Change or die. If this has always been the central imperative of human progress, there’s a lot more urgency to it lately. Half the battle to protect the planet means slowing, reducing, or prohibiting certain practices. The other half requires more pro-active adaptation: creative solutions to problems of our own making. Going into 2022, leading inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs have a raft of emerging ideas that might yet turn out to be lifesavers. Some are promising but still embryonic, others are already developed and good to go.
B-Droid
Robot bees sound like something we should be literally running from like swarmed crowds in a sci-fi movie, but researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology have designed benevolent armies of stingless little copter-like drones controlled by a digital management platform. Built for ‘low-nutrition and high-labour’, they’re able to identify and pollinate specific crops in those areas where real, wild bees are overworked or underrepresented.
The Smog-Free Tower
Actively cleaning polluted air seems like a particularly tall order, but Dutch urban artist and tech innovator Daan Roosegaarde has developed an imposing apparatus to perform that function. Rising almost 25 feet off the ground, his Smog-Free Tower sucks in particles from the surrounding sky to ionize and release them at a rate of 30,000 cubic metres per hour – a vacuum-cleaning service so effective and appealing that new towers are planned for South Korea, China, Mexico and Poland, as well his native Holland. In a smart bit of synergy, the compressed smog particles are used to make rings that you can buy and wear to show your support for the effort.
Dutch urban artist and tech innovator Daan Roosegarde created the Smog-Free Tower to clean polluted air.
Waterboxx technology allows plants to thrive even in extreme desert conditions.
Groasis Waterboxx
Another forward-thinking Dutchman, the flower exporter Pieter Hoff, came up with this seemingly paradigm-shifting means of growing crops in the desert. The operating technology is a so-called “intelligent bucket” fashioned out of recycled paper, which can germinate seeds and incubate saplings to grow productive crops even in regions scoured by drought or erosion. Waterboxx plants survive in extreme climates at an estimated rate of 90 per cent and use 90 per cent less water than other growing methods. This one could really help avert disaster where agriculture is seriously struggling.
Seabin
We know that there are islands of plastic waste floating out there in the Pacific, and if the thought of binning it all seems both too simple and too daunting, you may yet be inspired by the sheer industriousness of Aussie surfers Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski. Passionate about the ocean and duly offended by how badly we’ve dirtied it, they developed a floating trash receptacle with a submersible pump system and a ’catch-bag‘ that traps plastics, oils and other pollutants, effectively filtering the seawater flowing through it.
S.Café
Coffee being the de facto stimulant-of-choice for the global economy, it makes sense to channel its waste into something useful/sustainable/wearable. The S.Café brand began with a casual observation on the part of founder Jason Chen and his wife Amy that the smell of coffee will tend to mask other, more unpleasant odours. This led to four years of research and development on a custom line of textiles rendered from used grounds. The process uses less energy and water to produce yarn than most commercially available cotton and the resulting clothing dries 200 per cent faster, while also naturally absorbing odours and reflecting UV rays through a patented composition of micro-pores.
Veganbottle
Compostable vegetable-based packaging has been one of the truly substantial inventions of the climate emergency-era. Among the sturdiest variants is the Veganbottle developed by the French company Lyspackaging. Comprehensively biodegradable from cap to wrapper, it’s made from extracts of sugarcane, which needs less water than other crops. The bottle itself needs much less energy to synthesise than conventional plastics, too.
Organic Chain
Bittu Jacob and Mohammed Naseeb formed one of the winning teams for the recent Together Apart “hackathon” sponsored by Ericsson, under the patronage of the UAE Ministry of Economy. Duly showcased at the Swedish Pavilion of Expo 2020 Dubai, their Organic Chain concept deploys 5G tech to trace food supplies in the Gulf region from farm to market. Basically, each crop is barcoded and pinged through every stage of that journey, while the supermarket shopper at the end point can use a mobile app to scan their fruit and veg for all the relevant data: how organic they are, when they were harvested, what kind of quality to expect from that crop in context, and so on.
Sound of Electricity
Another finalist from the Ericsson hackathon, now on show at Expo 2020, is the brainchild of four female students from the University of Sharjah: Hessa Saif Al-Mahrazi, Fatima Suhail Al-Ghafli, Youmna Muhammad and Noor Akram Issa. Specialised in industrial engineering, sustainable energy and general medicine, they shared an idea for converting sound to electrical current and got to work on a device that uses the immense engine noise of aircraft as an internal power source to charge onboard appliances during flights. The team see this process as adaptable to almost any other loud environment, with obvious potential for a future of non-polluting energy.
EKA Seeds
As things currently stand, the production of palm oil is unsustainable, in that widespread cultivation requires vast tracts of land, which in turn demands wholesale deforestation. Singapore-based Golden Agri-Resources, which makes all manner of palm oil-derived products, has also developed a massively appealing biotech alternative with newly genetically modified seeds codenamed Eka 1 and 2. Plants grown from those seeds could generate up to 300 per cent more oil than the present industry average, while also maturing much faster and being more robustly resistant to drought and disease.
ZES Carbon-Free Cargo
Diesel-powered container ships don’t burn quite as much fossil fuel as cargo planes, but all those longer, slower sea and river journeys take their toll, too. In the Netherlands, for example, shipping accounts for about 5% of national emissions. This prompted yet another innovative Dutch collective, Zero Emission Services (ZES) to develop their own interchangeable energy system to power a ship called the Alphenaar for cargo-bearing inland journeys between Alphen aan den Rijn and Moerdijk. The vessel runs on 45 lithium-ion battery packs, each with an energy capacity equivalent to 36 electric cars (each also saving an estimated 1000 tonnes of C02 per year). These ZES packs are quick to recharge, easy to swap out, and so mobile that the company expects them to power everything from building sites to music festivals before long.
