It’s somewhat shocking that we need to devote an entire day to appreciating Earth and all it provides – namely, life.
As the scientific community gets set to march on Washington DC to call for scientific funding and demand social, economic, and climate justice for the planet, some of its members have been working year round inventing new products and innovating existing ones to make the world a little greener.
Some help humans, some help animals, some help bodies of water – all help the planet.
These are 5 innovative products that are saving planet Earth.
Ooho plastic-less water bottles
Thanks to Skipping Rocks Lab, plastic water bottles could be a thing of the past. The London-based tech startup has created Ooho, a water bottle with packaging made of seaweed.
More than $1 billion worth of plastic is wasted every year.
Not only is Ooho 100% edible and biodegradable, it’s cheaper to produce than plastic bottles.
The Ocean Cleanup
The world’s oceans are on pace to contain as much plastic as fish by 2050, largely due to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
While efforts at using manpower to removing the trash would take immeasurable amounts of time and money, the Ocean Cleanup wants to let the ocean do the work.
By placing an artificial coastline in the center of the garbage patch (that are passable by ocean life), currents push the trash to a central point where it can be collected.
The project has been in testing stages and is set to deploy in 2017.
Flow Hive
Bees are among the most important species on the planet for the work they do pollinating plants.
Which makes it more unfortunate that bees get crushed by traditional honey harvesting methods.
Flow Hive changes that. The innovative hive protects bees by allowing bee keepers to extract honey without killing any of the precious insects, and without getting stung – which makes the honey taste that much sweeter.
Toast Ale
When food waste ends up in a dump, the lack of oxygen during decomposition releases methane gas into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. In the sandwich-obsessed United Kingdom, excess bread is a huge contributor to the billions of dollars’ worth of wasted food every year.
Thankfully, there’s Toast Ale. The brewery collects leftover bread and uses it in the brewing process to create a beer that helps the environment by reducing food waste and its greenhouse gas contribution.
They then donate 100% of the profits to Feedback, a charity that works to end food waste. The last part isn’t an innovation, but it’s still awesome.
Tesla Solar Roof
Solar panels have been around for decades, but Tesla, one of the world’s premier electric car companies, just innovated the technology, not in performance, but aesthetics.
Introduced by co-founder and CEO Elon Musk last October, Tesla’s solar roof is made of durable tiles that allow sunlight to pass through to a solar cell. They perform the same function as a typical solar panel but look like modern roofing materials.
If cost-efficiency and helping the environment wasn’t cause enough to install solar panels, now they look good, too.