Successful Cleantech Stories Roundup

Sustainable Happy Endings

Often, we read about failures of recycling or cleantech or any tech to remain clean. Not today. Today I'm rounding up a few neat success stories, which makes a nice change. I'm proud to say that several feature Australian successes, which means we've been doing something right. 

After right after reading a few of the disasters (hey - I have to give some balance to my coverage, but hang in, it's not a lot of negativity, and it'll make the next few stories seem even happier and nicer...) that come up we can dive into the happy fluffy bunny news...

The first is the inevitable story about how plastic recycling will never work, and I call BS right in the first paragraph, "Americans support recycling" because the author quite patently doesn't - and is really only making a case for manufacturers to be allowed to continue making virgin plastic because as she says it is never recycled. 

Aside from the whole litany of reasons that used to be given for not recycling plastics (which may have held true two decades ago but have now been shown to be BS) she then segues right into conflating 'wasteful' with 'oooh dangerous! Flammable!' which is just as much BS, you can see the agenda of this article like a big "BULLSHOTT!!!" stamp over pretty much every word. 

And the heart of the matter is here, in this snippet: "...(r)ecycled plastic costs more than new plastic..." - and there it is. Poor billion dollar corporations shouldn't be required to fix their stuff-ups by recycling the plastics, they should just keep pumping out more and more nice new CHEAP plastic. You can read the rest but you can see can't you that it's just going to go under the hill and not just downhill, from there. 

The second story (paywalled, sorry) is a bit more grim but it shows what happens when we let attitudes and stories like the previous one become the narrative. Can't be bothered to stop pumping up fossil fuels because they created an empire on it, can't be bothered recycling the filthy remnants of their industry because it might slightly lower their obscene bottom line profits, and we end up with the mess coming back to haunt:
"Someone. Some place called .. wait, was it the Cannery islands or something? Yeah, that's the ones. As long as it's not around the beach of my mansion IDGAF, next item on the agenda please."

THAT is the level of rapacious greed and bastardry we're up against. ALWAYS call these bastards out, ALWAYS write to your government and the company's upper echelons and point out that we don't want to cop this shit any more. ALWAYS. 

So good news stories are very much needed, just remember that the bad news ones like those above don't just go away, they have to be driven away.

Microorganisms and Compounds

While some of the little thing are giving us colds and flus and COVID, there's a few others that are being quite helpful. Whether they're our bread and beer buddies "eatin' lead" for our common good, grasses quietly chowing down on military RDX residues, or  worms eating polystyrene (PS) as their main menu item, small organisms are becoming powerful allies in the effort to clean up our waste products. 

The fact that this is research that should have been 'done and dusted' BEFORE ever releasing the products they're now cleaning up for us should be a fact not lost on you. This is one of the biggest reasons why we're here in this situation now. The other reason is, you know, harvesting those resources out of the planet without paying the real cost of them. Which we're now having to pay because past corporations didn't GAF for future us. 

We've learned to live on the planet, at first in two dimensions, and then in three. But so far we've done a really crap job of navigating the fourth dimension. You know when a sci fi story has the protagonist go back in time and do something that changes the present? Well, turns out we should really have been paying attention to the story where the protagonist does something now and it has profound effects in the future. . . Yeah . . .

But back to one more good story of a tiny critter making big differences in the world is these bacteria that may soon be simultaneously able to digest plastics and produce antibiotics. This is the kind of research we need right now, and not hamstrung by the false old idea of economic value. I'd go so far as to say that if we poured every cent of ALL the wealth on the planet into such research right now, that's pretty much the only way we're going to survive the legacy that 'past us' has left us. . .

The Place Of Tech

And what tech has dirtied, tech can clean up. From a futuristic-sounding plasma technology that can destroy the 'forever' chemical PFAS to Shenzen technology blogger, developer, and maker Naomi Wu developing inexpensive and easy to make far-UV light fixtures that destroy airborne virus particles, technological advances in fields other than just the biological are making a difference. The latter story in particular illustrates how the growing field of technology 'makers' now have the resources and thanks to people like Ms Wu, the knowledge, to put their skills to work and come up with solutions.

In my view, corporations should actually  be required to sponsor such citizen scientists / engineers / biologists because some of the best, simple, and inexpensive solutions are coming from this sector. I needn't point out how makers produced face shields, masks, test equipment, prosthetics, and a whole slew of other public health and safety equipment. 

The Wins

Just a few simple words to show that if you make your message about single-use plastics absolutely clear, it does have a measurable and visible effect. Most of the plastic bag and straw pollution on Australian beaches is not from Australia but drifting over from Asia. Which goes to show that significant reductions CAN be achieved.

And it's not just plastic bags and straws, nor is it a new thing. Some of the research has been carried out over years of study.

Hydrogen

I'm totally stealing this from TEdADYNE Systems' usual EV and sustainable energy pile of stories: Some odd 'solar pixels' tale about using sun and some designed materials to create clean H2 for use as a fuel. 

Okay - the reporter in that story didn't quite seem to get that it's a process with some similarities to photosynthesis in that these materials when exposed to light split hydrogen and oxygen out of water directly without the step of generating electricity and then using electrolysis.

It's a much more direct process and so should produce a greater yield with better efficiency. The downside appears to be that the materials degrade over time with use. I guess it remains to be seen whether the constant replacement of the reactive material will cost more in energy than the cells harvest, or if it'll be a useful and valuable way to generate hydrogen.

It wasn't plain from the article either, but since some of the material is carbon-based, then there's every chance that it could be arranged that the major outputs of these cells could be H2 and CO2. And while it may seem that generating CO2 is a Bad Thing, in fact with an ancillary plant included in the plans, you could generate even more useful output from the operation, which would maybe push it over the edge to a viable technology:

It *seems* from the article that CO2 could be a side product, to which I say that you should just pipe that gas over an algae reactor and harvest either food (spirulina or other food algae,) animal feed (same but a wider range of algae,) or a carbohydrate oil that can then be further cracked for more H2.

So that's it for now. The images are sections out of AI generated imagery from https://craiyon.com which is a project from some of the same people that made Dall-E Mini.

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

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