Spotted: The world is increasingly looking for new sustainable sources of energy. Solar, wind. and water power are all environmentally friendly energy sources that don’t produce harmful emissions. However, renewable energy solutions can be costly, and it’s important to find cost-effective ways to implement them.
In light of this, researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland have developed a new way to generate renewable hydrogen fuel that is both cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Their new nickel-based catalyst uses sunlight to split water into its constituent atoms: oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be harnessed as a clean and renewable source of fuel.
As the world looks for cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy, hydrogen has emerged as a leading contender. Hydrogen fuel cells are highly efficient and emit no pollutants at point of use, making them an appealing option for the future of energy production. However, one major obstacle to widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cells is their cost. Precious metals such as platinum and palladium are often used in the electrodes, making production expensive. Some researchers are exploring alternatives to precious metals, with nickel emerging as a promising option.
To understand the effectiveness of the design, the University of Oulu team analysed the materials they used for their catalyst at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). Findings have now been published in the journal Applied Energy.
This breakthrough provides hope that we can develop cost-effective renewable energy solutions that will help us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. On this topic, Springwise has spotted an off-grid hydrogen generation technology for on-demand power and a way to power the planet through ultra-deep geothermal energy.
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.
Spotted: Grown from cells taken from unharmed animals, Meatable’s meat is identical in every way to a traditionally farmed animal meat with a significant exception – the production process. The harvested cells are used to replicate the natural process of fat and muscle growth in a process that takes only a few weeks. By contrast, it takes around three years for a cow to grow to a point where it can be slaughtered.
In addition to speeding up the process of producing meat, the company’s technology involves zero slaughter of animals or antibiotic use, while saving on land and water.
Because it takes up to 20,000 litres of water to produce a single kilogramme of traditionally reared beef, cellular agriculture saves millions of litres of water a year. A typical farm also produces vast volumes of animal waste that must be sustainably managed to prevent it from polluting waterways. Cultured meat, on the other hand, produces very little pollution or carbon emissions.
With global population growth continuing, and demand for meat staying fairly steady despite the rise in numbers of vegan products, Meatable’s team decided to produce food that could directly replace current favourites. The company recently revealed images of its pork sausage product – created in response to the demand for the food in Europe and the United States.
Currently awaiting regulatory approval for commercial sale of its products, Meatable plans to have its meat on shelves by 2024.
Molecular farming is growing in leaps and bounds, with plant cells being used to produce dairy proteins and an AI system building amino acid structures for growing new proteins through fermentation.
Spotted: For June’s Indigenous History Month, Cheekbone Beauty launched a social-driven ‘#GlossedOver’ campaign with the help of agency Sid Lee. Cheekbone Beauty is a Canadian, Indigenous-owned beauty brand that makes vegan and sustainable cosmetics. The campaign recognised the struggles First Nations and Indigenous communities have faced for access to clean drinking water – a hot-button issue in the last three Canadian federal elections.
As part of the campaign, Cheekbone Beauty is releasing a line of lip gloss made using water from Indigenous communities in Canada. The twist? The lipgloss cannot actually be sold because the water is so contaminated.
With names like ‘Lucious Lead’ and ‘E.Coli Kiss’, the Cheekbone Beauty lip glosses are sure to get people talking—and thinking—about why anyone should have to put contaminated water to their lips.
Cheekbone’s mission is to make ‘a difference in the lives of Indigenous youth through donations addressing the educational funding gap, and to create a space in the beauty industry where Indigenous youth feel represented and seen’. To date, the brand has donated over CAD$150,000 (around €110,000) to a variety of non-profit organisations across North America.
Innovations spotted by Springwise that tackle contaminated water include a mobile filtration system that provides affordable clean water, a green technology to treat industrial wastewater, and kombucha used to remove e-coli from water.
Spotted: Agriculture accounts for around 30 per cent of Tanzania’s GDP, and the country’s government is in the process of redirecting the farming sector towards a more sustainable and productive pathway.
Helping with this transition is Simusolar, a cleantech startup that is a leading provider of solar-powered water pumps and fishing lights in rural East Africa.
Only 3 per cent of Tanzanian farmers currently have access to irrigation technology, and most of them still use diesel pumps. Simusolar’s affordable solar-powered pumps enable farmers to increase their crop yields while using less water and fuel. In addition, the pumps reduce carbon emissions and pollution from diesel generators.
Meanwhile, Simusolar’s fishing lights replace the polluting kerosene lamps commonly used by Tanzanian fishermen. The solar-powered LEDs are as bright as a kerosene lamp, work under all weather conditions, and incur no fuel or maintenance costs.
Last year, Simusolar received €1.26 million from EDFI ElectriFI, the EU-funded electrification financing initiative. With this funding, the company intends to expand its product portfolio to create a mix of productive equipment solutions and services adapted to farmers’ needs.
Other off-grid solar energy solutions recently spotted by Springwise include a plug-and-play solar energy system for swarm electrification, a solar-powered off-grid desalination system, and solar-powered refrigerators to cut food spoilage in developing countries.
The ocean matters to humanity in more than one way. Not only does it support the livelihoods of billions of people – it also has an enormous influence on the climate. An estimated 83 per cent of the global carbon cycle is circulated through marine waters, and oceans have absorbed around a third of all the CO2 ever produced by humans. Moreover, marine waters contain resources that are extremely useful in the fight against climate change. Seagrass meadows sequester carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, and seaweed is used in a wide range of sustainable innovations.
Given the importance of oceans to our shared future, many innovators are looking to the ocean for inspiration. Although international co-operation and government action are essential for enacting change, innovation will also play a crucial role in protecting life below water.
Ocean pollution
Around 80 per cent of ocean pollution is caused by our lives on land through sources such as agricultural run-off, pesticides, plastic, and untreated sewage. And much ocean pollution ends up on the seafloor – including 60 per cent of chemical leaks, oil spill-offs, and micro-plastics. Latvia’s PurOceans Technology is tackling seafloor pollution in a unique way. The company pumps bubbles of ambient air to the lowest depths where they stick to chemical pollutants and float back to the surface.
To garner corporate funding and support for pollution clean-up, startup CleanHub has developed a tech platform that connects brands whose plastic products may end up in the ocean with local plastic collection schemes.
Marine and coastal ecosystems
Marine ecosystems are not only crucial for the vast array of species that live in them – they are also integral to the global economy. For example, hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on coral ecosystems for food and economic security. Yet, according to the UN Environment Programme, around 14 per cent of the world’s coral has been lost since 2009. In response, Blue Oasis Technologies has developed engineered underwater ‘cities’ that are designed to save coral. The structures are made up of 55-tonne modules that are lowered into the ocean with a crane, as well as smaller, stackable modules. Elsewhere, a project by Danish energy company Ørsted aims to provide a ‘safe haven’ for corals by growing them at the base of wind turbines.
While coral reefs receive a lot of well-deserved attention, they are not the only form of marine ecosystem. Seagrass meadows are home to myriad animals and plants, and act as extremely effective carbon sinks. Non-profit Beneath the Waves has teamed up with digital data company Hexagon AB to map seagrass meadows using airborne laser technology. The enhanced data will improve the accuracy of monitoring and restoration efforts.
Overfishing
The world produces around 200 million tonnes of fish and seafood every year. Statistics on overfishing are notoriously complex (and controversial). But a 2017 assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that over one-third of fish stocks are overfished. And the proportion of fish stocks that are over-exploited has increased over time.
One particular issue connected to fishing is by-catch. Globally, we throw just under 10 per cent of the fish and marine animals we catch back into the ocean. To help reduce the impact of fishing on marine life, France’s National Institute for Ocean Science is working with a number of partners to pilot an AI-powered smart net that can sort fish in the water, preventing by-catch. A simpler approach, tested in a study in Mexico, is to use illuminated fishing nets that reduce both by-catch and fishers’ workload.
SDG 14 also mentions illegal fishing as a particular challenge. In Korea, the government is leveraging drones, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things to manage octopus resources and reduce illegal fishing.
Scientific knowledge
To effectively protect and preserve our oceans, it is important for us to understand them. But more than 80 per cent of the ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored, and it is estimated that 91 per cent of ocean species are yet to be classified by science.
One way we can bolster our scientific knowledge of the oceans is through autonomous vehicles. The UK’s National Oceanography Centre has developed two new classes of autonomous underwater vehicle that can operate up to 1500 metres underwater. And, in China, a new autonomous vessel that serves as the mothership for a fleet of intelligent, self-driven air, surface, and underwater research drones, is currently undergoing trials.
Words: Matthew Hempstead
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Spotted: As demand for lithium-ion batteries rises, the extraction and production processes must be scaled up, often stressing the environment in ways that are not sustainable. Researchers forecast global growth in consumption of lithium will be 33 per cent from 2020 to 2021 and that demand is likely to continue to increase. With water resources already scarce (or polluted) in many locations around the world, improving the health of lithium production is a necessity to ensure the future health of the environment.
Canada’s International Battery Metals company recently concluded successful tests of its first mobile, commercial-scale lithium extraction plant. Integral to the success of the new approach is the swiftness of set-up and modular design. The company points to the current five-to-twelve-year lead time to build and activate an industrial plant as one of the main reasons such flexibility and speed are needed. The modular unit was set up in 10 days by a crew of nine.
This allows the global market to expand the number of viable extraction locations, as the modularity makes it possible to assemble and work in terrains previously considered too difficult to reach. Even more importantly, the new International Battery Metals process prioritises water and brine recycling to avoid creating the many thousands of kilogrammes of salty water waste that results from most extraction methods. In fact, the new process recycles slightly more than 98 per cent of the water used in the system.
As electric vehicle demand continues to grow, creating less waste and causing less environmental damage is a priority at all stages of the battery life cycle, with innovators creating new uses for used EV batteries as well as a chemical-free process for producing the metal from granite.
Spotted: Around the world, 1.8 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. To avoid water-borne disease, these people must treat the water available to them before they can drink it. But existing treatment solutions are associated with additional costs – both monetary and environmental. Boiling water, in particular, causes carbon emissions and air pollution.
But there is one way to treat water that involves no emissions and uses a free resource found everywhere: sunlight. Solar water disinfection (SODIS) is a process where the sun’s natural UV rays eliminate pathogens—such as bacteria, viruses and protazoa—from contaminated water exposed to sunshine. The difficulty is knowing when contaminated water has been exposed for a sufficient length of time for the UV rays to have rendered it safe.
This is where Austrian social enterprise HELIOZ comes in. The organisation has developed the WADI – a World Health Organization approved device that visualises the process of SODIS in water containers such as plastic and glass bottles. The WADI device, which can measure UV light, is placed alongside bottles of contaminated water exposed to sunshine, so that it receives the same dosage of UV rays. It can then be used to measure when the bottles have received sufficient exposure to render them safe – defined as the removal of 99.99 per cent of pathogens. This is done using reference values stored in the device.
The device is easy-to-use and designed for water treatment at the household level. Device users can look at a progress bar to track the rate of disinfection, and when the process is finished, the device displays a smiley face.
HELIOZ used the WADI devices as part of a campaign launched to coincide with World Water Day 2021. The campaign was focused on communities in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These communities received WADI devices, as well as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) training. The results of the project were impressive: in the project areas, the rate of water-borne diseases was reduced by 80 per cent.
Access to clean drinking water is a key sustainability issue, and Springwise has spotted a number of innovations that rise to this challenge. These include a mobile filtration system, an app that helps communities to maintain water systems, and an off-grid desalination system.
Spotted: At the very bottom of Chile, not far from Antarctica, is the wild and rugged region of Magallanes. Known for the constancy and strength of its wind, the area has traditionally supported a variety of farms along with a sizeable tourism industry. But now, Chile’s largest and southernmost region has been chosen as the setting for an innovative, $55 million (€50.6 million) facility that is exploring the commercialisation of synthetic fuel.
The project—called ‘Haru Oni’—is an initiative of startup Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF). The first-of-its-kind facility is designed to convert three ingredients, wind, water, and air, into a green fuel that could play an important role in the energy revolution.
The project combines the products of two separate processes: electrolysis and carbon capture. In the first, an on-site wind turbine produces an electric current that separates hydrogen from water. In the second, carbon dioxide is captured from atmospheric air and industrial sources. The CO2 and hydrogen are then combined to create a fuel that can be used in a range of everyday applications.
The process is billed by the company as ‘carbon neutral’, and two features in particular earn it this label. First, the hydrogen produced at the site is ‘green hydrogen’, as the electricity used to power the process comes from renewable wind energy that does not emit any carbon. Second, because the CO2 used to create the fuel is ‘recycled’ from the atmosphere, when the fuel is ultimately burned the CO2 released is not ‘new’. Instead, burning the fuel merely returns CO2 captured at the start of the process back into the atmosphere. This contrasts with the burning of fossil fuels which releases carbon that had previously been stored in the earth for millions of years.
The facility remains under construction and is due to begin production later in the year. Once up and running, the company says the site is capable of manufacturing 130,000 litres of fuel per year. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) will monitor the volumes of carbon captured and produced in order to verify the project’s carbon neutrality.
Synthetic fuels are an important area of innovation, and Springwise has spotted several similar processes, such as an integrated process that turns hydrogen and CO2 into aviation fuel, a Canadian facility that creates fuel from thin air, and an eKerosene plant in Germany that will produce up to eight barrels per day in 2022.
Spotted: Designed explicitly for communities living in remote areas that lack a consistent source of clean drinking water, Chilean company Fresh Water Solutions’ Urban device captures tiny water particles suspended in the air. By gathering the particles together, the moisture becomes heavy enough to form a rain cloud. The device then pools the water in preparation for filtration.
The device is small enough to fit on a countertop or table and runs on electricity. The captured water is filtered, purified, and sterilised before being made available for drinking. Each system provides up to 15 litres of clean water a day – enough drinking water for a small- to medium-sized family. A digital display makes the device easy to run and maintain.
Filters need to be cleaned every two weeks to two months, and replaced every one to two years. Owners can buy filters from Fresh Water Solutions or elsewhere as the size and shape is generic and easy to find.
Fresh Water Solutions also provides emergency water solutions, including a modular pond for extreme weather conditions, and a flexible, pillow-like tank for particularly tricky locations. Organisations can use the systems too, as the company’s commercial and industrial devices have capacity to create up to 5,000 litres a day.
Sourcing clean water is an imperative for many communities around the world. Most of the solutions spotted by Springwise focus on affordability and local materials. Macadamia shells are used in South Africa, and a ceramic design provides portable filtration in Mexico.
