People from Africa to Latin America are recycling bottles and using them to build fireproof, bulletproof, environmentally-friendly homes.

For about a quarter the cost of a conventional home, folks can build a two-bedroom house from 14,000 recycled plastic bottles by using the technique known as “bottle walls”.

The idea addresses both homelessness and pollution at the same time. Nigeria, for instance, has a housing shortage — 16 million people are homeless — and they have no manageable way to deal with plastic waste piling up across the country.

Nigerians have been getting help from Ecotec Environmental Solutions, a German firm since 2011, which is teaching them how to build with this model.

Cigarettes, the most frequently littered item in the country, could give a big bump to green tech, according to a group of South Korean scientists. The researchers transformed thousands of dirty filters into a material that can help store energy.

The scientists took used butts from Marlboro Light Gold, The One Orange, and Bohem Cigar Mojito cigarettes and and broke them down through a high-temperature process called pyrolysis.

When the researchers attached the hybrid carbon material they created onto an electrode, they found that it was able to store more electricity than commercially available carbon. The scientists see a wide range of possible applications for energy-retaining capacitors in portable devices, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. The Institute of Physics reports:

Co-author of the study Professor Jongheop Yi, from Seoul National University, said: ‘Our study has shown that used cigarette filters can be transformed into a high-performing carbon-based material using a simple one-step process, which simultaneously offers a green solution to meeting the energy demands of society.

‘Numerous countries are developing strict regulations to avoid the trillions of toxic and non-biodegradable used cigarette filters that are disposed of into the environment each year; our method is just one way of achieving this.’

We’re not saying to take up smoking — mojito-flavored cigarette, anyone? — but here’s hoping that in the future all those used butts might end up greening our electronics instead of piling up on our streets.

By Sarah Laskow
We have seen a lot of solar chargers in our day. And among all of them, this is the first one we’ve seen that we will definitely run out and buy as soon as it’s made available in the U.S. It’s a portable socket that gets its power from the sun rather than the grid. You plug into a window instead of into the wall. It’s easy.

That was the whole point, according to the designers, Kyohu Song and Boa Oh: “We tried to design a portable socket, so that users can use it intuitively without special training,” they write.

It is really simple. The portable socket attaches to a window like a leech to human skin. On its underside, it has solar panels:

The solar panels suck energy from the sun. The charger converts that energy into electricity. You plug in to the charger.

Even better, the charger stores that energy. After five to eight hours of charging, the socket provides 10 hours of use. You can pop it off the window, stick it in your bag, and use it to charge up your phone with solar energy, even if you’re sitting in a dark room.

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Scale insects can kill trees but are supposed to be harmless to humans. Yes, they’re parasites, but they don’t suck our blood or live inside us. But that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt us, indirectly. And as the planet keeps getting hotter, they will. As a new study shows, these tree-attacking insects thrive in hotter places — which, soon enough, will be everywhere.

The study, led by North Carolina State University entomologist Emily Meineke, looked at the abundance of scale insects on trees in Raleigh. They found that the bugs were “13 times more abundant on willow oak trees in the hottest parts” of the city, because the heat was encouraging outbreaks.

The scary part, though, is that, soon enough, all of Raleigh will resemble what are now the “hottest parts of Raleigh.” And eventually, even the cooler countryside will feel like the hot center of a city. io9 writes:

Cities warm more quickly than rural areas, but Meineke and her colleagues warn in their paper that the conditions in Raleigh will soon spread to wild forests as well. If insects overwhelm trees in these areas, all the animals who depend on those trees will become vulnerable.

This is how mass extinctions begin …

So, no, these bugs will not harm you. They’ll just kill the trees and all of the animals that depend on them, which can’t bode well for humans, either.

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Haight Ashbury Recycling Center Forcibly Evicted After 35 Years In Golden Gate Park

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After a bitter, multi-year fight between a long-standing neighborhood group and San Francisco’s Recreation and Parks Department, the recycling center that sat near the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park for over three decades has finally closed its doors.

Since 1980, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) had operated the facility, which was the last community recycling center in the area and the oldest in continuous operation in all of San Francisco.

The city began pushing for its closure in 2010, under the administration of then-mayor Gavin Newsom. “It kind of became obsolete over the decades,” Deputy San Francisco City Attorney Vince Chabria told KTVU. “Everybody started having curbside recycling.”

“The closure ends a neighborhood sore point and recognizes that the noisy, messy business isn’t needed anymore,” opined the San Francisco Chronicle, which has long campaigned for the center’s eviction. “It allows park officials to reclaim a corner of the park for more fitting use.”

Defenders have charged that the true motives behind efforts to shutter the center ran more along the lines of gentrification and desires to keep property values in the neighborhood high. The facility, for example, often caters to homeless individuals recycling cans and bottles in exchange for cash.

HANC filed suit against the city in 2011 in an effort to keep the center open, charging that the eviction amounted to discrimination against the neighborhood’s homeless community.

“This is part of nonauthentic, nongentrified San Francisco,” Robert De Vries, an attorney representing the HANC explained to the San Francisco Examiner. “Certainly it’s true some new people don’t like the old Haight-Ashbury. This is a social issue and I don’t think policy should be based on it.”

With our planet blatantly crying out for help (earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis… Earth is definitely sick y’all…), it’s all about finding alternative energy sources these days. One architect firm is going above and beyond any ideas I’ve come across thus far. Doll, an architecture firm based out of Rotterdamn, has created an amazing “Energy Floor,” which is capable of converting dance movements into usable energy. What an awesome idea! The club-goers are going to be moving all night anyways; might as well put their efforts to good use, right? The floor is really quite brilliant in its design. Each of the tiles within the floor is embedded with its own small generator. Each time the tile is stepped on, the kinetic energy is transformed into electricity. The produced electricity can be used to power any nearby electrical systems, like the dance floor’s LED lights or even a fog machine! These sustainable energy floors were created as a part of the architecture firm’s Sustainable Dance Club (SDC) concept. The SDC website has a great explanation of their project: “SDC started out as the upshot of a research project ‘When Nature Calls’ conducted by Enviu – innovators in sustainability and Architect Firm Döll. The result of the research project was the sustainable dance club concept, an idea that was officially launched in Rotterdam Club Off Corso in 2006 with the event ‘The Critical Mass.’ At the end of 2007, SDC BV was realized with the founding of the organization and development of product prototypes. In September 2008, Club WATT in Rotterdam was opened as the first Sustainable Dance Club™ showcasing the earliest model of the Sustainable Dance Floor. In 2009, an updated version of the SDF was launched and transported all over the world for a wide variety of clients. Projects ranged from permanent installations at museums in Miami and Philadelphia to pop-up events around the globe in Vancouver(Ca), Shanghai(Ch), Salvador(Br) and Abu Dhabi(VAE).” The people behind SDC believe in having fun while still accepting responsibility for the health of our world. They really want to make the world a better place and believe that by presenting a fun and exciting way to get people involved, we can take the steps forward to ensuring we have a better tomorrow. SDC’s vision on sustainability is simple: “People, Planet, Party!” Sounds good to me!