Catfish and zero wastes?

I didn't like catfish before, but I think I don't eat it any longer. However, this fish is very popular in many countries, including Southeast Asia.

Yesterday, I visited a community in Bangkok Metropolitan (Thailand) that made their own initiative to take care of their wastes with the help of catfish. Catfish is principally growing in dirty water that no other fish can survive. In this community, they have water under the houses, and started to farm catfish. They put all their organic wastes from the housholds and also a night market to these ponds to grow up the catfish. In addition, their wastewater including the toilet water goes directly to these ponds under the houses. Catfishes eat all the materials and grow well. Then, they harvest the fish and sell them in the market. People were happy and the fish were also happy! In this small community, they succeeded to reduce the amount of waste from 1.8 tons/day to just 200 kg/day, which is a great success! But I don't eat catfish :)

 

Plastic recycling in Sweden

The problems with the waste plastics in a global problem. Plastic wastes from bottles, bags etc. are not easily biodegradable and we see them spread everywhere on the streets, beaches, etc.

In Sweden, the plastics (mixture of various plastic materials) are collected separately from the other wastes. People put them is special containers. Then, it is collected by the municipalities or some companies and then moved to some special companies that take care of them. Swerec is one of these companies that recycle about 33,000 tons plastic each year, in which halft of it come from households. They separate hard- and soft plastics by blowing, contron the quality, cut them into in small pieces, and then separate the impurities. The mixed plastics are then separated based on their density. In this way, the waste plastics is recycled to the raw materials to make new plastics. Here is a short film about their process (in Swedish)!


(Plastic Recycling at Swerec in Sweden)


(The plastic wastes in one the beautiful beaches that I took the picture in 2008)

Our meeting with Hillary Clinton on Short Lived Climate Pollutant (SLCP)

I participated to a meeting today with State Secretary Hillary Clinton, Swedens Crown Princess HRH Victoria, Environmental Minister Lena EK and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. The discussion was about short lived climate pollutants (SLCP) such as methane, black carbon, HFC etc. These materials have a major contribution in climate change and global warming. You may see a recent program on Black Carbon on SVT (Vetenskapens värld).

This meeting will hopefully contribute into an acceptable agenda in Rio meeting this month on Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). Our model in Waste Recovery on how to connect local universities, political instruments, municipalites, private companies and NGOs in different countries was on special interest.


(I together with Lena Ek, Volvo CEO, Scania CEO, etc. Photo taken by my friend Olle Engström)


(Our meeting with Hillary Clinton and the Swedish delegetion)