Many manufacturers are moving toward zero waste today by finding a market for their byproducts. Where do some of those byproducts go?

For years, Pennsylvania-based adhesive manufacturer L.D. Davis has been producing adhesives made from pharmaceutical companies’ gel capsule waste – the pieces left over when the gel caps are cut out – and animal processing waste. Additional ingredients are water soluble and come from renewable sources. The result is a biodegradable adhesive for bookbinding, packaging, and other applications. Adhesives are often a relatively small component of other products, so they tend to be overlooked. The folks at L.D. Davis are hoping to see adhesives considered earlier in the product design process.

While the best strategy may be to eliminate waste altogether, using waste from one industry as a feedstock for another is an important step in improving resource performance. There have been several high-profile examples from big companies like GM and Ford in the news lately, but do you know of any other, somewhat hidden applications, like these adhesives?

At the end of a product’s useful life, there are a number of options to capture more value from the material in that product. Unfortunately, recycling can be energy intensive, as well as requiring many other resource inputs, such as water. In addition, the result is often a downgraded material (the material is broken down and put to a less valuable use or mixed with other materials that will make it difficult to recycle again). As an alternative to landfilling, some material is simply burned for energy.

The developers or Re-Tread products observed the volume of tires being recycled, burned, or landfilled (some 300 million per year in the U.S. alone) and sought an alternative that required few inputs and resulted in a value-added product. A tire has lost its value and is scrapped after just a half-inch of tread is worn off. That leaves a vast majority of material in that tire with the potential for a new use. Re-Tread created Tire Logs by cutting used tire treads into strips and wrapping them in the shape of a log. The resulting building material has applications in retaining walls, erosion control, flood abatement, seawalls, and more. It’s flexible nature means that it can withstand temperature changes and deformations better than competing materials.

For more details, watch a short video from Re-Tread here. What other products contain a vast majority of their materials after they’re “used up”? What opportunities are there to reuse those materials with the fewest added inputs?

There are a lot of methods available to keep clothes clean and wrinkle-free. Many of them involve chemical treatments, significant water and energy usage, or detergents with ingredients that are released into waste streams. What if the fabric itself could keep clothes in good, wearable condition with few resource inputs over time?

New York company Wool and Prince has developed a shirt that stayed fresh even after being worn 100 times without washing or ironing. According to the company, the shirt is made with a wool fabric that’s “a combination of superfine worsted yarn, low micron fibers, and a soft weave structure (the way the yarn is woven together).” In other words, the key to the fabric’s performance is the shape and weave of the fibers. Not only do the shirts require fewer inputs over time to keep them clean, less laundering means they’ll last longer than comparable shirts.

The fabric provides another example of how we can attain certain functions or benefits by rearranging materials at a small scale, rather using additional resources. It also shows how companies in completely different industries – in this case clothing and laundry detergent – are competing to deliver the same benefits to customers.

Street lights have been a target for improvement among lighting experts for some time, and there are a number of approaches to improve their resource performance. One option is to focus on the energy use of the lamps themselves, replacing them with LEDs to increase efficiency. Another is to try to reduce the amount of resources tied up in the infrastructure associated with street lights. Phillips, for example, designed a “floating” street lighting system called FreeStreet, which consists of a series of LEDs connected via hanging cables, eliminating lampposts. And another approach has to do with precision. Lighting designers have used directional lamps and add-on devices to ensure that the light is directed downward.

Light distribution in street lighting. (a) Weakness of traditional technologies. (b) and (c) show a graphical comparison between traditional street lighting (b) and ideal LED street lighting (c). (Source: Optics Express.)

Researchers at the National Central University in Taiwan and the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico are pursuing a new approach to precision. Their fixture contains a cluster of LEDs with a special lens that focuses the light rays so they’re parallel, rather than crossing over one another. The result of their design is light in a rectangular shape, offering a more precise match with the road surface that’s being lit. So, in addition to improving energy efficiency, the researchers have found a way to increase performance by using shape to get the light exactly where it’s needed.

For more technical details, you can read the research article published in Optics InfoBase. You can explore more on lighting at dMASS.net here.

How do you create extremely thin, flexible, yet strong structures? Scientists have been working for some time on “stacking” layers of 2D materials, or materials that are just one atom thick, to create ultrathin devices.

Now scientists from the University of Manchester have been exploring techniques to stack several layers of materials, including graphene, to create photoactive structures – in other words, extremely thin, efficient solar cells. Their method could be used to create solar coatings or paint for buildings.

Solutions that lead to the development of lighter, thinner technologies have the potential to reduce resource use significantly – just think about the difference in mass between a layer of paint and a typical solar cell. For more developments in graphene research, explore the University of Manchester’s research hub.

BASF and Swiss Krono Group have developed a lightweight board for furniture and interior construction that’s 30 percent lighter than typical particle board without sacrificing needed strength. The board not only saves on resources initially, but reduces resource use associated with shipping. It’s made from a polymer from BASF called Kaurit Light, combined with chipped wood and glue. It can be ground up and reused in new chipboard.

More interesting than the board itself is where it will be showcased next week – a special exhibit on lightweight materials at the timber and woodworking trade show Ligna. “lightweight.network” will include a number of advances in lightweight construction, particularly in the furniture industry. There’s also a parallel conference on lightweight panels, with talks on production methods, honeycomb construction, and other technologies.

We hear a lot about lightweighting in the auto and aviation industries, and now in wood products. It will be interesting to see where the idea will go next – what about applications in your industry?

Developing new, more efficient car transmissions can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So, while advancing this technology would improve a company’s competitive advantage, the work may be financially out of reach for one company to do alone. That’s why General Motors and Ford are teaming up to build fuel-saving 9- and 10-speed automatic transmissions.

This 6-speed automatic transmission was the result of a previous GM-Ford collaboration. Photo © General Motors.

According to GM,”The collaboration enables both automakers to design, develop, engineer, test, validate and deliver these new transmissions for their vehicles faster and at lower cost than if each company worked independently.” The more efficient transmissions will also help both companies meet fuel economy and carbon dioxide emissions standards in the U.S. and abroad. In addition, the transmission hardware will be identical in the two companies’ vehicles, which could lead to more resource savings in manufacturing and storing replacement parts.

Although Ford and GM are fierce competitors, they’re pooling resources to improve resource performance in automobiles. When should competitors find common ground to work toward technology that benefits the companies and potentially an entire industry?

Have you ever watched a time lapse of a pine cone as it dries or absorbs moisture? Pine cones, which are comprised of connected layers of material, change shape in response to moisture. The shape change occurs because of the alignment of fibers within the layers – one layer moves in one direction, bending the cone’s scales.

Inspired by pine cones, scientists have been developing similarly responsive materials. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have layered materials in precise directions to achieve different types of movements, like curling, bending, and twisting. By using an iron-oxide coating, they have found a way to create self-shaping objects that could be made from a variety of materials. There are potential industrial applications (ceramic parts that shape themselves rather than being pressed into shape), as well as medical applications (medical implants that take shape once they’ve reached proper destination inside the body).

As scientists learn more about how nature achieves certain properties or functions, they’re developing more precise and adaptable applications. What other recent biomimicry developments have you seen? How might they impact resource performance in your industry?

I had the pleasure recently of attending and presenting at Compostmodern13, an inspiring design conference. It offered an extensive and thought-provoking range of perspectives on resilience. It also offered a tremendous opportunity to discuss how dMASS strategy can be used in design to build sustainable and resilient businesses, economies, and societies.

Prior to the conference, I wrote about wealth, sustainability and resilience, stating that expanding wealth for more people is the critical missing element in most discussions about sustainability and resilience. We cannot achieve sustainability until everyone has a stake in it. Recycling and alternative energy are important ingredients to building sustainability, but they are not enough. Mass poverty leads to global migrations, political instability, and many other issues that distract us from solving our underlying problems.

For me, the question has always been, “What will it take to create enough wealth to include eight billion people in a robust and sustainable economy with a fixed resource base and within environmental constraints?” Many years ago, I learned from Buckminster Fuller that wealth expands with ingenuity, only as more people are actively engaged in identifying and solving important problems.

That is why, for many decades, Fuller urged architects and designers to use their unique skills and take the initiative to solve problems on behalf of all of humanity. He wanted designers to figure out what needed to be done and then do it.

At the conference, fellow speaker Paul Polak echoed this sentiment, pointing out that a vast proportion of designers have been working for the 10 percent of the population whose basic needs are most well met, while so many unmet needs – and corresponding opportunities – exist. Polak is working with innovators around the world, designing new types of multinational corporations that can serve a large portion of the world’s population not presently served by the global economy. They will do this by learning about the needs of this population and finding new ways of solving their problems in the marketplace. The idea is to sell to the more than two billion people who earn less than $2 per day, and become $10 billion companies in the process. Polak helped start one company that deals with water, another that focuses on nutrition, and a third delivering waste management. They all partner with existing shopkeepers and they employ radical technologies and tools (like solar electro-chlorination for clean drinking water). Polak expects these companies to be in 10,000 villages within two years.

There was also an important talk from Terry Irwin, the new Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, about moving past 19th century ideas that focused on designing pieces of systems to solve isolated problems, and instead seeing the bigger picture, seeing the world as a single integrated system.  She asked us all to question why we frame problem solving within a reductionist view of the world, and to think about designing for complex systems — realizing that our designs are part of a larger social, political, and economic fabric.

Finally, I was struck by one of the observations from DESIS founder Ezio Manzini concerning the inherently democratic nature of distributed systems that involve social innovations, or collaborative creation. He argued that people will cease to be passive consumers, accepting whatever is offered, and begin to take the initiative to help create what they want to see created. It’s designers solving problems, not necessarily through new science or technologies, but through rearranging relationships and social structures, looking for better ways to do things.

Broadly defined, “design” is the intentional arrangement of information or energy for a desired purpose or outcome.  From this perspective, everyone at the conference, regardless of his or her training or discipline, is a “designer.” The world’s innovators, whether in science, architecture, engineering, planning, business, policy, or other fields, are designers. The conference provided a real sense of the emerging roles of all designers: solving real-world problems, and giving people the tools to create what they want, in the ways they want to create it.  To find the people who exhibit new behaviors, and help them shift established patterns of work, buying, and providing services.

The conference left me feeling extraordinarily hopeful. Being in the midst of 500 designers who were willing to take time from their regular work, to use their free time, and to pay to learn how to be more effective at making the world work and making life better for people around the world should be enough to make anyone feel better about the future. It was for me.

Even as we reduce waste and close the loop on materials use, we will continue to need some form of materials collection. Today, there are a lot of inefficiencies in the waste collection system. Trucks are dispatched to pick up half-empty containers, while other containers overflow. Companies rely on incomplete data regarding waste pick-ups to track recycling and other aspects of waste management.

Finland-based Enevo Oy has developed a new system to alleviate these problems. ONe Collect uses sensors to monitor waste levels in containers in real time. Customers can monitor statistics on how much waste they’re shipping and when. The system can not only cut down on unneeded trips, but provide better feedback that can be used to reduce how much waste is produced in the first place.

New applications for sensors are being piloted all the time. What other new applications have you seen? How might they improve resource performance?