What's more good, healthy and nutritious fish in the kitchen? Rich in saturated fatty acids and Omega 3, it is a recurring ingredient in every long-lived population recipe. Fish (and in the kitchen also means molluscs and crustaceans) is also among the basic ingredients of Mediterranean diet – that thanks to which, it seems, we are still the healthiest country in the world. Represents one of the largest protein sources, plus the advantage of greater digestibility and low cholesterol concentration. It's a pity that the sea is literally invaded by mountains of plastic and when the nets are lowered in certain places more plastic than marine life is collected. A couple of years ago science has identified a bacterium that feeds precisely on PET, which constitutes a good portion of the plastic that has swept our seas. For now, however, this is not enough to save the planet …
But exactly how much plastic is there in the ocean? Last year, on the occasion of World Oceans Day (June 8), the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, a leading institution in supporting an eco-sustainable economy, released updated and validated data from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP): every year 300 million are produced in the world tons of plastic waste e 8 million end up in the sea(9.5 According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature). The plastic pieces form immense islands in the ocean, in particular the Pacific Plastic Island which, according to a study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature a year ago, is much more immense than previously estimated: the plastic now covers a tenth of the Pacific Ocean area. According to UNEP, if you do not run for cover by 2050 the plastic mass in the oceans will exceed that of fish by weight of all the seas.
Guilt of the food industry, especially the packaging of food and drink, especially those single use that now rages in the large distribution (and then also the clothing sector). The biggest plastic pieces they strangle the animals, like seals, or turtles, while the smaller fragments are famous 'Microplastics' – come ingested by fish, and arrive at human beings through food chain. Tuna, swordfish, crustaceans, molluscs – and in particular the mussels – is even in sea salt. The environmental organization Greenpeace has recently analyzed 39 samples of table salt coming from various countries: in 36 of them there were microplastics, or plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters. Other studies have led to the same conclusions. If the consequences of microplastics for human health whose tissues absorb microplastics are still not clear, one thing is certain: Microplastics are toxic.
Attention: the microplastics in our food do not come only from the sea (where, moreover, between the worst polluters stand out surprisingly the washing machines – thanks to the fragments of synthetic fabrics released into their washing waters – e the tires – thanks to the rubber particles due to wear). Microplastics are in great abundance in the water we drink, and end up in our dishes even in the form of powders that we eat together with food (plastic micro-fragments coming from furniture, for example). There spread of microplastics in the food chain is out of control, even the mosquitoes contribute to it. Result: a recent study by the University of Medicine in Vienna has documented what media there is 20 microplastic fragments every ten grams of human feces …
The good news, however, is that something important is moving and, in addition to a continuous call for a more eco-friendly attitude on the part of the new generations, there are people engaged in the search for new materials, for plastics that are not plastic, in short, maybe even edible.
"It is a generation of plastics derived from fermentation processes, which they no longer come from oil and if they are accidentally dispersed at sea, they can be biodegraded – he explains the expert Alessandro Carfagnini, chemist and developer of bioplastics. "It is the family of PHA-based bioplastics, a polymer that has the quality to come from from renewable sources and one of the few polymers that comes Removed from microorganisms in the water in the sea: this is part of the biological cycle and therefore does not produce plastic islands. Among other things, they are produced with even low-tech systems, therefore also sustainable for developing countries ”.
In past years there have been projects innovative that more than real technologies were the fate of "Artist proofs". Like the material designed by the student Ari Jònsson, based on water and agar agar, to point towards an ecological and edible bottle: a beautiful thing, but inapplicable because, assuming that the bottle does not melt, it still releases the taste of what it is made of, in this case an alga. Or the rings to keep the beers together using one edible plastic for animals produced by a small beer company in Florida, the Saltwater Brewery, (often these objects end up in the sea, causing problems both for pollution and for turtles and fish that remain trapped there).
Now however we are coming to delle true solutions: "Yes, it is a real solution: perhaps the bioplastic water bottle is still difficult to produce (there are various barriers, including that of flavor) – Carfagnini continues – but many other things you can do, for example i coffee cups rather than all those trays with which foods are packaged – and they are also good also for the microwave".
There are some very important and solid ongoing projects, like the European RES URBIS (coordinated, among other things, by an Italian) of convert food waste into "good" plastic: everything that gets thrown into wet bin will become a bioplastic of the future. And we don't think only of domestic waste, but all restaurants, parks, in short, many types of bio-waste transformed into new bio-materials.
"Sustainability is a human need, humanistic, which requires a technical-scientific (and technical-regulatory) response and solutions – concludes Alessandro Carfagnini – Fortunately we are getting there: do today choices that make us feel good in the present without compromising the well-being of the future generations is really possible".
Emanuela Di Pasqua
13 July 2016
updated by Carola Traverso Saibante
March 2019
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