Category: plastic pollution

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Plant-Based “Stem Cells” Could Possibly Drive an Environmental Revolution

For the last couple of years, my family has been making a conscious effort to buy less plastic.

Certainly we try to avoid single-use plastics, but even for things that we’ll use again and again we try to find more durable, organic or metal alternatives.

But of course, there’s often an environmental cost to wooden items, too. It presents a conundrum.

Until now. Are you ready to have your mind blown? Lab. Grown. Furniture.

I warned you.

Image credit: Goashape via Unsplash

Wooden furniture is gorgeous, and plant fibers are supremely useful for other everyday items too, like clothing.

That’s why bamboo has become so popular–it grows quickly, with less environmental impact.

But now a PhD candidate at MIT, Ashley Beckwith, and her co-author, Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, have a brilliant plan to reduce waste and environmental impacts even further by growing wood in useful shapes (like 2 by 4’s) right in a lab.

The MIT research team has been working with zinnia tissue, and they published their findings recently in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

As Fast Company reports, their goal is to:

…quickly produce in a lab what would take decades to grow in nature. From there, they could even coax wood tissue to grow into fully-formed shapes—like, say, a table—in order to mitigate the environmental harm of the logging and construction industries.

It’s not a completely new concept. Velásquez-García, a scientist in the university’s Microsystems Technology Lab, explains it in pretty simple terms.

“The plant cells are similar to stem cells. They have the potential to be many things.”

And it’s not just human stem cells. Other scientists have had similar success with lab grown meat products.

So isolating the ability to reduce plants down to a version of a stem cell is just the first step.

Like the meat manufactures who want to grow only the most desirable parts of the animal, Beckwith and team have similar plans for their saplings.

“Trees grow in tall cylindrical poles, and we rarely use tall cylindrical poles in industrial applications.

So you end up shaving off a bunch of material that you spent 20 years growing and that ends up being a waste product.”

Rather than stopping with just growing trees, the team could grow planks, or, rather like 3D printing, they could even guide the development of the plant fiber into the exact shape for its intended purpose.

Of course not every manufacturer has a noble drive to safe the planet.

That’s why this new process is so exciting. It’s so easy, that when compared with the cost of logging, transportation, and everything that goes into cutting down trees to shape them into boards, lab grown trees could actually come out on top, at a lower cost!

Image credit: Lukasz Szmigiel via Unsplash

If the idea of lab-grown veggies freaks you out though, don’t worry. The folks in charge don’t see this being a process that is used to grow food. More like the kinds of plants used to make clothes and industrial materials. There are so many things that could be made from biodegradable plant fibers! Deforestation could become a thing of the past! At least due to human consumption.

How’s that for exciting? Did it blow your mind?

Tell us what you think in the comments!

The post Plant-Based “Stem Cells” Could Possibly Drive an Environmental Revolution appeared first on UberFacts.

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Plastic Straws Aren’t the Biggest Offenders When It Comes to Oceanic Plastic Pollution

Well, this is interesting…

Plastic straws have been in the news lately, and not for anything good. People want to get rid of them, and consumers have been encouraging businesses and consumers alike to get on board in order to start trying to mitigate single-use plastics’ devastating effect on the world’s marine ecosystems.

But plastic straws only make up about .02% of ocean waste – not that much, in the scheme of things.

It turns out, that there’s a much bigger enemy to ocean life: cigarette butts.

 

According to an NBC News report, cigarette butts are the number one human contaminant in the ocean, but they have not, thus far, been significantly regulated.

The filters on cigarettes are made of cellulose acetate, which takes more than a decade to decompose. 60 million cigarette butts have been collected on the world’s beaches since 1986.

Cigarette makers invented the filters to alleviate health concerns (lol), but they created a concurrent pollution problem because smokers “flick” their butts – a habit no anti-littering campaign has been able to curb.

The Cigarette Butt Pollution Project hopes they can finally change attitudes with their new campaign.

“Cigarette butt waste has polluted our beaches, parks, and communities long enough – it’s time to take action!”

The U.S. government has attempted to curb the problem here and there, but legislation proposing to ban filters or raise the costs of cigarettes to cover the clean-up have sputtered and died.

A theme park in France has trained ravens to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for treats, but, though awesome, that’s not exactly a global solution.

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For those who think cigarette smoking is cool please think again. It doesn't only pollute you but also the environment immensely. Trillions of cigarette butts are thrown into the environment every year, where they leach nicotine and heavy metals before turning into microplastic pollution. Smokers around the world buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That’s 18 billion every day. While most of a cigarette’s innards and paper wrapping disintegrate when smoked, not everything gets burned. Trillions of cigarette filters—also known as butts or ends—are left over, only an estimated third of which make it into the trash. The rest are casually flung into the street or out a window. Cigarette filters are made of a plastic called cellulose acetate. When tossed into the environment, they dump not only that plastic, but also the nicotine, heavy metals, and many other chemicals they’ve absorbed into the surrounding environment. . . Follow @anonymous_earth_person Follow #anonymous_earth_person For more information 🌍 . #cigarettebutts #cigarette #pollution #airpollution #savetheearth #saveenvironment #saveanimals #ecofriendly #ecosystem #biodiversity #smokingkills #smoking #dontsmoke #microplastics #plastic #plasticpollution #plasticfreeliving

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As with the campaigns against plastic straws, it’s going to take a concentrated, sustained, and – most important – publicly supported effort to reduce the number of cigarette filters that end up in the oceans.

Do your part, and also…maybe don’t smoke in the first place? Because cigarettes kill more than marine life.

Just sayin’.

The post Plastic Straws Aren’t the Biggest Offenders When It Comes to Oceanic Plastic Pollution appeared first on UberFacts.