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Reuse

Turning Banana Peels Into Coasters: Tales Of Food Waste Innovation

May 25, 2025 Nina Ignaczak, Next City. , , , ,
Inside the historic Book Depository at Michigan Central, now home to Newlab’s innovation campus, Brittanie Dabney is quietly building a different kind of startup. Her company, EcoSphere Organics, doesn’t make apps or mobility tech. It makes biodegradable coasters out of banana peels. Dabney and her team collect food scraps from local restaurants like Alchemy and Johnny’s Speakeasy — coffee grounds, citrus rinds and eggshells—and process them into small-batch products like compostable packaging and plant-based leather alternatives. Using dehydration and fermentation, Dabney aims to create materials that are both functional and regenerative.

Talking Trash and the Climate Crisis

December 30, 2013 Martha Bayne, www.occupy.com ,
Elise Zelechowski is executive director of the ReBuilding Exchange (RX), a Chicago-based organization that diverts used building materials – the source of 40% of America’s solid waste stream – away from landfills by promoting sustainable “deconstruction” practices which allow it to reclaim lumber and other raw materials from demolition and remodeling sites and make them available to the public for reuse. An initiative of Chicago’s Delta Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1998 to promote economically sound environmental policy, RX also offers workshops on creative reuse, forums for contractors and other professionals, and job training for people transitioning out of the criminal justice system. An expert on all things garbage, Zelechowski spoke about the need to rethink the waste stream, the economic and environmental impacts of creative reuse, and how making trash visible is key to making it manageable.

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