municipal solid waste

Urban Transformations: In Pune, India, Waste Pickers Go from Trash to Treasure

5 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans, and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling the materials to scrap traders for income. With no organized waste-collection system in the city of 4 million people, there was plenty of waste for her to pick—it filled bins, littered streets and piled up in mountainous heaps in dumps. But Sonawane and others like her were often treated like the garbage they collected.

The Capture of Lost Trash Assets

13 years ago Glenn Meyers 0 Comments

But a waste-to-energy resource that many are missing is the anaerobic digestion of mixed organic waste, such as food and yard waste, a technology that was introduce in Europe as far back as the 1930s. What are we missing here in the United States? This calls for putting some numbers to work.

Landfills Can Free Us from Petrochemicals

13 years ago Tina Casey 5 Comments

The gigantic waste hauling company Waste Management has been transforming itself into something of a jolly green giant, given its recycling operations, landfill gas recovery and sewage-to-biofuel ventures. In its latest move, company signed an agreement with the research firm Genomatica to develop processes for converting municipal landfill gas to … [continued]

$100 Billion Opportunity for Waste-To-Energy Companies in Developing World

14 years ago susan 3 Comments

Here’s an opportunity to wisely spend some of the $100 billion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised at Copenhagen to cut the greenhouse gases of developing nations by aiding in the development of renewable energy infrastructure to by-pass fossil fuel dependence.

Apparently one in four Chinese cities and seven out of 10 counties are without sewage-treatment plants, according to the People’s Daily.