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Gene Ellis

Companies Quietly Apply Biofuel Tools to Household Products - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pplied-to-household-soaps.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 01 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Companies Quietly Apply Biofuel Tools to Household Products
  • A liquid laundry detergent made by Ecover, a Belgian company that makes “green” household products including the Method line, contains an oil produced by algae whose genetic code was altered using synthetic biology. The algae’s DNA sequence was changed in a lab, according to Tom Domen, the company’s manager for long-term innovation.
  • Unilever recently announced that it was using algae oil made by a company called Solazyme in Lux, a popular soap
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  • An ingredient crucial to malaria drugs, artemisinin, is already being produced from a yeast altered through synthetic biology. Specific brands have not been disclosed.
  • Solazyme points to substances like rennet, a key processing aid in cheese-making that requires an enzyme called chymosin to promote clotting. Traditionally, calves’ stomachs were used to provide that enzyme to curdle milk for cheese. But since the late 1990s, rennet has been generated by a microbe whose genetic code was altered with the insertion of a single bovine gene, and that process is the one most widely in use now in the United States.
  • Solazyme describes the organism that produces the oil as “an optimized strain” of single-cell algae “that have been in existence longer than we have.”
  • Ecover buys the ingredient, algal oil from Solazyme, which used to describe itself as a synthetic biology company but has taken the term off its website.
  • Solazyme pointed to the environmental benefits of its processes and noted that the World Wildlife Fund, Rainforest Alliance and other environmental groups support its work. “We use molecular biology and standard industrial fermentation to produce renewable, sustainable algal oils that help alleviate pressures on the fragile ecosystems around the Equator that are frequently subject to deforestation and habitat destruction,”
  • The groups acknowledge that the Solazyme oil itself — in the Ecover detergent — does not contain genetically engineered ingredients in the conventional meaning of the term. Rather, the organism producing the oil has been genetically altered.
  • Some of the same companies are now busily churning out vanillin, resveratrol and citrus flavorings from yeast and other microorganisms that are a product of synthetic biology for use in foods.
Gene Ellis

The Truth about Fracking - Kevin D. Williamson - National Review Online - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...ut-fracking-kevin-d-williamson

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The water makes the fractures, and the sand keeps them open. There’s some other stuff in that fracking blend, too: biocides, for one thing, not very different from what’s in your swimming pool, to keep bacteria and algae and other gunk from growing in the water and clogging up the works. There are also some friction reducers, because water and sand moving at speed can produce a lot of wear and tear (cf. the Grand Canyon), and the occasional jolt of 7 percent hydrochloric acid solution for boring out holes in the concrete. The mix is 99+ percent water and sand, and the rest of the stuff is mostly run-of-the-mill industrial chemicals (those friction-reducers use a polymer that also is used in children’s toys, for example). Real concerns, but not exactly an insurmountable environmental challenge.
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