Desertification

When I think of desertification I imagine the dusty sand dunes in the Sahara or Gobi desert where sustaining human life is daily struggle. And I'm not that far off...

Picture reused from this link

Did you know that Egypt used to have fertile land caused by the annual flooding of the Nile around the time of the ancient Egyptians? But in recent years, Egypt's food production is affected by desertification.

Desertification is a serious degradation of land resulting from a damaged ecosystem that can no longer sustain human development. Land that is in arid areas are most vulnerable. Associated as a man-made problem, desertification has been interlinked to poverty and hunger, and can can cause social, ethnic, and political strife.

Excessive grazing of livestock, poor farming techniques, and deforestation deplete the land's natural vegetation covering causing the soil to erode, become too salty (salinity), and to lose its fertility. To exacerbate the issue even more is climactic changes such as erratic rainfall and long droughts. Excessive and intense wild fires burn natural vegetation and degrade the land. In addition, there is a loss of biodiversity as well as the loss of capacity to sequester carbon emissions.

It hits the inhabitants the hardest in developing nations where many depend on the land for basic survival. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization desertification affects more than 1.2 billion people in over 100 countries. Desertification also threatens over 4 billion hectares of land - roughly a third of the Earth's land surface!!

The increased demand in food caused by an expanding population makes this an even more pressing problem - there are more mouths to feed using less arable land, putting stress on the land and increasing poverty and hunger. Before you brush desertification as a problem associated with developing countries, don't forget about the Dust Bowl in America. It's considered the worst man-made ecological disaster occurring in the 1930's. [On a side note - PBS is broadcasting a special encore of the film The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns airing on April 23 and 30, 2013 - click HERE for more info and to watch their trailer!!]

Credits: Arthur Rothstein; The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Prevention has been shown to be the best method of handling desertification for land that is still salvageable. On the other hand, Restoration is the key for land that has already been damaged. Restoration is not as easy as planting a bunch of trees, according to Menz, Dixon, and Hobbs, it involves assisting the recovery of a damaged or destroyed ecosystem. The cost of restoration multiplies when you include the cost of purchasing seeds, water and irrigation systems for large areas of land.

The three researchers from Australia outline the to-do's and not to-do's for large scale eco-restoration in the latest Science article. They propose a four point plan that identifies troubled regions and to showcase the social and economic benefits of a restored ecosystem for political incentive. They call for more research, as well as collecting and disseminating knowledge. Without more research, restoration can threaten ecosystems when they are improperly planned for. The authors mention China's Great Green Wall a Chinese afforestation program where native ecosystems have been compromised by planting non-native tree species in areas that naturally have no forest.

Anyway - here is an awesome video that is very informational about desertification by GoodPlanet


Much of the information about desertification was taken from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board, their assessment can be found here.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year folks! I can't believe how the years are just flying by now. The days are long but the years are short. Now that we've been settled in the city of Chicago for about 2 1/2 months I feel that I can return to my composting ways. My makeshift composter that I had made last year from a laundry hamper has been curing for the past few months in my in-law's backyard. As a novice composter, I didn't take into account of moving (again) or these cold wintry months where decomposition takes twice as long. The design of the compost was also poor because of its rectangular shape and open top, it was hard to stir the compost. I've just been browsing on the internet today and found a great blog called enviromom. Its written by two mom's who have taken on the challenge to greenify their lives and family. There was a short post and a video about the way their families compost, which was ingenious! One family uses the Earth Machine (which I am about to purchase) while the other family buries food scraps in their garden. I am loving their blog and their ideas! Here is their composting post.

Anyway, it's a new year and I wish everyone a happy and hopeful one! My new years resolution for this year is to 1) always have hope for the future and 2) work on building better and stronger relationships. What are yours?

PET depolymerization - a chemical recycling process!

Plastics are ubiquitous. They are in our clothes, coffee mugs, and car batteries just to name a few examples. As the world population continues to grow so does our consumption of plastics. Polyethylene terephthalate or PET, better known as recycling plastic #1 is one particular plastic we encounter daily. If you have ever consumed a soda from a plastic bottle, chances are this plastic bottle had a recycling #1 stamped on the bottom of it. Unfortunately, PET bottles don't get recycled the same way as cardboard or metal does. Meaning the soda bottle you tossed into the recycling bin doesn't get washed out and refilled and then restocked at your local grocery store or vending machine. Nope, they usually will get filtered out the waste stream and crushed, ground up and then reused into a product that doesn't require high purity PET plastic material.

But what if we could actually recycle PET plastic back to a form where it is highly pure? After many years of research, scientists at IBM and Stanford have found an organic catalyst that would do just that. Dubbed as a chemical recycling process or depolymerizing plastic, PET bottles are heated in ethylene glycol in the presence of an organocatalyst. The end result is the isolation of bis terephthalate (BHET) in high yield with minimum waste products. BHET can then be transformed back into PET plastic.

A Youtube video about this process can be viewed below:

What will this mean for the future of plastics? Maybe we will be able to recycle and reuse PET plastics rather than burying them our landfill.  Now that's pretty awesome.