July 2010
Case 7: Silk versus Titanium
generate top soil, expand farm land, reducing mining and energy consumption
By Gunter Pauli
author of the Blue Economy
www.zeri.org
The Market
The world market for biocompatible polymers is estimated at $10 billion worldwide. According
to the German Nova Institute demand for bio-based plastics and composites grow at double digit rates despite the economic crisis. Petroleum derived polymers substituted most natural alternatives, and replaced metals. The introduction of designer
plastics reduced cost and weight of transport vehicles and electronics. Polymers sourced from natural sources maintain a loyal clientele and even grow market share. However plastics made from corn starch compete with food, cotton consumes massive
amounts of irrigation water and pesticides, cellophane from cellulose requires sulfuric acid in the production process. These examples imply that polymers from renewable resources are not necessarily sustainable.
Silk is historically the first industrialized polymer that became a standard on the market. World output of silk once topped one million tons per year around 1900 but dropped to 90,000 tons a century later shedding an estimated 25 million rural jobs. The farming and processing of silk went into disarray from China over India, Persia, Turkey and Italy. Only a few luxury products like Hermès ties survived on the market as a quality bench- the Empress' tea cup and she pulled 300 meters of silk yarn out the hot water. This discovery gave rise to a worldwide industry.
Professor Fritz Vollrath and the Silk Group at Oxford University (UK) studied natural polymers from bees, ants, mussels, spiders and moths. Some spiders produce a silk that outperforms titanium. First silk has a weight performance ratio while being biocompatible. Silk is absorbed by body tissue, whereas titanium is not rejected by the body. Second, silk from the mulberry worm, which is not a worm but a caterpillar can be reprocessed into silk from the spider by merely controlling pressure and moisture content. Third, silk rich in carbon, not only substitutes a petroleum-derived polymer that emitted carbon in its making, silk unleashes a positive cycle of carbon sequestration from the planting of trees, generation of top soil to the production of biocompatible devices at low
energy and pressure, creating a raw material that can be recycled indefinitely. If raw silk is obtained through traditional methods as is done in Bhutan, there is not even the need to kill the caterpillar to access the polymer.
The First Cash Flow
While silk used to be the standard raw material for quality clothing, this market has evaporated over the years. It will be very difficult for silk to enter the market of consumer goods where the likes of nylon have long substituted natural polymers. The first portfolio of applications are in medical devices. Fritz Vollrath founded Oxford Biomaterials and successfully spun out four companies each focussing on clearly defined niches where silk has a competitive edge. The four applications are: sutures, nerve repair, bone graft and orthopedic devices. Capital has been raised and partners have been confirmed for each of the applications.
The simplest commercial product are sutures, these filaments used by surgeons to sew us back together after surgery. The braiding of raw silk under sterile conditions is all that is needed, then attaching a needle to the fiber. Mass production of standardized sutures is controlled by few players like Johnson & Johnson. While limited cash can be earned with silk for textiles, a niche market like sutures could stimulate the relaunch of local industries operating in a niche market, substituting expensive imports with local manufacturing that integrates tree planting, rural jobs, and carbon sequestration, with a cash flow from a value added that only requires limited investments to enter the market.
The Opportunity
The field of potential applications for silk goes beyond medical devises. There are some consumer products that offer an extraordinary opportunity as well, even though more became a double, triple and now even versions with five blades, each time promising a closer shave.
It may seem unacceptable to pretend that an alternative based on silk could outsmart the inventive capacity of 500 full time researchers at Gillette. However the new business model that potentially emerges could simply be so different that none of the three market leaders (Gillette, Schick and BIC) could embark on such a fundamental shift. Instead of cutting keratin (hair) with a blade, silk threads would roll over the skin chopping off the hair tops just like the old hand-powered grass mowers used to do. A major advantage is that silk can only cut hair, and never the skin.
If the 100,000 tons of highly processed metals sent to the landfill were replaced by silk, then this would require the planting of more mulberry trees, since the present world supply is only 100,000 tons. This requires the planting of an estimated 250,000 hectares of mulberry trees on dry land, which is available in abundance around the world. The planting, rearing of caterpillars and processing generates approximately 1,250,000 jobs while reviving the carbon sequestration cycle that outperforms any engineered solution.
The opportunity to introduce silk as a competitive product concentrates on market niches where the present consumer behavior is wasteful. The chance to substitute titanium with something as smooth as silk has a clear marketing advantage many are keen to exploit. And you?
For further background on the 100 cases surf to www.blueeconomy.de
To pre-order the book The Blue Economy: 100 innovations - 10 years - 100 million jobs,
please go to http://www.paradigm-pubs.com/catalog/detail/BluEco. You will receive a
10% discount if you order before April 1, 2010 and key in the promotional code: TBE4110.
This article introduces silk as a competitor to titanium as one of the 100 innovations that shape The Blue Economy. This is part
of a broad effort to stimulate entrepreneurship, competitiveness and employment.
by Linda Furey, Assistant Children’s Librarian
When I learned that retired Children’s Librarian Nancy Bonne had passed away I was shocked and deeply saddened. She was my mentor and friend and I will miss her far more than words can express. In that I am far from alone. Nancy was the sort of person who not only made lots of friends, but consistently went the extra mile for them. Sometimes she went the extra thousand miles. I was not at all surprised to hear that her final days were spent in Sikkim, India at the Taktse International School volunteering in the school’s library and visiting with good friends.
I first met Nancy something close to twenty-four years ago. I was at the time one of a quartet of high-school-aged Pages employed by the Beverly Public Library. My cohorts and I shelved books all over the library and occasionally manned the adult checkout desk. The Children’s Room was, at that time, up on the library’s third floor where the adult Fiction stacks are today. Nancy would have to come downstairs every so often to fetch carts full of children’s books that had been returned or one of us would bring them up and help put them back on the shelves. It was on one of her trips down to get the book-cart that our friendship began.
I was there at the desk on a quiet summer evening checking in books and Nancy was about to take her cart upstairs when she stopped and thrust a picture book at me. “Read that” she said with a twinkle in her eyes. “Read it right now.”
The book in question was Avocado Baby by John Burningham. To this day that book remains one of my very favorite children’s books. I laughed so hard the first time I read that book and I still laugh every time I read it. Nancy fed me a steady diet of very best children’s books in that way. She would turn up, book in hand, and say to me, “Read that.” I’d be willing to bet she did that exact same thing to thousands of children over the years.
Nancy had a truly vast knowledge of children’s books. It was a rare day that anyone could stump her. Ask anyone on the Children’s Room staff and they will tell you the same. A person would come in with a vague memory of a really good book he or she had read as a child. “It was about little sailboats and one might have been named after an animal of some sort,” the person would say. “Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome,” Nancy would declare. And she would be right. I even once heard a woman tell Nancy that there was a book she was looking for that was sort of old and had a red cover. I am still completely mystified as to how Nancy knew from that little description what book it was, but she did.
Nancy made an incredible number of friends of all ages over the years I knew her. She befriended Aka and Pintso Lauenstein and their parents when the boys were just children. It was through them that Nancy became involved with the Taktse International School. She boxed up old and damaged books that had been weeded from the library’s children’s collection (books that would have otherwise been thrown away) and packed them up to ship to India because the children at her friends’ school needed books to read.
I know from dozens of conversations how much she loved that school and how very much she wanted to visit India and see the library she had helped stock and meet the children. Her first trip there with her daughter and grandsons was an experience she absolutely treasured. She couldn’t mention the experience without grinning from ear to ear. I didn’t know that she planned to visit again, but as I said I am not surprised. I am glad that the children of Taktse got the opportunity to meet her. I am glad that so many of Beverly’s children knew her. But I for one am really going to miss hearing her say, “Read this.”
Please feel free to share your memories of Nancy with us in the comments section on our page and in the Children’s Room at the main library. http://www.beverlypubliclibrary.org/2010/07/22/a-remembrance-of-nancy-bonne-by-linda-furey/
One of the teachers who worked at the Taktse International School has written a lovely piece on her blog in memory of Nancy Bonne complete with wonderful photos like the one to the left. You can find it here - http://katiesendeavors.blogspot.com/2010/07/tribute-to-nancy-bonne.html
Case 6: Fuel from the Forest
create a multiple cash flow, regenerate biodiversity, power combustion engines
By Gunter Pauli
author of the Blue Economy
www.zeri.org
The Market
The world production of gum resin tapped from pine trees is approximately 1.5 million
tons. The resin is converted into rosin (colophon) and ingredient for the paper, paint, ink
and adhesives industry, and turpentine, a highly flammable biochemical. The world
production of renewable turpentine reaches 370,000 tons. Its use has been limited to
local blends for varnish and paints. The world market for these natural products - that
are widely substituted by synthetics derived from crude oil - is valued under one billion
Euros.
The Innovation
When Mr. Soichiro Honda introduced his motorbike in 1947, it was powered by
turpentine. Then, gasoline was hard to get, and since 70 percent of Japan was covered
with forests, mainly with pines, Mr. Honda organized tapping, distilling and distributing of
turpentine parallel to the sale of bikes. It was a unique to supply both the transport
vehicle and the fuel. However, this engine required a lot of pedaling to heat up and once
the combustion started, a cloud of smoke would emerge quickly creating “chimney” as
the nickname for the bike.
Paolo Lugari and his team at Las Gaviotas pioneered a decade ago with the
introduction of biodiesel from palm oil. Las Gaviotas operated in 2004 the first biodiesel
plant Bogotá, Colombia but realized that the input of methanol and the excessive
amount of glycerine as a by-product imposed commercial limitations. Hence the team
turned their creative minds to turpentine, a by-product from resin processing.
Las Gaviotas, located in the Vichada, imported fuels for tractors and motorbikes at great
expense. Experts considered the purification of turpentine into a clean fuel too
expensive. However, Paolo Lugari and his colleagues took on the challenge and
implemented a four stage cascading that eliminates all impurities over 10 micron. If Mr.
Honda were to have had access to such pure turpentine he would have proposed
massive reforestation in the tropics in parallel to conquering the world market for bikes.
The innovation goes beyond purifying turpentine using gravity and time. The
breakthrough rests in the design of a business model that generates four income
streams from a newly regenerated forest, turning a savannah back into the forest it used
to be prior to the arrival of cattle farmers who logged trees, slash and burned the region
and planted non-native grasses.
The First Cash Flow
Las Gaviotas set its mark in the world of sustainable and competitive businesses with
the introduction of solar water heaters. With 40,000 solar water heaters installed backed
by a 25 year warranty, the research center has proven it can compete on price and
performance. The regeneration of the forest costs approximately $1,100 per hectare. An
emerging forest will increase the pH of the soil, this filters rain water. The sale of
drinking water becomes a first cash flow that also fits into a strategy of preventive health
care in a region were a large majority of the population suffers from gastro-intestinal
diseases due to the lack of water.
While Las Gaviotas is capable of responding to all local demand, the excess of filtered
water is sold in Bogotá. After seven to eight years the young forest starts producing gum
resin. Since Las Gaviotas produces its own renewable energies on site, and processes
the resin locally, jobs are generated and cash flows. The search for additional cash flow,
especially the reduction of imported fuel lead to a third and a fourth income: turpentine
and carbon credits.
The Opportunity
If Las Gaviotas were to move towards full capacity production exploiting its existing
8,000 hectares with approximately 3.6 million pine trees it could generate 2.3 million
liters of turpentine as renewable biofuel each year. There are no external inputs needed.
Considering that the landed cost of fuel in the region is €3 per liter, the processing of
turpentine into a pure renewable fuel from the forest adds cash to the bottom line.
Money that would have flowed out of the local economy, now circulates through the
region generating jobs and income.
Anyone located near an existing pine forest could tap the treesʼ resin. Instead of
processing the resin solely for colophon, a biorefinery should be built, generating four
cash flows. This is profitable. When JP Morgan studied the financials of the existing
regenerated forest in Colombia, planted by Las Gaviotas employees, the investment
bankers specialized in emerging markets concluded that the regeneration of a tropical
rainforest in a savannah -that once used to be a forest- generates a net accumulated
discounted cash flow in eleven years. This means that the amount invested in year one
is earned back in just over a decade. It is no surprise that the chairman of JP Morgan
took time to visit the President of Colombia in order to support this investment
opportunity.
While different pine trees produce different levels of turpentine, stressed species like
those in the tropics planted on poor soil, e.g. the Orinoco Basin, and those located at
high altitude like Bhutan in the Himalayas are estimated to generate at least half a liter
of turpentine as pure fuel each year. Mature trees could even produce one liter per year.
Two thousand five hundred trees could produce sufficient fuel to drive 50,000 kilometers
with a fuel efficient car that averages five liters per hundred kilometers. This represents
an attractive option for remote economies, since the proposal is not simply to compete
on price and performance with diesel or gasoline, this approach shifts the business
model where an investment generates consistent returns and increase land value. The
wood can still be converted into pencils for exclusive companies like Faber & Castells,
creating a fifth cash flow.
Land that does not generate income and has no drinking water is worthless. A forest
that solely hosts biodiversity runs the risk of destruction. There is a need to generate
more value added, a precondition to creating sustainable jobs. A newly planted forest
that provides income, responds to immediate needs like water and fuel, is valuable. This
business model developed by Las Gaviotas builds social capital for the local population
that outperforms capital gains generated by holding on to Microsoft shares over 25
years. Who is prepared to do the same?
For further background on the 100 cases: www.blueeconomy.de
To pre-order the book The Blue Economy: 100 innovations - 10 years - 100 million jobs, please go to http://www.paradigm-pubs.com/catalog/detail/BluEco. You will receive a 10% discount if you order before April 1, 2010 and key in the promotional code: TBE4110.
This article introduces reforestation as a tool to produce fossil fuels as one of the 100 innovations that shape The Blue
Economy. This is part of a broad effort to stimulate entrepreneurship, competitiveness and employment.
The Blue Economy
All rights reserved. © 2010, Pauli
Date: July 16, 2010
Contact: Susan Jennings
Director, Office of Campus and Community Sustainability
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Phone: (508) 910-6958
Email: sjennings@umassd.edu
NOTED GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY LEADER TO SPEAK IN NEW BEDFORD:
“BP and Other Robber Barons: We Reject Your Apology; We Demand Change”
Come listen to sustainability advocate, global economist, and renowned author John Perkins speak about the most pressing issues of our times: preserving the natural world and shunning the kinds of unchecked capitalism that trades humanitarian and environmental ruin for ruthless financial gain.
UMass Dartmouth has teamed up with John Perkins to bring the SouthCoast region some of the most urgent perspectives of sustainability leaders around the world. Perkins himself spent much of his career as an intermediary working for big oil industries targeting developing nations as easy sources of fossil fuel and political manipulation. Perkins has seen the worst, and in contrast has also lived for long periods of time with the very same indigenous people whose environments were ultimately destroyed. The combination of experiences indelibly impacted this man.
Now, Perkins speaks out about the British Petroleum’s Gulf oil spill and how it is an indicator of how unsustainable our unrelenting pursuit of oil is today. It is a wakeup call that we are finally hearing because it is close to home, though other peoples around the globe have experienced similar devastation for the sake of fossil fuel and oil industry profits.
In his most recent submission to the Huffington Post, Perkins wrote, “Simple apologies -- even billion dollar ones to television viewers by the BP executives -- are not acceptable. Nor is it acceptable to stop off-shore US drilling and send our pollution to other fragile areas of our precious planet. We simply must put an end to the wanton depletion of oil and other resources for bottom-line gain.”
He continued, “In the current global economic crisis, we see how so many resources are wasted casually and depleted unnecessarily. Let's say "Yes" to establishing a new priority: a sustainable and just economy. Let's commit to standing firm, walking hand-in-hand together along a path that leads to a world we will want to pass on to future generations.”
Meet John Perkins and hear him speak about how his vision of “a new priority: a sustainable and just economy” can take shape and requires the thoughtful actions of every individual. Perkins will speak at the New Bedford Oceanarium on August 9 at 7p.m. Admission is free, though pre-registration is requested so that maximum number of attendees can be estimated. This event is hosted by the University of Massachusetts Office of Campus and Community Sustainability. For more information, and to save your seat, call 508-910-6484.
By DAVID ALLEN
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 15, 2010
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Coast Guard 2nd Class Petty Officer Melissa Steinman commands a 25-foot Boston Whaler, a tactical boat used to protect shipping in Kuwait. During her year in Kuwait, Steinman's frequent encounters with threatening speed boats resulted in her being diagnosed with PTSD when she returned home. She said a special retreat in southern Oregon, where poetry was used to cope with her stress, was 'cleansing.' COURTESY OF MELISSA STEINMAN |
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Bill McMillan is the organizer of the Welcome Home Project, a special retreat for combat veterans in southern Oregon where poetry is used as a tool to help them deal with PTSD. He is editing a documentary film about the project. |
Words can help heal a warrior’s inner wounds, and sharing their words can help their communities understand and welcome them home.
That’s the basic message that Oregon therapist Bill McMillan, creator of “The Welcome Home Project,” hopes will spread across the country once a film he is in the middle of editing gets widely distributed. Clips from the work in progress, called “Voices of Vets,” have been posted on www.thewelcomehomeproject.org since last year and are already being used by West Coast communities to help set up similar programs.
The film documents a four-day retreat by 18 combat veterans and five family members who learned to write about their feelings and then share their thoughts on stage in front of a packed theater in Ashland, Ore., three Memorial Days ago.
“Our original intention was to do several of these retreats in towns around southern Oregon, but we decided instead to focus our efforts primarily on getting the film completed,” McMillan said. He hopes to have it ready for distribution this fall.
“The work in progress video clip has begun to be used in a lot of different places to encourage dialogue and awareness of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and the issues faced by combat vets and their families,” McMillan said, adding that similar programs exist in Portland and Seattle.
Michael Meade, a mythologist and storyteller best known for his work with the poet Robert Bly in the so-called men’s movement of the 1980s, has conducted two retreats in Portland, McMillan said. Meade’s Mosaic Multicultural Foundation (www.mosaicvoices.org) co-sponsored the original retreat and published a book of the veterans’ poems.
Participants in the 2008 retreat at the Buckhorn Springs Retreat Center in southern Oregon included veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Healing happens when the burdens of war are shared by the greater community,” McMillan said in a telephone interview from Sacramento, Calif., where he is editing the film.
He and his wife, Kim, a therapist, knew about similar retreats for combat veterans dealing with PTSD, but the programs seemed to be missing something. There was little attempt, it seemed, to get the public involved in the healing process.
“We’re not veterans, so we looked at who was working with vets and contacted some people,” McMillan said. “The response was not overwhelming at first.”
Although working on stress issues through journaling and poetry is common, getting the veterans to get up on stage and share their feelings “scared the hell out of some of them,” he said.
There is no certain path on the road to healing. It is a direction that you take out of a valley surrounded by tall mountains. The underbrush of the forest is thick as a jungle.
— Melissa Steinman, “Old Timers — A Term of Endearment”
“We all joked that we were going into the woods and would sing and write poetry for four days, and we’d come out, and everything would be fine,” said Melissa Steinman, 31, who was deployed for a year in Kuwait as a Coast Guard tactical boat captain in 2004.
Eight- to 12-hour shifts putting her 25-foot Boston Whaler between small speedboats and larger anchored ships — to prevent incidents like the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen — frayed her nerves and gave her a bad case of PTSD on her return to the States.
“My sleep is still interrupted by nightmares,” she said. “I get real jumpy whenever I’m on the road — looking out for suicide bombers.
“Of course, everything wasn’t fine at the end of the retreat. But we were armed with more tools to deal with our problems when it was all over, and we did get cleansed a bit.” She sobbed quietly over the phone as she described the public performance at the end of the retreat. “Everyone in the group doubted anyone would bother to come, but the place was packed, and the people in the audience took part, singing along with us at times,” she said. “Afterwards, people came up to us and thanked us for being there. They said they’d been looking for ways to connect with us.”
I have walked through the valley of death and camped within its borders.
Others passed my camp on their final journey.
Some were comrades and parts of me traveled with them
— Ken Kraft, “The Valley of Death”
Ken Kraft, 45, also was touched by the community’s response.
“It was intense,” said Kraft, a former Army captain and Bronze Star Medal recipient who survived mortar attacks and a helicopter crash only to discover on his return home in 2005 that he had four herniated discs and blast damage to both knees, which had to be replaced. He spent a year in the hospital.
“There was so much raw emotion,” he said of the retreat. “I really think these things can save a life or two.”
When he returned from Iraq, Kraft underwent 24 surgeries in less than two years. He retired from the Army Reserve and his civilian job as a sheriff’s deputy and made his world smaller as a way to deal with PTSD and other issues. He now lives on a five-acre farm in Oregon City raising Victorian Bulldogs.
“The war changed who I am and how I react to things,” he said. “My wife still grieves for the person who went to Iraq because someone else came home.”
“The retreat was a great healing experience,” Kraft said. “It was a nice chance to put thoughts and ideas and stuff into words and work it all out.”
Case 5: Glass as a building material
reduce strip mining and landfills, sequester CO2, get paid for raw materials
By Gunter Pauli
author of the Blue Economy
www.zeri.org
The Market
The world uses an estimated 3,200 billion containers of all types to package food and
drinks each year - and growing. Nearly everything ends up as waste. Glass is a minor
component. Each year some 100 billion glass bottles and jars are produced in highly
automated facilities that can crunch out up to one million bottles per day with an
average value under half a dollar. In addition to packaging glass, flat glass is used at
home and in cars representing 44 million tons. The flat glass market is valued at over
$50 billion per year. Glass is a $100 billion market.
Glass has been produced for 9,000 years and the first bottle appeared 3,500 years ago.
Though, recycling bins have only been introduced in the 1970s. Whereas countries like
Sweden achieve +90 percent recycling, the US average is under forty, granted that
California leads with nearly 80 percent. The UK has a great preference for glass
containers using an estimated 8 billion units or 3.6 million tons of which less than one
million tons is recycled. The rest finds it way to landfills.
Glass is made out sand rich in silica and could be reused indefinitely. The process of
making glass is energy intensive. One ton of virgin glass requires four GigaJoule of
energy. Converting used bottles into new containers reduces the carbon emissions with
an estimated 17 percent, while avoiding mining. However, recycling is expensive.
Members of the European Union and numerous American states impose a deposit
which improves the economics. Charging as little as 5 cents per container in America to
25 cents for a liter bottle in Europe creates a secondary market. Unfortunately, the high
cost of collection, transportation, and the requirement to separate according to color,
has not been offset by taxes and fees. Even major campaigns by consumers and
governments does not seem to improve the glass companiesʼ appetite for more
recycled glass. Thus an estimated 65 billion bottles and jars are wasted each year.
The Innovation
Converting bottles back into bottles may seem logical. However asking trees to reprocess leaves back into leaves in the spring does not make sense from a physical, chemical and biological point of view. Just like leaves are converted to soil by microorganisms, fungi and earthworms, the innovation imagined by Andrew Ungerleider and Gay Dillingham in the USA is to convert un-recyclable blends of white, green and brown glass into a glass foam with a wide range of potential applications, except making bottles. It seems that the bottle itself was the bottleneck to the re-use of this natural resource.
The crushing of used glass into powder, heated up while injecting CO2 creates a foam,
lightweight but abrasive, strong and cheap. Since landfills are keen to reduce their load,
the recovery of glass on site and the local conversion into glass foam gives way to a
new business model: “entrepreneurs get paid to receive raw materials”. The innovation
is not limited to cascading of materials whereby the waste of one is an input for the
other, the innovation extends to the business model whereby the key ingredients come
with cash. In addition, if the factory is located close to (or even on) a landfill, the
production facility could benefit from methane gas generated by decomposing organic
waste, turning this greenhouse gas into a cheap energy source, cutting costs while
further reducing its adverse impact on climate change.
The First Cash Flow
Ungerleider and Dillingham went on to create in 1994 Earthstone. Motivated by their
desire to reduce strip mining they turned a known technique into a new business and
quickly found a simple market entry in the niche market of physical abrasives. Blocks of
recycled glass, with air bubbles and frustules similar to the strong diatom silica, clean a
BBQ grill, remove paint, or smoothen fiber boards. Since the handling is limited to
cutting blocks of glass foam into easy to handle abrasives, and the competition is
expensive with a well documented adverse environmental impact, supply stores like
Home Depot started carrying the recycled glass-based product. Once the first sales
were confirmed, then production increased and improved moving on the experience
curve, shifting from a batch to a continuous system, increasingly using local materials at
lower cost, turning more competitive.
The Opportunity
The field of applications is vast. While the US company Pittsburgh Corning, using a similar technique decided to focus on the market of building materials, with their first glass recycling factory in Belgium and a second in the Czech Republic, Ungerleider and Dillingham went on to discover a broad portfolio of applications. Today Earthstone has eleven applications for recycled glass on the market. The latest opportunity is to provide hydroponic agriculture a growth medium, made from glass foam, that can be permanently recycled eliminating a waste stream that strained this argo-industry. The Swedish building entrepreneur Åke Mård, located in Sundsvall, Sweden took blocks of glass foam and converted these into pre-fabricated foundations, walls and even roofs for homes. He discovered that glass - filled with tiny air bubbles - serves as a structural building material, not just as an insulation. This innovative construction technique has been approved by the European Union. No water permeates these blocks, no vermin eats its way through the walls, no fungi grow in the basement and the insulation factor outpaces known alternatives in price and performance. Mård realized that recycled glass performs four functions while serving as a physical structure.
The critical mass required to operate a commercially viable oven is estimated at 5
million bottles annually. By 2009, Earthstone processed 5.3 million bottles annually and
is profitable. Considering the consumption of 200 glass bottles per family per year, then
approximately 25,000 families are needed to make this business viable. The barrier to
entry is relatively low. The main cost is energy, which could be supplied by a company
with excess heat clustering activities like natural systems do. The creation of these
factories generate jobs, while improving the quality of building materials at competitive
prices, unleashing entrepreneurship everywhere, reducing the need for transport and
mined material.
For further background on the 100 cases: www.blueeconomy.de
To pre-order the book The Blue Economy: 100 innovations - 10 years - 100 million jobs,
please go to http://www.paradigm-pubs.com/catalog/detail/BluEco. You will receive a
10% discount if you order before April 1, 2010 and key in the promotional code: TBE4110.
The Blue Economy
All rights reserved. © 2010, Pauli
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