From a problem to a new material

This lesson asks you to explain how an environmental challenge has led to an advance in science or technology. The museum offers one example, a bag made from jute offered as an alternative to polythene bags; your class adds the other examples the curriculum names and its own. ¹

Trace three steps: the problem named, the new material or method, and what the record says it does. Notice what the record does not say about how well it worked.

Read the description of the invention as English Wikipedia gives it in the record of Mubarak Ahmad Khan. The Sonali Bag is a cellulose-based biodegradable bioplastic bag that decomposes in soil within three to four months and dissolves in water, named by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2017 and offered as a practical alternative to polluting polythene bags ². The article says Khan is known for his work on sustainable materials, and his other inventions include Jutin (2009), a lightweight, strong corrugated sheet of jute and polymer for low-cost housing ². This is a description carried by the article, not the result of a test made by the museum.

The record gives no statement by Khan of why he developed this bag, and it supplies no motive for him. What it gives is the problem named, polluting polythene bags, and the bag offered as an alternative to them ². It also gives where he worked: at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission from 1984, and since 2017 as scientific adviser to the Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation ^{2 3}. It reports that the research database Scopus considers him the leading scientist in the study of jute worldwide ^{2 3}. These are reports of a problem and a place, not of a motive.

Everything above comes from one English Wikipedia article and from Wikidata ^{2 3}. The record says revisions of the article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact. It lists the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences Gold Medal with the note "2010 in the English article's list" ². No article read for the record gives Khan a birth date; the year 1958 in the museum's data is carried from Wikidata alone, at year precision ^{2 3}. The record carries what the article says of the bag; it carries no test of how fast it decomposes, no sales figure and no comparison with polythene.

The record reports the article's statement that the bag decomposes in soil within three to four months ². Which would you trust more for that statement, the sentence in an encyclopaedia article or a laboratory report written by your own class, and why? Answer the strongest objection to your answer, that the article may rest on a real study: why does your answer still stand?

• Mubarak Ahmad Khan: his inventions, education and awards as the article gives them.
• Rizwana Hasan: her court cases over the improper use of polythene and other issues.

Read the record on Mubarak Ahmad Khan. In three lines, write the problem, the invention and what the record says about it.