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Choices matter - Patagonia owner gives company away to fight climate change &?Ecovado is a sustainable avocado alternative

Happy Monday, Earthfriend!?

Enjoy the recent news happening all around the world!?

Ecovado: A sustainable avocado alternative

Either you love them or hate them, but you cannot deny that avocados have become a staple in many people's diets. Avocados are healthy and a great source of fats, but they are not the most sustainable of foods. Avocado farming is highly water-intensive, with 60 gallons of water required to grow just ONE avocado. Due to international trade, these fruits have a high carbon footprint since demand is so high. But fret no more... Ecovado is here to save the day! Ecovado is an avocado alternative that looks, feels, and tastes just like an avocado!

Ecovado is made from broad beans, hazelnut, apple, and rapeseed oil to try and match the creamy texture and taste of the real thing. The coolest part is that it is wrapped in the wax that resembles avocado skin. So you actually feel like you are eating a real avocado! At the center of the Ecovado is a large nut in replacement of the seed. This product was specifically created for the British market as avocados are a bit harder to purchase there.?

The ecovado was created by Arina Shokouhi, a graduate of the London school Central Saint Martin who worked with a food scientist from the University of Nottingham’s Food Innovation Centre to come up with the recipe for Ecovado.

The waxy skin of the Ecovado is completely biodegradable and can even be up-cycled into a candle once the insides are eaten!?

If you want to learn more about this sustainable alternative to avocados, click?here!

Choices matter. Patagonia owner gives company away to fight climate change

BREAKING NEWS! Who said companies only care about profit-making? The owner of Patagonia has given away the company to a charitable trust. The former owner, Yvon Chouinard, said any profit not reinvested in running the business would go to fighting climate change.

?From now on 100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. Patagonia promptly changed their website to state "Earth is now our only shareholder" to show its commitment to doing as much as possible to mitigate the climate crisis.?

?Patagonia is currently worth around 3 billion USD, which makes this a huge win for the environment. Yvon has stated that profits to be donated to the climate cause will be around 100 million USD a year (depending on the health of the company). The Californian firm was already donating 1% of its annual sales to grassroots activists and committed to sustainability on many levels.

?So if you need some new activewear, which we all are from time to time, go for brands like Patagonia and know that you are also making a better choice for the earth! To read more about this initiative, click?here.

Supercharging plankton may be a way to fight climate change

Scientists believe they may be able to supercharge plankton to fight climate change. As complicated as this may sound, it really means that our oceans will absorb more carbon dioxide to help fight climate change!

But first of all, what does supercharging even mean? Phytoplankton is an organism that is responsible for producing 50 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere from carbon dioxide and sunlight. The idea is to seed the planet's oceans with more phytoplankton. Iron is a way to get phytoplankton to bloom, so scientists suggest we could slightly increase the existence of the metal by adding pieces of iron to iron-deficient parts of the oceans. The idea is that the more phytoplankton, the more carbon dioxide gets absorbed by our oceans.?

This is not a new concept as it has been discussed for decades, but only recently evaluated the potential of using our oceans to tackle climate change.?"We’ve got a big reservoir,"?states Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.?"It takes up a third of the greenhouse gasses already. The question that people are now asking more is what can we do to enhance that?"?He recommends that we get out there and do experiments to see if this is possible.

The exact costs and effort to put this all into a realistic project are still not clear. How much of the greenhouse effect this effort would be able to ameliorate is also still unclear. But Scientists believe the project has a lot of potential and is worth investigating further.

If you want to learn more about this, click here!

Biodegradable cling film made from discarded potato skins

?Keeping our food fresh and safe from contaminants usually means we have to use plastics. Sadly, we use a lot of plastic in our homes and most of the foods that we purchase at the grocery store are wrapped in some kind of plastic. An Australian biomaterials company has a solution for this problem - a nature-based cling film!

?Let me introduce to you the Great Wrap! It is a fully biodegradable cling film that is made out of discarded potato skins mixed with cooking oil and starch from the cassava root, also known as tapioca. If we compare a regular plastic cling film to Great Wrap, it is made out of natural materials and can naturally biodegrade in as little as 180 days. Which means it is not toxic or harmful to ingest, like the plastic alternative.?

Great Wrap is packaged in a container with a built-in slider-based cuter for easy use.?“The starch is extracted from the waste and then plasticized with a bio-based product,”?states Julia Kay, co-founder of Great Wrap.?“The thermoplastic starch (TPS) is then compounded with used cooking oil, cassava, and biopolymer additives to change the polymer structure so that it is suitable for stretch film,”?Kay added. The biopolymer additives make the film stretchy so that it mimics traditional cling film to be able to easily wrap around objects.

?The only issue with the Great Wrap is its inability to break down or degrade in marine environments (like oceans and lakes). In order to rectify this issue, the company is currently working with researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University to find out how it can convert potato waste into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which can break down in oceans and other aquatic environments in less than a year.

?If you want to learn more about this potato skin cling film, click?here!