Could the prickly pear cactus help solve our plastic problems?
Behold the humble prickly pear.
It is nowhere near as majestic as the saguaro or as sinister as the cholla. And outside of its occasional use as a novelty ingredient in margaritas or jelly for tourists, it is known chiefly as the bane of anyone who’s ever tried to remove its legions of microscopic barbed spines from their tortured skin.
That may be about to change. According to a report in Fast Company magazine, researchers at a university in Mexico have developed a technique to turn the pulp from the green paddles of the prickly pear into a new type of biodegradable plastic.
It could not have come at a better time — plastic pollution has reached epic proportions. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating mass of discarded plastic pushed by currents in the northern Pacific, is now larger than Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico combined.
The plastic continually breaks into smaller pieces and is eventually consumed by marine life large and small. In March, an autopsy on a whale that washed ashore in the Philippines found 88 pounds of plastic in its stomach.
Even humans are estimated to consume 50,000 pieces of microplastic a year, Fast Company notes.
Sandra Pascoe Ortiz, a chemical engineering professor at the University of the Valley of Atemajac and lead researcher on the project, told the magazine that prickly pears contain large amounts of sugars and gums, which makes them a perfect candidate to create what’s known as “biopolymers.”
Other plants, such as corn, have long been used to create polymer products like biodegradable plastic spoons and cups.
But, the magazine notes, corn has a huge carbon footprint when you consider all of the water, fertilizer and energy required to grow and harvest it.
Prickly pears, on the other hand, get by on little water and, as anyone who’s ever tried to remove one knows, grow seemingly everywhere.
Pascoe Ortiz said the product is still a ways from fruition, but that researchers are working with a company that is interested in bringing it to market.
In the meantime, we’ll raise a prickly pear margarita to science.