Category Archives: recycling

Convert documents to toilet paper in the comfort of your office

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Joel Johnson

What office worker wouldn’t love this machine from Tokyo’s Nakabayashi company, which converts regular office paper into toilet paper. The $95,000 machine, which is designed to be kept in an office, coverts 1,800 sheets of A4 paper into two rolls … Continue reading →

Community incinerator turns slum garbage into cooking heat

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Joel Johnson

AfriGadget takes a look at a clever garbage incinerator deployed in Kibera, Kenya, that turns waste fuel and garbage into cooking heat for residents. The design of the furnace actually allows plastics and other waste to be burnt without releasing … Continue reading →

Look at me still talking when there’s recycling to do: Ovetto Recycling Eggs

Posted on October 9, 2008 by John Brownlee

The Ovetto Recycling Egg is an expensive, dual-slot trash can that, for $250, allows for the separation of plastic and aluminum in one receptacle… a goal which can just as easily be accomplished for the price of a couple $5 … Continue reading →

Does Sennheiser use this cardboard packaging? (If they don’t, they should)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Joel Johnson

We can’t figure out if this packaging for the Sennhesier CX 300 headphones — made entirely of cardboard — is real or just a design prototype. Clearly previous CX 300 were packaged in the typical hard plastic shell, but perhaps … Continue reading →

Taking hammers to unsold Canon cameras, lenses

Posted on June 4, 2008 by Joel Johnson

There’s a lot of purportedness in this photoset: is this pile of Canon cameras really worth half-a-million dollars? Were they really damaged during shipping, forcing the company to destroy them all before they hit the grey market? Was there really … Continue reading →

Extracting metals from old electronics

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Joel Johnson

Reuters reports on “urban mining,” a fancy way of describing folks who drop old cell phones in chemicals by the ton, melt away everything plastic, and then harvest the gold, silver, and copper that remains. Eco-System, established 20 years ago … Continue reading →

Selling wine in TetraPak containers

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Joel Johnson

A wine importer is selling a Malbec grape wine called “Yellow + Blue” in TetraPak, a container familiar to many in the UK for its use in drink boxes. Dr. Vino took a look: The facility in Toronto is also … Continue reading →

Citizens still tossing too many electronics in the trash

Posted on April 17, 2008 by Joel Johnson

According to an in-depth report from Reuters, people are still throwing far too many of their gadgets in the trash: But while the percentage of old electronics thrown in the trash can dropped to 19 percent in 2007 from 21 … Continue reading →

Recycler BuyMyTronics.com Now Buying Cell Phones

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Joel Johnson

BuyMyTronics.com, the company that buys broken iPods, iPhones, and game consoles, has now added most cell phones to their line up. BuyMyTronics.com just added Cell Phones to our growing list of items that we purchase broken and used. For example; … Continue reading →

Leaf Bowls of India

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Joel Johnson

This post from Wan Yan Ling on Serious Eats about disposable bowls made of leaves makes me wistful for something like this in my country, although I’m sure it’d never get past the FDA. The imagery of completely environmentally kosher … Continue reading →