Green Biz

New Life for Leftover Latex

Peek into any basement or garage and you'll find them: old cans of paint left from a domestic makeover. Every year, do-it-yourselfers stash away some 66 million gallons of surplus latex. That's not counting the tons of waste from commercial sources, including low-quality paints rejected by manufacturers, dinged cans tossed by retailers, and big barrels abandoned by contractors.

A startup hopes to shift the flow of this colorful river away from the nation's landfills and into new plastics. Licensing technology from Rutgers University, Re-Manufacturing Technologies (RMT) has developed a process that combines waste paint with recycled plastic to produce resin pellets that companies melt and mold into various forms, from kitchen tools to electronics cases.

The RMT approach avoids landfill costs and helps meet the plastics industry's growing demand for recycled supplies, for which prices have climbed recently. Some day, paint recyclers might even pay you a fee to return those unwanted cans in your basement.

A Battery That Can Power a Whole Town




Microbial Methane Munchers

Could a microbe from hell help slow the pace of global warming? In the simmering, corrosive muds of Hell's Gate hot springs of Rotorua, New Zealand, researchers have discovered bacteria that devour methane, a greenhouse gas that environmentalists consider 20 times more harmful that carbon dioxide.

GNS Science, a research organization owned by the New Zealand government, says the tough new bug is the first methane-loving bacterium found to flourish in conditions as hot as 158F, with a chemical ambience similar to stomach acid. This makes it potentially easier to adapt to other hostile environments such as landfills, which leak methane as trash decomposes.

Matthew Stott, a GNS microbiologist, says the bug could also be adapted for use in other methane-venting sites, such as mines. Publishing in Nature, the researchers dubbed their superhardy discovery Methylokorus infernorum, a mix of the Latinized names for methane and the infernal place the bug was found.

Monsanto vs. GMO Haters

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