2016 the company has upcycled 33 million chopsticks that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill but in china people use that many wood utensils in one lunch break there people throw out 130 million pairs every single day that means leveling entire forests for a product most people use for just one meal it's not just asia consumers around the world contribute to this problem we all have this drawer filled with plastic cutlery chopsticks condiments that we never asked for inexpensive they're cheap they just come in without you even asking for them sheila moravati is the woman behind the cut out cutlery campaign her organization pressured major delivery apps to opt out of sending cutlery by default she estimates that saved well over 200 million utensils from going to landfill good job sheila activists in china tried a similar strategy in 2017 they sued their country's biggest food delivery apps trying to force them to stop giving cutlery by default there was a public outcry at the time but since the pandemic food delivery with single-use items is higher than ever so we may never eliminate disposables completely that's why sheila says upcycling is so important if there are opportunities like that to to use something that was going in the trash or headed to landfill why not we have so much trash right now and it's just we're at the limit the planet can't take it anymore when shop value first started it was only making coasters now it has franchises in three cities in north america with more expected later this year coasters are still the number one selling item but the collection has grown to more than 30 products and felix bach hopes his invention will show people that the next big idea for reducing waste could be right at our fingertips you put a few tiles and a few hexagon shelves on your wall and you can point to your friends to your wall and say hey guess what i have 1 800 chopsticks on my wall and you start a conversation about sustainability or about recycling [Music] india produces tons of flower waste every day but now one company is giving a second life to these sacred flowers collecting more than 12 tons of them from temples and transforming them into handmade incense sticks but can this blossoming startup make an impact on india's flower waste problem we visited the headquarters of fool and kanpur to find out [Music] it all starts in bustling wholesale markets like the one in chevalia merchants pick up the flowers that they'll sell outside hindu temples [Music] because these flowers are used in rituals they're considered sacred and can't be thrown into the garbage every day more than a thousand tons of flowers end up in the ganges river but many contain toxic chemicals like arsenic lead and cadmium as well as pesticides i have been seeing people putting flowers in the water all my life but never before had anyone questioned temple waste as a source of pollution the seed was sown ankit founded fool which is the hindi word for flower the company's employees pick up the waste from temples throughout kanpur making around 19 stops a day then they transport the flowers to fool's facility where they weigh and separate them from thread fabric and plastic workers save only the flower petals for the incense sticks and sort them by color they keep the buds and stems to create compost that is sold as a separate product then they lay the flower petals out to dry on large tarps once they're dry they grind them into a powder that is mixed by hand with water and essential oils until it reaches a clay-like texture [Music] then it's time to roll workers dip their fingers into the flower powder while rolling to create an even thickness then they let the sticks dry before dipping them again in essential oils they're laid out to dry one more time then packaged up workers here can produce around 400 incense sticks every hour ankit calls this transformation flower cycling and he says his product is cleaner than others normally insane sticks are made from charcoal burning charcoal releases the poisonous sulphur dioxide and gives out a lot of xylene chemicals in the beginning ankit's family and friends doubted his business when i decided to quit my job and come back to kanpur the reaction uh the immediate people i knew was i have gone bonkers that i want to leave a job as automation scientist and work with temple flowers he also had to convince the temples to give his business their sacred flower waste but he says they didn't initially trust him there's this line in the hinduarti which says which basically means what belongs to the gods goes back to the gods so this is how i used to like convince them that these flowers don't belong to you or me they belong to the gods and we're using it for the purpose of making incense which is again being used for worshiping the words ankit also wants to find other ways of recycling the flowers he started a research lab to develop new products they're testing vegan leather and a biodegradable alternative to styrofoam but those aren't ready for sale still floral waste makes up only about 16 percent of pollution that runs into the ganges harmful chemicals open sewer drainage and garbage run directly into the river that's a growing danger for the more than 400 million people that rely on the river for drinking water and despite best efforts to save the ganges it's a long way from being restored to anything like its headwaters in the icy himalayas knows his startup can't clean up the river on its own [Music] but he thinks he can help create awareness about a problem he says has been ignored and he's setting goals to grow his production and waste collection our target is to like at least have 50 tons of flour across five locations in the country to be able to employ a thousand women for now every stick sold is infused with the smell of success [Music] we just can't seem to get enough guac last year americans consumed more than 6 billion avocados and that produces a lot of inedible waste now a company has developed a process to transform avocado pits into plastic bioplastics like these could help reduce pollution because they break down faster and use less fossil fuels but how they're made and disposed of determines if they really are a cleaner alternative we visited biofosse in monterey mexico to see how it all works [Music] mexico exports about half of the world's avocados a single worker at this plantation in michoacan can cut over 800 pounds of the fruit per day many of these avocados will be shipped whole but some are pitted and processed locally this factory produces ready-to-eat guacamole and salsa they tried composting the avocado scraps but it didn't work avocado pits contain oils that made the process complicated so now they sell their seeds to biofosse bioplastics are what we call products that are mostly made of biological substances instead of petroleum the process starts with avocado seeds that have been washed at the supplying factory as the seed is going through the machine it's turned into a bioplastic resin that's ready to withstand a lot of heat what comes out the other end is a malleable sheet that can be molded and cut into different shapes studies have shown that bioplastics are an improvement over traditional plastics it takes less fossil fuels to produce them they contain fewer toxic chemicals and they decompose faster the technology to make these products has improved over the past few years and has grown to a nearly 20 billion dollar industry that's about the same size as the rapidly growing plant-based meat industry bio fossa is part of that trend the company launched eight years ago with a single facility today it has three locations across mexico but there are issues bioplastics require special industrial facilities to properly compost and they can contaminate the regular recycling stream they're also more expensive than regular plastic which is made from readily available petroleum there are two reasons because first of all crude oil is quite cheap right now and and secondly the production capacity for bioplastics is much lower while for fossil based plastic it's much bigger so they have an economy of scale in terms of production bio fossa produces about 130 tons of bioplastics each month that's equivalent to the conventional plastic waste produced by 13 000 americans it's a modest output for now but bo fosse products are shipped across mexico the uk and other countries in europe and the company recently expanded to australia but there's a long way to go bioplastics i think is probably a little bit less than one percent of the fossil based plastics for now they are mostly used in restaurants but the idea that biodegradables can be thrown into nature and will eventually go away is false it can take up to a year for bioplastics to break down in natural conditions that's still plenty of time to clog waterways or harm animal habitats still that's much shorter than conventional plastic items some of which will stick around for hundreds of years bioplastics can replace some traditional plastics so far that's only been tried on a small scale but thanks to biofosse we may be one avocado toast away from a cleaner planet [Music] these scientists are making foam from algae and it could be a game changer for a type of pollution that has a much larger footprint than most people realize flip flops they're the world's most popular shoe and they're piling up on beaches and in the ocean most are made from plastic foam which takes decades or centuries to break down naturally but these researchers growing green slimy algae may just change that but can this new kind of foam really replace regular flip-flops we visited their lab to find out steve mayfield runs the lab that makes the flip-flops he's studied algae for 35 years and he's still excited to talk about it they are the most efficient photosynthetic organisms on the planet and they're easy to grow and harvest in man-made ponds using less land than plants the process for turning algae into flip-flops is surprisingly simple the shoe consists of a footbed made from flexible foam an outsole made of a more rigid foam and a cotton strap to make the foam pieces the researchers use an industrial machine to mix together compounds created from algae oil this is the same machine you'd see if you went into any one of the shoe manufacturers in the world we want to make sure that the research and the work we do here is relevant to the real world to the commercial world the machine pours the mixture into molds the team then applies heat and the foam expands into the shape of a shoe they wait about 10 minutes for the foam to cure then peel the pieces out and assemble the finished product you put the strap through here and put the back two parts here you glue that on and then this entire thing glues and that's it that's all the shoe is so the manufacturing of these things is also really straightforward the sandal is 100 percent biodegradable it takes three to six months to break down in a compost pile or if it ends up in the ocean it would take about a year that's much faster than the average flip-flop made from plastic and replacing traditional plastic flip-flops with algae-based ones would also reduce the demand for fossil fuels petroleum itself is biodegradable they become not biodegradable when they go through a refinery and then a chemical company converts them to a plastic that is not biodegradable so all we're doing is instead of digging algae oil out of the ground we're growing algae oil and ponds that's why for years researchers around the world tried to turn algae into a low-cost low-emission biofuel and for the last 15 years private investors and the us government poured billions of dollars into this research but despite those efforts no one has yet figured out how to make algae biofuel cheaper than fossil fuels we're always going to be five years away from making algae biofuels economically viable maybe we should tackle one of the other problems that the world has that are little easier to achieve economically they shifted their focus to biopolymers or plastic alternatives made from plants they sell at a higher price than fuel number one they're about 10 times more expensive than fuel so the economics works out better but but number two plastic and ocean plastic pollution is an enormous problem and we need to address that the latest research reveals that plastic pollution is everywhere even at the lowest depths of the ocean if current trends continue the amount of plastic entering the environment annually will nearly triple over the next two decades the problem becomes apparent in places surrounded by water like the aldabra atoll off the east coast of africa last year researchers collected 25 tons of trash there they found that nearly a quarter of it was flip flops if you actually look in the world at what shoe is worn by the majority of people on the planet it's actually a sandal or a flip-flop but getting these more sustainable flip-flops into stores remains a challenge mayfield founded a company algensis materials to start to figure that out the best discovery in the world that stays in the lab doesn't really impact the world what impacts the world is products our plan in our startup company was to build the shoe so cool and so sustainable that we forced all of the other companies to pivot and become sustainable shoe brands he says they're already working with a major shoe retailer to begin commercial production in mexico but the pandemic has caused delays production's going there now but kind of slow we hope the flip-flops will be available by sometime next summer and the startup faces another big challenge it can't actually buy enough algae to support its supply chain for now it's making flip-flops primarily from plants not algae we get as much as we can from algae and then we fill in the rest of that using plant oils steve believes the supply will catch up over time as more algae farmers enter the market in the future you will buy 100 percent algae-based shoes but if we don't make our first million shoes then people won't build the algae ponds so we can make our next 100 million shoes but others like researcher john bennemann point out that algae farming will have to increase dramatically in order to support mass production of items like shoes really need 100 times more to be able to hold our hands up for that reason it could be more practical and profitable to make biodegradable shoes out of widely available crops like soybeans the argument that algae have this particular and specific competitive advantage is the one that still needs to be developed but steve argues that algae is better because growing it requires less land and water than plants for now algenysis materials is working with oils from non-edible plants we choose not to use soybean or canola because those are food oils so we don't want to compete with food ultimately growing more algae and using it to make stuff is a step in the right direction i'm not sure to what extent this will actually reduce your two emissions blah blah blah et cetera but it's definitely stuff we need we need to have these kind of market entries perfect is the enemy of good enough right meaning that if you always look for the perfect solution you'll never do anything you'll just sit around in the meantime steve says consumers can do more than simply wait for more environmentally friendly options too many people sit back and say oh well i you know i would love to have biodegradable plastics but they're not available to me well they're not available to you because you don't demand companies make those i would say the last challenge that i want to put out to consumers is don't underestimate your power and demand that the world change [Music] 10 tons of food goes unsold every day at this market but instead of going to a landfill it's turned into electricity that will power street lights buildings and a kitchen that preps meals for 800 people this is called biogas it's plentiful it's low-tech and experts say it burns cleaner than any fossil fuel so why can't we make energy from the 1.3 billion tons of food that gets thrown out every year we visited the bon pali market in hyderabad india to find out the first step is to chop up larger vegetables and load them onto a conveyor belt some of the vegetables are spoiled others are thrown away because it costs farmers too much to transport them back home cabinet the conveyor belt carries the material to a shredder which further breaks down the food into smaller more uniform particles in a single day it handles the same amount of vegetables that 150 indians eat in a year a grinder crushes the mixture into pulp which is pumped through underground tanks and into two digesters so anaerobic digesters basically have bacteria which are operated in the absence of oxygen or anaerobic bacteria and they actually eat essentially the food waste that we are putting in there and give out methane and carbon dioxide any organic materials emit these planet warming gases as they decompose but the massive amount of food waste makes landfills the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions just behind fossil fuels and agriculture burning biogas to make electricity is a way to harvest those gases before they enter the atmosphere at bowen pali the fuel can be stored locally in four huge balloons until it's ready to use and it goes all the way to the kitchen which is about roughly 400 500 meters away from here it's enough power to run a canteen kitchen that serves roughly 800 meals per day aside from energy the plant creates another valuable by-product fertilizer farmers who sell their wares at the market buy it back and spread it on the same fields where their vegetables grow by using this fertilizer their soils are also getting better their crops yields are better and their crops are being sold at higher cost because organic vegetables are very costly nowadays you know organic rice and all these things dr rao a scientist on the project is already building five more plants around the city and it isn't limited to vegetables biogas can be produced from any organic material including animal and human feces so if biogas can be locally sourced cuts down on solid waste and reduces emissions why aren't we all doing this because in most countries it's still cheaper to keep burning fossil fuels in north america biogas costs nearly five times more than natural gas now you can't compete with what you call gas in the united states it's 20 cents a gallon this gap is smaller in places like asia where the difference in price is less than two dollars per unit a lot of people a lot of state governments who were thinking about setting up these projects have suddenly of understood that yes it's possible to do it yes there are technologies which are indigenous which are built in india that can work for them the world's biggest biogas plant was recently built in denmark and new facilities are being built elsewhere in europe and africa an israeli company sells a product to make biogas in your backyard [Music] biogas will never replace natural gas there's just not enough waste to keep up with the demand for electricity but it does something that natural gas can it helps reduce landfill waste and it's a huge missed opportunity in the united states which throws out between 30 and 40 percent of all food even the farmers who lose money when they can't sell their produce believe biogas is better than just throwing it away [Music] and the engineers on the bowen poly project are hopeful that its success will inspire others so these projects have to happen you know for us to make life more sustainable not just for ourselves but for let's say even 20 years or 10 years down the line the scenario needs to be a little better [Music] it looks like a giant marshmallow but it's actually a mushroom slice it and you get crispy vegan bacon or a convincing alternative to leather and this lab grows an eco-friendly replacement to styrofoam that light but bulky material taking up a third of the space in all landfills but can this company grow it fast enough to make a global impact we visited ecovative's headquarters in green island new york to find out the magic is in mycelium the living root structures of mushrooms our entire philosophy is actually based around this idea that nature provides masilium is a great solution to both the plastics waste problem we face as well as animal agriculture i'm taking the mushroom mycelium and then i'm just going to section this petri dish all ecovative products start with these natural building blocks we have about 100 different strains in-house and we will analyze those for the different material properties that they have what do you think about the wall thickness on this it's pretty thin the company's best selling product is called mico composite it has similar properties to styrofoam but it's completely biodegradable we've worked with a variety of companies some of them huge companies like dell computers where they've used our earth friendly packaging to ship servers we've worked also with small new york startup brands like keep candles manufacturers design molds using large recyclable plastic sheets heat makes the sheets pliable so they can be shaped around any product they start with wood chips corn husks or hemp that would otherwise be thrown out by local farms then sprinkle in some fungal spores and add water pack the mixture into the molds and the mycelium starts to grow feeding on the shredded agricultural waste just over a week later the form-fitted mold is ready to ship so this jar and it fits really nice in there the final material is a little bit heavier than styrofoam but velvety soft to the touch this packaging breaks down in just 30 days conventional styrofoam never really goes away it can stay in the environment for up to five centuries and less than one percent is ever recycled ecovative has a different process to make vegan meat and leather which it claims consumes far fewer resources than the real thing then we're going to take this substrate which will inoculate this sawdust workers still start with agricultural waste and spores but these mixtures are placed in vertical farms growth chambers that mimic the conditions of natural soil and so what it's really trying to do is grow up and punch out through the earth to form a mushroom but we keep the environment such that it just grows and grows into this large marshmallow like structure that marshmallow is called ariel mycelium and it grows over the course of about 10 days their largest chamber can produce up to 200 000 pounds of mycelium per year we end up with these large industrial slabs which can be like 50 feet long and 5 feet wide and a couple inches thick in 2018 the company licensed its leather making process to bolt threads they make milo a leather alternative that has been used in clothing and handbags in 2020 the company launched a line of mushroom-based meat alternatives called my eats the mai is short for mycelium the first product is called my bacon it's made from ariel mycelium that's cut into slices compressed and seasoned it fries up and gets crispy just like bacon and tastes pretty amazing too we can't confirm the flavor but my bacon is definitely a healthier option it's high in fiber and has the same protein content as a regular slice of bacon with one-fifth of fat the company projects that as it scales up my bacon can eventually be grown for a dollar per pound a fifth of the market price of pork bacon and it takes nearly 600 gallons of water to produce one pound of pork but just over one gallon of water to grow a pound of mycelium bacon eben bayer and gavin mcintyre founded ecovative design in 2007 and debuted their myco composite packaging in 2011. since then a growing number of cities and states have banned the use of styrofoam but the united states does not have country-wide restrictions and the average person still uses 75 foam coffee cups per year adding up to 25 billion in 2020 ecovative produced over 6 million pounds of its foam alternative but that's just half a percent of the cups americans consumed my bacon might have an easier time catching on the market for meat substitutes is worth about four billion dollars and is set to double over the next five years bacon is a really important leverage point in the market it's one of the number one reasons people say they won't stop eating meat mycelium protein can mimic whole cuts of meat as opposed to most other plant-based alternatives which come in the form of minced patties or sausages but right now my bacon is only available in one grocery store in albany new york ecovative plans on branching out to more stores in 2021 and it's currently building farms with the capacity to produce 1 million pounds of mycelium per year the company recently announced it's raised a total of 100 million dollars in capital compare that with impossible foods a more established brand which has raised 700 million dollars to date ecovative design is a long way from displacing plastics and factory farming but according to eben his company is harnessing the potential of the living world my background and journey has been around figuring out how we can reimagine working with nature and using nature to create better solutions for everyday products we we have to use as humans that just have less impact on the earth bananas are one of the world's most wasteful crops and these giant stems are a part of the problem farmers typically burn them but that pollutes the air so instead one company in uganda has figured out how to pulverize them into fiber to make rugs placemats even hair extensions so could bananas become a green alternative to cotton or silk we visited the headquarters of texfad in the outskirts of kampala to find out every banana stem only fruits once in its lifetime before it rots or catches a virus and for every ton of fruit plantations produce two tons of debris but in those mounds of refuse kimani maturi saw potential he founded texfad in 2013 after discovering his love for hand weaving in college i cannot finish using the waste that is out there it's too much first workers cut the stems into celery shaped chunks and leave them out to dry in the sun then they feed those strands into an extractor like this one this is a crucial step and the only part of the process that requires machinery and it's not cheap this unit costs anywhere from one thousand dollars for a used one to ten thousand dollars brand new that price presents an obstacle for expanding this business the rest of the work is done by hand the extracted fibers dry again until they feel like a silky yarn but one that is as strong as rope at this point it's also ideal for dyeing the final stop is the weaving shed where the making of household goods and handicrafts begins some of the designs on these rugs are inspired by traditional east african patterns other products are custom made for clients it can take up to a month to weave a rug the price varies but many start at around five hundred dollars texfad employs 23 people and even offers an internship program for students the problem that we have here in our country we study we get our degrees but we don't have opportunities esther inibiona has been at the company for about a year she started as an intern and is now one of the main weavers why i like the people i work with is because they are motivating they help there are different groups of people around it's a very good thing because you interact with people of all ages banana textiles have been around for centuries in countries like the philippines nepal and japan but texfad is one of the first companies to bring it to uganda and the potential is huge because the country produces more bananas than any other in east africa about 9 million tons every year that's about 5 tons of fruit for every person in uganda i will never get worried that i won't have materials tomorrow as long as we ugandans are eating bananas on a daily basis and while kimani's business has grown over the past eight years it isn't enough to make a dent in the 30 billion global banana industry environmentalists say that composting the stems into fertilizers would be a more immediate solution it prevents dehydration it prevents deforestation and it gets a richer soil and richest oil is a more healthy banana many farms do that but chopping the stems requires tough manual labor so for most farmers in uganda getting rid of them is easier and faster still these kinds of textiles are biodegradable and are a more sustainable alternative to other popular fabrics banana fiber absorbs dyes better than cotton which means it needs less water and less land to produce but the special equipment and expertise hold back this method from becoming more widespread it could spread over the world if more machines are found and developed that actually makes such thin material that you can use it for the clothing industry because currently it's quite hard to do so and not a lot of machines have been developed or it's costly still kimani dreams big even during a pandemic i'm just imagining if there was no covet i think we would be a little further than we are today and he's always innovating there is no rocket science in what we are doing here no even people who come to land here they don't take much time to to land but this is just the beginning i can tell you that banana fiber is the next fiber the next fiber in terms of sustainable the fibers for fashions are not just for fashion for everything [Music] this dough is made with old bread that would have gone to the trash france throws out more than 150 000 metric tons of bread every year that's nine loaves for every citizen this machine could help close the loop the crumbler grinds stale baguettes into breadcrumbs that are so fine they can replace flour but is this idea enough to reduce food waste in bakeries across the country bakery pompanette is one of the more than 100 bakeries in france that uses the crumbler bakers here slice unsold baguettes and drop them into the crumbler's silver chimney today guillaume devenat and his apprentice elodie are making a fresh batch of his signature baguette the twenty percent [Music] normal person measures flour salt yeast and water then she weighs the exact amount of crumbs needed for the recipe she adds the bread crumbs and then needs the ingredients to form a dough which will rest overnight this machine helps shape it into baguettes devinat rolls the dough once more and adds the finishing touches before baking problem uh that is until three years ago when his flower supplier told him about the crumbler and its inventor frank wallace his solution crumbs which can be stored for months if dried properly but baker's told wallet there's no easy way to grind down their loaves so in 2015 wallet quit his job as a city planner and worked with a group of engineers to create a crumbler prototype bread is one of the staples of any complete french meal french consumers expect it to be fresh and without preservatives that leaves the country's 30 000 independent bakeries with a lot of unsold goods many businesses donate that bread at the end of the day and since 2016 the french government has forbidden supermarkets from throwing away their leftover food but even with those policies there's simply too much bread while it estimates that about 10 of each bakery's production goes to the trash baguettes bread is one of the most wasted foods around the world other companies have found fresh ideas of what to do with it in the netherlands met destad collects discarded loaves from the streets around rotterdam to turn into natural gas biova an italian brewery makes old bread into beer one advantage of the crumbler is that it can be used with any type of bread but getting the word out takes time hello for some bakers the price of the crumbler is a deal breaker the machine costs almost 500 euros for a one month trial or more than 2 000 to buy outright but devi knott says it was worth the investment [Music] [Music] he's created a variety of recipes based on the crumbs so how do customers feel about buying their daily bread from yesterday [Music] still instead of recycled while it prefers to call the items made with breadcrumbs escaped recipes m [Music] this liquid gold came from a pile of circuit boards and these days there could be more gold in a landfill than in a mine but extracting it is an expensive and polluting process often carried out at toxic dumps now a new zealand startup has found a cleaner and safer way to do that and its secret ingredient comes from nature microscopic organisms that evolved to absorb precious metals but can this complex process reinvent how we deal with the world's fastest growing waste stream we visited the test plant to find out mint innovation begins with the circuit boards that are inside nearly every electronic device so this is how the electronics circuit boards is how we receive them cut up treated into pieces the company says it sources all raw material from a local recycler exporting waste is an absolutely abhorrent thing for human race to be doing the company's founders think that if it's easier to get valuable metals from e-waste countries will choose to deal with it locally a lot of the gold's wrapped up in these chips the first step is to grind the circuit boards into a sand-like consistency workers shovel this sand into a reactor which mixes it with inexpensive chemicals those acids and oxidants are pretty commonly available industrial chemicals next machines pump the mixture into a filter press to separate the liquids from the solids this blue fluid contains a high concentration of copper tin and other less valuable metals mint uses electricity to pull out the copper we simply put that through a series of plates pass it over that that have electric current flowing through them and that plates out the copper from solution the metals that pay the bills are the gold the palladium the copper and the tin because they're most abundant and most valuable but at this step in mint's process palladium and gold are still stuck in the solids they're harder to dissolve and require another chemical bath for the precious metals you need something a little bit more oomph so that's why we break into two stages the next step in mint's process makes it one of a kind and it requires the help of nature we're the first people to use microorganisms to selectively concentrate precious metals we're kind of inventing the whole technology along the way [Music] mint's team identified these tiny helpers in 2017 through a series of research trips to places like abandoned mines or fields with rusty equipment given enough pressure and time microbes seem to find a way to thrive in any environment they collected species of bacteria and fungi that evolved to bond with specific metals microorganisms recover gold they also recover palladium these are not pathogens by any stretch of the imagination so would i drink a vial of them probably not but i wouldn't drink a while of a lot of things so over several hours the microbes will gain weight as they absorb precious metal ions and we've now got a concentrated microbial paste that contains a good portion of precious metal when the paste dries out the gold nanoparticles in it start to appear purple gold has this funny property that when it is in small nanoparticles as well i mean gold in color have this hue of blues to reds the mixture is ready for the last step so this is where the final bit of magic happens where we turn off the microbial part just leaving the metal part behind that they've captured our product is a gold rich ash that goes to a refiner who is the one who turns it into 99.99 gold it takes one week to extract 150 grams of gold from one ton of circuit boards the founders carry around this solid gold coin to show what that looks like is it pure gold that's pure gold super heavy it seems like a lot of work for a small payoff is it really worth the trouble mint's founders say yes because it's getting harder to mine precious metals from the earth the big gold mines are recovering literally grams three four five grams of gold from a ton of rock eighty-one percent of gold that's identified today is already above the ground and as gold mines are depleted the amount of e-waste generated globally has increased steadily over the past decades if those trends continue by 2050 we'll have to deal with 110 million metric tons of e-waste every year that's like every person in the world throwing away a countertop microwave up to a fifth of all e-waste moves across borders likely ending up in developing countries where workers process it by hand at illegal dump sites activist jim puckett has spent over 25 years tracking how e-waste ends up in these toxic environments the entire life cycle of electronics unfortunately disproportionately burdens the global south with the real environmental harm and pollution thousands of people worldwide make a living extracting copper from e-waste primarily by burning it inhaling the fumes damages workers lungs and increases their risk for cancer and other illnesses we are suffering for a year because the heat is the way that smoke to the disturbance other studies have found that large e-waste dumps contaminate water soil and crops even if e-waste is properly recycled the final product still needs to go to a smelter the energy-intensive end point for most mining operations mint's long-term goal is to make it easy and profitable for cities to process their e-waste locally we need to kind of get this you know really really cranking throughout the world and that's probably a 20-year vision the company is planning full-scale facilities in australia and the united kingdom this smaller plant in auckland new zealand was built to demonstrate how mints process works it processes about one metric ton of circuit boards per week but larger plants like the one they're building in australia will process 10 metric tons per day that would make the bigger plant able to process about one percent of all the e-waste australia produces annually the planned larger facilities will be almost entirely automated it's pretty light touch from a personnel perspective might have three people on the shop floor any one time running 24 7. the small number of employees would have limited contact with e-waste keeping them safe from exposure to toxic compounds however even if mint can realize its dream of a plant in every major city the founders face another problem that's completely out of their control unfortunately electronic waste generally is getting less and less valuable over time as a commodity manufacturers are learning to build gadgets with less precious metal mint's team is researching other types of waste they can run through this process like car parts as for solving the global e-waste problem jim puckett remains skeptical that any form of recycling is the answer i'm not saying don't go ahead with these techniques we're certainly going to have old circuit boards around for a long time and we're going to have to deal with them so let's move on it but we've got to turn off the tap that tap is controlled by the companies who manufacture electronics most of whom have no legal or financial incentive to design products that can be recycled it's an overflowing bathtub you can't run around with mops and say oh my god we got to mop this up we got to mop that up and we have a better mop here and a better mop there when the tap is pouring water into the bathtub it's overflowing down the stairs this is the problem we have is the tap of our waste is not being turned back these plates are made from the tops of pineapples that are shredded mixed with some recycled paper and turned into sheets that are left out to dry under the sun a machine presses the sheets into form and if these disposable plates end up in a place with soil and water tiny seeds inside will blossom in a few days [Music] on a busy day workers at lifepak can churn out ten thousand eco-friendly plates transfer in addition to plates the company also makes sandwich containers and coffee cup sleeves that contain seeds from edible plants like cilantro amaranth and strawberry lifepack caps its own carbon footprint by working with local suppliers yes he says it sources pineapple waste from a nearby processing plant the plant's owners charge nothing for the pineapple crowns they're happy that someone is willing to turn their waste into a resource important husband and wife team claudia barona and andres benevides founded lifepak 12 years ago in the city of cali the couple has won several small business awards and they even appeared on the colombian version of shark tank [Music] colombia like nearly every country in the world is trying to reduce plastic waste in 2017 the country introduced a tax on single-use plastics that increases each year and in some cities informal pickers are now paid as municipal workers but getting consumers to buy these products isn't easy the life pack plates retail at about two and a half dollars per dozen that's more than double the price of plastic plates from a big box store despite their higher price point lifepak has been able to capitalize on growing demand for sustainable packaging which has increased by 40 since the company started its plates are now sold in three large supermarket chains domestically the company also handles dozens of orders through its website each week with a handful of customers in the u.s lifepak's next challenge is to modernize its equipment so it can boost production andres and claudia also plan to franchise the business and expand into new countries to help more people cut back on plastic one plate at a time [Music] this coffin is alive it's made from mushrooms that soak up the toxins human bodies leave behind and it eliminates the need for massive amounts of wood steel and concrete used to bury the dead funerals in the u.s use enough of these materials every year to build a tower of caskets the size of the empire state building the loop coffin grows in a lab in seven days and absorbs into the soil in under two months but can it replace traditional burials we visited the creator of the world's first mushroom coffin to find out this is definitely my baby yes i think about it when i wake up i think about it when i go to sleep yeah i see them we got some friends bob hendricks searches for the building blocks for a loop coffin in delphi haute forest in the netherlands it's easy to find mushrooms but it's hard to find the specific one you need some are edible but some might kill you as well he harvests samples to bring back to the lab every weekend and this is not the one we use but we could make a coffin out of it we can try this one might be the holy grail here you can see all the wires so it's almost like veins of the organism it's mycelium thin white fibers that grow easily on all kinds of surfaces mycelium is the root structure of mushrooms and simply said they're just the recyclers of nature so everything that turns into death they turn it into life it feeds on decaying plants and animals expanding at a rate of half an inch per day from this little piece of mycelium we can grow a living coffin really yeah back at loop's headquarters bob and his team mix the mycelium with wet sawdust and spray it with a secret sauce that helps it grow then they seal it in a plastic mold shaped like a coffin this part of the process is also a secret fungus fills in the empty space and it dries within a week it's a building technique that bob has been experimenting with for years right now we tend to work with dead materials while envision a world in which we work together with organisms the final product is light but sturdy it's almost like a sort of styrofoam material so it's really rigid yet it's super lightweight it can carry up to 440 pounds each coffin is lined with a layer of moss sourced from a local farm the moss has two functions that it helps to decompose the body faster and rich in biodiversity and the other one is to give humans the experience of becoming part of the cycle of life a body interned in a loop coffin should not be embalmed or wear any synthetic materials so it can transform into soil faster that was an exciting prospect for johannes penheisen the 82 year old doctor became one of the first people buried in a loop coffin last year this is his final resting place in a special area designated by the dutch government for natural burials it became something like like like a beautiful thing you know because it was a special coffin and they really liked it most people's deaths leave a much larger footprint a conventionally buried body contains a mix of over 200 chemicals from tobacco residues to dry cleaning chemicals pesticides heavy metals and embalming fluids it can take up to 12 years for an embalmed body to turn into a skeleton but soft tissues release toxic chemicals and microbes after only a few months and traditional coffins contain preservatives paint and have metal handles all of these substances can leach into soil and water making it unhealthy for the living loop coffins can fix this because of a process called micro remediation that means that mushrooms will chow down on almost anything even pollution these fungi of course can have a lot of intake of heavy metals and all kind of chemical components because they they store it in their ether in their in the fungus body but breaking old habits can be difficult replacing bodily fluids with preservatives started during the american civil war the bodies of fallen soldiers needed to be transported long distances for burial embalming made it possible for president lincoln's open casket to remain on display for a three-week train trip from washington to illinois and it has been standard practice ever since bob wants people to return to the natural practices that existed for most of history as humans why are we not part of the cycle then we can actually enable people to feed the earth instead of polluted the company sold about 100 coffins last year priced at 1500 euros apiece about 1800 us dollars that's cheaper than even the most basic wooden caskets and a fraction of the 7 500 that americans pay for a mid-priced funeral loops off to a modest start but globally green funerals are becoming more popular people are really interested in new things in the funeral business and our members are asking if they can use the loop coffin for their burial today they make up a small proportion of overall funerals but two in three american consumers say they'd consider a green burial and they have a growing list of over 300 providers to choose from given enough time we all return to dust but bob hendricks hopes we'll choose instead to become compost these aluminum can pop tabs are being washed and will eventually be turned into designer handbags bottle top bags aim to highlight excessive waste in the garment industry there's over i think eight percent of global greenhouse emissions are caused by the fashion industry and bottle top is responding to that after they've been cleaned workers separate the pop tabs and paint them then women like anna take over using a method similar to crochet weavers arranged the pop tabs into patterns that adorn a variety of fashionable bags today anna is working on the balani [Music] this bag will take her about eight hours to make using exactly 1152 pop tabs people in brazil have a long-standing tradition of crocheting with pop tabs it's a craft that the co-founders of bottle top encountered on a trip there in 2007. we just started looking into into more as to how we can produce these products and eventually we created our own atelier in salvador helping people from two disenfranchised communities and giving them skills and livelihood to um to be able to create these products and support the people every year bottletop upcycles close to fifteen hundred pounds of pop tabs about the same weight as a smart car that may not seem like a lot considering people worldwide drink and throw away about 180 billion soda cans annually but according to ethical fashion experts every little bit counts production of garments um wastes more energy than the uh aircraft in shipping markets combined globally and that's just kind of for me puts it into perspective how massive this problem is but it's brands like bottle top that are working with uh smaller communities and really making such a huge impact on the ground with the people that they work with and that's really where it starts ethical fashion is a movement towards fair practices in every step of the supply chain from sustainably sourcing raw materials to paying employees fair wages and it's a growing market the demand for ethically produced fashion products could grow to eight billion dollars by 2023 we're seeing a really big shift in consumer behavior towards more responsible production within the fashion industry we're seeing even kind of big corporate fashion brands collaborating with maybe younger brands or artists whose core part of their work is to use upcycling and together they have been creating capsule collections or maybe one off pieces luciano rodriguez is in charge of collecting the recycled materials used in bottle top bags he buys them from the city's waste pickers or goes directly to dump sites where they are sorted and sold so we our now get the rimpools in a machining wash dry then we make a selection all by one by one it's all by hand after that we go back to the machine again to do a second wash [Music] the bottle top bags end up in london in the world's first 3d printed store made from recycled plastic we are smack bang in the middle of central london on regent street what you're standing on right now is the equivalent of 70 recycled truck tires above us you can see 3 000 recycled cans and the walls you can see this kind of rib structure is actually 3d printed waste plastic the bilani starts at 250 while a higher end bag like elise can cost over 600 there's no reason why there shouldn't be more sustainable stores we should be the norm this should be the way that fashion is going to make sure to give ourselves the best chance of preserving the planet and reducing carbon emissions even in a pandemic the store itself has been a magnet for high street shoppers but it is the bottle top story that keeps them coming back i think the more we read and the more we we hear about where our planet and our choices are taking us the more important it is to to make choices in particular in festive times when we're making presents for each other that are nice and we appreciate but also have some sort of positive impact for the wider community the wider planet these fibers are made from old clothes it's part of a process that can turn nearly any used fabric into something brand new and fashion retailer h m bets this solution could eventually recycle some of the billions of tons of textile waste produced every year but can a fast fashion company solve the problem it helped create we went to hong kong and sweden to find out most recycled textiles are turned into mattress stuffing or insulation and the original materials are scraps from the factory floor not used clothing but this facility inside a hong kong shopping mall is the first in the world to turn used clothes into new clothes all in one place first a technician like emily shao examines the garment so today we will recycle all garments this ozone chamber sanitizes the fabric in about an hour then emily removes the buttons labels and zippers and cuts the garment so the fabric is easy to work with the shredder strips the bits of cloth down further and then i would take off the open fabrics but this part of the process does require some new materials so we will add some virgin fibers into the yarns to make it stronger another machine mixes that cotton with the recycled skirt emily then rolls the mixed fibers into clumps and feeds them into a machine that turns them into what's called a fiber web but what happens next makes the assembly line in hong kong the first of its kind the fiber web gets bundled into these snake-like slivers the slivers are then spun into ply yarn the building blocks of a new garment finally a machine knits a new sweater based on a computer design shoppers pay about 65 dollars to recycle clothing here how do we help consumers think about their clothes differently well that's one of the reasons why we have a glass box doing research in a shopping mall the h m foundation partnered with the hong kong research institute of textiles and apparel that investment allowed the company to license and install the technology at one of their stores in stockholm where the company is headquartered h m calls it the loop here shoppers pay only 18 to see the recycling process in action that's about the price of a new pair of the brand's sweatpants that's how it comes out and then this is the only part that has to be removed virginia the technician trims the extra yarn and the garment is ready to go it takes three days to recycle one garment that seems like a lot of time and effort to turn a sweater into a new sweater that's because a factory like this that can recycle thousands of tons of clothes a day doesn't exist yet but h m says that eventually this kind of technology could be a global solution for textile waste the holy grail is a government to government recycling and that's for me where today most our investment going to but the fashion retailer continues to grow by selling cheap clothes to more and more people how often do you go maybe one time a week how big is your wardrobe it's like maybe half of my apartment well retail kings and queens she needs a walk-in closet yes but swedes aren't the biggest contributors to textile waste the average american spends over 1800 a year on new clothes and throws away 200 t-shirts worth of textiles every year people didn't always treat clothing as disposable fast fashion really took off in the 1990s thanks to polyester the synthetic fiber made from petroleum costs half as much as cotton i think very few people realize that most of the time today they're wearing plastic by the year 2000 polyester overtook cotton as the most popular fiber in the world that's the same year h m opened its first u.s store in new york city since then global clothing production has doubled and if nothing changes it will nearly double again by 2030. all that used apparel can end up in places like accra ghana which has one of the world's largest second-hand clothing markets every week 15 million garments pass through the contamanto market and nearly half of that goes to landfill is burned or gets swept into waterways we've completely devalued what clothing is clothing is now disposable and i don't know how we come back from treating it like a plastic bag or like a plastic bottle liz ricketts has spent over a decade documenting how used clothes from wealthy countries are exported around the world the clothing that's going to landfill a lot of it is wearable and a lot of the waste comes from familiar brands it's definitely the top 10 which are what you would expect and it's h m and zara m s adidas nike gap it would take the loop recycling machine almost 50 000 years to deal with just one week's worth of waste from the market you can't really convince yourself that creating clothing but doing it better is somehow going to solve this issue that there's simply too much clothing still h m executives say they're serious about scaling up recycling the company has set a goal of using only recycled polyester by the end of the decade we have developed together with hong kong rita a machine called the green machine the h m foundation invested 12 million dollars into technologies like this machine that recycles polyester and plans to build a larger factory that can recycle over 3 000 pounds of clothes per day but hk rita's ceo admits that recycling has a long way to go before it can make a dent in the industry's growing waste output the commercial scale useful recycling systems have to be in the order of magnitude of at least thousands of tons a day today less than one percent of used clothing is recycled into new garments it is clear to us that we don't have a lot of time we have this danger of doing too little too late experts say that recycling can never solve the problem of textile waste brands have basically convinced citizens that we have a waste problem because we don't have recycling technology that is not that is not why we have a waste problem it's only going to be solvable if we confront growth and if companies stop over producing h m has no plans to reduce production of new clothing we are a gross company our ambition is how do we make that growth being meaningful and consumers can do their part by buying less and holding on to their current wardrobe longer we always recommend that people take a year off of buying anything new even hk rita's ceo recognizes recycling alone can't solve the problem the companies that manufacture clothes will need to change the way they do business and that is what keeps him up at night my nightmare my nightmare scenario in the industry is that we are satisfied we're happy with very modest goals but that doesn't really do anything for anybody and then we'll be accused of green washing and by and large it'll be true for years people have dumped all kinds of waste into the ocean even coast guard ships like this the idea is that new coral will latch onto these massive objects and attract fish but just because it sinks doesn't mean it will help in fact some of these damaged pre-existing coral now a company has said their artificial reef is safe for all marine life the secret ingredient it's made from the remains of the dead there are thousands of memorial reef balls like this one off the eastern seaboard they've become successful habitats and protect hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate from storm surge flooding but with natural reefs dying off at an alarming rate can these underwater graveyards actually make a difference the two most important factors for a good reef are the materials you use and making sure it stays put larry begs and his team at reef innovations designed this bottom heavy reef ball to withstand violent sea currents they can weigh up to five tons the chemicals in conventional concrete can harm sea creatures so reef innovations has to use a special mix the concrete is a ph neutralized marine grade concrete that is very important for coral growth oysters corals invertebrates and stuff that will grow on the reef can attach to the reef ball very easily the company uses fiberglass panels to form the basic shape of the ball they insert an inflated buoy to keep the center hollow creating the holes that fish like to swim through once the concrete dries the team rinses the balls with a mixture of sugar and water to expose the surfaces where sea life will grow this is where the dead people come in a company called eternal reefs uses larry's creations for their memorials they've dropped almost 2500 of them over the past 20 years we work with families who have lost somebody and had their their loved one cremated they will come to one of our project sites the families mix cremated remains with concrete to make a separate centerpiece for the reef ball they call it a pearl what you're going to do is you can put your hand back you rock it back and forth we put fresh concrete on the top of the reef ball and then they put hand prints they write messages families are invited to bring things that represent their loved one's life as long as they're not environmentally harmful the remains replace some of the sand normally used in concrete they give you actually the bucket and the mix and then you pour your remains into that mix and you stir it phyllis flowers lost her son to brain cancer when he was just 20 years old so there's my son i had no idea what the eternal reef was until john found it in a small way he was giving back to the world in his mind by being able to add to the ecology of the coral reef that will save of course our seashores and build back sea animals and fish families take their finished reef balls out to the open water say a few words maybe a prayer and drop the memorial down to the seabed the whole process costs about the same as a conventional cemetery burial on florida's atlantic coast another company is in the underwater burial business the neptune memorial reef is the final resting place for over a thousand people here the human remains are mixed into statues shaped like starfish or stingrays it's also a tourist attraction we estimate there's probably over 2 000 divers a month that visit the neptune reef over the past century people hope to create scenic dive sites in other places they've dropped passenger airplanes car tires even old battleships it was really companies looking for cheaper ways of disposing products that they weren't using anymore or the military had ships or tanks and i think over time there's increased recognition that these were not good for the environment in the early 1970s a non-profit working with the army corps of engineers dumped 2 million tires off the coast of fort lauderdale the group optimistically called it the osborne reef but the coral never grew seawater corroded the tires as well as the steel clips and nylon bonds holding them together they broke apart wiping out nearby natural reefs decades later florida began a cleanup expected to end by 2028 some 600 000 tires are still down there healthy reefs provide a home for a quarter of all marine life protect thousands of people from hurricane damage and contribute over 4 billion dollars to florida's economy every year but even the best designed artificial reefs can't keep up with climate change unless carbon emissions are reduced all coral reefs could be gone by 2050. it's going to take all of us and now is the time this is our decade for now reef burials haven't reached the mainstream even if every one of the 3.4 million americans who died last year ended up in their own reef ball it would still only replace about one square mile of florida's shrinking reefs if we did that around the world it probably would help but we just we aren't you know so i feel good about what we're doing perhaps this kind of memorial is just a person's final act of hope that things can get better now is a time where we need a healthy ocean more than ever people throw out millions of tons of furniture every year in america the amount of furniture sent to landfill has nearly doubled from 35 years ago that's about the same time ikea opened its first us store now the company is trying to keep its stuff out of the trash ikea plans to make all of its 10 000 products from renewable or recycled materials and they launched a buyback program in 30 countries can ikea really solve the furniture waste problem it helped create we went to vancouver canada to see how the company is trying to make it work katie dixon estimates about a fifth of the furniture in her apartment comes from ikea our media shelves are from ikea yeah we've got the ikea special here the ikea store in vancouver has a program that rewards customers for bringing in used furniture people upload a photo online wait to hear if their piece is in acceptable condition a few minor scuffs and marks and then drop it off today she's calling the store to try and resell these cadillac shelves we just need to downsize a little bit it costs 35 dollars brand new i got a gift card because there's a promotion right now where you get double the amount originally i would have gotten 15 for the item and with the promotion i got 30 back thank you the items end up in a special section of the store after being cleaned up as soon as we put out it's just flies they just can't believe that said that's so cheap ikea revolutionized home furnishing with easy to ship flat pack furniture made from particle board but a lot of its pieces are much less durable than objects made from solid wood so they can end up on the curb the buyback service offers an alternative last year it helped give 39 million products a second life but not every customer is successful in using the program in another part of vancouver maria hernandez also lives in a home surrounded by ikea products basically all our plates and bowls are from ikea plus the glasses the step stool this is also from ikea and this helps me because i'm very short so i can reach stuff like that which is also from ikea oh and this light is also from ikea and it's very kind of like mid-century modern she's trying to sell back her rascog utility cart within a few hours maria heard back my item was rejected because of the rust and the guy on the phone suggested that i could clean it off but i think i'm gonna not bother with it in the end maria gave her blue cart to a friend she may have had better luck if she shipped the cart to sweden there in ikea's home country a second-hand store salvages furniture from the recycling center next door ikea opened in the rayatuna mall in 2020 to find out if selling refurbished furniture in a smaller location is economically viable people drop off hundreds of items here every day so the first step is sorting here you can see the queue of stuff that we collected today maybe around 40 and that is a really good morning refurbishes steam clean and paint furniture almost as clean as the the product that we sell in the department store so you do a really good work you want but not everything makes the cut rejected items head back out to the recycling center so now it's up to the company for this example ikea to take care of the item that is donated to them ikea plans to keep it going at least until november 2021 to see if this model can expand globally and eventually turn a profit ikea's pitch is simple stylish furniture can be cheap but that marketing mantra created a mountain of disposable products for a long time ikea advertised their goods as if this disposability was almost a bonus it was a benefit you get rid of it because you were tired of it and you didn't have to feel guilty about it in fact in one advertisement they always they ended by saying the new one is always so much better and the new one is much better it's a problematic model for a company aiming to become the greenest in the world we are on a journey to become climate positive in a circle company by 2030 which means that we look at the material we source to shift to renewable and recycled materials reaching that goal would likely make a massive impact on the furniture industry over 700 million people visited ikea stores by the spring of 2020 that means that four times more people went to an ikea than tested positive for the coronavirus last year in fact the pandemic was great for business ikea sales increased by nearly half as people stuck at home looked to make their life more comfortable the company grew to a 50 billion dollar behemoth by keeping things as cheap as possible that's not always compatible with sustainability when you produce this many goods for this many people at a relatively low price and one of your focuses is always keeping the price as low as possible you inevitably gonna cut corners which of course they do and ikea's footprint is massive according to one report ikea is the single largest consumer of wood in the world responsible for cutting down a tree every second ikea says that's not true but it does use about as much wood as the entire russian federation exports in one year the company claims that nearly 100 of its wood bears the seal of the forest stewardship council that's an international body that certifies sustainably harvested wood but last year an investigation by the environmental organization earth site alleged that nearly half of the wood ikea sources from eastern europe is logged illegally not only does fsc certification not guarantee that your wood is sustainably sourced it doesn't even guarantee that it's devoid of connections to illegal logging and much worse a spokesperson for ikea wood supply and forestry told insider that independent investigations showed no illegally logged wood entered the ikea supply chain from ukraine infsc did another greenwash investigation of one particular supply chain ukraine they didn't look at other supply chains in ukraine that didn't look at other supply chains in russia and they certainly haven't forced fsc to make them fundamental changes to its systems and procedures which would prevent it being abused in the way that we sin both here in this case and also around the world critics say ikea's environmental promises are more about marketing than actually reducing waste or improving sustainability i think that a key is making some efforts now but i think you have to be very careful because they always have you know this good bit of green washing by that company still ikea's efforts are better than the alternative so the solution is not to go elsewhere um because the reality is that other companies other big furniture retailers are as bad if not worse and the easiest solution to furniture waste doesn't cost a penny ultimately you need to buy less right now you need to buy less people need to buy less need to throw away less and they need to make do amend more [Music] everything in the shopping mall is recycled riya tuna is the first second-hand mall in the world here shop owners profit from what other people don't want i found some gels a table really old phones you can find everything here it's just your imagination but this is not your grandmother's antique shop the riya tuna mall has a staff of 50 professionals who clean fix and tag every item everyone has just been cleaned up a little bit what makes this possible is the mall's location right next door to the municipal recycling center and the local government helps pay for it it's a model on how to save perfectly good stuff from being thrown away bye-bye something that's a problem in a lot of other countries in the u.s alone 11 million tons of clothing shoes and textiles end up in landfills every year riya tuna has diverted tons of potential waste since it opened six years ago while generating millions in revenue for small businesses even sweden's most famous company ikea refurbishes its furniture here so could fixing recycling be as simple as a conveniently placed mall we went to eskastuna sweden nicknamed the world's recycling capital to find out people donate hundreds of used items at rio tuna every day they do not get any money for it they do it by heart sophia has managed the mall since 2020. it could be anything it could be electronics it could be furnitures it could be textiles teamwork if you don't need your old clothes you can just put it in there and one central place to get rid of all your stuff and you know that is going back into use again which is really good mall workers sort the items in a massive storage area that's closed to the public they'll sort things based on which one of rio tuna's 14 stores they're headed to this is a sewing machine and this is going to a store called axelina that is selling vintage clothing and the textiles the shops pay nothing for the donated items but they do pay rent for their retail spaces here is axelina's box she already has one two three four five six sewing machines that she is going to repair usually it doesn't work sometimes it's just they need a little bit oil a little bit of love every shop here has their own box or their own white stripes so here you can see it's ikea's box now the co-workers will try to find out which furniture comes from ikea every day camilla and her team sort through dozens of items that could be resold at ikea's second-hand store here you can see the queue of stuff that we collected today maybe 40 today and that is a really good morning but not everything makes the cut anything rejected heads back out to the recycling center next door so now it's up to the company ikea to take care of the item that is donated to them refurbishers for ikea's second-hand store paint and steam clean furniture almost as clean as the product that we sell in the department store so you do really good work you want in other areas old items can be upcycled into something new and unique i'm building a barbie house home for my grandkids it would be a really good one to take the barbie for a good swim electronics are also fixed up every day over 700 people shop at the riya tuna mall shop owners set their own prices which means shoppers can always find a bargain was it cheap yes 50 crowns perfect a lot of the customers have a quite small wallet so they would like to to get a lot of value for the money but it's not just about the money other shoppers are just out looking for that one-of-a-kind discovery a picture 59 crowns it's very cheap riya tuna is part of a larger initiative to breathe new life into escazuna a place that went into decline after the collapse of its steel industry in the 1970s about a decade ago the city kickstarted its economy by going green now biogas made from trash fuels buses and heats homes bike lanes wrap around public parks the waste processing plan is experimenting with black soldier fly larva to make compost faster and the mall of you stuff is a success for the smaller shops business is booming sales topped 1.8 million dollars in 2020. actually last year when the pandemic was greater than ever we have the highest revenue here um for the shops but the ikea secondhand store hasn't broken even the company opened the shop as a six-month trial part of ikea's sustainability initiative we do have some difficulties with the pandemic because we don't have that much customer that we hoped for i like that it's ikea but we don't have ikea like the big shop in in our city so could the next rio tuna mall be coming to a town near you that it's the only one in the world actually but i'm really hoping that it's going to be a lot of it all over the world of course but most places aren't like sweden the swedes have one of the best recycling programs in the world less than one percent of household waste goes to landfill the country's gotten so good at recycling it's had to buy trash from other countries to keep its waste to energy facilities humming anybody raised in sweden knows how to separate trash into five colorful bins the city of eskasuna takes it to the next level most households separate their waste into seven different colored bags it's a system that makes it easier for automated sorting machines to do their job at the waste plant but in the u.s where 50 of waste still goes to landfill donating used items isn't as commonplace second-hand sales are usually handled by charities like salvation army or goodwill rather than subsidized by the local government like riatuna is but the desire to donate is shifting stateside drop-off donations to goodwill and salvation army were up in 2020. it overwhelmed some goodwill stores so much they had to pay a million dollar trash bill to get rid of overflow items and there's a growing trend towards buying clothes secondhand in the u.s with over 2 600 overflowing landfills and hundreds of declining malls maybe the solution is just a matter of building both a little closer together [Music] this is how algae is turned into plastic one company bets this green powder can replace at least some plastic in almost any product while also cleaning the air and water too much algae can hurt natural ecosystems and sometimes make toxins that endanger humans and animals can this invention rid the world of harmful algae and fight greenhouse gases we visited two factories on opposite sides of the globe to find out it's a race against time to clean harmful algae out of waterways before it dies it'll sink to the bottom it'll decompose it'll release those nutrients back into the water column and then with sunlight and water again you're gonna have another bloom rotting algae also releases methane a greenhouse gas over 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide ryan hunt co-founded bloom in the hope that monetizing algae will lead to cleaner waterways but first you have to get microscopic algae out of the water bloom made a machine that can do that on the spot engineering firm aecom rents the harvester and has used it to clean up harmful blooms in new york and florida bloom buys algae from around the world and turns it into plastic pellets at its headquarters in mississippi first workers run the algae through a grinding machine this equipment allows us to mill the algae into a very fine powder and select the particle size that we need for our process then they blend the powder with plastic the machine creates hot strings of the mixture a blade cuts the strings into pellets and water passes through the system the pellets are cooled out of the molten state into a rigid form and they're dropped into a super sac where we can store them and we can package them for use by our customers nearly every plastic product is made from pellets brands can buy bloom's algae pellets to replace traditional ones in their products we started with making flower pots that's evolved into making sneakers for adidas and a whole bunch of other products such as sports grips and traction pads now bloom's pellets are mostly used in foam for shoes algae can be a good substitute for plastic because it contains lots of protein but algae pellets can't completely replace regular ones or the final foam wouldn't be springy enough typically we'll use anywhere from 10 to maybe as high as 30 percent of the algae in the final foam just depending on that performance need one of bloom's customers makes its product here in donggan china this factory produces sockliners the foam part of a shoe that sits under your foot it's made from 15 bloom pellets mixed with traditional plastic ones technicians carefully measure out the two types and then a machine mixes them together after that it's business as usual for the foam factory workers knead the pellet mixture and shape it into sheets then a machine heats the sheets under pressure until they expand into foam workers trim the foam sheets and mold them into the finished sockliner bloom shares data on the environmental impact of the pellets which brands can use for marketing we can calculate the environmental impact on a gram per gram basis we can tell you exactly how much water was cleaned and how much carbon was captured in that shoe ryan says each pair of sockliners kept about eight grams of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and cleaned about 17 liters of water dr scholl's shoes has made more than two million pairs of sockliners since it started working with bloom which the companies say kept about 17 metric tons of co2 from the atmosphere that number includes carbon dioxide removed from the air by algae and emissions that were prevented by using algae in place of plastic [Music] but at the end of the day it's still more plastic right most shoes made with bloom are not any more recyclable than regular ones we are faced with a difficult challenge because the footwear materials typically are made in a way that is not conducive to directly recycling them through traditional means and they're usually not biodegradable but when it comes to storing greenhouse gases inside an object not breaking down is the whole point if the product degraded it would release the carbon back into the atmosphere experts say this type of technology can help fight climate change right now we just send co2 into the trash heap in the sky but if you can take any of that co2 bind it in a stable form use it to make money in a valuable product you want to do that but even if all the world's plastic contained recycled carbon it wouldn't make a dent in emissions right now we emit 51 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year the worldwide volume of plastic that's made every year is about 1 billion tons so we cannot solve climate on the back of plastic it's just too small nowhere close so is it worth it that depends what problem you're trying to solve ryan says the main benefit of bloom's work is cleaner water algae has become a major issue thanks mainly to waste water pollution from farms fertilizers are full of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus which make algae grow faster runoff creates overgrown algae that removes oxygen from the water and blocks light to creatures living below this is called a harmful algal bloom it can kill fish whales and dolphins and make seafood unsafe to eat in some cases blooms can release toxins and make people sick 43 states have documented illnesses or death of humans or animals caused by fresh water blooms and satellite images show bloom intensity on the rise in lakes on four continents since the 1980s the algae bloom sources from waterways primarily comes from lake tai in china but no matter how much algae you remove blooms will keep happening if wastewater pollution continues the way that we ultimately address harmful algae blooms in a long-term scenario is addressing the source of nutrients from the beginning that means cleaning up wastewater before it reaches rivers and lakes the company can do this by intentionally growing algae at water treatment plants to help remove nutrients that cause blooms our hope is over time as the scale increases we will be able to intercept more pollution upstream which will cause less algae blooms in nature bloom gets about half of its algae from lakes and half from treating wastewater but what about the environmental impact of processing the algae and shipping it back and forth across the globe it does take energy to get the algae into this usable form a consulting firm called earthshift analyzed bloom's processes and found that even after you factor in these costs algae pellets are more sustainable than plastic ones we're avoiding the massive amount of emissions associated with drilling for oil extracting the oil refining it into a specific polymer or specific chemical algae also requires less land water and energy than other bioplastic crops like corn and soybeans ultimately bloom's long-term mission is to teach people that harmful algae can be put to good use every city has a wastewater plant every wastewater plant has an algae problem but no one's addressing it no one's recognizing the value if people knew that the green scum in the back of their pond had value you bet people would be harvesting it [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 792,377

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Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, world wide waste, marathon

Id: Y5CGcPzZ6LA

Length: 109min 5sec (6545 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021