15 years ago, a forest engineer decided to grow sponges in Galicia. The war against plastic has ended up giving him right
In the mid -90s, Juan Carlos Mascato finished studying forest sciences in Hamburg and enrolled in a company in the area. He was lucky: of all the things that company could have needed, he needed someone to speak Spanish, someone to send to Paraguay. It was then that he met the Lugfa and began his crusade against the plastic. Today is the largest producer in Europe in the sponges and natural scourers. And all from a small town in Pontevedra. What is the LUFFA? The LUFFAS are a genus of plants slightly related to pumpkins, cucumbers and melons. In fact, in Southeast Asia is a Very popular food as long as they are collected soon. Otherwise it becomes too fibrous to be consumed. So fibrous that, duly processed, they can be used as exfoliating sponges. For centuries, this type of vegetables (or some of its variants) were widely used and were among the crops of any orchard that would be precious. But the irruption of plastic from the 40s sent them to the drawer of history. Until now what THE WAR OF THE PLASTICS They have returned them to the first line. And what does the European Luffa giant do in Caldas de Reis? It is an excellent question. As Silvia Rodríguez explained in the countrythe clearest reason is that the Mascato family (of German mother, but Father Gallego) had a farm available in a town with a very particular climate that made it a good candidate to try subtropical crops: Caldas. Chance does not end there, of course. Because the processing of the LUFFA includes a fermentation phase in which the hot springs of the Gallego municipality fit as a ring to the finger. No one is a prophet in their land … And in this case it doesn’t happen either. Because the truth is that Iberian vegetable sponges It is little known here in the country. Of the 200,000 sponges that manufacture a year, only 10% stay in Spain. The rest goes to countries such as Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Norwegian or East next … Right now, the company works on an online marketing project in Germany and expanding its productive infrastructure to the US. What sponges can teach us. Because although the story is already very interesting, there is something that really crucial: that for decades we have despised many traditional solutions simply because they were. And that is a mistake. This was made clear in 2015 Karolinska Institute of Stockholm when granted your youyou The Nobel Prize in Medicine. Many interpreted him as a prize for traditional Chinese medicine, but it was not accurate: your feat was incredible. Since 1965, your youyou It was analyzing thoroughly Each and every one of the remedies that the millenary Chinese civilization had been selecting. And, indeed, most pure superstition, pseudoscience and placebo. However, he found the Artemisininea revolutionary treatment against malaria. Rethink the past. This is an example of the book that if we approach us with an open (but rigorous) look at the technological history of humanity, we can find really creative solutions to the problems of our day to day. In the middle of a world invaded by plastics, natural sponges are an excellent example. Image | Jan Helbrant | Tony Buser In Xataka | How an idea can model societies with hundreds of millions of people almost 1000 years later: Schultz’s hypothesis
