Recycling India's floral waste

India is a place of flowers. Lots of them.

Piles of marigolds, roses, carnations and other flowers are left at temples, mosques and sikh gurudwaras for use in religious ceremonies.

Afterwards, the flowers can prove difficult to dispose of.

Tipping the discarded petals into flowing waters is one option, but this can add to the burdens for India's often heavily polluted waterways.

Chemical engineer and eco-entrepreneur, Parimala Shivaprasad, thinks she has the solution.

The 26-year-old from Bangalore, currently a postgraduate student at the University of Bath, wants to turn the leftover flowers into a useful product.

Her big idea is to build a social enterprise that will enable temples in India to extract essential oils from the flowers.

Parimala Shivaprasad in the lab at Bath University

The remains, she says, can be used as organic compost for growing vegetables to help feed the poor.

"I want to collect the floral waste and extract the essential oils from the fragrant part, the biomass, and then compost the rest of the biomass to produce organic manure, looking at completely recycling the flower waste," she says.

"That manure could be used by small households or even the temples on their vegetable patch, because usually temples tend to feed people on a daily basis."

Parimala was constantly surrounded by flowers when she was growing up in India.

While studying for a degree in chemical engineering, she became interested in the idea of developing a business based on recycling floral waste from temples.

"Flowers from religious places cannot really be combined with normal waste," she says.

"Where [temples] have access to rivers and lakes, they tend to dispose of them in flowing waters because that is considered holy.

"Otherwise, they try and get them into the land fills, but if it cannot be combined with the waste it is dumped on open ground and this has led to a lot of pollution in rivers and lakes and on land."

Flower petals for Puja ceremony

Organic matter from rotting flowers contributes to the growth of algae, which can deplete oxygen levels and cause marine life to die. Rotting flowers may also cause pollution problems on land.

Parimala says about two million tonnes of floral waste in India are discarded every day after religious ceremonies, much of which could be totally recycled.

Step one: Test the idea in the lab
Parimala has developed lab equipment that would allow individual temples to extract essential oils.

"The early idea is to scale up the lab equipment I have to accommodate about five kilos of flower petals to work with on a daily basis and run the extraction unit for about eight hours a day," she says.

Waterways choked with discarded flowers are a common sight in India

Step two: Conduct pilot studies
Feasibility testing suggests the idea could work on a small scale, suitable for use in temples.

Parimala is planning to carry out a pilot study at a temple in Bangalore, with the help of her father, who is a chemist.

If this proves successful, she will extend the trial to more temples in the area before looking at setting up franchises across India.

Step three: Living the dream
She says her dream is to turn the idea into a social enterprise that will help tackle the floral waste problem in India.

"Seeing so much floral waste in India - and because I was a chemical engineer - I thought the two could come together and make something useful," says Parimala.

"An entrepreneur was totally unexpected for me because I was getting into my PhD. But, I really enjoy both being in the university and the journey so far as an entrepreneur."

(Source: BBC)

This desert in California is experiencing a wildflower ‘superbloom’

A wildflower superbloom is underway in the desert Southwest in March after seven inches of winter rain. Anza-Borrego State Park in California hasn’t experienced a bloom so prolific since at least 1999 according to park officials.

“This is shaping up to be a great wildflower year!” the park wrote on its Facebook page late last week. “…desert lilies are spectacular, and other annuals are coming along nicely! Make plans now to visit near the middle of the month.”

The purple sand verbena is widespread in the Anzo-Borrega right now. It’s native to the Southwest and it thrives in well-drained soil. Pristine white primroses are also in bloom among yellow-flowered brittlebush. But, according to hikers’ reports, the most uncommon flower in bloom this year is the purple, notch-leaved phacelia.

It’s “a very rare event,” one hiker noted on the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association website:

With over 7 inches of rain this season, the Borrego Desert is verdant green with flowers in stages of both bud and early bloom. We are on the “uphill side” of the peak bloom and experiencing more open flowers with each passing sunny day. We note a few locations where open flowers can be seen, especially for those willing to wander among the mix of buds and blooms. A top location is anywhere within a two-mile stretch of the Coyote Canyon Jeep Road, north of the north end of DiGiorgio Road with abundant Peirson’s Primoses and others, including a few remarkable Desert Lilies.

Another worth a look is the Henderson Canyon Road with patches of pink Sand Verbena, Dune Evening Primroses with their wide white petals, yellow Desert Sunflowers beginning to bloom, and a few Desert Lilies. Around Borrego Springs, roadsides are lined with yellow Desert Dandelions and other wildflowers. These flowers are best seen in the morning, as some blossoms close in the afternoon.

If you want to see the superbloom in-person, the park says the best time to view the flowers is in the morning. They close up in the afternoon heat.

(Source: WP)

Bumblebee buzz literally makes flowers explode with pollen

Like many people, reader Todd Barczak is increasingly interested in where his food comes from. So he came to us with this question: "Are honeybees the only bees that make honey?"

Weird Animal Question of the Week buzzed off to find out.

HOARDING THE GOLD
Of the estimated 20,000 species of bees worldwide, only a few hundred species make honey, and only honey bees make a surfeit of the sweet stuff says Juliana Rangel, entomologist at Texas A&M University.

There are seven species of honeybees, which include Asian, African, and European honeybees, the latter of which we mostly see in the U.S. (Related: "Obama Unveils Plan to Reverse Alarming Decline of Honeybees.")

Honeybees make extra because "they live in places where there are seasons," Rangel says, storing and living on honey in winter when there’s no nectar to eat.

WHAT IS HONEY, ANYWAY?
Bee barf.

So says Denise Ellsworth, an entomologist at Ohio State University who describes how bees suck nectar from plants, which then goes into a "honey stomach," an organ for storing food before it's digested.

The nectar mixes with an enzyme, and "the bees regurgitate that when they get back to the colony," condensing the nectar into honey.

PLAN B
Pollen easily gets stuck to bees' fuzzy bodies and carried from flower to flower, Ellsworth says, but bumblebees and some other wild bees do something honeybees don’t do: buzz pollination. (Related: "First Bumblebee Declared Endangered in the U.S.")

Bumblebees "can unhinge their wings from their wing muscles and vibrate their bodies," Ellsworth says, making that buzzing sound you hear when they’re on a flower in the tone of middle C.

"It’s the 'hey' in 'Hey Jude,' and it causes the flower to explosively release pollen."

To pollinate some plants, such as blueberries and cranberries, bees "wrap their legs around the flower" and buzz that note, causing release of pollen "like salt from a shaker," Ellsworth says.

That’s a level of intimacy you’ll think about over your next blueberry smoothie.

BEEING POSITIVE
But bees aren’t just persuasive. They’re energy efficient.

"Bees have a positive electrostatic charge to their bodies," says Ellsworth, "like when you scrape your feet across a carpet."

Flowers have a negative charge, so before a bee lands on one, it uses its body hairs to feel the strength of a flower's charge. A flower that has just been visited by another pollinator "loses a little bit of that negative charge," allowing the would-be pollinator to save time and move on.

A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS
All this work provides a whopping portion of what we eat: Honeybees, along with native pollinators like butterflies, pollinate a third of the food consumed worldwide, says Rangel.

Pollinators' global value is estimated at $200 billion per year; in the U.S., it's about $15 billion annually.

For all the delicious fruits and crops they give us, honeybees themselves have few genes for taste. But the insects do seek out nutrients such as salt, according to a recent study in the journal Ecological Entomology.

In autumn, when there are fewer plants available, bees visit puddles, bird baths, and compost piles to satisfy their nutrient needs, lead author Rachael Bonoan, a Tufts doctoral candidate, says by email. (Related: "For the First Time Bees Declared Endangered in the U.S.")

Little is known about minerals content in pollen and nectar, except that they contain "trace amounts," says Bonoan.

Therefore it’s important that bees have a variety of flowers, "so they have the best chance of finding what they need."

(Source: National Geographic)