PROJECT EASY GREEN

On the bright side, e-waste recycling is clearly a business on the rise.

Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) takes in approximately 15 million pounds of e-waste a month and recently opened a seventh center in North Carolina, says CEO John Shegerian. Soon, it will open centers overseas. More than 99% of the materials that come through the door — mostly glass, plastic and metals — get recycled. Very little ends up in the landfill.

The company is also working on a project with investor Alcoa to recover aluminum alloys from LCD and plasma TVs.  

“There are close to 10 pounds of aluminum in a single TV,” said Randall Scheps, director of consumer electronics at Alcoa.

Shegerian, one of the leading speakers in the field, and Scheps will both speak on the subject at E-Cycling Dollars & Sense this June 1 in Palo Alto, sponsored by Agrion. (I’m moderating — come check it out.)

If recycling can live up to its promise as one of the growth industries in green, e-waste recycling could become one of the most lucrative segments. We’re up to our necks in electronics, a lot of the raw materials are growing in value, and government regulators are devising policies to ensure they don’t end up in dumps.

Associated Tele-Networking, which specializes in recycling telco equipment, takes in 35 semi-trucks' worth of waste a month.

“They don’t have the room” to keep their analog, non-3G and 4G equipment, said co-founder Creighton Bildstein.

The gold, silver and Rare Earth minerals in circuit boards have give telcos an economic incentive to recycle. ATN serves as a consignment broker: it recycles and resells minerals and gives a portion back to the original owner.

So what’s the downside?

Many recyclers still simply dump old equipment in China, where toxic materials leak into the soil and water system. The situation is probably worse than it was 10 years ago, said Sheila Davis of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Security is also a problem. Many recyclers don’t shred drives — they just resell them, along with their credit card numbers and company secrets, said Shegerian. Even federal documents have wound up on resold flash drives.

Plus, consumers often don’t know or don’t care about recycling. Best Buy took in close to 85 million pounds of e-trash in 2010. But it often takes $10 gift cards or other spiffs to motivate consumers. It’s still not a natural part of the electronics buying experience. How many old PCs do you have in the house?

And the answer to the question: the average American generates 4.1 pounds of waste a day, says Shegerian, a walking treasure trove of fun trash facts.

Hope to see you there.

Reno, Nev.–You could call this water recycling squared.

Amy Childress, a professor at the University of Nevada Reno, and a group of researchers are experimenting with a method that essentially harnesses the hidden power of waste streams to turn sea or swamp water into something you could possibly drink.

In theory, it could offset 50 percent of the energy required in reverse osmosis (RO)  desalination, she said. The fifty percent figure is just in theory, she added for further emphasis, but any progress in reducing the power consumed in desalination would be welcome. Energy — which is used to pressurize water so that an RO membrane will fleece the salt and other impurities — can account for around two-thirds of the operating costs of a desal plant, according to general industry estimates. ("Current electricity use in seawater RO plants, including pretreatment, is approximately 3.73 kWh/ m³, with approximately 2.41 kWh/ m³ for the RO separation. The lowest demonstrated use for RO, excluding pretreatment, has been just below 1.6 kWh/ m³," wrote Aaron Mandell and Rob McGinniss from forward osmosis company Oasys in a recent article for us.)

The UNR concept works as follows. A standard RO plant for converting seawater into fresh water would be erected. It would function like a standard plant. Next to it would be a pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) plant. In this plant, lightly- to moderately-fouled water like sewer water would be directed to a reservoir. At one end of the reservoir would be an RO membrane. On the other side of the membrane would be an extremely salty solution. It could be the brine discharge from the principle RO plant.

Nature, and water, seek an equilibrium, so the lightly salted water would push itself through the membrane to the briny side in a vain effort to achieve saline equilibrium. The flow of water to the briny side would create pressure. Think of what happens when you eat salty food and get the sudden urge to drink water. You get bloated and distended. Same thing happens here.

In a PRO plant, however, that pressure could be used to pressurize water flowing into the main osmosis plant. (One could also insert a water column between the moderately- and seriously-fouled water supplies and get the same results.) In the end, you essentially exploit two dirty sources of water to recycle another one. 

The technique shares a lot in common with other desalination concepts we've covered here. Energy Recovery, for instance, harvests the pressure from discharged waste streams in RO plants to pressurize incoming water. The pressure harvested by Energy Recovery comes from the mechanical pressure applied to the water and not chemical/physical attraction, and it must be harvested from the waste streams as they jet from the RO plant. Thus, you could combine and Energy Recovery system with this technique.

Oasys, meanwhile, takes advantage of chemical attraction with its forward osmosis technology. Oasys uses chemical attraction for osmosis itself and not pressure harvesting. Finally, it's also like the osmotic pressure gradient created by Statkraft. in an ongoing trial in Norway, Statkraft harvests the pressure created by fresh water crossing a membrane to produce electric power. Childress and her group are doing the same thing, but instead of turning the pressure into power, and thus losing some energy in the conversion, they are directly using the pressure. (Childress pointed out that UNR's system and the Statkraft system are currently the world's two osmotic pressure gradients.)

"The main advantage is to produce drinking water at a reduced cost. Other benefits include brine dilution prior to ocean discharge and concentration/treatment of the impaired water source," wrote Andrea Achilli, a graduate student on the project in an email after our field trip. "It is also worth noting that the RO feed water is not diluted with impaired/waste water; it is comprised of only seawater, so this system does not represent a direct or indirect water reuse system. We simply recover the chemical water potential of the impaired water and transfer it to the seawater."

Childress is also conducting experiments on thermal desalination in which low-grade geothermal heat can be injected into salt at the bottom of reservoirs. Last week, I spent some time in Nevada and have some geothermal stories coming up. (Disclosure: I grew up in Reno, but, no, I do not carry money around in a big plastic bucket.)

Final extra tidbit: this piece of machinery comes from Childress' lab. NASA used to own it. Remember those experiments to develop drinking water from the urine of astronauts? You're looking at the machine that NASA employed.

The last six months have seen sharp increases in the global prices of wheat, maize, sugar and edible oils. According to the World Bank, the food price index increased by 15% between October 2010 and January 2011 and is only 3% below its 2008 peak. Weather shocks, export restrictions, curtailed supply and soaring demand for maize and other products pushed prices to levels that threaten millions of poor people. The current situation also reflects the established U.S. biofuel targets — the Congress mandated that biofuel use must reach 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. China, Indonesia, India and the European Union (EU) increased their demand for corn for biofuels. Combined with rising fuel costs, this is driving food prices to an all-time high.

Rising food prices are affecting mostly developing countries with steadily growing populations and thus the growing demand for food. In India, China and the Middle East, higher incomes contribute to more people shifting to the middle class, which is also changing dietary habits. To feed world populations, food production must be increased by 2050. Ways to achieve this vary with local climate and conditions such as water supply, soil fertility, humidity, etc., which vary significantly throughout the world.

While VCs are still mostly on the sidelines, there has been an influx of interest in air and water investments, and films like Food Inc. and the spread of organic food underscore the tremendous public interest in this issue.

AeroFarm says it potentially represents one way to start tackling the problem. Considering that 925 million people in developing countries (13.6% of the 6.8 billion world population) are undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the AeroFarm system, which is not restricted by any capacity other than modest amounts of water and electricity, has already proven to be a good solution for growing high-quality leafy greens in Saudi Arabia.

“Farm land fertile enough to grow crops is declining. AreoFarms is not constrained by any limitations. We only need a modest amount of land, plus water and electricity,” said David Anthony, managing director of 21Ventures, a virtual technology incubator that invested in the AeroFarm System.

“We make high-quality leafy greens at the same cost as the traditional farming areas in California or the southern coasts of Spain or Italy. The food doesn't have any sand or dirt on it and it is not shipped for three weeks because it is grown in the urban environment, where the biggest demand for food is, making it fresher and healthier,” Anthony added.

Will it work? It's hard to say. The concept would suggest farming could become distributed, the same way computing and energy have become decentralized. But unlike computers, vegetables don't grow everywhere. Compensating for sunlight and water requires electrical and mechanical systems. How much that will undercut the benefits remains to be seen. Also, some critics have said that the volumes of food from urban vertical agriculture will always be proportionally modest. It's for farmer's markets, one academic told us.

Still, it does help break the association between prime crop land and food. And as food demand rises in certain countries, it is unlikely that those people will rely entirely on imported food.

It also provides insulation against climate change. According to Anthony, “Nobody knows what climate change will do to certain farming periods. Will there be too much cold weather in certain places, which will freeze crops? Will there be storms that will flood the land?"