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Photo: Shreya Ramachandran, via Discover Magazine
By Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer
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.
This past week, Our Daily Planet got a chance to sit down with the Right Honorable David Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham, as well as the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor in Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet. We were inspired to talk to David after a recent TED Talk he […]
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The Wheelabrator waste-to-energy incinerator is Baltimore’s biggest standing source of air pollution. Its smokestacks send toxic mercury, lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides into the air off of I-95 in South Baltimore, whose residents are primarily Black and low-income.
Why This Matters: High polluting incinerators like the Wheelabrator facility are both harmful and expensive.
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The new Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, an economist from Nigeria, made ending fishing subsidies by governments her first priority on Monday, according to E&E News. This has long been a priority for the WTO, but her decision also reflects the importance of women in promoting and ensuring sustainable fishing globally.
Why This Matters: As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we wanted to shine a light on women’s contributions to the natural resource economy.
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