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News & Views From the Front Line
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Waste or food?
Over the holidays I've been reading David Archer's excellent book Tyne and Tide: A Celebration of the River Tyne
about the legendary river which flows about a mile south of where I'm sitting.However the following statement on river pollution made me stop and think:
"The generation of waste products is an attribute of all living creatures, and human beings are no exception. Most of the products decompose naturally in the environment and do not cause detriment to other organisms sharing their living space."
This encapsulates our short-sighted attitude to 'waste'. Contrary to popular opinion, organic wastes do not decompose in the environment, rather they are eaten. Horse manure is manna from heaven if you are a dung fly or one of many species of fungi or bacteria. That is their food source just as a shiny apple on a tree is food for humans. We're not immune from eating 'waste' products either, there are over 700 species of bacteria in our gut which metabolise various food elements, including some essential vitamins. Metabolise = eat and excrete! So rather than natural 'waste' materials not causing "detriment to other organisms", they are actually nourishing many of those organisms and form part of a continual cycle of nutrients.
So why am I being this pedantic so early in the New Year? Well we've got to start thinking about the materials in our economy in the same way. McDonogh and Braungart call these 'technical nutrients' to draw a comparison with 'biological nutrients'. If we start to think of a continual cycle of materials in the economy, and design materials and processes so the by-products of one process are always nourishing other processes in the system, then we are a long way towards sustainability.
Sound fanciful? Then check out the industrial symbiosis at Kalundborg.
Labels: biomimicry, industrial symbiosis, waste
# posted by Gareth Kane : 13:13
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Friday, 8 February 2008
Avoid Eco-clichés!
Before Christmas I mentioned that I hated the 'hands cupping a sapling' image used by so many green businesses. Then I admitted our corporate Christmas cards featured a polar bear rolling in the snow (v. cute - drop me a line and I'll send you one next year). Well, Getty Images has done some research that suggests these eco-clichés are a turn off to the average punter.This is a perennial problem for promoting green businesses - what images manage to use to communicate their ethos and values without the sappiness of the clichés. For the Terra Infirma masthead, we went for a picture of Kalundborg, the home of industrial symbiosis because a. we work with industry, b. Kalundborg is an exemplar of the type of solution we present to clients (waste is a resource), and c. we had a picture of Kalundborg. Of course few people recognise the picture and its significance and one reader described it as 'dark satanic mills'. Ho hum. I'll keep looking.
Labels: green business, green marketing, industrial symbiosis, Kalundborg
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:48
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Monday, 3 December 2007
Why don't we do district heating in the UK?
I was giving a presentation on Sustainable Construction on Friday to a group of Local Authority energy managers. I mentioned Kalundborg in Denmark where the entire town is heated using 'waste' heat from the local coal fired power station. From the conversation afterwards it turned out that many towns in the North East of England used to have district heating, but that most had be ripped out, not because of cost or performance, but because people just preferred to have their own central heating system. This is a real shame as the heat lost from our electricity generation almost exactly matches the heat demand from domestic homes, which in turn is responsible for a whopping 28% of the country's carbon footprint.This prejudice seems to be continuing. I've just been commissioned to do a scoping study for using waste heat, but the client has specified that I exclude domestic developments because they've drawn a complete blank so far. Only in Southampton does a district heating system using a combination of geothermal energy and combined heat and power seem to have taken off in recent years.
I can only assume the prejudice is based on security of supply. But, hold on, in my house there's only one gas connection and combi boiler - if that goes down we're cold. In district heating systems there's a back-up boiler, and if that fails, we'd no worse off than with the gas. Plus hot water arriving in our house would always be safer than gas. Given the opportunity, I'd sign up in a flash!
So why don't we do district heating?
Labels: district heating, industrial symbiosis, waste heat recovery
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:59
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Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Environment Agency will require Resource Efficiency data from IPPC sites
The ENDS Report is, well, reporting that the Environment Agency in England and Wales is planning to make the reporting of Resource Efficiency data mandatory as part of Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) reporting. Only a lack of funds is stopping them doing it sooner.Resource efficiency* is about getting the most out of every unit of physical input (eg materials, energy, water) into a system. Car fuel consumption in miles per gallon is an everyday example of a resource efficiency measure - miles travelled (output) for every unit of input (gallon of fuel).
The UK Government is extremely keen on resource efficiency as it is very business friendly - increased efficiency will lead to a reduction in operating costs. They have created the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste (BREW) fund which recycles money from landfill tax into schemes that improve the resource efficiency of, well you guessed it, UK business. The schemes include Envirowise (waste minimisation), the Carbon Trust (energy efficiency), WRAP (recycling) and the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme - NISP (industrial symbiosis). The model is quite neat - industry pays for its sins (landfill) and gets 'free' advice on how to stop sinning as a result.
However, there are concerns about how far Resource Efficiency can take us towards sustainability. The high targets required (a Factor 10 improvement over 1990 is the best guess) are extremely challenging on technical grounds, and then there's the dreaded 'rebound effect' which I will discuss at a later date. In the meantime, with it being flavour of the month, British business had better get its head around resource efficiency PDQ and the organisations above are a pretty good place to start.
* Resource efficiency is also known as eco-efficiency
Labels: carbon trust, eco-efficiency, envirowise, industrial symbiosis, nisp, resource efficiency, wrap
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:20
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Friday, 14 September 2007
Biomimicry by Janine Benyus
Another TED video for a Friday (click here to watch).Janine Benyus gives a stirring overview of her work on Biomimicry - the art of nature-inspired technical solutions. Nature tends to work at ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure and without highly toxic materials, so there are some massive environmental gains to be made if we can copy natural processes.
In her excellent book, Biomimicry
, Benyus extends the natural metaphor to larger industrial systems which leads us to our old friend Industrial Symbiosis.Note: make sure you watch until the end as there is a false ending before she is given extra time to finish her talk.
Labels: biomimicry, industrial symbiosis, janine benyus
# posted by Gareth Kane : 09:04
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Friday, 31 August 2007
So just what is waste?
The home page on the Terra Infirma website proclaims "waste is a verb, not a noun". This was a little catchphrase I dreamt up while facilitating Industrial Symbiosis brainstorming sessions. My intention was to get across the idea that most waste has an intrinsic value, but that we choose to waste it.Unfortunately, out in the real world where environmental legislation applies, this is not the case. Legally, 'waste' is anything a company 'discards or intends to discard'. Once it is designated 'waste', it will not stop being waste until it becomes part of a new product (but not an intermediate). This means that if you make plastic products and you want to buy some clean, pelletised recycled plastic to use as a raw material, you will need a waste management licence.
Even the builders of the 'Brighton Earthship' building, made out of scrap tyres rammed with earth, had to get special permission from the Environment Agency, otherwise the building would be an illegal landfill...
The huge barrier that this puts in the way of recycling has been recognised. The Waste Protocols Project (WPP), run jointly by the Environment Agency and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), is developing standards for recovered product. If material meets the standard then it will no longer be waste and can be traded without further restriction.
In my opinion this process needs urgent accelerating if we are genuine about treating waste as a resource.
5pm Update: I've just heard via edie that Blast Furnace Slag (BFS) will no longer will classed as a waste but a by product. Three million tonnes of this material is produced annually in the UK and it can be used in all sorts of construction products. Very good news indeed.
Labels: industrial symbiosis, recycling, waste
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:37
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Monday, 18 June 2007
Kalundborg, Denmark
A couple of months ago somebody gently criticised the choice of picture in the banner on the Terra Infirma website - saying that these 'dark satanic mills' were the wrong message for our company. But we've stuck with them as these aren't just any dark satanic mills, these dark satanic mills are in Kalundborg, Denmark and they aren't nearly as dark or satanic as you might expect.
Kalundborg is a sleepy little port of 20 000 people on the western coast of the Danish island of Zealand, famous for its remarkable five towered red brick medieval church which looms over the cobbled streets and red and yellow rendered houses of the old town. According to the tourist guides, that is pretty much all the town has to offer. But down at the waters' edge the view is dominated by two monolithic blocks of a huge coal fired power station across the fjord. Just to the left and beyond the older block of this plant, the flickering flames of two flare stacks mark the location of an oil refinery. Further left again is one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical plants. It is the story of these three industrial complexes, a number of smaller plants, the town itself, and their unique symbiotic relationship that brings environmentalists on pilgrimages from all over the world. Our party was predominantly from UK academia, but two Koreans had flown halfway around the world to hear the story of the Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis.
In a meeting room in the swish Youth Hostel where we were staying, Noel Brings Jacobsen, CEO of the Kalundborg Symbiosis Institute, told us how it all began. In the sixties, the Government decided to attract some big dirty industries to Kalundborg as it had become an unemployment blackspot. Planning regulations were relaxed and land was provided practically free of charge. The only problem being that there was no source of fresh water needed for all three plants except for Lake Tisso, over 25km away. So the plant managers worked together to cascade wastewater from one process to another, starting where it had to be cleanest and working its way down through the less fussy processes, and recycling it wherever possible. The power station produced an excess of steam so it was piped the short distance to the other plants and then around the fjord to the town where it heats all the buildings. More companies turned up to take advantage of other opportunities: a plasterboard company which takes the gypsum from the pollution control to build into its products and a fish farm which uses (and cools) some of the warm wastewater.
On Earth Day 1989 a number of students were asked to study the environmental impact of the town's industries and they started to trace these connections. Using a pinboard and coloured string, they presented the findings to the companies' management teams. The industrialists hadn't realised just how integrated and interdependent their plants had become, so they set up a small Institute to co-ordinate the relationships and started investing heavily in further synergies. Links have come and gone, but with the habit ingrained and the benefits proven, the infrastructure has simply been adapted to exploit new opportunities.
Noel took us around the plants, showing us the relatively minor adjustments required to make the processes compatible. The steam and water pipes run alongside each road, painted green and surrounded by vegetation. On top of the power station we got to see just how close the plants are physically, looking almost vertically down on the fish farm below. At the pharma plant, Claus the public relations/security man showed us the fertiliser product made from the process substrate. It is trademarked, but given away free to local farmers. If the company had to pay for disposal to landfill, the plant would go bust and 2700 local people would be on the dole.
Of course this is not eco-nirvana, explained Noel. The power plant burns coal, the oil refinery provides fuel for planes, trains and automobiles, and fish farming is rarely seen as 'green'. But, given these processes are a fact of modern life, the environmental impacts have been minimised. Almost every last scrap of energy and water is used and waste arisings minimised. None of the individual links are unique to Kalundborg, in fact most are found somewhere in the UK with the notable exception of large scale district heating. It is simply that nowhere else in the world can you find such a compact example of the benefits of Industrial Symbiosis.
Labels: industrial symbiosis, Kalundborg
# posted by Gareth Kane : 06:58
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
