Using biotech for sustainable chemical manufacturing
Spotted: The global chemical industry emits more than two gigatons of carbon dioxide each year, according to Deloitte. And many of the catalysts used to accelerate reactions today contain heavy metals which can contaminate the environment if not disposed of properly. This has sparked the interest of new generation of innovators who are looking to make the chemicals industry more sustainable.
One way to do this is to replace metallic catalysts with something healthier that can underpin less energy-intensive processes. To this end, Oxford biotechnology company HydRegen has created a bio-based manufacturing material that replaces heavy metal catalysts. Using a bio-based catalyst allows the production process to work on lower temperatures and lower pressure. That decrease then reduces the amount of energy needed to run the process, which contributes to a significantly lower carbon footprint.
HydRegen’s compounds are designed to slot into existing infrastructure as direct replacements for the toxins used by the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing industries. One of HydRegen’s investors estimates that if Paracetamol production switched over to biocatalysts, the industry would save hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.
The company works with organisations at all stages of production and can supply a range of biocatalysts from very simple to complex new materials that work with a business’s proprietary enzymes. HydRegen recently raised £2.6 million (around €3 million) in investment to use for licensing its technology and expanding the team in order to support commercial deployment of the innovation.
Industrial manufacturing contributes so many toxins to the environment that Springwise has spotted a range of innovations – such as artificial intelligence (AI) used in net-zero metal casting and a copper replacement that stores carbon – that are helping to clean up the industry.
Written By: Keely Khoury
The Binhai Science Museum was designed to showcase artifacts from Tianjin’s industrial past through large-scale contemporary technology, including spectacular rockets for space research. The project is part of the city’s Binhai Cultural Center and contains facilities for cultural events and exhibitions as well as galleries, offices, and restaurant and retail spaces. The project was made to relate to the rich industrial history of the area, the site of high-volume manufacturing and research. A series of large-scale cones create major rooms throughout the museum. The central cone, lit from above, connects all three levels of the building.
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Completed in 2017, Brock Commons Tallwood House is an 18-story, LEED Gold certified, 404-bed student residence building located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. It was the world’s tallest mass wood tower at the time of its completion. The timber structure and prefabricated facade also went up in only 66 days.
A CLT canopy runs the length of a curtain wall base, which reveals the warm wood finishes of amenity spaces within. Elevator lobbies are clad with the same material as the exterior. Hallway finishes include natural wood doors and a palette of rich umber and ochre accent finishes. Living unit interiors are bright white, spare and simple.
The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center is the academic hub of the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. With the goal of becoming a net zero building, The Bloomberg Center forms the heart of the campus, bridging academia and industry while pioneering new standards in environmental sustainability through state-of-the-art design. T
Designed as a rain screen system, the outermost layer of the façade is composed of aluminum panels surfaced in an iridescent, PPG polymer coating. Designed in collaboration with Zahner, an architectural metal fabricator, the façade utilizes Zahner’s Louvered ZIRA™ system to create the image patterning.
Perched on an island’s edge in Georgian Bay, Ontario, the Grotto Sauna is a feat of old-world craftsmanship and new world sustainability made possible by cutting-edge software and fabrication technology. The selected concept for the Grotto prescribed a solid, simple presence on the exterior, while the interior followed dynamic air movements in curvature forms; requiring design solutions.
Partisans collaborated directly with their fabrication partner, MCM Inc., to develop new prototyping methods and with engineers and develop novel software patches for the toolpaths. The latter enabled the fabricators to override the automated limitations of the CNC machinery and ultimately use it as a sculpting tool to achieve the aesthetic vision, all the while maximizing the available wood and milling along the grain so that the pieces would match one another. The successful production of the panels also had to anticipate the method by which they would be sequentially assembled. This required the team to develop a sophisticated installation plan in tandem with the fabrication process.
When Bjarke Ingels Group and JDS Architects set out to create The Mountain residential project, it was the 2nd generation of the VM Houses: same client, same size and same street. The program, however, is 2/3 parking and 1/3 living. What if the parking area became the base upon which to place terraced housing, like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge? Rather than doing two separate buildings next to each other — a parking and a housing block — the team decided to merge the two functions into a symbiotic relationship.
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