Isha Marla is a 14-year-old with a love for science who recently finished her last year at Tumwater Middle School in the Beaverton School District.
She is also just one of 10 students in the nation, and the only one from Oregon, who made it to the finalist round of a national science competition sponsored by Discovery Education and 3M, which manufactures a vast array of products, from Post-It Notes to stethoscopes.
The 3M Young Scientist Challenge is open to middle school students who for this year’s competition submitted a short video to describe their scientific solution to a real-world problem.
Marla’s entry focuses on using a material she made from seaweed and other ingredients to produce an environmentally sustainable fabric for making clothes.
Her proposal aims to counter the phenomenon of fast fashion associated with brands like Shein, H&M and Uniqlo that are popular with consumers eager to buy the latest fashion trends at low prices.
But chasing those trends at bargain prices can take a heavy environmental toll, with nearly two-thirds of discarded clothes ending up in a landfill, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Marla joins us for more details about her entry and chance to win a cash prize and the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist” this fall.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Isha Marla is a 14-year-old with a love for science who recently finished her last year at Tumwater Middle School in Beaverton. She is also just one of 10 students in the country, and the only one from Oregon, who made it to the final round of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Entrants had to come up with a scientific solution to a real world problem. Isha focused on fast fashion, the trend of super cheap clothing that’s often only worn for a short time before it ends up in a landfill. Her solution was to create a new fabric made partly from seaweed.
Isha Marla joins me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Isha Marla: Thank you so much. Nice to meet you.
Miller: How did you choose fabric as your project?
Marla: Yes, of course. So, a little while ago, I came across this article from the National Library of Medicine where I found that 92 million tons of fast fashion textile waste just heads to landfills every single year. Only 1% is actually recycled, which was shocking to me. And then when I looked around in my own community, I found that this is not just a problem on a global scale, it’s also a problem in the local community, with easily accessible fast fashion websites. Like you can just open up your computer and start surfing, and there you are on a fast fashion website, with so many different clothes that they have to offer.
So from there, I thought, this is a problem that really needs to be solved, because I can see it in my own community as well as it could be applied on a global scale. And that’s where I kind of came up with the idea of fast fashion. Then I came across biofabrics as a sustainable alternative to fast fashion, and that’s really where this whole thing started.
Miller: Why seaweed?
Marla: So, Alginate-based biofabrics are essentially sustainable textiles that are made from alginate, which is a natural polysaccharide extracted from brown seaweed. Alginate-based biofabrics is a pretty well researched area. And once I heard of that, I was trying to come up with different materials that I could bring together to really get us to be able to mimic that fabric shape that we could see on the clothes that we’re wearing right now.
That’s when I had a little bit of an idea. I remember the idea of mixing together sodium alginate and calcium chloride to come together in a fabric-like material. I’d come up with this idea from actually the culinary field, where you bring those two materials together in esterification processes that allow us to harden the material from the outside. And that’s where I was able to come to my final idea of creating a biofabric with sodium alginate, calcium chloride, glycerine and water. And the key challenges of my project was to optimize the composition of those materials as they form into the fabric to most be able to mimic the fabrics that we wear.
Miller: Are any companies currently making anything like this? You said that using this alginate, there’s been a lot of research already into that. Is there a product on the market that is sort of like this, currently?
Marla: Well, sustainable textiles, as I was talking about before, it’s a really huge problem everywhere. So creating sustainable alternatives is a widely researched field. There have been previous fabrics made with hemp and bamboo, and more like that. Alginate-based biofabrics is also a pretty well researched field. So the novelty in my project was bringing together my specific materials of sodium alginate, calcium chloride, glycerin and water, and bringing them together to apply them to the textile industry specifically.
Miller: What is the fabric that you came up with? What does it feel like? What does it look like?
Marla: It feels a lot like the fabric that we wear today, but it could feel like a lot of different things, because what I’ve been trying to work on is applying my fabric beyond just fashion and into other applications of fabric. So, in terms of looks and feels, what I aimed for was trying to mimic the mechanical properties, the fabrics that we wear.
Miller: … Like cotton. I mean, we wear a lot of different things, but cotton is common, so are all kinds of synthetics.
Marla: Yeah, so cotton was kind of the idea. And I’ve also been recently trying to put together something that’s like wool, to be able to replace more of the fabrics that we wear today to make a bigger environmental impact. But when I was creating my fabrics, my goal was to be able to create the same strength when we pull apart the fabric, match what happens, like how folds and twists affect the integrity of the fabric, and also just making sure they’re really durable.
And one of the ways that I actually did that is, after coming to the fabric that I was going to be testing, I tested it on different conditions that are like what our clothes go through pretty much every day. I sewed my fabric. I stained it with ketchup. I washed it in water and I ironed the fabric as well. And I found that my alginaFAB was able to withstand all of those conditions, which was super exciting.
Miller: You said you can wash it in water. Could you put it in a washing machine?
Marla: Well, I would say that my fabrics are probably going to be on the hand-wash side of things. You can definitely wash them with water and soap, but I think the dishwasher would be a nice new challenge for me.
Miller: And what is your idea for how this fabric would spend the end of its life, after it’s been worn? Let’s say it goes to a landfill. What do you think should happen to it?
Marla: One of the really big pros in my fabric is that it’s biodegradable, unlike a lot of the synthetic fibers that we wear. So it can actually be degraded in two different ways. One way is by submerging it in a citrate-based solvent. I actually tested that. By submerging it in a specific solvent, it would be able to almost fully break down over the course of about two months.
The other way is by burying it deep in soil and for it to react with soil enzymes. I’ve also been working on testing that lately with burying some of my fabrics in soil.
Miller: It’s the idea that this is more sustainable because it’s more sustainable to gather or grow brown seaweed than it is to grow cotton? How is it that this is, in the end, a more sustainable fabric?
Marla: In terms of the fabrics that we wear today, they can usually be split into synthetic fibers, which are man-made and usually not biodegradable at all, which would obviously mean that my alginaFAB would be better than those in terms of an environmental standpoint.
But on the other side of things, where we have our natural fibers like cotton and wool that come from plants and animals, they require a lot of natural resources to be able to produce, like excessive amounts of water. But with seaweed, we actually have seaweed surpluses right now. We have a lot of seaweed that’s currently being grown and it’s like a ubiquitous resource, which means that it would be easier to gather and grow.
Miller: Fast fashion has always struck me as a confluence of more than one issue. There is the environmental side you’re talking about, but then there’s also this superhuman social sciences idea of so many of us now seeing the clothing we wear as so temporary, in a way that’s pretty unprecedented in human history. People used to have their one dress that they’d wear for a year, say, and now we can have a shirt, have it for two weeks, then throw it out and get a new one for $2 because it’s made so cheaply in some factory so far away.
I’m curious how you think about that second piece of this. I mean, obviously your project is about the materials science of the fabric, but what about the psychology of just treating our stuff as disposable?
Marla: I think that one way that projects like mine, of creating these sustainable alternatives, could also tackle that problem is because, the reason a lot of people buy fast fashion clothing is because they don’t really know what happens when it goes into the landfill. They don’t know what happens after that process.
So by creating sustainable alternatives, not only does it target the environmental aspect, it can also raise awareness that we need to be making sustainable alternatives to these current textiles that we’re using. Maybe there’s something wrong with them and maybe we should either try to stay away from buying off of fast fashion websites or we should try to find a way to make our clothes more long-lasting.
Miller: What have you learned yourself from taking part in this competition?
Marla: This competition has been really exciting for me and one of the reasons why I entered it was also just to be able to share my project on a larger scale. But after being chosen as one of the top 10 finalists, I’ve been learning so much, both from my super talented peers, like the other nine people across the nation who have such great ideas – I’ve been learning about their projects in this process – and also I’ve been matched with a 3M scientist mentor. We’ve been working together to expand and delve deeper into my project, and also to work up to the final presentation, which is going to be happening in October. I’ve been learning so much about the industry working with him as well.
Miller: What is going to happen in October?
Marla: On October 13 and 14, in Minnesota, at 3M headquarters, we’re going to be having the final event. At the final event, all the 10 finalists are going to participate in some hands-on challenges using lots of 3M materials. All of us are going to have final presentations for a panel of judges where we’re asked lots of questions and we get to show off what we’ve been working on over the full summer. Based on that, they choose America’s next top young scientist, which is super exciting.
Miller: Do you have any idea what you’d like to do for a career?
Marla: Yes. Well, it keeps changing, like my career ideas has been changing over the years. But right now, I’m really interested in medicine and I definitely want to go into a STEM field. I’m very interested in medicine and surgery, especially heart surgery. Because I remember, it would have been in about fifth or sixth grade, I put together this whole game of the human body where you travel through the human body. For each system, there would be a different game that you’d have to play to learn about the system. And I just remember the heart being so, so fascinating, which is why .. and also surgery is just so important and it’s just such a noble profession.
Miller: Isha, congratulations and thanks so much.
Marla: Thank you.
Miller: Isha Marla is a 14-year-old. She’s going to be a freshman at Jesuit High School in the fall. She is one of the 10 finalists around the country in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge.
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