Two innovative Italian research projects are showing how science can transform environmental problems into opportunities – using satellites to detect plastic floating at sea and microscopic fungi to convert food-industry byproducts into protein-rich ingredients.
The first breakthrough comes from researchers at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-ISMAR) and Sapienza University of Rome. Their experiments demonstrated that Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR, satellites can distinguish significant accumulations of floating plastic from the surrounding water.
