Laissez-les Bons Temps Rouler, Y’all!

(Photo by Doug MacCash, NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune

I didn’t get to Louisiana to celebrate Mardi Gras this year, but my sister shared with me some excellent news that merges the Fat Tuesday celebration with sustainability! It seems a team of students at my alma mater, LSU, led by Professor Naohiro Kato, have improved on their previously developed biodegradable Mardi Gras beads.

If you’ve ever been to the celebration in New Orleans (or any other city that hosts a parade), you know that millions of plastic beads are thrown to excited parade-goers in a spectacular frenzy before Lent begins. Those beads end up collecting in people’s homes (like mine), or left on the ground to end up clogging storm drains, or being thrown away and trucked to landfills. Estimates put the amount of Mardi Gras beads wasted each year at over 1000 tons!

But the brilliant team of young inventors at LSU took their biodegradable bead design from a few years ago to the next level last year, developing a new bead chain with tiny globes that hold okra seeds! So even if the beads are left on the ground, or if they’re cultivated in someone’s backyard or compost pile, they can yield a key ingredient for gumbo! These beads were tossed from a few floats in New Orleans and in my hometown of Baton Rouge this year, and here’s hoping we’ll see more of them every year from now on. For more details, check out this article on nola.com.

Like I keep telling y’all, we’re all in this together!

(PS: Geaux Tigers!)