Last Straw
Responsible Innovation Projects
Over the last few decades, the alarming rate at which the bee population has diminished has been widely reported. However, there’s another problem that could help save the bees from extinction: straw pollution. Each plastic straw takes up to 200 years to biodegrade, causing irreparable damage to our ecosystems. Two threads to our survival that have a shared solution. Idea: We realized that the diameter of the most commonly used straw is the same size as honeycomb cells, home and breeding ground of the most important bee species for pollination: the apis mellifera. So, with the counseling of the Veterinary and Zoology Faculty of Mexico’s National University (UNAM), we designed a beehive with honeycombs made from reused straws. 200 reused straws = 3 thousand bees. It’s fabricated by CNC laser cut on MDF (vegetal compacted cardboard from wood ́s waste), and the blueprints are available as “open source”, so it can be replicated anywhere in the world.