Cow dung could be used to create a next generation sustainable material, according to a new report.

Livestock dung is typically used as a fertiliser or as a source of biogas for green energy applications, but the study, led by scientists at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) in collaboration with the universities of Bristol and Edinburgh, reviewed recent research into the development of high-value manure-derived materials from ruminant animals such as cattle.

They found that dung has been largely overlooked despite the “staggering” variety of different applications for recycled ‘ruminant waste biomass’ (RWB).

The most common applications use manure in combination with other components to create composite materials such as plastic, recycled card and paper or concrete. However, it could also be used for the extraction of nanocellulose – a prospective bio-based and biodegradable material of the future. See our article on Melodea. 

Currently, there is a trade-off between the performance of the material and the amount of processing required to achieve this – limiting the capacity of RWB to replace conventional materials on a commercial level.

Professor Fabrizio Scarpa, from Bristol’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, explained: “In this study we have looked at assessing current manufacturing processes and performance of sustainable composites with lignin-based reinforcements extracted essentially from ruminant waste.

“Those composites can also be made by using various types of recycled plastics, together with different classes of reclaimed natural fibres. This is very promising for future sustainable materials applications in the extraction of nanocellulose from manure.

Roadmap for making biobased materials

“Nanocellulose is a biobased material with very interesting characteristics from the mechanical perspective. We found evidence that manure-derived reinforcements could also provide mechanical characteristics like analogous existing composites made from reinforcements derived from non-waste sources.

“In the paper we also describe some potential roadmaps to consider synthetic biology routes to make viable biobased materials from manure, and moving the production of materials towards a sustainable, circular, and local supply chain.”

Vijai Kumar Gupta, Senior Challenge Research Fellow at SRUC, said: “Given the demand for sustainable materials and the ever-increasing interest in nanocellulose research, it is highly likely that it will soon be brought out of the lab and into factories and everyday products. 

“Ruminant waste biomass could be instrumental for the transition of nanocellulose production to large and economically viable scales.”

“Nanocellulose, in combination with other materials such as polymers, metals and ceramics, has huge potential for use in antibacterial agents, antioxidants, sensors, electromagnetic shielding devices, adsorbents in water treatment, fuel cells, electrochromic and in biomedical applications.” 

. 

The post Cow dung for biomaterials appeared first on Green Prophet.

While many Muslims don’t drink alcohol, the people of Batroun, Lebanon love their beer. At least according to Jamil al-Haddad, the visionary behind Colonel beer and a new microbrewery built out of recycled materials.

Jamil has been brewing beer for a very long time, and took several classes abroad in order to hone his craft.

“I was 17 when I started to make liqueur at home, Irish cream, banana, strawberry. I started in order to make a bit more money so I could buy myself windsurf boards,” he told Lebanon’s Daily Star. “I began while I was in the boy scouts, and then I made it at home.”

In addition to brewing a fine micro beer called Colonel, the 30-year-old entrepreneur commissioned Cedar Environmental to help make the building in which this alchemy takes place a powerful showcase of renewable materials and clean energy – a very ambitious move for the coastal business.

Related: Why Muslims Don’t Drink Alcohol

The brewery’s walls are clad in recycled wooden crates and the wall panels designed by engineer Ziad Abichaker are comprised of bricks made of melted down recycled plastic. The brewery has used up the equivalent of two million plastic bags, according to Your Middle East.

Other recycled materials have been incorporated into the project, which eventually will include a restaurant, bar and other facilities that Jamil has up his sleeve.

“This will be an outdoor area for barbecues, beer festivals and other cool summer events,” he explains to Daily Star, and a spot near the sea has been designated for small bungalows.

The idea is to create a welcoming and an educational space for visitors, who will be able to take tours of the brewery before or after eating a wholesome lunch.

:: Daily Star

Image via Your Middle East

The post Colonel microbrewery built with recycled materials opens in Lebanon appeared first on Green Prophet.

Pugedon approached the city with an idea to install vending machines throughout Instanbul.

Placed mostly in city parks and other areas where a lot of people congregate, the machines are receptacles for used plastic bottles, and have a bonus flap at the end where dishes of water and kibble are placed.

Every time a person pops in a plastic bottle, a bit of kibble is released into bowls at the bottom of the machine, which stray animals are free to eat without persecution.

The city was happy for Pugedon to install these machines because it costs them nothing. In fact, they’re fairly self-sustaining. Funds raised by recycling the plastic are used to purchase the kibble.

Related: Egyptian vet school exposed for vicious treatment of animals

I don’t know about you, but I’m always so heartbroken to see stray animals in the street. Many countries in the Middle East (and just about everywhere, let’s be real) have a stray animal problem, and most cities are at a loss for how to deal with it.

We’ve seen some inhumane solutions. In Egypt, for example, the government poisons street animals, and they can sometimes be seen dying a violent death as the strychnine circulates through their bodies.

This is a much more humane solution. People can feel like they’re helping the animals without having to take them home or interact with them directly, and there’s an environmental benefit at the same time!

Genius!

For more Turkish genius, check out these awesome solar-powered lanterns that also put recycled plastic bottles to good use.

:: Elite Daily

The post Plastic for kibble – vending machines for stray animals in Istanbul appeared first on Green Prophet.

A young firm from Turkey, Designnobis wants to turn them into lanterns!

Unlike other solar-powered lanterns that are currently on the market, Infinite Light treats waste (plastic bottles) as a valuable resource, which helps to drive down its overall carbon or environmental footprint.

It could also potentially drive down the cost, since users would only have to purchase a kit of parts, which includes a flexible solar panel that is placed inside a transparent bottle (for more efficient solar gain), small batteries that store the daytime energy absorbed by the solar panel, and a wire frame that provides the lamp’s portability.

“With Infinite Light, we aimed to create a sustainable lamp with minimum cost,” the designers at Designnobis told Fastco Design. “The lighting unit does not require any infrastructure, and it is a ready-to-use package that can be placed in a discarded plastic bottle.”

Related: WakaWaka provides solar-powered lighting for Syrian refugees

Albeit just a concept at this stage, this design would meet a tremendous need in the Middle East in particular. Especially now during summer, power outages are rampant, electricity is scarce, and millions of people – Palestinians, Syrians, and Iraqis most notably – have been displaced from their homes due to political conflict.

Which means there are millions of people who lack access to basic lighting, which can literally save lives in certain situations. For example, women and children become targets of sexual violence in refugee camps, a terrible crime that is particularly common in areas that have insufficient lighting.

Such a lantern, which is super easy to carry and hang in homes or offices, or donkeys even, thanks to the brilliant but simple wire frame, could also go a long way to reducing the plastic pollution problem in the Middle East North Africa region.

Plus, widespread availability or distribution and use of the Infinite Lights could help shape the way that people view plastic. Rather than view it as trash, it should be seen as a free and valuable resource that can be recycled for other meaningful and important uses.

:: Fastco Exist

The post Turkey’s Designnobis turns plastic bottles into solar-powered lanterns appeared first on Green Prophet.

Many communities in Israel are in various states of disrepair, a situation that a group of friends fresh out of the army decided to remedy back in 2002 when they started Ayalim to help enlist young adults into moving into communities that need a fresh start.

The Ayalim Association has since enlisted Israeli youth to construct 14 student villages throughout the Galilee and Negev; these students then work with the local community in an urban renewal initiative that is said to have drastically reduced crime in some communities.

This movement also boosts rent prices, but we’re not sure that’s a good thing.

Students team up with local children – both Jewish and Arab – in a mentoring relationship. In exchange for tuition reimbursement and subsidized housing, the students commit to 500 volunteer hours every year.

Related: Shipping container cargotecture not all it’s stacked up to be

The Lod student village constructed out of repurposed shipping containers will provide housing for 130 college students, who were selected out of a pool of 900 applicants.

The goal is to turn Lod, a ‘City of Shooting’ into a reinvigorated ‘City of Students,'” the organizers wrote in a recent press release.

This will be followed up with more villages, as well as parks, theaters, bars, and other facilities designed to rehabilitate what the Ayalim organizers call a “once down and out, written-off town.”

In addition to fostering safer, more vibrant communities, these villages help to bridge any divides that might have occured between Arab and Jewish communities.

Ayalim is hopeful their model can be replicated outside of Israel as well.

This new paradigm of urban renewal could serve as a great example for cities like Detroit and New Orleans looking for disruptive ways of turning urban blight into urban bliss.”

Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid will be among the dignitaries who will inaugurate the new village.

The post A shipping container village to rescue “shooting” city appeared first on Green Prophet.

A graphic designer, Hala Smadi also has a way with recycled tires. Similar to Bokja’s tires wrapped in exotic and colorful fabrics as a form of protest in Lebanon, Smadi’s recycled “Wheels” also puts disused tires to new purpose.

After rolling the tires to the nearby gas station where they are cleaned, the Petra University graduate brings the tires back to her own home and then weaves some kind of special magic.

Either she paints them in elaborate designs to be used as plant pots, or covers them in durable fabrics (often sent from Dubai by her Aunt who lives there) for use as a decorative piece, or even upcycles them as hipster stools.

Related: Bokya burns tires to protest pollution in Beirut

Speaking to Humanity Can Wait (HCW), a great website that chronicles grass roots art, culture, design and activities in Jordan, Smadi describes how interest from people both in Jordan and abroad spurred her to pursue this line of decorate Wheels (which many might see as a particularly disgusting thing to have in one’s house.)

In addition to being a unique way to express her talents, Wheels allows Smadi to attack a particularly vexing situation that the entire MENA region faces – mountains of scrap tires that are vectors of disease and potentially dangerous because of the way they retain heat and cause fires.

Asked by HCW how she finds her chosen medium, Shami says:

Anywhere and everywhere! I go around shops asking for wheels all the time. It’s incredibly time-consuming and hectic. I do buy some of them sometimes, but other times a lot of people give them to me. There are a lot of potential uses for old wheels and tires, but most of them are just thrown away. It’s a really good opportunity for me to recycle them.

The post Tires upcycled as Arabian stools appeared first on Green Prophet.

German artist HA Schult has spent the last 18 years traveling around the world with his own army of ‘trash people.’ Like a modern version of China’s terra-cotta warriors, the exhibit recently landed in Israel.

First built out of all manner of recycled junk in 1996, Trash People has since awed audiences in  Xanten, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Cairo, Zermatt, Kilkenny, Gorleben, Brussels, Cologne, Graz, Rome, Barcelona, Washington D.C., Siracuse, Fabriano, Telgte, and the Arctic.

Now the army of trash warriors, which is reduced from its original 1,000 to 500 and comprises 20 tons of iron, glass, computer parts and industrial waste, has touched down in Tel Aviv.

They didn’t go to Rothschild Blvd. They didn’t go to Jaffa. The trash warriors went to Hiriya, the site of what used to be the largest landfill in the country. And what a site it was.

Teeming with so much methane gas that it provides power for a nearby factory, the landfill has since been rehabilitated into a public park, and one that is incredibly active at educating the public about the downsides of poor waste management.

But they are also the vanguard for an active trash culture – people who turn waste into art and even functional objects.

Related: World’s largest trash mural makes life a little less horrible for people in Syria

There’s nothing functional about the German artist’s trash army on display at what is now called the Ariel Sharon Park. But it does serve as a remarkable wake up call.

Modern society has become so wasteful that we have run out of ways to dispose of the excess trash. The oceans are so full of trash, rescue teams mistook it for the Malaysian Flight 370 that went missing, and there’s even junk floating in space.

To some extent, each one of us is a trash warrior. According to a 2012 Ha’aretz article, after Americans, Israelis generate more waste per capita than anywhere else in the world. That same year, 3,000 tons of waste collected from Tel Aviv and surrounding towns was delivered to Hiriya every day.

Recycling is becoming more common and an increasing number of people are aware of how much junk they make. But not enough.

Hopefully this traveling exhibit will become the conversation at Israeli dinner tables, and that the vision of 500 life-sized trash people will forever remind them to reduce their consumption.

Images by Gianluca Battista via HA Schult’s Facebook Page

The post HA Schult arrives in Israel with an army of 500 ‘Trash People’ appeared first on Green Prophet.

Anyone who hasn’t been to Syria in the last few years can’t possibly grasp the full extent of the horrors Syrians have endured, but we do know it has been unspeakably hard. To take the edge off, a handful of artists in Damascus built what the Guinness Book of Records recently confirmed is the world’s largest mural made with trash.

Led by Moaffak Makhoul, six artists spent six months building the wall using whatever recycled materials they could find. Old spark plugs, broken tiles, keys, rusted iron, bicycle wheels, broken mirrors – all were fair game for the colorful mural.

Measuring 2, 362 square feet in total, the largest mural made with recycled materials in the world, the inspiration piece stands just outside of a primary school in the country’s capital.

Although this part of the country has been relatively unscathed in the three year battle that has killed at least 140,000, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and made refugees of two million, no Syrian is untouched.

Related: Collapsible refugee shelters powered by the sun

Everybody knows somebody who has lost a family member and the atmosphere is undoubtedly tense – particularly for children who have been robbed of the opportunity to live an innocent life.

Makhoul told Reuters that now is the most appropriate time for the mural.

“I’ve been sad to see a lot of my colleagues, artists, all traveling abroad and leaving,” he said. “God be with them and give them luck – but the country also needs all of us.”

Students told Reuters that they are excited about the mural. Not only did it make one child more excited to come to school, but another said the materials made him more aware of what can be done with what some people think of trash.

What a beautiful metaphor – the broken pieces of the country may one day be recombined into a unified, brighter whole – just like this incredible labor of love.

Image via Guinness Book of World Records

The post World’s largest trash mural makes life in Syria a little less awful appeared first on Green Prophet.

The nearly 10,000 Palestinian refugees packed into southern Beirut’s Shatila camp live in makeshift homes of corrugated tin, and many long to return to their homeland. In order to depict life in the camp, artist Abdulrahman Katanani used the only materials he had available to him – scraps.

Originally displaced from villages near Amka, Majd al-Krum and Yajur in northern Palestine in 1948, the Palestinian refugees settled in the Shatila refugee camp around 1949.

Since then they have raised families and tried to eke out some kind of dignified existence in an area of just one square kilometer. It’s not easy to get by with very little money, but life does go on.

For those of us who live in warm cozy homes that are cooled in the summer time, it’s hard to envision what it must be like to live this way. Which is what makes Katanani’s sculptures so powerful.

Related: Masafer Yatta – the Palestinian Cave Dwellers of Firing Zone 918

Using the materials of their existence – corrugated tin roofing, barbed wire and chain link fence – the artist frames nostalgic scenes – children flying patchy kites or playing soccer, men playing traditional music instruments, and families carrying goods on their heads.

Considering the medium, the pieces are incredibly detailed. They are borne not only from Katanani’s own experiences but from the rest of his community as well.

“When I started to use sheets of tin, people remembered that they live with this material,” Junk-Culture quotes him as saying.

“The saddest thing is that the people in the camps, are also like my materials, forgotten.”

Katanani works with Gallery Agial: http://www.agialart.com/index.htm and Gallery al markheyya in Qatar. http://www.almarkhiyagallery.

The post Powerful scrap sculptures depict life in Beirut’s Shatila refugee camp appeared first on Green Prophet.

Just three years ago, when I started writing for Green Prophet, a project like this was virtually unheard of. While  murmurings about clean technology, renewable energy and maybe even recycled materials had begun to emerge, there existed no supply chain of more earth-friendly materials to support any fledgling green initiatives. This I saw with my own eyes.

Now so much has changed, in large part thanks to government-sponsored Masdar (see photos of our trip to Masdar here), which among its many accomplishments established The Future Build, a brilliant platform that allows architects, designers, contractors and clients in the construction industry to source materials rated to the highest environmental specifications.

This in turn encourages suppliers to improve the quality of their product and enables Abu Dhabi to push their widespread “greening” initiatives even further.

The emirate’s Department of Transportation (DoT) has teamed up with the the Urban Planning Council (UPC), the Estidama program team and the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, along with an international consortium of road planning experts, to design and plan a new green road to link the UAE capital and Dubai.

(Related post: Abu Dhabi: biggest polluter turned green police)

Devised as a template for future roads, the new highway will be constructed with state of the art materials designed for optimum safety and security, including recycled materials such as asphalt and aggregate and rubber tires, and it will require less maintenance in the long run.

Part of the DoT’s Surface Transport Master Plan, the E311 will also be illuminated with renewable energy such as solar power, in order to reduce the project’s overall carbon footprint.

“The DoT has undertaken several studies to guarantee that the best possible approaches are being utilised ensuring that the project will bring the defined objectives,” according to local paper Emirates 24/7, “one of which is building modern and environment-friendly roads as opposed to the traditional ones.”

Construction on the pilot road will being in early 2015.

Image of Dubai/Abu Dhabi road sign / Shutterstock

The post The new road to Dubai will be recycled and green appeared first on Green Prophet.