Living and Dying in 3D

Printed Guns

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 ~ It had to happen.

The incredible advances in 3D printing, and the rapidly shrinking costs, have made weapons like the Liberator pistol inevitable. We may not need to worry—yet—but it is only a matter of time before it revolutionizes many things, including crime.

3D printing is poised to be another new technology where the capabilities are increasing and becoming more widespread faster than policy can keep up. Not just guns, but many other things, at least in theory, can and will be built from this technology, whether in the privacy of your home, or, without the capital expense, at your local store. Many kinds of things have already been made. In the future, perhaps the very near future, one will be able to print not just prosaic hardware, but other weapons, chemicals, even animal or human tissue, meat, drugs (legal or not)—maybe whatever one can imagine. Forget postal regulations, export controls, anti-proliferation, regulation, or licensing which all may become quaint notions of a simpler time.

Urban Farming

Industrial Rooftop Greenhouses

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 ~ Whole Foods Markets has announced plans to erect a commercial greenhouse atop its Brooklyn store:

Today Whole Foods Market has announced Gotham Greens as its operating partner of the nation’s first commercial scale greenhouse farm integrated within a retail grocery space. The 20,000-square-foot greenhouse, currently being constructed on the roof of the forthcoming Whole Foods Market store in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is scheduled to open later this fall. Gotham Greens will grow premium quality, pesticide-free produce year round in the greenhouse for Whole Foods Market Gowanus, as well as other Whole Foods Market locations throughout New York City.

Apart from all the benefits of having a green roof, the initiative will also grow produce that requires fewer water, energy and other inputs. Transportation costs and environmental impacts will also be minimized.

It will be interesting to see how well a retailer can vertically integrate their operations in this way. Locally, a couple of startups,including Suncrest Farms and Urban Harvest, are working on similar concepts.

If this is the start of a trend, and it sure looks like one, where are all the plants going to come from? Especially for hydroponics, tissue culture provides the best answer.

Breaking the Grade Barrier

Food is Food

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 ~ Food is still nutritious even if it doesn't look like the food in a carefully staged advertisement. How picky are we as consumers?

Maybe we’d be willing to buy a slightly smaller apple that only has 37 percent red coverage instead of the requisite 40 percent needed to qualify as the “fancy” grade that stores usually buy (yes, it’s actually measured). Maybe we consumers would even consider it a score to get a bag of Pink Lady apples for just 69 cents per pound.

Since I'm a home gardener and grow (some of) my own food, I'm already less focused on impossibly picture-perfect produce anyway. When you grow your own, it's often smaller (zucchini excepted) and sometimes not as beautifully colored or proportioned. It might even have pest damage! Horrors!

But it's still tasty, nutritious, maybe even organic! If you've ever worked in or patronized a food bank, you've seen food like this all the time. And if you care about sustainability, minimizing waste, and living more closely in tune with your environment, it's easy to take that first bite.

Zero-Waste

3 Steps

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 ~ Zero-waste, the goal, the practice, of becoming landfill-free, is an objective of a growing number of organizations. Those that have either achieved zero-waste or are in the midst of a zero-waste initiative have had success with a three-pronged approach according to Ashley Halligan:

1. Setting and defining a goal. Or a series of them. Zero-waste is a great goal, but initially getting to 80% of zero-waste can be a stretch effort, significant and laudable.
2. Engage Employees. Empowering your employees produces some powerful results.
3. Audit-and Tackle-Your Waste Stream. You can't manage (and mitigate) what you can't measure.

Quoting Kirk Varga:

When approaching a zero-waste goal, it’s important to consider that all materials are recyclable or reusable in one way or another.

For organizations, indeed, for businesses of any size, reducing waste means saving money. Consider: there are costs entailed in every component or constituent part of anything one buys. Discarding a portion of that is just trashing money. Best to buy only what one actually, and in an enduring way, uses. Otherwise, "rent" the materials—deploying them usefully, but acquiring and divesting them as part of an unending loop. Not to the land-fill, but to another use.

World Food Day

The Challenge of Feeding the World

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 ~ October 16 is World Food Day, established to raise global awareness of wide-spread hunger all over the world. Many organizations are today calling attention to this most basic human right—to have enough to eat.

The Institute of Food Technologists, for example, is highlighting the importance of industrial innovation in providing solutions to global hunger:

Just as society has evolved over time, our food system has also evolved over centuries into a global system of immense size and complexity. The commitment of food science and technology professionals to advancing the science of food, ensuring a safe and abundant food supply, and contributing to healthier people everywhere is integral to that evolution. Food scientists and technologists are versatile, interdisciplinary, and collaborative practitioners in a profession at the crossroads of scientific and technological developments.

The innovative scientists and researchers at Phytelligence are part of that global solution that will provide more food, of better quality, faster, to more people.

Scavenging

E-Waste isn't Recycled

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 ~ Most people with any environmental consciousness know not to throw obsolete or nonfunctional electronics in the trash. Such e-waste ends up in landfills where, over time, they release dioxins, heavy metals and other poisons into the ground and ultimately into the water table.

Sadly, "recycling" e-waste is little better, and arguably worse.

Guiyu, China is often referred to as the “e-waste capital of the world.” The city employs over 150,000 e-waste workers that toil through 16-hour days dis-assembling old computers and recapturing whatever metals and parts they can re-use or sell. This is far from an organized operation, however. Rather than having computers neatly stacked on palettes in storage units waiting to be recycled, computer carcasses are strewn about the streets and river banks. Huge tangles of wires and cables lay on street corners. Workers, whom will usually specialize in dis-assembling specific parts, will pull parts from the various scattered piles of parts about town and begin their work right on the street.

Turbine Transport

Wind by Rail

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 ~ As wind turbines get larger so do the blades. Because they are fabricated as single pieces, their transport has become quite difficult. Rail can minimize the distance they must travel by truck, a significant challenge on most roads, which generally lack the long, sweeping curves of railbeds. So it's great to see this:

A much better use of rail capacity than the environmentally atrocious idea of transporting coal for export to China.

Getting to Zero Waste

Throw Nothing Away

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 ~ It's said one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Houston-based startup RecycleMatch seeks to not only prove that adage, but to profit from it. The company is building a cloud-based marketplace where companies with unwanted stuff can find companies with an unfilled need for that same stuff. The result? Less into landfills.

Gas Price Blame

Whose Fault Are High Gas Prices?

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 ~ Gas prices always go up in spring (why?) and this year they are rising faster and farther than ever before. Especially since it's an election year, the GOP wants to blame Obama.

Veterans

Support Our Troops Really Need

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 ~ Today is Veterans' Day, or Memorial Day, and we all (should) pause to honor those who have served our country and remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in doing so. They deserve our utmost respect, and our deepest thanks.

But they deserve much more than that.

It's easy to post a quick note on Facebook, or unfurl Old Glory over the porch, or put a bumper sticker on one's car. Those are all good gestures, but they are merely nice; they don't actually support in any meaningful way our soldiers past or current.

And they really need our support.

Cellulosic Aviation Biofuels

Record USDA Grants to UW, WSU

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 ~ The announcement of the record grants for aviation biofuel research are exciting indeed and a great coup for biofuel researchers in the Pacific Northwest.

The 5-year grants, part of the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are the largest ever from the USDA. USDA was surprised at the level of interest when the funding opportunity was announced. 63 groups expressed interest and 35 were selected to submit full proposals. Of those, 30 made application, and 8 finalists were invited to Washington to present their proposals. The 5 winners include the teams led by researchers from the UW and WSU, each of which received $40M in funding. Each team is a consortium of members; approximately 62.8% of the funding will go to land grant universities and 22.9% to industrial (business) partners, with rest divvied up among other universities, federal partners and one non-profit organization.

Programmatically, the 5 teams are all striving to develop sustainable biofuels, particularly for aviation, a pressing need also a focus of the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Northwest (SAFNW) initiative announced earlier this year. The teams have some research overlap in their proposals: 62% of the funding targets woody biomass and 25% perennial grasses, with the rest going towards sorghum and other feedstocks. None of the funded research seeks to repurpose food crops into biofuels.

Some challenges the teams will face in creating a sustainable biojet fuel:

• Building an energy industry in rural areas
• Developing viable lignin coproducts. (As the old joke has it, “You can make anything out of lignin, except money”)
• Tremendous variability in the lignocellulosic cell walls of different feedstocks (e.g. between hardwoods such as poplar, alder and the ubiquitous North American softwoods, especially the Northwest’s Douglas fir) and between the different parts of the plant: stem, bark, leaves, etc. There are many tradeoffs between ease and cost
• Cost-effective pre-treatment alternatives, including optimal chip or particle size, and the presence of dirt and other contaminants (especially from woody municipal solid waste)
• Feedstock development strategies
• Establishing viable supply chains from landowners to aviation fuel
• Determining feasible transportation logistics that optimize what is being transported, how, and how far
• Stakeholder/community/social outreach: the project is unique because of the extraordinary level of vertical integration required

Recycling the Gyres

Method Madness

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 ~ Innovative company Method made a splashy announcement last week: they've made bottles from plastic recycled from the North Pacific Gyre.

This ocean plastic covers an area the size of Texas, and is the largest of 5 such floating garbage patches, one in each of the world's large ocean gyres.

However, most of the plastic pieces are so tiny that they can barely be seen, except by marine life that mistakes the plastic for food. The ingested plastic and its constituent chemicals and contaminants then enter the food chain.

Method has done well to call attention to the problem, and being flanked by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and SBA chief Karen Mills is a nice PR coup for sure, but there's no new business that comes out of this, nor any sustained environmental cleanup, despite the presence of the two powerful agency heads.

Why?

Mightier Wind

Nanomaterials and Gigaturbines

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 ~ Manufacturers are eyeing wind turbines of 10MW and are even pondering behemoths of as much as 15MW. Such monsters wold have blades longer than football fields, requiring different material sets than are in use today.

[Marcio] Loos [a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering] went to the lab on weekends and built the world's first polyurethane blade reinforced with carbon nanotubes. He wanted to be sure the composite that was scoring best on preliminary tests could be molded into the right shape and maintain properties.

Using a small commercial blade as a template, he manufactured a 29-inch blade that is substantially lighter, more rigid and tougher.

Sounds great, but, as one person noted in the comments, a spiffy and cutting edge technology matters little unless it is scalable, has a good supply chain, and, above, all, is cost-competitive. Oh, and how will they get it from the factory to the site?

Cleantech Needs Recycling

Resource Extraction Has Limits

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~ Our modern gadgets need many different kinds of resource inputs, including dozens of rare and unusual elements:

Try as we might, it's impossible to fashion wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles out of thin air. These technologies are complex, and many different materials go into their production. The problem is, a lot of the necessary metals aren't recycled at the end of their lives--and that could lead to shortages in the future, putting the entire clean technology sector at risk.

The news comes from a new UN report, which explains that under one-third of 60 recyclable metals have an end-of-life recycling rate above 50%. And 34 elements--many of which are crucial for clean technology--have recycling rates of less than 1%. This may not seem like a big deal now, but mined metals are a limited resource. As these materials become more scarce, we will see increases in land disruption, water impacts, energy use, and of course, cost.

The article makes a common mistake of referring to industrial metals (here: selenium and tellurium) as rare earths, which they are not. Rare earth elements are the lanthanides, although many other elements are, or will be, experiencing similar supply chain pressures. Nonetheless, the core point remains valid: in a world of ramping demand for products that consume finite resources, recycling is neceesary for sustained production.