“E-waste is going to be the richest ore of the future,” proclaims Jason Gaber, owner of Mount Baker Mining and Metals. Gaber has a YouTube channel where he shows viewers how hammer mills and shaker tables can be used to process component-laden circuit boards and separate plastics from a mix of metals, including gold.

The business of extracting gold and other valuable materials from electronic junk is growing and is even becoming a popular side hustle. One tonne of electronic circuit boards can yield in the region of 0.150 kg of gold, and over double that in silver. Plus, there’s likely to be anywhere from 250 – 300 kg of copper up for grabs per tonne of e-waste.

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For years, device users have been throwing away – collectively – billions of dollars in precious metals as they dispose of unwanted electronics.

In the beginning, e-waste was sent overseas to become somebody else problem. But processing e-waste has the potential to be many times more lucrative (and much less polluting) than trying to extract gold and other precious metals from ore mined from the ground.

The ability for environmental clean-up operations to turn a profit is seeing a wave of new e-waste recycling solutions enter the market. And for those can run their operations at scale, there’s money to be made in turning e-waste into gold.

One of the most ingenious approaches – which is still at an early stage, but generating commercially promising results – uses spongey nanofibrils created from a by-product of cheese-making to soak up gold ions in solution and turn them into flakes.

New sustainable method turns waste into gold! ETH Zurich researchers use protein sponge derived from food industry byproduct to recover precious metal from electronic waste. https://t.co/LkpuiFUMk1 #ProteinSponge #ElectronicWaste #SustainableGold @MezzengaRaf

— ETH Zurich (@ETH_en) March 1, 2024

Demonstrating the potential of their approach, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland used their cheese waste creation to obtain a 450 mg gold nugget from 20 junk motherboards. According to the team, the material was 90.8 percent pure (21-22 carats), which values the reclaimed gold at around USD 28 – based on today’s scrap gold price.

What’s more, the group claims that the cost of the source materials and energy costs for the process represents just 1/50^th of the value of the gold extracted from the e-waste.

Googling ‘how to turn e-waste into gold’ produces plenty of search hits, but many of the recipes feature toxic chemicals. However, by employing a bio-derived ionic sponge, the ETH Zurich researchers believe that they’ve found a gentler path to converting unwanted electronics into valuable materials. And they are not the only ones pursuing more environmentally friendly e-waste processing.

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Mint Innovation, whose vision is to become the world’s leading provider of circular green metals, opened a commercial-scale facility in Sydney, Australia, in 2022. According to reports, the operation can salvage USD 85,000 in gold per day from recycled electronics – as well as being able to recover copper and other valuable metals.

Cleverly, Mint’s process –which was developed in New Zealand – makes use of bacteria and fungi that have evolved in regions rich in mine works and abandoned machinery. The organic soup is capable of absorbing metals and Mint exploits those properties to process e-waste in a more environmentally friendly way, compared with conventional methods.

According to Mint, everything leaving its plant is benign, which means that there are no chemical waste streams to be dealt with. And there’s more good news as the process is applicable to other waste stream such as used batteries and catalysts.

The post Electronics recycling – cheese waste has a taste for gold appeared first on TechHQ.

• An ExxonMobil lawsuit against activist investors was filed in January.
• Activist investors not acting in the interests of shareholders?
• Everyone in the industry is watching closely – keen for a way to make climate activists shut up?

Facing dozens of lawsuits that claim it lied for decades about its role in climate change and the dangers of burning fossil fuels, ExxonMobil has gone on the offensive. Sure, it could reflect on its climate impact, but the company feels its time and resources are better spent on a lawsuit targeting investors who want the company to slash its pollution.

As the world burns, ExxonMobil might as well dive into the flames headfirst, go down swinging and all that.

To try to shape corporate policies in publicly-traded companies, investors can file shareholder proposals that are voted on at annual meetings. ExxonMobil says a pair of investor groups are abusing the system by filing similar proposals year after year in an effort to micromanage its business.

At a time when global temperatures are rising and corporate analysts say most companies aren’t on track to meet their emissions targets, there are growing tensions between companies and investors. Pesky activists calling for corporations to cut climate impact!

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“Exxon is really upping the ante here in a big way by bringing this case,” says Josh Zinner, chief executive of an investor coalition called the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, whose members include a defendant in the ExxonMobil case. “Other companies could use this tactic not just to block resolutions,” Zinner says, “but to intimidate their shareholders from even bringing these [climate] issues to the table.”

There’s potential for other companies to unleash litigation against climate activists – who aren’t getting enough heat already, right?

ExxonMobil said it’s suing Arjuna Capital and Follow This because the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) isn’t enforcing rules that dictate when investors can resubmit shareholder proposals.

Apparently, the case “is not about climate change,” and court is “the right place to get clarity on SEC rules,” according to ExxonMobil.

The shareholder proposal from Arjuna and Follow This called for ExxonMobil to cut emissions faster from its own operations and from its supply chain. That includes pollution created when customers burn its oil and natural gas. This is known as Scope 3 emissions and accounts for 90% of ExxonMobil’s carbon footprint.

The proposal that Arjuna and Follow This put forward is similar to others that the groups submitted in recent years. ExxonMobil says historically the motions received little support from other shareholders.

All eyes are on the case. “If companies are decreasingly able to get the SEC to allow them to exclude proposals that are obviously politically motivated, then the next question is, well, can the courts succeed where the SEC has failed — or, more accurately, not even tried?” commented Charles Crain – vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which represents ExxonMobil and other industrial companies.

After they were sued in federal court in Texas in January, Arjuna and Follow This withdrew the proposal and promised not to submit it to the company again, but ExxonMobil refuses to drop the case.

Follow This founder Mark Van Baal said the ExxonMobil lawsuit is trying to stifle shareholders.

“Apparently, Exxon does not want shareholders to vote on whether the company should accelerate its efforts to reduce emissions,” van Baal said. “This is the concern of more and more investors who want [to] safeguard the long-term future of the company and the global economy in view of the climate crisis.”

The threat of complete climate disaster is putting pressure on companies to cut down their emissions and other contributions to global warming – poor them. Many, including ExxonMobil, say they’re trying to eliminate or offset their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 but, according to independent researchers, few companies have shown credible plans to achieve their targets.

The number of publicly listed corporations aiming for net zero rose from 417 to 929 between 2020 and 2023, according to the Net Zero Stocktake report. A basic checklist was applied to corporate claims including setting interim targets and covering all the emissions a company is responsible for – including Scope 3 emissions.

Fewer than 5% of the companies examined passed the test.

So it’s really no wonder that they’re all watching the ExxonMobil lawsuit closely; is the best way to offset emissions suing the people holding you accountable?

Industry group the American Petroleum Institution says the lawsuits are meritless and politicized. ExxonMobil’s take is that since it’s acknowledged that climate change is real and, noted in its statement to NPR, is pursuing more than $20 billion of “low emission investments” between 2022 and 2027 then it shouldn’t have to answer to activist investors.

The oil and gas company doesn’t have a good track record.

The investment its making is on top of nearly $5 billion it spent buying a company specializing in carbon dioxide capture. The thing is, if it’s really so committed to the climate cause, why do shareholder proposals about its emissions annoy the company so much?

If you look at the numbers, its dedication suddenly seems… smaller.

The amount that ExxonMobil spends on its traditional energy business is staggering: last year it struck a deal to buy oil and gas company Pioneer Natural Resources, valued at almost $60 billion.

Activist investors use shareholder proposals to push corporations on climate. Experts say other investors, from whom Arjuna and Follow This struggle to get support, are hesitant to back new climate proposals when companies already have policies to disclose and cut emissions.

Investors worry proposals have become too prescriptive and might interfere with how companies are run.

It seems at least possible that changing how companies are run is the answer to cutting carbon emissions, but that it may reduce the profit investors see – a conundrum indeed within a capitalisic snowglobe, while everyone else burns.

ExxonMobil says it’s dedicated to cutting emissions from its operations but the idea that activist investors like Arjuna and Follow This can quickly push the company out of the oil and gas business with new climate policies is “simplistic and against the interests of the vast majority of ExxonMobil shareholders.”

ExxonMobil told NPR that while shareholders are entitled to submit proposals to the company, they don’t have “an unlimited right to put forth any proposal to do anything.

“Their intent is to advance their agenda rather than creating long-term value for shareholders,” ExxonMobil said of Arjuna and Follow This.

This appears to insist that having a planet to stand on is somehow not in the long-term interest of ExxonMobil shareholders. Which is how conspiracy theories get started.

Corporate America doesn’t like the shareholder proposals process and became increasingly frustrated by it after the SEC issued guidance in 2021 that made it harder to turn away some resolutions.

The National Association of Manufacturers has argued that forcing companies to publish shareholder proposals that deal with “contentious issues unrelated to [their] core business or the creation of shareholder value,” including climate change, violates their First Amendment right of free speech.

Crain says activists spend too much time pursuing a “political goal” and should instead try to help companies “understand and mitigate those climate related risks or opportunities for their operations.”

Critics of the ExxonMobil say its lawsuit is part of a broader effort to curtail shareholder activism, especially around social and environmental issues. “And the reason is because it’s one of the few effective avenues left to hold companies accountable,” says Zinner of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

So is the ExxonMobil lawsuit political or not?

Will ExxonMobil go down swinging?

The post Oil and gas company says suing climate activists isn’t political appeared first on TechHQ.

3D printed shoes are a great example of where additive manufacturing absolutely lives up to the hype. And following the progress made by sneaker designers such as Adidas, which has built up considerable experience in using 3D printers to make trainers, reveals much about how future products could be manufactured.

In the early days, 3D printing was badged as a rapid prototyping tool. Use cases were one-off parts or mock-ups to double-check that all was well before pulling the trigger on expensive injection molding tooling. But, as Adidas and other leading lights have discovered, the appeal of 3D printing for making shoes and other mass-produced goods goes much further.

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One of the biggest misconceptions about 3D printing is that it cannot be used to make products at scale. However, the progress made by Adidas and its additive manufacturing partner Carbon in developing 3D printing shoes for the mass market challenges that.

The rise of printer farms – sometimes referred to by operators as ‘warehouses where the shelves make the product’ – makes it possible for 3D printing to compete with injection molding at high volume. And customers will be surprised by just how many parts that modern 3D printing facilities can deliver.

Naturally, the design should play to the strength of the additive manufacturing process and suit speed-ups – such as having the 3D printer automatically eject the part after completing each build – to hit big numbers.

Today, manufacturing experts will recommend 3D printing to customers wanting up to a million parts a year, and the reasons are more than just cost-parity with injection molding. And this is where it’s useful to pick up a pair of 3D printed Adidas 4DFWD shoes to see the manufacturing appeal up close.

Forward thinking: the 3D printed midsole used in the Adidas 4DFWD features a variable stiffness bow tie lattice that compresses forward to improve running efficiency. Image credit: Adidas.

Trainers often push the design envelope in terms of the combination of shapes and materials. Sneakerheads view trainers as a work of art, and the lattice-based midsole of the 4DFWD is a thing of beauty. It has attractive mechanical properties too.

Designers of high-performance trainers want to be able to vary the stiffness of the midsole along the length of the shoe – providing comfort upon first strike, but without slowing down the athlete. And having lattice geometries greatly widens the range of mechanical properties that are available from a given material.

What’s more, 3D printed shoes open the door to massive customization – for example, lattices could be tailored to individual runners, factoring in differences in weight and stride length – making products more attractive to customers.

Updatable, updatable, updatable

The customization that goes hand-in-hand with 3D printing helps brands too, as they can update their range whenever they choose. Having to make changes to injection molding tools limits the frequency of product updates to maybe just a couple of times a year. But with 3D printing, it’s done in software – once the new file is loaded, you’re good to go.

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Manufacturing updates can be applied rapidly too. For example, as Carbon’s research and development team discovered ways to produce the 3D printed Adidas shoes more rapidly and efficiently, those process improvements could be sent seamlessly to the manufacturing facility without the need for any personnel to travel or change parts.

And it’s telling that other brands have joined Addidas in 3D printing shoes. Footwear designs have been walked down the catwalk and some firms – such as Vivobarefoot – are exploring how the innovative shoe manufacturing technology can support a circular economy for trainers.

Being able to print locally and on-demand can shorten supply chains and reduce the amount of unsold product that goes to waste. If circular economy ambitions can be realized on top of that, the future of mass-produced footwear and other 3D printed products could become even more attractive.

The post 3D printed shoes – footwear signals future manufacturing trend appeared first on TechHQ.

• Bitcoin designed to replace traditional finance and gold mining.
• Court documents say Nakamoto aware of energy consumption issue.
• Time to divest for the benefit of future generations.

A court case currently underway in London, UK, has made several emails more widely known, that were purportedly written by the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. In them, they considered the energy use of the Bitcoin network.

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The legal case centers on Craig Wright’s claims that he is Nakamoto. The real identity of the inventor of the cryptocurrency is not known for certain, and Wright’s claims, if validated, will mean that he has a significant say in the future development of Bitcoin projects.

Published in Wired last week, Satoshi’s emails contained several comments about the network’s energy consumption.

“If [Bitcoin] did grow to consume significant energy, I think it would still be less wasteful than the labor and resources of intensive conventional banking activity it would replace,” Satoshi said in a message to Martii Malmi, one of the early developers of the technology.

Bitcoin’s energy use

The actual levels of power consumption by Bitcoin are uncertain: miners operate in a highly competitive market and so are not inclined to be particularly transparent as to the details of their operations.

Energy consumption comes largely from two activities in the Bitcoin network that consume electricity – throwing massive computational power at the process to ‘solve for coins,’ and the processing required to handle individual transactions when cryptocurrency changes hands.

A well-accepted metric by the Bitcoin industry on energy consumption is the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), published by the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. The School revised its model in August of last year to take account of the changes in the underpinning technologies and hardware at the heart of the Bitcoin network since 2019. The update is, in part, a “response to evidence indicating a periodic overestimation of electricity consumption.”

“Pollution” by sheilaz413 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The figure representing the total energy consumption by the Bitcoin network was revised down by 9.8TWh (terawatt hours) for 2022 to 95.5TWh. That places the global system’s consumption alongside nation-states like Belgium and the Netherlands. The paper publishing the Index’s revision details also notes that, overall, the efficiency of Bitcoin mining has increased as hardware advances and refines (albeit now at a slower rate than in the currency’s hayday).

Bitcoin’s environmental impact

The environmental impact of Bitcoin operations is even more complex to estimate than their total energy consumption. Renewable energy is said to power a sizeable proportion of mining operations, with estimates varying [paywall] from around 40% to 75% of the total power consumption. Bitcoin mining operations tend to congregate where energy is plentiful from renewable sources, such as hydroelectric power. In these locations, like certain areas of the US, China, and Scandinavia, such hydroelectric power tends to be cheaper than fossil-derived alternatives.

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But environmental damage is said also to come from e-waste comprising of discarded mining rigs, which are superseded by faster, more efficient hardware in generational upgrades. Processing a single Bitcoin transaction is said to produce over 700 pounds of carbon, plus there are additional emissions from data center cooling systems and water usage, to name just a couple of other factors.

The two human activities that Bitcoin’s creator thought might be replaced by Bitcoin, conventional banking and gold mining, still create significantly more negative environmental effects than the entire Bitcoin apparatus, with conventional finance systems alone estimated to produce double the carbon emissions of Bitcoin.

But the slow rate at which Bitcoin transactions can be achieved effectively makes the currency unviable as an everyday means of exchange (there are other networks, such as Ethereum, which are capable of the type of scale required, and which do not use the power-intensive proof-of-work model to mine new coins).

The fact that Bitcoin exists in addition to the activities it was supposed to replace raises the question of its viability. Clearly, the technology cannot be uninvented, and attempts by governments to limit its use have been mostly unsuccessful, with most adopting the accept-and-tax approach to cyrptocurrencies. No governmental control over the Bitcoin was, it has to be said, part of its design remit.

But like renewable energy, which exists as a supplement to fossil-derived power, not as a replacement, Bitcoin and its ecological effects exist in addition to all the consequences of fiat finance.

Grist to the extinction mill

The Bitcoin network’s activities are said to consume the equivalent of around 2%-3% of the US’s annual power usage. Lowering power consumption worldwide, year-on-year, is the most important way to downgrade the status of environmental deterioration from an extinction event to merely a chance of survival for the generation that will live at the end of this century. (NB experiencing survival will still be deeply unpleasant.)

Given that Bitcoin’s purpose at present is just a different flavor of market speculation, and it will not replace conventional finance or gold mining, now might be the time to consider its net utility.

“Factory – Pollution” by plagal is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The post Bitcoin inventor was aware of currency’s power demands appeared first on TechHQ.

We’ve all got to eat, and so food production should be a lucrative business to be in. But as an industry, some argue that food costs more than it earns when you take into consideration the medical costs associated with bad diets. Plus, there’s the impact that food production has on the planet and its resources. However, there’s a glimmer of hope, and that operational lifeline could be food digitization.

“Digitization is a way that we can drive the efficiencies to do it,” Rini Greenfield – a Founding General Partner at Rethink Food, a VC firm supporting the digitization and decarbonization of the food system – points out. “If you want to solve climate change, you cannot ignore what is a third of the problem.”

The fact that VC firms have become interested in food is encouraging for those who believe in market forces. When it becomes profitable to save the planet, there’ll be no shortage of investment. However, things are far from perfect currently.

“This food system that we have today is excellent at distributing calories, but it is terrible at distributing nutrition,” Greenfield cautions.

Rethink Food is investing its multimillion-dollar fund in early-stage food and agtech companies, which are digital-first with a computational front end. Examples include Gro Intelligence, which Greenfield dubs ‘the Bloomberg of agriculture and climate’.

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The thinking is that access to better information gives producers more opportunities to plan ahead – software platforms will be increasingly important to help businesses build climate resilience into their operations. But food digitization helps in other ways as well, and this gets to Greenfield’s first comment about driving efficiency.

One of the reasons that manufacturing has seen mass automation is because repetitive, step-by-step processes are tailor-made for it. Knowledge work, in comparison, is a much messier mix of tasks. And it’s why raising the productivity of a law firm is harder than trying to get a factory to make more widgets. That being said, generative AI promises to do for knowledge work what robots have done for factories (and for more on this, Hamish McRae’s ‘The World in 2050’ is a useful read).

Similarly, food digitization sets the scene for deploying computing power and software to produce more with less, faster, and at a scale that traditional methods can’t match.

Industrialization of the grocery store

On TechHQ, we’ve written about how grocery stores are integrating compact warehouse automation technology into their operations to reduce the cost of order picking. It’s a trend that analysts believe will continue with traditional supermarkets looking more like fulfillment centers to grow profits from customers ordering online.

Bristol, UK, is one of many cities with so-called ‘dark supermarkets’ where only staff walk up and down aisles stocked with fast-selling essentials and popular comfort food. Outside, wait delivery drivers with no walk-in customers in sight. Digital food shoppers prefer to let their groceries come to them, and the proportion of in-store customers could decline substantially as supermarket digitization ramps up.

Absolute primer on digitization of food industry from @zbfuss via @patrick_oshag @InvestLikeBest #DigitalTransformation #tech #Grocery https://t.co/IrmaS1yUZ5

— Curtis Kopf (@ckopf1) January 12, 2021

Supporting the growth in online orders is an ecosystem of food delivery apps, which pay great attention to user-experience and leverage other digital smarts such as gamification that encourages drivers to accept more pick-ups. Delivery apps provide lead generation for grocery stores and give supermarkets and restaurants the opportunity to micro-target their online audience.

Technology can provide a huge revenue boost to independent food businesses, which would otherwise have struggled to compete with bigger chains. But food digitization isn’t purely about chasing profits. There’s scope to reduce the environmental impact of food production and grow produce with bespoke nutritional profiles.

Growing microgreens to order

For example, researchers in Italy – in collaboration with agtech firm Ortogourmet – have demonstrated that it’s possible to grow microgreens to order, customizing nutrition profiles on a large scale. The team grew crops of radish, pea, rocket, and chard, focusing on two nutrients in particular – iodine and potassium.

Rather than fortify table salt with iodine – a common strategy used to combat iodine deficiency – the group showed how it was possible to elevate iodine levels in microgreens, which is beneficial to those who have to watch their sodium intake.

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As well as raise nutrient levels, it was also possible to reduce the amount of unwanted elements – by 45%, in the case of potassium. “Since vegetables contain high concentrations of potassium, patients with impaired kidney function are sometimes advised not to eat vegetables, or that they should be soaked in water and boiled to reduce the potassium content through leaching,” explain the scientists involved in the work.

All of the microgreens were grown using a liquid medium in place of soil, which paved the way for better control over food production with more predictable yields thanks to the climate-controlled environment.

And, just like how dark supermarkets and ghost kitchens benefit from being sited in lower rent city locations, metro adjacent greenhouses and highly-efficient plant growing facilities could also turn out to be profitable in these spaces.

Food digitization could end up bringing the farm closer to the city, maximizing land use, and reducing food miles, which is an appetizing thought for urbanites.

The post Food tech – digitization unlocks efficiency gains in production appeared first on TechHQ.

Rare earth elements might not be top of the agenda for businesses, but many IT devices that companies rely on would either be useless or substantially inferior without them. And while more abundant than their name suggests, mineable concentrations of rare earth elements are limited. Your cellphone features a gram or so of rare earths – a collection of 17 metallic elements – which provide special properties to the electronics inside. Their magnetic behavior has helped to develop more efficient motors for EVs and improve the generating efficiency of wind turbines. These are just a few of many applications that make the energy-intensive mining process worthwhile for the tech industry, but there’s a big environmental cost to be paid. And that’s one of the reasons why efforts to use biomining to turn electronics green are attracting interest.

There’s seemingly no limit to the power of plants. On TechHQ, we’ve already reported on how coffee, mushrooms and pineapples could give rise to a new class of biodegradable device materials. And there are digital communication lessons to be learned from the internet of tomatoes. Adding to that list, is the prospect of using biomining to refine rare earth elements without the need for harsh chemicals – the topic of today’s discussion.

Starting with bacteria that already show a preference for selectively binding themselves to rare earth elements, researchers in the US have engineered strains capable of biosorbing up to 210% more than wild versions. “Despite the work that remains to be done, we believe that this work is an encouraging sign that with further throughput, bacteria can be engineered to have sufficient capacity and selectivity to replace solvent extraction as the method of choice for producing purified rare earth elements,” writes the Cornell University team in the journal Synthetic Biology.

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Solvent extraction, while effective, has the disadvantage of often requiring high-temperatures and harsh chemicals, both of which carry an environmental penalty. Biomining, on the other hand, can make use of nature’s talent for separating materials, which includes not just those in mined ore. Materials inside unwanted electronic components are becoming valuable too – for example, by putting already refined rare earth elements back in circulation.

Mint Innovation, based in New Zealand, describes itself as ‘the world’s first company to use natural biomass and smart chemistry to extract green metals from waste commercially, accelerating circular supply’. And the firm is one of a growing number of organizations tapping into the wealth of precious metals that can – with the right process know-how – be harvested from waste electronics.

The politics of rare earth elements

There’s a political angle to pursuing biomining prospects. China has emerged as the global leader in traditionally refined rare earth elements, which hold strategic importance. Many components featuring rare earth elements – for example, devices used in healthcare, transportation, and power generation – are of high importance to national economies. “Because of this critical role, interest and research into the recovery of rare earth elements from end-of-life products and secondary sources such as coal and coal by-products has recently increased,” comments the US Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

Canada, home to 15.1 million tonnes of Rare Earth Elements (REE) in 2022, holds the key to the future of electronics, clean energy, aerospace, automotive, and defense technologies.

Permanent magnets, crucial for wind turbines and electric vehicles, are driving global REE demand.… pic.twitter.com/UgdJ8W3Agz

— Troy Minerals (@troy_minerals) January 25, 2024

The US has reserves of rare earth elements estimated to be in the region of 2.3 million tons. However, China reportedly has more than 20 times this figure, and sits on a wealth of resources. Biomining technologies could help to not just reduce the burden that the refining of rare earth elements places on the environment; they may also ease global tensions.

Being able to access materials present in waste electronics reduces the dependence on imports, which may be limited and subject to tariffs. Ideally, stakeholders would put the planet first. But if national security pulls the lever on helping to turn electronics and other critical components green, then sobeit.

The post Could biomining turn electronics green? appeared first on TechHQ.

Much has been said about the role of LEDs in creating energy-efficient lighting. And, without a doubt, it’s a technology worth celebrating. But the story isn’t over yet, as researchers in the US believe that they’ve found a pathway to unlock even more energy-efficient LED lighting by plugging the so-called green gap.

The white LED bulbs that are all around us today are mostly based on blue light emitters covered with a layer of yellow (or sometimes separate green and red) phosphor. The photoluminescent coating absorbs some of the blue-LED emission and reemits yellow (or green and red) light to produce a white glow when the colors combine.

LED lighting has been credited with saving vast amounts of energy as solid-state emitters convert more energy into light compared with incandescent bulbs, which radiate large amounts of heat. The payback time for businesses that switch from using incandescent bulbs to energy-efficient LED lighting can be as little as 12 months or less.

However, the phosphor-based color mixing process, known as down-conversion, has its downsides. Firstly, there’s an energy penalty involved in turning high-energy blue light into lower-energy emission at longer wavelengths – in this case, yellow light. Regular white light LEDs emit around seven times more heat than light, according to reports.

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The good news is that there’s a way to side-step these losses by using individual red, green, and blue LED chips to produce energy-efficient lighting.

Solid state white lighting featuring blue LEDs and phosphor coatings is said to have a theoretical luminous efficiency of 255 lumens/watt compared with 408 lumens/watt for devices based on individual color mixed elements. For comparison, incandescent bulbs – even halogen-based lamps – top out at around 20-25 lumens/watt, in practice.

There are other reasons to avoid using phosphor coatings, as they can degrade over time and add to the packaging costs of the device. And, having mentioned these drawbacks, it’s only right to point out that color-mixed LEDs have their own issues as well – principally concerning the emission of green light, which is why the latest news has raised hopes amongst developers.

.@bruce_munro’s ‘Field of Lights’ puts an otherworldly twist on the usual garden landscape, illuminating @nycgov with 18,750 #LED spheres! @corcorangroup has more on the galaxy-inspired light show: https://t.co/jeOAexeJ1F pic.twitter.com/4GGUMB7v8E

— Lumileds (@lumileds) January 22, 2024

Typically, pushing more current through green LEDs – to make them brighter – produces an effect referred to as LED droop, which dims performance. But the researchers, based at the Innovative COmpound semiconductoR LABoratory (ICORLAB) in the US, believe that they’ve found a way to grow the necessary compound semiconductor layer with fewer defects to avoid such a scenario.

Looking ahead, they believe that the development of higher-performance green LEDs could unlock a 3x boost in the efficiency of white light LEDs compared with devices that are available today.

Don’t forget to turn off the lights

Innovations in solid-state lighting are welcome, helping to reduce energy costs at facilities. However, building management systems have an important role to play too in making offices and other business premises cheaper to run.

Using motion sensors to turn lights off when rooms and corridors are empty can further reduce the amount of energy consumed by buildings. What’s more, collecting occupancy sensor data can help building managers to determine how often different parts of the facility are being used.

Analysts credit LED lighting as saving millions of tons of CO2 emissions compared with the continued use of incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes. However, the challenge is being able to raise the efficiency of solid-state devices to keep up with the increased demand for lighting globally.

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that despite the falling carbon intensity of electricity, CO2 emissions from lighting rose slightly in 2022, which makes breakthroughs in green LEDs all the more important.

“To stay on track with the Net Zero Scenario, all lighting sales need to be LED technology by 2025, with higher efficacy levels by 2030,” writes the IEA in its analysis of lighting use in buildings. “Although the trend towards LED technology is positive, governments need to continue their efforts to realise this goal.”

Global electricity consumption in lighting needs to fall to 1041.45 TWh for services and 325.43 TWh for residential by 2030, which represents a reduction of around 20 – 30% from current levels.

The post Going green – more to come from solid-state lighting appeared first on TechHQ.

• Climate denial is back and rising – but with a twist.
• The “new dial” skirts bans on old climate denial by peddling the idea that climate scientists are alarmists.
• YouTube has been revealed to still make money off these new denial videos.

Climate denial and ecological misinformation has always existed in tandem with the revelation that human existence is damaging the Earth’s natural environment. Naturally the site of many untrue claims, the internet is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and climate change counter-theories.

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The nature of the climate misinformation being shared is evolving, though, according to a new report. Videos that preach climate denial are in decline across nearly 100 YouTube channels, but that doesn’t mean the increasing threat of climate emergency has caused deniers to reflect.

Instead, videos attacking solutions like wind and solar power are far more common. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified 96 YouTube channels that often share what it describes as misleading climate talking points.

Those include the channels for libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute, conservative nonprofit PragerU and, yet to be on the right side of any debate, Jordan Peterson. The CCDH study used an AI model trained on climate denial, backstopped by human checks, which it used to review transcripts from 12,000 climate-related videos posted since 2018.

Roughly half of the videos were found to contain climate misinformation or disinformation (the former doesn’t place blame on the disseminator; disinformation is intended to hurt a movement). Each claim was sorted into five broad categories:

1. Global Warming isn’t happening
2. Human-generated greenhouse gases don’t cause global warming
3. Climate solutions won’t work
4. Climate science and the climate movement
5. The impacts of global warming are harmless or beneficial

The first two categories were described by researchers as “old denial.” For example, a video claiming that cold weather disproves global warming would be included in this category.

The latter three are part of “new denial,” largely composed of attacks on climate solutions and the credibility of climate experts. Researchers found videos claiming that people’s standard of living will decrease if fossil fuels are used less because renewable projects require more land than fossil fuels. Last year, 70% of climate denial content on the channels analyzed focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, up from 35% five years ago.

There were also claims that energy-efficiency policies don’t reduce energy use.

Climate denial continues to make money while the planet burns.

Researchers divided each category into sub-claims, and many videos featured multiple types of climate claim.

Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive officer of the CCDH, said that old denial claims have “absolutely collapsed.” In 2018, old denial comprised two-thirds of climate denial claims across the 96 channels studied; by 2023, it was down to one-third.

The report attributes the change in part to the visible effects of climate change, now too severe to ignore. It also reflects YouTube’s improved policies around misinformation. In October 2021, YouTube instituted a ban on adverts for videos explicitly denying climate change, or the idea that humans are to blame for climate impacts. A few years before that, in 2018, it paired up with Wikipedia to fact check climate videos.

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YouTube’s ad policy isn’t foolproof, though; the CCDH found multiple instances of advertising on climate-denial videos. “We did see ads leaking into the old denial content,” Ahmed said.

In fact, YouTube still makes millions of dollars a year from advertizing on climate denial and misinformation videos. YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analyzed, CCDH said.

YouTube climate denial doesn’t mean the world is ending

Just yesterday, Tech Nation revealed its 2024 climate cohort, the technology companies joining its Climate Program this year. This is the fourth year of the program, which is designed to support the UK’s most promising climate tech companies.

It includes a curriculum tailored to tackling critical growth challenges and provides direct support on fundraising, acquiring multinational customers and advocating on climate policy. This year, the program’s focus is on critical solutions across food, biodiversity and nature, material innovation, packaging, the built environment, energy and mobility.

On announcing the program cohort, CEO of Tech Nation Carolyn Dawson said, “over 45% of the emission reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050 will come from the adoption of climate technologies that are still under development. Helping these amazing startups grow will deliver innovations with a dramatic impact on generations to come.”

The program’s steering committee includes leading names who have transitioned their focus to solving climate change, including Dhiraj Mukherjee, Co-Founder of Shazam; Marta Krupinska, fintech entrepreneur turned climate tech founder; Roee Goldberg, co-founder of OpenWeb; and Lubomila Jordanova, CEO of Plan A.

Backed by Tech Nation’s Founding Partner, HSBC Innovation Banking, does the program’s existence mean we can relax?

Probably not. Still, despite the climate misinformation all over YouTube, technological innovation is happening every day that would offset the damage that the internet does – and at least slow global warming. The best way to handle the spread of climate misinformation is to hold the platforms enabling the content accountable.

For the full list of businesses in Tech Nation’s 2024 climate cohort, click here.

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Responsible product designers are aware of the need to engineer items that are repairable and straightforward to recycle once devices reach end of life. Even Apple, which has a history of making smartphones that are tricky to take apart, has made concessions with its more recent iPhones (smartphone refurbishers were surprised to find a removable front and back on the iPhone 14 to aid repair). There are a number of factors at play in the circular electronics economy, and one that’s sure to be getting more attention is battery circularity.

Developers are scrambling to secure battery materials. Tesla broke ground on its in-house lithium refinery in May 2023, highlighting how integral battery supply chains are to the success of electric vehicle (EV) makers. What’s more, the race to dominate EV production could be about more than just eliminating tailpipe emissions.

Chinese EV maker BYD recently made headlines by beating Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of battery-powered automobiles. BYD is similarly vertically integrated, having its own battery production division and lithium mine operations. And once those batteries have been produced, they can provide a source of revenue many times over for firms.

In fact, it would not be a surprise to see large EV producers also become significant players in the energy sector. Once batteries have served a useful life in vehicles they can be repurposed into other energy storage applications – adding a further decade of service. For example, Volvo Group – which produces around 300,000 vehicles per year and expects those to be electrically powered in the future – has set up an Energy division to explore these opportunities.

Towards battery circularity

Decarbonizing transportation by replacing fossil fuel powertrains with electric motors is going to require – at first – mining vast amounts of battery materials. But digging lithium and related feedstocks out of the ground won’t continue at scale forever. Economists and technology experts believe that there will come a point when the battery value chain becomes independent of raw materials.

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“In all scenarios, China will be the first to realize a circular battery value chain, doing so more than ten years earlier than Europe and the US for lithium and nickel and seven years earlier for cobalt,” write Stephan von Delft and colleagues in a recent study.

Sourcing lithium, nickel, and cobalt from recycled batteries reportedly saves 70% of the emissions compared with mining. And closed-loop recycling methods mean that the water used in the materials reclamation – which includes plastics from the casing, as well as aluminum and copper from the battery internals – doesn’t end up as waste.

Popular types of lithium-ion batteries

Considering the automotive sector, popular types of lithium-ion batteries include so-called LFP and NMC designs. LFP batteries feature lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄) cathode material. NMC designs, on the other hand, are based on mixed metal oxides of lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt.

LFP batteries have the advantage of a much longer cycle life in comparison with other lithium-ion chemistries. And the materials system is said to support several thousand charging/discharging cycles compared with a couple of thousand for NMC cells.

Explore the #eBusMission Measures Catalogue for Improving the Circularity of Batteries Used in E-Buses unlocking innovative strategies & solutions to enhance battery circularity in e-buses
Download here: https://t.co/cR8cLtwtzg pic.twitter.com/nEqURFUaun

— (@TUMInitiative) June 14, 2023

Plus, the economics of making LFP batteries are more favorable for producers as their non-lithium feedstocks are more abundant. However, users will notice that EVs with LFP battery packs are either heavier or have less range than vehicles powered by other lithium chemistries, such as Li-NMC, due to energy density constraints.

Battery circularity beyond vehicles

As well as containing thousands of individual energy cells, EVs feature comprehensive battery management systems to keep everything running smoothly and maximize device performance. Data gathered from the battery management system can tell operators when it’s time to swap out the battery and give it a second life – for example, to support vehicle charging infrastructure or help optimize building power supplies and microgrids.

Used and refurbished EV batteries are capable of storing power gathered from solar panels or wind power. And tracking back to how automotive firms are realizing that battery packs can be useful outside as well as inside the vehicle, battery circularity enables those organizations to grow their customer base.

Companies that have traditionally targeted vehicle buyers can widen their appeal and meet the needs of people looking for energy storage more broadly. And the welcome reality that EV batteries can have many lives gives rise to the idea of having a battery passport [PDF], which can help buyers determine the provenance of devices that they are considering purchasing. Other stakeholders benefit from having this information too, such as battery collection firms and recyclers.

Design for remanufacture

Clever battery recycling technology capable of digesting EV power packs whole, avoiding the need for manual disassembly, is impressive and keeps valuable electrode materials in circulation. However, one of the most significant things that battery developers can do is to prioritize the repairability and remanufacturability of their designs.

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“Investing in this at an earlier stage can minimise or eliminate issues further down the line, while helping to achieve circularity goals, as batteries remain in use for longer to maximise the potential environmental benefits on offer,” comments Autocraft – an OEM partner with expertise in EV battery manufacturing and remanufacturing – on its website.

Key to the success of battery circularity will be investment in remanufacturing and recycling infrastructure worldwide, extending the useful life of Li-ion products globally, and enabling the widespread recovery of secondary materials.

The post Battery circularity – another reason to speed ahead with EVs? appeared first on TechHQ.

In the automotive sector, consumers have long traded in their old vehicles for a discount on a new model. And that approach is gaining traction in today’s growing circular electronics economy. Consumers are encouraged to extend the useful life of their mobiles, tablets, laptops, and other smart electronics by trading in old devices. Leaders in the field have even likened flagship smartphones produced by Apple and Samsung to vehicles made by automotive brands such as BMW, Audi, and Mercedes – given that products can have long lifetimes and serve many owners. But this is just scratching the surface of what can be done to reduce the carbon footprint. By rethinking device materials – considering novel feedstocks such as fungi, coffee, and pineapples – future products could be greener than ever before.

On TechHQ, we’ve highlighted the merits of using fungal machines as unconventional computers, and mushrooms could benefit the technology sector in multiple ways. Materials experts have been investigating whether the thread-like roots of fungi – known as mycelium – can serve as the basis for eco-friendly structures. Rethinking device materials could mean that products are simply composted at the end of their lifecycle, reducing the burden of electronic goods on the planet.

Repurposing waste as smart packaging

Researchers in Thailand (publishing their work in the journal Mycology – more details below) have shown that using a mixture of natural materials – in their case, fungi, coffee, and pineapple leaves – means that the properties of the eco-friendly composite products can be fine-tuned. What’s more, rethinking device materials is an opportunity to repurpose waste.

In their work, coffee grounds – collected from Starbucks coffee shops in Bangkok – are used as a filler and substrate for the mycelium spawn to grow into. The mixture can be placed into a mold to give the natural composite a desired shape. Once a sufficient amount of the mycelium network has formed, the mold and its contents can be transferred to an oven and cured at 80 degC to inhibit any further fungal growth.

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Coffee is an extremely popular drink globally. However, only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of kilograms of coffee beans consumed annually makes its way into the cup. Well over 99% of the roasted material ends up as spent coffee grounds – so there’s no shortage of feedstock for industrial users keen to explore novel applications.

Interestingly, the Ford Motor Company and fast-food giant McDonalds teamed up a few years back to convert coffee bean skin into car parts. “Every year, millions of pounds of coffee chaff – the dried skin of the bean – naturally comes off during the roasting process,” wrote Ford in its announcement. “Together, Ford and McDonald’s can provide an innovative new home to a significant portion of that material.”

Car parts that were produced included headlamp housings for Ford’s luxury vehicle brand, Lincoln. The parts were around 20% lighter than their petroleum-based predecessors and required less energy to produce, which point to further advantages alongside waste repurposing.

Actually starch composites are made of thermoplastic starch resin. By varying the amount of plasticizer, reinforcing fiber, etc., properties of the final product can be varied. The bags made from our raw materials can be 100% Biodegradable and Compostable. #GreenMaterials pic.twitter.com/dJJAmyje9q

— Huawei New Materials (@huaweinm6) August 8, 2023

Returning to the Thai team’s work, the group also added pineapple fibers (sourced from the leaves of the plant) to the bio-composite mix. Adding pineapple fibers affects the flexural strength of the composite, which means that materials can be designed to bend more or less, to suit the application.

And – just like with any regular device packaging – self-powered Bluetooth sensors can be added to support the circular economy further, as we’ve mentioned previously on TechHQ.

The development of compostable device materials is a hugely promising area, and we may well see products made from fungi, coffee, and pineapple feedstocks in all shapes and sizes in the future.

“Moving forward, we aim to delve into techniques such as 3D printing to mold mycelium composites, a topic that stands as a priority in our ongoing studies,” write the researchers in their paper – ‘Fabrication of mycelium (oyster mushroom)-based composites derived from spent coffee grounds with pineapple fibre reinforcement (Open Access). “Integrating 3D printing technology with mycelium composites provides a pioneering method for creating items with unmatched accuracy and adaptability.”

Starting with a few components to highlight what bio-composites are capable of, it’s possible that the production of future electronic goods will be less reliant on plastics sourced from fossil fuels. The United Nations has signaled its determination to end plastic pollution – beginning with a ban on single-use plastics – and this will encourage materials suppliers and customers to consider alternatives.

Naturally, pricing will be critical, but given the abundance of raw materials such as coffee grounds – which are classed as waste – rethinking device materials could turn out to be a profitable endeavor.

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