Insect Saliva Might Be Our Best Plastic Recycler

Once Again the Natural World Is Providing the Ideal Solution

The rapid decline of bee populations, native and European, is well-known. For beekeepers, one of the threats to our hives is waxworms or wax moths. A hive weakened by pesticides can easily become infested by wax larvae.

A few years ago, Dr. Federica Bertocchini, a microbiologist and amateur beekeeper in Spain, made an accidental discovery when cleaning out her waxworm-overrun hive. The larvae were not only chewing through the plastic bag she had put them in but were also dissolving the bag chemically. She and fellow scientists investigated exactly how the insects accomplished this feat. They found that the enzymes or proteins in the waxworm saliva led to the rapid breakdown of polyethylene plastic. These are the first animal enzymes that we know about to degrade plastic, and they do it in a matter of hours and at room temperature.

Because plastic is made to be durable, it is a ubiquitous waste product in our environment, polluting seafood, water, and even human bloodstreams. Over time, it eventually breaks down into small particles, ultimately becoming micro and nano plastic pieces. These particles are found everywhere, from Antarctica to raindrops to tap water, and are posing a growing problem to human health.

Polyethylene bags and other products make up 30 percent of all plastics. In the environment, they break down over hundreds of years through a process known as oxidation. The only large-scale recycling of plastics happening today involves mechanical processes of glycolysis, pyrolysis, and/or methanolysis, all requiring a great amount of energy. Even with these approaches, only about 10 percent of all plastics on the planet are recycled. 

The waxworm’s saliva enzymes oxidize plastic fast and without fossil energy. The only downside could be the release of carbon dioxide if billions of plastic-metabolizing insects are exuding saliva on plastic. More research is needed, but current research suggests scenarios where plastic waste can be “bio-recycled” and eliminate the release of microplastics into the environment. There are indications that these enzymes might yield useful chemicals as part of the degrading process, or even with additional processing steps become new plastic molecules, negating the need for virgin plastic produced from petroleum. 

As saliva enzymes start breaking down plastics at scale, the processes will need to be contained to ensure that our valuable bee colonies are not further threatened.

The Battery Storage Challenge Is Being Solved

Researchers Are Using Less Costly, More Abundant, and Environmentally Benign Materials in Battery Innovation

Using electricity rather than fossil fuels to power our world offers many pluses, especially since electricity is increasingly being produced from the sun, wind, ocean currents and tides. Microgrids and sophisticated software monitoring power needs and providing instantaneous switching are making communities even less dependent on fossil fuels for peak demand periods. Battery storage is the key component that will enable us to get to 100 percent clean electricity. One of the biggest obstacles in this trajectory is the limited, costly, and environmentally damaging mining of lithium, nickel, and cobalt — all of which are used in the manufacture of batteries.

A lot of research is going into making batteries using other, more abundant materials with fewer of the drawbacks of current batteries, namely, flammability and spiky dendrites. The spikes are caused when batteries are charged too quickly and result in shortening the battery’s life.

One international team is getting results using aluminum as one of the electrodes and sulfur as the other with a common salt as the electrolyte. The 230-degree Fahrenheit temperature required to melt the salt and run the battery can be generated internally by normal charging and discharging cycles — charging from the sun during daylight and discharging after dark when electricity is needed. The scientists estimate that the cost will be 12-16 percent of today’s lithium-ion batteries.

In Finland, a functioning sand battery seems to solve the problem of year-round green energy for heat. It works by heating sand (100 tonnes) in an insulated silo using electric-resistant heat produced from surplus wind and solar energy. The sand heats up to almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and maintains this temperature for months until demand and energy prices are high. When needed, air flows through a heat exchanger in the sand to extract the heat for use in a district (neighborhood) heating system or for industries that use a lot of heat like food and beverage processing. The town of Kankaanpää is using the first commercial installation of a sand battery.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a battery system with a non-toxic form of blue-green algae (Synechocystis) that takes in solar energy by photosynthesis. They have used it to power a microprocessor of a computer for more than six months. It is biologically based, produces renewable energy, and multiplies naturally, making it easily scalable. The device does not require any inputs other than sunlight.

Another solution gaining traction is to produce hydrogen from excess renewable electricity and store it until electricity demand is high and renewable generation low.

These are a few of the storage innovations that are likely to be part of the ensemble of processes that get us to our mid-century, carbon-neutrality goal.

Prefab Facades Make Old Buildings Carbon-Negative

Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization, and Robots Can Streamline the Retrofitting of Old Buildings

Globally, buildings use almost 30 percent of all energy for heating, cooling, and lighting. California is leading the world in requiring all new construction to approach zero net energy (ZNE). In a few years, this requirement will tighten even more. ZNE will become the minimum standard. But what about all the old, leaky, energy-guzzling buildings that constitute most structures in California, the U.S., and the world? The current pace of retrofitting — labor-intensive, customized, and on-site built — is projected to take more than 500 years to transform all structures. This will not do for a planet in crisis. The process needs to change. It needs to become digitalized, standardized, automated, streamlined, and industrialized. BlocPower, a U.S. company written about in a previous article, has moved a long way in this direction.

Ecoworks, a German company, has accelerated and standardized the process even more. Its first step uses artificial intelligence to find the buildings that consume the most energy. Once selected, each structure gets a 3D scan of its exterior and interior. This digital representation is turned into a detailed set of plans that includes new tailored façade panels with built-in insulation designed to fit like a glove onto the old building.

Once the digital drawings are complete, the plans are sent to an automated factory where robots build large panels (multi-story as needed) with windows, ventilation systems, and channels for utilities. Modular roofs are fabricated with integrated photovoltaic panels. Eighty percent of the work is done in the factory. It takes on-site workers about 20 minutes to install a panel, transforming an entire retrofit project into a few weeks rather than months or years using the traditional approach. Moreover, this schedule includes replacing all fossil-fuel equipment with efficient, renewable energy units. A recent retrofit went from using more than 500 kilowatt-hours per square yard of floor area to generating a surplus of electricity that gets fed into the grid.

Because the new building skin is attached to the existing structure, most of the old building is reused, creating a super-low carbon footprint for a project. At present, Ecoworks is doing multiple projects on similar buildings to scale up the process. While the current focus is mainly on apartment complexes, the company is looking to do schools and single-family homes next.

As the world seeks to reach net-zero carbon by 2050, Ecoworks is helping solve one of the biggest challenges of decarbonizing our built environment. As this approach comes to California and Santa Barbara, our review and permitting processes are going to have to become more streamlined and flexible.

Can Earthworms Solve the Water Scarcity Problem?

Nature Can Clean Our Polluted Water Efficiently and Inexpensively

Many farms, especially dairy farms, struggle with how to dispose of polluted wastewater. The hundreds of millions of gallons of water farms use gets contaminated with animal waste, artificial fertilizers, and harmful chemicals, which frequently percolate down to the groundwater that people could one day drink.

Some regenerative ag operations are finding a nifty solution to this problem. They are discovering that earthworms, those ubiquitous dirt-eaters, are also able to clean water. They have long been known as nature’s way of enriching soil, but only recently has it been found that they can also cleanse wastewater. 

BioFiltro, an international company, has installed more than 200 of their three-stage wastewater treatment systems. The first chamber contains wood chips, earthworms, and microbes. The second level filters the water through crushed rock, and finally the cleaned water is collected in a drainage basin. A dairy farm in Washington State pumps half a million gallons of manure and chemical-laden water through a BioFiltro vermifiltration unit each day. The worms devour all the manure and harmful chemicals while aerating the water and wood chips. The aeration by the worms prevents the chip layer from clogging and becoming anaerobic. The density of worms is around 12,000-18,000 per cubic yard. The dairy reuses this treated water 10 times.

Vermifiltrated water is highly nutritive, pathogen-free, and scrubbed of chemicals, qualifying it for use on crop fields. The key to this low-cost, efficient, and odor-free process is the earthworm. These workers live, on average, six years, have numerous offspring, and each one produces about 10 pounds of castings per year, a nutritious and valuable soil amendment. This vermicompost can produce an additional income stream for farmers or can be used on their own crops.

Traditional wastewater treatment is energy-intensive and generates around 5 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG). In comparison, vermifiltration requires almost no electricity, thereby reducing GHG emissions by 91 percent. Astoundingly, earthworms remove more than 80 percent of nitrites in wastewater and reduce methane emissions by an even higher percentage.

Vermifiltration was recently approved to become a component of the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Alternative Manure Management Program — a program that provides funding to farmers who install sustainable GHG-reducing systems.

Water is becoming an increasingly valuable and scarce resource. Climate change and droughts are further taxing the planet’s limited supplies of fresh water; 85 percent of fresh water is used in global agriculture. Vermifiltration offers great hope for cleaning, reusing and stretching our supply of water. It has even proven to be effective in treating industrial and municipal wastewater. Some scientists believe it to be one of the most promising efforts to stem the global water crisis.