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This week:
- His grandfather hides his garden with laundry water. She tested it for science.
- Overview: Voices for the Wild
- What if we put solar panels on each roof in the world?
His grandfather hides his garden with laundry water. She tested it for science.
This winter there was Drought in the province of Pendjab in Indiawhere the grandfather of Tanvir Mundra lives.
One of his tips to save water is to pour water from his laundry, known as Gray Water, on his garden. It was a piece of advice that he shared with his granddaughter, who lives in Vancouver, during their regular facetime calls.
And it inspired a scientific project that recently won Mundra First prize in the Earth and Environment Sciences category of the Taiwan International Sciences Fair.
Mundra, now a student of the 10th year at St. John’s school in Vancouver, asked her grandfather if her laundry water had already injured the flowers, vegetables and herbs he had grown up. He said he had never thought about it much.
Mundra wondered if the trick to do this work was the detergent of her grandfather.
“My grandparents, they often tell me how we are always today that use so many artificial synthetic cleaning chemicals when there are natural alternatives,” she recalls.
For detergent to detergent, his grandfather uses soap nuts – the fruit of a tree called Sapindus MukorossiOriginally from parts of South and East Asia. They contain high levels of natural detergents called saponins. Eco-blogs and At least one environmental group recommends them as an ecological soap, and they were even launched as a detergent to laundry at the den of the CBC dragon.
Mundra decided to test the method of her grandfather to cultivate plants with laundry water.
The first challenge was to find soap nuts, which are not sold alongside other detergents in supermarkets.
Finally, Mundra found it in a small specialized store in Vancouver.
The soap nuts do not work in the dispenser of liquid or powder detergents, but Mundra put a handle in a net bag and added them to the dirty clothes of its washing machine.
“They work,” she said, leaving behind a subtle perfume that she described as being similar to “apple vinegar”. (Others have said that soap nuts generally work well compared to commercial detergents. However, they Do not leave your white clothes so shiny and can Dressing that comes into direct contact..)
The same bag of soap can be used up to five times, she said.
Mundra picked up gray water from her soap walnut linen and a linen load that used a regular detergent.
Then, it planted 30 spinach seeds and watered each with gray water with soap, ordinary laundry gray water or tap water.
Ordinary detergent water has slowed the growth of spinach plants – you may want to avoid using it to water your garden.
But plants cultivated with tap water and water for soap laundry have also developed well.
“There is no effect … in terms of plant height, length of the leaves, length of the root,” said Mundra.
But did that affect the taste of spinach?
Mundra said she was told that she couldn’t eat the spinach afterwards, in case “something is wrong”.
She is now doing more tests on more plants. She also tries to find a way to extract saponins from soap nuts to develop a liquid detergent “which can be integrated into Western culture” and help people to be more durable.
“If we can really start to reuse our own waste of domestic water, like dirty water of laundry, then we save and keep a lot of water.”
– Emily Chung
Old problems What hell? are here. The CBC News Climate is page here.
Discover our podcast and our radio program. In our last episode: This might not look like climate work, but mechanical insulators help make buildings more energy -efficient. We leave to meet a young woman who has trained in the trade thanks to a program set up by the Youth Climate Corps BC The group, which forms young people around British Columbia for a wide variety of good green jobs, hopes to develop across the country.
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Reader comments
Last week, Anand Ram wrote on a workshop in Toronto who Help people sorting their waste in the right bins to maximize recycling. For a cup of coffee, he recommended to sort the lid in “recycling”, putting the sleeve in “Paper” and the cup itself in the garbage. Zamani Ra, the event host later wrote to say that she had been alerted which was incorrect. “The city contacted me with an update of the blue bac that I was not aware when we did our workshop,” she said. Last July, Coffee cups are accepted for recycling in the city of Toronto. Many readers have also written to emphasize this. Thank you all!
Write us to whatonearth@cbc.ca. (And do not hesitate to send photos too!)
Overview: Voices for the Wild
Lisa Mintz is a Montreal librarian who turned to activism after having concerned about the development that trees and animals threatened in a large urban green space called the Escarpment of Saint-Jacques. In this portrait, by the artist Quebec Lisa Kimberly Glickman, Mintz is held among a scented sumac alongside a brown snake and a red fox, while the fireplace moves above the head. Mintz is now Executive Director of Urbanature, a group that aims to provide nature -based learning in urban and suburban areas.
The portrait is part of a series called Voice for wildfeaturing women among animals and in the habitats they fought to protect.
“I want to show that anyone can be an activist. You don’t have to bind to a tree or do research,” said Glickman. She tries to include people from various fields, such as the novelist Catherine Bush, the assistant leader of the Green Party Angela Davidson and the professor of the University of Dalhousie, Alana Westwood, as well as well -known activists Maude Barlow and autumn Peltier.
She hopes that the series will make people aware of the work of these women and “I hope, you know, encourage people to action”.
Glickman hopes to add several other women to the series. On its website, you can see more portraits and suggest that women include..
– Emily Chung
Hot and disturbed: provocative ideas on the web
What if we put solar panels on each roof in the world?
What if each roof on earth was covered with solar panels? A group of mainly Chinese scientists calculated that it could cool the planet up to 0.13 C by 2050. Zhixin Zhang and team published their modeling study in the nature of climate change earlier this month. Johanna Wagstaffe of CBC takes a closer look at how they studied and what the results mean.
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