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Planet Care Carbon Capture Energy Human Effort Materials Mobility Your Home

366: The Resolutionary Anthem

Problem:

How to make people aware that there are solutions to Earth’s ailing condition and that YOU can help clean up, repair and protect our planet.

Solution:

Today marks one year since we started 366solutions and we have posted one solution per day – now a whole year’s worth –  on this site. You can find out more about the solutions by clicking on various links throughout 366solutions.com, or download all solutions through these links:

Download Microsoft Word file

Download .pdf file

In fact, these documents include even more ways to help clean up, repair and protect our shared planet Earth –  732 in all!

The Resolutionary Anthem

We also offer you this musical inspiration: The Resolutionary Anthem, by Sophia Dady:

Here it is being beautifully sung by a children’s choir at King Charles, Holy Trinity Church, Barrow Upon Soar at a specially arranged concert, which took place on the Eve of the Coronation of King Charles III.

Sophia Dady’s Website: www.sophiadady.com

This is, like our website, a work song rather than a Work of Art. If you would like to come on board and join with others in singing this Resolutionary Anthem, we encourage you to download the sheet music at no cost…all we ask is that you if you do perform the anthem, please send us a recording so that, with the required permission, we may upload it to 366solutions.com and www.sophiadady.com and promote you on our social media as a way of saying ‘Thank You’!

For the full list of performances and their location, click on the arrow in the top left hand corner of the purple frame.

 

Resolutionary Performers from around the World!

 

 

Lyrics

14,000 miles away they judge because they can
In their plush offices very tall and grand

“No reason to believe that there is a threat to man”
For years we’ve been presented with the scientific papers
Books and documentaries are warning of the dangers
For those in the field, we sing a different song!

Can’t you see? The Earth can’t breathe
The birds can’t feed their young anymore
It’s Nature’s law…

We’re playing for a team, a team that is the same
Not working on our own behalf for personal gain
The right time isn’t in the future, it is NOW!

Don’t you see? It’s not about me!
We all must pull together more
It’s Nature’s law…

CHORUS
Find solutions, that’s the key
Join your voice and sing with me
The World deserves our respect.

Solutions come so easily, when you focus on these three:
Clean,  Repair,  Protect

Our World

Find solutions, that’s the key
Join your voice and sing with me
The World deserves our respect

Solutions come so easily, when you focus on these three:
Clean, Repair, Protect

Our World

For how to do this, check out the solutions on this website and act NOW!

Categories
Materials Your Home

362: Straw drinking-straw

Problem:

Americans use 500 million disposable straws per day – or 1.6 straws per person. 500 million straws could fill over 127 school buses each day, or more than 46,400 school buses every year! Some scientists estimate there are 7.5 million plastic straws polluting U.S. shorelines, and anywhere from 437 million to 8.3 billion plastic straws on shorelines around the world.

France alone consumes more than 9 million plastic straws per year. For a few seconds of pleasure, people have been ready to use a plastic product which will take hundreds of years to decompose. From January 1, 2020, it became illegal to sell plastic drinking straws and drinks stirrers, in France and the UK.

But an alternative had to be found. In June 2018, McDonald’s fast food chain announced it would replace its plastic straws with paper ones, fine for CocaCola but inadequate for milk shakes. The same month, Starbucks announced plans to ditch plastic straws in all its coffee shops around the world by 2020.

Solution:

Jeff Lubrano, a 50-year-old designer at Studio Fertile in Paris, teamed up with 26-year-old Mike Sallard on his farm in Courgeoût, in France’s Orne region, where with his father they have been cultivating organic cereals for twenty-five years. Having shared and been shocked by a video on the Internet of a tortoise suffering from a plastic straw in its nasal cavity, they decided something must be done.

Having made many experiments to create straw drinking straws in the “Fab Lab” the Elabo de Bellême, Messsrs. Lubrano and Sallard launched the brand La Perche. The plan is to produce 3 million straw-straws in the first year, 15 million the second and 70 million the third. They are now planning to produce straw-based ear-buds and another project: « La sucette normande ». (“The Normandy lollipop”): a candy apple, attached to the end of a rye stick. The packaging would be biodegradable made of flower seeds.

Another alternative is bamboo. True Green Enterprises of Boca Raton, Florida was founded in 2007 by Terry Lehmann, determined to make bio-degradable hot cups and straws. These are made using sugar cane husks and bamboo, the two fastest-growing renewable sources of fiber for paper products in the world. It is better than a normal paper straw because of the qualities of bamboo. Terry developed the Green2 for Retail brand and the TreeFree for Commercial brand. In 2018 Terry received the WBE Star Award for women’s excellence in business leadership. (green2tec.com)

Another is the Lolistraw, made of a seaweed-based material and designed by Chelsea F. Briganti of Loliware in New York. This straw can be consumed after you finish your drink (if you don’t eat it, it can go in the compost or just dissolve in nature.) Briganti coined the term “Hyper-compostable” to convey that all of their products, including Lolistraw, will break down at the same rate as food waste in compost or in the natural environment, such as a waterway.

The company is VC backed and has partnered with IDEO, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, The Last Plastic Straw, Plastic Pollution Coalition & The Lonely Whale Foundation. The team recently announced their plan to replace one billion plastic disposables by 2020.

Discover Solution 363: Iron fertilisation

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Planet Care Your Home

359: Insect food for animal and human consumption

Problem:

Each year, around 70 million people are added to the world’s population. If growth continues at this rate, by 2050 the population is expected to reach a whopping 9 billion. To feed all of those hungry mouths, agriculture and pisculture will need to produce almost twice as much food as they currently do.

Solution:

Entomophagy (the consumption of insects) is a common practice that has been taking place for tens of thousands of years. Around 2 billion people regularly eat insects as part of their diet, and over 1,900 species are edible


The most commonly eaten bugs are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps and ants. The eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults of certain insects have been eaten by humans from prehistoric times to the present day. Around 3,000 ethnic groups practice entomophagy. Human insect-eating is common to cultures in most parts of the world, including Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. 80 % of the world’s nations eat insects of 1,000 to 2,000 species

Consuming insects as opposed to livestock is more environmentally friendly. Insects are cold-blooded and thus require less energy to maintain their internal body temperature. This means they are very efficient at converting feed into edible body mass, such as cattle.

Crickets require around 4 lb (2 kg) of feed to produce 2.2 lb (1 kg) of meat, and around 80% is edible. Cattle, on the other hand, require 8 kg to produce the same amount of meat, but only 40% of the cow can be consumed. This means that less land needs to be dedicated to growing feed for insects than for livestock, reducing irrigation and pesticide use.

Furthermore, the insects could even be used as livestock feed, for example replacing fishmeal. This would have the added advantage of increasing fish supplies available for humans to eat. Insects emit less GHGs and can be cultivated on organic waste.

In the Netherlands in 2009, Kees Aarts and Tarique Arsiwalla founded Protix in Dongen, North Brabant, which was then the world’s biggest automated insect farm. Protix began by using Hermetia Illucens insects, otherwise known as the black soldier fly although since 2017, the firm has added mealworm, cricket and locust ingredients through the acquisition of Fair Insects. In 2019 Protix opened a 150,000 ft² (14,000 m), US$ 500 million euro production plant and announced that it was looking to open more farms within two years.

In France, Antoine Hubert of Ynsect produces powdered insect protein in bulk from a small beetle, called mealworm for fish farming, pet food, and even the fertilizer industry. Originally a musician, inspired by the way he had seen New Zealand farms use worms for composting food waste, Hubert became an environmental activist, developing a science education game and visiting schools to evangelise about the importance of insects in the food chain.

Ynsect uses robotics, artificial intelligence and techniques borrowed from vertical farming he can bring costs enough to make this a mainstream protein source. Robots feed the stacked trays of mealworm larvae and rotate them around the factory as they go through their two-to-three month growth cycle, until they are finally dipped into boiling water to kill and sterilise them.

Ynsect raised US$125m in series-C funding in February to finance the building of a new 430,000 ft² (40,000 m²) vertical farm in Amiens in Northern France, an order of magnitude bigger than the 32,000 ft² (3000 m²) facility it already has in the Burgundy wine region.

The facility, dubbed FARMYING, enabled Ynsect to multiply its current production capacity by 50-times. The facility became be the new hub for 3 raw materials and nutritional suppliers, 1 larvae supplier, 2 research facilities, 4 tech suppliers (including Ynsect), a quality-control specialist, a sustainability consultant, an innovation consultant, 4 end-users and 3 international bio-economy consortiums.

The company plans to build 15 factories around the world over the next decade, in North America and South East Asia as well as Europe, producing at 1m tonnes of insect protein a year. That would still be a tiny fraction of the 1 billion tonnes produced each year for animal feed.

The Aspire Food Group based in Austin, Texas, led by Mohammed Ashour pioneered the first large-scale industrialized intensive farming entomophagy company in North America with a 25,000 ft² (2,300 m²) building where automated machinery breeds crickets. Each bin can hold about 10,000 to 15,000 crickets at a time. Since crickets take only about a month to become big enough to harvest, Aspire produces roughly 22 million every month Aspire are part of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture.

Pets are estimated to be consuming up to 20% of all meat globally. Pet owners are being urged by vets to feed their dogs and cats on a diet rich in insects. The British Veterinary Association (BVA) says some insect-based foods may be better for pets than prime steak. Farmed insect protein is typically raised on human food waste.

In terms of human consumption, by 2011, a few restaurants in the Western world regularly served insects. For example, two places in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, offered cricket-based items. Vij’s Restaurant had parathas that are made from roasted crickets that are ground into a powder or meal. Its sister restaurant, Rangoli Restaurant, offered pizza that was made by sprinkling whole roasted crickets on naan dough.

Discover Solution 360: Room-temperature superconductors

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Energy Your Home

345: Solar kits for internet access (SDHS) OniriQ

Problem:

The Internet is not always available rural communities in Third World countries.

Solution:

In 2016 a team led by Rodolphe Rosier in Senegal developed an off-grid access system for 600 million Africans.


Called SOLARBOX50 it combines solar energy and digital home systems (SDHS) and is a crossover between traditional solar home systems (SHS) and set-top boxes. A typical SDHS device (solar box) comes with a 50W solar panel, 3 LED lamps, a 19-inch TV set and an embedded Internet connection for domestic use and for IPTV; all for a monthly subscription fee.

Joined by Michael Hernandez, the renamed OniriQ was improved from a traditional design model to a design that resulted in savings and increased data redundancy. Like every startup, OniriQ experienced difficulties raising money, especially for hardware development.

But following the completion of the first set of working prototypes and the warm reception from testing at Ounck, a rural community 370 mi. (600 km.) from Dakar, the team behind OniriQ got the needed motivation to keep on pushing. While it is still seeking fund to enable it attain 5,000 units of production, ten were deployed in homes of influencers and local personalities in the community where testing was carried out, with financing from an NGO named Energy Foundation for the World. OniriQ’s plan is to export its solar kits to seven African countries, available on the micro company’s internet platform

Discover Solution 346: Prefabricated Plastic Road

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Materials Planet Care Your Home

340: Pods for coffee

Problem:

When Éric Favre, an aerodynamics engineer from the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud first created a system for putting coffee into single-serve aluminium capsules or pods, he little dreamed of the environmental risk they posed.

Machines that depend on hard-to-recycle pods, such as Nespresso and Keurig systems, are awful for the environment can create unnecessary landfill waste. Of the 39,000 capsules produced worldwide every minute, 29,000 of them end up in landfills. Nespresso alone made almost enough coffee pods to circle the world 26 times.

Solution:

1991 saw Nespresso launch the world’s first capsule recycling system in Switzerland. By 2015 they had reached 86% global recycling capacity, achieved with the help of some 14,000 dedicated capsule collection points operational around the world (additional to over 80’000 UPS points in the US and over 6’000 Green Dot collection points in 3 countries).

Nespresso are expanding their capacity to collect used aluminium capsules to 100% wherever the company does business, thereby increasing recycling rates. Further to this, each time it makes environmental sense, they will recycle used Nespresso capsules collected by the company, reusing them as new capsules.

Another key part of this vision is for 100% of our virgin aluminium capsules to be produced with material compliant with the new Aluminium Stewardship Initiative standard, currently being developed within a multi-stakeholder program led by the IUCN.

Nespresso is not the only firm with a conscience. In 2017, regarding his creation of the Keurig machine and its plastic pod, inventor John Sylvan stated, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.” Glorybrew is a Miami (Florida) based coffee brand and the innovator of the 100% compostable, single-serve, BPI and Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee pods for Keurig machines.

The ring is made using coffee chaff and the filter with renewable bio-based materials. These K-Cup pods have been proven to completely break down in about 8 weeks, becoming clean soil that can be added back into the ecosystem.

Even though Keurig has a goal to make all pods recyclable by 2021, (still 57 billion, or so, more sold pods away) Glorybrew pods will remain the greener choice both now and then. This breakdown occurs in Industrial Composting Facilities, as there is not currently a certification for backyard composting.

CBD produces 95% organic, Hemp You Can Feel Coffee, based on some of the highest quality ingredients available in the marketplace: hemp extracts, organic non-GMO starches from vegetables, honey from organic farms, and trace amounts of organic vegetable and coconut oils.

No chemicals, surfactants, or artificial processes are added to make their infusions. Their hemp extract infusions are based on BeeFuse Technology patented biomimicry composition, which is part of PhytoPharma International Ltd, was invented by Ilan B. Simon in Israel. CBD’s packaging of the coffee pod and the lid are 100% compostable within 120 days of being discarded.

What you can do: Use environmentally benign coffee pods

Discover Solution 341: Ruthenium

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Energy Your Home

339: Energy-efficient shower head

Problem:

Spending too long taking a shower in the bathroom is energy inefficient in both water and electricity. According to Ademe’s estimates, the shower represents 40% of the water consumed by a household.

Solutions:

Gabriel Della-Monica has invented Hydrao, a LED shower head which automatically changes colour depending on shower length to make you aware of how long you have been showering.

This shower head also has an integrated flow restrictor disc to limit the water flow rate to 2.6 gallons per minute (10 litres/min). Della-Monica, a telecoms engineer, has 4 teenage daughters at home, and was also looking for ways to reduce his water bill and to have some hot water left over in the morning.

During the first 3 minutes of showering, the LEDs glow green with approximately 8 gallons (30 litres) total water consumption, from 3 to 5 minutes: the LEDs glow orange,5 to 6 minutes: the LEDs glow red (approx. 15.8 gallons/ 60 litres) total water consumption and from 6 minutes after, the LEDS blink red.

In 2015, Della-Monica founded the Hydrao startup in Grenoble as part of French Tech, the Minalogic technology cluster and the GreenTech Verte incubator overseen by the French Minister of the Environment.

Following the company’s first ever award for Best-in-Innovation from ST Microelectronics, HYDRAO has since garnered numerous awards both in France and abroad: amongst which are a 2016 CES Innovation Award and two 2017 CES Innovation Awards and two 2017 UK Water Efficiency Product Awards from the well-respected NGO Waterwise. (hydrao.com)

A mist shower atomizes water to very fine drops (less than 10 microns), which greatly reduces the water flow. Buckminster Fuller invented the first one in 1936 as part of his Dymaxion bathroom (he called it a “fog gun”). The idea was taken up again in the 1970s, when several trials and experiments were conducted with both atomised hand washing and showering.

In San Francisco, USA, Nebia Spa Shower was developed in 2014 as a prototype designed to cut down on water usage in Mexico’s largest athletic club chain, where one of the company’s co-founders, Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, was CEO. By utilizing the same technologies that engineers use for rocket engines and medical devices, the Nebia (= “mist” in Italian), developed by a team of world-class thermo and mechanical engineers, industrial designers, atomizes the water stream into tiny droplets, allowing 10 times the surface area to be covered with only a fraction of the water volume; all while maintaining water pressure and decreasing water wastage.

Soon, Nebia made its way as a beta product onto the campuses of Google and Apple, with the fledgling startup eventually wooing prestigious Silicon Valley investors including Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt. Patent US20160059243A1 was granted 2018. In four years, Nebia 1.0 claim to have saved 100 million gallons (380 million litres) of water. In 2019 Nebia teamed up with Moen to develop the Nebia 2.0, designed to save 65% of the water and 60% of the heating energy used by a standard shower. (nebia.com)

In the Netherlands, Jonas Görgen, a young designer who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2019, became fascinated by the history of the mist shower and decided to build one himself. Compared to earlier mist showers, Görgen has improved the concept in two important ways. First, he developed a kit that can turn almost any shower into a mist shower with very little effort. Second, in contrast to earlier experiments, his mist shower uses not one but three to six nozzles. It costs far less than the Nebia.

Another alternative solution is Ilya, a cyclic shower, developed by Simon Buoro, Antoine Escande and Nathan Guiraud, three engineers graduated from INSA, the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse, France. With each new shower taken, the system draws 10 to 20 pints (5 to 10 liters) of water from the water network, as would be the case with a conventional shower.
These few litres of water correspond to the volume of water required to fill the system and guarantee closed circuit operation in the various subsystems (filter, heater, etc.) of the cyclic shower. This is possible because it turns out that the shower water is in fact very little polluted, especially if natural soap and shampoo are used. For a conventional shower the water is heated to 40 degrees at a cost. With this cyclic system, energy consumption is lower because the recovered water is still hot.

What you can do: Reduce your environmental impact by using an energy efficient showerhead

Discover Solution 340: Pods for coffee

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Materials Your Home

335: Soapbottle

Problem:

On average, we use eleven bottles of shower gel and ten bottles of shampoo every year, resulting in about 75 kilotons of plastic waste — about a thousand full olympic swimming pools. but why is a product that is used for about a month made of a material that takes an average of 500 years to disintegrate?

Solution:

A packaging made from soap.


Developed by Berlin-based designer Jonna Breitenhuber, SOAPBOTTLE aims to solve this problem by creating a packaging for liquid washing substances from soap. As the content within is being used, the soap packaging very gradually dissolves. As in the case of the ice cream wafer for example, the „wrapper“ can even be used completely.

When finished, remnants can be used again, as hand soap or processed into detergents. Soap is made of natural ingredients and is biodegradable: waste can be completely avoided

Soapbottle is being promoted and sold by Patrick Munsters and Carel Neuberg founders of Marie-Stella-Maris, an Amsterdam-based lifestyle brand that is committed to increasing access to clean drinking water worldwide.

What you can do: Buy and use SoapBottle products

Discover Solution 336: Flexible and portable water turbine

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Your Home Materials

332: Biodegradable toy bricks

Problem:

In 1919, the rubber shoe heel manufacturer Premo in Petersfield, England produced Minibrix, made of hard rubber which had the ability to deform under pressure to allow firm interlocking of studs and holes.

Then in 1949 Ole Kirk Christiansen of the LEGO factory in Billund, Denmark began producing plastic toys which included interlocking bricks of different colors.

Available in 53 different colours, more than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced in seventy years, with 19 billion LEGO elements produced every year. 2.16 million LEGO elements molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.

This makes LEGO the world’s biggest toymaker. Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been made with a strong, oil-based plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. While boxes of LEGO are usually handed down in families are passed on, a proportion end up in landfills.

Solution:

Biodegradable bricks
For centuries, off cuts left on the woodworker’s bench had been used by their children to balance on top of each other. In 1837, Friedrich Fröbel built specific wooden building blocks to teach the alphabet and numbers for use in his preschool kindergartens.

In 2012 LEGO pledged to find and start using sustainable alternatives to its raw materials by 2030. Realizing the scale of the challenge, it later invested US$150 million to hire almost one hundred scientists and fund research and development.

During seven years, LEGO kept hitting brick walls. They tried making pieces from corn, but they were too soft. Its wheat-based bricks did not absorb color evenly or have the requisite shine. Bricks made from other materials proved too hard to pull apart, broke or had what executives call “creep,” when bricks lose their grip and collapse. Over 200 combinations were tested.

In August 2018, LEGO launched 25 various brick shapes, derived from sugar cane grown in Brazil, colored green and shaped such as leaves, bushes and trees. Confident, LEGO next launched a 200-piece tree house kit again in ethanol-based bioplastic. The search goes on for an improved version to replace their traditional acrylonitrile butadiene styrene polymer.

In 2019 Lego launched a 12-ounce build-on brick mug, made of BPA-free plastic, coming in eight colors.

Discover Solution 333: Plastic from waste CO₂

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Planet Care Your Home

331: Synthesized dairy products

Problem:

Butter ranks third, below beef and lamb, for carbon dioxide emissions per pound of food. Cheese comes fifth.

Solution:

Synthesized dairy products


From 2014, Ryan Pandya and Perumal Ghandi of Perfect Day Foods in Berkeley California have produced synthesized milk by altering sections of the DNA sequence of food-grade yeast into

Trichoderma reesei fungus such that the microorganisms, once fed with certain nutrients, produce many of the dairy proteins, casein and whey found in milk (casein, lactoglobulin, and lactalbumin);
Combine those with water, plant-based fats, vitamins, and minerals, and you get dairy products—without having a cow – like mozzarella cheese, baked goods that require milk, yogurt, and milk shakes.

Smitten Ice Cream and Brave Robot have turned the proteins into delicious vegan, dairy-based ice cream, but Perfect Day is hoping to expand into a whole range of creamy products, for example nosh on a bagel with real schmear that doesn’t contribute to the climate crisis.

Perfect Day, the most well-funded protein fermentation company in the world, has over $360 million in total funding to-date. The recent acceleration has been supported by continuing expansion of production capacity of its animal-free dairy protein, solidifying new brand and foodservice partners, and establishing commercialization plans in new product categories within the next year.

In Glil Yam, Tel Aviv, Israel, Ori Cohavi and Aviv Wolff also founded the start-up Remilk to commercialise their patents for microbial fermentation to create a base that is identical to dairy milk but free from animal-derived ingredients.

The Israeli solution was to recreate the proteins by taking the genes that encode them and inserting them into a single-cell microbe, which they manipulated genetically to express the protein in an efficient and scalable way. Using a microbial fermentation process, they increased the number of proteins, which they then dried into a powder. When mixed with water, plant-based oils like coconut oil or sunflower oil, and plant-based sugar, the milk liquid and its derivatives can be produced with exactly the same properties, taste and structure, he said

Remilk has raised $11.3 million in capital to move its goal of disrupting the global dairy industry into production.
Perfect Day’s and Remilk’s solution for food production will be up to 100 times more land efficient than the existing dairy system, 25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time-efficient, and 10 times more water-efficient, he said.

What you can do: Purchase and enjoy synthesized dairy products

Discover Solution 332: Biodegradable toy bricks

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Materials Your Home

329: Sneakers

Problem:

Sneakers are manufactured with harmful chemicals that are released into the environment. They are also disposed of in harmful ways, such as incineration or dumping them in landfills, which exposes our environment to these toxic chemicals.

Solutions:

In 2015, Cyrill Gutsch of New York, founder of Parley for the Oceans teamed up with Adidas, with its 9.7% athletic footwear global market share, to produce sustainable running shoes called UltraBoost X, made entirely of yarns and filaments reclaimed and recycled from marine plastic waste and illegal deep-sea gill-nets.

A chip in the heel of the shoe enables the runner to use their phone to scan their shoe and follow its story from plastic waste to stylish sneaker. As part of their commitment to tackle plastic waste, Adidas’s trainers use only one material and no glue, making them easier to recycle.

In addition, in between 2017, Adidas and Parley for the Oceans organised “Run For The Oceans”, a global running movement that uses the power of sport to raise awareness for the threat of marine plastic pollution.

They hosted a series of physical runs in several key cities worldwide including LA, New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Milan and Shanghai, and mobilized the global Adidas Runners network to organize weekly running initiatives in 50 Adidas Runners communities worldwide.

For the 2018 event Adidas matched every kilometre run with US$1 dollar, for the first one million kilometers – to support the Parley Ocean Plastic Program, focusing specifically on the Parley Ocean School initiative, which educates and empowers the next generation of Ocean Guardians through immersive experiences in the environment we are fighting to protect.

With in-school and water sports activities, the program introduces youth to the underwater world, teaching them about the impacts of marine plastic pollution and giving them the tools and inspiration to protect their future with Parley AIR.

In 2019, Adidas produced 11 million pairs of shoes with Ocean Plastic® by Parley by intercepting plastic waste on beaches, remote islands and in coastal communities. Adidas has launched a sneaker made from virgin plastic that can be ground up and remade again, as part of the company’s bid to mitigate the plastic crisis.

The Futurecraft Loop shoe was launched April 17 by Adidas as a first step for the brand to help “get off plastic waste”. The aim was to create a product that could be recycled as part of a closed-loop system. To do this, Adidas developed a high-performance running shoe made completely from a single material, virgin thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). This single material is the key to its recyclability.

One of the biggest challenges in recycling sneakers is that they are made of many different materials, which are difficult to separate, sort and re-purpose. To test the Futurecraft Loop, 200 users trialled the sneakers then sent them back to Adidis for washing and grinding up into pellets, which wefre then heated for future sneaker components. Thus, the plastic pellets can be re-used to make a second edition, which will then be tested.

Adidas is not alone. Reebok manufactures a sneaker made from organic cotton upper and corn-based sole, which is then shipped with 100% recycled packaging.

For its 100% vegan sneakers, Veja uses organic cotton grown by farmer associations in Brazil and Peru that harvest it with respect for people and the environment and wild rubber that helps preserve 300,000 ac (120,000 ha.) of the Amazon rainforest. The fabric used for its Veja’s B-Mesh sneaker is crafted from recycled plastic bottles and its CWL trainer is made out of corn waste from the food industry.

In 2019, Kanye West, the American rapper, singer, songwriter presented a new sneaker prototype called the Yeezy Foam Runner, made in Atlanta from a combination of petroleum-based ethylene-vinyl acetate and foam produced from algae. West told the audience that his new Yeezy headquarters in Cody, Wyoming, would include a hydroponic farm where the company can grow its own algae.

By making foam from algae, the company can help clean waterways to protect wildlife and drinking water, and it can avoid using the fossil fuels typically used to make foam. The prototype pair West showed off were a bland khaki color, Yeezy is looking into environmentally friendly dyes. Manufacture will begin in 2020.

What you can do: Purchase planet conscious sneakers and footware.

Discover Solution 330: Water monitoring satellites

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Materials Planet Care Your Home

326: Plastic-free aisles in supermarkets

Problem:

According to the Checking Out on Plastics report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace UK, .Britain’s top 10 supermarkets are flooding the planet with 810,000 tonnes of single-use plastic every year, according to a major new report.

This is in addition to over 1.1 billion single-use bags, 958 million “bags for life” and 1.2 billion plastic bags for fruit and vegetables, which supermarkets produce annually. Seven of those supermarkets are putting into circulation around 59 billion pieces of plastic packaging a year – roughly 2,000 pieces for every household in the country.

Solution:

In 2016, Siân Sutherland and Frederikke Magnussen launched A Plastic Planet, coming up with one solution of a plastic free aisle in supermarkets. In February 2018, the world’s first plastic-free supermarket aisle opened in Amsterdam. Ekoplaza, a Dutch chain, where around 700 products at its pilot launch and everything was packaged, just in glass, metal, cardboard or a compostable, plant-based biofilm.

Sutherland and her team at A Plastic Planet have been working collaboratively with industry, retailers, Governments, legislators and the UN to accelerate the pace of change at all levels creating the Plastic Free Trust Mark for brands, with over 1,000 already certified, and the Industry Commitment Mark ‘Working Towards Plastic Free’.

A Plastic Planet also became a key founding partner in the Plastic Health Coalition, bringing together the world’s scientists, doctors to irrefutably prove the impact of plastic toxicity on human health.

In January 2019, Thornton’s Budgens supermarket in Belsize Park, North London introduced dedicated plastic-free zones featuring more than 1,700 plastic-free products. Customers can pick up everything from fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and cheese, to wild game meat, including squirrel and wild boar, all free from plastic packaging. Plastic-free materials are being used instead, including beech wood nets, pulp, paper, metal, glass, cellulose and carton board.

In June 2020, A Plastic Planet and packaging companies Reelbrands and Transcend Packaging came together to develop the world’s first compostable, plastic-free PPE (personal protective equipment) in clear plastic-free REELshield visors in a bid to assist the fight against coronavirus polluting the environment.

From June 2020, collaborating with Loop, a “zero waste shopping platform”, Tesco, the British supermarket chain is trialling a scheme in the UK where online shoppers will get products in reusable packaging. The trial covers 150 items, which will be delivered in reusable containers for which consumers pay a deposit.

After using the products, which include Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Persil washing liquid, Coca-Cola, and Danone yoghurt, customers ask for DPD (Dynamic Parcel Distribution) to come and pick up the empties in the bag.

Based at the European Marine Science Park in Oban Scotland, a team led by Karen Scofield Seal, at Oceanium Ltd is investigating the potential of seaweed to provide a long-term response to the demand for marine-safe packaging as well as sustainably-sourced plant-based food sources. Their solution is a circular life-cycle bio packaging material, Oceanware designed to be disposed of with food waste and ultimately used for compost for soil health or anaerobic digestion for energy.

What you can do: Be conscious of your ‘plastic footprint’ and shop at Ekoplaza if possible 

Discover Solution 327: Bricks from cigarette butts

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Materials Your Home

320: Plastic bottle cutter in

Problem:

What to do with plastic bottles in the home.

Solution:

Plastic Bottle Cutter


In 2016, two Russians, Pavel et Ian Polianskii living in Versailles, France developed the Plastic Bottle Cutter, a cutting tool, which after removing the bottom of an empty bottle, can shred the rest of the plastic into long skinny strands of plastic rope. The device consists of a wooden handle, razor blade, and a cutting guide and can be used in any home or office.

The product first appeared on Kickstarter on February 23, 2016. With no moving parts and a simple design, this handy handheld device seemed to explode in popularity nearly overnight. By the end of March the product had gained nearly 7,000 backers and a pledge total now passing $350,000; far more than the original goal of $9,945. PBC became 8th most funded project from France, top150 most funded design projects of KickStarter, 4.195% funded!

The Plastic Bottle Cutter can be ordered online but users should consider how to ultimately recycle the twine they produce from it.

Discover Solution 321: RIKR backpack

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Your Home Materials

299: Sustainable or recycled musical instruments

Problem:

The metals used in brass and wind musical instruments are not biodegradable. Small pieces of metal, such as tin cans, will rust and flake into the atmosphere after about 100 years, but something as large as an instrument takes much longer.

While woodwind instruments almost brought their African blackWood or Mpingo forest source to extinction, spruce, maple, rainforest mahogany, ebony and rosewood trees used for guitars were being cut down faster than they could be replaced.

Solutions:

In 1996, Tanzanian botanist Sebastien Chuwa and US woodturner James Harris founded the African BlackWood Conservation Project, working with students to plant hundreds of mpingo saplings to save the forest.

Their campaign received little international attention until a BBC documentary, “The Tree of Music” focussed world attention on the extinction risk.  By 2004, Chuwa’s goal was achieved and more than 20,000 trees were planted in that year alone.

Also in 1996, Gibson, one of the world’s premier guitar brands, became the first in the industry to make some of its instruments using wood certified as “sustainably harvested” by the non-profit Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

In 2008 Gibson was joined by other guitar manufacturers Taylor, Fender, Martin, Guild, Walden and Yamaha to sign on as partners with Music Wood Coalition, a project of the leading environmental non-profit Greenpeace to promote changes in logging practices that would secure the longterm sustainability of tonewoods.

There are alternative solutions. In 2006, Favio Chávez, music teacher, and Nicolás “Cola” Gómez, a rubbish picker, began to wonder if they could create instruments from garbage they found on the large landfill in Cateura, a small town in Paraguay where residents suffer extreme poverty.

With the help of lutier Nicolás Gómez, Chàvez began to manufacture all kinds of instruments with which children could play.Their workshop became a place of musical refinement and experimentation. An oil drum was a good body for a cello; a bent kitchen fork for a violin tailpiece. The first few scratchy instruments were given to local kids for whom a new violin might cost a month of their parents’ wages.

Chávez began to train his ensemble which he called La Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura, or The Cateura Recycled Orchestra, formed by young people from 11 to 25 years at risk of social exclusion. Since 2012 the orchestra has given concerts, not only in South America, but all over the world.

In 2015 “Landfill Harmonic”, a film that follows their journey, won a special mention in the environment award at the prestigious Sheffield Doc/Fest. The orchestra has now spawned copycats and is connected with similar groups who have formed independently from Ecuador, Panama, Brazil and Burundi. In Mexico, the Orquestra Basura (Trash Orchestra) have recorded albums and achieved minor celebrity status.

Another solution was found by Simon Lee of Burgos, Spain, originally trained as a sculptor who used these skills to work as a prop and model maker in the theatre, film and television industries.

After many years of working he decided to retrain as a guitar maker at Merton College London, but instead of using traditional tropical hardwoods materials, in 2008, he recycled. Lee’s Cyclotron guitars are made from recycled CDs, yoghurt pots and offcuts of industrial pipes. Though the neck is still made in wood, Simon makes it a point to source materials locally where possible.

Art Mayer of Copper Guitars in Moscow, Russia has built the the iCaster, a Tele-style guitar built from 107 Apple iPhone cases, gluing them together in a block roughly four phones thick and then carving out the body, which also includes a recycled mahogany sustain block.

Discover Solution 300: Organic-inorganic hybrid material for separating CO²

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Materials Your Home

295: Polypropylene-free tea bags

Problem:

Canadian researchers published a study in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Environmental Science and Technology which found that steeping a single plastic tea bag at brewing temperature releases about 11.6 billion minuscule particles known as “microplastics” and 3.1 billion “nanoplastics” into each cup. Teabags could be as big a cause of plastic pollution as microbeads or carrier bags.

Solution:

Organic tea bags are made by a dozen manufacturers including Brew Tea Co., Teapigs. Aldi, Duchy Organics, Hampstead Tea, Steenbergs, We are Tea, Hannah Sell’s Tea and Nemi.


Based in Keynsham, England, Pukka Herb teabags are made of a special blend of natural abaca (a type of banana) and plant cellulose fibres. Their supply of tea bag paper is also unbleached. They are staple-free and 100% biodegradable and/or recyclable. The tea bag strings are made from 100% organic, non-GMO, un-bleached cotton use a simple stitch of organic cotton and a unique folding process. This means they do not need to use polypropylene or a metal staple to hold their teabags together.

The tea bag is only a century old. Before that loose tea leaves would brew in a tea pot, while the tea infuser or strainer made of stainless steel was fine for one or two people. These systems are still eco friendly.

What you can do: Purchase tea that uses organic tea bags.

Discover Solution 296: Second-hand Shopping Mall

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Planet Care Your Home

283: Microfilter clothes washing devices

Problem:

700,000 plastic microfibers come off synthetic garments when they go into a machine. By coming off, these fibers pass through the filters of the washing machines, which are not equipped to retain these microparticles. Since wastewater treatment plants do not have the capacity to filter them, they end up in sewage and, therefore, in the oceans. These fibers finally finish their course in the organism of marine animals.

Solution:

Microfilter clothes washing devices


In 2005, Brian Koski of Wexco Environmental Inc., Milaca, Minnesota developed the Filtrol 160 attachable filter which removes non-biodegradable materials and fibers, such as lint,hair, pet fur, sand, food and other debris, from a washing machine discharge. Filtrols are now in use problem in thousands of homes, businesses, and residential properties across the USA.

In 2008, keen surfers, Alexander Nolte and Oliver Spies co-founded of LANGBRETT GmbH specializing in environmentally friendly surf, skate and outdoor apparel with retail stores in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt.

Concerned with micro-particle pollution, they conceived of a plastic filter bag specially designed to retain these particles during a clothes wash. Nolte and Spies worked with German research institute Fraunhofer to test and vet the bag’s design and material.

They settled on polyamide, also known as nylon, that does not shed synthetic fibers easily. It is made with a 50-micron mesh, a width that allows soapy water to enter the bag without allowing fibers to leave. They trade named their patented innovation the Guppyfriend.

Guppyfriend attracted the attention of Patagonia, the American clothing company, Greener Grazing program at Australis Aquaculture when word about the project reached Phil Graves, managing director of Tin Shed Ventures, Patagonia’s investment fund. Patagonia already had a relationship with LANGBRETT, which sells Patagonia clothing.

They received early prototypes of the bag and tested them with the UCSB researchers they had worked with on their fiber loss study. They confirmed that the bag trapped anywhere from 90-95% of fibers. When the bag is removed from the washer at the end of a cycle, the fiber – visible against the white mesh – can be removed by hand and disposed of. Tests show that the bag remains functional and intact after hundreds of washings.

Since then, Nolte and Spies are also working on reducing microfiber losses before the fabric reaches the laundry room. They are working with Deutsche Textilforschungszentrum, a German standards body, to create a metric that will show the rate and amount of fiber losses of a given textile. They hope clothing designers will choose fabrics that aren’t prone to shedding. (en.guppyfriend.com)

In Ljubljana, Slovenia, a team led by Mojca Zupan and her engineer Hakim El Khiar have developed the PlanetCare washing machine filter. PlanetCare filters are available worldwide from an online shop. Every user receives a filter, replacement cartridges, a hose, a mount, and a small counter of wash cycles.

After the initial installation, the user will need to replace a full cartridge after approximately 20 wash cycles. After installing the last new cartridge, they return the used cartridges to PlanetCare for recycling (cartridges come in a returnable box with prepaid postage) who will send you a new set.

A commercial PlanetCare filter is designed for the service industry. Laundromats, hotels, hospitals, marinas: wherever washing machines operate 24 hours a day. This filter has been tested and approved by four renowned institutions: University of Slovenia, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), the Swedish Environmental Agency and a washing machine manufacturer.

As of January 1, 2025, based on a decree passed by the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, all new washing machines must be fitted with microplastic filters, while manufacturers would obtain an environmental bonus if they transitioned before 2025.

What you can do: Use one of these filter to help reduce microfiber pollution.

Discover Solution 284: 99Recycle

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Your Home

257: Oceanix

Problem:

By 2030, approximately 60 % of the world’s population will live in cities that are exposed to grave economic, social, and environmental pressures. Further, approximately 90 % of the largest global cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels. By 2050, out of the world’s 22 megacities with a population of more than 10 million, 15 are located along the ocean’s coasts.

Solution:

In June 2019, UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda along with non-profit Oceanix unveiled designs to build a floating city at sea that would house 10,000 people, be fully autonomous and could withstand Category 5 hurricanes.


Based in Hong Kong, Oceanix is the brainchild of Marc Collins Chen, a Tahitian entrepreneur and former politician, who served as the Minister of Tourism of the Pacific nation of French Polynesia. In January 2017, this nation looking for a potential lifeline as AGW takes hold, in had become the first country to sign an agreement to deploy the floating islands off its coast. Low-lying, small islands of the Pacific are disproportionately at risk of losing land as sea level climbs by an expected 10 in. to 32 in. (26-82 cm) by the late 21st century.

Also on the team are Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Denmark and MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. Oceanix City would measure 185 ac (75 ha) spread over floating platforms. The idea is that the floating hexagonal platforms would be prefabricated on land and grouped into clusters of six to create a “village” of up to 1,650 residents.

A total of six villages would then be grouped together around a central harbor. All buildings would be kept between 4 and 7 seven stories-high to ensure a low center of gravity and mitigate the effects of high winds. They would also be made from sustainable materials such as bamboo and feature large flat roofs to aid shading and offer space for solar panels. There would be a focus on farming too, both on land and, below sea level, floating reefs, seaweed, oysters, mussel, scallop and clam farming.

Residents would get around on electric vehicles. The structure itself will be moored to the bottom of the ocean and will rely entirely on the concept of so-called “ocean farming”, which means growing food under the surface of the water. For example, cells under the platforms could collect mussels, squid and other types of seafood. Aquaponics systems will use fish waste to help fertilize plants while vertical farms will generate year-round production.

Both technologies could help the city self-sufficient to food during a hurricane or other natural disaster. Either cars or vehicles with harmful emissions will be forbidden. Even garbage trucks will not be provided – trash pneumatic tubes will be installed. They will transport the waste to a sorting station where they could be identified and redirected. The city will also have a water system that extracts clean water from the air. (oceanix.org)

Currently there is a technology race to build the first green floating city for people to live sustainably on the ocean. Singapore is cooperating with Norway on ambitious floating projects. In Europe, Norway is putting the weight of its state-owned enterprise Equinor (formerly Statoil) into exploring this new space and building strategic alliances. Norway is conducting workshops on floating cities.

The Netherlands, in cooperation with the United Nations, recently announced the creation of the Global Center on Adaptation to be housed in floating offices in Rotterdam. This center will be led by several luminaries, including former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, business leader Bill Gates and CEO of the World Bank Kristalina Georgieva.

Discover Solution 258: Plaxx plastic-recycled oil

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Materials Your Home

255: Eco-friendly mattress

Problem:

Most mattresses are made with synthetic fibers or foam, which don’t biodegrade. Cotton or wool stuffing can be processed with pesticides and other chemicals—some of them potentially carcinogenic.

Solution:

The eco-friendly mattress.


In September 2020, John Lewis & Partners, a brand of high-end department stores operating for almost one century throughout Great Britain, launched its first ever fully recyclable eco mattress.

Their EcoMattress is handcrafted in a carbon-neutral factory in Yorkshire using chemical-free materials, 200 recycled plastic bottles, and layers of EcoFlex fibres (a soft polyester filling made from 100 % recycled fibres).

The mattress, which can be fully recycled at the end of its life, also features a clever glue-free high density Cortec Quad pocket spring system, innovated by Harrison Spinks Springs of Leeds, UK. With a total of 750 pocket springs in the king size mattress, it aims to provide balance during the night, while also reliving pressure and helping to keep your body weight evenly distributed.

What you can do: When you next purchase a mattress, make it an Eco-mattress 

Discover Solution 256: Natrium Reactor

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Materials Your Home

252: recyclable pantyhose

Problem:

A pair of women’s tights (pantyhose) does not resist more than six uses. The 104 million pairs of tights in France thrown away each year equal to the weight of the Eiffel Tower or 7, 300 tonnes of garbage..

Solutions:

Lætitia Paput and Aurore Jacques of the Bordeaux suburb of Blanquefort, France decided to make pantyhose in a fiber recycled from plastic waste from the textile industry which were previously buried or burned. They also created bins specifically from thrown-away tights.


They called their start-up REV, the first three letters of the French words “rêver, révolutionner et revivre” (= dream, revolutionise and recycle). Rêver because it is a childlike dream to create this brand of textile; revolutionise eco-fashion with pretty and comfortable products and recycle materials.

To finance their first pairs of tights, Paput and Jacques launched a fundraising campaign on the Ulule platform. In a few hours they had reached 440% of their goal.

In Stockholm, Sweden, Nadja Forsberg and Linn Frisinger started up “Swedish Stockings” to make a luxury range of pantyhose from recycled nylon and natural fibers, at a plant in Italy which uses sustainable practices like eco-friendly dyes, post-dyeing water treatments, and solar power.

From a fashion perspective, there are classic black opaque panty hose, racy Astrid fishnets, lace and leopard tights, and pointelle socks, among other styles. Committed to a circular fashion industry, Swedish Stockings also provide two recycling centres to which you can post your old nylons for recycling, and they will accept any brand.

Send a minimum of 3 old pairs at once, and they will send you a discount code for your next purchase.

Considering whether there is a second life for old tights, Forsberg and Frisinger teamed up with Gustaf Westman to combine recycled tights and recycled fiberglass and make them into a limited edition collection of marble-look tables durable enough to be used both indoors and outdoors.

Each table (depending on its size) contains between 80 and 350 pairs of tights that have been diverted from landfills through their recycling program.

What you can do: Buy stockings form and support REV and Swedish Stockings

Discover Solution 253: Smog-dissipating gun for Delhi pollution

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Materials Your Home

245: Sustainable tooth cleaners

Problem:

All-plastic polyethylene toothpaste tubes were introduced in the 1990s. One billion toothpaste tubes end up in landfills every year harsh chemical residues Every year, more than 50 Empire State Buildings worth of toothpaste tubes end up in landfills or oceans.

Solution:

Tube-free toothpaste


Determined to replace toothpaste tubes with tablets, in 2016, Lindsay McCormick, a TV producer in Hollywood, California, bought a new TDP 0 tablet machine made in Texas and having learned how to use it, began experimenting in her Los Angeles apartment with a range of different ingredients.

She talked to every dentist and dental hygienist who would give her the time of day and even took open source online chemistry classes to develop the right formula, free from harsh chemicals, dyes, artificial flavors, and unnecessary fillers.

The result was a product she called Bite Toothpaste Bits, a mint or mint charcoal flavored pill which once bitten becomes foamy like toothpaste, quantities of which can be contained in a refillable glass bottle.

Before long Lindsay started getting orders from people who shared her passion for sustainability.

So she bought a TDP 5 machine from the same company in Texas for US$2,599 that could make five thousand pills in an hour. A “Women’s Health” video that she had shot on her iPhone started going viral. Soon after, Lindsay ended up having to quit her job and has been working full time on Bite ever since.

After being featured in media outlets such Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, Bite operates out of a fully FDA-approved manufacturing facility to keep up with demand. Since August 2018, Bite has sold more than 12 million tablets.

Early in 2020, kid-friendly flavored Bits became available with their 4-month subscription. At the same time, in response to the hand sanitizer shortage due to COVID-19, Bite found the World Health Organization’s (WHO) formula and made it, using their repurposed and sanitized glass Bite bottles, then donating the first batch to those most in need in the Los Angeles area. (bitetoothepastebits.com)

Lindsay McCormick is not alone. In 2018, Kalleonne Laboratoire des Sources in Souspierre in the Drôme region of France, launched Ascentical, toothpaste sourced from mountain plants in a recyclable metal tin. It sells in BioCoop stores across France.

Toothpaste can be applied by fingers, but usually by a brush. John and Heather McDougall grew up in a small town in North Dakota. With a dad as a dentist, John’s path to design school, and Heather’s to law, were far from the family business. During school, however, they decided to use their talents to create products with environmental and social value, and as fate would have it, they could not resist starting with a toothbrush.

The result was the Bogobrush made from sculpted organic wild bamboo with bristles made from 62% castor bean oil and 38% nylon, and packaged in a cardboard box. Another firm, Radius, makes funky-looking toothbrushes called Source from cellulose and removable heads with vegetable-based nylon bristles.

What you can do: Buy and use these products.

Discover Solution 246: Peppermint tea for fart reduction

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Your Home

237: WholeGarment

Solution:

WholeGarment


In 1962 Masahire Seima built the prototype of a fully automatic seamless glove knitting machine but it was considered to be difficult to put into practical use and incurred large debt.

Thirty years later, in 1995, his company Shima Seiki presented the commercial version of a textile machine that could produce an entire garment without seams, using only the amount of yarn required to knit that item, thus reducing labor and material loss associated with cutting and sewing processes, saving substantially on waste.

They called it WholeGarment.

It was unveiled at the unveiled at the International Textile Machinery (ITMA) exhibition, the machine was described by SWG (Sächsische Walzengravur) as “The Magic of the Orient”, able to knit a single sweater from yarn in only 30 minutes.

During the next twenty years, at the Innovation Factory, which was set up in 2016 as a means of establishing a new production system for the Japan-based fashion retailer to utilize Shima’s latest knit production technologies, the machine was improved to give greater productivity and efficiency, flexibility, reliability, and expanded patterning capability as well as product range.

One innovation was the Slide Needle, (whereby a slider mechanism replaces the conventional latch, expanding possibilities in knit and transfer, with increased number of knitting techniques.

In 2002, a no-plate ink jet printing machine “SIP-100F” was developed, and a “Total Fashion System” based on “SDS-ONE” strengthened the cooperation between “SIP” and “P-CAM,” contributing to a revitalization of the industry, helping to optimise inventory levels and reduce consumption. In 2017 Uniqlo teamed up with WholeGarment to launch a collection which featured items to redefine quality knitwear at affordable prices.

As part of factory greening, Shima Seiki has a large-scale solar power generation system at each factory and are promoting the reduction of energy consumption. They have also planted approximately 12,000 trees, outside their factories making approximately 30% of the site “green space,” and contributing to CO₂ reduction.

Some major customers are Max Mara (a fashion designer brand) and Paola Martignoni (an Italian knitwear manufacturer).

In the financial year to March 31 2019, Shima Seiki Ltd sold 1,521 machines worldwide. Liu Jingyuan, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who follows sales of WholeGarment in Asia, forecasts that annual sales will be roughly double that in the financial year ending March 2021. The main bottleneck, argues Mr Liu, will be parts shortages rather than final demand.

In September 2019, Shima Seiki was selected by the Cabinet Office public relations office of the government of Japan as one of several innovative companies effectively undertaking Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations as a global agenda.

What you can do: Buy and wear a WholeGarment.

Visit us tomorrow for Solution 238: Thermosyphoning: how to heat without using electricity from the Grid!

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Planet Care Your Home

236: Marine glass

Problem:

What to do with emptied edible sea shells

Solution:

Marine glass


Atelier Viaud in Rennes, Brittany, France specializes in the formulation of Ostraco marine glass from natural resources and co-products in the regions. From the object to the work, from a palette of glasses growing over the years and crafted by craftsmen, the Viaud’s Atelier offers collections for the home through its ® brand, exceptional pieces on -measurement for professionals, and occasionally produces pieces in collaboration with other artists.

A graduate of the Boulle school, Lucile Viaud wanted to work on the issue of valuing marine resources, and in particular waste, fish bones or skins, oyster or abalone shells, shells, to create a material and then imagine objects.

It was at the Idmer technological innovation center in Lorient that Lucile Viaud carried out her first research. This is where her first marine glaz (old Breton for Glass). She began with microalgae and oyster shells, then later progressed to abalone shells. Production of the elegant blue-green bowls is then carried out by Stéphane Rivoal in his workshop in Arcueil, in the Paris region,

The particularity of its glass lies in its infinitely recyclable state.

Discover Solution 237: seamless sewing

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Human Effort Your Home

219: Cell-grown meat

Problem:

Apart from the destruction of forests to make prairies for livestock, the latter’s methane emissions contributing to GHGs, their intake of antibiotics and their traumatic electrocuted death prior to preparation as edible meat have seen an exponential rise in the number of vegetarians and vegans worldwide.

Vegetarianism categories were estimated in 2018 to be about 11% of the world population.

Solution:

Slaughter-free meat involves taking a sample of animal stem cells from a real cow, the building blocks of muscle and other organs and replicating them outside of the animal.


The cells are placed in petri dishes with amino acids and carbohydrates to help the muscle cells multiply and grow. The concept of cultured meat was popularized by Jason Matheny in the early 2000s after co-authoring a seminal paper on cultured meat production and creating New Harvest, the world’s first non-profit organization dedicated to supporting in vitro meat research.

In August 2013, Mark Post, a Dutch pharmacologist and Professor of Vascular Physiology at the Netherlands’ Maastricht University, was the first to showcase a proof-of-concept for cultured meat by creating the first burger patty grown directly from cells.

The burger was cooked by Chef Richard McGeown of Couch’s Great House Restaurant, Polperro, Cornwall, and tasted by critics Hanni Rützler, a food researcher from the Future Food Studio and Josh Schonwald. To commercialize the product, Mark Post co-founded Mosa Meat, indicating that they planned to bring cultured meat to the market by 2021.

In 2015, Maastricht University hosted the first International Conference on Cultured Meat. As the field has grown, non-profit organizations such as New Harvest and The Good Food Institute have begun hosting annual conferences to convene industry leaders, scientists, investors, and potential collaborators from parallel industries.

In 2018, a Dutch startup Meatable, consisting of Krijn de Nood, Daan Luining, Ruud Out, Roger Pederson, Mark Kotter and Gordana Apic among others, reported that it had succeeded in growing meat using pluripotent stem cells from animals’ umbilical cords.

Although such cells are reportedly difficult to work with, Meatable claimed to be able to direct them to behave using their proprietary technique in order to become muscle cells or fat cells as needed. The major advantage is that this technique bypasses fetal bovine serum, meaning that no animal has to be killed in order to produce meat.

It is estimated there were about 30 cultured meat startups across the world. A Dutch House of Representatives Commission meeting discussed the importance and necessity of governmental support for researching, developing and introducing cultured meat in society, speaking to representatives of three universities, three startups and four civil interest groups on September 26, 2018. (meatable.com)

In California, Just is developing lab-grown chicken nuggets, while Finless Food has developed a lab-grown tuna and Memphis Meats, is working on another cell-based product.

In Israel, in 2017 Professor Shulamit Levenberg from Technion University founded Aleph Farms in Rehovet, to commercialise the technique of growing bovine cells on a scaffold similar to growing human tissue implants.

A study by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam found that cultured meat was “potentially … much more efficient and environmentally-friendly”, generating only 4% GHG emissions, reducing the energy needs of meat generation by up to 45%, and requiring only 2% of the land that the global meat/livestock industry does.

In March 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreed on a framework to regulate laboratory grown meat. This deal takes lab meat one step closer to being approved for commercial sale in the United States. Some lab meat producers expect this approval within the year, but some experts warn this process might take years.

During 2019, the nascent, laboratory-grown meat industry experienced fast development thanks to millions of dollars in capital investment. Estimates suggest these meats could reach a mass market by 2025,

The multi-billion dollar traditional meat-producing industry does not approve, warning that the energy and fossil fuel requirements of large-scale cultured meat production may be more environmentally destructive than producing food off the land.

In May 2019, the Alabama Senate passed a bill to ensure that laboratory-grown meat substitutes are not sold to Alabama consumers labeled as “meat.” There are over 20,000 cattle farms in the state of Alabama. Beef continues to be a favorite protein among consumers across the world, with exports of American beef representing an US$8 billion industry alone.

Visit us tomorrow for Solution 220: sub-atomic springs that break down plastic

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Planet Care Your Home

216: Less thirsty rice

Problem:

Traditional rice farming is heavily reliant on ready supplies of water and labour. Climate change and urbanisation, however, threaten traditional paddy cultivation.

Solution:

A team led by plant development biologist Dr Smita Kurup at the Rothamstead Research in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in the Philippines, and Punjab Agricultural University, India, are using use cutting edge plant breeding technologies, field trials and an image based system for measuring traits to accelerate the development of new direct seeded rice (DSR) adapted rice varieties that can be grown with less water than conventional puddled transplanted rice.


In many parts of Asia farmers are switching to direct seeded rice DSR as a more sustainable alternative. This is grown in dry fields, so uses less water and requires less work. It also cuts out the greenhouse gases that bacteria in paddy fields produce.

Kurup has already identified in the lab hitherto ‘unknown’ varieties more suitable to DSR in terms of their seedling traits by screening several hundred varieties from the International Rice Genebank at IRRI.

As a next step, the plan is to use these lines to combine with current good yielding and disease resistant rice cultivars to generate new high-yielding “DSR adapted” rice varieties.
Once developed, their field performance will be evaluated at multiple locations. Finally, the most promising breeding lines will be nominated for trails in Asia before releasing to farmers.

Visit us tomorrow for Solution 217: Indoor vertical farms

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Your Home Planet Care

211: Xeriscaping your lawn

Problem:

Every year across the USA, manicured grass lawns covering up to 50 million acres of land, consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year, 200 million gallons of gas (for all that motor mowing), and 70 million pounds of pesticides. … In fact, these lawns can do substantial harm to the environment and to both vertebrates and insects.

Solution:

Xeriscaping: lawns that are less thirsty.


The concept combining “landscape” with the Greek prefix xero-, from ξηρός (xēros), meaning dry, was coined and trademarked by Denver Water, the Colorado city of Denver’s water department, during a difficult drought period in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Lawns were a European invention, England to be precise, and they were the undertaking of the fabulously wealthy, seeking to bring the glade closer to home.

Originally, they were cultivated with more useful (though not necessarily used) plants like chamomile or thyme. However, the trend moved towards closely cropped grasses, first maintained by grazing sheep then by men with scythes and finally, eventually, moving along (in fast forward) to the suburban land owner with his fossil fuel lawnmower, trimmers, and multitude of weapons against nature.

A growing number of homeowners are converting part or all of their lawns to a less thirsty form of landscape. These no-mow yards fall into four categories: 1) naturalized or unmowed turf grass that is left to grow wild; 2) low-growing turf grasses that require little grooming (most are a blend of fescues); 3) native or naturalized landscapes where turf is replaced with native plants as well as noninvasive, climate-friendly ones that can thrive in local conditions; and 4) yards where edible plants—vegetables and fruit-bearing trees and shrubs—replace a portion of turf.

In Montreal, Canada, landscape gardeners Philippe Asselin, Emile Forest and Jonathan Lapalme have created an ngo “Les Nouveaux Voisins” (= the new neighbours) to replace lawns with gardens favorable to biodiversity.

They encourage individuals to change cultures to accommodate more plants, birds, insects, and other non-human neighbours. This in turn will reduce heat islands, increase carbon sequestration in soils as well as increased community resilience.

Organizations like the Surfriders Foundation, a national environmental group made up of surfing aficionados, have helped transform turf lawns in Southern California parks and homes into ocean-friendly gardens, using succulents and other indigenous plants along with hardscape materials like rocks and gravel that increase filtration, conserve water, and reduce runoff.

Xeriscaping goes one step further by replacing grassy lawns with soil, rocks, mulch, and drought-tolerant native plant species. Trees such as myrtles and flowers such as daffodils are drought-tolerant plants.

Native grasses (warm-season) that have been cultivated for turf lawns, such as buffalo grass and blue grama, can survive with a quarter of the water that bluegrass varieties need.

What you can do: Xeriscape your lawn.

Discover Solution 212: Drone fireworks

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Human Effort Your Home

207: Sewing with seaweed

Problem:

As the world consumes more and more clothing, brands and suppliers are trying to meet this increasing demand by producing more garments. As these clothes make their way through the supply chain and product lifecycle, they take part in an environmentally hazardous sequence of events.

Solution:

Rapidly degradable yarns from kelp.


In Brooklyn, New York, Aaron Nesser, a graduate of Pratt Institute, Tessa Callaghan, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, with Aleksandra Gosiewski, Asta Skocir and Theanne Schiros researched into polymers made mostly from sustainable sea kelp

By 2018, they got to a point where they were spinning the polymer into something that, when worn, was durable and which they called AlgiKnit. Completely customizable, the material’s yarn-like strands can be any dimension and knitted to spec for sneakers and handbags, or the company can alter the hand-feel, durability and size of the material to create accessories like wrist watches

With their proof of concept landing the team $2.2m in seed investment from Hong Kong venture capital firm Horizons Ventures, AlgiKnit was also awarded €100K from the Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge

While they experimented with an idea for a futuristic-looking trainer and collaborated with a designer to make a French-style market bag that was hitting fashion weeks that year, they eventually decided to focus on scaling up the production of the seaweed textile which can be died with pigments at scale.

Discover Solution 208: Office and home decor made from chopsticks

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Human Effort Materials Your Home

202: Invisible barcodes for recycling

Problem:

Many consumers struggle to figure out which items can be recycled while sorting our rubbish at home. Machines in sorting plants can face the same problem. This prevents many countries from achieving the recycling rates they would such as.

Solution:

Ravi K. Sharma of Digimarc in Portland, Oregon has developed and patented an “invisible” barcode which can more accurately identify recyclable plastics that could prevent their unnecessary disposal into landfills or incinerators.

Digimarc has signed Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, which is focused on building a Circular Economy for plastics.

Products have disguised codes printed all over them making it easier to scan distinguishing food-grade plastics from non-food grade plastics so the right kind of plastic can be re used to manufacture new items.

Following successful initial trials carried out by TOMAR at a recycling facility in western Germany, involving scanning and photographing items at 150 frames per second, in 2020 the system will be installed in a conventional waste sorting plant.

The system, called HolyGrail has already involved a consortium of twenty of the world’s biggest brands, including Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Danone.

At home, individuals will be able to use an animated app on their cellphone to identify and place different types of plastic in the right trash cans.

Discover Solution 203: Iron fuel

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Energy Your Home

181: Greener personal desktop computing

Problem:

Internets cause global warming. Blog servers might have more than 10,000 PCs occupying an area of more than 40, 0000 sq. ft that generate huge amount of heat while running.

Each click of the keyboard engenders heat in a computer or laptop and processing of information data causes a minuscule rise in environmental temperature. Single internet search, depending upon the initial data, might consume enough electricity to run an 11 watt energy saving light bulb few minutes to an hour.

With about more than 5.6 billion searches internet searches estimated globally daily, the power consumption and GHG emissions generated by internet and computers is alarming. Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day (Internetlivestats, 2019). If you break this statistic down, it means that Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average.

Solution:

Greener computing.


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star program has set up green computing criteria, and compliance with these requirements earns systems the Energy Star label.

To gain Energy Star compliance, computers must use an energy-efficient power supply, operate efficiently in power saving modes (standby/off, sleep and idle modes), and also provide power management features (along with information about how to use those features).

If all the computers that are sold in the United States met Energy Star requirements, greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by the equivalent of 2 million cars and save about $2 billion annually on energy costs

In addition to the Energy Star label, EPEAT (Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool), run by the Green Electronics Council, rates computers based on more than 50 energy-efficient criteria including everything from what materials were used in the system and its packaging to its energy conservation and end-of-life management.

This is a three-tiered rating system — gold, silver and bronze — and computers ranked by EPEAT are also Energy Star compliant.

In June 2007, Dell of Round Rock, Texas, set a goal of becoming the greenest technology company on Earth for the long term. The company launched a zero-carbon initiative that included partnering with customers to build the “greenest PC on the planet”.

Called the Studio Hybrid, its 87% efficient power supply meets Energy Star’s 4.0 green computing standards, and EPEAT gives the system its highest rating, gold.

The Studio Hybrid is 80% smaller than a typical desktop computer while its packaging is made from 95-percent-recyclable materials and comes with less printed documentation – 75 % less by weight (all documentation is made available online instead)

For an additional charge, owner-users can personalize it with a bamboo sleeve. And when they are ready to upgrade, the Studio Hybrid comes with its own system recycling kit.

Alongside Dell, other PC manufacturers have come up with solutions, including Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M57p, the Apple Mac mini, the Zonbu Desktop Mini, the Acer TravelMate TimelineX, the Asus Bamboo Series, the CherryPal etc.

What you can do: Shutdown and unplug your computer when not in use. Using your system’s power settings (for instance, programming a sleep mode or turning the machine off and unplugging it) is a smart way to conserve energy. But when it’s time to upgrade your system, consider going green. And don’t forget to recycle your outdated system.

Discover Solution 181: An app to help clean up rubbish

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Your Home

175: Biodegradable glue sticks

Problem:

Paper glues have a long history. UHU was developed by August Fischer of Bühl, Germany from 1905, and for a century this twist-and-glue stick was used in offices, classrooms and homes worldwide. But their single-use plastic condemned them to the landfill.

Solution:

From 2014, UHU, now owned by the Bolton Group, marketed its ReNATURE stick with a sugar cane based PE-HD container and 70% nature-based adhesive.


In 2018, the product received the Österreichisches Umweltzeichen für Produkte (the official Austrian environmental label for products), a hallmark of high environmental standards, quality and product safety. (uhu.com)

Similarly Henkel of Düsseldorf’s Pritt Stick has formulated a glue power primarily from natural sources, 93% of it is made from raw materials such as potato starch.

To mark the environmentally friendly formulation, “Mr. Pritt” is supporting the global urban green-space charity ‘Trees for Cities’ through Pritt’s ‘Stick up for Trees’ campaign. Mr Pritt is encouraging kids to use their imaginations and get artistic by creating tree collages from renewable and recycled materials such as leaves, bottle caps and egg boxes.

In 1927, Aldo Balma and Andrea Capoduri of Voghera, Italy manufactured their Coccoina natural glue made of potato starch, glycerine, almond oil and water. It was contained in an unbreakable aluminum packaging complete with little biodegradable brush with natural bristles in the middle.

In 1984, Coccoina 84 was launched, a formulation of liquid glue based on polyvinyl alcohol, a biodegradable water soluble polymer but still characterized by an almond scent. The Coccoina stick, based on water-washable polyvinylpyrrolidone, was produced from 2007. (coccoina.it)

What you can do: Use biodegradable glue sticks.

Discover Solution 176: Substitute river sand

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Human Effort Your Home

162: BPA-free food cans

Problem:

Since the 1950s manufacturers discovered that lining the inside of their tins with bisphenol A (BPA) epoxy resins strengthened the tins and extended shelf life. But BPA is also an endocrine disruptor the effects of which have been linked to an increased risk of breast, lower sperm counts in men and prostate cancer, infertility, type 2 diabetes, obesity, asthma, and ADHD.

Solution:

BPA-free food cans


Eden Foods grocery store set up in 1968 is now the oldest organic food produce in the US. In 1997, Eden Foods became alarmed by the toxicity of bisphenol-A (BPA) in cans and food packaging long before it made it to mainstream news. From April of 1999, Eden beans have featured a custom made can lined with an oleoresinous c-enamel that does not contain the endocrine disrupter.

Oleoresin is a mixture of oil and resin extracted from plants such as pine or balsam fir. Since then Eden uses BPA-free enamel-lined cans for most of its products (the only exception being tomato-based foods). After years of trying to realise a BPA-free tomato can, in 2011 Eden found an alternative in the amber glass jar.

Recently, some of the world’s biggest food companies such as Nestlé, Heinz, General Mills and Campbell Soups have attempted to remove BPA from their products. Several other firms, such as Coca-Cola, declined to disclose a timetable for its withdrawal, saying that BPA was safe.

The UK’s Food Standards Agency has examined BPA, and says that levels of the compound people would typically consume do not represent a risk to consumers.

What you can do : Make sure to buy food cans that are BPA-free

Tomorrow’s solution: bioplastic food wrap

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Materials Your Home

145: Recycling false teeth

Problem:

Dental crowns, bridges, and PFMs are alloyed with gold, platinum, palladium, and silver, nylon and acrylic. When their wearer changes them or dies, they must be recycled in order not to end up in the landfill.

Solution:

In 2006, Isao Miyoshi was running a dental laboratory in Sakado, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. Every day, he visited the dentistry department at the local Meikai University Hospital, where he collected dozens of plaster impressions of people’s gums and their remaining teeth. Back at Miyoshi’s lab, his 12 dental technicians then crafted new dentures as replacements for the patients’ lost teeth.


But then 63-year-old Miyoshi came up with a solution. In his lab, they were making about 30 new dentures a day. People on average get new dentures every three years, because the condition of their teeth changes. Once the new ones are made, dentists usually give the old ones back to the patients. But most people don’t know what to do with them and they end up keeping them in a drawer.

That’s really a waste of something useful.

What if he were to collect crowns, bridgework, dentures, inlays, clasps, gold teeth and other metal extractions, then remove the metals and re-sell them for recycling while discarding the rest.

With 5 grams of these alloys worth around 2,000 yen, once they are separated from the dentures recycle used dentures, if all of the 3.6 million dentures with precious metals discarded each year in Japan were recycled, they would be valued at up to 7 billion yen (roughly $83.3 million).

Miyoshi founded a non-profit Japan Denture Recycling Association and it was not long before the program was able to donate all its earnings to UNICEF and has since given over $400,000 to charity

Founded in 1892, Garfield Refining in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is one of the oldest and most respected precious metal refineries in the world. Recognized in North America as DentalTown’s “Best Dental Scrap Refiner” for 9 years in a row, for Garfield refining is recycling.

In England, Simple Refining, a family run company based in Cheshire, also specialises in gold refining and recycling of dental scrap. While in France a D3E (ou DEEE) dentaires are recycled Récyclum (formerly Recydent)

What you can do: Ensure that yours and your family’s false teeth etc are sustainably recycled.

Discover Solution 146: Faux fur

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