One of the best movies (series) I’ve seen lately is an animation called Love, Death + Robots. One of the opening episodes of the series shows robots taking a trip to earth years after the perish of human civilization. They mention that one of the reasons humans were not able to survive is because humanity could not take care of our own planet.
With the way things are going right now, that episode might just be a forecast of what the future might actually be. We’re slowly killing our land, and poisoning our air and ocean with our industrial activities, and even from products of machines we carry out day to day activities like cars.
In the last decade, it’s relieving to see that the need to sustain and protect earth is gaining more traction, and alternative environmentally friendly methods to do things have started rolling out. These are what I’m going to be talking about in this post.
Electric cars
Cars are one of the most widely used machines today. They also have been one of the major sources of air pollution, especially in population dense areas such as cities because of how much fumes they emit.
Recognizing the need to reduce this pollution, electric cars have been evolved as alternatives to fuel-based ones that emit Nitrous Gases from combustion to remedy this concern.
Although, there’s been arguments about how electric cars do not completely solve the problem because even electric cars contribute to air pollution via sources like tyre wear and others. Me, I think that argument is baseless, because not only do fuel-based cars have this same fault, but their exhaust fumes cause the damage on several folds more.
Bioremediation alternatives for handling waste
Again, cities are mostly where you find the largest emissions of industrial waste because of actions of production companies and the likes. The products from industries vary depending on the type of industry (the work they do). Plastics, oil, even expired foods are a few of some of the things industries discard. And where do they discard them, you ask? Well, the ocean of course.
But there are better ways to dispose of waste, especially in quantities as large as industrial waste. Which is where Bioremediation comes in. But there’s a small hitch. The disposed waste should be biodegradable. Lol let me talk a little bit about Biochemistry here.
On the basis of whether substances can be acted on and broken down by microorganisms, we can classify them broadly into Biodegradable and non-biodegradable substances. Some of the waste produced by these industries are biodegradable and so can be broken down by microorganisms in a controlled way. For instance, instead of a burger company dumping loads of burgers into trash cans or emptying into the ocean, they can add enzymes that feed on carbohydrates to the burger to be disposed for them to completely digest and utilise the burger’s carbs. This is controlled disposable because this is handled on a large scale in labs. If the burger company has use for them, they could further use the enzymes for something else, or sell them to another company as an alternative source of revenue.
Liquid Trees
I think it was somewhere last year I saw a video about a vase of green-looking water on the side of the road in some city, and the claim was that the vase was equivalent to several trees and was purifying the air in the city by the same mechanism trees do.
I didn’t understand how some liquid in a vase could do that at first, so I did a little digging into it. Turns out, the green looking vas was “a liquid tree” invented by scientists in Serbia cultured microalgae in over 600 litres of water. You can read about it here.
The idea is that cities mostly being densely populated lack spaces for trees to be planted. So these vases are there as convenient and small-sized trees for improving air quality.
These are just some of the earth-friendly innovations out there. For some of these, it might take a while before it gets to certain parts of the world. Before then, even the regular planting of normal trees, practising proper waste disposal, and pushing for recycling or upcycling instead of disposal will go a long way.
All unsourced images here are from pexels.com
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