If only the media covered science as it does the endless verbal diarrhea of politics and sports. We would then know much more about the real heroes among us. In the process, we might also inspire ourselves to live more fully in a fact-based world of scientific and technical reality.
Enter Sandra Pascoe Ortiz, a chemical engineer and biotechnologist at the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac who has discovered how to turn cactus leaves into inexpensive (vs. costly corn-based plastics), non-toxic, and fully biodegradable plastic. Her trial-and-error research at her home base of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico now makes it possible to convert the ubiquitous nopales cactus into plastics that take only one month to biodegrade in soil and one week to do so in water. Pascoe Ortiz found a way to combine the highly viscous liquid inside a prickly pear with glycerin, proteins, and dyes and dry this mass over hot metal plates to form a plastic-like substance.
The meaning and magnitude of this discovery is hard to overemphasize, if it can be scaled and commercialized. It's a potentially massive contribution to efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and a highly practical solution to the vexing, complex problems presented by single-use plastics.
Now more than ever, it's important that those of us from the U.S. see beyond ourselves and understand the quality of science being undertaken all over the world, including by our fellow North Americans across the border.
Enter Sandra Pascoe Ortiz, a chemical engineer and biotechnologist at the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac who has discovered how to turn cactus leaves into inexpensive (vs. costly corn-based plastics), non-toxic, and fully biodegradable plastic. Her trial-and-error research at her home base of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico now makes it possible to convert the ubiquitous nopales cactus into plastics that take only one month to biodegrade in soil and one week to do so in water. Pascoe Ortiz found a way to combine the highly viscous liquid inside a prickly pear with glycerin, proteins, and dyes and dry this mass over hot metal plates to form a plastic-like substance.
The meaning and magnitude of this discovery is hard to overemphasize, if it can be scaled and commercialized. It's a potentially massive contribution to efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and a highly practical solution to the vexing, complex problems presented by single-use plastics.
Now more than ever, it's important that those of us from the U.S. see beyond ourselves and understand the quality of science being undertaken all over the world, including by our fellow North Americans across the border.
Image courtesy of City Express.