Monday, March 8, 2021

Green materials for a greener world: Athanassia Athanassiou at TEDxRoma



Ah, TED in Rome...discussions of pizza and gelato, gladiators and forums, Catholicism and plastics...

You know, plastics. The worst thing that we've done for our environment and that we keep using more of every day.

This video opens with an enumeration of the environmental horrors of plastics - volatile gas releases, effects on our hormones, increasing petroleum needs, oil spills and seeps, toxic discharges into the environment - and shifts to alternate options to our uses of polymers.

The speaker, Athanassia Athanassiou (seriously, that's what the title says), illustrates some of the polymer replacements or adaptations that her research group is working on to either modify polymers to actually help the environment or to replace the polymers with other materials.

The video is more a survey of some research than it is an inspirational TED talk. Neat ideas, though.

(As an aside, why would the foreign TEDx conferences be presenting in English? None of the TEDx conferences in America are in foreign languages. Just wondering...)

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