Environmental + Sustainability
The Kids are Alright: Kennesha Garg and her Mangrove-Inspired Solution for a Greener Future
By Luke Carothers
Kennesha Garg is a high school senior in the San Francisco Bay Area who is demonstrating an extraordinary passion for researching the human impact on ecosystems and advocating for climate policies. Kennesha has lived in both the United States and India, giving her a unique perspective on how different countries tackle climate problems in different ways. With this unique perspective comes immense anxiety, Kennesha says, which “often led to nightmares and dire thoughts.” Rather than living in continued fear of this understanding, she recognized from an early age that she had the power to do something about these issues. Looking for somewhere to start affecting change, Kennesha quickly identified landfills as an area she could make a significant contribution. In 2017, methane emissions from landfills represented 17 percent of total emissions in the United States. This large contribution from landfills represents a significant hurdle in the push for a greener future. Kennesha describes the problem with landfills as stemming from waste buried underground where there is no oxygen present. A major byproduct of waste decomposing under a lack of oxygen is the production of methane gas. Methane is a particularly harmful greenhouse gas as it is around 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. In current landfill design, wells and pipes are installed horizontally and vertically to extract methane via motors. Pointing to the large percentage of methane emissions in the United States, Kennesha describes current landfill architecture as “not efficient at all.” She also adds that these poorly designed landfills, beyond having a significant impact on climate change, also cause many other problems for surrounding neighborhoods and wildlife. Inefficient gas collection
systems allow gasses to accumulate and remain trapped inside landfills, which can cause internal temperatures to rise. As they do, fires and explosions are more likely to happen. Furthermore, Kennesha points out that “particular matter and stench sourcing from landfills can also lead to health problems–such as asthma, cancer, and birth defects–in neighboring communities” as well as disrupting wildlife. While there has been significant progress made in recent years regarding protecting the environment from landfills, Kennesha isn’t satisfied, believing there is still a long way to go to ensuring the ultimate goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and no disturbances to communities. Thinking about these issues and the path to achieving these ultimate goals, Kennesha reflected on her time spent in India as a child where she first saw Pichavaram Mangroves for the first time. She was captivated by their sight–tracing the sight of their “majestic, spread-out roots,” and held a sense of fascination and mystery with their shape. Years later, after identifying landfills as a problem to solve, Kennesha came across the concept of biomimicry, which she explains as mimicking models from nature to address our problems. After a little time applying this concept with other organisms to landfills, she soon remembered her fascination with mangrove trees and their roots. Kennesha became curious about how mangroves functioned and thrived in wetlands. Mangroves in wetlands often have roots underwater, which are susceptible to drying out because of a lack of oxygen. To overcome this, mangrove roots have developed a pressurized tissue, called aerenchyma, that is used to transfer oxygen from the leaves to the roots. Discovering this system allowed Kennesha to see the parallels
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csengineermag.com
September 2023
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