Spotted: The global food system accounts for over a third of annual greenhouse gas emissions. And the problems don’t stop at sustenance-free ingredients: even food colouring contributes to emissions, especially those derived from petrochemicals. Danish biotech company Chromologics hopes to change this, proving that this aesthetic additive can instead be environmentally friendly.
Instead of extracting colours from high-value raw materials like tomatoes, potatoes, insects, or beetroot, to create natural food colourings, Chromologics harnesses a fungus to create a low-carbon, natural red powder. Along with sugar and other nutrients, Chromologics ferments the fungus in water, which makes it produce a red colour. The company then filters away the fungus before processing the remaining fermentation liquid into a concentrated red powder.
The result is a pH- and temperature-stable, tasteless, water-soluble, vegan food dye – called Natu.Red – that uses renewable materials at a high production rate. And according to Chromologics, this concept can quickly become circular by running the fermentation process on green energy and recycling the water.
Chromologics recently raised €12.6 million in seed funding, of which €7.1 million will accelerate the commercialisation of its natural red food colouring.
Springwise has previously spotted other innovations aimed at revolutionising the food industry, including research that shows food can be grown using artificial sunlight, and a mycelium farm that creates an alternative to bacon.
Mass timber will not become a mainstream building product because it uses too much wood, construction material expert Benjamin Kromoser claims in this interview for the Timber Revolution.
“If we go more in the direction of mass-timber buildings we don’t have enough material, so the idea of scaling it up in the near future will fail,” he told Dezeen.
“I think there will be a possibility to scale it up a bit, so its use will go up in the next few years – especially in Sweden and Norway, where they have built quite a lot of cross-laminated timber production facilities.”
“But from my point of view, I think we will reach the maximum of mass timber in at least 10 years. I think, really, it will be before 2030.”
“Using wood doesn’t [automatically] make a building sustainable”
Kromoser leads the Institute of Green Civil Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, which receives funding from both industry and public sector organisations.
He believes that the main challenge for the building industry is using fewer raw materials overall, rather than simply switching from concrete and steel to biomaterials like wood.
“Our aim is to minimise the environmental impact of buildings over the whole lifecycle,” he said.
“Using wood doesn’t [automatically] make a building sustainable, because basically, what we have as a problem is that in total we need too much materials.”
Mass timber is the term given to engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glued laminated timber (glulam), which typically constitute layers of wood bound together to form strong structural components.
“Wood is a limited resource”
Because trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere, replacing heavily polluting man-made materials like concrete and steel for timber can significantly reduce the embodied carbon footprint of buildings.
But while mass timber can be used for taller buildings than conventional timber-frame construction, it uses much more wood. That leads Kromoser to doubt its overall sustainability.
“Wood is a limited resource,” he said. “It always has to be a balance between what we take from the forest to use for building construction and how much grows again.”
“If we go in the direction of building everything with CLT, then maybe from the point of view of temporarily storing CO2 it would be great, but it’s definitely not really possible to scale that up.”
Mass timber usually consists of layers of wood bound together to form strong structural components. Photo courtesy of Katerra
Even in Austria, where around half the country is forested, he is doubtful it would be possible to translate that into half of new buildings in Vienna being made from mass timber.
Instead, he argues that to increase the proportion of construction that uses wood, more material-efficient methods like timber frame must take precedence.
“It would be great if we could build 50 per cent of the buildings in Vienna out of wood but we are far away from that regarding the availability of the materials, so going in the direction of mass-timber construction is wrong,” he said.
“We have to go in the direction of using timber in the most efficient way and that means structurally optimised buildings, so mass timber is definitely not the right way to go.”
“Timber framing is much more efficient, and you can quantify that with a life-cycle assessment.”
Need to “decouple” material use from economic growth
Kromoser argued that mass timber’s main application should be for creating cantilevers or bearing heavy loads, or for living spaces in attic rooms thanks to its thermal massing properties.
“Timber is a great material, and mass timber where it has its justification is a good thing,” he said. “But thinking about how the building can be structurally optimised is a really important thing to keep in mind.”
“That’s my key message, because then we can reduce the amount of raw material required and then we can build more out of timber,” he continued.
He argues that depicting mass timber as a golden ticket to decarbonising the built environment could risk distracting from the main issue of material use.
“If you’re speaking about a big potential in mass timber construction, it could justify for our society, ‘if we use this material, it doesn’t matter anymore how much we use’. That’s absolutely not right.”
The major challenge, according to Kromoser, is to decrease the use of raw materials while still enabling the growth of economies around the world.
“Further development of society is always linked to an increase in materials, and that’s the wrong direction,” he said.
“So what we really have to think about is how we decouple the connection between material use and the further development of society. That’s the biggest issue and it’s not linked to construction material.”
This article is part of Dezeen’s Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.
Spotted: It is now well-understood that data centres consume vast amounts of energy. This is because the banks of servers in the data centres require a lot of cooling, which, in turn, uses a lot of energy. But one data centre has found a use for all the heat that it generates, a use that could also help public facilities such as swimming pools save money on their energy costs.
Deep Green, which runs data centres, has developed small edge data centres that can be installed locally and divert some of their excess heat to warm leisure centres and public swimming pools. The system, dubbed a “digital boiler”, involves immersing central processing unit (CPU) servers in special cooling tubs, which use oil to remove heat from the servers. This oil is then passed through a heat exchanger, which removes the heat and uses it to warm buildings or swimming pools.
The company says the heat donation from one of its digital boilers will cut a public swimming pool’s gas requirements by around 70 per cent, saving leisure centres thousands of pounds every year while also drastically reducing carbon emissions. Deep Green pays for the electricity it uses and donates the heat for free. This is a huge benefit, as Britain’s public swimming pools are facing massive increases in heating bills, which is causing many to close or restrict their hours.
The company hopes to install boilers in 20 swimming pools in 2023.
The issue of data centre energy use is moving to the fore, and is encouraging a host of new innovations. Recent ideas for more sustainable data centres that Springwise has spotted include a new server design that is much more energy-efficient, and the powering of data centres with hydrogen.
Dezeen Courses: in the latest roundup of programmes listed on Dezeen Courses, we’ve selected five architecture and design courses that specialise in sustainability.
Based at institutions in the UK, USA and Italy, the courses aim to challenge students to create design solutions that respond to the global climate crisis.
The selection of courses includes undergraduate and postgraduate degrees that provide specialised training in addition to online short courses that intend to give students an insight into sustainable design or careers in the field.
Here are five sustainable architecture and design courses on Dezeen Courses:
Master’s Program in Sustainable Architecture and Design at SOS School of Sustainability
The Master’s Program in Sustainable Architecture and Design at SOS School of Sustainability in Milan, Italy, trains students with backgrounds in architecture, engineering or design to become sustainability experts in the building profession.
Find out more about the course ›
Sustainable Architecture MArch (Part 2) course at Centre for Alternative Technology
The Sustainable Architecture MArch (Part 2) course at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales, teaches students the core principles of sustainable architecture to respond to environmental problems.
Find out more about the course ›
The Natural World at Academy of Art University
The Natural World undergraduate course at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, USA, offers students site visits and fieldwork to learn the principles of sustainability, ecology and environmental conservation to apply to their landscape architecture designs.
Find out more about the course ›
Sustainable Design MA at Kingston University
The Sustainable Design MA course at Kingston University in London, UK, provides designers from all backgrounds the opportunity to narrow and specialise their creative practice in sustainability.
Find out more about the course ›
Sustainable Product Design Online Short Course at University of the Arts London
The Sustainable Product Design Online Short Course at the University of the Arts London teaches students to incorporate sustainability into the development of their product designs.
Find out more about the course ›
Dezeen Courses
Dezeen Courses is a service from Dezeen that provides details of architecture, interiors and design courses around the world. Click here for more information.
Spotted: The World Health Organization estimates that 1.5 million deaths are caused by vaccine-preventable diseases every year and one, if not the main, obstacle to improving essential vaccine distribution is a lack of refrigerated storage. Now, a portable, solar-powered cool box is helping healthcare workers across Kenya improve vaccination rates for some of the most common diseases.
Engineer Norah Magero created the VacciBox as part of her work as co-founder and CEO of Drop Access, a Kenya-based organisation supporting off-grid communities in becoming sustainable via renewable energy solutions. Drop Access helps small communities access financing for solar energy projects, trains farmers to use new sustainable agricultural methods, and makes it possible for healthcare teams to safely store and transport vaccines and medicines. Having initially outsourced manufacturing to China, Magero and her VacciBox co-founder James Mulatya knew that the cost of the refrigerator was important to expand vaccine access, so decided to work with other local engineers to keep production in the country.
Solar-powered and with a built-in battery backup, VacciBox uses the Internet of Things (IoT) feature to track temperatures, location, and maintenance needs for each refrigerator. Designed explicitly to be easy to transport on the back of a bicycle or moped, the fridge comes with a pop-up handle, rubber wheels, and a USB charging port as an additional service.
Currently in use in two pilot locations, immunisation at one of the facilities has already increased by 45 per cent with the help of the VacciBox. The design won the 2022 Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge Grand Prize, and Magero plans to use the $250,000 (around €234,000) prize to expand production and expand into other countries.
The challenges of keeping medicines appropriately cool are sizeable, and Springwise has spotted innovations seeking ways to tackle this problem by creating medicines that are stable at room temperature, such as immunisations that are administered via a patch, or vaccines encased and protected in silica.
Spotted: In order to mitigate the impacts of climate change, it is likely that we will need to scale up direct air capture (DAC) technology and carbon storage. In DAC, air is run through filters and sorbents to separate out the CO2. The filters are then heated to release the CO2, which is either stored underground or used in products such as building materials and fuels. As you might expect, this process often requires significant energy and incurs expense.
Now, new research from a team at Lehigh University, has found a way to make the DAC process more efficient. Most current DAC filtering processes use amine-based sorbents (materials derived from ammonia, which contains nitrogen). In this study, the researchers added copper to the amines, which allowed the sorbent to filter out three times as much CO2 as existing products – lowering costs and improving efficiency.
On top of the improved efficiency, the addition of copper meant that when the material came into contact with seawater, it converted the captured CO2 into a harmless alkaline material almost identical to baking soda. This opens up the possibility of storing captured CO2 in the ocean, which could allow DAC plants to be built in a much wider range of locations.
The researchers point out that there is still a long way to go before this technology is sustainable. For one thing, ammonia is derived from fossil fuels. Another concern is that no one knows what the effect would be of large volumes of baking soda entering the oceans each year. But despite these notes of caution, the research is an exciting development as countries explore the practicalities of deploying DAC technology.
There are currently just a handful of DAC facilities around the world, but the technology has an important role to play in the reduction of atmospheric CO2. Springwise has also spotted a method for turning atmospheric carbon into solid carbon, and a process for permanently storing CO2 in rocks deep underground.
We should be aiming for the future depicted in the Timber Revolution logo with a combination of mid- and high-rise mass-timber buildings interspersed with trees, argues ACAN co-founder Joe Giddings in this interview.
“My vision is in some ways aligned to that illustration,” Giddings said of the artwork produced for the series by Yo Hosoyamada (top).
“I really think we should be building our cities densely and avoiding urban sprawl, and if we follow that to its logical conclusion you need buildings at scale.”
Joe Giddings is UK networks lead at Built by Nature and a co-founder of ACAN. Photo by Melchior Overdevest
Giddings is a co-founder of the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) pressure group and UK networks lead at Built By Nature, an organisation dedicated to accelerating timber construction across Europe.
“So many architects really want to use mass timber but never get very far because it’s tricky,” he told Dezeen.
“That is sort of our mission.”
“We really need to be not building as much as we can”
Because of their structural properties, Giddings believes that mass-timber products like cross-laminated timber, glued laminated timber and laminated veneer lumber are best-placed to decarbonise the built environment, and not timber frame as some experts suggest.
Timber frame uses less wood than mass timber but is only suitable for use at up to three storeys he stated. Meanwhile, more resource-intensive engineered-wood products are strong enough to support much taller structures so can help increase urban density.
“It’s really only that family of products that are suitable for the buildings that we should be building,” said Giddings. “I really think we need to be looking at laminated veneer lumber
Giddings also argues that mass timber goes hand-in-hand with reducing demolition of existing buildings as a means of limiting the vast greenhouse gas emissions associated with construction.
“When you imagine a future where we aren’t demolishing anything, timber comes into its own because it’s lightweight and you can add storeys to existing buildings,” he said.
“We really need to be not building as much as we can, and if we are building we need to make sure it’s out of biobased materials. That is the only way the built environment is going to help combat the climate crisis.”
One major current barrier to greater uptake of mass timber in architecture is the limited supply chain, with engineered wood still only accounting for a small proportion of the structural timber products produced worldwide.
However, Giddings contends that increasing demand for mass timber has the potential to mark a fundamental shift in our landscapes, back to one centred around trees.
“If you build up the supply chain enough and demonstrate demand it creates a commercial incentive to plant forests,” he added. “Forests could be at the heart of our society again.”
A 100-metre-tall timber tower designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen is set to be built in Switzerland. Image courtesy of Schmidt Hammer Lassen
Another hot topic related to mass timber is the ongoing race to build taller and taller buildings out of wood, with the five tallest timber buildings in the world all completed in the past four years and a 100-metre-tall wooden skyscraper set to be built in Switzerland.
Some experts have been critical of this trend, arguing it does not make best use of the material. But despite his view that mid-rise buildings should be the focus, Giddings sees some value in timber skyscrapers.
“It’s fantastic to see really tall buildings being built from timber,” he said. “It advertises the idea that it’s possible.”
“Of course we really need to be building mid-rise office and apartment buildings but the tall wooden buildings tell people that it is possible, and the reaction is ‘wow, I didn’t know we could do that with timber’.”
“We should always come back to embodied carbon”
Nevertheless, he is firm that simply using timber as part of a building’s structural makeup is not enough, and that the focus should always be on cutting embodied carbon.
“We should always come back to this embodied carbon issue and look at each case on its merit,” he said.
“We shouldn’t be promoting buildings that are quite bad in terms of embodied carbon just because they have a bit of timber in them.”
He points to Google’s gigantic new London headquarters, designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio and currently under construction. The 330-metre-long building will be partly made out of timber but still use large quantities of concrete and steel.
“Yes they have managed to use timber, but a lot of it is just standard construction,” said Giddings. “I don’t know if we should be celebrating unless they achieve a low embodied-carbon figure.”
Completed last year, this project saw 93 per cent of the existing 1930s concrete building kept and extended upwards and outwards with a timber and glass structure to form a new office space.
“We should be celebrating projects that use timber to infill and extend,” said Giddings.
Giddings cites The Gramophone Works in London as “a model for how we should be building”. Photo by Dirk Lindner
For mass timber to become more widely used, Giddings believes that governments need to champion research into its use and the major technical challenges – moisture ingress and fire safety – which are currently the basis of insurance and regulatory hurdles.
In addition, he emphasises the importance of more architects learning how to use timber appropriately.
Fire in particular, he says, is a “nuanced and complex issue” that should be subject to a frank discussion.
“At the moment we can’t ask any old architect to design a timber building because the knowledge is not there,” he said. “A lot of the know-how exists in a small number of forums.”
“We are faced with a really complex challenge: we need to switch really quickly to mass timber but we also need a rapid uptake in knowledge to enable this transition, which isn’t happening fast enough at the moment.”
This article is part of Dezeen’s Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.
Spotted: Energy cannot efficiently be stored for very long – and it is expensive to store it far from where it is produced. This is why, as the world transitions to sources of energy that are generated intermittently (such as solar and wind), the need for better energy storage solutions has risen to the forefront. Australian startup MGA Thermal has developed what it hopes will be a revolutionary new method for efficient storage of renewably generated energy.
MGA’s technology uses a new type of thermal storage material, called Miscibility Gap Alloys (MGA). These are capable of safely storing a huge amount of energy as heat. The company manufactures MGA blocks that contain particles of tiny metal alloys, dispersed in a matrix material. As the blocks are heated (using renewable sources), energy is absorbed and the particles melt. At the same time, the matrix material remains solid and holds the molten particles in place. When the blocks cool, the energy is released.
The company has recently received funding from Shell to build a pilot project that will demonstrate steam generation from the blocks. The pilot plant, which will only be around 12 metres by 3 metres in size, has a planned storage capacity of five megawatt-hours. The project will gather data to validate the efficacy of using the blocks as mid-to-long-term thermal storage in a practical system.
Energy innovators have their sights firmly set on developing much more efficient storage systems. Springwise has recently spotted several of these systems, including an iron-air battery and a salt battery small enough to use in electric vehicles.
Spotted: The global population is ageing, and the World Economic Forum states that Asia-Pacific will likely experience the fastest increase in the number of older citizens between now and 2050. This ageing population comes with a number of challenges, one of which is a greater need for modified diets that provide sufficient nutrition for those with health problems that prevent them from eating standard meals. Singaporean startup Pullulo is working to fill this need with a flexible product that can provide protein for different food applications.
Pullulo has developed an innovative microbial protein that is highly nutritious, affordable to produce, allergen-free, non-GMO, and vegan. It is also less susceptible to supply chain disruptions. The protein can be added to a wide variety of products – such as purees, 3D-printed food, soups, and stews – to give them a higher protein content.
In order to create a more sustainable product, Pullulo uses waste from surplus and discarded raw fruits and vegetables to produce its microbial proteins. The startup points out that the process of using microbes to generate protein also consumes carbon dioxide, allowing the company to support decarbonisation initiatives and continue scaling without harming the environment.
In explaining why it has opted to develop protein using microbes, rather than other sources, the company states that, “Microbial protein is an alternative plant-based protein that provides a compelling, efficient solution of securing food that’s accessible to all. It has higher protein content compared to traditional sources of protein like meat and uses upcycling for its production.”
The number of innovations involving meat replacements or cultivated meat has been increasing steadily as concern grows over the carbon footprint of livestock and dairy production. Some of the recent developments in this area that Springwise has spotted include a cultivated pork made using microalgae-based growth serum, and a fungus-derived substitute for egg whites.
Spotted: Artificial intelligence (AI) is already making inroads into our daily lives through virtual assistants, image recognition, and financial fraud detection. However, even the best AI hardware is still a long way from the energy-efficient, low latency, and high-throughput processing our own brains are capable of – but maybe not for long.
Back in 2018, researchers at the Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group at the University of Manchester developed SpiNNaker (spiking neural network architecture) — a supercomputer architecture that mimicked the interactions of biological neurons. SpiNNaker is being used as one component in the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year project that aims to create an ICT-based research infrastructure for brain research, cognitive neuroscience, and brain-inspired computing.
In 2019, the second-generation SpiNNaker 2 was developed by Technische Universität Dresden in collaboration with the University of Manchester. From this project, SpiNNcloud – a Technische Universität Dresden spinoff – was born. The company’s unique computer hardware is used for applications such as robotics, sensing, and prediction.
Now, SpiNNcloud has announced it is receiving a €2.5 million grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) for its newest project, “SpiNNode: SpiNNaker2 on the edge”. The funding will be used to expand and develop brain-inspired hardware for mobile applications and test it in real-life industrial situations.
The need for energy-efficient hardware has become more pressing with the development, and widespread adoption, of more sophisticated AI models. Christian Eichhorn, Co-CEO of SpiNNcloud Systems, explains, “AI such as ChatGPT is now entering our everyday lives and, therefore, represents a revolution comparable to that of the internet. Training this AI model consumes as much electricity as 3,000 households use in a month (…) We are working on the most energy-efficient computing hardware for large-scale applications, as this will be key to significantly reducing the carbon footprint of AI.”
Advances in AI are coming thick and fast, and Springwise has spotted several recent innovations, including the development of faster and more efficient optical neural networks, and numerous products such as a platform for tracking the climate footprint of food products.
