Giant blobs of seaweed are hitting Florida. That’s when the real problem begins – NPR

Sargassum Seaweed, Sunny Isles, Florida (by Jimmy Baikovicius CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

It used to be that the conversation around subtropical marine life centered on declines: the death of coral beds, the diminishing variety of seagrasses, the disappearance of fish. But for now, it’s an overabundance that’s hard to miss. From Montego to Miami, an influx of algae called sargassum is leaving stinky brown carpets over what was once prime tourist sand. It’s the most sargassum researchers have tracked this early in the year. Deciding what to do with it is proving more challenging the more we learn about it — and inspiring some entrepreneurs to rethink removing sargassum altogether…

How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle – NPR Planet Money

Care for a drink? (by Vincent VR CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

The rise of curbside recycling programs over the past few decades has meant more glass recycling. But for a long time, many recycling centers didn’t have the technology to turn recycled glass into the raw material for new bottles. Instead, recycled glass often wound up being used as a cheap construction material, or even to cover landfills.

Now, with new technology that can better sort glass collected in curbside recycling, more used glass bottles can be turned back into new glass bottles. To see how this works, we went to a glass recycling facility and a bottle factory…

Outside a recycling plant in Jersey City, N.J., there are piles and piles of what looks like garbage.

But it’s actually broken glass…