Slime, Plastic-Eating Worms & Other Ways To Fix The World | Planet Fix | LIVE | BBC Science

Slime, Plastic-Eating Worms & Other Ways To Fix The World | Planet Fix | LIVE | BBC Science

growing all over these mountains is one
of the weirdest plants you’ll ever
see it’s a strange type of giant maze
that grows up to 20 ft tall these
disconcerting finger-like things are its
roots suspended meters off the ground
and they ooze with a gooey mucus and
it’s this mysterious mucus that could
help feed the planet and end farming’s
toxic Reliance on chemical fertilizers
this is the Holy Grail as long as
scientists can crack its code this is
the town of Tonto pek in southern Mexico
for centuries possibly even Millennia
this maze has been meticulously cared
for by the indigenous Farmers there
but word about this Mysterious Giant
corn eventually reached the ears of
curious scientists one of those was
Howard yanana Shapiro who was living in
Waka all the way back in 1980 I here
they have giant maze so the word giant
maze you know kind of intrigued me the
the maze that was growing was 16 to 18
ft tall you know a normal maze that you
see Across America might be 8 to 10 feet
tall but this was gigantic I I just
couldn’t believe it seeing something
that was mythical and in many ways it
was mythical on the surface of the roots
in a period when a maze plant would need
nitrogen for that explosive growth there
was a mucilaginous material really thick
very viscous and we would watch it and
it would Auto dose itself as essentially
and this mucus appear to be allowing the
plant to self fertilize meaning the
farmers barely needed to add any
artificial fertilizer the idea that a
maze plant could make its own nitrogen
sounded like science fiction to
virtually everyone we talk to and to
understand the reason why you’re going
to have to get used to a very important
term nitrogen fixation nitrogen fixation
nitrogen fixation nitrogen is essential
to all plants it’s a major component of
all proteins and chlorophyll we’re
literally surrounded by nitrogen the air
is 78% nitrogen great except it’s not
because almost all plants apart from
legumes can’t convert this lovely
nitrogen from the atmosphere into the
ammonia that it can actually use and the
reason this is such high stakes is about
way more than corn the world’s
population is literally fueled by serial
grains wheat corn rice San Millet barley
these make up more than 50% of the
world’s diet and none of them can fix
their own nitrogen so we spray huge
amounts of nitro Rogen Rich fertilizer
to pluck the Gap great for delivering
bigger yields and helping to feed the
planet’s 8 billion people terrible for
the environment unfortunately most
plants when we apply the fertilizer you
only take up about half of it it
pollutes the water table there’s huge
utopic sections of the Gulf of Mexico
which are dead zones caused by nitrogen
and that’s not all fertilizer isn’t
cheap so in some parts of the world
Farmers can’t even use fertilizers at
all meaning lower yields and less food
to feed people wouldn’t this be great if
you didn’t have to apply nitrogen in
ammonia form wouldn’t it be great if
this impacted the production in the
global South where they don’t have
access to fertilizer particularly hell
yes so you have a scientific motivation
you have an ecological Mo motivation you
have a financial motivation all of these
come together when you try to solve a
systematic problem so that’s the prize
but it’s time to go back to Mexico
Mexico is the birthplace of corn home to
more than 50 varieties but the one with
the ability to fertilize itself is
called oton and even in Mexico this
remained a relatively well-kept secret
for centuries when Howard first came
across it in 1980 it still took him
nearly 30 years to get the right team
together to study it so we started
working with the community we started
doing all the kind of research let’s
establish facts and we engaged the
community extensively we built a lab
there we had people from the community
actually working for us together with
Mexican scientists and the town of taton
pek they studied how this slimy muel
helps the plant to self fertilize and
grow so tall they found that it’s packed
with nitrogen fixing bacteria usually
found in the soil the gel itself acts
like a sort of Shield creating a low
oxygen environment that allows the
bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen
into a form the plant can actually use
this allows the plant to take up to 80%
of the nitrogen it needs directly from
the the air finally after a decade of
research there was proof of the
Agricultural Holy Grail a self-
fertilizing serial crop but almost
immediately some people started to ask
who owns the rights to an amazing plant
like this some even went much further
labeling it as an example of what’s
known as biopiracy so biopiracy is
basically the idea that there is a
misappropriation of biodiversity for
research or the development of
commercial products and I always talk
about this by thinking about Indiana
Jones right so the idea that then you
know somebody could soup in to uh you
know biodiversity rich country take a
few plants soup out and discover the
cure for cancer um and make a lot of
money and um yeah and it was kind of
that was a happy ending right well wrong
uh and a lot of countries are saying
actually this biodiversity is located
within or countries and it’s
intrinsically linked to the culture and
lifestyles of a lot of our indigenous
peoples and local communities so what
does all this mean when it comes to
alaton in in Mexico uh an agreement was
negotiated between a company and the
local community in a way to secure uh
prior and fund consent for This research
um and also to agree on sharing uh some
of the potential benefits every time
that one seed is sold half the Val Val
of the royalty goes to the
community The Village has been
instrumental we could have never done
what we’ve done without them they’ve
been all in the whole way it’s fair to
say that some are still definitely wary
especially because the agreement itself
remains confidential but in a way all of
this only matters if this scientific
Marvel can actually deliver on its
promise because it’s not made any money
just yet because for all the tantalizing
promise of this self- fertilizing corn
Farmers aren’t going to grow it on a
massive scale unless it can compete with
current industrial scale corn so
researchers are currently crossbreeding
it with other varieties hoping to
transfer some of its unique properties
they’ve already managed almost half the
amount of time it takes to grow and
they’ve made huge progress on fixing
nitrogen too we can now fix about 40% of
the nitrogen from the air from just the
local bacteria in the fields in the
United States so this this plant is
recruiting the bacteria to fix nitrogen
from the air and 40% is a good amount
probably three or four generations away
from a stabilized hybrid maze but the
future of this is not just about corn so
now the scenario is nitrogen fixing maze
nitrogen fixing rice what’s next wheat
then let’s do Millet which is used in
many parts of the world how about barley
all of that is open now for discussion
in a perfect world all crops would would
fix their own nitrogen and we would
reduce the amount of fertilizer that we
need so the future for nitrogen fixing
cereal crops is looking bright hopefully
in my lifetime nitrogen fixing maze
commercially available around the world
but in our increasingly monocultural
world the fact that a little known ma
from a misty mountain in rural Mexico
has been kept Alive by smallscale
indigenous farmers and could now help
tackle world hunger points to another
inescapable thing we cannot talk about
biodiversity as something separate than
people people use biodiversity people
care for biodiversity people depend on
biodiversity and you know the idea that
there is this wealth of knowledge and
possibilities around biodiversity is
really such a wonderful connection
between people and nature and we must
find a way to be able to tap into this
potential in a way that we are all
benefiting because as much as the
science is amazing it’s equally amazing
that it’s only thanks to this small
community in the mountains of Waka who
have preserved this rare plant with such
care that were even able to get excited
about it at all these worms are
literally eating their way out of this
plastic bag but not only can they eat it
it’s actually good for the planet so if
they can biodegrade plastic could they
be the answer to our planet’s massive
plastic problem biology has found a way
to some extent to deal with this because
the latest science on this is
mindblowing not only might we make
plastic biodegradable we might even one
day be eating vanilla ice cream from
recycled plastic and
eoli yes I mean it’s chemically
identical yeah so we’ll get back to that
in a minute let’s start with the worms
these little creatures are wax worms Dr
Federica berini is a molecular biologist
and she first witnessed this phenomenon
when she chucked a bunch of wax worms in
a plastic bag as a hobby side project
because well who doesn’t I bumped into
the walk for accident because at that
time I was a beekeeper because they they
live in the in the beehives they are
considered plagues by beekeepers so
after cleaning the my beehive putting
the worms the plastic bag and within a
short time I realized they were making
producing holes the Plastics started to
degrade almost as soon as it touched the
worm’s mouths so we thought okay maybe
something coming out of the mouth so we
start collecting this liquid coming out
it’s called saliva but it’s the liquid
coming out of the mouth so in this
saliva we found two enzymes that can
reproduce the effect of the saliva mean
oxidizing polye and it takes a few hours
at room temperature in in watery
solution and the amazing thing is that
the worms can even digest the plastic
breaking it down into something useful
for the worm the worm itself when eats
the plastic and start breaking it down
its guts react almost as if it was
eating normal food so that means that
there’s something happening with the
physiology of the animal that extracts
something out of this plastic
biodegradation and it just continues as
if it were normal diet that’s Dr Chris
Le Mo who inspired by federica’s
findings also began looking into these
worms we found that the plastic allowed
them to still retain all their fat and
presumably continue with their life ccle
basically these worms are fattening
themselves up by whatever means
necessary before they turn into moths by
which point they don’t eat again only
reproduce I always call them bags of
gonads that can fly because that’s all
they do so there’s a race on the way to
figure out just how this mechanism works
that’s the million or trillion dollar
question cuz once we figure that out
that’s a trillion dollars worth of
plastic we can degrade because as cool
as the wax worms are this is really
about the spefic specific combination of
bacteria and enzymes that can break down
plastic something that’s exceptionally
rare in nature so why is it so rare why
is plastic so hard to break down well in
nature most things decomposed because
bacteria breaks down the chemical bonds
that hold a substance together these
enzymes and bacteria have evolved over
Millennia to break down whatever it
finds in front of it then plastic comes
along here’s a scene that has long since
ceased causing any surprise dishes that
bounce when they drop to the floor
nowadays it gets bad W but it’s a total
game Cher for Humanity but Nature’s
never experienced it before Plastics are
made up of long chains of polymers with
very strong bonds and one of the keys to
Breaking these bonds is through
oxidation that’s what the worms appear
to be doing with their saliva
introducing oxygen molecules to the
plastic and this is something who
achieved in environment through light
for example high temperature and this is
the bottleneck takes a while because you
know the environment has its own timing
so the worms what they do is just
produce molecule of oxygen so in a few
hours instead of months or years or
whatever so this is the it’s a way to
overcome the bottleneck of this reaction
so what’s next unleash the worms uh no
that would be a terrible idea remember
this they are considered plagues by
beekeepers but even sticking just the
plastic the process is still way too
slow to realistically solve our plastic
crisis anytime soon so Stand Down wax
marada the real stars of this though are
the enzymes if the researchers can
identify them and scale them up there’s
a chance that in the future this could
be one of the solutions it will take a
lot of
cash but now scientists are looking for
similar enzymes in all sorts of other
places super worms too so anything that
has a worm in it it seems to be prone to
eat uh plastic in fact over 30,000
enzymes have been identified capable of
digesting 10 different types of plastics
one bacteria found in cow stomachs can
be used to digest polyester but the one
that’s getting everyone really excited
is a bacteria called idella sakaiensis
and especially its enzyme Petes uh
Plastics waste in general but more
specifically PT has infiltrated our
environment and biology has found a way
to some extent to deal with this over
time there was a discovery outside of
Japan where they had found that microbes
began to colonize on parts of a water
bottle cells were actually living and
maybe even surviving off the carbon
within that plastic we can take this
enzyme out of the cell and we can begin
to engineer that enzyme even further to
be able to have better activity directly
on plastic waste pet plastic that would
take centuries to break down in nature
Petes can break down in a matter of days
but it doesn’t solve our plastic problem
not yet anyway to have any real impact
at scale we need to Turbo charge how
quickly it works and that’s exactly what
how’s team has done and they name this
really fast version of P’s um fast PES
they did this using AI essentially by
using a vast database of all known
enzymes in the natural world and then
running simulations about which
combinations and mutations would speed
up the process kind of like a form of
computerized accelerated Evolution
machine learning approach really is it’s
rapid Evolution to some extent on there
but at the same time it’s Guided by
observation we saw that this enzyme was
not very stable overall and used a
machine learning type of approach to
figure out which point mutations would
make this enzyme more stable and found a
couple of mutations that really both
increased the stability significantly
but then also gave rise to a significant
increase in the activity of this enzyme
on plastic this Cutting Edge technology
opens up a whole new frontier of
scientific possibility and the team
aren’t done yet thinking about trying to
clean up plastic that’s actually in the
environment those applications don’t
have the benefit of being able to
control the temperature and pH very well
so having an enzyme that ultimately is
flexible enough to work in a variety of
different conditions is extremely
valuable once pet plastic is broken down
into its component parts talic acid and
ethylene glycol it can then be recycled
into new plastic but it doesn’t
necessarily have to be plastic in theory
it could be used to make something
better
like this well sort of because a team of
scientists in Edinburgh have found a way
to turn plastic into vanillin that’s the
central ingredient in vanilla and they
did it using eoli sounds delicious for
me and for anyone who’s thinking about a
nice vanilla ice cream what what are we
not understanding about that we can ask
this question a lot um yes I mean it’s
chemically identical okay forgive me if
the next part ruins vanilla for you so
vanillin is a compound that’s derived
from from oil that we pump out of the
ground it’s the same feed stock that we
use to make petrol that we we use in our
in our cars so we in essence took one of
those enzymes that had been reported to
do the initial depolymerization and then
took the mixture of talic acids and
ethylene glycol that you get from that
and simply just fed it to our eoli but
the way that I think about it is you
know yes this compound is coming from
plastic waste and yes it’s coming from a
bacteria but I think we as a society are
okay with eating food that has oil in it
the vanilla derived from oil so why
wouldn’t we be okay with having having a
bacterium produce produce that for us
now these guys aren’t really trying to
sell you vanilla ice cream they’re more
interested in upcycling recycled plastic
there’s recycling Plastics into more
Plastics and then there’s upcycling
Plastics into other compounds the issues
at the moment currently with that
approach is that when you subsequently
recycle plastic into other plastic
the value of that plastic and the
quality of that plastic actually
diminishes so you you enter into this
down cycling approach that does solve
the problem in the short term but It
ultimately generates the same waste what
we think is quite interesting about
upcycling plastic is you re-enter that
carbon back into the you know the
chemicals economy as something that’s
higher value vanillin is not the only
product that we can make from pet
plastic the molecules that you get when
you depolymerize pets um are actually
intermediates on route to a huge number
of Industrial Products that we rely on
nowadays one of the most interesting
ones that we’re focusing on right now is
is pharmaceutical intermediates you can
take pet plastic waste and turn it into
pharmaceutical compounds so taking
something that’s actually damaging the
environment and turn it into a source of
human medicine so medication other
flavoring compounds materials for your
clothing Cosmetics it’s quite staging I
think this is only really the beginning
of what could be possible in in the area
of plastics of cycling I think that very
much is the case
so worms themselves aren’t going to eat
all our troubles away but the science
going on around this is genuinely
exciting and it’s all thanks to nature
for providing the inspiration imagine
your dystopian future couple of over 10
cars crops can’t grow swarms of robots
are the only Signs of Life pretty
textbook apocalypse 101 except what if
it’s not what if those robots could be
part of the solution to prevent Global
catastrophe robot bees it’s it’s almost
impossible to overstate the role that
bees actual bees play in our world today
nearly 75% of leading crops depend on
animal pollination without them we
really would be heading for disaster but
bees have been in trouble for decades
mostly thanks to a toxic mix of habitat
loss pesticides climate change and
disease the beekeepers across United
States have lost 45% of honeybee
colonies only between April 2020 and
April 2021 that’s insane honey be are
responsible for the onethird of the crop
we actually eat right so it’s a big
problem so in one sense we’re already in
our dystopian future and we need to find
Solutions and for some that means robot
bees because in Labs all over the world
the race is on to create robot bees
capable of pollinating plants and
revolutionizing agriculture as we know
it even if it does still sound like a
dystopian nightmare but how realistic is
it to make them in the first place
because replicating what a bee does is a
mammoth challenge to pollinate a flower
a bee has to locate the flower identify
where the pollen is navigate through all
sorts of elements and obstacles and then
land delicately on the flower itself
that’s a huge technological challenge
let alone cramming all that computing
power into something as small as a tiny
robot but that’s the task facing chahat
Singh at the University of Maryland we
are at a stage where we are have the
brain of a bee but at the size of a
hummingbird so we can do pollination in
the wild but for a certain specific
flowers but what we want is to do
pollination for all the flowers in the
world right and generally sunflower is
like one of the biggest flowers that we
can find so if you want to pollinate the
flowers which are very small we have to
build something which is as small as a
honeybee which is probably going to be
like 100 of the size also taking on this
robot B challenge is Dr Kevin Chen at
MIT if I look at a flower it’s just
probably about a couple of centimeter so
I have have to have very good Precision
for the robot to approach a flower
gently land down the flower and this
very careful control so that it doesn’t
falls off so trying to land down flower
approach a flower is very challenging
control problem but that’s that’s
something we we are uh actively solving
right now but the latest robot bees are
already capable of some impressive feeds
they can fly in all directions detect
and avoid Predators Flip 3
160° well sometimes and they can already
identify specific flowers to pollinate
so we have an AI framework and it goes
and searches and detects these fls once
you know which FL you want to pollinate
it has a control policy which says that
okay I want to go down as close as
possible and on the bottom of the robot
we there’s a welcro which extract these
po graines the next goal for jat and his
team is to downsize this robot how bird
closer to the size of a b but that’s
much easier said than done everything is
a trade-off between computer power and
size and the major obstacle facing all
robot B Pioneers is battery power on
something so tiny these drones currently
have a battery life of about 5 to 7
minutes because of the current state of
batteries we have so one of the thing
that excites me how do you come up with
this cognitive design which is very simp
to the mind of the be to actually get
things working on that small of a scale
because you can’t just take an
artificial intelligence framework that
works on a bigger drone and just
downsize it near future I would say I
would definitely see the bees will be
needed to work indoors in which they
will be Tethered to a power supply
thinking about deploying a lot of them
in the wild that having done pollinate
really requires us to solve the energy
or the power challenge first so if
you’re really trying to either build
more efficient bees but also waiting for
the next breakthrough in Battery
Technology that allows us to to have a
bees artificial bees that can fly for a
much longer time but jat and his team do
have an ingenious solution in the
meantime they’re working on an
autonomous Robo beehive where a massive
robot Mother Ship of a drone can fly to
a tree attach and then deploy it smaller
Robo B babies out to pollinate it’s
easier for the muzzle beehive to detect
these uh tree branches because it has
the entire depth maps that you see in
most of the cell driving cars right so
it goes and autonomously attaches or
latches on and the mother be commands
these smaller bees you find you
pollinate and you come back to B and
these entire PIP plan is autonomous
right so if you have a field of about a
th000 Stars we would need about 8 to 10
small Robo bees which can go around the
field and fall in, FL in about five s
minutes but if the goal is essentially
robotic pollination and the intricacies
of both flight and power are proving so
difficult do we really need them to fly
at all that’s what researcher yugu is
looking at with his team at West
Virginia University he’s developing a
groundbased robot that can pollinate
flowers as they go up and down the aisle
of an indoor Farm what we doing is more
like a human pollinating hand
pollinating cucumbers in a garden so all
goes as planned with the extra computing
power that something like this would
bring there’s way more that you might be
able to do than just pollinate Yo’s
robots would be able to monitor the
plants at the same time and send back
Reams more data to make farming more
efficient and deliver bigger yields the
ability to pollinate is also the ability
to support many other tasks so robots in
some form are definitely part of the
future of farming but let’s go back to
the robot bees s goes perfectly well we
resolve the battery power problem robot
bees and Al capable of pollinating
Fields worth of crops at a time but
swarms of tiny robots that could fly
anywhere record information undetected
and be controlled remotely H what could
possibly go wrong with that apart from
it literally being a Black Mirror
episode if say I’m an evil scientist I
want to do spying on people from a
serious scientist perspective if I
really want to do that evil thing I
probably wouldn’t take shobi as my first
candidate to do those if I build a
rotary vehicle the aerodynamic
efficiency is much higher than flat
given the current engineering constraint
I probably build a smaller Qui rer so
basically there’s better ways to spy on
us great everything that the B sees or
anything that it sends is computed on
the B itself and it’s not sending these
information to any other source and not
relying on any other source to do this
computation that stops the risk of the
hacking of these tiny drones marginally
satisfying although still relying on a
fair bit of trust there but personal
security is not the only concern that
people have raised for a start
ecological waste and damage could be
another unintended consequence but it
seems to me a bit of a flawed solution
they’re going to break down they’re
going to need maintaining there’s the
risk of them being hacked into probably
a much cheaper solution would be to look
after real insects we are the reason
they’re declining and we could use fewer
pesticides leave a little more habitat
for them we often Overlook the really
obvious simple solution and instead try
to invent some really complicated
technological fix there’s certainly no
replacement for actual bees it’s
estimated that nearly 600 billion worth
of global crops depend on pollinators
such as bees to grow they’re absolutely
essential to Global food production and
saving them from collapse has to be a
priority but when it comes to robot bees
it’s not exactly an either or scenario
as the researchers are Keen to stress we
have no intention of replacing these we
are looking for a solution which could
Aid or help honey beef I think you know
trying to build robotic prototypes of
smaller insect help us to understand
insect and it can be beneficial for the
biologist as well Evolution has like 3.8
billion years of research and
development we should definitely learn
from them there are also other
pollination scenarios where bees don’t
even exist in the first place like here
we’re also thinking about if you want to
do assist agriculture experiment in
space in those cases of course now we’re
using humans right the astronaut will be
doing the pollination Etc but hopefully
we can automate that process in the
longer term but it’s not only about
pollination for these robot bees the
researchers also dream of other exciting
real world applications the scenario
that I want to give is for example there
is a earthquake and the building
collapsed and there are people who are
trapped inside with micros skill robot
can be very useful to search for how
many people are trapped and where are
those people trapped and Beyond search
and and rescue they can also help us
avoid other doomsday scenarios by going
where humans struggle to reach like
inspecting weak spots in bridges or
helping escape a nuclear meltdown these
tiny little be drones they can go near
the surface of these power plants and
they can look for the cracks and they
can scan the entire thing to understand
okay is there anything that needs to be
repaired before we start this operation
so while swarms of robot beers might
still be decades away if they happen at
all
it’s clear that the technology is
advancing rapidly and although it’s
tempting to pitch bees against robot
bees in some Hunger Game style Winner
Takes all that’s not really the case
actual bees are the real deal and need
predicting but robot bees May well have
a part to play what do you think the
future will look like this this or will
it look something like this climate
change is transforming the way we think
about the designs of our cities we’re
typically used to thinking the future is
a shiny Concrete Jungle but this is
looking less and less likely at least
not until we’ve solved a huge problem
first this stuff concrete the foundation
of well foundations concrete has a lot
going for it it’s cheap reliable and so
easy to use that basically anybody can
be taught to work with it so it’s no
surprise it became the defining
architectural feature of the last
century so whether you’re a fan of
brutalism or you just think Architects
have actually been War calling us in in
a concrete prison Either Way Concrete is
a really useful material problem is it’s
threatening the future of our planet
because of its absolute dependency on
fossil fuels You couldn’t possibly make
it on anything like this scale without
enormous fossil fuel inputs so the
search is on for alternative materials
that can offset concrete’s carbon
footprint and while looking ahead to the
Future many are actually delving into
the past for inspiration but one thing
does seem so
we cannot build in concrete and steel
any
longer so what exactly is so bad about
concrete concrete is a big part of the
problem it’s around 8% of all carbon
emissions at the moment these emissions
are largely caused by one ingredient
cement while cement makes up just about
10 to 15% of concrete’s total mass it
accounts for up to 90% of its greenhouse
gas emissions but despite this huge
carbon footprint we’re making massive
quantities of this stuff the total
amount of cement we make on the planet
every year at the moment would require
you to cover an area of the size of
Australia in Woodland but with a global
population of nearly 8 billion and an
anticipated rise of 2 billion more over
the next 30 Years the demand for housing
and by proxy concrete is only getting
larger in 3 years of its peak building
boom of around 2013 China used more
concrete by a long way than America had
used in the entire 20th century and
that’s the central conundrum of concrete
whilst it’s contributing massively to
the rise in global temperatures it’s
also difficult to find a sustainable
alternative capable of building on such
a scale but one possible solution a
material that’s both recyclable and
plentiful might be just beneath our feet
mud mud brick construction has been
around for centuries but perhaps
surprisingly many of these old Earth
architecture structures are still
standing firmly today such as this the
gingera mosque in timbuk 2 Marley
erected in 1327 and built almost
entirely using materials such as fiber
straw and wood and still standing today
it’s a prime example of the durability
of Earth building but how exactly does
this method work so Earth building is a
historic traditional technique and it’s
all about using some kind of soil in
buildings for the most part that means
subsoil so that’s getting into the
mineral bit of the soil there’s always
going to be some clay within that
subsoil because Clay is the sticky
binder that holds everything together
the clay can then be easily molded into
different shapes for use in the walls
making it totally cement free and
meaning it has drastically lower carbon
emissions but ramed Earth also has
another trick up its sleeve it’s
excellent at regulating both temperature
and air quality keeping the inside cool
in the summer and warm in the winter
Clay is a hygroscopic material so it
likes to Tak in moisture when there’s a
lot of moisture in the atmosphere it’s
absorbed into anything that’s made of
clay and then slowly released later so
it has this beautiful effect on humidity
in any part of the house where it levels
it off this makes ramed Earth a
potentially attractive Prospect when it
comes to small residential units but
what about skyscrapers and high-rise
Flats can this ancient technique be
unified with modern architecture well
the answer is complicated there are
stunning examples of Earth architecture
being used utilized for tall buildings
such as the yemeni town of shibam which
was largely constructed in the 16th
century and is sometimes referred to as
the oldest skyscraper city in the world
some of the buildings in this city of
mud are over 30 ft High and the fact
they’re still standing some 500 years
later shows just how durable Earth
architecture can be but unfortunately
this ancient material faces an equally
ancient adversary water so where we
might get problem is say if we had a
leaking gutter where there’s constant
water coming through then eventually
that little bit of water tracking
through Can Break Down The Walls and you
can get bits of collapse that way in
shabam this water damage is mitigated by
routinely applying fresh coats of mud
but this method of preservation is
better suited to warmer climates not so
much the constant rain that is typical
of European cities meaning the
maintenance of large scale structures
may not be so viable so to build our
future skyscrapers we may need to turn
to a different material Timber we need
to think really carefully about how we
can change the way in which we build the
technology exists the materials are
there so this is an opportunity to
really make a big difference relatively
quickly this is Andrew W who’s designed
the office group’s black and white
building which is made entirely of
Timber standing at just over 58 ft high
it’s the tallest Mass Timber building in
central London so you can see from this
building each one of these W panels
arrives on site millimeter perfect so
we’re not throwing anything away at this
building site there are no big skips
full of rubbish outside and in the UK
about 50% of our landfill is just from
construction and the key advantage of
Timber is that it’s regenerative you can
grow more of it so it’s not an
extractive process we’re not scraping
something off the surface of the planet
of the earth which we will never be able
to put back every tree that’s cut down
five are put back in its place you might
be wondering about fire safety and
that’s something that’s certainly not
lost on Timber Architects either both
the actual risk and the public
perception one of the primary issues
that we face is a concern around fire
and we work very closely with fire
Engineers with different research
departments globally so that we’re
really careful about how we instill
those in our buildings and I live in a
Timber building on the seventh floor
with my family this is very close to me
ensuring that the buildings that we
build are safe Timber seems like a
genuinely exciting and viable solution
to the future of how we build our cities
but there is a limitation it’s not going
to replace concrete entirely not least
for major infrastructure projects we
will probably always need concrete you
know for the infrastructure for Bridges
Tunnels for the foundations of the
buildings that we build but we need to
transform the industry to one that
vastly reduces the amount of carbon that
it emits the central issue all comes
back to concrete as long as it Remains
the cheapest strongest fastest and most
versatile Building Material which it is
we’re not going to eliminate it entirely
so what if we don’t have to abandon it
Al together what if instead there was a
way to recycle it and make it more
sustainable and that’s exactly what Dr
Pippa Horton has been working on so I’ve
got here a piece um of one of the very
first batches of cement that we produced
and how we make this is you take old
concrete and you separate out from the
concrete the Aggregate and the sand and
what we left with his old cement and in
order to turn that cement into new
cement it needs to be heated at very
high temperature I’m using an electric
heart furnace which is a really hot
furnace used for melting metal and we
put our old cement paste into that
equipment Heats it up and turns it back
into new clinker and then we get to
process it and recast it into into new
cement but simply this means recycling
the cement we have to produce new
variants in an almost looplike process
but with this cement being sourced
predominantly from Demolition waste is
there enough to make this VI
so there’s enough demolition waste at
the moment that we could meet the needs
of about a quarter to a half of global
cement using this production process so
it couldn’t completely replace it but it
would do a pretty good job of meeting
some of those needs without missions
we’re aiming and we hope that this
process can be completely Caron free and
we eliminate all the emissions we think
we could save 500 million tons of CO2 a
year from doing this process if we did
it at full scale so perhaps a couple of
percent of of global emissions but
they’re really R of th approximation
Innovations like this trying to
transform concrete from within could be
the key to making the future of
construction sustainable but beyond
reusing concrete there’s also the option
of reusing the things we’ve already
built it’s called retrofitting which is
repurposing buildings rather than
tearing them down and replacing them
with more concrete we have a very very
large stock of existing robust buildings
80% of the buildings we’ll have in 2050
are already up by a conservative
estimate and almost all of them are
performing really badly in energy terms
so we need to sort them out sorting out
an existing building is very much lower
carbon in almost all cases than building
a new one it’s very unlikely there’ll be
a one-size fits-all solution when it
comes to concrete so rather than our
future cities looking like sci-fi
Utopias or dystopias depending on your
particular aesthetic our future skylines
are likely to look more like a collage
with exciting new Innovations sitting
alongside some of the surprisingly
durable techniques from far back into
human history an exciting way to keep
history visible while also ensuring we
don’t demolish the future in our rush to
keep
building ah coffee the fuel that powers
the global economy by keeping us awake
through all that unpaid overtime the
medicine that gets you through a meeting
with your boss while horrendously hung
over basically you know it will always
be there when you need it except what if
it’s not because here’s the thing coffee
is going extinct a combination of global
warming pests and a nasty fungus called
coffee leaf rust are threatening coffee
as we know it more than 60% of the
world’s wild coffee species are expected
to be wiped out by 2050 but there’s hope
in the form of a long lost little be
recently rediscovered in the wild in
Sierra Leon it’s called cafea Stena
although it depends who you ask in terms
of how to pronounce it and it’s called
Cafe stopa stenia you I I’ve been told
that’s incorrect for ailla and there’s
also talk of another wild Bean in Uganda
Cafe Liber that’s also promising to help
fight back against climate change and
it’s just as well because the world is
hooked on coffee about 2 billion cups of
coffee are consumed around the world
every single day it’s an industry worth
an estimated $500 billion supporting
some 100 million coffee Farmers coffee
is an extremely Global crap it is a
major export for about 20 25 countries
meaning the income that a country earns
from coffee exports might help pay for
roads and hospitals here’s the thing
with coffee there are some 130 known
speces of coffee in the world but all of
that delicious Elixir floating through
our veins every day comes from basically
just two types of bean cafea Arabica and
cafea canura which we also commonly call
rusta for coffee snubs araba is
basically seen as the nice tasting one
you’d buy at an overpriced coffee shop
and raboa usually ends up blended into
instant coffee and it’s araba the nicer
tasting one that’s suffering most with
climate change it is very susceptible to
diseases and pests and it also has kind
of a narrower environmental pocket that
it thrives in Arabica is hyper sensitive
to Rising temperatures and this is
already having a massive impact on
coffee Farmers right now araba is going
to continue to decline in production
farmers are facing more pressure from
diseases Pest and weather and they need
a plant that is more
so that’s why people have started to
reconsider some of the other hundred or
so species of wild coffee looking for
help and there was one person who kept
coming up in basically every
conversation I had if you have spoken to
Aaron Davis speak with Aaron Davis Aaron
Davies so I went to Q Gardens in London
to speak to the man himself how do you
pronounce Sten orer or stop it’s cofa
steno there you go
steno glad we got that one sorted it
used to be widely consumed around Europe
in the 19th and early 20th century it
was successful it did pretty well for a
number of years and then almost
completely vanished overnight but
reports about it from the time captured
the imagination of Aaron and his team
what they were saying is that the taste
is is excellent and that it in some
cases is better than araba now when you
hear that it you start to get excited
but even more intriguing was that it
could withstand higher temperatures than
a Raba and still survive so it’s not a
core tropical plant like a Raba it
occurs in the lowlands where it’s hotter
and that starts to pose some questions
around could it be useful climate change
adaptation and if that wasn’t enough
there are accounts of being resistant to
coffee leaf rust and coffee leaf rust is
the worst disease of coffee it
annihilates countries it causes Farmers
to go bankrupt very very quickly it’s a
terrible terrible disease if that were
the case that would be a big tick in the
Box for coper amazing
problem solved except no one knew for
sure that it wasn’t already extinct one
of the only known existence of it were
these samples right here dried out and
stuck to an old piece of paper from the
19th century that sample right there in
my hands is from the 1870s and was the
biggest stash anyone knew about so how
do you find a long lost species that
might not even exist well Aaron and his
team had to turn detective they track
down the last known sightings of it to
some forest and sier Leon but even some
of the forest Forest didn’t exist
anymore so no luck there and that turned
up absolutely nothing so they set off on
foot into the surviving Forest hoping
they’d get lucky I mean were you
literally just going off hoping for the
best my job as a person that knows wild
species is to find that plant in the
forest CU When you go into that Forest
there’s just many hundreds of plant
species it’s dark so you have to
identify just from its leaves which is
which is quite tricky and then
eventually they found one
we often say that if we were doing this
in 10 years time there might be a chance
that it it would actually be extinct in
Sy now I turned up to Q Gardens hoping
to sample some of this mysterious coffee
for myself but as it turns out I never
stood a chance so valuable is just the
potential of this Wonder Bean to an
industry worth half a trillion dollars
that Q Gardens can’t keep it on the
premises in any significant quantity
because of the fear of Bio Espionage the
demand is so great for people wanting to
grow this coffee outside of Africa or in
other parts of Africa that we have to be
very careful not to pass it on to other
countries but we also know that people
have tried to steal this
coffee this idea of people stealing it
um is that from here from Sierra Leon I
can’t show any details of the nefarious
recent history of sta but we do know
that attempts have been made to visit
sier Leon and and acquire the beans from
illegal sources I mean our Our Hope and
our aspiration is that we can use staer
to um benefit the country where it where
it’s found they are the uh the countries
the communities that should be
benefiting from this natural biological
resource so with good reason I wasn’t
able to verify how good it tastes but
when this coffee was tasted by industry
experts it passed with flying colors and
that only adds to its Allure as a
potential savior of the coffeee industry
okay so how do we get from a promising
little magic bean into actually
transforming a multi-billion dollar
Global industry Farmers aren’t just
going to switch over to a new Bean on a
whim so the next step for Aaron and his
Partners is a trial project where they
pay farmers in Sierra Leon to grow it
and see how it performs guaranteeing the
farmer’s income while they continue
their research but that’s not the only
thing going on with it many people see
this as the wonder Bean um and it nearly
every box that you would need from a
really good coffee crop plant but the
yields are quite low so what we see is
that initially it will become high value
Niche crop for those PE those people
that are really into coffee the real
coffee Geeks uh but our aspiration is to
use um
stener in a breeding program to develop
something that’s commercially scalable
so that’s where we are with Stena for
now an exciting possibly game-changing
Prospect but still some way off tot
transforming the coffee industry but if
just one of these wild species offers
such promise what about the other 130 or
so because it turns out staila isn’t the
only wild species that is offering hope
of Salvation this is Katherine Kuka
she’s based in Uganda where coffee makes
up a crucial part of the economy Uganda
is gifted in terms of coffee she’s been
researching another of those wild
species one called CAA Liber also known
as EX
and here something really exciting is
happening because farmers are already
switching over to using it of their own
accord it is a farmer lead initiative
because they do exp experience these
challenges the drought spells are very
intense and more frequent so when
drought hits you’re seeing Farmers
taking a decision to uproot all the
robust coffee and plant more of Liber
coffee it’s quite resilient to Drought
to come on coffee past and diseases and
also the yield is very very promising
this species is the one that is
sustaining our coffee production in such
times when the droughts are intense and
more frequent this is
our our our goto species the challenges
we are seeing with climate change are
asking us to rethink our coffee sector
should we keep burdening it with only
two species is when we have a we of
other species with full potential
thriving in the world and that’s what it
really seems to come down to preserving
as much genetic diversity as possible
and maybe reinforcing the idea that
actually we need to keep some of these
around if you lose steni or if you lose
Liber or something else then you lose an
option some of the genetic diversity
that is in some of these wild species
may have really there may be some really
useful traits kind of hiding in these
plants that may help us solve future
problem problems for example like
resistance to a disease that is not
really known yet or really widespread on
coffee Farms the potential for that
might be in one of those 130 species so
we don’t want to lose it right once it’s
gone it’s gone but with such promise
being shown by just two of the wild
species that were previously slipping
towards Extinction hopefully we might
now do a better job of keeping the je
pool as biodiverse as possible and
keeping our coffee flowing for good

From plastic eating worms to self-fertilising wonder crops, explore the ways in which climate issues are being resolved to make Earth a better place.