Bestcare - Spirulina - Supporting the Environment
There is a popular myth about Spirulina helping to reverse the green-house effect by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing abundant oxygen. Spirulina does remove and store carbon dioxide and does produce oxygen. Unfortunately, the carbon dioxide is released when we eat and digest the algae. We breathe in oxygen to digest the algae and then breathe out the carbon dioxide (which was incorporated in the algae), and it returns to the atmosphere.
Spirulina may not be able to save our planet, but we can. As consumers, we are faced with choices that affect the environment every day. Choosing pesticide and herbicide-free food is one way of ensuring that these harmful chemicals do not enter the environment or our bodies. We can also carefully select foods and other products on the basis of packaging, eschewing the excessive use of plastic and other hard-to-recycle materials. Glass has significant environmental benefits over plastic.
First, the raw materials of glass are primarily sand and limestone, whereas the raw materials of plastic are petrochemicals. Petrochemicals originate in oil-producing areas such as Iraq and Alaska – two areas that have been devastated as a consequence of oil. The production of plastics involves the use of solvent chemistry, which results in considerably more air pollution than that created by glass production. Finally, plastic is difficult to recycle. Many areas still do not offer recycling of plastic, and those that do struggle with the many different types and the difficulty of ship-ping such bulky materials. Glass is being readily accepted as a recycled material all over the nation – it is recycled at about ten times the rate of plastic. Also, glass is an excellent barrier to oxygen and moisture and imparts no residues to the product.
Recycling glass means using up fewer natural resources, reducing air and water pollution, and saving energy in the manufacturing process.
Extract from: SPIRULINA: Nature’s Superfood By Kelly Moorhead and Bob Capelli with Dr. Gerald R. Cysewski