This makes glass recycling much more efficient. What are we to do with all this glass? Some smart engineers are saying, “Build with it!”Ī report from the Journal of Cleaner Production finds that waste glass can be repurposed into building material without needing to remelt it and without requiring much water to produce. Which is a problem, because glass will take about 1 million years to break down. But a large amount of glass isn’t recycled and ends up in the landfill. We have to think about Western burial practices more strategically if we want to use our limited usable land more efficiently, economically and ecologically. More people will be born, more people will die. Worse, embalming fluid leaks into groundwater, and further carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere from the manufacturing of caskets, headstones and grave liners. Humans are embalmed and take a long time to decompose, so they don’t go back into nature the way organic beings are designed to. In most western societies, death is a somber and touchy subject, and we don’t mean to say that dead humans are waste to the environment.īut corpses do take up a lot of space, water and energy to be buried in the stereotypical western tradition.įor example, each year in the U.S., 2.7 million people die and are buried and emit carbon dioxide and particulates into the atmosphere. They offer an alternative to cremation and conventional burial practices by gently converting human remains into soil, which is then used to help restore forests, nourishing new life and sequestering CO2 from the air. With companies like Recompose or Earth, the latter option is possible. Or do you want your body to be composted for further use, giving new life? What do you want to happen to your body after you die? Do you want it to be buried in a coffin or cremated? Maybe the creepy-crawlies aren’t so bad after all. Instead of producing climate-warming greenhouse gases in the process, it can be used to cut the cost of growing and feeding livestock for human consumption. Using the black soldier fly larva effectively reduces the amount of organic waste rotting in the landfill. Once the larva are nice and fat, they can be fed to chicken, fish, even turtles. The larvae are great at converting this waste into body mass. They are a great source of sustainable protein ( 42%) for aquaculture, pets, as animal feed, and yes – also for humans!Īccording to the Smithsonian, larvae from black soldier flies already eat the food waste from about 2,000 restaurants in China. This particular type of larva is ideal because it has a voracious appetite: about 2.5 pounds of larva can eat through 5 pounds of food waste in 4 hours. This, in turn, competes with crop cultivation for human alimentation, because feeding crop to animals to eventually be able to eat a steak is very inefficient and a huge waste of resources.Īnd that’s not even talking about the environmental impact of the current meat production process through CO2 and methane emission or the widespread use of fertilizers and pesticides. At the same time, humans are cutting down huge areas of land – even the ever more endangered (rain) forests – to grow crop to feed livestock. Spoiled and thrown out food is also a lot of unused fuel. What most people are not aware of is that organic waste which ends up in landfills is actually a major source of greenhouse gas emission (find out why and how to avoid this in this article). While the thought of eating insects can make a person’s stomach churn, insects provide a great ecological service to reducing the immense amount of food waste dumped in landfills each year.Īccording to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, one third of the food produced each year – or about 1.3 billion metric tons of edible food – either spoils or is thrown away. While there may be some concern over BPA potentially leaking into nearby water systems, the financial, environmental and urban benefits of these roads may simply outweigh the costs.
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