Compost

Although we should try to keep as little of our organic waste as possible from going to the landfill, not everyone has the outdoor space for a compost heap. The Puresky Waste Composter is designed to help, by moving the composting indoors.

If you've ever been turning over your compost heap and found months-old "compostable" plastic items that were still mostly intact – well, you're not alone. New research states that 60% of such plastics don't fully degrade in home composting systems.

Single-use, single-serve coffee "pods" are definitely not eco-friendly, which is why refillable pods have been created. Swiss company CoffeeB is taking a different approach, however, with its fully compostable Coffee Balls.

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam is a problematic material, in that it's cheap and lightweight but also non-biodegradable and difficult to recycle. German scientists have developed a possible alternative, though – foam made out of popcorn.

Although pens may not be a huge source of landfill waste, it still hurts the environment when they're simply thrown away. That's where the Scribit Pen is designed to come in, as it's claimed to be completely compostable.

Using a compost heap is a great way of putting food waste to use, but that waste can take several weeks or longer to become compost – in the meantime, it may stink or attract pests. The indoor Kalea device, on the other hand, is claimed to produce compost in just two days.

BioBag World Australia and IG Fresh Produce have come up with an alternative to polyethylene wrap that can be used to keep cucumbers fresh.

​Compost heaps do have some limitations – they take a long time to convert waste to soil, they can attract pests, and you're not supposed to put meat scraps in them. Well, apparently none of those things apply to a new appliance known as the Zera Food Recycler.

Researchers from the Young Investigator Network at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) in Germany are developing printed electronics from natural and compostable materials that could help make a dent in the millions of tons of electronic waste piling up worldwide each year.

We've already got biodegradable shoes and bikinis, but how about just regular ol' shirts and pants? Well, while materials such as cotton and wool will biodegrade under the right conditions, clothing manufacturer Freitag is producing clothing that's specifically designed for easy composting.

New York creates a huge amount of waste. Disposing of it requires a variety of environmentally damaging processes, such as landfill and transportation. To try and minimize the impact of waste disposal, Present Architecture has proposed a series of composting islands along the city's waterfront.

L'Uritonnoir is a portable, composting urinal for large festivals that reduces a bale of hay into usable fertilizer.