A glob of fat the size of a school bus was stuck in the London sewers. The 15-ton ‘fatberg‘ formed when waste food fat congealed around discarded wet wipes in the main drains under London Road in Kingston, Surrey. The blockage was removed by engineers before raw sewage started spurting out of neighborhood manholes. Fatberg-damaged sewer pipes will take six weeks to repair.
Researchers at the City University of Hong Kong, working with The Climate Group and Starbucks Hong Kong, have converted coffee grounds and stale pastry into plastic’s chemical components. The demonstration project used a small biorefinery rig sufficient for “proof of concept.” The process uses enzymes from fungi to break the waste’s carbohydrates into sugars and ferment them into succinic acid, which can be used to make many things, such as pharmaceutical additives, detergent, solvents, polymers, mulch films, rubbish bags, flushable hygiene products, and artificial sweetener.
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