The only two options that freight trains have for accessing the east side of the Hudson River are to cross a bridge in Albany—140 painstaking miles North of New York City—or to ride a rail barge across the Hudson through the highly efficient marine-rail operation run by NYNJ Rail in Jersey City.
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A toxic and deadly week in landscape reads. We learn how, remarkably, tourist poop is flown by helicopter out of national parks, how Silicon Valley exports toxic waste all over the country, how poison lurks in our old televisions, and how the land can just fall away in the form of Washington’s deadly mudslide.
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As a nation, the United States consumes a whopping 8 billion chickens every year, and this results in a few mountains’ worth of chicken feathers in pure waste. But no more, some entrepreneurs say: chicken feathers could be the future of plastic.
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As the country’s largest producer of cheese, Wisconsin is also the country’s largest producer of cheese waste. But why think of that as a bad thing? In the hands of some enterprising Wisconsinites, what was once wastewater is now electricity. This is, after all, the same state that’s using salty cheese brine to de-ice its roads
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Drug users might be less than forthright about their illicit habits—but they all have to pee. With that in mind, scientists are drug-testing entire sewer systems to study just how popular illegal drugs have become.
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Among the things I found mortifying about my parents when I was a teenager was their habit of leaving buckets of pee in the bathroom. Instead of flushing all that phosphorous- and nitrogen-rich urine down the toilet, they saved it for our backyard vegetable garden. Pee as fertilizer has since—contrary to everything my teenage self wanted to believe—become a hip idea among some eco-minded backyard farmers.
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As of last month, New York City’s Sunset Park waterfront is home to the largest commingle recycling facility in the nation. After its inaugural run on opening day, the facility shut down for some final tweaks and testing before it opens full time. During this period of maintenance, Gizmodo visited the new facility for a private tour of the process that materials go through in the new location.
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Landfills are pretty wretched places with all the rotting trash spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s no wonder humans have started building robots to do the dirty work in dumps around the world. The fact that these mechanical workers do it with lasers is just a bonus.
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We’re wasteful people. Maybe not you and maybe not me but definitely "we". Some of us try to live as consciously as possible but it hardly matters when the rest of us are inconsiderate and lazy. The United States wastes about $165 billion in food every year. Half of the food produced in the US is wasted between the farm and the fork! This video reveals the numbers behind the food we waste. It’s pretty rough and it doesn’t get much better. [Visual.ly via FoodBeast]
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Are you going to win the $550 million pot? Statistics aside, you feel almost 100% certain that you will. Now is the time to start wrapping your brain around just how much cash that is. More »
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