The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Recycling entrepreneur stubs out cigarette garbage Posted: 28 Jan 2013 02:55 AM PST  TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky works in his office at the company's headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey, January 10, 2013. – AFP pic The 30-year-old who dropped out of Princeton University to start his innovative company TerraCycle in Trenton, New Jersey, says there's no such thing as trash, even when you're talking about the contents of ashtrays. In a programme started in May in Canada and now running from the United States to Spain, TerraCycle collects cigarette butts from volunteers and turns them into plastic, which can be used for anything, even ashtrays themselves. The discarded cigarettes, which litter countries around the world, are first broken up, with the paper and remaining tobacco composted. The filter, made of a plastic called cellulose acetate, is melted down and turned into an ingredient for making a wide range of industrial plastic products, such as pallets – the trays used to ship heavy goods. It seems that for once smoking benefits everyone. The tobacco industry, happy to get some decent publicity, pays TerraCycle. Volunteer collectors win points per butt, which can then be redeemed as contributions to charities. Sidewalks start looking cleaner. And TerraCycle, which sells recycled products to retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods, gets more business. TerraCycle has a similarly creative view on all manner of other refuse that has tended to be bracketed as impossible to recycle and is instead sent to the landfill. Juice sachets, plastic bottles, pens, coffee capsules, candy wrappers, toothbrushes and computer keyboards are all grist for TerraCycle's mill. Some items go to classic recycling, meaning they are used purely as material for a wholly new product. Others are upcycled, which means the shape of the piece of garbage is retained and incorporated into a new product. For example, candy wrappers, complete with their logos, are used to bind books, or are joined together to make backpacks. "The purpose of TerraCycle is to make things that are non recyclable recyclable," CEO Szaky said at the New Jersey headquarters. Soon they'll be doing chewing gum and dirty diapers, but Szaky said his "personal favourite" is used cigarettes. "It's the ash, the cigarette butt, it's the packaging, everything," he said. "After we launched it in May in Canada, it was so successful, we collected over a million cigarettes in a short period of time. We had all these great organisations collecting and the tobacco industry was so excited that they launched the programme in the US, in Spain." Expect to see the project spread across Europe and possibly Mexico in the next four months, Szaky said. It takes between 1,000 and 2,000 butts to make a plastic ashtray, and more than 200,000 to make a garden chair. Not that there's any shortage of supplies: 37 per cent of the world's litter is in cigarette butts, with up to a couple trillion thrown out yearly, Szaky said. About 35 million people across 22 countries take part in TerraCycle's collection programmes, which are financed by businesses, like Old Navy clothing in the United States and Colgate, which supports the toothbrush collection. "When we created the cigarette solution, we went to big companies and showed them plastic made from used cigarettes. They couldn't believe it and the companies got very engaged," Szaky said. "They not only finance the programme and pay for all the costs, they are out here, and are going to do very aggressive promotion." Szaky's company began when two people had the idea of harvesting worm excrement for fertiliser. Now it employs about 100 people. "I want to solve every kind of garbage that exists," he said. "My real goal would be that there is no such thing as garbage. Garbage doesn't exist in nature." – AFP/Relaxnews |
| Starchy genes made dog into man’s best friend Posted: 28 Jan 2013 12:36 AM PST
Comparing the genetic code of the domestic dog to that of its wolf cousins, a team of researchers from Sweden, Norway and the United States found several telling differences. "Our findings show that the digestive system of dogs have adapted to be able to live on a diet similar to ours," co-author Erik Axelsson from Uppsala University in Sweden said of the study published in the journal Nature. Previous research had suggested that dog domestication started when ancient wolves started scavenging on waste dumps near human settlements. The dog is estimated to have split from the wolf anything from 7,000 to 30,000 years ago. "A completely new piece to the puzzle is our finding of a more efficient starch digestion in dogs," Axelsson said by email. This could mean that only wolves who learnt to better digest the leftovers survived to become dog ancestors. "In addition, it suggests that the domestication process took off when agriculture developed." The team had compared the sequenced genomes of 12 wolves from different areas in the world with those of 60 dogs from 14 breeds, and found 36 genomic regions that had probably been modified through domestication. More than half of these regions were related to brain function, including central nervous system development, which may explain behavioural differences such as a dog's reduced aggression compared with the wolf. Three genes with a role in starch digestion also showed evidence of evolutionary "selection", the scientists said. The dog was most likely the first animal to be domesticated by Man – a key development in the development of modern human civilisation. The new study demonstrated "a striking case of parallel evolution" between humans and dogs, its authors wrote, with similar evolutionary changes allowing two species to cope with a diet ever richer in starch. "This emphasises how insights from dog domestication may benefit our understanding of human recent evolution and disease," said the study. – AFP/Relaxnews |
PARIS, Jan 28 – A genetic switch allowed dogs to adapt to a starch-rich diet and evolve from meat-munching wolves into man's leftover-loving best friend, scientists said recently.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Features To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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