Bono Helps Tokyo Turn Landfill into a Forest

Tokyo is in the process of turning a former garbage-covered artificial island into a vast new “Sea Forest”, an 88,000-square-meter park connected to the city center by a road tunnel. Architect Tadao Ando devised the project as a way to aid in Tokyo’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics. The transformation has been underway since 2007 and is expected to be ongoing until 2016.

Rock-star-slash-activist Bono is among those who have planted trees at the site, along with Nobel laureates and a Japanese astronaut.

From AFP, via Google:

The mega city of Tokyo, the world’s largest with 36 million people, long ago ran out of space for the mountains of rubbish it was producing and had used millions of tonnes since the 1970s as landfill to create the artificial island.

Looking down at the 88-hectare (217-acre) wasteland of garbage and dirt, fenced in and criss-crossed by bulldozer tracks, Ando instead imagined an oasis of natural beauty on the edge of the Japanese capital.

“I wanted to convert the landfill space into a forest,” the renowned architect told AFP. “Japan in the past was covered in forests. But because we have burnt so much, these forests have started to diminish.”

Ando said he wants to send a strong environmental message with the “Umi-no-Mori,” or “Sea Forest”, landfill project — for a return to nature and to boost efforts to counter global warming.

See, Bono’s not so full of crap after all. Yeah yeah yeah!

Link [Google AFP]

Mexico City Will Green its Garbage Dumps

Mexico City has a trash problem – a big one. Just 6 percent of the city’s waste is recycled, with the rest filling vast landfills that officials say are getting out of control. So, the new Waste Commission decided to set some lofty goals in an attempt to transform one of the world’s biggest and messiest waste management systems into a green system that would rival those in San Francisco or the Netherlands.

From MSNBC:

A newly formed Waste Commission is working to build four state-of-the-art processing centers in the next four years to recycle, compost or burn for energy 85 percent of Mexico City’s trash — compared with about 6 percent recycled today.

“The whole concept of recycling is very new in Latin America,” said Atiliano Savino, president of the International Solid Waste Association.

While many places are good at recycling one thing, such as aluminum, Savino said, he’s never seen a city revamp its recycling program on this scale in so little time. U.S. and European cities that now have recycling rates over 50 percent began decades ago.

But Mexico City has no choice. The federal government proposed to close the city’s main landfill this month, saying the 50 million-ton dump has become too full and leaches contamination. Scientists dispute that, and the closing has been delayed by a city appeal in federal court for an extension. Yet waste management officials know that soon much of Latin America’s largest metro area will be forced into expensive, temporary alternatives for dumping trash.

New processing centers will recycle 20% of Mexico City’s trash, compost 20% and burn another 45% for energy by 2012, according to the Waste Commission. The government will also harvest methane gas from Bordo Poniente, the city’s largest landfill, and use it to power the subway and light homes.

Considering that Bordo Poniente receives 700 truckloads of trash each and every day, such a program would make a huge difference. It will be a challenge for sure – especially getting the people of Mexico City to start sorting their trash, and to get the garbage worker’s union to collect separated waste. However they manage to do it, this will be a huge step forward for Latin America, providing a great example for many other cities with similar, if not as pressing, waste problems.

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Flickr user maurortega

High School Student Finds a Way to Biodegrade Plastic in 3 Months

Holy awesome! Some high school kid in Canada came up with a way to bio-digest plastic shopping bags. For a freaking science fair! Amazing. 500 billion plastic bags are produced worldwide every year, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. We’re all aware of the fact that plastic bags pose a lot of problems – they clog up landfills, choke marine life and are seen floating in water far too often. Finding a way to get rid of them is huge.

From The Record:

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature.

Daniel ground the plastic bags into a powder and mixed it with ordinary household chemicals, dirt, yeast and tap water to encourage microbe growth. For three months he allowed the concentration of microbes to increase, and put the culture into three flasks with strips of plastic bags. Six weeks later, he found that the bags weighed an average of 17 percent less. Not satisfied with that result, he continued working on the solution until he isolated his most effective strain of plastic-eating bacteria and got a result of 43 percent degradation in 6 weeks.

What a cool example of how innovation can come from the most unexpected places.

Link [The Record]
Photo credit: Flickr user scottwyden

Holy $#@%! The Average American Family Wastes 122 lbs of Food Every Month

Being freegan never looked like such a good idea. The average American family of four produces 122 pounds of waste each month, and most of that goes straight to landfills. That total doesn’t count food wasted by farms, processors and wholesalers. It adds up to a whopping 1,464 pounds per year. That waste includes lots of stuff that’s perfectly good, and the rest could at least be composted. Remember that the conditions in landfills prevent things from biodegrading like they would out in the open. This kind of waste causes our landfills to pile up, fast.

Christ on a bicycle, this is insanity. I knew we were a wasteful culture, but, wow. Most of us can recall our mothers telling us to eat up because there are starving children in Ethiopia, but damn, clearly what we really need to be doing is buying less in the first place – or giving the stuff we can’t eat to those in need. It’s truly sad to see so much waste when there are so many people struggling for a morsel of food every day.

Click here to see a higher resolution copy and read the details. Crazy!

Link [Groovy Green]
Photo credit: The New York Times