Janet, now 37, was playing with her new pet dog, Stitch, who jumped up, grabbed her sleeve, and tore several holes in her sweater with its sharp teeth. Instead of throwing the sweater away, Janet decided to repair it.

She turned to “visible repairing,” an idea of repairing clothes that leaves an obvious fix. She added bright flowers and other small designs to damaged clothes. “Every time you do a repair, it’s like having bought a new piece of clothes,” says Janet.

Actually, repairing is a great opportunity to realize the urgent (迫切的) need to reduce waste. Sadly, we have become used to replacing things instead of repairing them — and the rubbish is piling up. Worldwide, we throw away 92 million tons of cloth every year. Electronic waste is another growing problem: About 50 million tons of it is created each year around the world.

The good news is that fixing things can help deal with the waste problem. There are some solutions. Due to information online, the popular how-to site iFixit.com , a database (数据库) with nearly 100,000 repair brochures for everything from electronics to clothing, has promoted more than 100 million repairs. In addition, since the first Repair Café opened in2009 in Amsterdam, more than 2,700 cafés have been set up to offer in-person fix-it help in various countries. Organizers set up events, and volunteers with repair knowledge bring their tools. They will try to fix whatever people bring in, for free, and teach visitors how to do repairs themselves.

Fixing things is part of a larger change toward a circular economy —the idea that instead of throwing away things once they are broken or out of date, we reuse or repair them, keeping them out of the landfill (垃圾填埋场) for as long as possible. According to a 2023 report from Circle Economy, a Netherlands-based NGO, if the world changed to a circular economy, we could lower the amount of waste by a third.

An easily biodegradable（可生物降解的）material that could be “part of a global answer” to single-use plastic pollution has won its inventor, British designer Lucy Hughes , the international James Dyson Award.

Hughes' Marina Tex bioplastic is strong and flexible, making it a possible alternative for single-use packaging such as bags and sandwich wrappers. Its key ingredients are fish scales and skin, so it can break down in home food waste or compost bins.

Hughes created Marina Tex for her final-year project in the product design course at the University of Sussex. She had set out to create something using waste rather than unused materials, which led her to the UK's fishing industry. She ran more than 100 experiments to improve the bioplastic mixture, mostly using the kitchen stove in her student accommodation.

The fish scales and skin removed during processing usually encl up burnt or buried in landfill. And with “about 500, 000 tonnes of such waste produced by the country's fisheries annually”, it seems possible that Marina Tex could be used largely in industrial production. The material is low-energy to produce and doesn’t consume the earth's natural resources considering it's based on existing waste. It is also strong, boasting a higher tensile（可拉伸的）strength than the current material most commonly used for plastic bags.

British inventor James Dyson, who every year selects the grand prize winner in the international student design competition that bears his name, said that the material had the potential to replace traditional single-use plastics. “Marina Tex elegantly solves two problems：the ubiquity（无处不在）of single-use plastic and fish waste.” he said. “Further research and development will ensure that Marina Tex evolves further, and I hope it becomes part of a global answer to the abundance of single-use plastic waste.”

Pay a visit to the Chicago River and you’ll find that it has a wonderful new addition to the local wildlife. Among the birds and fish, visitors may spot a small robot moving up and down the busy waterway. This is Trashbot, the creation of a startup called Urban Rivers, using cutting-edge technology to clean up trash in the area.

In some ways, Trashbot is like the vacuum cleaners (真空吸收器) found in American homes. But it isn’t. While its free movement and lack of onsite handlers may give the impression that this is a self-driving machine, this could not be further from the truth. At any point in time, Trashbot might be controlled by one of the Internet users.

Anyone with a web connection can get into Urban River’s website and take a two-minute turn at piloting Trashbot. The company’s goal is to use this time to direct Trashbot to pick up trash, and then carry this to a collection point on the river bank, where it can be later removed.

The idea for Trashbot started a few years ago when Urban Rivers’ project the “floating gardens” on the Chicago River got clogged up (被堵塞) with trash. To solve this, they started employing old-fashioned human litter pickers to collect trash from the river. However, this turned out to be ineffective.

The idea of a robot boat was born then, but the team wasn’t sure how to pilot it. Teaching a computer to understand what trash is isn’t easy, Trash is a somewhat abstract concept (概念) . We know it when we see it. At this point they decided to turn to the Internet for help.

“We figured that we could put out a call so that this boat could be controlled by people around the world,” says Nick Wesley, one of the brains behind the project. “Letting people take control of a robot to clean up trash makes for a really cool experience.”