Man figures out how to make bioplastic out of food waste, rather than food, making it as cheap as regular plastic


With all the single-use plastic bans coming into effect around the world, there is a demand for biodegradable alternatives.

The trouble is some biodegradable plastics are still made from fossil fuel, and 80 percent of biodegradable “bioplastics” are made from food sources, like corn.

And… biodegradable plastics typically cost around 40 percent more than regular plastic.

A Mexican biochemical engineer named Scott Munguia has come up with a solution.

Avocado pits.

His company Biofase is located in the heart of Mexico’s avocado industry, where it turns 15 tons of avocado pits per day into biodegradable straws and cutlery.


The pits, discarded by local companies that process the fruit, would’ve otherwise been headed for a landfill. So not only are his production costs dirt cheap, he’s helping cut back on agricultural waste.


The company is then able to pass that savings along to the consumer, keeping prices equal with conventional plastic.

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Illegal Amazon rainforest loggers ambushed a young indigenous leader on Friday, murdering him in cold blood and wounding another member of the Guajajara people in Brazil.

Paulo Paulino Guajajara, 26, was shot in the head during the ambush. The murder occurred in the Araribóia Indigenous Reserve, an area under serious threat from illegal miners and loggers attempting to exploit the indigenous land.

Paulo was a prominent member of the Guardians of the Forest indigenous land defense group and took on the task of becoming a land defender. Guardians is a group of 120 indigenous Guajajara who risk their lives to defend theirs and other indigenous groups’ homes against loggers.

Reports say that during the attack, fellow member of the Guardian, Laércio Guajajara, was shot twice, grazing his arm and back before escaping the aggressors. He was later taken to hospital, said the Guardians’ leader who has also received threats from loggers.

Why Does The Government Allow This To Happen?
Violence has escalated against the forest protectors under the current far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro. According to the Brazilian pan-indigenous organization APIB, a group that represents almost one million indigenous people throughout Brazil, the President is to blame.

“The Bolsonaro government has Indigenous blood on its hands.

The increase in violence in Indigenous territories is a direct result of his hateful speeches and steps taken against our people,” APIB said in a statement.

Despite federal law enforcement investigating the murder—allegedly a logger was also killed—Paulo’s body remains missing.


APIB leader Sonia Guajajara blasted the government over dismantling the environmental and indigenous agencies and urged lawmakers to refuse a deal that will see the sign off on a major trade deal with the EU. The deal, Sonia told Reuters, could see farmers and loggers driven by open markets to drive production and invade further indigenous lands.

“It’s time to say enough of this institutionalized genocide,” she said.



Just like other governments around the world (Australia and the United States), Bolsonaro condemns activist groups, NGOs and blames environment laws for hindering economic growth. Following his election last year, President Bolsonaro vowed to reverse indigenous protections that keep 15 percent of Brazil’s land reserved for indigenous tribes.

While Bolsonaro has yet to make good on his threats, his continued racism against the indigenous peoples has encouraged illegal logging, mining, and violence.

Amazon Watch program direction Christian Poirier spoke to Democracy Now!:

“[The Guajajara are] doing this on behalf of all of humanity, because they are protecting the critically important Amazon forests that sustain our climate, protect our climate, power or, I should say, fuel the rainfall all over Brazil, but also here in this country. In the state of California, rainfall is slackening due to the fact the Amazon is being decimated today.

Their rights are enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution—their rights to territory and to their way of life … Yet they have been systematically deprived of these rights.

And what we witnessed today—or, two days ago, with the murder of Paulino, was an example of that, a manifestation of the violence that’s growing in these communities.”

Before his death, Paulino spoke to Reuters in September about the inherent dangers he faced by guarding the rainforest:

“There is so much destruction of nature happening, including trees with wood as hard as steel being cut down and taken away.

I’m scared sometimes, but we have to lift up our heads and act. We are here fighting.

We have to preserve this life for our children’s future.”

At one time there were estimated to be only a few hundred Florida manatees left. So, in 1973 they were put on the endangered list. And as hoped, their numbers began to flourish once again.

It makes sense, then, that if the Florida manatee is out of harm’s way, so to speak, they should be removed from the endangered list, right? Well, yes and no. Though there are now estimated to be more than 6,000 Florida manatees in the wild, not everyone is thrilled to see their status changed from “endangered” to “threatened”.

With overall manatee numbers in the Caribbean region up around 13,000, and around half of those Florida manatees, the US Fish and Wildlife service went ahead and made the change to their status. This was in order to make way for others who need the services and protections the “endangered” designation affords them.

What landed them on the endangered list in the first place? Unfortunately, it’s human interference, as you might have guessed. The main causes of manatee death, are impacts from boat propellers, and the loss of their natural habitat. Since neither of these root causes has been remedied, the risk of the manatee numbers suffering again in the future is quite high.

Florida Manatees Are Not Out Of The Woods
The Center For Biological Diversity had this to say about the removal: “… manatee numbers have never truly recovered, as the animals must contend with a barrage of manmade threats. Each year, about 87 manatees are killed by collisions with boats, the single greatest cause of premature mortalities. This is more than seven times (the) number of manatees that the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates can be killed without impairing the species’ recovery. Meanwhile, boating in Florida is at an all-time high and increasing…” and “in 2017, the (US Fish & Wildlife) Service downlisted the manatee from “endangered” to “threatened” despite the fact that 2016 had been the deadliest-ever year for manatees.

There are many who echo these sentiments and believe the move is a real blow to the future of manatees. That removing the protections which afforded manatees the chance to beef up their population, will cause their numbers to dwindle once again. Then we’ll be back at square one.

But let’s not forget the really good news in all of this. The manatee population throughout the Caribbean and Southeast US is now estimated at around 13,000. Of those, about half are believed to be Florida manatees. That’s a far cry from the 1970s when only an estimated few hundred remained. So the special attention on these gentle giants and the protection they were previously afforded did have a positive affect. It’s unfortunate that limited resources exist for protecting endangered animals, and their status must be continually reassessed. If the protections they were enjoying did, in fact, make a positive impact, it’s easy to see how removing them will negatively impact their numbers too. Will the Florida manatee’s status have to be looked at again in the future? If the fatalities continue at this rate, it seems quite likely.

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A product many have not even heard of is causing an apocalypse of sorts for the world’s orangutans.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, rainforests are being slashed and burned at an alarming rate to make way for a third world cash crop: palm oil.

Palm oil has become almost ubiquitous in household products; it is used in instant ramen dishes, shampoo and conditioner, makeup and skin care products, chocolate-hazelnut spreads and nearly half of all packaged goods at any given supermarket. Many manufacturers have turned to palm oil because it is so cheap—until one factors in the cost to both human health (it is horrible for your heart), and the irreplaceable rainforests both our global ecosystem and the native orangutans depend upon.


To date, over 90 percent of orangutan habitat has already been destroyed. Additionally, smoke and debris from the fires are causing further damage to our primate relatives.


“The problem with fire and smoke is absolutely dire,” said Lis Key, International Animal Rescue’s communications manager in a Takepart interview. “Wild orangutans and orangutans in centers like ours are badly affected by the smoke. Some suffer upper respiratory tract infections, which can even prove fatal. Some of the babies we’ve taken in recently have been suffering not only from dehydration and malnourishment through lack of food but also breathing problems from the polluted air.”


One must wonder if a lower price point is worth the suffering and even possible extinction of living beings.

Luckily, it is not game over for orangutans yet, and there are steps we can all take, right now: boycott products or companies that use non-sustainable palm oil, write to companies that make products you use with this ingredient and tell them you won’t support unsustainable palm oil, educate friends and family and click here. A different ending to this story may yet be possible.

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Mushroom-foam is as cheap as Styrofoam, requires no fossil fuel, and creates no plastic pollution, biodegrading in your garden in just a couple of weeks


Ikea is switching to a new mushroom-based, biodegradable alternative to polystyrene (Styrofoam) packaging for its furniture and home decor.

Known as Mycofoam, the product is made of agricultural waste products like corn or hemp husks, oat hulls or cotton burrs and mushroom spores.

The agricultural waste is molded into the desired shape and then seeded with mushroom spores, which begin to sprout mycelium, the vegetative part of fungi that forms a web of hairlike roots that typically hold soil together, but in this case hold the packaging together.

The mycelium threads spread rapidly throughout the material, digesting and binding it into a durable, shock-resistant foam.

When the foam reaches a desirable consistency, it is heated and dried to stop mycelium growth, so it can be used to cushion and protect everything from glass and ceramics to electronics and furniture.


Once the packaging has served its purpose it can be “tossed in a lake to feed fish” or into your compost pile to fertilize your garden, says the video below. In these moist environments, Mycofoam is completely biodegraded in just a couple of weeks.


Styrofoam on the other hand takes thousands of years to decompose and harms countless animals and other organisms that ingest it in the process.

Created from waste products, the material requires no fossil fuel, making it just as cheap (and probably cheaper to make in the future) as polystyrene.

Hopefully Ikea’s idea will spread and all Styrofoam packaging will be replaced with “mushroom-foam.”

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Trader Joe’s was one of the first chain grocery stores to begin selling organic food, but their products have not necessarily been eco-friendly. A vast amount of the produce that can be found at Trader Joe’s is needlessly covered in plastic, but that is about to change soon.


The company recently announced that they will be cutting down on their use of plastic, and reduce their consumption of plastic by roughly 4 million pounds each year. More than half of that plastic, 2.5 million pounds, is being cut from the produce department.

Now, many produce items that can be safely sold loose will not contain any packaging. This change will save the company a ton of money, and those savings are reportedly being noticed by customers as well.

At one Trader Joe’s location, a customer said that they found a single head of garlic for $.49, when before the same item was sold in packs of two for $1.39 before. For this item, the loss of packaging came with a 25% reduction in price, and customers say that this has happened all over the produce section.

There were some food items that just needed plastic to be kept fresh, although a statement from Trader Joe’s noted that they were seeking solutions for more eco-friendly packaging for these situations.

“The outcome of our test was not tolerable from a food-waste perspective, so we are in pursuit of alternatives. While we may not always arrive at the right solution the first time, we remain steadfast in our dedication to this important work,” the statement read.

The company also said that they will be phasing out the use of styrofoam trays and looking for a variety of different ways that they can cut down on waste in their stores.

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Trader Joe’s has been keeping their customers informed about the changes through their website and on their podcast, “Inside Trader Joe’s.”

In the press release, the company explained that:

A fundamental focus of sustainability is maintaining product integrity and preventing food waste. We strive to balance the key role packaging plays in this effort with the overall impact packaging has on the ecosystem, as we approach making any changes. We are also aware that the realistic opportunities for recycling materials, along with differing understandings of what is the “best choice” for sustainability, makes this work complex. While most of the plastic in our packaging has the highest recyclability acceptance rate in the U.S., reducing the amount of plastic packaging in our stores is another important focus of our sustainability.

Trader Joe’s has also taken some other measures recently, in addition to reducing packaging and no longer offering single-use plastic bags. The company has also promised to get rid of Bisphenol A, or BPA, from their packaging.

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A group of young Peruvians has launched a project called ‘Bio Plant’ in order to help the world use less plastic. They have created biodegradable dishes made of banana leaves to reduce environmental pollution caused by excessive disposal of plastic. Every banana leaf plate used instead of a plastic one is one less item polluting our planet!

Chuwa Plant
This innovative product can decompose within 2 months – it’s completely degraded naturally before the 60 days are up. Those commonly used plates and containers made of polystyrene (styrofoam) on the other hand take up to 500 years, causing untold amounts of damage to the flora and fauna of the oceans and wildlife on land.

Chuwa Plant
With the co-financing of the Innóvate Peru Program (through the Bio Challenge contest aimed at supporting the development of innovative solutions focused on the sustainable use of the resources of our biodiversity), they were able to design and manufacture specialized machines – a presser, a shipper, and a die cutter – for the production of the biodegradable dishes. With the new equipment, they are able to manufacture 50,000 dishes monthly.

Josué Soto, the leader of the project, explained how they are working directly with small producers in the Peruvian Amazon, who are provided with a fair price and technical training to take advantage of the losses of banana cultivation.

The Chuwa Plant group has also made these dishes with paper and cardboard cellulose – all of which (including the banana leaf plates) are disposable (single use), resistant to various temperatures, liquids and can be used with any type of food.

Josué Soto said that they do not need to cut down banana trees or pluck their leaves as they break off when pickers remove the clusters of bananas from the tree.

The plates are rectangular in shape, measuring 22 cm x 16 cm x 3 cm (height) and are not carcinogenic because they do not contain styrene, a petroleum derivative that is found in other types of containers.


Bio Plant plates have already been in use in traditional and patron celebrations in various regions of the country. The group plans to enter the natural restaurants and ecological wineries market with their product. “The approximate sale price of our dishes is 100 to 120 soles (US$29.64-35.56) for 100 dishes, depending on the thickness of the sheet, but over time it may be more accessible to all consumers,” said Soto in Spanish.

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Hempearth, the Canadian cannabis firm, has designed the world’s first plane made and powered by hemp – the non-psychoactive member of the cannabis family 10 times stronger than steel. Interestingly, everything from the seats, the wings, the plane walls and even the pillows are made from hemp. The plane, with a wingspan of 36 feet, can hold one pilot and four passengers. What’s more? It runs on 100% hemp oil!

Hemp is lighter than traditional aerospace materials (such as aluminium and fiberglass) and therefore requires a lot less fuel to reach a high altitude. Most importantly, hemp is non-toxic, sustainable, requires way less water and land to grow than cotton, and compared to steel or carbon fibre, has almost no environmental impact.


Hempearth CEO Derek Kesek says:

“This plane project is our first experiment with industrial hemp, and we plan to explore many other uses. Once we establish structural testing and information from this project, we will apply it to other forms of construction. This is the kind of future we all want here on Earth. The sky may not be the limit.”


Hempearth is also developing hemp composites in Montreal, which could replace all fiberglass in aviation and other industries — such as construction. It recently turned down Dupont as they “don’t and never will sign or work with fascist companies that are associated with military, The Rockefellers, The Rothchilds and or the Military Industrial Complex”.

“I build things organically and take it one thing at a time,” Kesek adds. “Richard Branson is my biggest inspiration because he is showing that it’s not business as usual any more: if you want something you go get it.”

When the first hemp plane is completed, its first flight is set to take place at The Wright Brother’s Memorial in Kitty Hawk North Carolina – the birthplace of aviation.

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Volunteer divers just pulled 3200 pounds of garbage off the ocean floor of Florida’s Deerfield Beach. Imagine if we had cleanup efforts like this all over the world!

Opossums attract and then kill thousands of ticks per acre, per week, making them one of our best allies in stopping the spread of Lyme disease, researchers say.


A study compared squirrels, mice and opossums, which all eat ticks, and found opossums were the most effective exterminators.

Ticks favor opossums twice as much as the other rodents, the researchers, from Syracuse University, found.

Fortunately, for humans, possums are also the most effective at killing the disease-carrying pests.

Opossums kill almost every tick that occupies them, the study found. A single opossum kills over 5500 ticks per week.

“Opossums are extraordinarily good groomers it turns out – we never would have thought that ahead of time – but they kill the vast majority – more than 95% percent of the ticks that try to feed on them,” disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld explained.

“So these opossums are walking around the forest floor, hoovering up ticks right and left, killing over 90% of these things, and so they are really protecting our health.”

Worldwide, more than 1.3 million people die each year of infectious diseases transmitted by a vector, such as a mosquito, sand fly or tick, according to the World Health Organization.

Vector-borne diseases also inflict heavy tolls on crops, livestock and wildlife, the study’s authors wrote.

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Teenager wins Google Science award for genius invention that could cheaply remove most microplastics from the ocean


Because microplastics are so small — some as tiny as grains of sand — scientists have had a hard time figuring out to remove them from the soil and the sea.

Now, an Irish teenager has come up with a promising solution for this seemingly impossible task — a magnetic liquid that attracts microplastics to itself.

18-year-old Fionn Ferreira was kayaking one day when he spotted a rock covered in oil from a recent spill. Clinging to the oil were a bunch of tiny pieces of plastic.

“It got me thinking,” Ferreira told Business Insider. “In chemistry, like attracts like.”

Plastic and oil are nonpolar, making them likely to stick together in nature

Ferreira wondered if the effect could be recreated using ferrofluid, a magnetic, oil-based liquid invented by NASA in 1963 to keep rocket fuel moving in zero gravity.

Today ferrofluid is used to control vibrations in speakers and to seal off electronics to keep debris out.

Ferreira makes a more environmentally friendly version of the liquid than the kind used in rocket fuel, using recycled vegetable oil and magnetite powder, a mineral found naturally on Earth’s surface.

When he first drops the liquid into a container of water contaminated with microplastics, it disperses and turns the water black.

Then he dips a magnet in the water, which pulls out all the ferrofluid, plastic and all, leaving clear water behind.

The method removed 88% of the micrplastics in his test samples.

The most difficult type of microplastic to remove was polypropylene, used to make all sorts of plastic packaging. Still, the ferrofluid removes 80% of polypropylene.

The easiest microplastics to remove were microfibers from plastic clothing such polyester, spandex and Lycra.

Washers and dryers are currently not equipped to filter these microfibers, which are a major source of ocean plastic pollution, so this is great news for that application.

Additionally, Ferreira‘s invention can be used at wastewater treatment plants as a sort of catch-all for microplastic pollution before it enters rivers, lakes and oceans.




Ferreira has won the Google Science award, $50,000 and educational funding for his invention.

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A Mexican researcher has discovered a way to make plastic from cactus that biodegrades in a month and is safe to ingest.

Credit: Jorge Valencia/KJZZ
Sandra Pascoe Ortiz, a chemical engineering professor at the University of the Valley of Atemajac, has come up with a new use for the prickly pear cactus - a staple in the country's diet - using its juice as a base for biodegradable plastic.

Her most recent samples are light green, paper thin and tough enough to be used as bags.

Pascoe Ortiz hopes the cactus-based plastic will help reduce the impact of solid waste in Mexico and around the world.

Watch the video below to learn more:


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