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Tiny trash factories

Not all waste has to go to waste. Most of the world's 2.22 billion tons of annual trash ends up in landfills or open dump. Veena Sahajwalla, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of New South walks, has created a solution to our massive trash problem: waste microfactories. These little trash processors house a series of machines that recycle waste and transform it into new materials with thermal technology. The new all-in-one approach could leave our current recycling processes in the dust.

Sahajwalla launched the world's first waste microfactory targeting electronic waste in 2018. A second one began recycling plastics in 2019. Now, her lab group is working with university and industry partners to commercialize their patented Microfactoric technology. She says the small scale of the machines will make it easier for them to one day operate on renewable energy, unlike most large manufacturing plants. The approach will also allow cities to recycle waste into new products on location. With a micro-factory, gone are the days of needing separate facilities to collect and store materials, extract elements and produce new products.

Traditionally, recycling plants break down materials for re us c in similar products. It is like melting down plastic to make more plastic things. Her invention evolved this idea by taking materials from an old product and creating something different. "The kids don't look like the parents," she says.

For example, the microfactories can break down old smart phoned and computer monitors and extract silica and carbon, and then combine them into silicon car bide nanowires. This generates a common ceramic material with many industrial uses. Sahajwalla refers to this process as "the fourth R," adding "____" to the common phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle."

In 2019, just 17.4 percent of e-waste was recycled, so the new ability offers a crucial new development in the challenge recycling complex electronic devices. "We can do so much more with materials," says Sahajwala." Traditional recycling has not worked for every recycling challenge." She and her team are already working to install the next waste microfactory in the Australian town of Cootamundra by early 2021, with the goal of expanding around the country over the next few years.

Osedax worms have been found in oceans all over the world. They've only ever been spotted on bones, which makes some scientists think that the bone-eaters are specialized to live in odd ecosystems, such as whale falls. "Those kinds of animals are definitely uniquely adapted to the environment in which you find them, "says marine biologist River Dixon. She is a graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

But as recent experiments show, the bone-eaters may not be picky about what type of bones they devour(吞食). Last year, biologists spotted Osedax worms in the Gulf of Mexico for the first time. And not on whale bones. Dixon was part of a research team that made the discovery. In early 2019, her group put the dead bodies of three alligators(短吻鳄)in water about 2 kilometers deep. Over the next few months, they sent a remote-controlled vehicle a few times to spy on what were essentially "alligator falls". 51 days after the alligators were placed in the seawater, scientists revisited. "The flesh was gone", Dixon says. . "It had been reduced to just the skeleton(骨骼)." And just as at whale falls, it hosted a carpet of bone-eating Osedax worms. These worms were similar to other bone-eaters but represented a never-before observed species. That means the scientists who found them get to name it (although Dixon says they haven't settled on a name yet).

The lab where Dixon works studies food systems in the deep ocean. Algae and plants use photosynthesis(光合作用)to turn sunlight into food. Animals eat those plants and algae to survive. Then larger animals may eat those animals. But sunlight doesn't reach the deep ocean's bottom. So other pathways are essential. These pathways include whale falls and other dead bodies. The scientists wondered how alligator falls fit into a larger food web. To find out, they submerged them.

Studying alligator falls, Dixon says, could help show how life evolved(进化)in the deep sea. It's possible that the creatures found on whale falls and other falls today, Dixon says, evolved from creatures that hundreds of millions of years ago would have devoured plesiosaur (蛇颈龙) falls.

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