An “Everest” of waste

What happens to our garbage after it is dumped? Through the example of Delhi, the film explores the transformation of a piece of plastic waste into a resource, through filmed interviews with diverse “people of waste” living in the shadow of consumer society. It aims at making visible the myriad of professions that specialize in the collection, sorting, reselling, cleaning, shredding and transformation of waste, from the stigmatized garbage picker at the bottom of the chain until…

Certains objets sont très difficiles à recycler parce qu'ils sont faits de nombreuses couches de différents matériaux : baskets, panneaux photovoltaïques ou batteries. Au laboratoire ICMCB à Bordeaux, une équipe de chercheurs utilise les fluides supercritiques pour séparer les éléments. C'est un domaine entre le solide et le gazeux où les propriétés des matériaux sont étonnantes et promettent de belles avancées dans le recyclage des déchets...

As part of its participation in VivaTech 2022, the European event dedicated to technological innovation, CNRS is presenting a sample of its deeptech know-how through various start-ups from its laboratories. These start-ups include Rosi Solar, which uses raw materials from the photovoltaic industry's waste, and FunCell, whose biosourced additives are used to reinforce paper and cardboard.

Episode 1: In the future, what if toilets separated our organic waste directly into a reusable product, and our urine was used to fertilise the fields with minimal pollution? We take you on a journey to discover the toilets of the future!

Electronic waste contains numerous precious metals, woven together. However, recent technical advances do not allow them to be efficiently recovered and processed. In Orléans, a group of ICAR, CEMHTI and BRMG researchers have developed a solution to this problem with the use of water, in what is known as a "supercritical" state. When this water is heated in a reactor it reaches extreme temperatures and has a powerful corrosive effect. The device was tested on circuit boards, with the aim of…

Plastic waste that accumulates in the ocean slowly deteriorates into smaller pieces. Scientists now estimate the amount of microplastics under the sea at 5000 billion tons, but the amount of nanoplastics remains unknown. That is why a French team decided to collect samples from the Mediterranean Sea to detect traces of nanoplastics. First, they concentrated the water by ultrafiltration and then used a dynamic light scattering technique to identify the nanoparticles. The final step was to resort…

In Saint-Laurent-Le-Minier and in many abandoned industrial and mining sites, the soil is full of contaminants (cadmium, lead, zinc, etc.). Thankfully, in this case like in many other instances, Mother Nature comes to the rescue by providing us with depolluting plants, such as the legume Anthyllis vulneraria which absorbs zinc. Chemist Claude Grison explains this depollution by phytoextraction. The cherry on the cake is that this biomass can be recycled using ecocatalysis, which…

A new scientific project launched by the Tara Oceans Foundation has embarked on the schooner TARA to sail the nine largest European rivers, in order to follow the route plastic takes before it transforms into microplastic. The scientists are using a manta net, which allows them to take samples from the surface of the water due to the small mesh size, and capture microplastics in the open sea, on the coast or in rivers. The aim is to determine the types of plastic contained in European rivers…

Nanoplastics with a size of less than a thousandth of a millimetre are the finest form of plastic pollution. The Pepsea research project focusses on a type of nanowaste that is still poorly understood. Researchers chose Guadeloupe to study its impact on the environment. The island is exposed to the ocean and the North Atlantic Gyre making it an area of plastic accumulation. It is the perfect field of study for researchers who are going to explore its beaches and mangroves. They investigate the…

Can human development continue at this pace without causing a loss of biodiversity? A group of researchers at the French Institute of Pondicherry believes so. By studying the impact of human activities on a biological hotspot in the South of India, they hope to find the key to a harmonious coexistence between humans and wildlife.

Associated with waste and squalor in the collective unconscious, gutters are essential elements of the sanitary life of our towns and villages. A whole universe of cells and micro-algae thrives there, fed as much by their direct environment as by waste water. In order to measure the proportion of anthropic and environmental contributions to the composition of their water, a series of samples were taken from Parisian gutters randomly from the 1,700 kilometre-long streets of the French capital,…

In forests, the underground work of fungi mycelium transforms organic waste into nutrients for the plants. Gil Urban and Arnaud de Grave, president and technical director of the company Polypop respectively, use this capability to clean polluted areas, and even dealing with hydrocarbons. Can fungi provide new ecological solutions for human societies?

In the Aveiro district of Northern Portugal, Estarreja is a town with a lagoon area where its rich ecosystem has been suffering from intense pollution since the 1950s. It is also the place of the second most important chemical compound in the country. Cross disciplinary research has been conducted by the International Human and Environment Observatory (OHMI) since 2010 to assess the impact of chemical pollutants in this densely populated area where there is still much traditional agriculture. …

Since the 19th century, western cities have been equipped with all kinds of utilities and networks supplying them with water, gas, electricity, public transport, waste collection and disposal. To supply a city with water is to solve both the problem of distribution in sufficient quantity and also that water potability. Bernard Barraqué, socio-economist and urban planner at CIRED, after a brief historical review, presents the research that has been carried out constantly to improve water…

The Observatories “Men and Environments” (called in French OHM) are intended to encourage the interdisciplinary researches on a given territory, marked by a major event which has a very important environmental, economical and social impact. The observatory dedicated to the coalfield of Provence was the first created by the CNRS in 2007. The area observed by this OHM is the former Gardanne coalfield, which covers 17 towns of about 100,000 inhabitants, and whose exploitation was definitively…