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Our Daily Planet is a daily morning email (M-F) to keep you informed of the stories shaping our environment. If these issues matter to you, we’d like to be the best ten minutes of your morning.
Today we’re celebrating Shreya Ramachandran, a 17-year-old Californian who came up with an efficient way to reuse grey water — the water first used for sinks, showers, and laundry machines — for irrigation. She was spurred to take action after living through a water crisis as a preteen. When her grandmother brought soap nuts, the dried brown shell of the soapberry, from their native India, Ramachandran started thinking about how they could be part of the solution.
“I was using them as a shampoo, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, if they can be used for this purpose, maybe soap nuts can be used as an alternative laundry detergent as well. And then we can reuse the water because soap nuts are all natural,’”she told Discover Magazine.
Ramachandran took over her parents’ bedroom to experiment, proving that plants could grow healthfully using water from the soapberry wash cycles but not with conventional detergent water. She’s since founded her own nonprofit, The Grey Water Project, which educates people about reusing water and developed a science curriculum on the topic that more than 90 schools teach. Her next step? A degree in environmental science and public policy so that her research can turn into solutions that get implemented.
The Colorado River is drying up, millions are at risk of losing their water supply, and Indigenous communities are fighting to keep their water rights. The Western megadrought is taking its toll on American communities, but how did we get here? In his new film, River’s End: California’s Latest Water War, Jacob Morrison delves […]
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and HP just announced that they’re taking their friendship to the next level. The odd couple is teaming up and expanding their partnership to restore, protect, and improve the management of almost one million acres of forest. HP is pledging $80 million to forest conservation and restoration, and not stopping there […]
Researchers from the National University of Singapore used data from more than 1,000 twin siblings to evaluate their opinions about environmental policy. They found identical twins were more likely to have similar views on green policy than non-identical twins, suggesting that support for climate action may have a genetic component. Felix Tropf, a professor in […]
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