Thursday, March 29, 2012

Let’s Concentrate!

In an earlier blog post I mentioned wasteful ineffective packaging. Now I want to show you an example of improving product packaging.

All Small & Mighty 3x-concentrated laundry detergent released in 2006


Laundry Detergent!

What’s so amazing about this? Well the idea of a concentrated solution is that you need less of said solution to obtain the same “working” results. So we get to buy less detergent bottles, hence reducing how many are discarded and made in the first place.

Another neat thing is that concentrated liquid reduces water. Before the laundry detergent came watered down, this increased the water used in production as well as packaging and transportation.

Water is a very important resource, vital for life. We use freshwater water more than we think. We can categorize water use as direct and indirect. Direct would be drinking, cooking, swimming pools, ect., indirect would be food, electronic devices, manufacturing,  etc. (WaterFootprint)

So next time you go shopping for laundry detergent take the concentrated bottle, and remember to read how much you need. It will be far less than the un-concentrated version, adding more than you really need won’t make your clothes any cleaner the detergent will just wash away, which is wasteful. So read the labels, and add just enough because more won’t help the environment nor your pocket.  

Friday, March 23, 2012


If you ever visit Puerto Rico you would hear the sounds of my fauna. Among those there is a little slimy cold amphibian called coquí. It is onomatopoeically named, and coquí is commonly used to describe seventeen species of Eleutherodactylus. The little guy fill our ears with its song and children sing to them thinking the coquís respond. The song serves as a warning and a mating call. It is a warning to other males not to enter their territory and an open invitation to females.  




Globalization is not a solely a human phenomenon of communication, trade and travel. The world fauna and flora have been trans-located from endemic lands for centuries. The framboyan traveled from Madagascar, and who would ever imagine the island without the beautiful spectacle this tree provides. Breadfruit it also another plant species that traveled far, it was introduced from Polynesia to the Caribbean colonies.

Framboyan 


The seventeen species of coquís  live in diverse habitats through the island. Some live in the drier climate, while others in more humid areas and then some in the elevated mountains. Of the known species of coquís  in Puerto Rico three are already thought to be extinct coquí dorado, coquí de eneida, and coquí palmeado. The coquís  suffer ant the hands of human development, climate change, and invasive species.


There is not a clear path for each invasive species that settle in a new territory. But once they arrive they affect the natural ecosystem. The fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis arrived in Puerto Rico around 40 years ago; the estimate is given relating the appearance of the chytridiomycosis illness. This illness causes skin infection and the fungus proliferates in humid areas.


Coquís  are an important national symbol and entertainers during the night. They boast more than just esthetic importance. They are important predators of small insects, responsible of controlling mosquito’s population and other pests.


Climate change aggravates the situation. The winter season is characterized by lessen rainfall, years back rain was seen around every three days while now it can go nine straight days without raining. This is not an arbitrary occurrence rather the new average. One of the consequences is the migration of coquís  to more humid areas where they are exposed to the fungus and develop the skin infection that causes their premature death.


We can observe the travel patterns of other invasive species. The easiest ones to track are product of human pompous behavior. The selfish need to own exotic animals. The problem is that these species are abducted from their land and introduce into new habitats. Sometimes they cannot survive in the strange lands and sometimes they thrive due to the lack of predators.


Iguana iguana native of Central and South America was introduced to Puerto Rico as an exotic pet. It was introduce into the wild because people tired of them and they escaped captivity. It was considered harmless to animal species because iguanas are commonly herbivores. They are also thought to eat bird eggs, small insects, and coquís . There is some debate upon the matter. Some investigators suggest that they only do so if there is no edible plant option in their diet, if they are in captivity. Iguanas only have three know predators in Puerto Rico, and they have multiplied their numbers, becoming a threat to plant species they eat. If their number rise and the plants they feast on diminish they would become prone to eat small animals.

Juancho II eating a hibiscus flower. Captured in Fajardo, PR.


El coquí himself is an invasive species. It was introduce in Hawaii in the 90’ where it song its considered a cacophony, it threatens the Hawaiian insect population and competes for food with other native predators. The Hawaiian government has tried various techniques to eliminate coquís such as citric acid, concentrated caffeine, water vapor and traps. The problem is that the use of insecticides to control the species is harmful to the environment. 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Matryoshka Dolls

A box arrives; you open it to find a second box surrounded by air bags. After jumping on the air bags to startle your lab mates, you open the second box to find a small bottle nested by foam peanuts. But I lied it was not just one box. How many boxes do we receive daily in one particular laboratory?  I could not say. I do know that the size of a box could tell me how big an object can never be. Otherwise there is no correlation between the size of the object and that of the box.



Now reader, you might be thinking “Silly girl, of course chemicals require additional protection during shipment”. I will ease your mind, harmful chemicals come in a bottle, wrapped in thick absorbent towels, inside a thick plastic bag suspended in absorbent foam, inside an aluminum air tight cylinder (very difficult to open I should say) inside a box, surrounded either by packaging paper, air bags, foam or other. Oh and I forgot, sometimes you are lucky and get multiple cylinders. I’ll tell you now about space, say the chemical bottle is two inches tall, the cylinder might be more than a foot tall; can you guess the size of the box? The box will most likely be able to fit two of these cylinders. Since the box is too big it creates the need for additional snubbers. Then I wonder, wouldn’t it be nice if we had smaller boxes?

Small box, Danbo


However, we also order other stuff. Harmful chemicals are not the only ones being subjected to numerous entrapments. Last week we killed a pH electrode and needed to resuscitate it, I mean replace it. Once again, we can observe the Matryoshka effect, the electrode itself is small, but since it’s made out of glass and any scratch to the functioning surface would render it useless it must be protected. Clearly, it comes in a foam bed within a “small” box. When the electrode arrives you get a box that could easily fit about twelve of the small boxes, with room to spare because they don’t concur in length. What’s the purpose for that second box, when the electrode rests protected in its foam bed?

Ever since I started grad-school, shipments of supplies have perplexed me. Often I have joked that if I don’t become a research professor I would certainly go to work for any of these companies and manage the boxing and shipping department. I would save so much money from my innovative boxing ideas that I would become their hero. Because, think about it, boxes and snubbers are not the only resources being wasted. You have to ship them, and to ship them you have to put them in a transportation device, which can only hold so much space and weight for that matter. For each trip, an x amount of fuel is used and parts are damaged, which must be repaired or replaced.



The associated cost is not merely monetary, it also has an environmental impact.  Where did the cardboard box come from? If you sum all of the energy invested, what was emitted to the atmosphere, to the land, to water sources? And after all that process, when you have the box in your hands, will it be reused, recycle, thrown away? But we are missing one R, reduce. The amount of packaging is an excessive Matryoshka that must be reduced. So I should change my major, study industrial engineering, and eliminate unnecessary boxes. 

Mafalda. The last panel reads "In the space era everything is possible"