Their YouTube channel has some great videos that illustrate the work they’re doing. A couple of interest to Environmental News Bits readers include:

• Trash | Track
• CO2GO – carbon footprint in real-time

Van Jones’ talk, which has been making the social media rounds, is available on the main TED site at http://www.ted.com/talks/van_jones_the_economic_injustice_of_plastic.html.

I noticed this morning, upon glancing through NSF’s science360 ‘News Service’ that aggregates stories including a lot of news releases, a link to an Idaho National Lab press release by Sandra Chung. It describes a method to blend wood with living bacteria. The bugs make a form of plastic called PHA. Not only does some of the plastic mix loose into the material’s recycled cellulosic woody matrix, but the bacteria grow cheaply on waste. Their sturdy plasticky cell walls go into the resulting faux-lumber too.

Interesting, I thought. Clever for sure. Then uh oh. It said one big advantage of the stuff is that if one puts this material in a compost heap it will break right on down. Ditto for landfills, if a little slower.  By contrast it says here and I believe it, conventional wood and petroleum-based plastic composite lumber will just sit there for centuries without rotting (That’s a hint why such boards make good decking).

Hmmm. This is just opinion, but it seems sensible enough to me to be worth raising in a real news story: Shouldn’t one WANT plastics to last near forever in a landfill? It’s a landfill, not a future farm plot where you don’t want the plow to hit a two-by-eight plank. Landfills are places that someday may make a suitable underpinning for other construction, a park, a forest, whatever. There are rocks and old bricks down there doing nothing much, why not plastic too? Especially if a plastic is made in part from petrochemicals, isn’t it better to sequester it for a long time rather than having it rot? That releases its carbon to the air, maybe as methane which is worse in the short run than CO2, accelerating global warming that some of us still believe in as a bad thing no matter what the US Chamber of Commerce says is the really sound science to embrace.

EPA’s Sustainable Materials And Residuals ManagemenT Decision Support Tool (SMART-DST) was developed by researchers in the National Risk Management Research Laboratory to encourage more sustainable management of solid waste. The DST provides a science-based approach to municipal waste management, using life-cycle assessments to evaluate energy, climate change pollutants, air criteria pollutants, and waterborne pollutants. In 2009, the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences asked EPA to assist in a study to promote sustainable development in Colon, Panama, by providing options to the region’s continued reliance on open dumping for waste disposal.

Zero waste, which focuses on sending minimal trash to landfills, is becoming a more popular topic among the sustainability crowd. The thinking goes that if we can are not constantly replenishing wasted raw materials, we reduce energy consumption and the pollution that goes along with it. The United Kingdom is pushing for a zero waste policy, and across the Atlantic there is talk about implementing such changes in Massachusetts…

The risk in any zero waste measure, however, is creating a demand for a resource that in the end cannot be sustained. Some argue that simply recycling or burning garbage does not address a core issue, consumerism, as Christine Loh of Hong Kong Civic Exchange has argued. So whether a city aggressively incinerates or composts, questions fester: what happens when that source runs out? If it’s biomass, do we go after trees? Or do we just have to consume more if those incinerators provide a cost-effective way to fuel our homes?

Scientists previously mapped huge floating trash patches in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, but now a husband-wife team researching plastic garbage in the Indian Ocean suggest a new and dire view. “The world’s oceans are covered with a thin plastic soup,” says Anna Cummins, cofounder of 5 Gyres Institute.

When it comes to mysterious islands in the Pacific Ocean, anything’s possible. Just ask Ricardo Montalbán and the castaways of “LOST.” Perhaps it’s that brand of fantastical thinking that led Netherlands-based architectural firm WHIM to devise Recycled Island, a floating man-made island constructed of plastic recycled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I’ll give you a moment to wrap your head around that.

CleanTech Biofuels, Inc., an early stage provider of cellulosic biomass feedstock derived from municipal solid waste (MSW) for energy and bio-based chemical production, announced an agreement with Fiberight LLC. (Fiberight), to install its demonstration vessel at Fiberight’s cellulosic ethanol pilot plant in Lawrenceville, Va. This combination of CleanTech’s patented Biomass Recovery Process and Fiberight’s Targeted Fuel Extraction process will create a fully-integrated MSW to cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant.

Residents are concerned about the oil spill’s more than 175,000 gallons of liquid waste and 11,276 cubic yards of solid waste that have been deposited.

The National Solid Wastes Management Association (NSWMA) and its members stated on Thursday that “they fully support state and local initiatives to reach ‘zero waste,’ and will continue to invest in technology to reach that goal,” says an NSWMA press release.

In a new position paper, the association states that “America is transitioning slowly but surely to a zero waste society” and that NSWMA’s members are “stepping forward to facilitate a discussion among the public, waste collection service providers, customers, manufacturers, government and consumers on how we can collectively work toward zero waste.”