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Using fallen city trees for greener urban building – Springwise
CategoriesSustainable News

Using fallen city trees for greener urban building – Springwise

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: According to one study, rural and urban communities across the US lose around 36 million trees every year, whether that’s due to felling, disease, or weather-related damages. Once they’ve fallen or been cut down, the majority of these trees are chipped, burnt, or simply sent to rot in landfill. This represents a huge waste of potential resources and economic opportunity. One startup that’s hoping to change that is Washington-based Cambium Carbon.

Instead of allowing fallen or cut-down trees to go to waste, Cambium partners with local sawmills and other organisations to turn them into Carbon Smart Wood – a high-quality, carbon-negative building material with various purposes, including decking, siding, fencing, millwork, and lumber. To regenerate land and ensure the long-term of America’s forests, the company allocates 15 per cent of its profits to the planting of new trees, targeting historically underserved and low-canopy areas.

Cambium Carbon also tracks all incoming material through its transparent supply chain software, Traece. With the Traece system, end users can also access information on their Carbon Smart Wood manufacturing, as well as helpful data on the carbon impact, which can be used in a company’s climate reporting as they work to meet sustainability goals.

Numerous companies have seen the potential in Cambium, with Carbon Smart Wood already incorporated across various sites like Maryland’s Guinness Brewery, the Patagonia store in Baltimore, and the National Geographic headquarters in Washington. Furniture retailer Room & Board has also used the material to craft unique coffee and side tables.

There are many other innovators making use of wood to create beautiful, eco-friendly products – including a waterproof wood composite for use in bathrooms and another material made from wood waste.

Written By: Lauryn Berry and Matilda Cox

Reference

Bio-mining lithium with microbes for greener extraction
CategoriesSustainable News

Bio-mining lithium with microbes for greener extraction

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Lithium is an essential mineral with a variety of applications, including in the production of electric vehicle batteries. However, mining the element is carbon intensive – generating 15 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of mined lithium. So, even though lithium is playing a key role in the green energy transition, the sizeable impact of its production raises questions about its sustainability over the longer term. This is where startup BioMetallum comes in.

The Argentinian company hopes to meet the increasing demand for lithium, without the accompanying environmental cost. Instead of using a highly chemical-intensive process, BioMetallum’s system, called Lithium BioX, relies on biotechnology and microorganisms to extract useful metals like lithium from brine, even when the brine has low concentrations of such metals.

The bacteria act as a kind of biomagnet in the brine, absorbing the lithium into a biofilm that retains the minerals ready for extraction. After testing hundreds of bacteria, the team carefully selected those that had desirable qualities, such as brine resistance, and manipulated them to enhance their lithium-absorbing abilities. Because the method doesn’t use harsh chemicals, it means other elements in the brine, like potassium, can also be retrieved.

Unlike current methods, which can take a year and a half to extract the desired elements from evaporation ponds, BioMetallum’s technique takes a matter of weeks. Needing only five per cent of the land currently required, and achieving a lithium recovery rate over 90 per cent, Lithium BioX helps to make lithium production much more efficient and economically viable. And, the method of extraction also allows the brine to be returned after use, without producing any toxic chemicals or waste.

BioMetallum has also turned its attention to used Li-ion batteries, with its circular Lithium BioR biotechnological process that uses the same principles to enable the complete recovery of lithium from spent batteries.

Sourcing and retrieving precious minerals is crucial for the transition to green technologies. Springwise has also spotted this AI that aids in the locating of minerals like lithium as well as this lower-impact and cheaper lithium extraction method.

Written By: Archie Cox and Matilda Cox

Reference

Greener lubricants to decarbonise heavy industry
CategoriesSustainable News

Greener lubricants to decarbonise heavy industry

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: As renewable energy infrastructure expands, so do the maintenance requirements. And, similarly, the growth of e-commerce requires ever-faster production and distribution networks. Facilitating that growth are new machines, including robots, capable of technical tasks older ones are not. As materials technology develops, heavy machinery is increasingly smart, connected, and made from more environmentally healthy components.  

A crucial aspect of many industrial machines is the lubricant that allows the pieces to move at incredibly high speeds and temperatures. When contaminants get in the oil, machines can fail, jeopardising worker safety and causing production costs to skyrocket. Dutch industrial lubricant manufacturer Fluitec provides new-generation lubricants and management systems. The company’s lubricants are designed to withstand the new workloads of cutting-edge machinery, and the management systems provide laboratory-level quality analysis on the plant floor as well as in the field. 

Fluitec’s Fill4Life programme is a circular method of improving the life span of a lubricant while reducing a company’s carbon emissions. Rather than the linear model of adding new oil to a machine and then disposing of the old, Fill4Life uses Fluitec’s turbine oil and healthier, greener additives to significantly prolong the life of a machine and the lubricant that allows it to run. Fill4Life is customisable and can reduce every machine’s CO2 footprint by 85 per cent and save a company at least 50 per cent of its previous expenditure on oils.  

Fluitec also provides the Ruler V Antioxidant Monitoring solution to analyse and predict the longevity of the lubricants currently in a machine. The monitor works in full sunlight and includes dictation capability and a camera for fast, accurate reports from the field. And with a small Membrane Patch Colorimetry (MPC) test, Fluitec provides a visual inspection of a lubricant’s health in under two seconds. The system stores the data for trend analysis and pre-emptive maintenance to help reduce machine failure.  

Fluitec is a carbon-negative company and claims to be the only one of its kind to attain B Corp certification.  

From electricity-powered paving vehicles to industrial waste materials replacing cement, innovations in Springwise’s library are working to help decarbonise heavy industry as quickly as possible.

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference

Building greener homes with coconuts and sugarcane
CategoriesSustainable News

Building greener homes with coconuts and sugarcane

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: By 2050, Africa is expected to be home to an additional 1.1 billion people, which is almost 75 per cent of the world’s projected population growth of 1.5 billion people. Analysts believe that 80 per cent of the buildings that will be needed to accommodate that growth have yet to be built. This opens up vast and varied opportunities to develop circularity in urban planning and development, and construction practices.  

Ghanian company Ecovon is already working towards more sustainable building practices by upcycling a common agriwaste product into an all-natural, compostable building material. Ghana is one of the world’s largest coconut producers, something the Ecovon founders wanted to take advantage of. The industry produces upwards of 750,000 tonnes of coconut waste each year. 

Using coconut husks as the basis for wooden building panels allows farmers and processors to earn additional income while also reducing the amount of organic waste needing disposal. Husks are dried, milled, combined with sugarcane, and then pressed into shape. The production process is carbon neutral and the boards can come in a mix of colours and sizes. 

In tests, the resulting panels proved stronger than traditional wood, as well as being much less expensive to produce. They’re also naturally antifungal, flame retardant, and do not use any chemical binding agents. Without those toxins, the boards are fully compostable. 

Using the material reduces demand for hardwood, which helps reduce deforestation. Following decades of deforestation in Asia and South America, attention has shifted to include African forests. They are now in serious danger as deforestation across the continent is happening at twice the global average.  

From seaweed bricks to invisible solar panels that blend in with historic buildings, innovations in Springwise’s library are finding ways to improve many of the most common construction materials.

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference

Can we attract a greener future with rare-earth-free magnets?
CategoriesSustainable News

Can we attract a greener future with rare-earth-free magnets?

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Magnets made from rare earths have become ubiquitous in several high-performance technologies and products ranging from wind turbines, electric vehicles (EVs), consumer electronics, and robots. However, while rare earth elements are essential for critical infrastructure, China controls the bulk of the supply chain, making the magnets subject to geopolitical tensions.

Now, Niron Magnetics has developed a high-performance permanent magnet that is as strong as a rare earth magnet but does not use any rare earth elements. Instead, the company’s Clean Earth Magnet is produced using abundant and easily recyclable materials (iron and nitrogen).

Not only do Niron’s magnets exceed the performance of rare-earth-based magnets by up to 50 per cent, according to the company, but they also have a 75 per cent lower overall environmental impact. Additionally, the Clean Earth Magnet is stable over a wide range of temperatures and, helped by the company’s scalable manufacturing processes, can be produced at a lower cost than those made from rare earths.

Niron’s magnets were recently selected as one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023, and TIME is not the only one excited by this technology. The company has forged commercial partnerships with companies like Volvo Cars, General Motors, Tymphany, and Western Digital.

Earlier this month, Niron announced an additional $33 million (around €30.4 million) had been raised, from investors including GM Ventures and Stellantis Ventures. This new financing will help the company scale its manufacturing capacity to support exclusive customer programmes and the first sales of its Clean Earth Magnet.

Replacing new rare earth elements is the goal of recent innovations that include the use of ferrite magnets in wind and tidal generators and the recycling of rare earth elements from products such as flat-screen TVs.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

Reference

Decarbonize Your Home to Support a Greener Grid
CategoriesSustainable News Zero Energy Homes

Decarbonize Your Home to Support a Greener Grid

By Zarkon Group,

Solar supply and residents’ demand

California already has a great deal of solar electricity being generated, both on buildings and in large-scale solar farms. For example, years of Prop 39 projects for school districts around California have been completed, installing megawatts of solar farms on campuses. These sites were targeted, in part, due to lower summer occupancies, and net metering rules allowed them to reap large financial benefits. Most of these campuses are net exporters of clean renewable energy all summer long. Every day, the managers of the electrical grid must stabilize local electric networks to share this abundant load throughout the day, and quickly ramp up centralized power once the sun goes down and folks head home.

As more all-electric buildings and homes come online, it is important to look at the impacts of these buildings on grid health. The grid must continue to be updated to guard against solar saturation: where solar generation exceeds the total usage in a given area. The grid is managed by local utilities and state agencies, and this balance of supply and demand drives time-of-day pricing that encourages responsible usage.

Energy industry experts point to what is known as the “duck curve,” the risk of over-generation of renewable energy (especially solar) and the impact of having to ramp up energy production (most often these are natural gas plants) to respond to rising demand when the sun goes down. In the belly of the duck (the middle of the day), solar production is peaking and electricity sells at a loss. Yes, California is paying other Western states to take solar energy off their grid. This lets baseload generation systems like nuclear, hydroelectric, and some natural gas plants run constantly, as they cannot easily, or cost-effectively, shut down and then come back on daily.

Reference

Biosolvents for greener manufacturing of solar panels 
CategoriesSustainable News

Biosolvents for greener manufacturing of solar panels 

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Although organic solar cells – those that use carbon-based materials and organic molecules – are one of the greenest solar cell technologies, manufacturing them still relies on carcinogenic petrochemical processes. With the health of workers and the planet in mind, researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have replaced the toxic solvents with plant-derived alternatives. 

By applying a framework called the Hansen solubility formulation, the KAUST team searched for a new solvent that was similar on a molecular level to the toxic solvent presently used for organic solar cells. With this, they found that plant-based solvents called terpenes could suitably replace them without impacting the cells’ light-capturing performance. 

Daniel Corzo, a PhD student in Derya Baran’s lab, who led the work, said: “We obtained solar cells with efficiencies above 16 per cent using terpene-based inks — essentially the same as from chlorinated solvents — but with an 85 per cent lower carbon footprint and with the potential to become carbon negative in the future.” 

In a bid for their discovery to make an impact, the KAUST researchers have made their findings freely available in an interactive library for green solvent selection. 

Springwise has previously spotted other innovations aimed at improving solar energy, from replacing silver with copper in solar panel production, to a startup that hopes to divert solar projects to more impactful sites.

Written By: Georgia King

Reference

A safer, greener, and cheaper battery
CategoriesSustainable News

A safer, greener, and cheaper battery

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Electrification of day-to-day activities, such as transport and heating, is essential if the world is to transition away from its reliance on fossil fuels. But as new electrified technologies come online, the overall demand for electricity is set to sky-rocket. According to German startup So-Cer, electrification of mobility will triple the demand for electricity, while electrification of heating will triple it. And as variable renewables are added to the energy mix, there is an increasing need for smart energy storage solutions that balance supply and demand.

So-Cer has developed a reliable and affordable battery that can help to address both the rapidly growing demand for electricity and the addition of renewables – a situation the company refers to as the ‘energy balance challenge’.

Using only locally sourceable raw materials and base components, the brand aims to reach a lifetime storage cost of less than one cent per kilowatt-hour of storage. This would make the So-Cer Battery the most cost-effective option on the market, and the go-to choice for homeowners and businesses alike.

One of the key issues with many current battery solutions is their reliance on materials—notably lithium and cobalt—that are extracted using environmentally harmful processes and are only available in certain regions of the world. By contrast, the So-Cer cell leverages cutting-edge battery technology that does not require lithium or cobalt. Instead, it uses salt, water, carbon, nickel, stainless steel, and alumina – all of which are globally abundant resources. This makes the So-Cer cell an attractive option for reducing international procurement dependencies.

In addition, the company claims that it is the safest of its kind on the market, being non-combustible and non-explosive with no degassing, no thermal runaway, and no conduction.

The cell’s power rating is comparable to that of current lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries and is being marketed for stationary applications because of its chemical properties. 

Other recent battery-related innovations spotted by Springwise include a modular lithium extraction plant, sodium-ion batteries for remote communities, and a company turning used electric vehicle batteries into home energy storage systems.

Written By: Katrina Lane

15th June 2022

Email: info@so-cer.com

Website: so-cer.com

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