Posts

Three Things You Need to Know About Bioproducts

Image
Three Things You Need to Know About Bioproducts Everything from the makeup that you put on your face to the plastic fork that you ate with at your picnic can be made from bioplastics. Bioproducts are all around in stores, our home, and workplaces. These products are helping our environment in many ways. During this blog I would like to share how using bioproducts is going to help our environment, through harvesting from sugar crops, switching to bioplastic bags, and where you can find these products.  What is a biobased product? This is any product that is derived from starch, sugar, wood, cellulose, lignin, proteins. One common crop that a lot of people are familiar with is sugar. Crops like sugar are used to make bioproducts and no piece goes to waste. You heard that right! Every single part of a sugar crop is used for some type of purpose, making it very good for our environment. When extracting materials from sugar beets and sugarcane, they are brought to the mill for sugar extract
Post a Comment
Read more

Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals

Image
Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals Is wood good? Wood is all around us from forests all the way to the chair you sit in to eat dinner. Wood is a necessary product that we as consumers have relied on for years. Believe it or not there is a lot more that goes into the production of wood and paper products. We will be diving deeper into the process of bringing wood from a forest to lumber, building with wood, and the overall question if wood is good. By the end of this blog, I hope that you can confidently tell someone if wood is good.  For a lot of people, we think that wood gets cut down from a forest and is chopped up into perfect pieces and brought straight to the store; but this isn’t the case. A lot of thought is put into the process of trees being cut down. Selection harvests are very popular for picking specific tree groups to cut down based on size, species, ect. This ensures that trees are being harvested every 40-50 years. Clear-cutting is also popular. This involv
Post a Comment
Read more

All feedstocks, biorenewables included, have to be sourced from somewhere

Image
All Feedstocks, Biorenewables Included, Have to be Sourced from Somewhere As our population continues to grow so does the supply and demand of crops. Corn and soybean are two crops in high demand due to being used in a lot of everyday products. In this blog we are going to dive deeper into the differences between natural and plantation forests, the resources that are being implemented to protect forests, and what we can expect for the future.  Natural forests are found all around us and that's because they take up 90% of the forests in the United States. Natural forests do not use fertilizers, pesticides, or genetically modified species. While natural forests are good for the environment they don’t produce as much wood yield as Plantations. Plantations are becoming more popular as the population continues to grow. Plantations are made to maximize production of wood in the United States. Plantations use fertilizer, and genetically modified soil to produce wood and crops 10 times fas
Post a Comment
Read more

Consumption, resources, and the environment: What you need to know

Image
Consumption, resources, and the environment: What you need to know As a Gen-Z, I was always told to take shorter showers, use reusable water bottles, and don't use plastic bags. Growing up, I was told that using biorenewable resources is what is going to save our planet, but is it? As humans, we have a direct and indirect impact on our environment, and the choices we make affect our carbon footprint. We are going to highlight some of the impacts that the production, consumption, and distribution of products and resources have on our environment.  Moving through our day-to-day lives we have many indirect and direct impacts on our carbon footprint through what we do. Transportation, consumption, household energy, and food all have a direct impact on our environment. When we drive a car it releases carbon dioxide. Purchasing processed foods has a higher emission than fresh foods like fruits and vegetables due to the production and transportation of the product (energy education). Whil
Post a Comment
Read more