1 . Textile (纺织品) waste is a growing problem for our environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported the US throws away more than 11 million tons of clothing every year. That is why some small businesses spotting the problem are beginning to recycle in ways they haven’t before.

Create Good Company is a clothing company that tries to produce sustainable (可持续的) clothing and repurpose older clothing into updated fashionable items. Maggie. Hendricks, the owner of Create Good Company, said, “If you can revamp what you find, why wouldn’t you do that instead of buying new things?   It’s a big issue not to create new waste. I would say we are 90%recycled materials.”

According to the EPA, the average consumer (消费者) throws away 81.5 pounds of clothes every year. “Anywhere between 10%-17%of the waste that’s going into landfills (废弃物填埋场) is made up of things like textiles and clothing,” said Danny Katz with the CoPIRG Foundation.” A lot of the clothing that we’re producing doesn’t even get worn, so it’s going right to the landfill or even being burned and contributing to pollution that way. It’s really worrying.”

This is why businesses like Create Good Company exist—to use outdated clothing and turn it into dresses or jackets.

“There’s just so much waste and so many big companies that might not think about it,” Hendricks said. “Just standing with other like-minded people who are interested in sustainability is important.”

Another important element Hendricks has focused on is creating these items and selling them at an affordable price.

“Sustainability sometimes is green washed in companies and they make things more expensive,” Hendricks said. “That’s not how we become a sustainable world. I think making products affordable is important to me. I want to buy things that are better for the environment without throwing my pocketbook in the fire.”

2 . Plastic is everywhere in our modern world. Its toughness makes it an extremely useful material from household items to vehicle parts, but that same toughness makes it hard to break down for recycling or disposal (处理). However, Japanese scientists at the University of Tokyo have developed a new plastic material that can be broken down more easily and can self-heal and remember past shapes.

Based on a kind of plastic called an epoxy resin vitrimer, which is brittle (脆性的), the new plastic has a huge range of advantages. Once scratched (刮划) with a knife, it can completely patch itself up after being heated to 150 ℃ for just 60 seconds. When shaped into the shape of a crane, then flattened, it can fold itself back into the crane shape by being heated up. It does all of this much faster than others of its type.

The new plastic can also break down easier. Even if it’s thrown into the environment, it still has less of a problem than other kinds of plastic, which the team demonstrated by placing it in seawater for 30 days. It biodegraded (生物降解) by 25% and released something that is eatable for ocean life.

The new plastic is more resistant to breaking. It can also repair itself, and can recover its original memorized shape. It even biodegrades safely in a ocean environment, according to Shota Ando, a researcher of the study.

The material can be used in a variety of applications. “Building materials for roads and bridges are often composed of epoxy resins mixed with compounds (化合物) such as concrete and carbon,” said Ando. “By using the new plastic, these would be easier to maintain as they would be stronger and healable using heat. Unlike conventional epoxy resins, this new material is hard but flexible, so it could also be expected to strongly bond materials of different hardness and stretch.”

3 . Small-scale fisheries supply many people with food. Almost all of those in this trade rely on gillnets (刺网) to trap fish. But gillnets trap other things, for example, endangered animals such as turtles; dangerous ones, such as Humboldt squid; and ones that are both endangered and dangerous, such as several types of sharks. Everyone involved would be better off if this did not happen.

Building on studies done both by himself and by others, to try to avoid the accidental netting of turtles, Jesse Senko, a marine-conservation biologist at Arizona State University, has been investigating the idea of fitting LEDs to nets to avoid netting other unwanted by-catch (误捕的鱼) without discouraging target animals. And, as he reports in Current Biology, it seems to work.

Dr. Senko and his team set up an experiment in the Gulf of Ulloa, in Mexico, in which they cooperated with local fishermen to employ over 10,000 meters of nets that had had nets battery-powered waterproof green LEDs fixed onto them every ten meters. Half of these lights were lit. The other half were left unlit, as controls. Each lit net was paired with an unlit one, and the two were used alongside one another at major fishing locations. The fishers’ target fish were large groupers (石斑鱼). Dr. Senko was interested both in what else got caught and whether the lights decreased catches of the target species.

On the latter point, to his relief, they did not. On the former, the lit net s caught 95% fewer kilograms of shark-related species. In particular, several threatened species turned up less often in the lit than the unlit nets.

The advantage from the point of view of fishermen was that they needed to spend a lot less time clearing these dangerous by-catches from their nets. And, crucially, the LEDs concerned are cheap, hard-wearing, and easy to fix. There are also plans to make them solar powered, for easy recharging. Here, then, is an environmental-protection idea from which everyone wins.

5 . Plastic is everywhere in our environment, especially in the ocean. Actually, a large amount of plastic waste is floating around the world’s oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.

Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin. No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, an engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.

Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine (海洋的) animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplastics. We are closely related to oceans so the consequences of throwing plastic away may return to affect us some day.

“This isn’t a problem where we don’t know what the solution is,” says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist, “We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle.” It’s a matter of building the necessary systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.

Living Green