I’ve just discovered this bit of inanity, a month or so late. Queen’s University Belfast has a slice of a €1 million study known as the Badana project, to “develop new procedures to incorporate by-products from banana plantations in the Canary Islands into the production of rotationally moulded plastics”. Why? Because:
Once the fruit has been harvested, the rest of the banana plant goes to waste. An estimated 25,000 tonnes of this natural fibre is dumped in ravines around the Canaries every year.
How, I wonder, do they maintain the organic content of the soil in which those bananas grow? No chance of recycling all that waste fibre, is there?
Ireland’s Daily Star newspaper headlined the story “Boffins go bananas”. I’d have preferred “Boffins are bananas.”