Comment

Comment by Elizabeth on March 21, 2009 at 9:57pm

Thanks for bringing the rice fibre-reinforced composite to my attention, Fred.
A friend of mine used to pick cotton when he was a young child, and he told me that in those days, the husks (around the seeds) and excess or damaged seeds were a burden, a waste product, they had to pay people to take them away...until the use of seeds and husks for agricultural feed was discovered - at which time it became a valuable commodity and virtually overnight the huge piles of 'garbage' made the cotton gin owners into millionaires. I hope this will happen to the rice farmers and processors as well.

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." - Buckminster Fuller (Jane Jacobs suggested much the same thing, with examples, in Economy of Cities)