Skeptics of green innovation (and, yeah, somehow there still are a few of those) often point to the bottom line as a reason for questioning sustainability’s ‘bang for the buck.’ For those people, we present the following example; researchers in Scotland have engineered bacteria to detect land mines.
Data suggests that 20,000 people are killed each year by land mines, scattered in over 87 countries worldwide. Securing these land mines is a dangerous and painstaking process, but more dangerous is the fact that many of them remain hidden. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are modifying strains of bacteria that can detect the presence of explosives.
The bacteria glows green- so, this really is ‘green innovation’- in the presence of explosives, easing detection. The research team states that after a few hours of spraying affected fields, the bacteria starts to glow showing the presence of explosives.
[Source:Inhabitat]
