Spotted: Researchers predict that the refurbished electronics market will reach more than $94 billion (around €88 billion) by 2030. Such growth suggests an increase in the accessibility of devices based on cost as well as more robust reuse and recycling systems.
Contributing to the big strides being taken in keeping used electronic devices out of landfill is technology recycling company GreenDice. The Estonian company partners with a range of businesses to place their used equipment with members of communities in need of connectivity.
With a starting monthly fee of €5.9 per month, individuals can choose a refurbished laptop, desktop, or both. Every plan comes with GreenDice’s guaranteed IT support and full transparency on how old the device is and who owned it. Borrowers can feel confident that they are getting quality devices as all equipment comes from globally known manufacturers and businesses upgrading their tech.
If a device is no longer needed, borrowers can return it at any time, with no costs involved in cancelling. And when a computer reaches the end of its usable life, GreenDice takes it back and oversees the responsible, sustainable recycling of its parts.
For businesses, GreenDice offers a way to reduce environmental impact without having to resort to offsetting emissions. The company’s programme also makes it possible for organisations to complete reliable full life cycle assessments of their device inventory.
Affordability is a cornerstone of the company’s programme, and the team plans to decrease monthly fees in proportion to a growth in the number of commercial partners.
A non-toxic, low-energy material recovery process, along with a used electronics marketplace are two other methods of increasing circularity that are highlighted by innovators in Springwise’s database.
Architizer is thrilled to announce the winners of the 11th Annual A+Awards! Interested in participating next season? Sign up for key information about the 12th Annual A+Awards, set to launch this fall.
Susan Sontag once said that there were only three subjects she had been interested in her whole life: “freaks,” women and China. She isn’t alone — especially on that last point. The world’s oldest continuous civilization has always captivated Westerners, partly due to the perception that it is shrouded in secrecy.
Even fifty years after Nixon visited China, this perception still has some basis. The political regime of President Xi is not known for its transparency. While China is by no means a hermit kingdom, there is much about its economy, military and politics that remains the subject of speculation. Little details, anecdotes or photographs from China are scoured like Rorschach tests, with Western spectators seeing in them what they want to see: evidence of either China’s strength or its weakness, its national virtue or its deep corruption. And as fear of China’s rising power has grown, these interpretations have trended toward the ominous.
In recent months, as rumors of China’s economic crisis have spread, the images that seem to interest people the most are photographs of China’s so-called “ghost cities” — urban developments that are eerily under-occupied. The most famous of these, the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, is also one of the most captivating, as it includes not only luxury residences but also city squares and museums. But what do these images signify? Are Ordos and similar developments simply modern-day Potemkin villages designed by the CCP to place a veneer of luxury on an economy with deeply flawed fundamentals? The answer seems to be yes and no.
According to experts, China’s economic crisis is driven by an over-reliance on investment as opposed to consumer spending as the driver of economic growth. As counterintuitive as it might sound to those who, like me, never got past Econ 101, economic growth can be driven by capital investment even when there is a lack of demand for the products and services that are being invested in. Stephen Morgan, a professor emeritus of Chinese economic history at the University of Nottingham, explained this process in a recent interview with Vox.
“Investment is largely going into, as I said, infrastructure, real estate. At present, probably about 40 percent of that is unproductive,” explains Professor Morgan. “One way to think of that is ‘bridges to nowhere.’ The thing about investment is it doesn’t matter whether the bridge goes to nowhere or it actually serves a purpose. It produces GDP growth.When I was living in China, between 2013 and 2020, in Ningbo, I used to take the bus to work every day. The bus stops between my apartment and the university were rebuilt three times — three times in about six years. The first time they needed rebuilding. The second time, there were some nice improvements, like electronic boards that told you when the bus was going to come. The third time they rebuilt all the bus stops with so much steel you would need a tank to knock them down. Other than that, there was very little welfare benefit. That’s wasted investment.”
The city of Ordos isn’t exactly empty, but it feels that way. Over two thirds of its apartments are unoccupied. Image: Popolon, architects : Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun from MAD Architects[1], Ordos Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0
Real estate was long considered a “safe” investment, which is why the Chinese state encouraged and participated in this kind of investment. Some are still holding out, sitting on empty properties hoping they will get a return. However, the situation is strikingly unbalanced. According to a 2021 Business Insider article, there are about 65 million empty homes in China, almost enough to house the entire population of France. This is an especially daunting statistic when one considers the fact that many people in China live in substandard housing. The real estate that is being built is not being utilized by the Chinese population.
So what do the Chinese ghost cities signify? Nothing more or less than the misallocation of resources in that country. It is a problem created by a set of policies that solved one problem (increasing economic growth) while creating others (debt and waste). Despite the spell China casts on the imagination of westerners, there isn’t anything mysterious about it — the misallocation of resources has always been the central problem in the field of economics and no nation has ever been able to solve it, whether through markets, central planning, or a mix of the two.
Maybe one day we will have housing “to each according to his need,” but for now that is not the case — whether you are in China or the US. The two nations have more in common than they think.
For architects, the last decade in China has likely been bittersweet. While there were no shortage of opportunities, architecture is at bottom a practical art, and I imagine the architects who worked on these ghost cities were filled with a sense of emptiness, perhaps even dread, as they contemplated the fate of their creations. A building without a purpose is a melancholy thing indeed, like a song that no one will ever hear.
Architizer is thrilled to announce the winners of the 11th Annual A+Awards! Interested in participating next season? Sign up for key information about the 12th Annual A+Awards, set to launch this fall.
Cover Image: Ordos City, Uday Phalgun, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Spotted: The global refurbished and used mobile phone market is expected to grow from more than $50 billion (around €47 billion) in 2022 to around $172 billion (around €161 billion) by 2033. And advocates of electronics recycling see an encouraging uptick in consumer demand for refurbished devices.
As a means of making the most of all the valuable materials found in devices that range from smartwatches and tablets to video game consoles and audio products, digital resale platform Valyuu connects buyers and sellers with its reliable second-hand electronics marketplace. Valyuu provides buyers with a reliable evaluation of products that includes photos and access to full test reports.
Sellers have multiple options on the platform. They can sell their device for an immediate payment through Fast Pay or wait a bit longer to receive a Best Value payment. Valyuu covers all shipping costs, and if a seller chooses to donate their device to the company, Valyuu donates the value of the sale to a social inclusion and education charity.
With data sensitivity a major barrier to large scale electronics recycling, Valyuu provides sellers with detailed instructions on how to wipe clean their devices. And once the company receives an item, its team of IT experts re-wipes the product for further data protection.
If a device needs something fixed, the Valyuu team of refurbishers makes it usable again. And if a device is no longer usable, Valyuu’s team of recyclers takes it apart for sustainable reuse and recycling.
The Netherlands-based company operates throughout the Benelux countries of The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany and plans to continue expanding the availability of its services internationally. Having recently closed a round of seed funding that raised €2.4 million, the company plans to further expand the range of products available on its platform, further its research and development (R&D), and make its service available in more locations.
As well as electronics, refurbishment is being used by a multitude of industries as a means of reducing waste while expanding the lifespan of goods. In Springwise’s library, innovations include a subscription service for office furniture and virtual trunk shows of used luxury items.
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.
Economic growth has been a defining feature of the past 50 years of human history. And this has had a positive impact by lifting billions out of poverty. In fact, the World Bank reports that, in China alone, 800 million people have risen above the poverty line over the past forty years.
However, to date, economic growth has been inextricably linked to the ever-more-intensive extraction and consumption of natural resources. ‘Material footprint’ is a measure of the total amount of raw materials extracted to meet global demand. And, according to the UN, this figure has risen from 43 billion metric tonnes in 1990 to 92 billion tonnes in 2017. Moreover, the International Resource Panel estimates that we could be consuming 140 billion tonnes of minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and biomass annually by 2050.
This situation is clearly unsustainable, which has led to the rise of the concept of the ‘circular economy’. Today, we can think of our economy as ‘linear’ in the sense that, for the most part, our resources are converted into products that are then disposed of as waste at the end of their useful life. By contrast, in a circular economy, waste materials are turned back into fresh resources.
If successfully implemented, this economic model could reduce our reliance on virgin materials and de-couple growth from resource consumption. But to make the circular economy a reality, we need solutions that promote the ‘five Rs’: reduce, refuse, recycle, repair, and reuse.
Many such solutions will be on display at ChangeNOW in Paris between 25th and 27th May. Here are five of the best.
Europe’s top three coffee-consuming countries drink more than 1,000 cups per person every year. Many companies encourage the use and washing of mugs and bowls in the office, and with a goal of reducing the water used to provide such a service, French company Auum has created a new method of cleaning. The Auum-S single glass dishwasher is made from a patented design that disinfects reusable cups in 10 seconds, allowing one washer to clean up to 2,000 glasses per day. The company is building a circular economy with French-made parts and assembly, along with a rental service that ensures that machines are properly maintained, and glasses recycled at the end of their life. The countertop washer cleans a single glass using 140-degree Celsius dry steam and less than a single ounce of water per wash. The high temperature negates the need for chemicals. Read more
Batteries are found everywhere in modern life, and around 15 billion are produced and sold for household use every year around the world. All these batteries need to go somewhere when they run out, and the vast majority end up in landfills, where they leach toxic substances that pollute the soil, water, and air. To tackle this problem, startup BeFC (Bio-enzymatic Fuel Cells) has developed a battery made from paper cellulose. The twist? Instead of incorporating metal or chemical catalysts, which are often expensive to source and harmful to the environment, BeFC’s system uses biological enzymes to convert natural substrates, such as oxygen and glucose, into electricity. The paper-based cells are extremely thin and flexible. This means they are highly compact and perfect for use in low-power, portable, and disposable electronics – including medical wearables, which are normally powered by button-cell or lithium batteries. And because the batteries are bio-based, they are biodegradable, which means that they can be easily and safely disposed of or recycled. Find out more
Polyurethane is a polymer material used in a range of common products from plastics and construction filler foams to adhesives. A group of compounds known as polyols are essential for making polyurethane, and today these are mostly derived from petroleum. However, polyols can also be derived from natural plant-based sources. To date, most of these alternative ‘biopolyols’ have been derived from virgin feedstocks or plants that compete with food production for land resources. As a result, they pose their own sustainability challenges. Now, Cyprus-based company Ecorbia has developed ‘Crudyol’ – a biopolyol made through chemical upcycling of biomass byproducts. This material is truly compatible with circular economy principles as it provides a cost-effective method for putting a range of industrial waste streams to good use. Find out more
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the buildings and construction industry was responsible for 39 per cent of process and energy-related carbon emissions in 2018, 11 per cent of which come from the production of building materials. Italy-based architectural firm Ricehouse is on a mission to build houses more sustainably, by using rice by-products. The company uses natural waste residues, such as rice straw, husk, and chaff to create circular construction materials, including thermal insulating plasters, finishings, lightweight screeds, and prefabricated panels. Read more
Animal leather has multiple negative environmental impacts. To start with, raising livestock takes up a lot of land and contributes to deforestation and the disruption of vital carbon sinks. On top of that, leather tanning can lead to toxic chemicals, such as chromium, entering the environment. And, at the same time, huge amounts of fashion waste is sent to landfill each year. Now, North Macedonia’s L&E Studio is developing a new, more sustainable approach to designing and producing handbags. The studio employs local craftsmen who use cruelty-free leather alternatives to make the fashion accessories. Each bag comes with a lifetime guarantee and a repair service, and is made exclusively of recycled or upcycled materials. Find out more
Springwise is a proud partner of ChangeNOW, which takes place in Paris 25-27 May 2023. As the world’s largest event for the planet, the three-day international summit brings together entrepreneurs, businessleaders, and policymakers to accelerate change.
Spotted: As e-commerce continues to grow, so too does the need for scalable technology solutions that help businesses maximise their sales. Nibble Technology is an artificial intelligence (AI) e-commerce negotiation chatbot that creates a pleasant, customised connection between customers and merchants. The chatbot—which can be integrated with leading e-commerce platform Shopify—lets customers make an offer for a product when browsing a retailer’s product pages. The negotiation process is very quick, with customers able to strike a deal in under a minute.
Nibble has recently released an updated version of its Shopify app, while securing a new funding round anchored by UK-based venture capital firm Venrex.
The updated app features improved AI negotiation capabilities, and is specifically focused on supporting businesses in the circular economy and B Corporations. Half price fees will be offered to these clients to support their sustainable business practices. Following the update, Shopify store owners will also be able set up Nibble in minutes. Non-Shopify customers can also use Nibble through the company’s API.
Pre-owned marketplaces (both offline and online) have always utilised negotiation to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for both the customer and seller. Nibble brings this concept into today’s environment, providing customers with the feeling of an in-person negotiation, while increasing customer interaction, and boosting conversion.
Other AI-powered retail solutions spotted by Springwise include an AI solution for the fashion industry that personalises customer experiences and avoids supply chain waste, an AI-powered sensory quiz that provides wine recommendations, and computer vision used for fashion cataloguing.
