Beginning in May 2010, Knowaste Ltd., will open a new recycling facility in the England. Hopefully other countries will take notice and build their own dirty diaper recycling plants. Why? The average baby goes through 5,000 to 6,000 diapers by the time they are potty trained? That’s almost one full ton of waste per baby. Disposable diapers can take up to 500 years to decompose.

As well as baby diapers, the new UK plant will also accept adult hygiene waste from nursing homes and hospitals. The Birmingham facility is the first of five proposed plants in the UK.

Established in 1989, Knowaste recycles other absorbent hygiene products besides diapers – bed-liners, adult incontinence and feminine hygiene products. Disposable diapers consist of three parts: wood pulp, gel polymers and mixed plastic. According to the Knowaste, 98% of the disposable diaper can be recycled.

The best way to reduce office waste is not to produce it in the first place. Before buying any kind of supplies for your office, ask yourself if you need to buy the goods or materials, or if you are simply buying too much. Use electronic communication whenever possible to reduce printing and faxing, and try to encourage staff not to print out documents or emails if possible. Reuse or recycle paper, printer toner and ink cartridges that you would normally just toss out. If you are replacing computers, look into computer recycling. The amount of office paper currently sent to landfills is huge, and totally unsustainable for the planet.

Here are some startling numbers:

A typical business office will produce about 1.5 pounds of paper waste per employee each day.
The paper industry ranks 4th in contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions.
For every ton of recycled paper it can save up to 17 trees.
40% of the solid mass in landfills is paper and paperboard waste 14.

Companies that use well-thought out waste reduction and waste management strategies eventually will see better financial and environmental benefits. Minimize the amount of waste you do produce, and recycle what you can after items have been reused. This will allow you to make save money on office waste disposal costs and reduce your business’ impact on the environment.

David de Rothschild is taking recycling to a whole new level. Taking thousands of plastic bottles, which de Rothschild says are a symbol of global waste, and constructing a boat that he plans to sail from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles.

“It’s all sail power,” de Rothschild said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.”

The boat, appropriately named the Plastiki, is currently being built on a San Francisco pier and is scheduled to set sail from San Francisco in April. Plastiki’s twin hulls will be filled with 12,000 to 16,000 bottles. Covering the hulls will be panels made from recycled a woven plastic fabric called PET.

“This actually is the same material that is made out of bottles,” said de Rothschild of the PET fabric. “We actually wrap the PET fabric over the PET foam and then basically put it under a vacuum, heat it, press it and create these long PET panels. So that means the boat is, technically, one giant bottle.”

Plastiki will also have a watertight cabin, which sleeps four. Two wind turbines and an array of solar panels will charge a bank of 12-volt batteries, which will power the onboard electronics.  The ultimate goal of the Plastiki voyage is to draw attention to waste as a renewable resource while encouraging people to embrace clean, renewable energy.

If you simply toss out your old electronics, like computers, printers etc, not only are you taking up increasingly limited landfill space with valuable resources like plastic, metal and glass, you’re also putting toxic materials in the ground.

If you bought your TV, computer, or other electronic device in the last decade, it can be upgraded or refurbished and be of use to someone who doesn’t have the money to buy a new one. Or you can take the recycling route: many computers and other electronics are built to be easily demanufactured into their component parts for easy recycling. Some devices may require more energy to recycle, but it’s still better than just leaving them to a landfill.

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition provides several excellent Consumer Guides that walk you through just how you go about finding a recycling facility for your old electronics. One of these guides is A Consumer’s Guide to Recycling Your Old TV. All the info you’d need is summed up in this guide. They also have a TV manufacturer report card that highlights where a manufacturer ranks in their recycling programs. Also take a look at a listserv like Freecycle, and you’ll likely find some who at least wants it for parts.

An industrial design student in the U.K. has built a cheap, ecological transport – a cardboard bike. He designed the bike after learning that a bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds, so he decided to make a bike inexpensive enough that it wouldn’t matter if it got stolen. The prototype is made almost entirely from recyclable and recycled materials, using interchangeable mechanical parts. It costs about $30 to make. The body of the bike is environmentally-friendly and biodegradable industrial cardboard used in constructing particle boarding. Problems? Only if it rains!