[LINK] "Milkweed touted as oil-spill super-sucker — with butterfly benefits"

[rfmcdonald]

I saw the Margo McDiarmid news story last night on the CBC that inspired this article. The idea of using the fluff of milkweed to deal with oil spills, in the process producing a plant vital for butterflies, feels to me like the work of a quiet genius. Well done, indeed!

Franç​ois Simard, creator of Protec-Style, has a contract with Parks Canada to supply national parks with oil-spill kits. The kits come with various sizes of absorbent tubes filled with milkweed fibre.

Simard says milkweed has a unique ability to repel water, which makes it perfect for oil spills on land or water.

"You can leave an absorbent [milkweed] sock in water and it will only absorb the oil. It's very unique in nature to have fibres like that," said Simard in an interview at his factory in Granby, Que.

[. . .]

The white fibres that you can often see floating in the fall breeze are light and hollow and able to absorb four times more oil than polypropylene, the artificial product now used to clean up spills.

Simard has set up a co-operative of 20 farmers in Quebec to grow 325 hectares of milkweed. He says there are another 35 growers on a waiting list.