1 Week, 7 Stories - Newsletter #44

Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.

This summer in Calgary has been one of water restrictions and repairs to a crumbling water infrastructure. The result has been significant disruption to businesses in the areas where the work is being done. Municipal construction has hurt not just Calgary business, but businesses across the country.

A major water main break in northwest Calgary got the summer off to a rocky start. There were water restrictions, and the repairs meant road closures disrupting businesses in the area. Customers were deterred by the detours and reduced parking, commuters were frustrated, and many people assumed businesses were closed. One area found both its water and business slow to a trickle.? Rinse and repeat when businesses where affected again in late August. Meanwhile in southwest Calgary, road construction and redesign were causing chaos as well. The owner of a burger joint called it a “nightmare” and said that foot traffic to the restaurant had become non-existent. The work has already led to one business closing and the construction completion date has been pushed back more than once. While a one-time $5,000 grant from the city was welcomed by area businesses, it may not be enough.

Calgary is just one municipality where the bottom line of businesses is being hurt by what a Toronto Sun editorial refers to as a massive public infrastructure deficit. Statistics Canada says it would cost $264.7 billion to replace crumbling infrastructure across the country. With that repair and replace work comes major headaches. In August, a report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business found that 68% of small businesses in Canada had experienced disruptions due to local construction projects in the past five years. The average loss in revenue was 22% and there were increased costs for cleaning and repairs. Construction related disruptions lasted an average of 508 days which meant many small business owners had to use their own savings to stay afloat.

In Montreal, major road repairs started in July and are expected to continue to 2025 and already businesses are hurting. Over in British Columbia, about 61% of the businesses that responded to the CFIB survey said “traffic, dust, debris and noise” were the main challenges and that staff and customers had problems finding parking because of construction. In May the Gastown Improvement Society in Vancouver said that its members were losing upwards of $500,000 a week after 10 weeks of construction. In Charlottetown, PEI renovations and new construction around the Confederation Centre is scheduled to begin in October and will take 20 months to complete. Business owners have expressed concern, but the CEO of the Centre says it is “a short-term inconvenience for a very significant gain”.

Those significant gains come with long term pain that may not be enough to justify what small businesses are going through.?

When plastic first appeared on the commercial scene around 1907 no one imagined where the new synthetic material would take the world.

Annie Leonard, the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, said “There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.”

In the case of plastics, that is probably understating the problem because plastics breakdown into small particles less than 5 mm (0.20 in) long and those bits migrate everywhere in the environment and in your body. ?

Those nano bits are certainly not visible when peering into your glass of water but researchers at the University of British Columbia have developed a portable and low-cost device that can measure particles from 50 nanometres to 10 microns in size. The results of their work were published in ACS Sensors, but you will need a subscription to get past the abstract. An ordinary litre of bottled water you purchase in your local convenience store has nearly a quarter of a million of those microplastic particles.? The new device does not help you strain them out, but it is important in helping us better understand exactly what is going on and find alternatives.

There are some alternatives already, though none of them are particularly satisfactory and microplastics are so ubiquitous that they are not going to disappear. A report in the Washington Post says that boiling and filtering water can remove up to 90% of particles. There are some what-ifs such as the concentration of particles and the initial chemical make-up of the water, but it does at least offer an at-home start.

You could switch to glass bottles though if the water already contains microplastics, you have not solved anything. Believe it or not, glass bottles have a greater environmental footprint than plastic, though they also have a higher chance of being recycled by consumers.?

Another option that has appeared on the scene thanks to scientists in Germany, are fungi that will break down synthetic plastics.? The fungi are more effective at gobbling up polyurethane than the polyethylene used in plastic bags, but it is a step forward. The researchers also believe that the fungi evolved a taste for plastic in response to the increased presence of plastic in their environment.? A similar evolution in bacteria was found in a landfill site by Japanese scientists but like the fungi there is a lot more work to be done.

There are also bioplastics made from agricultural, cellulose, or potato and corn starch waste. Depending on how they are made, some are biodegradable or compostable, others not so much so it is important to read the label. Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society and is one of Canada’s leading science communicators. In an article and video this week from the Montreal Gazette, he covers the benefits and problems with the use of bioplastics.

We are the only species on the planet which produces waste that the natural world cannot dispose of so the least we can do is solve a problem of our own creation. ?

Say it ain’t so!

?On Tuesday Tupperware filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States.? It was nothing short of a major development in food storage when it hit the market in the US in 1946 and into Canada in 1948. The company’s marketing strategy also had an impact on how household goods were sold.

Those plastics in the previous story which are causing so many problems today were a big deal in the last century when Earl Tupper was working at a plastics factory in Massachusetts. He was an avid tinkerer and was using polyethylene in his own home to make plastic containers for cigarettes and soap when he came up with the first piece of Tupperware. The country was still recovering from the Depression when he started selling his ‘Wonderbowl’ which offered a better way to save food leftovers and store food to reduce spoilage, so it caught on quickly. ?

His refined plastic and the new containers revolutionized food storage, but the idea of holding home Tupperware Parties to sell the product was not his idea. That is credited to Brownie Wise who was so successful in the early days of Tupperware that Mr. Tupper made it the cornerstone of his company’s marketing plan. At its peak there was a Tupperware party being held somewhere in the world every 1.5 seconds.

Why then is Tupperware now staring at the bottom?

Time and technology.

As plastic manufacturing became less costly, more and cheaper alternatives to Tupperware hit the market. Earl Tupper sold out and left the company in 1958 and with him went his imagination and engineering skills and by the late 1980s many of his patents had run out. The containers are made of polypropylene and low-density polyethylene containing bisphenol A (BPA) which has come under scrutiny as a health hazard, and many customers turned to more environmentally friendly products. For a long time, the company stuck to its face-to-face marketing model, but an online digital world took over leaving Tupperware on the sidelines. (My view is that a smart digital/Instagram/TikTok strategy combined with the Tupperware parties run by its 300,000 independent salespeople would have been a killer tactic).

During CVOID there was a brief blip in Tupperware sales as people were cooking more at home and paying more attention to safe food storage, but it didn’t last.

With $700 million in corporate debt, we may not hear the snap of the airtight seal lid on a Wonderbowl container for much longer.??

Here we go again.

The rise of superbugs. These are bacteria, viruses, parasites, or fungi that are resistant to our current batch of medicines we rely on to stop them from causing disease. These superbugs are becoming more prevalent over time by evolving resistance to our drug regimes. It is a natural process that these organisms have been perfecting for much longer than we have been developing drugs. So good are they at their job that a study published in The Lancet this week says that 1.9 million people will die every year by 2050 from diseases caused by antimicrobial resistant organisms.?

The problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been known for some time, but its magnitude was not flagged until 2014 when the World Health Organization published its first AMR global surveillance report.?? Apart from the ability of disease-causing organisms to adapt and mutate, one of the causes behind the growth in AMR is the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in human and animal medicine. When a bacteria, virus, or parasite is exposed to a drug it triggers a response, so the more drugs, the more (and more successful) mutations.

The latest example in Canada are gonococcal infections which are resistant to the two main antimicrobials used to treat the infections. The most recent World Health Organization list of resistant organisms covers 24 pathogens including more strains of HIV and MRSA which are not responding to existing treatments.

The challenge to developing new drugs is in part, a matter of economics. Pharmaceutical companies need to invest huge amounts of money into research and development with no guarantee of success or of ongoing income when they do put a drug onto the market. Later this month the United Nations is holding a high-level meeting on AMR to find ways to deal with the barriers to bringing new replacement drugs to market and to improve treatment of existing resistant diseases.?

No matter what new or improved drugs are available we need to use them more wisely, so we do not create a new wave of mutations and start the cycle all over again.

This week during a press conference in Los Angeles, Donald Trump promised “more water that you ever saw” by diverting Canadian rivers to bring it to the United States. He said we “essentially have a very large faucet”. There are some immediate environmental, factual, and political problems with everything he said, but it did bring back some memories from my university days.? Even back then we knew that our watersupply would eventually become a problem and one of the ideas that had been proposed was the North American Water and Power Alliance or NAWAPA.

It was a BIG idea. To borrow some Trumpisms, the biggest idea you have ever seen that would move trillions and trillions and trillions of gallons (we were not metric then) of water.

Boiled down to a one-liner, the plan was to flood the Rocky Mountain trench.

In September of 1965 the Flathead Courier said that despite its $100 billion cost (those are 1965 USDs) the “skids are being well greased” and that it was the type of plan needed to get water to areas demanding it. Those areas were mostly in the United States and that same month Senator Frank Moss (D-Utah) introduced a resolution in Congress for an economic and engineering study of the proposal.

Senator Moss was chair of a special senate subcommittee in 1964 when a fully developed plan was presented by the Ralph M. Parsons Company. During that university course we were able to see an overview of the plan and you can see it online as well.? The numbers were staggering. BuzzFeed looked back at it in 2015 as part of a broader article on the water crisis:

• 860 million cubic yards of tunneling.
• 30 million tons of steel.
• 369 dams, canals, pipelines, tunnels, and pumping stations
• 30 years to complete.
• The creation of a 500-mile-long and 10-mile-wide reservoir.

That same article from the Flathead Courier quoted George Moore, president of the First National Bank of New York who said the “NAWAPA project was essential if our economic growth and standard of living is to be sustained” and that the question was not whether it would be undertaken, but how it would be completed.

Canadians did not see it quite the same way and a Vancouver Sun headline called it “A Threat to Our Sovereignty” and went on to make other observations such as, “Prince George – gone for ever beneath the waves like another Atlantis”.

The whole idea eventually died because of the environmental devastation, cost, destruction of whole towns, and as Canada was never onboard with the idea, it could not have been pushed through by the other side of the border alone.

Or maybe the idea is only on extended life support. NAWAPA had a revival of sorts in the 80s led by Lyndon LaRouche, another name you may have forgotten. He was a political activist who made a swing from far left to far right and promoted conspiracy theories before it was a fashionable part of modern political discourse. He was convicted of numerous fraud related activities and served prison time. After his death in 2019 the LaRouche Movement kept his ideology alive and as late as 2010 tried to revive the goals of NAWAPA.?

As for Donald Trump eyeing our big, beautiful rivers, and finding ways to make sure that water is not wasted by allowing it to flow into the ocean, that too was an underlying principle of NAWAPA. The New York Times concluded an editorial on September 12, 1965, saying Canada needs to address its balance-of-payments deficit and “by selling water which is going into the ocean, they might solve a lot of problems”.

I have not written about stem cells in a while and when an article by Professor Paul Knoepfler came to my attention this week, I thought it was about time I re-visited the wild west of stem cells.

According to the Mayo Clinic, stem cells are special because they can self-renew (copy themselves) and most importantly, they can become other cells that do different things. Because of these unique properties stem cells can be used to treat diseases such as blood cancers and leukemia. The biology is not easy to get right so there are a limited number of approved stem cells treatments in the United States and Canada.

Given the potential of stem cells and the unfortunate fact that people with otherwise incurable conditions may be open to suggestion, unapproved stem cell therapies abound. For instance, the Arthritis? Society of Canada points out on its website that there are no stem cell transplants available for osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal diseases, yet there are for-profit clinics offering exactly that hope. The American Lung Association and many other organizations have had to issue similar warnings.

Also offering hope are stem cell supplements as outlined in Professor Knoepfler’s article. Amazon is loaded with products offering everything from “digestive happiness” to “improved cognition”.? Most recently these supplements have been promoted as a path to beating long COVID. In April the US Food and Drug Administration posted an advisory saying that none of these products have been approved for the treatment of COVID, and a host of other disease and conditions.

Stem cell therapy is one of the more promising new medical treatment available in the 21st century, but as University of Alberta professor and researcher Tim Caulfield has been pointing out for years, it is getting harder to distinguish between good and bad products and treatments.

?A new wave of supplements has only made the problem worse.

Many of you are reading this newsletter while enjoying a coffee.

Hang on to that fresh java because the future of your morning jolt may include one that has never been anywhere near a coffee bean. Atomo launched its beanless coffee in 2019 and says it is now sold in more than 70 coffee shops in the United States. Forbes does not exactly paint an appealing picture of the new brew saying it is made of superfoods, date seeds, sunflower seeds, lemon, date pits, and caffeine leftover from decaffeinated green tea. However a BBC tech reporter tried it this week and said “it tasted close enough to good coffee for me”, and though she would not be switching completely she was willing to try their brew at home product. Grist also tried out an Atomo latte in April and it passed muster.

Atomo is not alone in the field. In 2021 TechCrunch featured a coffee start-up called Compound Foods which had secured $5.3 million (USD) in seed funding, but judging by its website, it has not made much progress. Northern Wonder is a Dutch company that is surviving the brave new world of coffee with a product made from lupin beans, chickpeas, and chicory while still offering a caffeine kick.

These start-ups are not making beanless coffee as a pet science project but are offering an alternative to beans which do not come from de-forested areas and are not susceptible to weather extremes which have made coffee prices swing wildly over the last few years. Whether the big players in the coffee sector will stand by and watch will be interesting. The new start-ups are not yet a threat and in some cases they are collaborating with leading coffee companies according to JustDrinks.

If you are going to stick to your favourite Arabica or Robusta however there was good news for you in a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Your cup of Joe may have a protective effect against certain diseases such as type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and strokes. (You cannot access the full paper, but the media release will explain the basics.)? ?The research was done using data from the UK Biobank and not from new clinical research, but if you are looking for an excuse to put on a fresh pot today, this will do just fine.

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

I have also started a Substack newsletter which will include 1 Week, 7 Stories and other new material over the weeks to come.