Spotted: We don’t often think of anaesthetic gases as contributing to global warming, but 2 per cent of the UK NHS’s greenhouse gas emissions come from anaesthetic and analgesic practices. During an operation, only a tiny percentage of anaesthetic agents are absorbed and metabolised by the patient’s body, meaning that the vast majority of this volatile anaesthetic is expelled as waste.
To address this, SageTech Medical has developed a flexible, modular system that allows hospitals to capture exhaled waste anaesthetic gas in reusable canisters in the operating theatre. The canisters are then emptied into bulk storage tanks and collected.
Captured gases are recovered and recycled to yield active pharmaceutical ingredients, which are then bottled for reuse. This process reduces the energy and carbon needed to manufacture the virgin gases, as well as the environmental impact of their release, creating a circular system.
Recent orders made by NHS trusts, including in Manchester and Hull, mean that SageTech’s circular technology will soon be in use in certain NHS hospitals. The next key milestones for the company include achieving significant UK sales and gaining the CE Mark for its SID-Dock capture machine, so that SageTech can then distribute across Europe too.
Waste anaesthetic gases are a substantial and broadly unaddressed cause of air pollution. Other recent innovations spotted by Springwise in the archive that aim to tackle causes of air pollution include concrete that cleans the air in road tunnels and DIY air filters.
Spotted: Water plays many vital roles in our body and the environment and is needed for basic sanitation, but there are many places in the world where clean water is not readily available. While multiple factors like inadequate or damaged infrastructure, poor resource management, and pollution are contributing to low water supply, it is clear that climate change is also playing a part.
This is where NovNat Tech comes in. With its technology, NovNat aims to improve water security and boost climate change resilience. This Birmingham-based company has developed a novel ‘atmospheric water harvester’ powered by waste heat from industrial operations, to help provide reliable and consistent water access by extracting water from the air at scale. NovNat’s proprietary porous materials act as a nano-scale selective sponge to soak atmospheric humidity and convert it into water.
Having been rigorously tested, the harvester’s materials have demonstrated breakthrough performance in capturing and releasing water from the air – much faster and with less energy required than pre-existing atmospheric water generation (AWG) systems. The company is currently developing a prototype AWG system, funded by Innovate UK, designed to deliver water on the go for rescue and military vehicles.
The air is filled with many valuable resources, and many innovations are looking to harness these for good use. In the archive, Springwise has also spotted a team that’s made a massive step towards providing hydrogen fuel from the air and a solar-powered panel that captures water vapour from the atmosphere.
Spotted: Plastic waste is not only a problem in developed nations – it is a major problem globally, including in Africa, where it contaminates freshwater sources and has a big health impact.
Brickify is a Nigerian company working to solve this issue – and tackle homelessness – with one solution. The company collects plastic waste from families and individuals in exchange for cash. The waste is then used to manufacture plastic bricks for use as a construction material.
The bricks are made up of around 90 per cent of plastic waste, along with other materials that give them great strength and fire-resistant properties. The bricks interlock like Lego toys, so they can be used in construction without any additional materials. They are around 30 to 50 per cent cheaper than conventional bricks and will not decompose, so are very long-lasting.
Brickify has received small amounts of funding in the form of awards from Impactionable and the Social Innovations Competition. However, the company has also partnered with several state and national government agencies, corporate and non-profit organisations.
From using recycled plastic as a building material to turning waste plastic into non-toxic resin, tackling plastic waste is now the goal of a huge number of entrepreneurs as spotted by Springwise in the archive.
Spotted: Cladding is an outer layer of material that is used to improve the appearance, thermal insulation, and weather resistance of a building. The cladding used in Grenfell Tower in the UK was Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) – a highly flammable product that consistently failed fire tests. The ACM has been blamed for helping the flames spread when the infamous fire at the tower block broke out in 2017.
To help prevent tragedies like this, scientists from RMIT have found a way to grow fungi using renewable organic materials as feedstock to form thin sheets that could be used to produce fire-retardant cladding. The final material is lightweight, thin, and versatile, making it suitable for multiple automotive, maritime, and possibly aerospace applications – as well as in construction. When mycelium is exposed to flames, it forms a protective layer of char that resists fire and heat transfer, and protects any flammable materials underneath.
The RMIT team scientists aim to replace composite cladding panels that usually contain plastics, which produce toxic fumes and thick smoke when exposed to fire. Co-author of the research, Associate Professor Everson Kandare, highlights: “Bromide, iodide, phosphorus, and nitrogen-containing fire retardants are effective, but have adverse health and environmental effects. They pose health and environmental concerns, as carcinogens and neurotoxins that can escape and persist in the environment and cause harm to plant and animal life.” The mycelium-based material, by contrast, burns cleanly, only releasing naturally occurring water and CO2.
RMIT scientists aim to develop an environmentally friendly fire-proofing mat that could then be used for building cladding. And to make the potential cladding sustainable and scalable, the researchers are also exploring collaborations with the mushroom industry to use fungal waste products in production.
Mycelium has been used by many companies looking to create sustainable alternatives to everyday things. In the archive, Springwise has spotted interior design products and clothing made using mycelium.
Spotted: For many companies, more than 70 per cent of their carbon footprint is composed of scope 3 emissions – those that occur in an organisation’s wider value chain. But keeping tabs on these emissions is a hard task, as it can be difficult to trace materials through every stage of the supply chain.
One of the specific problems associated with the data gathering process, is the need to collect information from suppliers that might be sensitive. But now, Dutch startup Circularise is tackling this problem through its digital product passports.
Circularise’s technology generates a digital passport for each different raw material that goes into each component. Companies at the end of the supply chain then add their own information to create a new digital passport for the final product. This facilitates re-use and recycling by providing reliable information on a product’s composition and provenance.
All this information is recorded in an immutable format on a public blockchain. This provides superior levels of verification compared to other digital passport solutions, which use private blockchains.
What really separates Circularise from its competitors, is the startup’s focus on helping suppliers share sensitive information on topics such as environmental impact, material composition, or life cycle assessment data. It does this through its patent-pending Smart Questioning technology. This uses advanced cryptography techniques – called zero-knowledge proofs – that allow suppliers to prove their claims without the need to provide sensitive raw data.
Suppliers answer lists of questions at an agreed level of disclosure – from full disclosure to no disclosure of underlying data. The verifying company can then choose a question from the list, and the supplier provides the answer. If the question is set at the highest level of data privacy, the answer is provided alongside a cryptographic proof. Smart Questioning verifies this proof against the raw data without the data itself being revealed to the verifier.
In the archive, Springwise has spotted other innovations working to modernise the supply chain, including a platform that provides product transparency to customers and another that helps companies decarbonise.
Spotted: In 2022, wind was the fastest-growing renewable energy source behind solar, and demand for wind power is only going to increase as economies transition to net zero by 2050. What is more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the average annual growth rate of wind electricity generation needs to get to around 17 per cent to meet the agency’s Net Zero 2050 scenario.
One sticking point for wind energy, however, is that it’s subject to weather changes, and so can be inconsistent. Hoping to make wind energy more powerful and reliable is Norwegian firm Kitemill, which is tapping into previously underutilised and untapped energy by harnessing the power of wind high above the ground.
Essentially, the firm’s new KM2 system – an enhancement of the company’s previous KM1 prototype – functions much like a kite. The “kite”, tethered to a generator on land, resembles an unmanned plane with a wingspan of 16 metres. The system has four propellors that are used for about two minutes during both take-off and landing, so that the kite can take off even in low wind conditions on the floor. It is also fully autonomous, so requires no more attention than conventional wind turbines.
Where the KM2 diverges from a conventional wind turbine is in the fact that the latter is fixed, and so suffers from reduced activity in low wind conditions, whereas the KM2 system can change its position. The kite uses LIDAR readings of local wind conditions to direct its altitude and more consistently harness the wind at far higher altitudes, up to 500 metres off the ground.
Kitemill is set to install 12 of its KM2 units for the €7.5m Norse Airborne Wind Energy Project (NAWEP), backed by the European Union (EU) Innovation Fund.
Springwise has also spotted similar renewable energy projects in the archive, like an underwater kite that harnesses the energy of the tides and heat pumps that harvest the energy of sound.
Spotted: Cities are responsible for around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, part of which can be attributed to inefficient road transport networks. Indeed, according to UK startup Route Konnect, the UK’s roads are up to 30 per cent inefficient.
To tackle this problem, Route Konnect has developed technology that anonymously analyses video feeds to provide real-time insights into the ways in which people move across space – whether in a vehicle or on foot. These insights can then be used to make planning decisions that improve air quality or optimise traffic flow.
What sets Route Konnect apart is the fact that it does not rely on privacy-infringing technologies such as facial or automatic number plate recognition. Instead, it works by analysing flows across multiple cameras, matching the paths travelled by people and vehicles across different camera views.
Each of the ‘heuristics’ Route Konnect uses to analyse flows is less powerful on its own than technologies like facial recognition. But combined, they create a system with an accuracy rate of 98 per cent.
In the archive, Springwise has spotted other innovations working to optimise urban planning, including one platform helping to decarbonise cities and a ‘1-minute city’ design.
Spotted: Lithium is a vital component in the high-energy batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs). But lithium is in increasingly short supply — threatening the conversion to EVs. According to estimations, by 2025 lithium demand is likely to marginally outstrip supply, with this gap widening dramatically by 2030.
Most of the world’s lithium reserves are found in brines – natural salt-water deposits. The conventional process for extracting lithium from brines requires evaporation in large ponds. This process is environmentally damaging, slow, and vulnerable to weather. However, startup Lilac Solutions has developed a new technology to extract lithium from brines without the need for evaporation ponds.
Lilac’s process uses specially developed, nano-coated ion exchange beads to absorb the lithium from the brine. Once saturated with lithium, hydrochloric acid is used to flush the lithium from the beads, yielding lithium chloride. This is then processed on-site using conventional equipment to create the finished product.
According to Lilac, this process offers a seamless scale-up and an 80 per cent recovery rate for lithium, as opposed to 40 per cent using conventional evaporation techniques. Lilac’s solution is seen as a potential game-changer.
Optimising mineral extraction is not limited to lithium ponds. Springwise has also spotted innovations in the archive that include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover minerals important for green energy and environmentally friendly processes for mineral extraction.
Architects must start placing greater emphasis on protecting biodiversity in their projects, writes RSHP sustainability lead Michelle Sanchez.
It’s time to make peace with nature. Architects should add strong biodiversity mitigation principles to their projects no matter the scale and constraints.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, some organisations in the construction industry have advocated deploying all our efforts into implementing guidance, targets, and calculation tools to allow us to achieve net zero by 2050.
Sustainability as a concept goes beyond environmental impact
No doubt there is much to do in terms of carbon reduction in the industry, but by focusing all our energies and resources down that road we are forgetting two major things.
First, sustainability as a concept goes beyond environmental impact. Sustainability was defined back in 1987 by the UN as the balance of the environmental, economic, and social impact of any project – this is the Sustainability Triple Bottom Line. We are forgetting that sustainability engages with a far greater range of issues than carbon emissions alone.
Secondly, our industry has a much wider negative impact beyond the 38 per cent contribution to carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. Now that we have a way forward to reducing operational and embodied carbon, we need to look at sustainability as a whole and see other areas where our industry is causing harm.
Biodiversity comes out as one of the big-ticket items that we need to tackle next. Infrastructure and the built environment are responsible for 29 per cent of threatened species, according to the World Economic Forum.
And biodiversity is more crucial to our way of life and our economy than we realise. Forty-four per cent of global GDP in cities is estimated to be at risk of disruption from nature loss. Business as usual is no longer an option – we as an industry need to do better.
It will benefit people, too. To return to the Sustainable Triple Bottom Line concept, having nature-based solutions embedded into our designs has a positive social impact on the local communities and building users. The enhancement of biodiversity is directly linked to the improvement of health and well-being, especially with respect to mental health. There is a direct correlation between having access to external, green spaces and the well-being of the user of that space.
Adding a 10 per cent net-gain is not enough
Politicians are slowly waking up to the issue. The COP15 summit has started work towards a new global pact on nature protection. In the UK, the government’s 25-year Environment Plan will require all new development in England to provide a biodiversity uplift of at least 10 per cent according to a habitat-based metric.
This legislation is expected to come into force in November and will need to be considered by all stakeholders in the built environment – from designers and architects to financial institutions and property consultants. But adding a 10 per cent net-gain is not enough to be able to reduce the negative impact that our way of life has had on biodiversity.
We need to be creative and innovative. We need to find clever ways to provide green spaces, wildlife corridors and shelter for different kinds of animals. We need to encourage pollination and generate green infrastructure at scale whenever we can.
I am calling all architects and building-industry stakeholders to review their current projects against the BiodiverCities report from the WEF, where experts have listed a series of five key strategies that we can add to all construction projects to enhance biodiversity.
First, we must make the built environment more compact. Higher-density urban development will free up land for agriculture and nature. It can also reduce urban sprawl, which destroys wildlife habitats and flora and fauna. Existing cities and settlements should be considered for strategic densification. Just like we are starting to review existing buildings and their possibility to be retained or fully retrofitted before making the decision to demolish, we should have a similar approach with any land that does not have an existing structure that could be used for other purposes than urbanising the environment.
Second, we must design with nature-positive approaches by having buildings that share space with nature and are less human-centric. Nature-positive strategies should not be an afterthought or a tick-box exercise to comply with a planning requirement. All developments must include nature-friendly spaces and eco-bridges to connect habitats for urban wildlife. Should we start placing biodiversity at the core of project design I am sure that we will end up generating greener and more appealing places.
It’s time to rethink what we are doing as an industry
We also need planet-compatible urban utilities. To stall biodiversity loss, we need utilities that effectively manage air, water, and solid waste pollution in urban environments. In addition to benefiting nature, this will provide universal human access to clean air and water. We can implement new technologies that could transform urban utilities and make them planet-compatible.
Nature as infrastructure involves incorporating natural ecosystems into built-up areas. Instead of developments destroying floodplains, wetlands, and forests, they would form an essential part of the new built environment. This approach to development can also help deliver clean air, natural water purification and reduce the risk from extreme climate events.
Finally, we need nature-positive connecting infrastructure such as roads, railways, pipelines, and ports. Transitions in these areas mean a change in our approach to planning to reduce biodiversity impacts, with a willingness to accept compromises to enhance biodiversity. Building in wildlife corridors and switching to renewable energy in transport are key elements of nature-positive connecting infrastructure.
It’s time to rethink what we are doing as an industry and realise that by focusing so much on carbon reduction we are neglecting other areas where our industry causes much harm. We need to tackle climate change and sustainability from all fronts. We need to design in a holistic way that considers the Sustainability Triple Bottom Line and every impact related to it.
I would like to start a call for action and to encourage architects, developers, contractors and consultants to rethink the way we design buildings and public spaces, to find strategies to add biodiversity enhancement, and to truly assess the impact that our projects have on biodiversity.
The photo, by Joas Souza, shows the green roof of the Macallan Distillery in Scotland, designed by RSHP.
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Spotted: When it comes to on-site renewable energy, a key challenge facing many businesses is that sources such as solar and wind are intermittent, generating power only when the sun shines and the wind blows. Energy-storage solutions are therefore crucial for ensuring sufficient power is available when it’s needed most.
Enter Connected Energy, a UK startup that has created E-STOR, a commercial-scale, energy-storage system that leverages 24 second-life Renault EV batteries. Easily installed at modern commercial and industrial sites within a 20-foot shipping container, E-STOR can optimise a site’s energy use, reducing costs and carbon emissions.
Another key benefit of the system is that it’s completely modular. Units can be installed individually or as multiple systems working together, meaning storage can be scaled-up as the client requires. Servicing businesses across the UK and Europe, the company even offers free feasibility studies to ensure that battery energy storage is the right solution for any given site.
Clients use E-STOR for active load management. The system can be charged from existing building supply or from solar panels and on-site wind, flexibly storing surplus energy generated when demand is low for use at peak times. Companies can also use E-STOR to generate revenue by offering load-balancing services to the grid.
Springwise has spotted other energy storage solutions in the archive, including one designed for homeowners in the event of a power outage, and another made from recycled batteries.
