Sustainability Community

Hello Community,

This morning, while enjoying my train journey to London, I found these two articles in the New Scientist. I thought they are interesting because they are talking about things that are familiar (plastics, trees) but with new focus and evidence. You can see these articles in the attachments or in our Library. Briefly:

Biodegradable plastic may actually be worse for plants. Scientists show that microplastics and bio-microplastics affect minerals such as nitrogen in the soil negatively. Nitrogen is essential for producing chlorophyll that allows plants to absorb energy from the sun. Reduced nitrogen affects plant growth. Bioplastics had an event greater negative effect  when flood was simulated possibly because the excess water encouraged pathogenic bacteria in the soil that affect plant growth.

Trees are even better. Microbes living in the bark of trees are absorbing methane from the air, adding to the climate benefits that we knew trees give us. Scientists at Birmingham University showed that while most trees emit small amounts of methane at soil level, further up the trunk, the exchange flips and trees start absorbing atmospheric methane. Methane-eating microbes known as methanotrophs are removing methane from the atmosphere at a large scale, across temperate, boreal and tropical environments. In total, trees could be absorbing between 24 million and 50 million tonnes of methane from the atmosphere each year, similar to the volume absorbed by the world's oils.