Chemicals and waste

Each year the RELX Environmental Challenge is awarded to projects that best demonstrate how they can provide sustainable access to safe water or sanitation. In the past decade, the company has awarded $750,000 to projects and solutions that improve the world’s water quality and sanitation. This article, using innovative parallax storytelling technology, looks at the tangible impact of the RELX Environmental Challenge.

High-tech products like batteries and electronics contain a variety of valuable, scarce, and in some cases potentially harmful materials, but in only a few exceptional cases (such as lead-acid batteries) is the material being recovered efficiently. Cotributing to SDGs 7, 9 and 12, this special issue seeks to elucidate the technical and institutional difficulties inherent in recycling these products and provide a forum for sharing potential ways to overcome them. 

This book chapter addresses goals 7, 13 and 11 by looking at ecological technologies that transform natural resources into anthropocentric goods and services.

The need for improved and safely managed sanitation facilities is acute in dense informal settlements in rapidly urbanizing areas. One of the key factors influencing the cost-effectiveness and reliability of service provision in informal settlements is the ability to optimize waste collection from latrines with variable use patterns that are spatially dispersed within an informal settlement. This study investigates how latrine sensors could be used to estimate waste fill levels and improve servicing efficiency for forty latrines in Nairobi, Kenya, supporting SDGs 3, 6 and 9.