Wednesday, October 27. 2010Bioplastic Made from Poop, for a Profit!Via GOOD ----- by Alex Goldmark
Sometimes you can take two problems, add them together, and get a win-win solution. In this case, here are the two problems: First, as cities expand we create more waste and more sewage, and we don’t have any really good plan for it. And second, we keep making more and more plastic that never goes away, filling landfills or swimming in oceanic garbage patches. So, what’s the natural solution? Why not turn the poop into plastic that biodegrades? Simple, right? Actually, yes. It turns out it is. Ryan Smith is CTO of Micromidas, and he turns poop into plastic for a living. “We take raw sewage from a waste water treatment plant and we convert it to biodegradable plastic.” He says it is “just a series of tanks, nothing complicated or fancy about it. Nothing that is technically too difficult.” That’s because he gets bacteria to do the hard work for him, and that’s the novelty of his product. Finding the bacteria, and mixing them up into the right combination, that’s a different story. Right now, most plastic comes from petroleum. So as you tear open that new SD card from its packaging, or toss out the packing foam from your last Amazon order, you are, in essence consuming oil. There are various sugar- or corn-based bioplastics on the market already. (You can even follow this You Tube video and try to make your own.) These starch-based plastics solve the problem of living forever in a landfill or garbage patch, but if produced at the volume of petro-plastic, they would significantly drive up the price of corn or sugarcane. So a better solution, and the innovation here, is that Micromidas’ bioplastic adds sewage treatment to the enviro-benefits, and leaves corn out of the mix. It just so happens that’s also good for the bottom line. (Dane Anderson Micromidas Engineer at work) Here’s how it works, as explained by Smith. They take sewage and feed it to bacteria. “The bacteria store the organics as a bio-polymer … little plastic granules, or inclusions, inside their bodies … they are creating it.” Just like when we eat sugar and, through a series of metabolic processes, turn that into a fat, those little micro-buggers turn sewage into plastic in their bodies. Then Micromidas uses a proprietary process that "disrupts" the cells and takes the plastic out. After they get it all cleaned up, the end product is a high-value, low-cost plastic resin ready to be sold off, and it biodegrades in under 18 months once disposed of. Lest you go try this at home, the bacteria are no ordinary bottom-of-your-tub household contagions. Ryan Smith says, “we actually have bug hunters, or ecological microbiologists. They actually go out into nature, they grab a soil sample, a sample of pond water, a sample of waste water” and then through a series of screening mechanisms they pick out just the right microbes that are particularly good at consuming sewage and making bio-plastic. The company then breeds and combines the best of these and now has a library of 50-60 bacteria with different traits for different kinds of sewage chomping and plastic pooping depending on the needs of the “feed source.” Yes, that’s another way of saying, there is a secret formula of bacteria that eat poop and poop plastic, and it varies depending on the sewage you want to feed them—that’s the business in a nutshell. Technically speaking, what the bacteria create inside their bodies is a resin powder. Its not a final product by a long shot. Micromidas then has to sell that to a plastics processor. Smith concedes, “we are not currently at a point where we know for certain what application makes the most sense.” Over the past couple months they have developed enough of the plastic resin to send to testing labs to explore options. Possible final products currently being prototyped and tested could be foams, fibers, films, injection molds and lots of other fancy words that mean plastic packaging that doesn’t get anywhere near food. “Something you don’t eat with, but is a packaging material, and ecologically beneficial,” Smith says. If he can prove his resin does the job, the economics are in his favor. For most plastics, the “feed stock” is about 50 percent of the production cost, whether it's petroleum or bioplastic, but in this case Micromidas actually gets paid to take the sewage off the hands of local processing plants. That’s starting production with a negative unit cost. Not a bad sign for sustainability. Right now they are still paying for the heavy load of research, testing, and other start-up costs, but Smith says he’s expecting to make his bioplastic at competitive market prices for other disposable plastics when they finalize the formula. They plan to build out their operation to a commercial scale (right now its prototype scale) within the next six to twelve months he says. Then the money, and the poop will roll in. Images courtesy of Micromidas.
The new NorthVia Mammoth ----- by rholmes
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ’services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change” — are fueling both international involvement and urban growth in the Arctic:
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.
Personal comment:
Of course, this makes me think of the project we've done last summer, Arctic Opening. The arctic region will certainly be the area where the fate of all "sustainable" approaches will finally be decided... And for my part, I'm not very optimistic about it unfortunately.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Sustainability, Territory
at
10:32
Defined tags for this entry: ecology, energy, globalization, interferences, sustainability, territory
Tuesday, October 19. 2010Vertical Farming: New Book OutVia WorldChanging ----- Dr. Dickson Despommier, a former professor at Columbia University and champion of vertical farming, has released a new book on The Vertical Farm Project. The book puts forth his argument about the future of urban agriculture through vertical farms. Worldchanging has covered the debate over vertical farms quite a bit (see the list at the end of this post for links), and the idea is certainly a controversial one. I've not yet read the book, but it would be interesting to know if Despommier addresses some of the challenges to the concept pointed out by others, such as the need for a proven business model for wide-scale application, and how vertical farms can grow food without herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers and operate in a low-carbon way despite high energy needs.
LA Half-Way House Starts Vertical Farm | Sarah Kuck, 25 Aug 08 Since moving into the Los Angles half-way house two years ago, residents of the Rainbow Apartments have been devising a plan to start their own urban garden. After a few trials and errors, the novice gardeners have now succeeded in creating a 34-foot-long plot bursting with strawberries, tomatoes, basil and other herbs and vegetables, which grow vertically against their cinder block building. ¶ In addition to providing them with fresh, nutritious food, the residents have found that the garden has given them a way to connect with each other and build a supportive community... Cities are for People: The Limits of Localism | Adam Stein, 8 Aug 08 Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for "vertical farms," stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would -- theoretically -- supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists' conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai. ¶ The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public (including the editors at Worldchanging), who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that. ¶ Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable. ¶ Perhaps those costs pencil out (although they almost certainly do not), but the plausibility of the idea itself is in some ways beside the point. Whatever the merits of vertical farms, the enthusiasm with which this idea has been received suggests that we're becoming mightily reductive in the way that we think about sustainability... Rewilding Canada | Karl Schroeder, 01 Jul 2007 ...to focus on just one technology, let's look at the potential impact of vertical farming. ¶ There's a great site introducing the concept called, logically enough, the vertical farm project. This site will give you an extensive introduction to the idea of doing intensive hydroponics agriculture in urban hi-rises, and it includes a lot of architectural plans, systems analyses and hard numbers. Cost is somewhat skirted-around, but doesn't appear to be prohibitive when you factor in the fertilizer, pesticide, transportation and storage costs of our current mode of production. ¶ It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now. ¶ So, let's do the math... More Infrastructural Greening | Sarah Rich, 9 Apr 07 It's hard to tire of projects that involve wallpapering, paneling, and roofing urban structures with plant life. Though it's becoming a more common design approach for enhancing air quality, catching runoff, highlighting the "green" aspects of a building, and sometimes even providing food, it always has an unexpected effect, accustomed as we are to surfaces made with impermeable and dull materials...[the concept of vertical farming] had a recent update in New York Magazine.Since we discussed the concept, developed by Dickson Despommier, who teaches environmental science and microbiology at Columbia, a whole lot more people are on board with the climate change issue. So his proposal to put agriculture into skyscrapers and reallocate land to forests in the interested of sequestering carbon and slowing global warming now has the attention of more than just design junkies and eco-imagineers. It's become an attractive possibility to venture capitalists from all over the world. The idea factors in not only the climate aspect, but also impending population explosions, looking at taking food cultivation upwards instead of outwards as it grows to accommodate greater numbers of people . Vertical Farming | Alex Steffen, 26 Jun 05 On an urban planet, closing urban resource and energy loops -- creating zero-waste systems for meeting the needs of people who live in highly dense cities -- floats in front of us, grail-like, as a goal. ¶ No one quite knows how to get it done, yet. But more and more interesting pieces of the puzzle are piling up, like smart places, smart grids and product service systems...Here's another piece of the puzzle -- vertical farming:...it's a provocative idea, and might fit together with some of the innovations discussed above in novel and worldchanging ways.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Sustainability, Territory
at
13:27
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, books, density, ecology, farming, sustainability, territory
Tuesday, October 05. 2010If Genetically Modified Trees Could Help Stop Climate Change Would You Support Them?Via TreeHugger -----
Some new research in Bioscience outlines different ways in which genetically modifying trees and plants to help them increase their carbon sequestration potential to fight climate change--we're talking billions of tons of carbon a year here--immediately raises the question of support for them. If GM trees could really help stop climate change, would that make you any more likely to support them? The paper Photosequestration: Carbon Biosequestration by Plants and Prospects of Genetic Engineering [PDF], goes through a number of ways in which trees and plants act as carbon sinks (through biomass, in soil, biochar, use in wood products, bioenergy crops) and examines ways in which genetic modification could boost this: Enhancing photosynthesis, increasing the carbon allocation to roots, improving tolerance to environmental stresses such as salinization and drought conditions, and improving biomass quality in bioenergy crops. It's all interesting from a technological point of view and I encourage those interested to dig into the original report for more info. But what's the theoretical payoff of using GM technology along these lines? The report authors show that maximizing photosynthesis could lead to a 50% increase in productivity, calculating that on land currently under cultivation this could boost carbon storage by 2-3 gigatons annually. GM tweaking of other aspects of carbon storage could produce an additional 6-8 gigatons of storage. Now that's by no means an insignificant amount of increase, but it's also less than one-third of total carbon emissions caused by human activity. And the researchers specifically note that this is just one of many policy and technological tools available to increase carbon sequestration in natural vegetation and crops (AIBS BioScience). Considering that, would you back using GM plants in this manner? Obviously some of the same issues that dog other GM crops would still be in play: Health issues, cross contamination with non-GM plants, and (the bigger issue to me) continued consolidation of corporate control over essential elements of life. What do TreeHugger readers think? Monday, October 04. 2010Your Next Volvo May Be Made out of BatteriesVia GOOD -----
Volvo might have a solution. The Swedish car company recently announced that it has been working with Imperial College in London to develop a "composite blend of carbon fibers and polymer resin" that can serve as a car's body panels while also functioning as a battery, storing and releasing energy. Future Volvos could be literally made out of batteries. The company's press release candidly admits that "at the moment this is just a fascinating idea," but it does add that "tests are currently under way to see if the vision can be transformed into reality." If it can, electric cars might get a whole lot cheaper, and the same material could be used to shrink the size of anything that requires a battery: think cell phones and laptops.
(Page 1 of 1, totaling 5 entries)
|
fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
QuicksearchCategoriesCalendar
Syndicate This BlogArchivesBlog Administration |