from denverpost.com: Colorado School of Mines engineers have found an alternative to digging into mountains for minerals: mining the minerals from food waste. They’ve turned putrid banana peels, eggshells and rice husks into crystal-clear glass. Now they’re investigating what other muck may yield. In a lab here, they rigged up a cooking system that starts at a fridge, where students delightedly donate garbage. This garbage is ground in blenders, dried, then pounded into fine white powder containing pure minerals, such as silica and oxides, that typically are mined using heavy diggers and toxic chemicals. An oven heated to 3,000 degrees melts the silica powder into a molten red substance that when poured into molds morphs to glass. The U.S. government has registered a provisional patent.