Inbox

X-Ray Vision for E-waste: Science Daily has an article today about an "artificial vision system" being developed by a Spain-based company, Tecnalia, to improve the recycling of electronic scrap.

"The aim of this project, known as SORMEN, is to develop a technology for the separation of scrap metal from electronic waste based on a system of multispectral vision and incorporate it into the process of a recycling plant. This new machine overcomes the limitations of current, basically manual, methods which consume a large amount of manual labour and time and which are unable to separate metals whose characteristics of colour, shape and weight are similar."

Next up: figuring out how to make the system faster than a speeding bullet.

Chasm of Demarcation: The gap that divides the environmental policies of the Bush and Obama administrations grows wider by the day.

Yesterday Obama's interior secretary, Ken Salazar, voided 77 oil and natural gas leases on public lands that the Bush administration had auctioned in December. Salazar said the Bureau of Land Management granted the leases without adequately considering the potential harm they could cause to two national parks in Utah.

Salazar also said the Obama administration still has a lot of additional environmental-policy-reversing to do: "There were a number of decisions made by the Bush administration and, in my view, many of them were rushed, without going through proper environmental review. We are looking at many of those matters. This is only one of a dozen or so."

I predict busy times ahead for gas station price sign changers.

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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