Spotted: According to the World Health Organization, 829,000 people are estimated to die each year from diarrhoea caused by unsafe drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene. At the same time, global warming is making it harder to ensure adequate supplies of fresh water in many places. Desalination is one solution to this problem and startup Nanoseen is working to make this process cheaper and more efficient with its nanotechnology filters.
The filtration technology, called NanoseenX, uses specially created nanomembranes with pores ranging in size 0.1 to 0.8 nanometres, which trap different impurities and salts. Depending on the salinity of the water and level of contamination, between 2 and 20 nanomembranes are used, which are arranged in cascades or as a ‘sandwich’ inside a cylinder-shaped device. Gravity is used to carry out the filtration, removing the need for extra energy or pressure.
In addition to removing salt, Nanoseen claims that the system can purify any polluted water, turning it into drinking water in two to five minutes. In addition, the nanomembranes can be used in existing equipment in water treatment plants. The membranes are completely scalable and, at a cost of around $0.08 to $0.50 for each nanomembrane, they are one of the cheapest solutions available. Nanoseen is now looking for further investors to enable them to bring NanoseenX to market.
Given the seriousness of the issues surrounding freshwater contamination and shortages, it is no wonder that more and more work is going into tackling this problem. Springwise has spotted the use of microalgae to clean industrial waste and a chemical-free industrial water treatment system.
Spotted: Social justice organisation Impact Justice has recently introduced its newest initiative: Growing Justice. The programme connects incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals seeking fairly paid secure work, with the cutting-edge technology of vertical farming.
Working with vertical farming experts—Skout Strategy and Agritecture—Impact Justice is designing and building two new farms – one located in a women’s prison in central California, and the other at the organisation’s Oakland headquarters. Each farm is modular, built in a shipping container, and hydroponically grows a variety of greens for use in the prison kitchen.
Farm employees will learn about all aspects of indoor farming, from the conditions needed to grow a range of foodstuffs, to the technological and mechanical processes that run the systems. The education that employees receive is rigorous and designed to provide the necessary knowledge and expertise for a career in the industry, including the foundations for starting their own business. The food being grown should also help to improve the overall healthfulness of prison menus, as well as provide incarcerated individuals with a direct connection to nature they would otherwise be unable to access.
Springwise has spotted many vertical farm facilities run by AI and at various stages of automation. Because of this, people new to the industry learn just as much about technology as they do about farming, which in the long run, could provide improved resilience in future employment.
Spotted: Mars Materials is a California-based startup working to commercialise technology developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Using captured carbon dioxide, the process creates acrylonitrile (ACN), which is a building block for carbon fibre. Carbon fibre is used in plastics, rubbers, and chemicals, as well as in steel and aluminum production.
By reducing the need to create new chemicals, businesses using the material reduce their production emissions while putting captured carbon to extended use. Financially, the material could be a significant cost saver for companies as the Mars Materials team says that using the new method results in lower production costs than current systems.
Overall, the company plans to put at least a gigatonne (one billion tonnes) of captured carbon into everyday use. When used in carbon fibre applications and as a base material for chemical manufacturing, the sequestered emissions could soon be in products at every corner shop. Having recently closed a pre-seed round of funding that raised $660,000, the company plans to begin producing product samples to test with manufacturers. The organisation’s two founders were also announced as Breakthrough Energy Fellows, recognition that comes with support for accelerating their innovation.
Captured carbon is being used in an increasingly varied range of applications. Springwise has spotted onboard emissions being used to power ships and alternative proteins fermented with captured carbon.
Only “hardcore sustainable” customers are currently willing to pay extra for eco-conscious hotels, according to Marco Lemmers, CEO of hospitality company Conscious Hotels.
Lemmers predicts that hotel guests will be prepared to pay more for sustainability in the future, but it will be “a few years from now”.
“I think people will be prepared to pay more for a sustainable solution,” he told Dezeen.
“We’re not there yet, because the hotel business is still quite price-sensitive. You have to be hardcore sustainable to want to pay €10 euros extra for a sustainable stay. But slowly it’s moving in that direction.”
Marco Lemmers is CEO of Conscious Hotels. Main image: the all-electric Westerpark venue is one of four Conscious Hotels in Amsterdam
Lemmers, who founded Conscious Hotels in 2009, spoke to Dezeen during The Lobby hospitality design conference in Copenhagen in August.
Conscious Hotels has four properties in Amsterdam. These hotels have eco-friendly policies in place for all of their operations, including interior fit-out, energy and water use, food and drink, and cleaning processes.
According to Lemmers, the company’s sustainability ethos has enabled it to build a loyal customer base.
“We’re the most sustainable option in Amsterdam, so we see a lot of returning guests” he said.
The brand’s mantra is “eco-sexy, big smiles”
However this alone is not enough to make the business thrive, Lemmers explained. Conscious Hotels aims to be competitive in terms of design and cost, so it can also attract non-eco-minded customers.
“The only way to make change is to seduce people,” he said.
“We have our sustainable planet promises but we also have to make it sexy. Sexy is about having beautiful places, beautiful food and drink, and beautiful people.”
Looking forward, Lemmers predicts that changes in legislation will soon give eco-minded hotels a competitive advantage over rivals.
He believes that hotel owners in Europe will soon be legally obligated to meet much stricter rules on the sustainability of their buildings and operations.
“We’ve already seen it happen in the Netherlands with offices and the same will happen with hotels,” he stated.
“Even if you don’t believe in sustainability, do a SWOT analysis in the next business planning cycle and see the threat.”
The Tire Station of one of two Conscious Hotels with its own source of solar power
The CEO says that hotels lagging behind need to urgently rethink their approach, or risk playing catchup.
“There’s an opportunity now – if you have sustainability in order, you have a competitive advantage,” he said. “Pretty soon legislation will push you to go there anyway, and there’s usually not a lot to be gained by being one of the last movers.”
Conscious Hotels implements a number of guidelines in order to reduce its environmental impact.
All the materials used for hotel fit-out are either natural products with cradle-to-cradle certification, or they are recycled or second-hand.
Interiors only use materials that are recycled, second-hand or certified cradle-to-cradle
Conscious Hotel Westerpark is 100 per cent electric-powered, with most of its energy supplied by the brand’s own windmill, while two of the other hotels generate energy from rooftop solar panels.
Restaurants serve organic food, with more than 50 per cent vegan or vegetarian dishes, and almost all produce is sourced from local suppliers.
Other initiatives include green walls, passive heating and cooling systems, organic cleaning products, water-saving showerheads and faucets, refillable toiletries and waste separation.
All food and drink is sourced from local suppliers
While Lemmers acknowledges that some of these initiatives require time and investment, particularly for large hotel chains, he claims that others are easy to implement.
He believes that all hotels could easily take at least one step towards improving their sustainability credentials.
“Start with the operation; you can do it today,” he said. “Just procure stuff that’s local instead of having it come from the other side of the world.”
“FF & E (furniture, fixtures and equipment) comes slightly later, but you have to invest in that every seven years anyway, to maintain and renew.”
Conscious Hotels currently has 318 rooms across its four Amsterdam hotels, although the brand plans to increase this to 1,500 as part of a Europe-wide expansion.
Spotted: The simplest way to reduce single-use plastic packaging is to not buy anything in it. Now, UK online grocer Dizzie has created a closed-loop delivery system that does away with the reams of harmful waste generated by most grocery shops. Pantry essentials and cleaning and personal care products are delivered in fossil fuel-free reusable pots. Shoppers can decant products into their own containers or use things directly from the Dizzie pot. Dizzie picks up the empties when the next order is delivered.
Design studio Blond makes the pots from used cooking oil and wood pulp waste from the paper-making process. Strong enough to be cleaned to the highest food safety standards more than 100 times, the pots are available in three sizes, with each size differing from the others by one-third to make measurement and storage easier.
Dizzie uses carbon-neutral delivery companies, and electric vehicles wherever possible. Shoppers can choose to pay delivery fees once a year, monthly, or as a one-off, depending on how frequently they buy from Dizzie. The company recently celebrated preventing more than one million pieces of plastic packaging from entering landfill by shoppers using refillable containers instead.
On-demand production combined with the refill approach to products helps companies keep waste to a bare minimum. Springwise has spotted a create-your-own soap brand that makes bars as orders come in, as well as a campaign encouraging Venetian tourists to ditch single-use plastic bottles of water in favour of refillable containers.
Designers might have had a hand in causing climate change but they are also key to solving it, according to the chair of the UK Climate Change Committee, who addressed the Design Council’s sustainability conference as it kicked off alongside COP27.
“In the past, we have created great wealth through remarkable design, from Newcomen’s steam engine to the very latest in nuclear technology,” John Gummer, also known as Lord Deben, said at the Design for Planet Festival.
“The trouble is we didn’t recognise that what we were designing actually had within it the ability to destroy.”
Lord Deben spoke at the Design for Planet Festival
Gummer, a Conservative former environment secretary and top climate adviser to the UK government, said this means that designers now have both the responsibility and the unique ability to reimagine products in a way that doesn’t harm the planet and its people.
“Sustainable development demands good design,” he said. “We won’t win the battle against climate change unless we design the solutions.”
“It is good design, which will enable us to use the smallest amount of our resources as is possible, that will enable us to reuse, that will enable us to extend, that will enable us to be flexible, that will enable us increasingly to grow – but to grow in a way that is not at the expense of others and the planet.”
The two-day event in Newcastle aims to encourage and support designers in taking an active role in solving the climate crisis.
This should involve making sustainable low-carbon designs that are still beautiful and easy to use, Gummer argued.
“I don’t think being attractive is something to be ashamed of because what it means is that we create things, which people want to use and want to use properly,” he said.
“One of the fundamentals of beauty is now going to be that they enhance, extend and enable our lives rather than being at the heart of our destruction.”
Designers “fed up” with industry’s lack of action
Gummer is the chairman of the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee, which is responsible for advising the government on emissions targets and monitoring its progress in achieving them.
Last week, Gummer warned that the UK’s attempts to tackle emissions have so far been “appalling“, leaving the country “off track” for meeting its climate targets.
This has been echoed by experts including Cambridge University engineering professor Julian Allwood, who argued that the UK’s net-zero strategy is as unrealistic as “magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood”.
The UK’s design industry had a similarly slow start, launching its Design Declares campaign a full two years after architects, engineers and other creative industries declared a climate emergency.
Announced in September as part of London Design Festival, the initiative hopes to unite studios that are “fed up with a lack of industry momentum”.
The Design for Planet Festival is taking place from 9 to 10 November at the V&A Dundee. See Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.
Spotted: Floating homes are increasingly seen as a viable housing option. Copenhagen-based MAST architecture studio’s concept of modular structures makes the idea sustainable by building with recycled materials and incorporating marine-friendly shapes into the design.
Called Land on Water, the studio’s concept uses flat-packed modules made from recycled plastic to create the floating base. Designed to be easy to ship and assemble, the system is customisable. Once the bases are built, they can be connected in a variety of configurations, providing everything from a floating pool to homes and recreation space. More or less support can be added as needed as a community develops and changes.
MAST uses gabion construction for the bases, which is a series of mesh cages filled with flotation supports. In this case, the studio recommends locally sourced, recycled materials. Sea creatures can live safely in, on, and around the cages, and the studio explicitly eliminates harmful chemicals and other materials from the design in order to better support and live in partnership with marine life.
Currently working on a prototype, the studio seeks partners interested in developing the concept for a range of projects.
As well as floating homes, Springwise has spotted floating work pods and floating solar farms taking advantage of the flexibility of working with water, rather than against it.
Reflecting our global Springwise readership, we explore the innovation landscape and freshest thinking from a new country each week. This week we are heading to Morocco…
Climate targets: A 45.5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – 18.3 per cent of this target is unconditional with the remaining 27.2 per cent conditional on international assistance
Sustainability issues
Water scarcity– Morocco is extremely vulnerable to drought and water scarcity. Development strains, increased demand for irrigation, and population growth are causing a decline in renewable water resources. Water-stressed farms, in turn, require greater irrigation, further reducing available water in a vicious circle.
Phosphate production– Morocco plays a crucial role in the global food system. The country possesses over 70 per cent of the world’s phosphate rock deposits from which the phosphorous used in fertiliser is derived. Phosphate extraction and fertiliser production both have a major environmental impact as they are highly energy- and water-intensive.
Coastal erosion– Rising sea levels and climate-change-exacerbated coastal erosion are threatening the livelihoods of many coastal Moroccans working in sectors such as fisheries and tourism. In fact, according to the World Bank, coastal erosion threatens to swamp entire beaches in the MENA region.
For farmers in Africa and the Middle East, reliance on an increasingly volatile climate is making it more and more difficult to achieve a stable, predictable income. And, according to The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, aridity in parts of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region will increase in the next century, shrinking arable lands and disrupting agricultural patterns. This worrying trend inspired the foundation of Jodoor, a Rabat-based startup that designs, builds, and installs hi-tech connected greenhouses for farmers. Read more
The world loses almost six million hectares of forest each year to deforestation. That’s like losing an area the size of Portugal every two years. And around three-quarters of this deforestation is directly attributable to agriculture. To respond to this problem, From Sand to Green (FSG) has developed a nature-based solution for transforming deserts into farmland. Read more
A century ago, a growing population pushed farmers to grow crops faster than nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil could keep up, and supplies of natural nitrates began to run out. In response, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a process to react hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under pressure to make ammonia for use as fertiliser. But in solving one problem, they caused another one – making ammonia in this way takes a lot of energy. Now, a new process for making green ammonia may once again come to the rescue. Read more
Words: Matthew Hempstead
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German tech company Open Funk has developed a more sustainable version of a food processor, which is repairable, upgradable and compatible with glass jars that people already have in their homes.
Shortlisted in the sustainable design category of the 2022 Dezeen Awards, the Re:Mix blender works with standard canning jars of any shape or volume, such as those used to hold jams and pickles, as long as they have an 82-millimetre twist-off lid.
Open Funk’s aim was to create a new approach to designing kitchen appliances by stripping back unnecessary components, open-sourcing the design and allowing people to utilise everyday items they already have in their cupboards.
The Re:Mix blender is designed to be compatible with common canning jars
Re:Mix is constructed from recycled and recyclable materials, with speckled panels of reclaimed waste plastic used to wrap the cuboid base, which holds the motor of the food processor.
Much like a Nutribullet, the gadget has a separate blade head designed to be screwed onto the jar containing the food. This is then slotted on top of the motor and controlled via an aluminium knob mounted on the front.
To extend its lifespan, the product was designed to be easily repaired and upgraded – either in Open Funk‘s Berlin workshop or at home with the help of open-source design plans.
Its separate blade head is designed to be screwed onto the jars
The company also developed a closed-loop business model for the blender, which will involve buying back and refurbishing used Re:Mix models.
“The world’s obsession with competition, globalisation and patents got us to the point where the way we make things is causing tremendous harm to our environment,” said Open Funk. “We believe Re:Mix is proof that another way is possible.”
The base of the food processor has a modular design and is held together without adhesives, allowing it to be disassembled with common tools. Its puzzle-like joints have a simplified design that is sturdy and durable, according to Open Funk.
The design is open-source so that anyone can make their version of the product
The speckled panels surrounding the base of the food processor are made in France by melting and pressing waste plastics, before the resulting slabs are CNC milled in Berlin.
Open Funk says it chose to make Re:Mix compatible with 82-millimetre jars as these are widely available across Europe, as well as being large enough to accommodate the blades and to fit most people’s hands for rinsing.
A QR code on the back of the blender’s base leads to a repair guide, video tutorials and a product passport that helps users to repair and upgrade the product themselves.
Open Funk only ships to the European Union, which the company says was an intentional decision to guarantee repairability, lower the ecological footprint from shipping and bypass the work of having to engineer the product for international standards.
Instead, the company hopes to inspire designers around the world to adapt its product for their own markets.
“We hope to see other hackers, makers and entrepreneurs take the open-source blueprints of Re:Mix and build their own local versions in their own regions,” Open Funk co-founder Paul Anca told Dezeen.
It has a modular design that is easy to take apart for repairs and upgrades
“Not only would this create a platform for decentralised production with low emissions but the end products will be reflections of local customs, taste and materials,” he continued.
“That’s a much more creative expression than the current one-size-fits-all approach we see in the industry.”
Re:Mix is shortlisted in the sustainable design category of the 2022 Dezeen Awards, where it is up again projects including the K-BriqTM – a brick made entirely of construction waste – and a bespoke furniture collection made from firehoses by Local Works Studio.
Spotted: A century ago, a growing population pushed farmers to grow crops faster than nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil could keep up, and supplies of natural nitrates began to run out. In response, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a process to react hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under pressure to make ammonia for use as fertiliser. But in solving one problem, they caused another one – making ammonia in this way takes a lot of energy. Now, a new process for making green ammonia may once again come to the rescue.
Dutch company Proton Ventures, the Institute Research Energy Solar et Energy Nouvelles (IRESEN), and Morocco’s Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) have signed an agreement to build a demonstration-sized green ammonia facility at the OCP Group chemical complex in Jorf Lasfar, Morocco. The plant will be capable of producing 4 tonnes of ammonia per day, powered using an electrical load emulator that simulates the profiles of wind and solar generation at different geographical sites.
The partners say the facility will act as a ‘world reference unit’ and the trial results will be used to develop large-scale industrial projects that use renewable energy to generate ammonia. The partner organisations hope that the project will allow them to develop expertise, conduct training, and acquire data covering a range of scenarios and operation and maintenance configurations. The hope is that this will enable future green molecule production plants.
Mohammed Bousseta, Director of Innovate for Industry at UM6P explains that the plant will “constitute a living laboratory available to UM6P Researchers, Doctoral Students and Professors for research and education in the fields of hydrogen and green ammonia [as well as] a pilot for training and feasibility studies for a large industrial unit of Green Ammonia.”
The promise of ammonia as a future green fuel can be seen in the variety of recent innovations covered by Springwise. These include a generator that runs on both hydrogen and ammonia fuel and a zero-emission ammonia fuel used to power heavy machinery.
