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Containers made from plastics are used in most traditional greenhouse operations. While plastic containers are practical, strong, and can be formed to any size, shape, or color, the extensive use of these petroleum-based containers creates significant waste disposal problems for the greenhouse industry and consumers. One example: a 2008 report found that a typical greenhouse operation in California discards over 3560 pounds of plastic trays, flats, and containers annually.

We're stumbling through a science fiction wonderland of not just high-flying communications software and tools but of the basic building blocks for the devices we use to do that communicating. The latest contender for radically-improved memory in a computer? Blood. Researchers in Gujarat, India have created a "memristor" -- a portmanteau of memory and resistor -- made of human blood. A resistor is the part of a computer chip that regulates the flow of electricity. Unlike most resistors, a memristor remembers previous levels of voltage and allows for a repeat of that flow.

Nearly 3 billion pounds of chicken feathers are plucked each year in the United States -- and most end up in the trash. Now, a new method of processing those feathers could create better types of environmentally-friendly plastics.

One of the most important decisions facing designers of plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles is related to battery choice. Now, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have used a life cycle analysis to examine three vehicle battery types to determine which does the best job of powering the vehicle while causing the least amount of environmental impact during its production.

That axiom of sustainability -- "recycle and reuse" -- could help ease concerns about a reliable supply of substances, indispensible for a modern technological society, that are produced almost exclusively in the Peoples' Republic of China. That's the conclusion of a study on these so-called "rare earth" elements in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.