Solutions

submitted by Albert Gomez

An electronics waste handling facility called Seoul Resource Center in the northeast of the Seoul. Eco City

wsj.com - by Steven Borowiec - July 25, 2013

South Koreans are among the world’s most frequent phone upgraders, buying about 15 million new mobile phones each year

To tackle the issue of electronics waste, or e-waste, the Seoul city government is employing the elderly and low-income to breakdown and process parts with a program called Eco City.

“Our country lacks natural resources. We started this center after we realized that a lot of the kinds of things we need, like metals, were already in the country but were being thrown out,” Eco City Chief Executive Lee Dong-hyun said.

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We’re going to need a bigger bucket of water.  Shutterstock

grist.org - by Natalie Starkey - July 14, 2013

Global warming could be reversed using a combination of burning trees and crops for energy, and capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground (CCS), according to an analysis by scientists. But experts cautioned that trying such an approach after temperatures had passed dangerous levels could be problematic, as climate change reduced the number of trees available for “bioenergy.”

The bioenergy and CCS method was the most cost-effective way of tackling carbon emissions, said the team at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, publishing their research in the journal Environmental Research Letters on Thursday.

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Research - Meeting global temperature targets—the role of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034004/article

July 1, 2013 — A slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, received major media attention in 2010 and 2011 when the outside world realized where computers go to die. In an area called Agbogbloshie, impoverished residents were burning broken electronic parts, discarded and dumped by wealthier nations, to extract the metal components. Crouched around bonfires, they inhaled toxic smoke and unwittingly leached heavy metals into a nearby river, just to eke out a living.

Harvard undergraduate Rachel Field '12, an engineering sciences concentrator, read the news reports and devoted her senior thesis project to addressing the problem.