Salman Shooshtarian Asbestos has been found in mulch used for playgrounds, schools, parks and gardens across Sydney and Melbourne. Local communities naturally fear for the health of their loved ones. Exposure to asbestos is a serious health risk – depending on its intensity, frequency and duration – as it may lead to chronic lung diseases. The source of contamination is believed to be timber waste from construction and demolition sites that was turned into mulch. So far, 60 locations in Sydney and 12 in Melbourne have been identified as contaminated with asbestos to various degrees. The numbe ..read more

Maksim Safaniuk/Shutterstock Production of natural rubber has claimed over 4 million hectares of forest in south-east Asia since 1993 according to a recent study. This destruction of tropical forest for rubber plantations is thought to be two to three times greater than previous estimates. Natural rubber is vital to tyre production since it is stronger, more wear-resistant and more flexible than synthetic rubber. Multiple blends of natural and synthetic rubber are used for making different parts of a tyre. If more of these tyres were recycled, it would reduce how much oil, energy and forest is ..read more

What to do with them? thaiview/Shutterstock Wind-farm owners in Europe are holding off on scrapping their old turbines to maximise the power they can generate from them. That’s the latest news from a meeting we recently attended on the industry’s future. Wind turbines are designed to last 25 years, but the calculus for owners appears to have shifted because of the surge in electricity prices due to the Ukraine war. According to industry representative Wind Europe, only 454 megawatts (MW) of old turbines were decommissioned in 2022 compared to an expected 1.5 gigawatts (GW). That equates to mor ..read more

The glamourous aspect of fashion obscures the health and socio-environmental issues of the textile industry. (Shutterstock) The pollution caused by the textile industry is often discussed, but its impact on health is less emphasized. Nevertheless, the petrochemical compounds used in the manufacturing of our clothes have harmful effects on workers, surrounding communities, and consumers. This issue has a global impact, but its assessment is complex due to our low chronic exposure to a “cocktail” of synthetic substances whose cause-and-effect relationships are difficult to identify. Moreover, mo ..read more

A beach littered with plastic and other waste in the fishing village of Kayar, north of Dakar, Senegal. Bara Deme, Author provided Plastic pollution is an urgent environmental issue, globally. Every year, about eight million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans. Most of the 17 west African countries have a problem managing plastic waste. Eight of them are among the top 20 with the least effective plastic waste management practices – up from five in 2015. This has worsened marine pollution and adversely affected activities in the region. Coastal provinces account for about 56% of west Africa ..read more

Misuzu Henderson / shutterstock This Halloween, around 18,000 tonnes of pumpkins will go to waste in the UK alone. That’s because, of the 30 million purchased each year, about half go entirely uneaten. That’s £27 million worth of edible food. The global costs will be far higher, once we add in the waste in the US and other countries where pumpkin carving is also a Halloween tradition. The money spent on buying pumpkins is only a fraction of the true cost. When a pumpkin is wasted, the water, energy and labour used to grow and distribute it is also wasted. For every kilo produced, around 260 gr ..read more

Andrey Popov, Shutterstock Each year, Australian households discard about 2.5 million tonnes of food. Most (73%) of this food waste ends up in landfill. This is costly and contributes to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, because food waste rotting in landfill produces methane. So reducing household food waste and diverting it from landfill saves money, improves food security and benefits the environment. To address the problem, we need to understand how people generate and dispose of food waste. In our new study, we found households fell into three categories – based on the amount of food w ..read more

Food waste is a global problem with approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted each year throughout the food lifecycle – from the farm to food manufacturers and households. Across the food supply chain, Australians waste around 7.6 million tonnes of food each year. This costs our economy approximately A$36.6 billion annually. In a recent study published in Bioresource Technology Reports, we have found a way to use food waste for making a versatile material known as nanocellulose. In particular, we used acid whey – a significant dairy production waste material that it usually difficult to ..read more

The national cabinet has announced plans to build an extra 1.2 million homes by July 1 2029. The construction, operation and maintenance of buildings accounts for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. If these new homes are built in a business-as-usual fashion, they will significantly increase national greenhouse gas emissions. What if we committed to building homes that produced net negative emissions? Put simply, such buildings remove more carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere than are emitted during their lifecycle. This includes emissions from producing building mat ..read more

Shutterstock There’s growing global concern about potential risks to human health and the environment from a group of industrial chemicals commonly known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals”. While the full extent of harm from PFAS is still emerging, the fact these chemicals persist in the environment and accumulate in the body is alarming enough. Some scientists believe they will never break down. Until now, Australia has not restricted the trade or use of most PFAS chemicals. But that’s about to change. The federal government intends to stop the import, manufacture and use of some types of PFAS w ..read more