16 Ways To Solve Trash, From Recycling Jeans To Making Bricks From Tires - Season 4 Marathon

Humans are generating more waste than ever, from the food we eat, the clothes we wear to the items we use once and throw away. Now people around the world are starting to treat waste as a product that can be reused, put in buildings or turned into new materials that we don't even have names for yet here are 16 stories from around the world about dealing with waste Worldwide. This is one of the first tire

recycling

companies in Nigeria. Workers begin by tearing out the steel wires so the rubber can be cut, crushed and spun. on

bricks

for drive

ways

and playgrounds, this is softer and actually a great bounce here.

E falo started free

recycling

in 2018. Now his company recycles hundreds of

tires

per day. We have more than 400,000

tires

stored on the S side, but it is only a small portion of The problem is that humans throw away about a billion tires every year. Recycling them becomes expensive and complicated, so in most countries they just accumulate in landfills and here in Nigeria they can help spread malaria. We have stagnant water that can then become a breeding ground for four mosquitoes. Why is it so difficult to recycle tires and why are tire graveyards so dangerous? More than half of all cars in Nigeria are found in and around its largest city, Losos, so there's a good chance that old tires will end up in the hands of a roadside mechanic like maybe you.

You go on the road you have a flat tire, I'll fix it for you. He saves any tire he can't fix to sell and recycle for free. Sway and other shop owners like Adams make about 30 cents per tire, it's good, it's good, good, because that This tire is condemned before can't be used for anything before, so now I can set it up for free for the company. Today's salon will be stored in the lot behind the 2 1/2 acre free recycling facility when a fed wanted to launch the business, no one believed it. she could make money with a lot of time, she looked at us like we were crazy and generally that was the reaction, but now she has over 100 full time employees and the company makes about 16 cents for every tire recycled in my life.

The first tire in which the first baby was recycled in October 2020. The first challenge is to remove the steel cables embedded in the rubber, so one of their first investments was this machine called polemicist that removes them in about 20 seconds . The tires then head to this helicopter. which cuts each one into four or five pieces,

making

it easier to work with them. The company can process about 150 car tires per hour. The same elements that make tires durable also made them difficult to recycle in the 19th century. Charles Goodar accidentally dropped sulfur-treated rubber onto a stove and discovered a process for hardening the material called vulcanization.

He made the rubber stronger and more resistant to extreme temperatures, exactly what cars needed from tires as more Americans began driving. Rubber production skyrocketed in the early 20th century, with most of it coming from plantations in the Southeast. Asia and then World War II happened the verdict is on rubber the enemy now has over 90% of the world's raw rubber supply the allies needed a lot of rubber for trucks, cars and airplanes the United States asked its major manufacturers to find an additional source synthetic rubber one of the newest wartime industries one of America's modern miracles Today's tires are a mix of natural and synthetic rubber reinforced with metal and plastic fibers to make them more durable, but no matter how strong be, they do not last forever and all Old rubber accumulated rapidly in the late 20th century.

The US had accumulated more than a billion old tires in landfills. They can remove toxins and, when buried, can sometimes trap methane or other gases and literally float to the surface. They also burn quite a bit. In 1987, about 30 acres of tires caught fire in Colorado, it took almost a week to put them out, and the incident put this type of waste in the national spotlight. Within a few years, all but two states passed laws that helped finance a new tire scrap. By 2021, the US industry had reduced the number of tires in storage to just 50 million. Now the United States burns a third of its used tires to fuel cement kilns and paper mills, and another third is turned into rubber surfaces like artificial turf.

Less than 20% ends up in landfills, but in developing countries like Nigeria, tire waste remains a growing problem. The country is among the bottom 10% in the world for recycling and sustainability, but free recycling aims to change that. In the factory, outside Flos, the shredder breaks the tires into pieces, these drums crush. They divide them into even smaller pieces, workers rake the remains on vibrating screens, and large vacuum cleaners prevent rubber dust from filling the factory. Pieces of air 5 mm and smaller fall through larger pieces return to the process and are crushed again. The magnets pull out the remaining metal fragments, so here.

It is the F SE where the fibers have separated from the chromium fiber. These are reinforcing fibers usually made of plastic nylon or some other synthetic material. Now all that's left is rubber. The final vibrating screen separates the different sizes of powder, which will give a smoother feel. Suitable for playgrounds and gyms and 3-5mm crumbs which are durable enough to use on drive

ways

to make those paving stones. Rubber crumbs inside heated mixers. A polyurethane binder helps hold everything together. It took a long time to figure out the right ratio that could work. In the tropical climate of the Nigerian savanna, a blend or formulation that would work in, say, Europe, wouldn't necessarily work here, so you know you just have to find what works best.

Dyes adjust the color. A small layer of the color mixture first goes into the mold and then. The rest of the brick is filled with undyed rubber mixture which helps reduce manufacturing costs, then it is pressed by hand and loaded into tricks, after loading it is rolled to the hydraulic press where we press all the material mix. proper compression is finally left to dry in an oven for up to 8 hours Nigeria's unreliable electricity grid means the factory has to produce most of the energy it uses. 80% of our energy is generated internally from diesel generator sets. Workers remove the dry paving stones.

From the molds on a normal day they make enough pieces to cover an entire tennis court. Each tire produces about 25 of these dog-bone-shaped rubber

bricks

. They are now ready to ship waste tires. They have become a 12 billion global industry in the US. In Europe and Japan most are recycled and many are burned for energy. Tire-based fuel costs less than natural gas and burns cleaner than coal, but still produces emissions comparable to other fossil fuels through another method called pyrolysis. Tires heat to extreme temperatures without oxygen. They claim it is the cleanest way to recycle them, but it requires a lot of energy, leaving small profit margins in the US.

A third of recycled tires are turned into new surfaces in homes and playgrounds or mulch for gardens in response. to public concerns about crumb rubber leaching toxins in the U.S. The federal agency said it could not prove health risks existed, but recommended that children not eat the rubber. Sound Advice in Losos the most sold free recycling items are the paving stones used in playgrounds like this one at an international school we have been to. very happy with your service um The product is good, the thick rubber provides a good bounce for children when they play, but also makes repairs and additions easier.

If you want to add more services or more structures, simply remove it and when you're done, put it back. While free recycling aims to eliminate all of Nigeria's tire landfills, for now this flow continues to grow, but that's not eo's only concern. The mother of two is starting a family and a business together. She says free recycling is about to become profitable and she continues to build it brick by brick. I think she is a natural problem

solve

r. She saw a problem. She found a solution. Charming but disturbingly efficient. She plans to expand across the country, as well as the IV Coast of Rwanda, Ghana and Kenya.

I'd like to see us address it. more waste different types of waste your paper waste e-waste uh pet bottle that's why our slogan is waste for wealth hotels throw away millions of bars of used soap every week, but they don't have to go in the

trash

, recycle soap It can be as simple as shaving the surface with potato peelers, we would sit here and just scrape it off and make sure it was clean and that's it, no that was 14 years ago today. Sean Seer's company, Clean the World, has a factory that can handle thousands of bars an hour and on the other side of the Atlantic in Leon, France, the uniso team turns waste into new bars they say are completely hygienic.

Both companies donate their products to homeless people and children in developing countries, but as these nonprofits refine the process of dealing with this type. Trash Hotel CS has begun to reduce the use of individually wrapped hygiene products and some countries are even considering banning them entirely. We traveled to France and Florida to see how these two companies are helping people get clean around the world. A bar of second-hand soap is not disgusting as it may seem, yes, there is probably dirt, hair, dead skin cells and bacteria, but when you wash, the soap molecules bind to the germs and natural oils on your skin.

While these molecules attract grease and dirt, they repel water. Running water pushes soap molecules away. along with all that dirt captured from your skin, safely away from you, so even a contaminated bar is safe to clean your hands with bar soap, it may have germs, but it probably won't make you sick, in fact, the simple act of washing your hands. can remove something as serious as the Ebola virus, yet both Unis Soap and Clean the World follow additional guidelines for cleaning their bars. This is how Unis Soap collects thousands of bars from hotels in France. First, all dirt left on hotel guests must be removed.

The team. They set up peelers on a table to remove the outer layer The peelers are very sharp so the workers wear special gloves to protect their fingers They inspect each bar The company claims that scraping alone is enough to maintain a sanitary process but it's a lot of work so Pauline worked with an engineer to invent a machine that can reduce some of the labor, while Unis Soap didn't show us exactly how this prototype works, it hopes to build more as it scales up commercial mixers, grinds and mixes bars of different sizes into smaller, more uniform bars. pieces, the mixture finally enters an extruder that molds the soap into one long piece, workers hand cut the individual bars and stamp the Unis Soap logo on each one Since the company launched in 2017, workers have processed almost 10 metric tons of soap this way in the United States.

Claims the world's largest cleaning company upgraded to an industrial assembly line years ago, used soap comes from thousands of hotels around the world, totaling about 1.4 million rooms in 2009, CEO Sean Seeper He began

making

shaving soap with vegetable peelers in a one-car garage. I would sit here and just scrape it and make sure it was clean and ready. Today a giant machine called a refiner cleans dirt and hair from the top layers by expelling uniform noodle-like strands from all the different sized bars. They are heated and mixed with a water and bleach solution for 7 to 8 minutes to disinfect them.

A conveyor belt carries the sterilized mixture to a final refiner before it is molded. A long bar of recycled soap comes out of the extruder as it is cut into individual pieces. Bars Clean the World send soap abroad to countries like Ghana, Bangladesh and the Philippines, where many people live without basic access to running water. More than 3 billion people around the world live this way and more than 700 children die every day fromdiarrheal diseases that could easily be transmitted. it is prevented by washing with soap and water we need a couple more the company informs its hotel partners about how their donations help so that they know EX L how much diversion to landfills they have had how many bars of soap have reached the hands of children and mothers around the world Thanks to its efforts since 2009, Clean The World has donated more than 73 million recycled bars to children in need.

While Unis soap continues to grow compared to Clean The World, it is already having an impact closer to home. Pauline got the idea from her. She recycled soap while staying at a hotel, so she began contacting hotels in 2017 about their used toiletries. They now collect soap from almost 350 places. Getting the soap was the easy part. Figuring out how to recycle it took longer, leading Pauline to a government. program that matches youth with disabilities with a variety of small businesses, and she relies on volunteers to help distribute hygiene kits containing toothbrushes, toothpaste, and, of course, recycled soap.

Marcel comes several times a week to meet friends, play and stay warm. In addition to using the only public showers in the area, Uniso has donated 30,000 of these bars across France to community centers like this one, but the hotel industry may be moving away from the practices that allow these two companies to help people In 2019, Marriott International and IHG, two of the largest hotel companies in the world, announced that they were supplying bathrooms with large refillable liquid dispensers, representing nearly 2.4 million hotel rooms without more bars in their showers. The company estimates that they will eliminate more than 2 million pounds of plastic going to the landfill this way.

Marriott told Insider that it's even considering removing the small bars of hand soap next to hotel sinks, but this trade-off isn't that simple. According to one study, washing with a bar uses less soap than liquid cleaners, up to six times. For starters, they don't require plastic bottles, and those refillable soap containers almost always pick up more bacteria when staff refill them. Despite this, Unis Soap and Clean the World continues to expand its soap recycling initiatives beyond its humble beginnings. They both started from a simple question. What happens to this soap after I review it? The next time you are asked how a hotel can improve your stay, consider asking them what they do with their dirty soap.

This huge pile of pine trees will turn into cardboard packaging. A single box can contain material from thousands of trees and pass through the hands of hundreds of workers It's like it's just a box and I say no, there's not much in it. If you've used a cardboard box in the US today, there's a 1 in 3 chance that International Paper has made it the largest paper company in the world. Cardboard is essential for countless industries protecting items as they move on trucks and ships and the good news is that it is one of the most recycled materials in the world, but if so much of it is reused, why do we still have to cut down millions of trees?

And is it possible to make environmentally friendly cardboard? This factory in Georgia is just one of hundreds of facilities operated by International Paper. It runs 24/7 to meet the demand of online grocery stores and more, but no one in this industry would call their product. cardboard, why don't you like to use the word cardboard because it's not cardboard? Experts call it corrugated packaging, a wavy layer they say sandwiched between two flat outer sheets, but yes, most people call it cardboard and it starts with live trees. Forester Alex Singleton guided us. an area whose trees were sold to International Paper 2 years ago has since been replanted with longleaf pines, but it will still be decades before the new crop matures.

For many foresters, we only see a site harvested once during our careers. From this stage until it would probably be around 30 years after logging, landowners would make money by selling their trees to different industries, turning them into things like poles. wooden telephones and, of course, paper. The idea is to turn forests into an investment so that more people plant them and maintain them without young people. Healthy forest our industry could not succeed I don't see logging or logging as a negative, it's just the beginning of a process, but critics say that replanting trees is not the same as letting them grow.

This is one of the most industrial and most deforested sectors. Forests of the Planet The American South, sometimes called America's Timber Basket, is home to 2% of the world's forested land, but produces nearly 20% of our pulp and paper products, meaning it is highly productive or highly exploited depending on who you ask. On a typical day, around 300 trucks loaded with freshly cut trees arrive at this mill. First stop is Woodyard. Some of the trees are kept in these huge piles that ensure the mill can sustain 24-hour operations. They come from farms and forests within 12 miles a sprinkler keeps them moist so they stay cool and to reduce the risk of fire a crane picks up the trees from the pile and drops them into a machine that removes the bark with a drum and you're removing the bark, you know, I tell you kids similar to a potato peeler this process creates tons of leftover bark that will be burned for energy the debarked logs travel through a shredder and accumulate here in that pile of wood chips we can keep up to about 100,000 tons of chips, it only takes about 10 days to cross this mountain.

A conveyor belt feeds the next pulping step. Pine is made of long, fibrous fibers held together by a natural glue-like material called lignin. Paper makers want the fibers but not the glue, so they use steam. and chemicals to dis

solve

it, the reaction can create a gas that smells like sulfur, if you've ever noticed a rotten notor while driving by a paper mill, that's probably why International Paper says its plants are built to capture many of those gases, which reduces the smell, the fibers are covered in a toxic mixture of chemicals and tree waste, so they have to be cleaned, that liquor that is washed evaporates, consolidates and enters what we call a recovery boiler;

In other words, the plant burns those sticky remains creating steam. and chemicals that can backtrack the process and save energy. We are actually plants within a plant, so we have our own chemical plant, our own energy plant. In fact, this mill produces approximately 75% of its own energy on site. IP also burns. less carbon than before, which helps reduce emissions from factories, but trees contain a lot of carbon and the company's own sustainability report says the carbon released by processing the trees was more than double the emissions coming from the burning fossil fuels in 2022 before pulp becomes paper.

Workers add used cardboard to the mix. Old packaging gets a new start at this warehouse. The boxes we use here at the Recreation Cycle plant come from local retailers and grocery stores within up to 300 miles of the factory. Katie Freeze has worked on this recycling. Mill for 3 years, she says people still have a lot of misconceptions about the process. Our process is designed to remove things like grease and tape, simply recycle any corrugated boxes you have, whether it has tape or food on it, it can be used. To make paper again, you can recycle a pizza box every day.

This factory recycles 500 tons of used cardboard. Each ton saves energy and water for trees. Saving water is key because almost every step of paper manufacturing uses a lot of it; used cardboard is also pulped. The water and chemicals are then mixed with fresh fibers. Workers simply call this huge contraption the paper machine, it presses the pulp flat and squeezes it out of water, then sends the mixture through a series of dryers heated to over 200°F as it travels down the the machine and it becomes drier and drier and after all, you still only have paper to turn into corrugated packaging, the rolls go to a box plant like this one in Illinois, here the flexible paper is turned into strong boxes, the heartbeat of the plant is the core, corrugated is the central shape of the packaging.

The cape takes on that distinctive wavy shape. The waves are actually called flutes and they are what give strength to this type of packaging. There are different types of flutes. The smaller ones print better, they aren't as good at stacking strength and the larger ones don't print. too, but they are better for accumulating strength. This plant can make boxes in more than 1.6 million different designs. The smallest box I've ever made was about the size of a ring box. The largest box I have ever made in one of my installations was for a washing machine after gluing the layers.

Final touches include printing graphics and cutting the sheets into their final shapes to save space. Most boxes are shipped flat to customers and any trim or waistband pieces can be recycled back into the process. USA More than 70% of used cardboard is recycled, which is much higher than rates for aluminum, glass or plastic. Wrought paper is very easy to recycle because the supply chain supports it, so it has value and also helps nearly 80% of Americans do so. recycle it using containers right on the sidewalks, so why does the industry still use so many trees? Part of this is that old cardboard cannot be recycled indefinitely.

The EPA says it can only go through the process about seven times each time. By pulping and blending the long, strong pine fibers become a little shorter and weaker and eventually the degraded pieces of paper simply pass through the meshes and out of the process, so recycling is very important, but even if 100% of the boxes will be reused, making new ones would still mean cutting down trees. Some expert site. The big question is whether the industry manages forests responsibly. International Paper sources more than 90% of its fiber from trees in the southern US, where the vast majority of forests are on private property.

What we do is provide a viable solution. market for that owner's trees so that they have the necessary income to pay for the reforestation that is carried out on their lands. Foresters and paper companies argue that without such a market people could simply sell their land, potentially losing forests forever to agricultural parking. Data from plots or other uses from the University of Maryland shows that tree cover in the US today is about the same as it was in 2000. To me, as a forester, it must mean that we are doing our job right. job. We are taking care of the environment, we are promoting forest growth, but measuring forest area is complicated to begin with, not everyone agrees on what a forest is.

Pine plantations are not forests, they are tree farms that lack the diversity, the structural diversity, the biological diversity that a Many of these species depend on a non-profit environmental organization called The Dogwood Alliance. He says tree farms have been replacing natural forests which could potentially have a global impact. Some experts estimate that natural forests are 40 times better than plantations at storing carbon, making them crucial to slowing growth. Forests also have many other benefits, such as filtering our drinking water and reducing erosion. Certain forestry techniques. Technological techniques, such as leaving some large trees in place, can help planted forests retain those benefits.

I think there are ways to manage forests sustainably without removing the largest ones. trees and completely destroy the structural complexity of a forest, but that requires very skilled specific forestry and that is not always what happens, ultimately the world uses a lot of paper that has to come from somewhere; You may see certifications stamped on boxes that are supposed to indicate they were made from trees that were sustainably harvested. International Paper says more than 30% of the fibers it used in 2022 came from forests with one of those certifications. I think there is a way for industry and conservation to coexist in the southern forests, but there has to be a way for industry and conservation to coexist in the southern forests.

With a good faith effort on all sides, this sticky substance can be turned into a film similar toplastic that can cover all kinds of food and you can eat it. The process that makes it possible is carried out in a high-tech laboratory, but the raw materials come from seaweed. Agricultural companies around the world are racing to find eco-friendly versions of thinner packaging; It is the material that makes up about half of all the plastic in our oceans. Jane says that she has invented a product that could replace it. We make Cleo tensiles that we call good plastic uh or uh, the kind of plastic form that grows seaweed doesn't require fertilizer, fresh water or soil. n and her team say their product is non-toxic and dissolves completely in liquid within hours.

They call the company Zero Circle, a nod towards reducing emissions and waste to zero and right now this startup is competing against seven other plastic alternative companies for a prize of 1.2 million. We traveled to India to see how seaweed can replace plastic food packaging, while extracting this new material requires state-of-the-art equipment. The algae used to make it use only the simplest tools. Dilip Kumar owns this seaweed farm and supplies raw materials to Zero Circle. This material grows rapidly every 45 days once from the date of navigation. Dilip hires locals like Kopia to build bamboo rafts at the same time.

Fishing dominated this area, but in recent years more locals have made a living farming seaweed. They are working in the same waters where they used to fish before and now they can farm them. With more than 4,500 meters of coastline, India has quite a bit of space to grow them. Seedlings are tied to ropes on each raft and each knot holds a seedling. Lakshmi has been farming seaweed for 18 years and says the local perception of the business has changed quite a bit. Every part of this operation is done by hand. including transporting full rafts for harvest workers cut the seaweed but allow some segments to grow back then the seaweed is dried in the sun after approximately 36 hours laakshi removes dried salty seaweed and other contaminants the dried seaweed is exposed to the sun sun for a few more days before heading to the zero circle labs for these Farmers seaweed provides a livelihood, but it's not always easy, you don't know what's coming in the ocean for you today, it's like a box of surprises all days and you keep solving the puzzle every day, they do what they do.

Commercial seaweed farming around the world has increased a thousand-fold since 1950, but experts warn that large, rapid increases in seaweed farming could have unintended consequences. Algae rafts can block light and change the way water flows. to the ecosystem below and if farming operations are not managed properly, it can be devastating in 2013, a bacteria decimated the seaweed industry in the Philippines. Studies show that the disease spreads easily between rafts that have been placed too close together here at the Zero Circles laboratory in Puneet. In plastic alternatives, first, the dried seaweed goes through several washing and grinding steps. Notice how it flows freely.

The clean water removes impurities from the washed algae and then enters a reactor to be heated. The carbohydrates within the algae are what is needed to make a plastic-like material. It is extremely gel-like and viscous, technicians add solvents, it is strained and then we get this. You can see the gel starting to clump together in the vaker. The next stop is this device called a rotary evaporator, it removes the solvents until it is refined and flows more freely. gel is then placed in a mold to be molded and dried, so if you notice this forms a nice thick gel that can be removed from the plate in a few minutes and when stretched thinner the seaweed mixture comes out looking like family films that companies use for packaging.

Food Zero Cical film can be heat sealed like plastic wrap, but unlike conventional plastic, it dissolves in water in boiling water, it's a matter of moments in seawater. The team says the film will disappear in 2 to 4 hours and takes up to 4 months. In a zero-composite post pile, Circle designed a product compatible with existing machinery, meaning manufacturers would not need new equipment to make the film. without plastic, then these pets are placed on a manufacturing line, which is clear. THS, we are not altering it. but we are adapting our product and the company plans to start selling pellets by 2024.

The idea is that manufacturers can make edible biodegradable forms of many products, such as instant soups and tea bag packages, hamburger wrappers, gift wrappers, food packaging. fashion and old supermarket bags, they have very, very good capacity, they can hold 5 to 8 kg in a single shopping bag, while these alternatives to plastic offer great environmental benefits. Traditional plastic film made from petroleum is still cheaper. We're trying to solve two big problems: one is to make a fantastic material and make it at a cost that people can use it, so Zero Circle claims to have an eco-friendly plastic alternative that it wants to scale up, but it's not alone.

The company is one of eight finalists for the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Award. The fashion designer partnered with Lonely Whale, a non-profit organization that played a huge role in the movement to eliminate plastic consumption. straws, are offering $1.2 million to find alternatives to thin plastic films. I was ecstatic. We almost missed the deadline because we didn't know. Four of this year's finalists use seaweed alternatives. The seaweed community is not very competitive. very friendly with each other and we are all friends, we talk about the same problem. It took more than a year for the judges to ensure that the winning company's solution was more than just marketing.

Scientists analyzed each product through a battery of experiments with samples placed in ocean water for months under the same conditions that conventional ocean plastic would be so

trash

. Other trials evaluated how plastic alternatives could affect wildlife. The finalist and controls will remain in the intestine of the simulated pit for 24 hours when Insider published this video. The Tom Ford award had not been announced, we will add a link in the description to the winning companies. I think it's probably one of the oldest challenges we've ever participated in, but they're doing it well and I think that's what makes it special.

NHHA was partly inspired by their own consumption. I always had that guilt that I think every Millennial has about the amount of pollution that we are creating on a daily basis, so circle zero is not just looking at plastic films but The things that we may not think about many brands that are changing to the paper are still putting plastic coatings, glues, coatings, but Niha and zero Circle are working to change even those parts with algae. This is the first time we developed the algae-based glue. volatile organic compound and free of formal deide three works on cardboard, paper and wood quite strongly, so the future of circle zero could be growing as fast as sewing and there was an ocean of opportunities that no one was looking at, which I felt In countries like India, it is incomprehensible why people would not take advantage of such an opportunity.

About half of every pineapple eaten ends up in the trash. The skin and the heart can be composted, but in many places they are not a single company. Turn leftover fruit into natural soap and cleansers founder Le D Hang says they're safer for the planet and people, so safe that he drinks them every day. Fermented fruit is part of a new trend. Clean with enzymes instead of harsh chemicals. Does it really work throughout the story? People have used all kinds. of things to wash everything from animal fat to human urine, in the early 20th century scientists discovered how to make foam in a laboratory using fossil fuels, which paved the way for all kinds of synthetic gels, powders and cleaning chemicals which are largely detergents.

You can actually see the difference instantly. The problem is that they were full of things that water treatment plants were not built to clean, like phosphorus and nitrogen. When these elements flood waterways, they can cause algae to grow faster, creating thick layers of sludge that suffocate life. Next, that's exactly what happened in North America in the 1960s. Lake Erie is almost biologically dead today; detergent pollution has spread around the world, foaming rivers and feeding the grown algae. Fua Biotech is betting on fruit cleaners to be the next chapter for cleaning products. The name Fua comes from the phrase fruit warrior.

The company buys fruit waste from a factory that makes canned pineapples. Workers here cut up thousands. of them every day this pile is the product of only half a day of work these used to rot in nearby landfills creating bad odors and methane a powerful planet Waring Gas now workers load the remains into a truck and travel approximately 2 miles to the production site . Here the team unloads the fruit skins and washes them, then mixes the first ingredients, sugar and water. Fua uses about 2 metric tons of sugar every month. Add the pineapple peels to the sugar water and wait for the mixture to begin to ferment.

Fermentation is when microbes like bacteria or yeast break down complex molecules like sugar into simpler things like alcohol. This is how barley becomes beer and grapes become wine in fua fermentation. The waste is converted into cleaning liquids, but the secret is not the alcohol, it is the enzymes and acids that the pineapples release. Enzymes are molecules that speed up chemical reactions such as digestion in the human body. Certain enzymes can fight germs by entering cells and breaking them down from the inside. It can kill bacteria or just slow them down enough that they probably won't make you sick, but to produce those enzymes that stop plant germs, you have to ferment the right mix of ingredients for just the right amount of time, the workers here stir the mixture every time. . one day after about a month it looks like this after two months this mass of bacteria and microorganisms forms that's how you know it's working the founders don't keep any of their processes a secret Wang says she learned this technique from Rokon Pon bong she is a scientist and a Buddhist nun who discovered the formula and then shared it freely for others to use after the mixture ferments for 3 months there is enough acid and enzymes to work as a cleaner now it is ready to be filtered the leftover solids are They become fertilizer for nearby farms and the remaining liquid is the basis for everything Fu does.

Fua buys these oils from local farmers, who make them using agricultural waste such as stems and leaves. The final blend is bottled and shipped to Min Mars throughout Vietnam or to online customers in most countries. A plate bottle. The soap sells for just over $2. Wong says it is less than the cost of similar imported products. She uses an on-site lab to test her products and analyzes competing products, as well as measuring pH and testing other additives. Cleansing with fermented fruit is a fairly new concept, but there is evidence that it has a lot of potential. Researchers compared a mixture of pineapple enzymes with bleach and water and found that it killed one type of bacteria equally well, and early research suggests that the fruit's enzymes could even make wastewater cleaner.

We know more about common chemicals. Cleaners like bleach kill many germs, but they carry other risks. He began making fruit cleaners when his wife, now the company's CEO, developed eczema. Studies have linked cleaning products to skin irritation and respiratory problems, including asthma, when used and stored properly, they are safe. for most people, but mixing bleach with the wrong cleaners can create deadly fumes, which happens thousands of times a year here in the United States. So could we one day replace bleach and household detergents with fermented pineapples? We asked an expert. He will be surprised. Yes, totally.

Yes, but he also said we need more research. Only a certain number of bacteria have been tested, so a wide range of studies with a wide range of microorganisms will probably need to be done to ensure they are truly effective. Enzymatic cleaners pose another challenge. one of the main problems with a certain temperature is that it could be inactivated.Fua says their products can last about 2 years, which is about the same time as most chemical cleaning sprays. It still has more work to do with so much pineapple processing in the region the company says. has a lot of waste to work with, but mainly the founders want people to know that there is a gentler alternative, so they are eager to spread the word: we make over a billion pairs of

jeans

each year and most of They end up in landfills, that's partly because cotton is notoriously difficult to recycle, the process is long and expensive, but some in the fashion industry want to make a pair of

jeans

greener.

It's a big problem because this country imports more used clothing than anywhere else in the world. So how do you recycle jeans? It starts in huge facilities like this one in Karachi, where workers sort through 25 metric tons of used clothing every day, most of these items donated to charities like the Salvation Army in other countries, often everything that isn't can sell in second-hand stores in the United States and Europe can sell in sorting centers in Pakistan. Bags, sweaters, pants and more are separated into hundreds of categories. Items are grouped according to quality and type. They then send them to places like this huge second hand market in Ghana, here local sellers bid on the bales and then try to sell their weed for a profit.

In Pakistan, lower quality garments are sold at low prices to recyclers, usually to be shredded and used. things like insulation and where most see rags, AFM sees riches, buy used jeans from this local sorting company, clothes that are too dirty or not good to wear, we give them to companies like artistic for recycling at AFM , workers cut the garments The company cannot process stretch jeans blended with polyester or nylon, so it only accepts denim that is at least 98% cotton. It takes about three pairs of used jeans to make one pair of recycled pants. A quick pass down this conveyor belt.

Cut these long strips. of fabric into small pieces, each step aims to grind the pants into cotton. This compactor presses the cotton into large bales. The company says these machines can process up to 800 metric tons of used clothing each month, but the recycled fibers are too short to be spun into yarn. into yarn, so the company had to add virgin cotton to the mix when AFM first purchased a cotton recycling plant in 2015. It was only able to incorporate 5% recycled material into its mix today it can mix up to 30% cotton used. This machine is called The blendo mat removes the top layer of fiber from various bales to ensure consistency.

This particular batch of denim will use 8% recycled material and 92% virgin cotton. In the spinning room, a carding machine draws the blended cotton into a net and then stretches it to a thick thickness. ropes called sers the ring spinning process converts rope into yarn, although it is largely automated now this method is based on ancient yarn spinning techniques the fiber is twisted tightly and then wrapped around a spool called a bobbin workers They place larger spools on a metal rack called an AEL and then wind the threads around a beam, one of these can hold over 4000 strands of thread side by side, now it's time to take a bath.

AFM dyes its fabric with recycled indigo, completely eliminating wastewater from the dyeing process. We are making this fabric by extracting indigo from our After using textile waste and then reusing it to dye new fabric, the strips appear green at first because indigo dye is not soluble in water. The threads only turn blue when they come into contact with oxygen. That's why the strings rise into the air. The process is called skying, these rollers expel excess water and then each rope lands in its own bucket in the Rope Dyeing Department. Production is around 70,000 m per day. The Indigo dyeing process is generally associated with massive water consumption and pollution, although it is prohibited by law in some Pakistanis.

Factories pump raw water into sewers. City canals, rivers and groundwater contaminate already scarce supplies. Many factories lack the space or resources to treat their water, but AFM says it purifies around 300,000 gallons of wastewater at a giant treatment plant every day. Up to 70% of this water is used in its recycling process at the factory. In the factory, an automated loom mixes dyed yarn with white yarn, usually in a 3:1 ratio, giving the jeans their signature 12 pattern. The fabric is wrapped around giant wheels and then layered. In total, AFM produces 36 million million fabrics a year, which is almost enough to circle the entire planet.

The finished fabric is cut into various sizes and styles using Cutting Edge software. Lasers etch patterns into genes. This technology eliminates the need for toxic chemicals often used to create a stressed vintage look AFM uses less water in its finishing process, as a result, saving water is crucial in Pakistan, much of the country depends on the Indis River for irrigation and hydropower, but extreme droughts mean parts of it are already drying up. It takes 10,000 L of water to make a single pair of jeans, so reducing water consumption can have a big impact. Eco-friendly washing machines give jeans a more worn look.

Sustainable washing means less energy, less water and fewer chemicals. This is a big impact for sustainability. Consider what we are doing now and then a dryer dries the jeans as they hang in the air. Think of it as a car wash for pants workers. Add the finishing touches, from buttons to labels. From there, they head to stores across Europe, North America and In Australia, once-worn jeans get a second life - while it may seem like AFM has its process down to a science, it wasn't always that way. The now multi-million dollar doll company began as a small clothing store in 1949 by Ahmed Om and his wife HRA.

Ahmed sold handmade leather hats and bags to sailors from his home in 1972. They opened their first clothing factory. Today it is directed by his son Ikbal. Ahmed HR's role in the company would later inspire his granddaughters and Haa Ikbal to follow in his footsteps. My sisters are now directors of AFM. My grandmother actually managed the operations at that time and then it became factories. When women apply for jobs at AFM, not only at the worker level but also for management positions, they do so because they know it is a possibility here. AFM has also been at the forefront when it comes to sustainable denim manufacturing.

In 2015, it became one of the first companies in Pakistan to own this. A cotton recycling plant that produces recycled denim from there became the number one priority. AFM is not alone in its mission to recycle textiles, other factories in Pakistan are also investing in cotton recycling. It has become a real necessity and it is not just something that looks good in your portfolio, but it is something that is now required, even big-name companies like H&M have invested. Millions in new recycling technology at the company's store in Stockholm. Customers pay to have old clothes transformed into new ones, but recycling a single garment can take several days.

H&M wants to move to 100% recycled or sustainably sourced materials by 2030, but increasing recycled production is The expensive AFM has decades of head start, although the cost of its factories was enormous, it was spread over many years at the time. , no one was doing it, no customer even understood why it was a necessity, but it was my father's vision that stood firm and he made this massive investment because he knew where the world was going. AFM says it has the capacity to create half a million pairs of jeans each month, but its actual production is around 300,000 for recycled jeans to become a large-scale success.

More companies need to get involved right now less than 1% of all clothing becomes recycled garments an even simpler solution is to buy less. I firmly believe that consuming less but of better quality is the way to go and that is because this is not to discourage people from buying more. but if they buy better and buy better quality once someone ends up with a garment that can always be resold second hand or donated, it simply increases the lifespan of a garment if you buy better quality in 2012, a teenager came up with a ambitious plan to eliminate plastic in the ocean buy and slat wanted to harness natural currents to collect floating debris inside a giant U-shaped barrier.

I believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be completely cleaned up in just 5 years. That schedule didn't work and there is still garbage. On average, trucks of plastic enter the ocean every minute, but ocean cleanup has made progress. The nonprofit has removed more than 200 metric tons of trash from the Pacific. Many people said it couldn't be done, that it was stupid. A pipe dream, but to really make a dent in plastic pollution, the organization is getting closer to the source where most of the ocean's plastic comes from. Rivers, so the Dutch entrepreneur invented these large machines that capture waste before it reaches open waters.

Rivers are the arteries that transport The newly arrived TRs from land to sea are called interceptors and the founder plans to deploy a thousand of them, but some experts worry that these machines could strip rivers and oceans of things they are supposed to They are also there, so that a network of garbage barriers can clean them up. the most polluted rivers in the world and they are cleanest Rivers the key to a plastic-free ocean the Osama River in the Dominican Republic flows into the Caribbean Sea is one of the dirtiest rivers in the world and Carmen and Carion have lived nearby for 24 years ocean cleanup installed an Interceptor about a mile downstream from your home in 2020, the idea is to let the current do most of the work while the trash travels.

Downstream, this 700-ton long arm redirects it towards the opening of the machine, so what the barriers do is let the water pass through. They pass but stop everything floating on the ceiling. We have these solar panels that are connected to batteries that store energy so we can continue intercepting even at night. BL conveyor belts carry the waste to one of six garbage bins which they can fill in just 3 days during the rainy

season

, much of the current transportation is plants and in this case it is probably not a bad thing: they are invasive aquatic insects that They grow naturally in the Amazon, but over the past century humans have introduced them to new places where they don't.

There are no predators like the Osama River where they are taking over blocking light and oxygen and killing plants and animals beneath them. The plant tends to thrive in polluted water and its roots cling to debris. Nearby factories and farms have used this river as a landfill. Earth for decades, but in Santo Domingo many people who live on the banks of OS depend on it for drinking water, many of them also have limited options to deal with waste, it has to do with urban planning and whether these communities here They do not have access roads for trucks to enter, some locals throw their garbage in drainage ditches called katas, so right behind me we have the canyata bonavides, it is one of the worst canatas we have here on the Osama River, just like rivers are arteries. that carry plastic to the ocean these baskets here are the arteries that carry plastic to the river ocean cleanup estimates that Osama transports up to 22,000 metric tons of plastic to the Caribbean Sea each year Mount Propet has 10 other interceptors in rivers around In all the world, devices cannot remove all types of pollution, such as chemicals or PL plastic that does not float, and until residents have more options to deal with trash, it will continue to end up in Osama, on which we largely depend, working with local partners. like the Dominican navy here or the UNDP precisely to work on this Upstream problem the navy manages the day to day operations for the river cleaner and works with the national government to manually collect the garbage that slips through the Interceptor that they have demonstrated be The perfect partners for us by the end of the year should be owners of the Interceptor.

Once that happens, the ocean planet will shift its focus to other rivers like the Mataba River in Guatemala, which the nonprofit says could have more plastic than any other in the world. world in Guatemala uh there are so many Dres coming down the river that these machines would fill up in a few seconds so again we havea different type of Interceptor. The non-profit built an Interceptor fence to trap plastic in a flash flood zone that flows into the river, each river is unique, it really needs to be tailored to the specific circumstances of that river, the fence lets some plastic through, but bune hopes to have an updated Interceptor by the end of 2023, while the founder has not given up on his initial dream of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch founded Ocean Cleanup in 2013 and a decade later, the patch is still growing.

One challenge is that it's not actually a patch, it's actually two swirling clouds of debris that are often not visible on the natural surface that the Kerns have. Five similar whirlpools called gyers were created around the world and each one collects trash. The nonprofit is working to clean up the North Pacific. gy use this thing. It is a flexible barrier stretched between two ships with a shallow screen hanging down. The idea is to consolidate the floats. plastic, making it easy to collect about once a week, the ocean cleanup says that in total more than 200 metric tons of plastic have been removed from the Pacific, but that's only about 210 percent of all the plastic that could be floating here, the team is working.

In a system three times larger than this one that should be ready sometime in 2023, some researchers worry that these cleaning machines could disrupt ecosystems by collecting living things along with trash. Ocean Cleanup says the screen creates a downward flow that carries living creatures below, but the system still catches some fish, crabs, barnacles and other animals. The nonprofit says it is continually adjusting the device to try to keep the creatures away, but it is impossible to avoid them completely, in part because marine life is mixed with the plastic and can even live. right in it, sea urchins, starfish, pretty much anything you can imagine, you can also find in these plastic flows, there are many organisms that also attach their eggs to these floating plastics.

Some critics say the idea of ​​passively collecting plastic is ever risky. It's in the ocean It's connected to marine life It's too late to remove it A potential alternative is to target clumps of trash instead of sweeping up all the gy Plastic in the open ocean tends to form these plastic dust bunnies in the sea Collect Plastic waste is also pretty easy once it builds up on these dust bunnies because then you have a single target area with an extremely high amount of plastic. Those groups are mostly fishing gear that cause the most damage by focusing on things like ghost gear, which are really dangerous to mariners. life, you are collecting the most harmful plastic from the ocean, not necessarily collecting some of the less harmful plastics, like laundry baskets or buckets, which can have a lot of life growing in them, ocean cleanup says that in the long term your ocean Los systems will be more scalable than manual cleaning when it comes to river cleaning experts were more optimistic.

I loved how he channels it in the diagrams. I thought it's so perfect once it's in the ocean, it's a problem that really becomes much more difficult to deal with bu results as of April 2023, his team has collected more than 10 times more plastic from Rivers than from the ocean In Santa Domingo, members of the Dominican Navy empty the garbage containers and send the room to the Ducasa landfill. Of course, the landfill is not ideal, but at least it is a million times better than the one that empties into the ocean. Good says the river. Plastics cannot be recycled as easily as those from the ocean.

It's much more of a mix and it's also much more contaminated. So there is wastewater that is often found in these rivers, ultimately restoring a contaminated ecosystem requires big changes. The best way to keep plastic out of rivers and oceans is to reduce it. Everyone can do something, but we also need companies to do their part. There has to be a collaboration between all sectors of society in the meantime, kmen does what he can to clean his own neighborhood in his free time he collects water and transforms it into ours, dries the plant and weaves it to make hats, bags and more .

Like plastic, the plant may be useful, but Carmen still wants it gone. These bricks are made from seaweed. The secret is sargassum, an invasive species that washes up and rots on North American beaches. Massive waves can cause respiratory problems and cost millions. clean but where most people see a problem Omar Vásquez saw potential turns algae into bricks strong enough to build houses that he says can withstand hurricanes Omar and his family immigrated to the US with nothing in their pockets when he was only eight years old now uses his bricks to build houses for low-income families like López's.

Could this invention help other countries clean up their coasts? We went to Mexico to see how entrepreneurs like Omar are making the most of a stinky situation. Omar and his team begin collecting the seaweed at 5:00 a.m. Today they are in Puerto Morelos, a small coastal town about 25 miles from the hotels in Cancun, paid to remove the seaweed from the beach and out of sight of tourists. They collect around 40 metric tons of sargassum every day. With one day enough to fill two of these containers, the idea of ​​turning seaweed into bricks occurred to Omar in 2018, when more than 50,000 metric tons of sargassum washed ashore.

Omar makes the bricks he calls Saga blocks in his workshop, 10 minutes from the beach, the workers grind. The dried sargassum is turned into a fine powder by crushing it with stones and then mixed with soil that Omar reuses from construction sites. Shovel a mixture of sargassum powder and soil through a grape to remove any large pieces. They mix the powder with water to form a thick paste the exact recipe is a secret but each brick is approximately 40% sarcasm Sargo blocks can also be recycled over and over again with a single machine Omar can make up to 3000 bricks per day He developed eight prototypes before perfecting this one He is now designing a larger machine that could produce 8,000 bricks per day He has six full-time employees making the bricks and some also help build houses Since 2018 Omar has built more than 40 houses, the first is right next to his workshop, he named it after his mother when he was 8 years old.

Omar left a house like this to cross the border to Mexico with his mother, they would not have a house of their own during the 30 years they lived in the US ., finally returned to his home country to Well, in 2014, with only $55 in his pocket, he used it to start a business buying and selling plants and finally saved enough money to buy this lot. The development of the Sara blocks required a lot of trial and error. Omar's business is called vietto blue green. He does most of it. With the money he sells plants and the hotels pay him to clean the sargassum.

He also sells his bricks and builds houses. He has sold more than 20 houses and given away another 15. Omar admits that the houses may not be luxurious but they are durable, which is good news. For Elizabeth Delarm Banola López and her daughters, her house was destroyed by a hurricane in 2021. Omar helped them rebuild it with Sara blocks. In fact, research shows that seaweed is a great insulator that keeps homes cool in the summer and stores heat in the win, Omar usually hears about. people in need through a friend or local and there is no shortage of raw materials in the last decade the waves of sarcasm have become so large that they can be detected from space in 2020 the Mexican government collected 19,000 metric tons of sargassum from the beaches of Kintana Rose in 2021 collected twice that amount studies show that prolonged exposure can make it difficult to breathe in 2023 the Cancun hotel association reserved more than 20 million to eliminate it from the beaches and the problem goes beyond Mexico invasive wheat has spread to the coasts of North America in Florida, Texas and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the exact cause of the increase is unclear, but some experts blame high levels of nitrogen in the sea as a result of agricultural waste runoff and deforestation, so now Omar's business is receiving the international attention it has given.

TED Talks appeared on Shark Tank Mexico and traveled internationally to promote their product. Investors and companies from more than a dozen countries came to learn from him. Omar is exploring licenses and franchises in the SAR block. recipe for other businesses in other parts of Mexico other entrepreneurs are experimenting with new ways of using sarcasm, such as making notebooks and even shoes. A British startup called Seaweed Generation is using sarasam to capture carbon and store it at the bottom of the ocean in Mexico. Omar is simply grateful to live in his home country surrounded by the people he loves and after work returns to a house he built himself using his own bricks Omar hopes his success inspires others Aaron Fletcher has been preparing for the end of the world for 15 years He chose to become homeless when he was in his early 20s.

He now lives in this wagon. Everything is tailored to fit my body down to the quarter inch of its height and survives on sheep's milk every 400 years. The collapse of society. Oh that's good. and we are already behind. I spent 3 days with Aaron in rural Oregon documenting his attempt to live completely off the grid. healthy lifestyle or Aaron has taken grooming too far, come out, good sheep, yes people walk, walk their dogs around here all the time and stuff, mainly everything Aaron owns fits inside the cart he designed himself , yeah, bike wheels, it's their bedroom, it covers their kitchen and their bathroom they literally sit here and just poop on them and then what do you do with the bag and then you throw it in a trash can?

Yes, good sheep, you hear him grunting that he is like a pig, as if he were very happy, right? now most of her diet comes from happy JC, she's like a teenager Rosie, thanks Rosie and the animal that pulls her cart Ramy, yes he knows her name, he's just a big Love Bug half gallon of U's milk One sheep provides 2100 calories, so each sheep can feed three people. He also turns his wool into clothing using only his hands and a cardboard box to shape the felt. One sheep fleece is enough to make a full hoodie and that hoodie will be thick and last like 5 years at least, um, the smaller scraps I have I use to make patches and to make toilet paper.

Sometimes Aaron hunts wild animals like raccoons, he cooks in this solar camping oven that he bought online and combines between a thermos and a greenhouse. I guess I'll be eating raccoon for the next week. I have eaten fox raccoon and coyote. I hear a really good paw. Today he is making ground lamb

season

ed with foraged plants. This is Mugart from the same street and this is. a percaine, the meat was a gift from a local farmer and he tops it off with cheese aged on his cart and it's probably the equivalent of a year old AG blind.

Aaron avoids using money instead he works for local farmers in exchange for food. or a safe place to park his car. I'm advertising my main service, which is farm care and management, wow, wow, chick, chi, chickens, they love fresh water, today it's cleaning the chicken coupe, uh, this is the kind of job that farms and A Farmers really don't like having to open and close the greenhouse daily, that's pretty much all I have to do and trade for staying here and it takes forever. He uses YouTube to share his message with others. Thanks to all my new followers and their channel they have started to generate a small but constant income.

I would like people to take away from this footage that there is an alternative way, there is a more useful job for you, that has much more time available, and lots of it. more peace um and it's out of the artificial economies um cities uh when I'm editing I edit with uh just iMovie it with one hand I edit completely with one hand with this thing the solar panels allow Aaron to charge his devices while traveling this is Panel 150W solar uh A10 uh, this is my 500 hour water battery that my subscriber sent me and for things like his portable freezer, um, I've unplugged it from my friend's uh Outlet here.

Aaron's latest idea is to turn his sheep's milk into ice cream. Popsicles, that's interesting. He also added sea salt. He heads into town to hand out free samples. People pay, pay $5 a piece, like a pig and yeah, I don't know, I just feel bad trying to collect money in this part of Oregon. Temperatures can drop below freezing in winter and reach 110°F in summer. cool evaporative cooling effect since sheep don't sweat, you have to add, you have to add sweat to them oncefor Aaron to arrive within the city limits. It's time to get out another piece of equipment, I'm going to stop right here and get you your poop cups and give you a drink real quick.

I forgot to give them their poop cups, why do you have to do this? No need, I just want to keep it sanitary on the sidewalk and don't give anyone reason to vilify what we're doing, perfect, oh my god, that's the one you tried, that's nothing but my sheep's milk and pear syrup that I harvested from the cut pear. trees in Foss it's very difficult to find someone who is so open that makes a delicious ice cream side you wanted oh yeah oh I'm very happy that's fine, if you want, if you want to try both, sure, thank you very much, but Aaron's relationships with the The locals are not always friendly, he is not a very nice person, he is very aggressive, he always throws tantrums and has attacks as if he were simply Agro.

I mean, I don't avoid it. I don't know, Aaron used to live in Ashland Oregon at some point. Aaron says local police began fining him for walking his animals in public parks. I'm going to give you a fine and I'm not going to accept the fine from you. I'm not going to accept the fine, you can do whatever you want, no. I'm not going to accept the ticket and I'm not okay. Finally, the Ashlin City Council passed a law requiring special permits to bring livestock, except horses, into town, so if Aaron Fletcher gets a horse, he can ride it all over town.

Aaron ended up at Talent, which is surrounded by Orchards, built relationships with several landlords that allowed him to stay for free, yes, but just as he was settling in, his lifestyle was put to the test in 2020, oh my god, set fire to the Almea in September. the fire burned through Ashland and leveled downtown, it's in our fucking Orchard, no, come on, I'm going faster than these cars trying to evacuate, it was very scary, really scary, and if I hadn't gotten out in That time, I would have done it. We have been trapped as if our exit had been on fire and we would not have been able to leave by the summer of 2022.

Much of the talent mall remained empty. Many here still live in a government-built trailer park. It was supposed to be a temporary housing solution. Aaron says his way of life can offer ideas to people struggling to find a home, and those in RVs could be happier, healthier and more purposeful if they had a connection to local small farmers. They need his help right now Aaron doesn't talk much about his past but he didn't always live like that oh yeah, I was raised like everyone else on soda and cereal. He left his parents' house in Kansas City when he was a teenager, yeah, I thought that shit was going to hit the fan again 15 years ago when I voluntarily became homeless first, I thought it was going to happen within, you know, weeks or months and, yes, here he is 15 years later, more or less in He first jumped on trains with his dog Sam.

He continued and used to dive into dumpsters in search of food. I just threw away 24 boxes of unexpired hummus and six eggs about 10 years ago. Sustainability was taken more seriously. He adopted goats, then sheep and started trying to get it all. his food comes from local sources. Aaron has been managing his way of life for years, but he wanted to know how it's affecting his health, so we hired a local doctor to give him a checkup. Hello, Dr. Duncan mlan Duncan runs sisku vital medicine. oxygen saturation is at 99%, which is perfect, so now we're going to take your blood pressure okay, so I'm 120 over 80, okay, I'm going to dig a little deeper, okay, okay, okay, I'm taking six files, holy snik.

Because? Well, because we're trying a lot of things on you, oh my gosh, you shouldn't have told me that you have a blanket or something we can lay on. Yes? Where is here? Leave your jacket and then you will go to bed. and here we go come here buddy let's go one two three there let's kick his feet this is going to come out there you go there you go buddy there you go buddy oh wow there I passed that eh yeah interesting that's a lot of blood man wow, interesting I had a dream did you?

What dream did you have? Don't know. I feel very good with Aaron. All tests are quite normal. Excellent vital signs. He has very nice skin. You know, he is a little thin in the body. He seems pretty good, but we'll find out more in the labs we check. Aaron's blood tests, other than slightly elevated cholesterol, probably due to all that milk and cheese, have no major health problems. Aron is not completely self-sufficient. I have episodes on I go to the city food bank. Any feed I consume from the artificial economy I use as fuel and then refocus on pursuing these forms of weaning shortly after we filmed with Aaron Rosie passed away from bloat, a common cause of death for livestock. but then Happy had two lambs, yeah, boy.

And in a new experiment, Aaron raised money from his subscribers to buy a donkey that would help him travel longer distances. This is Faith Faith, the donkey so far has had mixed results. The donkey caused a major accident that she caught on her cell phone camera no, no, oh my god, I'm so lucky to be alive, so lucky for everyone else, I'm so lucky they didn't involve traffic. Aaron Fletcher has sacrificed a lot since he decided to do so. strive to become self-sufficient, but he truly believes that this is the best way he can serve others.

That's all I can do is try to improve all our hopes for the future and get help to make that hope a reality. There is even more hope that someone called you crazy, yes, are you crazy? Everyone is a little crazy, but no one. uh, it's not a measure of health, uh, being deep, it's not a measure of health, being well, adapting Ed to a deeply sick society and I. I'm obviously the least adapted, so I'd say I'm the least crazy of them all, since I know that a makeshift gas mask to pump in air is the only thing keeping this sewer diver from choking on toxic fumes every day, dozens of thousands of people.

People do one of the deadliest jobs in South Asia since they exist beneath the underground sewers, it has been someone's job to keep them clean now a robot could put an end to this dirty business once and for all. Meet the Bandicoot, it has four expandable legs, four chambers and a carbon fiber. A body capable of lifting more than 250 pounds, a retractable hose, and an articulated shovel can access places that only human hands could previously reach. Hands like those of Kumar Mandal, who used to jump into the sewers before getting a job operating the robot that Bandicoot is a part of. wave of robots maintaining the city's almost invisible but absolutely critical infrastructure and that's good news because clogs aren't just a problem in South Asia, pipes are clogged everywhere, including some of the richest cities of the global North. to get bigger and bigger and clog up all your PT so why are sewers around the world getting so bad and what can cities do to stop them from choking around the world?

First, can we take a minute to appreciate the miracle that you are able to wake up? walk four steps, relieve yourself and throw away the water. Far, far away, many early civilizations had opened sewers in the streets and until a few hundred years ago people often simply threw their waists out of the window, things didn't start to change until the Industrial Revolution. As cities' populations skyrocketed and a deadly disease began to spread throughout the world, Kala killed millions of people over the course of the 19th century. It's a really unpleasant way to die. Diarrhea and vomiting until the body runs out of fluids.

It took science decades to achieve this. a consensus that the pathogen spreads through water and how they solve it Brewing scientist Jon Snow noticed that in one neighborhood those who drank beer instead of water from a contaminated well survived an epidemic in the late 19th century, cities largest in the world began the massive construction of sewers. projects the designs were grand and quite beautiful in paris the sewers became a tourist attraction today much of the world's population depends on an invisible network of pipes and tunnels to transport their waste all sewage systems depend simply on gravity In the modern era the biggest innovation has been the addition of pumps that can help sewage flow uphill.

That's the most important technology in urban planning that hasn't changed much in hundreds of years and there is the problem that cities grow but their sewers can't keep up when the London sewers were being built in the 19th century. Sir Joseph Boslet doubled in size from the original design, but now the poop is hitting the fan as are used cooking oil baby wipes and other things that people throw away but the sewers weren't designed to handle. Changing weather patterns mean that cities are periodically hit by heavier rainfall and rising sea levels. All that water can cause sewers to clog in the streets, so cities have to build bigger and bigger tunnels, which comes at a huge price in many Indian cities.

It is cheaper to find people willing to unclog faulty pipes by hand, although this work has been illegal since 2013 and manual work has been abolished. Waste collection is what inspired the founders of Gen Robotics, the company claims that robots like Bandicoot will end up cheaper over time and eliminate danger for workers. The four co-founders didn't set out to clean sewers, although they began making robotic exoskeletons in college. They felt that the limitation of a human being can be drastically improved using technology so that we can do extraordinary things like Iron Man. They changed their focus after a fatal accident in the sewer near their school.

Sanitation workers are working inside the sewer. They fell unconscious and in order. In order to help them, this car also tried, but also fell unconscious and died. Going from Iron Man suits to sewer robots wasn't easy. The first challenge, understanding India's old and complex sewage systems. The second problem, the manual scavengers were afraid that this invention would eliminate them. The workers know that we are going to build a robotic device to do their job and they are very afraid to let this job go away even though everyone says it is an inhumane task, no one likes to do it.

Research shows that 80% of India's wastewater. Workers die before the age of 60 due to health problems. Gen Robotics set out to educate thousands of garbage collectors about the dangers of their job and at the same time hire some of them to operate the Bandicoot. Now the company is up and running with nearly 300 robots in 18 of India's 28 states, sewers in India are especially bad because their antiquated systems can't keep up with the growing population, according to the Central Control Board. Pollution India, less than half of the country's centralized sewers function effectively. Bandicoot robots arrive at a cleanup site in the back of a truck, unlike when they go underground without protection, crews now wear hard hats, high-visibility vests, gloves and boots, now the only manual part of the process they What they still do is remove the manhole cover.

Once the unit is in place, operators use the control. panel to lower what they call the spider into a sewer, the arms help guide it while the cameras give the operator a close-up view, so this thing works similar to a human hand, like grabbing debris , will collect them and the bucket approaches to close them and the waste. It is brought to the top. Sensors check for poisonous gas and sound an alarm if conditions are dangerous. Manual cleaning is not only dangerous but also slow. Typically teams of three to five collectors can only clean two manholes per day.

To operate the B only two people are required and up to 12 people can clean. India is home to 1.4 billion people and Mumbai, the largest city in the country, has around 22 million people, and there are dozens of other giant cities in India. The sewers in each vary, meaning genetic robotics are always necessary. tweaking their designs, each Bandicoot is being custom-made, as if what Mumbai needs is not what Kolkata needs today at the general robotics plant in Palakad. Three bandicoots will roll off the assembly line. Normally, it takes 4-10 days to assemble a robot with it. With a staff of between four and ten people cutting, bending steel tubes and welding, almost all production steps are done in-house and each part must bemeet the exact specifications for an urban sewer system.

The software and design teams know that Bandicoot's operators could be former manual garbage collectors. little education, so they did their best to keep things simple. We actually worked with Google and created a beautiful UI system to make this build. Robotics spent 2 years developing Bandicoot before deploying it in the field. Workers assemble the frame that houses the controls and the robotic spider arm, one bolt and cable at a time, all sensitive electronics must be waterproofed. Building by hand slows down assembly time, but the company says it's the only way to ensure quality control. Robotics gen. plans to standardize production eventually to be able to scale it up, this is not the case. an achievement, but it is a kind of blessing that we have to serve society, but even maintained by innovative technology.

Sewers everywhere are failing. Why, in the first place, has the list of things people throw away gotten longer over the years? More wet wipes, food and cooking oil. Entering the system like never before underground, their powers combine to create unholy monsters known as fatbergs, masses of fatty inorganic materials that can block entire tunnels. Fatbergs prompted politicians around the world to discourage or even ban non-flushable wipes. , so far these laws have failed to make an impact in 2021, California passed a law that simply required sanitary wipe manufacturers to label their products with a do-not-flush warning, and in the United Kingdom, lawmakers are pushing for a complete ban on the sale of plastic wipes that clog drains;

It is their third attempt in 5 years, secondly the huge repairs that some places need are becoming much more expensive, for example when it was first built the London sewage system cost almost £400 million adjusted to inflation back then, London's population was only 2.6 million people, now 9 million residents pull more than At any time in history, the city is completing a 15m underground tunnel to transport surplus to treatment plants instead of dumping it into hot springs. This single project cost almost £5 billion, 10 times the cost of building the entire sewer system in the 19th century and third. We have entered a new era of climate change with stronger storms testing the capacity of sewers more frequently.

New York City sewers handle both sewage and storm runoff. Every time a storm hits the city, storm drains can back up and spill billions of gallons of raw sewage. waterways every year and flooding could be deadly in 2022 11 people drowned in their homes when heavy rain overwhelmed the sewage system, so it seems no matter what cities do, they will never be able to keep up with their own garbage, the Modern wonder of flushing toilets opened a Pandora's box of problems right under our feet, but historically there are alternatives. Farmers came to the cities and paid for human waste to be turned into fertilizer.

Startups are looking at recycling urine to return nutrients to the soil and composting dry toilets are a proven way. Let the waste decompose without water, so next time you have to go just think about where what you throw away could end up. These plastic fibers began as buckets taken from trash and are now used to make rugs and prayer mats. At the Hijazi straw mat factory in Gaza, working with plastic waste is the only option Yad Hiji used to import virgin plastic from Saudi Arabia, but since 2007 blockades have made it difficult for anything to enter or leave Gaza.

There are stocks of all kinds of important items. As trash piles up, people across the Strip are finding all kinds of ways to run their businesses with materials recovered from landfills. So how is garbage handled in a conflict zone? We went to the Gaza Strip to see how people make a living. Donkey carts full of plastic buckets arrive at this factory almost every day, workers cut the buckets into pieces to put them in the crushers, washing machines remove dirt and waste, excess water is drained and the pieces to the dryer to spin them. The rest, this type of plastic retains its strength after recycling despite being incredibly light, the plastic is poured into bags and sent upstairs using an elevator, then the pieces of plastic are loaded into the hopper where they will be heated to their point fusion and then dyes are added to adjust the color.

The flexible slurry falls into an extruder before being pushed into long strands. The water cools the plastic until it solidifies. The strands are cut back to pellet size and end up in these huge sacs. The granules are then sent back to the floor below and heated. again before pouring them into specially sized machines for the mat yarns, this time the machines cut the plastic yarns to the perfect size for the weavers to bundle the filaments and take them to the weaving machines. The factory can produce up to 500M mats. every day, but that is much less compared to previous years when the father of an od opened it in 1986 the factory ran 24 hours a day with almost 30 employees now there is only one shift today and conflict often dictates schedules work Israeli airstrikes damaged the factory several times most recently, as of May 2023, IAD has still not been able to rebuild many of the materials needed to rebuild the factory are difficult to find or too expensive, such as cement, which was banned largely until 2021, the factory continues to operate despite the challenges of operating in conflict.

Electricity in the Gaza area is unreliable and works only 14 hours a day on average. Power in Gaza comes mainly from two sources and from an old diesel-powered plant that only meets about 1/5 of Israel's electricity demand and power lines, but diesel is expensive and there is little room. to store large quantities the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated parts of the world it has been an occupied territory since 1967 in 2007 Hamas took control of Gaza Israel the United States and the European Union have labeled it a terrorist organization since then Israel has restricted the movement of people and goods in and out of the 25m strip of land the blockade cut off materials that could be used to make weapons and for other military purposes according to the Israeli government we cannot allow materials that could be used for weapons that we would be used against us to cross the border, but the list also included many basic items needed to repair the infrastructure.

Overtime, supplies of construction materials, fuel for cars and power plants, spare parts to repair broken machinery and even some medical equipment, have been periodically depleted and the piles of garbage continued to grow larger and larger Mohammed Sabri mus, director of the Water Quality and Environment Authority in Gaza, says the territory produces more than 2,000 metric tons of solid waste per day, Gaza's recycling centers cannot handle it all, and the blockade often prevents waste. from being sent to other countries for processing, so a large amount of garbage ends up in the strip's two official landfills, where it is regularly burned, but because the landfills lack adequate firefighting equipment, large Fires can burn for days, this one in March 2023 took more than 3 days to There is so much garbage that illegal dumping sites sometimes become the only option since the start of lockdowns.

Unemployment has hovered around 45% in Gaza and illegal landfills have become a source of income. for garbage collectors who sometimes burn electronic waste to recover copper and other metals, creating clouds of toxic smoke linked to higher rates of cancer and respiratory problems for Gaza children, even though most gazin suffer the waste problems that those piles of garbage have become a resource in 2019. man began recycling paper waste by turning it into trays to transport eggs. Aram spent 2 years perfecting the recipe. Workers first tear up the trash paper and mix it with water. The proper ratio produces a thick, moldable slurry.

The molds press the grout into the proper shape, squeezing out the excess. water and then dried under the harsh Mediterranean sun. Acram now employs seven people to make the trays, unlike the raw materials needed for the mat. Egg cartons from the factory remained off Bann Imports' list, but local farmers prefer recycled cartons and each egg is more valuable. More than 60% of people in Gaza are food insecure and isolated from the rest of the world. Gaza has been called the world's largest open-air prison, but it has about 25 miles of Mediterranean coastline. Ali Mah worked with a collective of artists to build C Is Ours Cafe.

Planters made from old tires line the path to the entrance, one of the doors comes from a refrigerator and the windows from an old washing machine. Inside, artists run a community center that teaches locals how to reuse everything the cafe allows customers to donate waste from their homes. In Le of cash despite the war around them, artists Cobble together A Min Oasis by the ocean spend their days working on community art projects, the cafe and community space provide a modest income for the half dozen people who work here and, although it seems like a peaceful evening today, there are always reminders of the effects of war.

Ali is in talks with the Gaza government to open more community centers, especially for children. The conflict has forced Ali and Yad, as well as many other Palestinians, to become unlikely recyclers who make the best of A terrible situation: health and beauty product packaging is a recycling disaster. Every year people throw away over 100 billion of these items and the corporations that make these products throw away mountains of products that don't even make it to the shelves, most recycling centers don't accept them. They use them because they are too difficult to process, but a British company has found a way that makes it harder to try not to get banned by the machines.

The refactory turns waste into plywood-like boards that can be used for anything from flower pots to furniture. I decided to go and invest in something that no one thought would work, as more and more brands want to be seen as sustainable. This company helps them clean up their acts. Do these boards have sides? What does it take to recycle approximately one third of what is not recyclable? of the cosmetic waste refactoring handles come from collection boxes placed in stores across the UK. People are only supposed to drop cosmetic containers, but all kinds of things end up in the factory to be sorted by workers like Curtis, whatever you can think of is B, he goes.

I go through about 20 bags like this every day, so what I'm really looking for here are metals, glass, and batteries, so they all go into separate sections. Some products have a little bit of everything, like makeup palettes which often have a glass mirror, metal trays and a plastic shell, we will split the makeup palette, one will go into the metal stack and one will go into the glass stack . Petes from this brand can cost around $50 and like many items in this stack, this one is barely worn. I never thought that anyone would throw away so much as sorting this way takes time and money and that is one of the reasons why many recyclers around the world only take two of the seven types of plastic plants, often rejecting the other types along with anything that is too dirty and sends them to landfills or incinerators.

The refactory says it does not reject anything. I don't think there is a material out there that doesn't have a route to recovery or recycling, but manufacturers throw away many items before they go to market, including entire shipping pallets of mislabeled or expired recalled products. Brands tend to be pretty secretive about it, so no one knows how much they destroy, but about 70% of three factories' cosmetics come from manufacturers, including this luxury Tom Ford perfume. Perfume is considered hazardous waste in part because it is flammable and historically 100% of that material has gone to incineration. The factory sends the glass and metal to other locations for conventional recycling and all the plastic ends up here in thewashing and crushing room, it smells delicious, it is a mix of soaps, shower gels, perfumes, anything, so yes, people like to work in this area, this machine cuts the bottles and tubes into pieces. the size of a peanut shell and we wash them with hot water, first we will crush them to make it nice and small so that it cleans better, then the empty containers are washed two more times, the process requires a lot of water, but the company says that about half of this is rainwater you collect and reuse to recycle the recovered at least three four times through washing once the pieces are clean, it's time to grind them even smaller.

The material is introduced into this large crusher, where it has a 20 thousand mesh. will knock it down nice and small along the way a magnet removes some metal pieces like the little springs inside the soap electric current pumps take out the rest the clean pieces head to the mixing room this pulverizer grinds the granules up turn them into a powder that will become the outer layer we pulverize the material and mix it in these big mixers behind me, a giant corkscrew inside this machine stirs it all up, the final mixing head towards the middle, the operators cook boards of three layers in machines that function like giant waffle makers.

Placing the siding from scratch Today's customer asked for boards that look like a birthday cake. First we put the sprinkles, which are bottle caps. The glaze is a white powder coating that provides a smooth finish. It is made from recycled items such as bottles. boxes and the last thickest layer is the core which is the material of recycled materials, so I have mixed poers and different melins, that part is key when pressing them into boards it means that all the package packaging can be mixed and nothing is wasted, creating something more sophisticated. like a water bottle, it would mean using only one type of recycled plastic and mixing it with a lot of new plastic, this clam shell closes and heats the mixture to about 410° F.

The melting takes about 8 minutes and then we cool it for about 25 minutes if we did it faster, I'd be married, um, but we do it nice and slow and then it comes out nice and flat. These cuts can continue the process along with the plastic trash on the floor. There is nothing that is wasted in this process. The boards have many uses benches, bookshelves, planners, bus stops, they can even outfit an entire room, it was designed to replace plywood, we make bathroom and shower cubicles and all kinds of wonderful things, but the product is not perfect, It's not a miracle solution, obviously, when they are cut and worked on, they create a microplastic.

Conventional methods often have the same problem. Studies have found higher levels of microplastics in waters near recycling plants. The refactory tries to keep the problem under control by selling finished products, not building. materials so you can handle the shavings at home the key for us is that we know where that product is if that product gets damaged or they decide to change it we can recycle it again into the next product for them the refactory says they can recycle the boards and products made with them again and again, yet there isn't much demand for products made with these things, we give them away a lot, so we do a lot of charity events and we carry out a plan called the skull cycle that the company encourages its customers to think of uses for the boards, like decorating your offices, we can recondition it, we can replace it so we can be as big or small as you want, so how can a company make a profit?

Things that people hardly want, well, at first it wasn't like that. A part of the business for the first time in the last two years has become profitable. Revenue comes mainly from customers who pay Refactory to collect waste. Everything is based on the success of incorporating so many brands and making what we do a success story. Clients doing so include Boots Pharmacy and The Body Shop who have waste collection boxes in many of their stores, people pay for a box and as part of that box fee delivery and collection there will be included and also the processing fee.

Waste and as the beauty industry faces criticism for generating a lot of waste, more retailers are turning to recycling to clean up their image, so it's really refreshing to see Brand's approaches in the way they're doing it for the first time. time here in the body shop this box is filled approximately every week people can put any personal cure. BS, any brand. There are not only body shop items there. The manufacturer claims its boards create less planet-warming pollution than sending waste to landfills. What we discovered was that there is actually a 50% carbon savings with a recycled board compared to putting that same plastic in a landfill.

Refactory workers said they were proud to be part of an operation like this. We are taking trash and giving it a new purpose, a new life. To speak, the company has plans to expand, but it will take massive scale to tackle the sea of ​​packaging waste. Steven says the ideal scenario would be to design packaging with disposal in mind. We have always had a hard time understanding why Brands would bring certain products to the market without really understanding if there is a reason to recycle them. Disney World produces a lot of trash, over 15,000 a day at Magic Kingdom alone, but you won't see it anywhere.

Magic Kingdom has a futuristic hidden tube system. Like these, the rocket trash was out of sight at 60 MPH. The Disney system is top secret, so we went to the only other place in the United States that handles trash this way and on this scale, Roosevelt Island, the small strip of land between Manhattan and Queens in New York City has been dumping its garbage through tubes for almost 50 years. This was supposed to be the future of trash. No more bags on sidewalks, giant trucks and vermin. Dozens of European cities have systems like this integrated into their infrastructure.

So how did Disney's magical trash tubes come about? they end up on a small island in the middle of New York City and why hasn't the system taken off in the US? Pneumatic tubes date back to the early 19th century. They basically work like giant vacuum cleaners that use compressed air to move objects from one place to another. In the following decades, cities around the world began using tubes to deliver mail and medical supplies. Banknotes and at one point even McDonald's, but the idea was always to move people like in Jetson oh boy. In 1870, Alfred Eli Beach developed the first subway in New York City, using pneumatic power, it only traveled the length of one city block and was more of a proof of concept than anything else when Roosevelt Island opened its doors for For the first time to residents in 1975, developers had a unique opportunity to experiment with a new type of waste.

The island was previously home to a notorious mental health institution, a smallpox hospital and a prison. This penitentiary is by far the worst in the United States. The island needed an image overhaul and a garbage disposal solution at the time when New York City sanitation workers were on a 9-day strike, more than a week went by without garbage collection and people mutinied The system was modeled after that at Disney World's Magic Kingdom, was installed a few years earlier and is still in use today, so how do they do it? work, this is the Roosevelt Island avac facility, the vacuum assisted automated collection process is really what it is Larry Carrick has worked as the island's senior stationary engineer since 2018 and there is a lot to take care of 1974 I think this was all installed and operational this is still still working, uh for the most part, so yesterday was a 17 hour work day, you know, it's part of the job every day, about 8 tons of garbage goes through these tubes, eventually it all compresses in these containers.

The city's Health Department sends special trucks. To be picked up three times a day along with bins full of recyclables and bulk items too large for the island's avac system, the trash goes to a transfer station in Queens, where it mixes with trash from the rest of the city and It is sent to landfills or incinerators that burn trash to produce energy. The Avac system doesn't solve the problem of where our trash ends up, but it makes the arrival process much cleaner. All of this happens out of sight of the 11,000 people who live in the island I have been here for 5 years.

I found out two weeks ago, but the avac system is far from perfect. Decades of wear and tear have left pipes prone to clogs and leaks, especially when residents don't understand what the problem is. The system can handle anything you can think of, even crazy hockey sticks, someone threw a bed frame in there, a bunch of carpeted backpacks and then I heard about the infamous mattress and the infamous tie goes WR so that's cause for concern. laugh than fixing these jams require some creative solutions so basically it spins when we have the handle or a machine hopefully it grabs onto whatever the jam is and we can punch the crap out of it once we have it right we try to rip it out . when it comes to larger repairs someone has to crawl in and these pipes are only 18 inches in diameter, if there is a leak in any pipe we will have a gentleman who will actually climb up to this area and get on a skateboard along with some welding equipment and will end up skidding here so we can weld the hold.

It is a very simple, intuitive, easy-to-use process. When it works. When it doesn't work. It sucks, but despite occasional breakdowns, many residents prefer it to traditional. garbage collection Judith Birdie moved here in 1977, 2 years after she opened a residence and, as president of the Rosevelt Island Historical Society, she literally wrote the book. Oh, what a wonderful book. I think I'll read it. She said she couldn't imagine it. garbage collection there is no other way I want a traditional garbage collection I love that we don't have garbage on the street you don't see a rat anywhere in this place in other parts of the world the avac systems have a more modern touch in Norway, these different cans separate trash from recycling and in Sweden and Spain some are even fully automated, so why can't Americans just throw trash down the tube?

The main reason, of course, is that the money to maintain these systems is also complicated and expensive. Private developers really have no incentive to invest in this type of infrastructure. One of those who build these systems compares it to a sewer line. How many times do you have to roll the L in your apartment to amortize that investment? The right is basic. The service you have in your home and installing them is complicated, if not impossible, it involves tearing down buildings to put the pipes underground, which is especially difficult in New York City. Manhattan has a huge underground complex, things like the subway system, gas lines, electrical pipes that would be essentially impossible to implement a QALY system like we have here, but in the polo fields of Harlem, the city's Housing Authority from New York is trying.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, whether for dense or high-rise buildings. Pneumatic collection. It can really save a lot of space on the sidewalk. This will be the first time in half a century that an AAC system will be installed in the city. The project will cost approximately $31 million and will serve 4,000 residents in four different buildings. To be completed by summer 2024, if the project works, it could serve as a model for the rest of the city and the country. A Swedish company called envac designed the Roosevelt and Disney systems and is looking to expand its footprint in the United States.

We really believe there is enormous potential. The market in the US still has a long way to go, we know it won't be easy. Roselt Island might not be the trash-free utopia we were promised decades ago, but advances in avac could lead us to rethink how we dispose of our waste and the infrastructure behind it. has to take the time someone has to have the technology around here this can't continue someone has to keep investing money in upgrades and producing positive things this rock hard beam is made of hard to recycle plastic like grocery bags, bottles and Even an electronics company called plastic cones takes the plastic that basically no one else wants and turns it into building materials.

The finished bricks interlock like life-size Legos. The company makes it easier for locals to make money by collecting waste from thelandfills or the street the mission to improve lives Plastic from schools is accumulating in Côte d'Ivoire, a country like many in the world that has almost no formal recycling programs. Could these building materials be the solution? We went to West Africa to find out how to make schools with waste from around the world fatumata is one of thousands of self-employed waste collectors in Ivory Coast, she collects plastic from this landfill in Aban, the country's largest city, and she likes it what are you doing.

Part of an informal collective of recyclers trained in plastic concepts, many types of plastic are collected, including things that other recyclers don't accept. Fatum says that since joining the company's training program he earns about four times more than he used to. Pickers are paid at a local sorting site after workers weigh and record each bag. plastic concepts pays 100 CFA Francs or about 16 cents per kilogram of plastic. We try to avoid intermediaries and we try all the time to directly empower the people who collect plastic on the street. Then it's time to start sorting, they take out the pieces that can't be used.

For bricks like PVC, which can release toxic fumes when melted, we all the time get material that we can't transform into PVC or some kind of P, so that's your job too: to sort again and check again what kind of plastic We are obtaining and they take out the PVC after sorting it, they load the plastic into a crusher, flattening the waste approximately four times more than it fits in each truck loaded to the factory. This facility can process about 40 standard garbage trucks of plastic each month. Workers load hard plastics like these from Electronics onto a conveyor belt that takes them to a shredder every time you work with plastic it needs to be a small size, we have crotches just to take the plastic, maybe a 5mm size, the chips crushed They go into a hopper and then travel down the line until they melt.

Soft plastics, like grocery bags, go through different machines, but the process is similar, they are shredded into small pieces and then melted. The final mixes combine different categories of plastic in specific proportions. We have two different types of mixes, one mix for bricks and another for columns for structural elements we have a small percentage of some additives to help the plastic in the machine and everything the company keeps those recipes secret hidden from our cameras behind this curtain along with the brick making team behind the wall we have all the technology and molds we develop, that's the way we make bricks, but they showed us how beams and columns are made by pushing the hot mixture into long molds, The workers dip them in water to cool things down, they remove this rock and the mold pushes a beam, the team cuts the beam into shorter segments and drills holes in each end.

Any leftovers, such as rough end pieces, go through the entire process again. This school was made with recycled building blocks in 2019 and there are over 300. classrooms made with bricks concepts throughout the country Oscar Mendes and Isabel Christina Gomez started the company in 2010, they are based in Colombia, but in 2019 they received a call from UNICEF asking them to expand their business to another country in need, Côte d'Ivoire, according to the According to the United Nations, more than a million children in Côte d'Ivoire do not go to school and sometimes it is because they simply do not have a place where to go.

The classrooms are too far away or too full, they normally have capacity for 50 children and you can find up to approximately 80. Teachers say that it is impossible to give lessons and teach normally. Each of these takes about a month to build the government. They did the project from the beginning mainly because it was fast. Construction here on the coast can take years. The government estimates that Ivory Coast needs around 30,000 more classrooms like this to end the shortage. So is there enough plastic trash to build all of those? Technically, yes, the city of Abon probably generates enough waste each day to build around 45 classrooms, by collecting, sorting and transforming.

All that plastic is the hard part when you need to design a really good sorting process here, okay, take this out and bring bottles, bring the bottles, but tell the guy to take this out, itch, itch Oscar says to take this process to more communities could be the key for us. They are solving local problems and the solution must be local. We're trying to see how we can get down to a really small scale and go directly to people who can maybe make their own bricks and their own products. He says the company has transformed more than 3,000 metric tons of plastic in Côte d'Ivoire since it started here.

In the long term, solving the plastic problem means producing less, but for the foreseeable future the waste has to go somewhere and, Ultimately, the work is much more than using garbage, they are doing good things for the environment and for the people. We are very happy to see how people are changing their lives. Their faces, their looks say it all because for the first time they have something and it's yours this looks like cotton candy but it's actually plastic trash spun into soft, ultra-fine fibers the four people who invented the process were inspired by the children's gift we wanted a project that can create a new business model in countries where plastic is abundant now the company Poly Floss Factory is implementing these portable units The world is turning used plastic into insulation, so imagine a great puffer jacket for homes.

These covers can help keep basic shelters warm even in refugee camps. Can a Polylast machine make recycling easier in parts of the world that are drowning in the trash we went to? Paris to see how a company that started as a school project is insulating homes with global waste It all started in 2011, when four design students in London set out to invent a cheap and simple way to turn plastic into something useful, but it would take them 11 years and eight prototypes to fine-tune their technology the first prototype produced a dense foam one of the properties we couldn't fully achieve was sponginess or softness the next three devices emitted fumes and were not safe to use indoors yet the graduate students They made all kinds of products like lampshades, bowls and headphones, but then the team almost abandoned it.

They disagreed about whether to accept an investment that would have forced them to industrialize the technology. They decided to reject the money and remain small. We make the decision. To rely on equipment to preserve our friendship and trust, we envisioned smaller machines that could be distributed globally to the source of waste instead of transporting waste to factories. In 2014, they came up with a version that made the thinnest fiber we had. We wove it, we had it woven, it was very flexible, very versatile, then a British architecture school asked them if the wool-like material could be used as insulation and it worked even if it's a shelter.

Isolation is key and almost non-existent in some part of the world. Finally, in 2020, they released the latest version, dubbed Ellie Kristoff. Manufacture each component of the machine in house. Ellie costs about $7,000, weighs 220 pounds when fully assembled, and is the safest and most efficient design yet, but you can't just throw a used bottle in there. The plastic needs to be cleaned and shredded, so they typically buy pellets from companies like Lemon Tree, a local recycler in Paris that accepts more than 30 types of waste. It handles about 200 metric tons of plastic per year at Poly Floss. The pellets go to the shredded plastic hopper.

It works too, the machine can process two of the most common types of PET plastic and polypropylene in less than a minute. The melted plastic is extruded through the head. This head spins very fast up through this motor and then the melting plastic creates fibers. centrifugation, they are blown by this blower the moment you turn on a machine and fibers appear, it is really coincidental to see how the dental floss accumulates can be fascinating, but it is also dangerous, it is a machine that melts plastic, so it does not it must be touched without gloves and Also of course some smell, so we need to have gas masks and eye protection.

We keep the machine in a safe room to contain the microplastic. It takes about 33 pounds of fiber to fill a 22-ton deck. This can catch fire, which is why flossing is necessary. To be encapsulated in a flame retardant fabric, the fabric must also be breathable but still resist water moisture, bacteria, and rodents. Other types of insulation can be made from recycled materials such as scrap glass and metal, but synthetic yarn says its product is safer to handle than other popular ones. Fiberglass mineral wool and spray foam options can irritate the skin, eyes, and lungs, so you need protective gear to install them;

You can actually touch the polyester thread and you won't have all the problems you have with rock wool or glass wool polyester thread, partners with NOS. To ship their machine around the world and make insulation using locally sourced plastic waste, we followed Polyl team members to a migrant community outside Paris as they installed insulation in seven homes. About 30 people live here, all of them from the Ivory Coast, many of them built their own. houses with cheap materials, the aluminum covers reflect sunlight, so the panels can also keep shelters cool in the summer of 2020. Poly Floss partnered with two NGS to insulate shelters in a camp in northwest Syria to people fleeing ongoing violence.

They established production in Gaziantep. A 4-hour drive from the camp across the Turkish border, most of the waste they use comes from grated yogurt containers purchased from local recyclers. We had to work with very irregular houses and make sure they were safe and warm. Field tests showed that insulation kept shelters up to 14° warmer during the winter. So far, the project has isolated 22 Syrian homes. Polyl also deploys its machines in countries that have little knowledge of recycling infrastructure, such as Nepal. Cities here collectively produce around 350 metric tons of plastic a day. much of that ends up in landfills for the Polyl team.

Isolating is just the beginning. We know Polyl is very small, but we hope to have a piece of the puzzle to solve something much bigger to change the way we think about waste. At one point, they are exploring whether dental floss could be used for things like sanitizing food and produce packaging. It is a technology company, but it is also very much social, political and EC iCal Endeavor that we pursue. We make almost 50 billion shoes every year. and almost all of them end up in landfills now, a company in the Netherlands claims it has figured out how to recycle footwear.

It processes up to 2,500 shoes per hour and some big brands like Adidas say they are also trying to reduce waste through the use of materials. Made from ocean plastic, so why is it so hard to recycle shoes? What are the efforts of big brands to make it easier? Your typical running shoe can contain around 40 different parts and dozens of different materials, these include plastic, nylon, metal, rubber and something called ethylene vinyl. Acetate which is basically a kind of homemade foam for most mass produced shoes, the layers are held together with a powerful glue and that is what makes these products so difficult to break down and recycle.

It is important to get rid of the glue because any remaining sticky residue would contaminate the separated materials and shoemakers need these materials in their purest form to make new shoes. Entrepreneurs Danny Pormes and his wife Arna say they found a way to recycle every part of the shoe for all materials. We have the solution: the company quickly shreds the feet o To cut a long story short, FFG sources Dutch army shoes from collection boxes in stores and sometimes directly from the manufacturers, they pay FFG to dispose of the shoes or pairs defective items returned by customers.

You must first separate them by type. FFG operates a fully automated mechanical system that does not use chemicals, such as glue, solvents to separate the different components. Dany tried everything from microwave ovens to irons, I tried to do it myself, dismantling the shoes by hand, I did all that. In the end, a series of machines using heat and friction proved to be the solution. The most methodeffective and this is where the magic happens. One machine heats the shoes to remove the glue and then another separates the different materials. Beyond the use of heat and friction, the company won't share more details about its process, but we do know the final products.

They are separated by type and the foam and rubber are ground into small particles so that the rubber is rubber without any contamination, without glue. FFG also insulates the other materials in the shoe, such as the upper fabric that can be spun into yarn. make new laces and medals with Steel Toad Safety Shoes Danny and Erna began their recycling journey at their Running Shop. I have a vision, but my wife is an entrepreneur that we started together 20 years ago and if she wasn't there, yes, I was. Fully done, we are ready to change the entire footwear industry.

It is very difficult, but we are doing it. They opened their Runners World shoe store in 2004 and offer personalized recommendations to customers based on their running style. Danny and xmarine won contracts to supply the dutch. Soldiers with sneakers and then the Dutch government asked us, yes, about 8 years ago, to think about recycling, thinking about a take-back program and that's basically how F Grinder started. FFG also teamed up with as6 to figure out how to make new sneakers from old ones, but cobblers. They say recycled materials have limitations. If we take our highest-performance running shoe and make it entirely from recycled circular materials, we won't have the same functional properties, but for now the shoes A6 makes from old materials aren't intended for high performance.

Our ultimate goal would be for them to be as functional as all of our running products and we hope it's not just an interesting side project, but something we can actually implement into the way we make shoes in large companies around the world. The world is trying to figure out how to make a shoe that is less wasteful. Adidas, which makes more than 420 million pairs of shoes each year, has a couple of products in development. In 2015, the company began making sneakers and other clothing using plastic trash collected from the ocean. The plastic is crushed into flakes, heated and cooled into pellets before being spun into a polyester filament that can be used to make the uppers of sneakers, but still leaves us with a shoe that cannot be completely recycled in 20121.

Adidas introduced a completely manufactured shoe. of virgin plastic without glue holding it together the future craftsmanship Loop was designed to be recycled in future generations of the same shoe Adidas says that using a single material allows it to break down the shoe and recycle it without fear of contaminants, but the plan only works if the company can convince Customers return old pairs while big companies experiment with recyclable sneakers. Researchers at UC San Diego have studied the possibility of making footwear with biodegradable materials. Steve Mayfield and his team turned to algae to create environmentally friendly flip flops.

They are the most efficient photosynthetic organisms in the world. Planet in 2021 we visited Steve's lab in San Diego. The process for turning seaweed into flip flops is surprisingly simple. The shoe consists of a base made of flexible foam, a sole made of a more rigid foam, and a cotton strap to make the foam pieces. Researchers use an industrial machine to mix compounds created from algae oil. This is the same machine you would see if you visited any of the shoe manufacturers in the world. We want to make sure that the research and the work that we do.

This is relevant to the real world to the commercial world the machine pours the mixture into molds the equipment then applies heat and the foam expands into a shoe shape. They wait about 10 minutes for the foam to dry, then peel the pieces and assemble them. the finished product you pass the strap through here and then you put the two back parts here, you glue them and then all this is glued and that's it, that's the whole shoe, so the manufacturing of these things is also very simple, the sandal It is 100%. Biodegradable, it takes 3 to 6 months to break down in a compost pile or, if it ends up in the ocean, it would take about a year.

Steve and his team have partnered with the Reef brand and plan to sell a seaweed sandal by summer 2024. In India, another entrepreneur is reversing this process instead of saving shoes from landfill. He is turning landfill into shoes. Ashe Bab started daily in 2021, when she was only 23 years old. We described her business later that year because it is the Hindi word for plastic. Each pair contains 10 plastic bags and 12 bottles. They clean the bags in a hot tub filled with just water without any added chemicals and then hang them to dry inside the warehouse's theater. They stack 8 to 10 layers of bags at a time and then place them under a heat press, this finished product will cover most of the shoe.

The founder of the company calls it daily Tex, so it is a material that is made entirely from Bas plastic bags without the use of any chemicals, packaged and shipped 7 hours north to Nitou. Shoe factory which is where the shoe will be assembled. The first daily teex sheets are die cut using metal shapes. Other patterns are cut from arpet fabric which is made from recycled bottles and woven into something resembling a canvas. Workers sew the two types of materials to join the assembled upper part. stretches DA soles are made from industrial rubber crumbs. A worker needs to rough up the sole on this grinder so that the glue added in The Next Step will adhere.

They cover the top of the sole with a transparent glue. A special ultraviolet light increases its adhesion. The shoes go through a series of heat treatments and layers to strengthen the bond between the sole and upper, then comes the final round of stitching. DA laces are also made from recycled plastic. This factory employs 170 people and makes shoes for three different companies that we wanted. to make sure we still use existing sneaker manufacturing techniques, you know, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. They produce 15,000 pairs of shoes every week and try to recycle everything, even the remains, it is recycled and some is also reused.

To make more Tech Sheets, the company sold 300 pairs of sneakers in its first month and says that the shoes are designed to last, are extremely durable and last like any other sneaker between 2 and 3 years, depending on how they are used in the Countries. Low. William Toa's company is using materials from old shoes in a new Mini Soccer field. Denny called me because he saw on the Internet that I make artificial rubber flooring and wanted to talk to me about the possibilities and ideas he had. Shoe recycling, this is the start of something, workers mix dirt shoes with a polymer binder and spread it on a concrete base to provide a soft and elastic surface to play on.

It's a fitting new life for many of the shoes you may have worn. The people who play here a company called Exclusive International turns FFG materials into displays like these. At AS6 headquarters we bring in between 45 and 60% of the milling of the material and we bring them back in this sheet material, this is Dr Martin's specific PVC. out Al, here you can see the yellow stitching on the reg grind in FFG Danny and Arna are still perfecting their process occasionally with the help of their four children, the family has faced many obstacles, including a fire that completely destroyed their first manufacturing plant. recycling. in 2022, then everything burned down, nothing was shaved, but in 10 months their new facilities were already up and running, most people at first laugh, but now they tell us, my God, what is this so good.

You have been fighting to do this, to do it well and to achieve it. It is a family business. It is a family business with passion and strategy. Yes, in the long term.