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Teenage boys in different parts of the world have solved two of the most difficult problems facing the environment and both projects are low-tech and affordable.

Richard O’Shea from Blarney won this year’s BT young scientist top award for his invention of a smokeless biomass-fired cooking stove.  Richard had visited Africa and seen first-hand how many people cook indoors on wood-burning stoves: 2 billion people across the world rely on burning biomass materials like wood, dung and plants to cook their food.  Every year thousands of people in the developing world who cook indoors in poorly ventilated homes die from smoke inhalation.

Richard then spent months designing a highly efficient, smokeless stove that can be built using found materials such as tin cans.   His goal is to work with charities such as Trocaire and Concern to share his invention with those who need it and can build their own.

Meanwhile, across the water in Canada, 16-year-old Daniel Burd won the Canadian Science Fair with his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel  recognized that plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means that decomposing microorganisms do exist.

Daniel immersed ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth and then isolated the most productive organisms.  The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures, Burd achieved a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an  amazing result.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured annually and an expanding Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Burd’s breakthrough is timely and now needs to be embraced by governments and industry alike.

Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.

1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too!  When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.

2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)

3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.

4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.

5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?

6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.

7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.

It’s not all bad: the old “death zone” between East and West Germany is now a unique nature preserve, where many species who were almost exctinct are now thriving; the ancient and underappreciated black bee could be the salvation of plummetting bee populations across Northern Europe; and thanks to the economic downturn recycling waste is suddenly a very profitable business.  Could someone please alert the media?

Amidst all the doom and gloom and very real economic pain, one happy effect of the recession, at least in the UK, is a massive reduction in waste.  Instead of carelessly throwing out food, people are buying less and using more. In England, local councils and waste management companies are reporting a drop of up to 10 per cent in waste collection in recent months, a fall that the UK environmental charity Waste Watch estimates could result in a massive reduction of 2.5 million tonnes in waste production in 2009 – enough rubbish to fill Canary Wharf five times over.  I don’t have the figures for Ireland but suspect the same is going on here.  Which makes you wonder how much people were throwing out in the first place!  There are a few reasons offered for this change: a shift in public attitudes away from extravagant living; a drop in the amount of white goods (like washing machines and TVs) being thrown out; and a fall in construction waste, as the recession affects the number of building projects.  But there’s also a rise in recycling, which indicates a social shift beyond economics. One young mother says “I suppose it is a combination of not wanting to waste money and concerns about the environment. Not being wasteful does save you money. I think a lot of people feel the same as me about not wasting things.”  Less is more might be the new black!