io9: garbage

Egypt's Trash City Only Looks Like the Garbage Apocalypse

Lauren Davis — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:00:00 PST

Somewhere buried under all those bags of trash is the Egyptian city of Zabbaleen, where garbage reigns supreme. It looks like an object lesson, warning us of some impending garbage apocalypse, but there's something entirely different at work.

We've seen cities around the world ruined by radiation, pollution, political shifts, and depleted resources. At first glance, Zabbaleen looks like another set of modern ruins, a city crushed beneath our waste — a real-life version of Futurama's "Big Piece of Garbage."

But Zabbaleen is actually a thriving community built on the use and repurposing of waste. Residents of the city, which sits just outside of Cairo, collect trash from wealthier cities and use or reuse some 80 to 90 percent of it. Some of the waste is fed to livestock or burned for fuel; what can be repaired is fixed and sold. Much of their business consists of sorting and cleaning items and then selling them as scrap. Zabbaleen residents performed the service for the government, and now many waste management companies outsource their business to the city. But the citizens still live at poverty levels and amidst heaps and heaps of garbage.

Incredible ‘Garbage City' Rises Outside of Cairo [Inhabitat]

Manson Is A Method Actor, Of Sorts

Graeme McMillan — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:40:00 PDT

Wondering what gives Shirley Manson the experience to be able to pull off playing a hard-ass CEO in the new season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles? Apparently, very tenuous logic, according to the former lead singer of Garbage: "You know, she's the CEO of a corporation that develops technology... As a musician, we're dealing with technology all the time nowadays so it's not such a stretch." Well, it was that or "she's a woman, just like me." [Comic Book Resources]

Biggest garbage dump: Oceans or Space?

Michael Reilly — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:40:00 PDT

People are good at spreading trash around the globe, and even our vast oceans are starting to fill up with (mostly plastic) refuse. Witness the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a floating trashcan the size of Texas. But outer space is closing the gap, according to a recent article in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (thanks, TreeHugger). We've heard a lot about the threat space debris poses to expensive communications satellites (read: Pentagon is getting worried about damaging their pretty spy sats), but what about crewed flights? Tourists' flights into low Earth orbit are going to be bumpy rides if we don't get to fixing his problem soon.

Superbugs to Make Power from Poo

Matthew DeBord — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:00:20 PST

Quick intro to the hydrogen-economy paradox: The stuff could save our oil-addled asses, but curses! We have to burn oil to make the stuff. Enter researchers from Penn State, who have announced that they can use specially bred bacteria to make the most plentiful element in the universe from... Well, let's allow FOXNews to serve up the money shot:

The idea, first announced in 2005 but improved upon in newer work, is to take liquid waste, such as effluent from sewers, breweries or food processing plants, and feed it to soil- or wastewater-derived bacteria raised in reactors designed to foster their growth.

Gracious me! Effluent! They've got some kind of poet on the shit-eating bacteria beat over there in Murdoch country.

Actually, the process sounds like it might have legs. The Penn State engineers think they can eventually run their bacteria-breeding reactor on electricity generated by the bacteria-~~poo~~ effluent interface. This is significant, as it would create a closed loop, with beautiful clean sweet-smelling hydrogen as the only byproduct. Not exactly an organic perpetual-motion machine, but close. It would provide a significant boost to more widespread use of fuel-cells.

The key input to get the coveted output, of course, is crap, of various flavors. And lord knows we're not going to be running out of that anytime soon.
AP Photo/Jay LaPrete

Garbage in, hydrogen out [FOXNews]