Climate Good News
Around the world people are taking the initiative to mitigate climate change.
Here are some good news briefs compiled by the Climate Issue group
of the LWV of Bellingham/Whatcom.
A Breakthrough to Solve Plastic Packaging
A new film that can be made from widely available food waste is as effective as conventional plastics at shielding food from moisture and oxygen, its inventors say.
The novel material was made by combining cellulose from wood pulp and chitin from crustacean shells or mushrooms, and builds on the team’s previous research to develop an alternative to petroleum-based plastic that can extend the shelf life of fresh produce.
In their 10 years of work so far, they have made progress, developing materials that have become successively stronger and less permeable. However, they’ve battled to overcome one significant hurdle, which is that, as humidity rises, the material they’ve invented becomes more permeable to both oxygen and water, threatening the contents within.
This time they tried a different approach, first of all adding a new ingredient, citric acid, to the mixture, and combining the three ingredients using a method called “cross-linking,” which bonds elements tightly to form a dense network. “Cross-linking has been shown to be effective in controlling moisture sensitivity of biopolymers at high humidity, generally by reducing swelling in the presence of water vapor,” they explain in their research.
The result of this three-part cellulose-chitin-citric acid matrix was a fine plastic sheet, suitable for covering food. Next, they needed to test out the resilience of this film-like material, by exposing it to varying degrees of humidity and heat.
Most strikingly, their experiments showed that at humidity levels of 80 percent — reminiscent of some tropical countries — the biobased film was even less permeable to oxygen than some mainstream plastic packaging like EVOH (ethylene-vinyl alcohol), commonly used to package fresh produce.
Also impressively, compared to polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, one of the most widely used plastics in food packaging, the permeability to water vapor in the bio-based plastic was only slightly higher. And, when contrasted with other bioplastic products like polylactic acid and cellulose acetate, the new material was at least two orders of magnitude more resistant to oxygen, the researchers say.
All this suggests a serious potential contender to conventional plastic packaging — and, if it relies on food waste streams, this new material could help tackle that mounting global problem, too.
What’s less clear from the study is how far it would go to tackle the problem of plastic pollution, given that the paper doesn’t explore how quickly this material biodegrades, and whether that can happen naturally, or if it would require more resource-intensive industrial composting processes. The researchers do hint that it solves this problem, saying, “We’re using materials that are already abundant in nature and degrade there to produce packaging that won’t pollute the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years.”
If that’s accurate, then alongside efforts to reduce the reliance on unnecessary single-use packaging in the first place, their invention could help shift the needle on plastic waste.
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Anthropocene Magazine, Nov. 28, 2025:
Meredith et. al. “Transforming Renewable Carbohydrate-Based Polymers into Oxygen and Moisture Barriers at Elevated Humidity.” ACS Applied Polymer Materials. 2025.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsapm.5c02909
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Mushrooms: The New Hero of the Ecosystem
When Mount Saint Helens erupted on the morning of May 18, 1980, the stratovolcano spewed a plume of debris high into the earth’s atmosphere and spread ash to at least 11 nearby states. The blast produced lahars — landslides of mud and ash — that barreled down the mountain, annihilating the landscape of evergreens and wildflowers in their wake.
But, despite the appearance of a mountain-side extinction event, life was already regenerating. Just 10 days after the eruption, the geomorphologist Fredrick Swanson surveyed one of the lahars with colleagues and noticed something intriguing. In the rubble, fine, filament-like threads had attached themselves to some of the smaller pebbles and stones cast out of the volcano’s center.
In an interview with Oregon State University in 2015. Swanson opined, “If the spores are heated significantly […] they will germinate and start sending mycelia through the soil.” What Swanson was witnessing was the phenomenon of “phoenicoid fungi,” aptly named in a nod to the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes.
Fungal organisms such as these are often the first responders to blast zones and wildfire burn areas where the decomposing landscape serves as a smorgasbord for their biological needs. The emerging field of mycoremediation, a fungi-centered branch of bioremediation, seeks to harness the role of fungi as nature’s ally in rehabilitating polluted environments. This includes land scorched by volcanic eruptions and forest fires, but also the likes of abandoned mines and hazardous landfills, and even regional highways where toxic road runoff enters our water systems.
Already there has been some beginnings of restoration using fungi in the latest fires that haunt our western states. “Fungi play the role of primary decomposers in many environments,” explains Brendan O’Brien, the executive director of CoRenewal, a nonprofit that specializes in the use of fungi in ecosystem restoration. “They are in the best position to degrade a lot of the persistent organic pollutants that we’ve been shipping off-site, into our air, into our oceans, into our natural systems, into our soil.” These included debris from human-made structures plus all the things inside them — batteries and electronics, cleaning supplies, plastics from Tupperware, toys, etc.
O’Brien also sees potential in fighting one of the most insidious issues of our contemporary moment: PFAs (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). “We hear a lot about how PFAs are forever chemicals and these are very, very, very stable carbon-based molecules in the environment. That’s why they’re so persistent,” he says. “If there’s anything out there able to degrade those compounds, it’s gonna be fungi.”
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Reasons to Be Cheerful, Oct. 2, 2025:
“Fungi Are Becoming Invaluable First Responders in Eco-Crises” by Kea Krause.
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/fungi-firstresponders-eco-crises-mycoremediation/
