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News and resources to inspire concerned citizens to work together in building a healthier, stronger society that benefits all.
Biodegradable Bottle
Algae-Based Jars Quickly Decompose
Source: TakePart.com
Green Crisis
One in Five Plant Species May Face Extinction
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Ari Jónsson, a 32-year-old student at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, has invented an all-natural water bottle that holds its shape when full and decomposes when empty. He debuted his creation at the DesignMarch 2016 festival in Reykjavík, Iceland. The only two materials needed to create the bottle are agar, a gelatinous substance that comes from red algae, and water. “I just followed the path in what I was researching, trying to find new ways to use materials,” says Jónsson, who combined the two ingredients, heated the mixture, poured it into a mold, and then quickly cooled it. The H2O binds and thickens the agar when cooled, retaining the shape of the water bottle mold, explains Jónsson. When the finished bottle is empty, “It will rot like other foods.” The bottles can sustainably decompose in soil, although Jónsson has yet to determine exactly how long that process will take. A plastic water bottle takes more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, and in the U.S., more than 2 million tons of the containers are languishing in landfills.
A new report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK, has issued the first comprehensive assessment of plant life, the inaugural State of the World’s Plants, and found that one in five plants may be at risk of extinction due to invasive species, disease and changing landscapes. Researchers also have determined that just 30,000 plant species have a documented use out of hundreds of thousands of known species. These are only the vascular plants that have specialized tissue for sucking up water through their systems. Over the years, different people and agencies have identified the same plant at both different times and locations, so they may have accumulated multiple names. The Kew researchers determined that each plant in the International Plant Names Index had, on average, 2.7 different species names. By cutting out the duplicates from more than a million different names, the Kew report was able to pare down the known species to 391,000. In the Arctic, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday bank buried in the side of a mountain, contains more than 800,000 samples representing 5,100 different crops and their relatives. Source: Wired
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