Biology 10H                                                                                                   Taylor Sears

Current Event #2                                                                                          May 14, 2014

"Promising Solution to Plastic Pollution." N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2014.

            Recently researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering introduced a new bioplastic that comes from shrimp shells. The material that is so useful is the chitosan, which is a form of chitin. Chitin is the second-most plentiful organic material on Earth. The researchers use the chitosan to make shrilk, which is a compostable material. This article discusses the why this new shrilk bioplastic is better than the bioplastic made from renewable cellulose. One reason being the shrilk breaks down a lot fast. It only takes a couple of weeks whereas the current bioplastics don’t even fully degrade in the environment. Also, shrilk helps the environment by releasing nutrients that support plant growth.

            This article is important because there is a lot of pollution today and we need to find materials that will help the environment and not hurt it. Today, researchers have discovered that 34 million tons of plastic waste is generated each year and of that 34 million tons less than 7% is recovered for recycling. All the plastic that is not being recycled and being buried in landfills are threatening the marine life in all oceans around the world. Sooner or later species will become extinct because all the plastic is killing them. It is our job to find the least harmful plastic to use to make it safe for marine life. The Wyss Institute has done that. They discovered a bioplastic that will not harm the earth, but help it.

            Overall, I really liked this article and the topic of the article. I love animals and would not want to see any of them being harmed from things humans can prevent. I liked how the article used good statistics as facts to illustrate how badly plastics are affecting our environment. This article was not extremely challenging to read, but it wasn’t easy. There were a couple of words I had to look to double check what they were like, chitin and chitosan. Other then those words I thought they did a great job describing the new bioplastic. I particularly liked how they compared the new one to the old one. By doing this it shows how much better the new bioplastic is then the old bioplastic.