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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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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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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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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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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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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