The escalating global demand for food production underscores the urgent need for sustainable agricultural innovations. This research contributes new insights into the environmental benefits of using urine-derived phosphorus (P) fertilizers by closing the nutrient loop and applying the technology to agricultural food systems. Anticipatory life cycle assessment was used to quantify the environmental impacts of replacing conventionally mined P fertilizer with recovered urine-derived P fertilizer within the production of beef and plant-based burgers. Results shows that implementing recovered P fertilizer provides greater environmental benefits for all environmental impact categories, with global warming, eutrophication, and water consumption being the main impact categories examined in this study. Urine-derived P fertilizer use in beef burger production led to a 4% reduction in global warming impacts (3% for plant-based), 15% reduction in eutrophication (2% for plant-based), and 42% reduction in water consumption (46% for plant-based). Uncertainty in the results was accounted for using Monte Carlo simulation with 10,000 runs to rank the four burger production scenarios (e.g., conventional and urine-derived beef burger and conventional and urine-derived plant-based burger) based on their environmental impact on global warming, eutrophication, and water use under conditions of baseline, realistic, and maximum uncertainty. Under conditions of realistic uncertainty, implementing urine-derived P fertilizer for beef burger production was considered beneficial for global warming, eutrophication, and water consumption, with 78%, 99%, and 89% of the runs showing environmental benefits, respectively. Due to the lower P fertilizer requirements in plant-based burger production, uncertainty assessment under realistic conditions showed that a reduction in water use was the only expected benefit of implementing recovered P fertilizer, with 71% of the runs providing water use benefits. These results show that closing the nutrient loop by implementing urine-derived P fertilizers can be beneficial when applied to the correct agricultural food system (e.g., beef burger production) and is expected to have the most pronounced benefits with regard to water savings.

The problem is that children in developing countries are doing our dirty work. Electronic waste that end up in landfills in these developing countries pose a danger to the children extracting metals that are then resold in local markets. The dumping of solar panels in these landfills is sometimes the only alternative for some manufactures because there is no viable option for silicon wafers. Solar panel installations started to peak in the early 1990's . With the lifespan of a solar panel being 25 years, recycling these panel is not a priority task in government policies. First Solar is currently the only company in the United States that executes the full recycling process. However, there is an environmental hotspot and an energy intensity phase identified in their process. The second stage in First Solar's recycling method consist of hammering and shredding the solar panel to reduce the surface area to then move on the chemical path stage. This stage currently uses 1.1 kWh for a meter by meter solar cell. A thermal processing method was explored and found to be the most environmentally conscious chose in terms of emissions and energy cost. The thermal method uses a conventional furnace to burn away the EVA, leaving the internal components of the cell intact and ready for the remaining process of recycling. SLICE method aims to introduce an industry tailored, low energy cost process, that initiates a solar panel recycling infrastructure in the United States. The recycling infrastructure is needed to sustain the exponential growth of solar panels and avoid third party recycling to developing countries. This new method transitions from lab tested batch processes to a continuous process.