waste

North Carolina has been grappling for years with the enormous quantity of waste produced by its hog farms. But the state has more than twice as many poultry farms, and the state must consider the impact of poultry waste when thinking about how to regulate the agriculture industry, says a new report from the Environmental Working Group.

The District of Columbia is following cities like New York and San Francisco in moving toward curb-side pickup of waste for composting, saying about "148,000 tons of organic waste could be composted annually — about 60 percent of the food and yard waste generated in the city each year," the Washington Post reported.

Farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota produce around 60-80 million pounds of plastic every year, from bags to hold silage to tunnels that protect crops. But in the past two years, thousands of farmers in the two states have joined a program run by Arkansas-based Revolution Plastics to recycle their plastic waste.

In Europe, a designer from Austria, Katharina Unger, is working with Utrecht University on "a system that cultivates edible plastic-digesting fungi," says Wired.