Recycling food waste would bring huge benefits, but microplastics a challenge
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-Oct-2026 16:16 ET (30-Oct-2026 20:16 GMT/UTC)
Keeping food waste out of landfills provides climate and other environmental benefits, and Vermont requires residents to divert these materials to better management pathways. With other states considering similar policies, UVM researchers studied the potential outcomes of bringing these efforts to a national scale. Key findings include that diversion of food waste from landfills to composting and anaerobic digestion at a national scale in the U.S. would reduce the current climate impacts of these wastes by 89 to 99%. Environmental nutrient pollution from food waste management, which can contribute to infamous summer blue-green algae blooms in lakes, could drop by 49 to 54% for nitrogen, and 78 to 98% for phosphorus. But if the organics resulting from composting and anaerobic digestion were spread on agricultural fields, they could also carry around 20,000 tons of microplastics into the soil annually, the researchers found.
High-speed optical imaging is often limited by the trade-off between sensitivity and response speed. Researchers developed an NbSe2/WSe2 semimetal-semiconductor heterostructure that tailors interfacial energy barriers through band engineering, enabling low dark current, rapid photoresponse, and high-fidelity imaging
The stability of ecosystems is affected by biodiversity at every level of the food chain. Scientists recently discovered that herbivore asynchrony stabilized a semi-arid grassland ecosystem by serving as a biological buffer between plant and predator communities.