Valentine's Day Flowers Don't Have to Be So Bad for the Earth After All

A clean-tech startup in Germany is producing sustainable food packaging out of agricultural waste as an alternative solution to single-use plastic. Bio-Lutions claims its products are compostable and uses less water than other products, but the material used won’t work for some food items like hot beverages. The company already has investors such as Delivery Hero that will use its products when the factory is producing compostable packaging.

From collecting plastic to transforming it into infrastructure, communities all over the world are implementing solutions to tackle the growing amount of plastic waste. In Malawi, women are separating garbage from plastic and creating new products like fire briquettes, doormats, and organic compost that they can sell to others. A town in Tasmania turned their plastic waste into a road made of recycled asphalt that is expected to last 15 percent longer than regular asphalt. And Zimbabwe is employing youth to recycle plastic into eco-friendly construction materials.

Two organizations in Pakistan are working to tackle the country’s waste problem. Saaf Suthra Sheher in Islamabad set up partnerships with offices and schools to process their dry waste like plastics and glass. TrashIt, a Karachi-based group, collects organic waste from vegetable sellers and restaurants and then processes and sells it as compost. Although the two organizations can only process so much of the waste produced in cities, they argue that until an effective municipal waste collection system is implemented, they can educate individuals and businesses about how to recycle properly.

Pepperdine University is having some trouble as they try to go about achieving the goal set by the California government stating that 75% of waste must be diverted by 2050. This article covers the specifics of the conservation efforts at Pepperdine, and also looks at more successful programs going on at UCLA and Santa Clara University. Some effective tactics include a comprehensive education plan on recycling, requiring faculty and staff to dispose of landfill waste themselves by only collecting recyclable waste, and partnering with athletic teams to champion conservation.

Companies and research initiatives around the world are developing and testing new toilets that can collect human urine and turn it into fertilizer. These urine diversion toilets have been implemented in places like South Africa with mixed results. However, researchers in Sweden are using portable toilets to gather the urine, dry it into fertilizer pellets that are then used to grow barley for beer. This work could show how to implement these kinds of toilets on a large scale.

In the recent years, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission voted to restore consumers' "right to repair" their products and 27 states have introduced repair bills. This policy push has encouraged a growing number of independent repair shops and workshops that enable consumers to fix their products safely and effectively. Together, they're leading to a reduction in both electronic waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

The app Too Good to Go helps restaurants and other shops prevent food waste by selling their extra food to people for a cheaper price. So far, more than 700,000 people in the United States have downloaded the app and the company estimates that, on average, each meal sold halts 2.2 pounds of food from ending up in the garbage, which ends up reducing carbon emissions. There are challenges to widespread implementation, but the app has launched in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle.

A teenager in India came up with a solution to combat the plastic waste crisis that usually comes with planting trees. Srija created a biodegradable pot made out of groundnut shells that decomposes in the soil after 20 days. She’s working with an organization to scale her product, which costs just 27 cents to make.

Mason & Greens is a zero-waste store that reduces environmental impact by selling package-free items, from shampoo bars to organic produce. Dry goods and the wines, oils, and kombucha on tap are bought with reusable containers and priced by the ounce, which reduces plastic waste and allows customers to buy only what they need. In addition to minimizing products' carbon footprints, the store has been profitable since it opened and the owners say that, while prices are initially higher for consumers, reusable products may be less expensive in the long run because they don’t have to be replaced as frequently.

To preserve the millions of trees that are cut down just to produce coal in Burkina Faso, a Burkinese engineer created "green charcoal that would not only protect forests but also help fight against the proliferation of garbage." This ecological fuel is made from carbonized collected garbage and coconut husks, which in turn has reduced the amount of garbage that has to be managed by the authorities in charge of sanitation.