Spotted: The World Economic Forum (WEF) calls the reuse of greywater – lightly used waste water – “one of the most promising avenues for water innovation.” One of the main challenges in increasing this reuse, though, is the highly energy-intensive process required to power the treatment processes and plants.
Renewable energy could be the solution that makes greywater recycling sustainable. French company Geopure designed a system that provides an endless loop of zero-waste, sustainable showers. The company’s WTS100 system was created particularly for organisations and communities living in remote areas or off-grid. The shower requires 100 litres of water from almost any source, including groundwater sources and rain.
Water drains directly from the shower and accompanying taps into the recycling system, to be purified immediately without using chemicals or generating emissions. Once the water has been disinfected and is ready for reuse, the system pumps the water back to the shower.
The WTS100 system is modular and portable, enabling custom sizes and bespoke layouts. Geopure’s systems are currently being used in locations that include an off-grid glamping camp in Australia and a self-sufficient cabin in Finland.
The UN Environment Programme calls wastewater “an invaluable resource” that could supply over 10 times the water currently provided by global desalination. Springwise’s library showcases a number of innovations seeking to make use of that resource, from beer to biomanufacturing feedstocks.
Spotted: Analysts expect that almost a third of the world’s population will still be cooking with polluting fuels in 2030. This is bad news for the environment, and threatens the health of those cooking in polluted spaces – a burden that disproportionately impacts women and girls in countries with developing economies.
Nigerian environmentalist and entrepreneur Tunde Adeyemi wants to relieve those burdens and improve the health and wellbeing of rural communities across the African continent. His solution is customised, portable biogas digesters that turn organic waste into electricity, clean cooking fuel, animal feed, and fertiliser. The Kitchen Box is the home solution, and the Bio-Tank is the agricultural version for smallholder farmers.
The digesters are not only affordable, costing one-tenth of current biodigester systems – enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and produce biogas that is safe and emissions-free. Adeyemi’s company, D-Olivette, produces all parts of a biogas production system, from tanks and bags for transporting the gas to a biogas-powered stove. The digesters take 10 minutes to set up and come with a five-year guarantee.
The Kitchen Box is relatively small at 500 litres, making it suitable for use in diminutive kitchens and cooking spaces. Organic waste is emptied into the container where it ferments into biogas. Once the gas is combusted, it can power super-hot, clean cooking. The byproducts of the process are available for use as organic fertiliser.
The Bio-Tank works the same way and is available in a variety of capacities from 500 to 50,000 litres, and can be designed and sized to bespoke requirements. The tanks are suitable for fermenting farm and human waste, as well as byproducts from food industry businesses. D-Olivette also offers bags for storage and transport of the biogas, making it easy to share and sell the clean fuel.
The accompanying app uses AI to maximise use of the system for each owner and help communities earn carbon credits for emissions mitigation. To make the system easy to implement, D-Olivette offers training on the set-up and use of its biodigesters with every purchase.
D-Olivette recently won the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation by the Royal Academy of Engineering and has sold more than 4,000 units of the Kitchen Box. The digesters are currently available across Nigeria and Benin Republic, and Adeyemi plans to continue expanding availability of the systems to reach as many rural communities as possible.
Other biogas innovations featured in Springwise’s library include municipal and farming systems for transforming organic waste into fuel.
Spotted: Few people stop to think about the carbon emitted by browsing the internet, but running and cooling servers and powering data transfer uses a lot of carbon. Each video or display ad impression represents an average of one gramme of CO2 emissions, which may not sound like a lot, until you consider how many ad impressions are viewed worldwide.
Now, Sharethrough, an omnichannel supply-side advertising exchange, and Scope3, a supplier of supply chain emissions data, have partnered to create GreenPMPs, the first supply-side platform (SSP) to offer media with net-zero carbon emissions.
The GreenPMP initiative enables brands to allocate a portion of their ad spend towards the funding of high-quality carbon removal activities, in order to compensate for the carbon emissions generated by running digital ad campaigns. Ultimately, this should make it easier for brands to reach their goals of net-zero emissions.
The programme places a Green icon on ads to alert consumers that it is sustainable. Using Sharethough’s GreenPMPs site, advertisers can measure their emissions across the entire programmatic supply chain in real time, using data from Scope3. Using a Carbon Emissions Estimator, advertisers can get an approximation of how much carbon waste an ad campaign could potentially generate, and then remove their ads from high-emission or low-performing sites to reduce their overall campaign emissions.
Surveys show that consumers tend to favour brands that demonstrate their sustainability and eco-credentials. In the archive, Springwise has spotted other brands making a sustainable change, including a pasta brand that saves energy by promoting passive cooking and a fashion brand that promotes clothing resale.
Spotted: Sustainably strengthening economies and agriculture is foundational to the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But climate change is putting increasing pressure on agriculture – with fluctuating seasons, changing rainfall patterns, extreme weather, and drought all becoming more common. Now, French agrobiotechnology company Elicit Plant uses plant-derived molecules called phytosterols to help crops survive dry periods.
Phytosterols are lipids that activate a plant’s resistance to environmental stressors. The compound is applied to plants early in their growth to encourage the development of characteristics that maximise the efficiency of water use.
Longer roots combined with reduced evapotranspiration help global cereal crops such as soybean and corn better survive the increasingly challenging environments within a changing climate. Elicit Plant’s trials show an increase in yield of between 13 and 22 per cent per crop, with a monetary value increase of up to $240 (around €219) per hectare.
The company’s first product is called BEST-a and is designed for soybeans. It can be used on corn, too, although a compound specifically for corn is nearing availability. As well as waiting for the final regulatory approvals, the company is also developing additional products to expand the range of crops it supports. BEST-a not only helps farmers grow more in drier conditions, the product also makes it possible to stretch available water supplies over a longer period of time.
Innovations that help farmers grow enough food for the world’s expanding population are crucial. Some that Springwise has spotted include urine-based fertilisers and sensors that optimise water usage for crops.
Timber provides almost all the building fabric of Green Solution House 2.0, a hotel on the Danish island of Bornholm completed by architecture studio 3XN.
Located in the town of Rønne, the modular building consists of a structural frame of cross-laminated timber (CLT), an exterior of timberboards and a layer of wood fibre insulation.
Green Solution House 2.0 has a modular CLT frame
The design was developed by 3XN with its sister studio GXN, which specialises in circular architecture, and is intended as a model for sustainable construction.
As well as specifying natural materials, the design team planned the hotel so that it could be built quickly and efficiently, with minimal waste.
Timber clads the exterior above a layer of wood fibre insulation
Its CLT frame was designed as a kit of parts and manufactured off-site. Material offcuts were carefully calculated and then used to create bespoke furniture elements within the building.
The building also incorporates granite surfaces made using waste material from local quarries.
The structure was designed as a kit of parts and built off-site
“The widespread use of timber is both good for the climate and gives a particularly warm atmosphere,” said Lasse Lind, partner at GXN and project lead for Green Solution House 2.0.
“The building itself is an expression of the hotel’s ambition to make green solutions an attractive element for guests.”
Hotel rooms sit on either side of a central atrium and staircase
Green Solution House 2.0 is an extension of Hotel GSH, also designed by 3XN, which opened in 2015.
The three-storey building contains 22 single bedrooms, one double bedroom and two dedicated meeting rooms.
Its interior is organised around a linear atrium, sandwiched between two rows of rooms on the ground and first floors.
A generous staircase rises up through its centre, leading up to a terrace and spa on the uppermost floor.
CLT offcuts were used to create bespoke furniture
A sheltered balcony or terrace fronts each room, helping to naturally shade floor-to-ceiling glazing while also providing guests with private outdoor space.
Inside the rooms, the CLT structure is left exposed to create a warm cabin-like feel.
Each room has its own balcony or terrace
Modularity was key to minimising waste in Green Solution House 2.0.
The building is formed of repeating box-like modules, arranged in a staggered formation to capture as much natural daylight as possible.
This standardised approach meant that offcuts were of the same size and dimensions, making it easier to utilise them for multiple furniture elements.
A spa is located on the uppermost level
Timber is a recurring material in 3XN projects, with recent examples including the Klimatorium climate centre, also in Denmark, and the planned extension to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The extensive use of the material for Green Solution House 2.0 has led to the project being named a 2022 winner of Årets Byggeri, a prestigious architectural award in Denmark. Hotel GSH received the same award in 2015.
The facade is staggered to maximise natural daylighting
“We are very proud to receive this award, which focuses on the impact that architecture can have on society,” said Lind.
“As an office, we seek to inspire through our projects, and we hope the Green Solution House 2.0 will inspire people to build with biogenic materials, use local and upcycled resources, and make holistic sustainability the main design driver.”
Green Solution House 2.0 forms part of Hotel GSH in Rønne
The building also incorporates rooftop solar panels and water recycling to reduce its energy footprint.
The studio expects the building to have a very low carbon footprint across its lifespan.
High-density, low-rise urban housing is the key to accommodating another three billion people over the next 80 years without costing the Earth, writes architect and urbanist Vishaan Chakrabarti.
By the year 2100 there will be 11 billion people on the planet, according to the United Nations – three billion more than there are today. You might rightfully ask how we can house an additional three billion people when nations around the globe are struggling to provide adequate accommodation for those in need today.
Meanwhile, the world is already experiencing the extreme impacts of anthropogenic climate change, as well as an omnipresent energy crisis fuelled by the war in Ukraine.
A surging population risks putting an even greater strain on the environment
A surging population risks putting an even greater strain on the environment and comes with even more demand for energy. No one, particularly not in the West, has the right to wish these newcomers away or deny them the housing, mobility, technology, food, and yes, the energy, they will need to live their lives.
How can our housing needs be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? How can we use today’s technologies to design new housing that is not only sustainable, not only low in embodied energy, but also truly carbon negative?
We simply don’t have the technology today to build carbon negative towers
We can conserve where we can, such as by adaptively reusing some of our existing building stock, particularly older office buildings made obsolete by the pandemic. But this alone won’t make a dent in our impending housing needs – we must build, and we must build better.
I for one am tired of hearing about solutions that don’t have a chance of widespread, affordable, global adoption for decades, even the great technology of mass-timber skyscrapers made from carbon-sinking, environmentally friendly and fire-retardant wood.
I love a good skyscraper, but we simply don’t have the technology today to build carbon negative towers.
We’re also decades away from realising clean grids in our existing cities, where most global population growth will occur, because of challenges ranging from inefficient transmission lines to the fossil fuel lobby’s chokehold on our governments.
The tyranny of today’s challenges demands a widely attainable answer now. We cannot wait until 2050.
Goldilocks-scale housing would enable us to house everyone while drastically reducing the emissions impact of our homes
The answer is hiding in plain sight: a “Goldilocks” type of high-density, low-rise urban housing that sits between the scale of sprawling single-family houses and large-scale towers, advocated by many architects and urbanists for decades.
From the hutongs of Beijing to the rowhouses of Boston, this scale of housing has created some of our most beloved urban neighbourhoods.
If adopted en masse, it would enable us to house everyone while drastically reducing the emissions impact of our homes.
Importantly, at two to three stories – but no higher – under the international building code this low-rise housing is required to have only one communal stair if wheelchair accessible units are provided at grade.
“Goldilocks housing could finally provide affordable, communal, equitable housing for communities in dire need of it,” argues Vishaan Chakrabarti
That allows for less concrete, lower building costs, and more community connection by dispensing with elevators and the banal experience of double-loaded corridors, while small shops and workspaces can also occupy the ground floor.
It is also, based on research my own studio conducted alongside engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, the maximum scale possible for carbon negativity with today’s technology.
In most sunny climates, which is where we anticipate the most population growth, this Goldilocks prototype hits the sweet spot between the number of residents it can house and the amount of roof area needed for enough solar panels to supply more energy than these residents need.
Solar panels, which are decreasing in cost while gaining in efficiency, could also be supplemented with existing state-of-the-art battery systems that level out solar supply and user demand to provide a constant energy source.
Because of its structural simplicity, Goldilocks housing can be built by local workers in accordance with local climates
Air conditioning and heating can be provided through electric pumps that are readily available today. These can create thermal storage by producing ice or hot water off-peak for use on-peak, enough at the Goldilocks scale to offset their energy use.
Additional sustainability measures, such as systems to compost food scraps and solid waste, can also be implemented with today’s technologies and can be self-contained within Goldilocks housing unlike in large towers where much more space is required.
The footprint is compact, leaving room for substantial tree and ground cover, decreasing stormwater impacts, reducing the heat island effect, and lowering the demand for air conditioning.
Because of its structural simplicity, Goldilocks housing can be built by local workers in accordance with local climates and customs out of simple local materials, like wood or brick, both of which have relatively low embodied carbon compared to concrete and steel.
We need not fear new neighbours
Goldilocks housing could finally provide affordable, communal, equitable housing for communities in dire need of it.
Architects can work with communities to make this low-rise housing appealing, visually and socially, integrating it into the lives of existing neighbourhoods.
When woven into the fabric of our cities, the Goldilocks scale is dense enough, at almost 50 units per acre, to support mass transit, biking, and walkability, connecting people with jobs, schools, parks and other daily destinations in an environmentally friendly way.
This isn’t rocket science. It is advocacy for simple, small-scale housing with solar panels above, transit below, known technologies throughout, all organised into affordable green, mixed-use neighbourhoods.
If the entire world lived at this scale, all 11 billion of us in 2100 would occupy a land mass equivalent to the size of France, leaving the rest of the world for nature, farming and clean oceans.
According to the International Energy Agency, the Goldilocks model offsets so much carbon that it would effectively cancel out the emissions of every car in the world if we all lived this way. The impact would be staggering.
We need not fear new neighbours. We can accommodate 11 billion people without being beholden to autocrats and fossil fuel companies who continually threaten our collective existence.
We don’t have a lack of land or technology. We just have a lack of vision and will, because the answers are hiding in plain sight.
Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, urbanist, and author focused on cities and sustainability. He is the founder and creative director of global architecture studio Practice for Architecture and Urbanism. He served as director of planning for Manhattan under former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, working on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and the preservation of the High Line. He has presented multiple TED Talks, with the most recent on Goldilocks-scale housing.
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Spotted: Wastewater, such as that containing sewage and agricultural runoff, generally contains an overabundance of phosphorus. This can lead to increased growth of algae and large aquatic plants, which can produce toxins and result in decreased levels of dissolved oxygen in the water, a process called eutrophication. Traditional methods for reducing phosphorus in wastewater generally involve chemicals, which are energy inefficient and can themselves cause problems. Now, a nature-based process for removing phosphorus, developed by start-up I-Phyc (‘Industrial Phycology’) is gaining traction.
I-Phyc’s solution is a circular process that uses algae to remove phosphorus, ammonia, and other harmful contaminants, including steroids, and insecticides. At the same time, the growing algae locks away carbon and produces biomass from which sustainable products can be created. Algae thrive in water containing an excess of nutrients. I-Phyc’s process deliberately applies algae to wastewater treatment in a controlled way, allowing the algae to do its work before the final, cleaned effluent is discharged to the watercourse.
The company claims that it is able to consistently remove between 50 and 99 per cent of pollutants without the use of chemicals. In addition, the biomass produced by the algae contains a number of compounds that can be used commercially. I-Phyc helps wastewater treatment operators to harvest the algae and transform it into useful products, including fertiliser, poultry feed, sustainable feed stock, biogas and specialist oils and lubricants. The entire process is carbon negative.
I-Phyc has recently raised £2.3 million (around €2.6 million) in an investment round led by Mercia water and Mellby Gård AB. In a press release, Kiran Mehta, Investment Manager at Mercia, said, “Our previous investments helped I-Phyc to develop and roll out its technology and it is now attracting huge interest within the industry. With water companies trying to meet ever increasing water quality standards and challenging carbon emission goals, new technologies will have a key role to play. This new funding will help position I-Phyc as a leader in sustainable water treatment solutions.”
Wastewater treatment can be an energy-intensive process, so it is no surprise that we here at Springwise have seen a number of innovations aimed at developing more sustainable treatment methods. Some recent projects includes an easy-to-use device that disinfects water using sunshine and a solar catalyst that can treat wastewater in a manner similar to photosynthesis.
Finnish companies Polar Night Energy and Vatajankoski have built the world’s first operational “sand battery”, which provides a low-cost and low-emissions way to store renewable energy.
The battery, which stores heat within a tank of sand, is installed at energy company Vatajankoski’s power plant in the town of Kankaanpää, where it is plugged into the local district heating network, servicing around 10,000 people.
The company behind the technology, Polar Night Energy, says it helps to solve one of the key obstacles in the transition to full renewable energy: how to store it for use during times when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing, and particularly for use in the wintertime when demand is high.
The Kankaanpää “sand battery” holds 100 tonnes of hot sand
“Solar and wind power is basically already really competitive in terms of energy price per produced energy unit,” Polar Night Energy co-founder and chief technology officer Markku Ylönen told Dezeen.
“The only problem with them is that you can’t really choose when it’s produced.”
He said that while lithium batteries are well suited for vehicles, “if we’re talking about gigawatt hours or terawatt hours of excess electricity, it’s not technically feasible to try to cover that with lithium batteries, and also the costs will be immense”.
“Even even if we dug out all the lithium in the world, we couldn’t build batteries big enough to accommodate all the fluctuation in renewable energy production,” Ylönen added.
The battery stores excess renewable energy as heat that can later be sent to homes and businesses
Polar Night Energy’s sand battery stores heat for use weeks or even months later. It works by converting the captured renewable electricity into hot air by using an industrial version of a standard resistive heating element, then directing the hot air into the sand.
The heat transfers from the air to the sand, which ends up at temperatures of around 500 to 600 degrees Celsius and retains that heat well. To unlock it for use, the process is reversed and the hot air funnelled into a heating system used for homes or industry.
According to Ylönen, the process is low-cost – sand is inexpensive so the main costs are related to equipment and construction of the steel storage tank.
It is also low-impact, with the only substantial greenhouse gas emissions being embodied emissions from construction and the transport of sand, which should come from a location close to the battery site.
And although there is a sand shortage related to the material’s use in concrete and glass, Ylönen says the battery does not require this kind of fine-grain, high-quality sand.
Instead, they can use sand rejected by the construction industry, or even alternative “sand-like materials”, of which Polar Night Energy already has several contenders.
The battery can be made with any type of sand from any location
The Kankaanpää battery is four metres in diameter, seven metres high and contains 100 tonnes of sand, but Polar Night Energy envisions future batteries being 20 metres across and 10 metres high.
This should give the battery one gigawatt hour of storage capacity, which is equivalent to one million kilowatt hours (kWh). The average UK home uses 1,000 kWh of gas and 240 kWh of electricity per month.
Several sand batteries of a standardised size could be placed around larger cities to service larger populations.
The sand battery would most likely only be used to provide heat and not electricity due to the inefficiency of the conversion process, but according to Ylönen, the world’s heating needs are great enough to justify having separate storage systems.
“The heating sector is something like one quarter or one third of the emissions of the world,” said Ylönen. “Along with the transportation and food industries, it’s among the largest sectors in terms of global warming.”
The urgency of transitioning to renewable energy has increased with the Ukraine war, which has led to spiralling energy costs and has revealed Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas.
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