The Sixth Wave

A circular economy

admin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:34:03 +0000

Is prosperity dependent on resource consumption? Two separate reports are saying no, and instead proposing a new model of industrial organisation that decouples economic growth from resource consumption, and which has the potential to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.

‘A Global Redesign: Shaping the Circular Economy‘ – a report from UK think tank Chatham House suggests that this approach has the potential to deliver transformative change that brings with it significant business opportunities.

“A ‘circular economy’ (CE) is an approach that would transform the function of resources in the economy,” the report’s website states. “Waste from factories would become a valuable input to another process – and products could be repaired, reused or upgraded instead of thrown away.” Read more here.

A second report, commissioned by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and titled ‘Towards the Circular Economy‘, suggests that a shift to a circular economy could represent annual net material costs savings of up to US$ 630 billion, and that’s just in a subset of EU manufacturing sectors.

According to this report, a circular economy is, “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design”, and whose primary aim is to ‘design out’ waste.

“Waste does not exist—products are designed and optimised for a cycle of disassembly and reuse,” the report states. Read more here.

Desertec takes first steps

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:42:33 +0000

The Guardian: The first phase of the ambitious ‘Desertec’ project, which aims to generate enough solar and wind energy from the deserts of North Africa to meet 15% of Europe’s energy needs, is set to get underway early next year with construction of a 50MW solar farm in the deserts of Morocco.

Desertec is a largely German-led initiative, backed by some of the world’s largest blue chip companies, that hopes to build a vast network of solar and wind farms in North Africa, connected to electricity consumers in that region and across Europe by a special network of high-voltage, direct-current transmission cables to cut down transmission losses.

The cost of the project has been put at around estimated at €400bn (£342bn). Read more.

Matching waste to want

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:56:19 +0000

Fast Co. Design: Companies spend a fortune sending waste materials to landfill – an estimated US$22 billion per year according to the US EPA – but a new endeavour aims to act as an online go-between, matching businesses creating waste streams with businesses who wanted to reuse materials.

RecycleMatch entrepreneurs Brooke Betts Farrell and Chad Farrell were inspired by IBM’s decision tosell the silicon wafers used to make its computer chips to the solar energy industry, which saved IBM around US$1.5 million in the first year.

The site acts a bit like a dating agency, carefully vetting companies to ensure that the waste they want to dispose of does have value. It is free to list on the site and once a match is made, business pay a one-off matching fee of $1500 to RecycleMatch, plus a fee of $10 per ton of waste. The idea is to deter householders from using the site to dispose of household waste, but the per ton fee is still far cheaper than the typical landfill disposal fees.

RecycleMatch finds users for a range of waste, including concrete, textiles and even food waste, which often goes to zoos. Read more.

Change fonts, save ink

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 06:09:15 +0000

The Economist: Saving money on office supplies such as toner and ink could be as simple as changing fonts, The Economist reports.

The difference in ink usage between Arial and Century Gothic fonts might seem insignificant to the naked eye, but a 2009 study found that switching from the heavier Arial to thinner-lined Century Gothic could save businesses as much as $80 per printer per year. For the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, which recently implemented just such a change, this could translate to savings of around $10,000 per year.

Dutch company Ecofont has taken this one step further, creating a new font called Vera Sans – a version of a commonly used font in which the individual figures are riddled with tiny holes. Ecofont’s software even lets users adapt normal fonts so the fonts display normally on screen, but are shot through with holes in print. The company says this simple measure can reduce ink or toner requirements by 25% without adversely affecting print quality. Read more.

Waste = resources

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:02:19 +0000

With waste an effective dead-zone of profit, one company’s waste can be another company’s resource stream. Wastivity is essentially an industrial trash and treasure, where producers of waste can cost effectively find buyers in order to avoid waste to landfill. Buyers, in turn, can drastically reduce their direct procurement costs by purchasing ‘waste’ as an input to their production system.

Two opportunities are regularly asserted in the corporate strategies of the world’s leading firms:

1) To use supply chain partnerships to gain competitive advantage; and

2) To reduce the environmental impacts of processes and products.

Wastivity creates a new vertical link in the supply chain, presenting an opportunity for businesses to not only reduce total system waste-to-input ratio, but also realize financial value for waste (internalization) through the establishment of a marketplace. Find out more at www.wastivity.com

The dawn of the sixth wave

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:55:34 +0000

Global investment firm Allianz Global Investors has released a report suggesting the recent financial crisis could herald the start of the sixth Kondratiev wave – a wave in which the key is a increase in resource and energy productivity.

The report describes a structural change in economy called “Eco-Trends”, and argues that growth will be generated from a new mix of economics, ecology and social commitment. The authors singled out nanotechnology and biotechnology as being two areas of interest for their potential to contribute to this increased productivity.

“Both of these segments could play major roles in the new structural cycle by using new materials (and/or properties of materials) and new processes to make many sectors more environmentally friendly through the use of fewer resources and less energy,” the reports authors wrote. Read the report here.

Energy efficiency saves IBM millions

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:00:18 +0000

Greenbiz.com: Energy conservation efforts at IBM facilities around the world have exceeded even the company’s expectations, delivering nearly US$27 million in energy savings in 2009, representing around 5.4% of the company’s total energy use.

The savings flowed from the 1900 or so energy conservation projects implemented at IBM’s 270 facilities around the world, which enabled the company to reduce its electricity consumption more than 246,000 megawatt-hours of electricity, avoiding more than 142,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Read more here.

Waste whey to electricity

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:38:01 +0000

The Economist: Cheese might seem an unlikely candidate as the next big thing in renewable energy, but a Greek researcher has discovered a way to generate electricity from one of the major waste products of cheese manufacture – whey.

Whey constitutes around 70% of the volume of milk and is an often costly by-product of cheese manufacture as its biological nature requires treatment before disposal. However the microbial content of whey makes it perfect for use in microbial fuel cells.

In microbial fuel cells, bacteria carry out the catalytic reactions in the fuel chamber, metabolising the fuel and producing nature chemical reactions that generate a current.

Greek microbial engineer Dr Georgia Antonopoulou has shown it is possible to get almost as much power from raw whey as it is from refined fuel, if the whey is diluted and the microbial balance of the whey carefully managed, The Economist reports. Read more here.

Community solar

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:25:06 +0000

Grist: A city in Washington State has found a way around the problem that stops most people from installing solar panels on their houses – cost. Ellensburg is launching its own community solar ‘garden’.

Rather than cough up the estimated US$30,000 to install their own solar panels, residents are being asked to pay what they can above $250. The money has allowed the city to build ten solar arrays on a sunny block of land next to a major highway, and already has plans to build six more arrays, ten concentrating solar collectors, and eight small wind turbines.

Since being built in 2006, the community solar project now delivers an average of 102,000 kilowatt-hours of solar power into its grid each year – enough to completely power about ten average U.S. homes – and has raised more than $100,000. Read more here.

Bacterial sewage treatment

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 01:41:58 +0000

New Scientist: A newly-discovered type of bacterium that converts ammonium into nitrogen and methane could drastically reduce the amount of energy needed to process sewage.

Researchers from the Delft University of Technology have developed a technique using this new bacterium that by-passes one of the most energy-intensive processes in sewage treatment. In conventional sewage treatment, bacteria convert solid waste into methane and a liquid waste containing ammonium. This ammonium is then digested by other bacteria that require a constant supply of oxygen, which must be pumped in, consuming megawatts of power.

The new technique cuts out this second stage, as the newly-discovered bacteria process ammonium directly into nitrogen gas and methane gas, the latter of which can be collected and used to generate power. So instead of consuming power, this new treatment process could generate it.