Contributed by Dr. Brennan Gantner, CEO and co-founder of Skip Technology View the original article here
This article is part one of a two-part series addressing energy curtailment. Part two will be published later this week on Renewable Energy World.
New reports detailing the staggering waste of two-thirds of the energy generated in the USA have society scrambling to understand how. While electricity generation and transmission loss are hardly new, the rise of renewable energy (RE) sources has led to a staggering amount of energy that is literally thrown away- rendered unusable.
In 2022, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) curtailed 2.4 million megawatt hours (MWh) of utility-scale wind and solar output, a 63% increase from the amount of electricity curtailed in 2021, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). At wholesale costs, that’s millions of dollars of economic loss; At the current average end-user rate for electricity in California of $0.33/kWh, it’s $800 billion dollars lost.
Storage and timed release of electricity through the use of large-scale energy storage systems could cure the curtailment problem, reducing wasted clean power and potentially saving billions of dollars.
What is energy curtailment?
Large-scale energy use via the electrical grid is a finely balanced process. For decades, the state of California has suffered from rolling brownouts due to insufficient generation. Texas has seen similar problems from wholly different causes, with electricity generation failing at low temperatures, resulting in mass blackouts and more. And while underproducing energy, especially drastically compared to demand, is a life-threatening issue, overproducing energy can negatively impact the stability and longevity of the grid. Sufficient excess can cause everyday power surges but on much larger scales. This damages or destroys anything grid-tied: appliances, manufacturing, transformers, or minor electronics like phones and chargers. Even when equipment is not damaged, sufficient supply-demand imbalance, where supply outstrips demand, results in power being reflected back to the grid, to be lost as heat.
To walk the narrow line between under and over-production, US utilities use a bulk production method for primary generation supplemented by variable output and smaller fast spin-up plants to meet demand that varies by time-of-use (TOU). Historically, US bulk generation has been provided by coal. Coal plants have longer ramp-up and cooldown times, which makes them ideal for steady, bulk generation, while natural gas peaker plants have been used for on-demand generation during high TOU.
Coal has proven problematic in many ways. With massive carbon and sulfide output, coal plants generate potent greenhouse gasses and radioactive dust. More extreme weather effects due to climate change are being observed, thanks, in large part, to years of coal power plant output. Worse, coal pollution at every stage, from mining to burning, produces multiple adverse health conditions. From miners with lung disease to local residents receiving VERY large radiation doses, the economic costs of coal are staggering, let alone the humanitarian ones. Burning natural gas (methane with trace additives) is cleaner but still results in greenhouse gases. What’s needed are electricity production methods that don’t release CO2. Enter renewable energy (RE),
RE comes from natural processes that can be tapped without burning anything. The current market winner is solar energy, with wind and water trailing. Natural processes, however, occur sporadically, at times that often are not the same schedule as when society would like to use power. Solar, for example, is only available during the day. Turbines only produce power when the wind blows. Hydroelectricity from water can be more stable until a drought occurs, such as has been the case with Lake Mead, resulting in widespread power outages. Each RE source has drawbacks, but all share the same benefit: they don’t produce greenhouse gasses and perpetuate further climate change.
Why does curtailment happen?
Because the grid requires balancing supply and demand, every US grid runs a surplus whose size is determined by how well providers can forecast demand. Good forecasts result in small but real waste. Bad forecasts, however, result in either blackouts or massive waste. This excess power is the first type of curtailment, where power is supplied beyond the demand. Mitigating this at the grid scale is a complex process, often involving multiple agencies that are slow to act.
RE does not make curtailment any less of a problem. If anything, inherent RE variability exacerbates the complexity of matching supply to demand: solar peaks midday, wind peaks whenever the wind blows, but usage peaks when the workday ends, as workers return home, cook dinner, watch TV, and are generally awake after the sun sets. This typically results in TOU rate hikes. Usage also spikes in the late afternoon in locations that require cooling, like much of the southern US. On particularly warm days, when air conditioning is a life-saving necessity, the heat curve lags behind the illumination curve, so while the peak of solar energy production is midday, the heat peak is between 3 and 5 pm. Finally, usage peaks at night in locations that require heating. In particular, transitioning from local fossil fuel-burning heat sources in the northern part of the country to heat pumps, results in usage for heating peaking overnight into early morning.
Additionally, large amounts of California Independent System Operator (CAISO) curtailment are reported seasonally. Solar production ramps up through spring to peak in summer, but usage lags production. The seasonal variation in RE results in not a mismatch of hours, but potentially months.
A general solution is the same as for fossil fuels: produce exactly as much as needed for the worst-case scenario- that way, there’s always power. On average, a large excess of power is generated. This is the second form of curtailment, where (dirty) power is produced concurrent with RE production, and excess energy is discarded. This is how energy production in the US currently works because it is currently more cost-effective (in multiple ways) for excess energy to be curtailed instead of stored to average out over high-demand periods. Consider, for example, the case where external government subsidy makes wind and solar construction, functionally, free. Then, because storage would cost money, it’s cheaper to simply build sufficient wind and solar to always have power, curtailing what’s not needed.
Another type of curtailment occurs due to transmission infrastructure limitations. Transcontinental transmission wires can only transmit so much power. When too much is generated it’s often curtailed to prevent overloading transmission wires, which at sufficient power can melt them. The safety limits are set low and do not account for changing conditions. With proper monitoring, more energy could be transmitted on the same set of lines by taking conditions into account. Heimdall Power has launched a device that sits on transmission lines and feeds real-time information about conditions to centralized monitoring. Set to be tested in the US in 2025, it could allow 40% more power to be transmitted using existing wires.
What are the costs of curtailment?
While subsidies exist, it is not functionally free to construct RE generation. Curtailment happens in large part for economic reasons, though the cost is more complex than the materials and installation costs of storage methods. As cited in the introduction of this article, in 2022 the CAISO curtailed 2.4 million megawatt hours (MWh) of utility-scale wind and solar output, a 63% increase compared to electricity curtailed in 2021. At the average end-user rate for electricity in California of $0.33/kWh, that’s $800 billion dollars in loss.
Those costs aren’t necessarily economically real, but it’s a place to start. Assuming greater availability did not impact price, they can be compared to the costs to generate the wasted excess. In 2022, the average utility-scale solar installation cost per watt was $1.07, rising to $1.16 in the first quarter of 2023. Using these figures, the extra generation installation cost is:
These costs are decreasing, but the decrease is leveling off, with current wholesale costs as low as $30/MWh. The construction represents just the sunk costs in building additional generation, while the wholesale electricity rate represents what a market with an infinitely large demand for electricity absorbs if available. While neither of those is the case, the true economic value lost must be somewhere between.
New advances decrease these costs. Solar was not competitively priced until 15 years ago, and today solar electricity is among the cheapest available. It may ultimately be cheaper to overbuild energy production facilities should those costs prove cheaper than storage costs. Indeed, with the cost of Lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries approaching $100/kWh, it makes sense to consider alternative approaches to li-ion on cost.
Contributed by Dr. Brennan Gantner, CEO and co-founder of Skip Technology View the original article here
This article is part two of a two-part series addressing energy curtailment. Part one was published earlier this week on Renewable Energy World.
While a thought experiment involving the free construction of infinite wind energy generation capacity elucidates the economics of generation vs. curtailment, it sidesteps the problem of time-shifted generation vs. usage peaks. Wind may blow at any time, in any location, so a sufficiently large number of turbines could conceivably cover peak usage needs with large curtailment off-peak. Solar, however, is locked to overhead sunlight hours, so it cannot be harvested at all desired usage times, at least without very long-distance transmission, which represents a much larger problem. To convert to a renewable energy (RE) world, with large amounts of solar production, energy storage isn’t just an economic problem, it is fundamentally required.
Lithium (li)-ion storage is, currently, the dominant player in grid-scale energy storage, but there is insufficient capacity in current leading li-ion battery technology to supply the grid-scale storage necessary to accommodate even the current levels of RE generation. This supply side failure is a direct driver of curtailment in California and many other markets. Exploration of alternative solutions that offer to offset the resource restrictions that impact li-ion energy storage include pumped hydro (Lake Mead), electro-mechanical (Energy Vault), thermal (Ambri), and alternative electro-chemistries (Form, ESS Inc.), but always at a high economic or land-use cost. Many solutions are simply worse than lithium but are still being investigated due to the overwhelming necessity of storage for a functional RE grid.
Each of the above, including li-ion storage, comes at a higher cost in the current market than the costs resulting from curtailment. Again, this is a direct driver for why energy curtailment happens at large scales: it is simply cheaper, currently, to build more RE generation than it is to store large amounts of energy. As the above technologies reach developmental maturity, however, costs should fall quickly.
How can we better address curtailment in the future?
The next generation of energy storage is almost certainly going to be composed of many different storage solutions. Li-ion continues to come down in costs, and may eventually reach parity with generation costs. Without a huge breakthrough in the technology, however, it still presents many issues related to sourcing, mining, processing, and recycling the rare earth metal(s) involved. Solid-state batteries, just starting to appear on the market, are likely game-changing in many areas.
Moreover, much of the standard battery construction capacity for the foreseeable future is likely to be taken up in the transition from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs), where weight, size, and charge characteristics are incredibly important. These requirements make alternative solutions difficult to implement, as evinced by how long it took for electric vehicles to become commercially viable from initial inception. The first EV was created in 1828 by Hungarian Anyos Jedlik, meaning battery storage technology took almost 200 years to arrive at a commercially viable solution.
A cheaper storage model is clearly needed. Since the requirements for stationary energy storage are more relaxed, one likely option is cost-competitive alternative electro-chemistries. Among many working on this, Skip Tech is developing a high power density, high energy density, liquid system for long-duration energy storage (LDES). In comparison to traditional li-ion batteries, the electrolytic solution is not integrated into the structure of the system, but stored separately and passed through the power cells, where the energy stored in the electrolytic fluids can be extracted or stored by reversing the flow. Flow battery technologies, like the Skip Tech liquid battery, offer many advantages including the ability to customize the duration of storage separately from the amount of power delivered, and in some cases can even support “refueling” approaches, where the fuels used in the system are “charged” at one site and then are transported to the energy storage system, allowing “recharging” without direct grid connection.
A system in which the electrolytic “fuel” is removable can be operated in the more traditional manner of fossil fuel power plants by removing the fuel from the potential RE site and transporting it to an electricity-generating plant elsewhere. This, in turn, allows for the reuse of much of the existing infrastructure around fuel storage, transport, and usage. In particular, the US military has studied power usage and generation in the field and determined that it may be unfeasible to construct long-term, on-site RE generation equipment and facilities. Transitioning this existing high-usage system away from fossil fuels may require a fuel delivery system of much the same nature as existing infrastructure. Transitioning to an electrolytic fuel may be that solution: power can be captured elsewhere, such as wind farms in remote locations, stored in the electrolytic fuel, and transported in the same equipment used to transport fossil fuels today. It can then be extracted at the necessary location by a second set of reversible cells in operation much like a traditional power plant, at a steady power, amperage, voltage, and frequency output to better support existing systems that have come to rely on that stability.
The Skip Tech solutions target the key 10-hour duration market and can scale to higher and lower amounts of energy storage. They do so at a competitive price point (<$100/kWh) and with very long expected system lifetimes (20+ years). This same supply chain is replicable in other parts of the world. Their technological breakthrough, utilizing flowing fluid dynamic membranes rather than classical plastic (e.g. Nafion) membranes, solves the longstanding and key problem that has held back flow batteries from wide adoption. While doing so, it also opens up an electro-chemistry that was incompatible with prior membranes. In particular, Skip Tech can use hydrogen and bromine as the reaction couple, which has an incredibly simple reaction chemistry and very favorable reaction energetics.
The key technological innovation in the Skip Tech system lies in the reaction cell. Traditional flow batteries require a separator membrane to allow electron transport but prevent bulk material migration. Skip Tech has developed cells where traditional plastic membranes have been replaced by flowing liquid membranes formed from hydrobromic acid; the resulting system is a “liquid battery.” Liquid batteries hold the promise of greatly reduced costs and longer lifetimes, while also enabling the use of highly reactive chemicals that are not compatible with traditional membranes. Skip Tech is developing these systems into compact, LDES solutions, using hydrogen and bromine as the primary reactive elements. The hydrogen bromine (HBr) reaction has fast kinetics, leading to high power, typically a few kW/m2. It is also easily reversible, leading to high round trip efficiencies, typically >80% DC-DC. Bromine is readily stored in solution within hydrobromic acid, which leads to high energy densities. The hydrogen and bromine are stored in separate tanks, effectively eliminating self-discharge, and this energy storage solution is scalable to meet Department of Energy (DOE) long duration storage shot cost targets. HBr batteries can also operate at a wide range of environmental conditions, specifically in places where heat or cold require temperature regulation for li-ion batteries.
Based on conservative cost modeling, Skip Tech expects to achieve storage costs below $50/kWh in the long run, and levelized costs of storage below $0.05/kWh-cycle, where storage becomes cheaper than extra RE generation capacity. At their current design point, the capital cost of the power system, including labor, is CP =$396/kW ($33/kWh), while the capital cost of the energy system is CE =$56/kWh. These costs decrease further for longer duration systems (e.g., 24 hours of storage costs less per kWh than 12 hours).
Curtailment presents real economic costs that are measurable and additional ethical problems related to waste that are more difficult to quantify. Everyone can agree, however, it is better to produce in proportion to what we need, so long as the costs to do so are advantageous. To that end, we can decrease curtailment with investment in and exploration of new storage technologies to better match electricity generation with usage. This will bring the costs associated with storage down sufficiently so that it becomes more economically viable to store excess energy generation instead of simply wasting it freeing up resources we can devote to more and better pursuits and decreasing human impact on the climate. Thus, investment in storage technologies is a win for everyone.
By: Michele Bertilli View the original article here
Following bold policies that promoted reforestation and private conservation in the early 1980s and 1990s, Costa Rica succeeded in significantly increasing its forest cover, which also boosted its nature-based tourism industry.
But the rise of mass tourism, including cruise ships, are starting to bring in environmental damage, warn the early promoters of sustainable tourism, as the industry’s value is estimated to more than triple by 2032.
The experts recommend shifting from pursuing sustainability to a regenerative approach, integrating local communities in tourism supply chains, and redirecting profits from mass tourism to private conservation.
LIMÓN, Costa Rica — On board Jurgen Stein’s two-seat gyrocopter, tourists can see the rainforest like never before. From the sky, the Selva Bananito Reserve looks like an endless stretch of broccoli.
“We have 11 life zones. Almost 5% of the global biodiversity exists here,” Stein says, pointing at the reserve that’s part of the Bosque de las Madres biological corridor.
Nestled in the Talamanca Mountains in southeastern Costa Rica, his private reserve stretches to the fringe of La Amistad International Park, the largest nature reserve in Central America that straddles more than 400,000 hectares (162,000 acres) of the border region between Costa Rica and Panama. Stein’s own reserve, a more modest 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres), was inherited largely from his father, who purchased the area in 1974 for farming and logging. But Stein refused to continue clearing the forest, and instead turned 1,250 hectares (3,088 acres) into an ecological reserve in 1994, keeping only a third of the property devoted to farming.
Selva Bananito is home to birds such as the great jacamar (Jacamerops aureus), anteaters like the northern tamandua (Tamandua mexicana) and the silky anteater (Cyclopes didactylus), and the Central American agouti (Dasyprocta punctata). It also hosts jaguars (Panthera onca) and pumas (Puma concolor). “When my father was 90, I gave him the footprint of a jaguar and a photo of a puma looking at one of our trap cameras. He stared at the picture and cried the whole day,” Stein says.
Birds enthusiasts can explore Selva Bananito to spot some of the 300 species that have been identified on the Lodge’s property. Image by Michele Bertelli.
Soon after establishing his reserve, Stein realized that he needed more sources of income to make up for no longer being able to log. He and his sisters saw tourism as an alternative, and in 1995 they opened the reserve to visitors. Today, guests sleep in 11 cabins built with recycled wood in traditional Caribbean style, and enjoy hiking and horseback riding in the reserve or watching some of the 300 species of birds living here. The more adventurous can also rappel down a 24-meter (80-foot) waterfall or glide from tree to tree on zip lines. And they can fly with Stein over the forest.
Over the years, Stein has become a well-known figure in Costa Rica’s ecotourism industry, including serving as vice president of the National Chamber for Ecotourism (CANAECO) and sitting on the board of the Nature Reserves Network, which represents all of the country’s private reserves. If Costa Rica has achieved worldwide recognition, he says, it’s thanks to tourism.
Tourism and conservation go hand in hand
In Costa Rica, sustainable tourism became an essential driver of the economy in the early 1980s. “We could not compete with the beaches of Mexico and the Caribbean islands. But we realized that no one had our natural assets,” Costa Rican Tourism Minister William Rodriguez López tells Mongabay.
The country implemented several bold policies to showcase its standing as home to 6.5% of global biodiversity. In 1969, it began designating the first protected areas, reversing policies stretching back to the early 1800s that had favored forest-clearing agribusiness. These earlier policies promoting deforestation drove Costa Rica’s rainforest cover as a proportion of the country’s total land area to as low as 40% in 1987. In 1995, Costa Rica turned the tide and approved a new law banning any further changes in land use and implementing a payment for environmental services (PES) program to support private conservation efforts.
Under the PES scheme, farmers and landowners receive an economic incentive for taking care of their trees through practices such as reforestation or agroforestry. The program, is funded mainly through a national fuel tax and water charge, covers 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres), or about a quarter of Costa Rica’s land area, and has seen 6 million trees planted since 1997.
Together, these policies have proved successful: today, forests cover 57% of the country. According to the World Bank, Costa Rica is the first tropical country to have reversed deforestation.
Jurgen Stein points out the boundaries of the Selva Bananito Reserve from his two-seater gyrocopter. Image by Michele Bertelli.
Tourism has developed along the same trajectory: the number of foreign visitors has risen steadily; of the 2.7 million people coming to Costa Rica in 2023, 1.6 million, or about three in five, visited its protected areas. Tourism today accounts for 8.2% of GDP and 21.3% of the workforce, both direct and indirect, making it an essential part of the economy.
Over time, the tourism sector has implemented many measures toward greater sustainability. In the 1990s, the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism (ICT) created a third-party certified label to guarantee the social and environmental sustainability of its hotels and other ventures. Businesses looking to be certified must meet a range of criteria, including measuring their carbon footprint.
But local ecotourism operators such as Stein say they fear this blessing could soon turn into a curse. “Costa Rica should keep growing the seed it planted many years ago, which attracted the tourists here. The same tourists that today asked me how is [it] possible that they saw trucks loaded with giant trees,” Stein says.
The threat of mass tourism
During his frequent flights over the rainforest, Stein has witnessed an increased presence of deforestation since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020. He says he fears the subsequent economic crisis has pushed many local farmers toward illegal logging, damaging the country’s most precious asset. “It’s all for construction. Costa Rica is for sale. Ocean view, beachfront, whatever: we are selling our country to people who have money and want a second or third house,” Stein says.
In 2023, the public prosecutor’s office received 2,355 complaints of environmental crimes, most regarding damage to biodiversity, invasion of protected areas, violations of the forestry law, or illegal mining. Illegal logging is on the rise, especially in the country’s north, on its southern Pacific coast, and in Limón, the Caribbean coastal province where the Selva Bananito Reserve lies.
Guests of Selva Bananito can enjoy hiking, horse-riding and birdwatching. Image by Michele Bertelli.
Stein recalls flying to the border with Panama in March 2022 and spotting a track through the forest that he’d never seen before. “I flew over there again a week later, and I could already see a bulldozer and the timber,” he says. He sent the coordinates to the authorities, who subsequently arrested a group of loggers. But simply policing the damage after the fact isn’t enough, Stein says.
He notes that the farmer who allowed the logging on his land earned the equivalent of more than $100,000 for just a week of logging. For conserving the same amount of forest, he would have earned just over $3,000 in five years.
“Extraction and destruction bring more money than conservation,” Stein says.
His concerns are shared among several of the pioneers of sustainable tourism in the country. “Massive tourism is poisonous for eco-travelers,” says Glenn Jampol, chair of the Global Ecotourism Network (GEN) and owner of the Finca Rosa Blanca Coffee Farm & Inn. Jampol moved to Costa Rica from the U.S. after buying an old coffee farm. With his mother, they decided to restore the area and rent out a few bedrooms to pay for the work. And it was a success. National Geographic magazine selected Finca Rosa Blanca as one of its Unique Lodges of the World. Jampol’s coffee was also awarded the top prize for organic coffee at the World Coffee Challenge.
But Jampol says he’s worried that, by embracing mass tourism and cruise ships, Costa Rica could lose its competitive edge in the expanding sustainable tourism industry. GEN valued the global sustainable tourism market in 2022 at $3.3 trillion, and projects it could reach $11.4 trillion by 2032. “Many believe that the more tourists, the better. But it’s a lie,” Jampol says. “It is not about the price: it’s about the value, [about] an unforgettable experience. If we follow the [mass tourism] trend, we will lose all our edge.”
From sustainability to regeneration
Even the ICT, the national tourism institute, seems aware of the limits of the current model. “In a destination like Costa Rica, nature is the raw material to generate tourism. We cannot imagine growing infinitely,” says Tourism Minister Rodriguez López, adding the country’s success has been based on attracting higher-income visitors. Tourists spend an average of $1,746 and remain in the country for almost 13 nights. “We don’t want massive tourism like some other Caribbean islands, where they strive to receive 12 million tourists on an island that is smaller than our country. There is no degree of conservation there, and no sustainability by a long shot,” Rodriguez López says.
Yet, in 2022-2023, cruise ship arrivals set a new record, with Costa Rica welcoming around 350,000 visitors from 407 ships.
Glenn Jampol (far left) joins a group of visitors for a coffee tasting at Finca Rosa Blanca Coffee Farm & Inn. Image by Michele Bertelli.
“Cruise tourism is the worst social polluter: they eat everything on board, leave the garbage on the land, and work only with a couple of tour operators,” Jampol says. “We don’t want more tourism: we want better tourism.”
At the annual “Planet, People and Peace” conference organized by ecotourism association CANAECO in October 2023, many other operators voiced their concerns.
“Not everyone who lives in a touristic place is part of its value chain,” says Mario Socatelli, a consultant and speaker with more than 25 years of experience in the sector. Over his career, Socatelli has gone from managing sightseeing tour operators to flight companies. He was both a maker as well as a beneficiary of Costa Rica’s success, and he also recognizes the pitfalls.
“The World Tourism Organization estimates that the value chain of tourism covers 80% of a community, but 20% remains out of reach,” Socatelli tells Mongabay. According to him, Costa Rica should shift from pursuing sustainability to adopting a more integrated regenerative approach. “We don’t value ecosystemic services such as the importance of the biodiversity in the food production, the water generated in a protected area, the importance of a beautiful landscape,” he says.
The solution would be to integrate the whole community into the value chain of tourism. “It is not only about the product or the hotel, but also about the whole territory,” Socatelli says, citing successful examples of rural tourism in Colombia and Italy. He also says the country has no time to waste in finding the right balance between being a popular destination and preserving the ecosystem, because market trends are already changing.
In the meantime, Stein says he’d be satisfied simply by seeing some of the profits generated by mass tourism pouring down into his conservation efforts.
“A hundred and eighty thousand tourists on cruise boats dock in Limón every year,” he points out. “Couldn’t they give us 5% of their profits for the water that they receive [through our reserve]?”
Banner image: Nestled in the Talamanca Mountains in south-east Costa Rica, the Selva Bananito Reserve spans over 1,250 hectares (3,088 acres). Image by Michele Bertelli.
Intelligent floating infrastructure could make cruises more sustainable
Companies including Royal Caribbean Group and ELIRE Group are working to make cruises more sustainable with innovations such as floating infrastructure
Cruise holidays offer a unique blend of relaxation, exploration and fine dining, all without leaving your floating hotel.
The Cruise Lines International Association forecasts an impressive 35.7 million global passengers in 2024 and the global cruise market is more than US$8bn.
Alongside its expansion, the cruise industry faces significant environmental challenges.
Cruise ships produce significant air pollution and have large carbon footprints, considerably surpassing those of flying or driving.
A medium-sized cruise ship can discharge upwards of 1 billion gallons of untreated sewage into the ocean, threatening delicate marine ecosystems like coral reefs with irreversible damage.
The industry is trying to pivot towards greener practices, facilitated by innovative collaborations and pioneering technology.
Jason Liberty, President and CEO at Royal Caribbean Group, says: “As a cruise company, we know we’re only as vibrant as both the destinations we visit and the oceans we sail. That’s why our strategies extend from our ships to our shoreside operations as well.
Jason Liberty, President and CEO at Royal Caribbean Group
“From the tour operators we drive to pursue sustainability certifications to how we are intentionally diversifying our supplier base, with more local sourcing, we are focused on innovating across all aspects of our company, especially in our work to advance sustainability in the communities we visit.”
Amsterdam’s solution to cruising’s problems
In Amsterdam, the influx of 190 cruise ships per year brings a lot of tourists, but also poses serious environmental and residential challenges.
To combat this, the city has initiated plans to drastically reduce the number of cruise ships permitted to dock.
Amsterdam hosts more than 20 million tourists every year
By 2026, the limit will be set at 100, with a complete ban on cruise docking in the city centre envisioned by 2035.
A new terminal, situated 16 miles away, will serve future cruise ships, which from 2027 must employ onshore power instead of traditional oil-fired generators.
Lubomila Jordanova, Founder and CEO of Plan A and Co-Founder of the Greentech Alliance, says: “Amsterdam’s proactive measures reflect a commitment to creating a more sustainable and liveable city by tackling the dual issues of overtourism and pollution head-on.”
Lubomila Jordanova, Founder and CEO of Plan A and Co-Founder of the Greentech Alliance
How floating platforms could support sustainability
The concept of floating smart hubs presents a groundbreaking approach to enhancing cruise sustainability.
These floating infrastructures typically inflict minimal environmental harm compared to permanent port expansions, but current versions usually serve one purpose and are sunk after their useful life.
Smart Hubs offer cost-effective and sustainable long-term solutions with a lifespan of more than 30 years
The floating infrastructure market, set to reach US$18.5bn by 2030, could serve various industries, improving operational sustainability across the board.
ELIRE Group’s hexagonal Smart Hubs can be assembled or dismantled as necessary and aim to support cruising to become more sustainable.
Luke Jenkinson, Founder & Group CEO at ELIRE Group, explains: “The innovative engineering behind our Smart Hubs, combined with the versatility of a unique multi-modal hexagon design, allows for endless configurations tailored to specific cases and locations.
“These range from large coastal wind farm assembly setups to smaller last-mile midstream river cargo configurations to reduce CO₂ emissions.
Luke Jenkinson, Founder & Group CEO at ELIRE Group
“We conducted a study in partnership with an independent decarbonisation consulting company MH Tech and discovered that a network of SmartHubs in ten small regions across the Mediterranean including Malta, a location known for its congested roads, could save the equivalent of 10 million tonnes of CO₂ over a 10 year period.
“In addition, it can take 30% of HGV vehicles off the roads by enabling logistics via electric waterborne transport.”
How Royal Caribbean Group is becoming more sustainable
Royal Caribbean Group has not only committed to stringent sustainability targets but is also pioneering extensive research and technologies to reduce environmental impact.
As of 2023, the company is more than halfway towards its 2025 carbon intensity reduction goals and has diverted 87% of its waste from landfills.
Nick Rose, Vice President, Head of ESG at Royal Caribbean, says: “I am proud of the continued effort Royal Caribbean Group has made to protect our beautiful oceans and find unique ways to reach our communities.”
Nick Rose, Vice President, Head of ESG at Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean Group has created the first at-sea waste-to-energy systems and started construction on its first methanol-capable ship.
The company is committed to net zero and has partnered with companies including Mærsk and the WWF to develop new technologies and solutions.
By Victoria Corless View the original article here
A flash heating technique breaks down plastic waste and converts it to pure hydrogen and graphene with significantly less emissions and at a low cost.
As the impacts of the ongoing climate crisis and environmental challenges like pollution and ecosystem degradation become increasingly evident, the need for innovative solutions that address these complex issues on multiple fronts grows more urgent.
In a recent study published in Advanced Materials, researchers led by Boris Yakobson and James Tour from the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University in the US are doing just this with a new technology that converts waste plastic into clean hydrogen gas and high-purity graphene without any carbon dioxide (CO2).
“What if we turned waste plastic into something much more valuable than recycled plastic while at the same time capturing the hydrogen that is locked inside?” asked Kevin Wyss, a chemist at SLB (formerly known as Schlumberger) who completed the project as part of his Ph.D. thesis.
This idea led to a transformative solution that not only mitigates environmental harm but also harnesses untapped value from problematic waste materials.
The desire for hydrogen
Hydrogen stands out as a clean and attractive fuel source due to its ability to yield substantial energy per unit weight while generating water as its sole byproduct.
“This is what makes it sustainable or ‘green’ compared to current gas, coal, or oil fuels, which emit lots of CO2,” said Wyss. “And unlike batteries or renewable power sources, hydrogen can be stored and re-fueled quickly without waiting hours to charge. For this reason, many automobile manufacturers are thinking about transitioning to hydrogen fuel.”
In 2021, the global consumption of hydrogen reached a staggering 94 million tonnes, and demand is projected to surge in the coming decade. However, the dilemma lies in the fact that, despite hydrogen’s reputation as a green fuel, the dominant method of hydrogen production still relies on fossil fuels through a process called steam-methane reforming, which is not only energy intensive, but results in CO2 emissions as a byproduct. “In fact, for every ton of hydrogen made industrially right now, 10-12 tons of CO2 are produced,” said Wyss.
An emerging alternative is to produce hydrogen gas through a process known as electrolysis, where water is split into its constituent elements using electricity. While the electricity source can be renewable, such as solar, wind, or geothermal energy, ensuring this remains a challenge. These processes also require additional materials, such as catalysts, and cost around $3-5 USD per kg of hydrogen, making it difficult to compete with the reforming process at ~$2 USD per kg.
“You can see why we need methods to produce hydrogen in an efficient and low-cost method that does not produce large amounts of CO2,” said Wyss.
The problem with plastics and hydrogen fuels
Wyss explained that the challenges posed by plastic waste pollution and low-carbon hydrogen production are problems that scientists have successfully addressed decades ago.
“In the case of plastic waste pollution, we know how to recycle plastics — the problem lies in the fact that recycling is so expensive, with the high costs of manually separating plastic types, washing the waste, and then re-melting the polymers,” he said. “As a result, recycled plastics often cost more than new plastics, so there is not an economic incentive to recycle and thus, pollution is still a problem decades later.
“In the case of hydrogen production, we know how to make hydrogen fuel without producing CO2, but is two to three times more expensive than methods that produce hydrogen with lots of CO2.”
Hence, the real challenge lies not in solving these problems, but rather finding ways to reduce the cost of their solutions — a challenge Wyss and his colleagues are tackling head on.
Flash Joule heating breaks down plastics
Their approach uses flash Joule heating, a cutting-edge technique for rapidly heating materials to extremely high temperatures. To achieve this, an electric current is run through a material that has electrical resistance, which swiftly converts the electricity into heat, achieving temperatures of thousands of Kelvins in mere seconds.
“We discharge current through the sample of plastic, with a small amount of added ash to make it conductive, and achieve temperatures up to 2,500°C within a tenth of a second, before the sample cools back down within a few seconds,” said Wyss. “This rapid heating reorganizes the chemical bonds in the plastic — the carbon atoms in the plastic convert to the [carbon-carbon] bonds of graphene, and the hydrogen atoms convert to H2 [gas].”
“This process upcycles the waste plastics with high efficiency using no catalyst or other solvents,” he continued. “Once our plastics have undergone the reaction, we also get pure, valuable graphene, used for strengthening cars, cement, or even making flexible electronics and touchscreens, and which currently has a value of $60,000-$200,000 per ton.”
Wyss says that his lab at Rice University has been working on flash Joule heating for the past five years, but their main focus was previously on making graphene from plastics. But he says that, after some time, they realized that many plastic polymers also contain atomic hydrogen. “If we end up with graphene, which is 100% pure carbon, where is all the atomic hydrogen locked in the plastic going?” he asked.
They therefore set about trapping and studying the volatile gases emitted during their flash Joule heating process, and to their surprise discovered they were liberating almost 93% of the atomic hydrogen and were able to recover up to 64% of it as pure hydrogen — yields that are comparable to current industrial methods that emit five to six times more CO2.
“Our method produces 84% less CO2 and greenhouse gases per ton of hydrogen produced, compared to the current popular industrial method of steam methane reforming, […] and uses less energy than current ‘green’ hydrogen production methods, such as electrolysis,” Wyss said.
Making an EarthShot
This aligns with the US Department of Energy’s EarthShot Initiative, modeled after the historic “Moonshot Challenge”, which aimed to put a man on the moon in the 1960s. Similarly, the EarthShot initiative seeks to mobilize resources and creativity to achieve ambitious environmental goals.
These goals are intended to be scalable, achievable, and designed to tackle critical issues related to climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and other environmental crises. “The climate crisis calls for a different kind of moonshot,” they wrote on the website. “Energy Earthshots [such as the Hydrogen Shot] will accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade.”
The goal is to make 1kg of clean hydrogen cost $1 USD within the next decade, where clean hydrogen is defined as any that is produced with less then 4 kg of CO2 as a byproduct.
“Our research has shown that we can do that now, if the [flash Joule heating] process is scaled up, converting waste plastics into clean hydrogen and graphene,” said Wyss. “Currently, 95% of hydrogen produced globally results in 10-12 kg of CO2 being produced as a byproduct. Our process produces as little as 1.8 kg of CO2 per kg of hydrogen.”
Before this can happen, Wyss acknowledges that scale-up is still an issue. As hydrogen is a flammable gas, its safe capture and purification requires some careful planning and engineering. But Wyss is hopeful it can be done.
“A company named Universal Matter was started three years ago to scale-up the flash Joule heating process to make graphene,” Wyss said. “In that short time, [they have] scaled from gram-per-day levels to ton-per-day graphene production. So, we are very optimistic that this hydrogen production method can be similarly scaled successfully as the core principles are identical.”
Reference: Boris I. Yakobson, James M. Tour, et al., Synthesis of Clean Hydrogen Gas from Waste Plastic at Zero Net Cost, Advanced Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202306763
The United States is projected to generate 220 million tons of plastic waste in 2024, a 7.11% increase from 2021. Over a third of this waste is expected to be mishandled, contributing significantly to global plastic pollution. With only 19.8% of PET, HDPE, and PP plastics being recycled, the remainder often ends up in landfills, oceans, or incinerators.
The theoretical Plastic Overshoot Day for 2024 is set for this week, September 5, marking when plastic waste production surpasses the planet’s management capacity. A study by EA Earth Action identifies the top offenders in per capita waste generation:
Michigan
Indiana
Illinois
The concept of converting plastic waste into hydrogen fuel offers a potential solution to both waste management and energy challenges. This process involves:
Collection
Sorting
Shredding
Pyrolysis
Steam reforming
Each step contributes to a cleaner planet while producing a valuable resource. Hydrogen fuel, a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, could aid in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ensure that plastic waste is put to purposeful use.
Implementing such a system would require carefully designed infrastructure, stringent regulations, and public cooperation. While challenging, the impact on the environment, human health, and biodiversity warrants such an endeavor. Given that 94% of Americans are inclined to recycle plastics and limit single-use plastic, there is potential for such transformative systems to take root.1
Rice University Breakthrough
Researchers at Rice University have pioneered a easy to scale-up method to convert mixed plastic waste into high-yield hydrogen gas and graphene through rapid flash Joule heating. This breakthrough not only generates clean hydrogen but also creates valuable graphene.
Summary of How it Works and Benefits of Their Process:
Flash Joule heating is a process used to convert plastic waste into hydrogen gas and graphene.
The method rapidly heats plastic waste to high temperatures, causing hydrogen to vaporize and leaving behind graphene.
This process is scalable, low in complexity, and environmentally friendly.
The production of graphene helps offset the costs of hydrogen production, making it economically viable.
Flash Joule heating can produce high-value nanomaterials efficiently and at a low cost.
The process results in reduced carbon emissions compared to traditional methods.
It can synthesize various graphitic materials, such as holey and wrinkled graphene, which have increased surface areas for applications in energy storage and water purification.
The method demonstrates high yields of hydrogen gas from common consumer waste plastics.
Life-cycle assessments show this method releases less CO2 than most current hydrogen production methods.
The approach supports sustainable energy transitions and addresses plastic waste effectively.
Nanyang Technological University Innovation
NTU in Singapore has developed an energy-efficient method using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and a commercially available vanadium catalyst. This process operates at room temperature, drastically reducing the energy footprint compared to traditional heat-driven recycling methods.3
Combining these cutting-edge technologies into a unified system could yield significant environmental and economic benefits. By deploying LED-based pyrolysis followed by advanced steam reforming techniques, the process efficiency can be maximized while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Integrating these technologies into a circular economy framework, where waste is treated as a resource rather than a disposal problem, will also drive market acceptance and investment.”
This approach reduces the plastic burden on landfills and oceans, and addresses energy security issues by providing an alternative, sustainable fuel source.
Environmental and Economic Impact
Upcycling plastic waste into hydrogen fuel offers significant environmental and economic benefits. By diverting plastic waste from landfills and oceans, this process can mitigate:
Soil contamination
Leachate production
Marine pollution
The reduction in microplastics entering the food chain would have positive implications for both marine life and human health.
Economic Benefits
Creating and operating hydrogen production facilities from plastic waste would generate new jobs across various sectors, from engineering to facility management. The demand for specialized skills in pyrolysis, steam reforming, and hydrogen purification would foster new educational and vocational opportunities.
The shift to hydrogen fuel derived from plastic waste can offer a competitive edge in the face of increasing regulatory pressures to reduce carbon footprints and fluctuating fossil fuel prices. Advancements in technology promise to reduce the cost and energy requirements of hydrogen production, enhancing the feasibility and affordability of scaling up these processes.
In Summary, converting plastic waste into hydrogen and graphene offers a multitude of environmental benefits. This innovative process drastically reduces the amount of plastic ending up in landfills and oceans, where it can leach harmful substances into the ground and marine ecosystems.
By transforming plastic waste, not only is pollution minimized, but valuable graphene is produced, which can be used across various industries, from electronics to materials science. Furthermore, the hydrogen generated serves as a clean energy source, as it emits only water when used as fuel, contributing to a sustainable energy future. This water emission is so clean that some consider it drinkable, showcasing the immense potential of this technology to support environmental and energy goals.
Exploring the full potential of upcycling plastic waste into hydrogen fuel allows the United States to address both environmental sustainability and economic viability. With strategic investments, supportive regulations, and public engagement, this approach can mitigate plastic pollution, foster a circular economy, and position the nation on a sustainable path towards energy transition and environmental stewardship.
Geyer R, Jambeck JR, Law KL. Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Sci Adv. 2017;3(7):e1700782.
Wyss B, Luong DX, Tour JM. Recycling plastic waste into graphene and clean hydrogen. Carbon Energy. 2021;3(3):475-485.
Salehzadeh Einabad M, Dehghani H, Nagarajan D, et al. Light-driven plastic waste valorisation to hydrogen fuel and carbon nanomaterials. Nat Catal. 2022;5:706-716.
Written By: Namrata Sengupta View the original article here
Getty
The global surge in electronic waste (e-waste) poses a critical environmental and health challenge. In fact, according to the UN’s recent Global E-Waste Monitor Report, “The world’s generation of electronic waste is rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling.”
The report estimates that in “only 12 years, the amount of e-waste generated per year worldwide almost doubled, to 62 billion kilograms in 2022. It is projected to increase to 120 billion kilograms in 2030.”Most of the e-waste ends up in landfills, as currently, only 22.3% of e-waste is collected and recycled. The problem here is that e-waste is nonbiodegradable. It also poses a significant health hazard and pollutes land, water and air.
The primary factors behind e-waste growth are the ever-expanding global data sphere, rapidly evolving technology, shorter device refresh cycles, increased appetite for electronic devices and insufficient recycling of e-waste.
Businesses, in their bid to safeguard data privacy, also contribute significantly to the e-waste crisis by employing traditional physical device-destruction methods like shredding, degaussing or burning to protect data when retiring or disposing of IT assets.
Many of these devices could have been reused after repair and refurbishing. If we talk about e-waste generated due to the physical destruction of potentially usable drives, the numbers are astonishing.
Device reuse will be an important factor in mitigating the hazardous effects of e-waste on the environment and human health.
Device reuse is the practice of prolonging the life of IT devices by refurbishing and repairing them for reuse rather than disposing of them physically. It plays a major role in reducing the generation of e-waste and its impact on the environment.
Organizations should practice secure media sanitization over device destruction to promote device reuse. Global bodies like NIST with their Special Publication 800-88 and the IEEE with Standard for Sanitizing Storage have stated that media sanitization techniques like overwriting, cryptographic erasure, block erasure, etc., are sufficient for permanent data removal beyond the scope of recovery, eliminating the need for physical destruction. Erased devices can be reused without the fear of compromising data confidentiality.
There are several ways that device reuse addresses the e-waste crisis. Here are a few to consider:
• Reduction Of E-Waste In Landfills: Repairing and refurbishing increases the life span of IT devices, and they can be used for longer durations. This helps prevent operational devices from ending up in landfills and stops the leaching of hazardous material into soil and water resources.
• Reduction Of Dependency On Mining: When IT devices are used for longer, they reduce the dependency on mining for new raw materials. It helps reduce the ecological impact of mining, like deforestation, loss of natural habitat and environmental degradation.
• Energy Conservation And Reduction In Emission: A significant portion of the energy consumed by a laptop in its entire life cycle is used during the manufacturing process. Reusing devices significantly cut down on energy consumption and carbon emissions during manufacturing and transportation. It thereby reduces the carbon footprint of an organization and helps diminish the effects of e-waste.
• Promotes A Circular Economy: Reuse is a crucial component of a circular economy. It supports circularity by keeping devices and materials in use for longer durations, creating a sustainable business model that prioritizes refurbishment and recycling over physical destruction.
Ways To Implement Effective Device Reuse Strategies
As e-waste reaches alarming levels, the need for sustainable practices is more urgent than ever. Merely destroying devices worsens the crisis, endangering both the environment and human health. Embracing device reuse not only mitigates the adverse effects of e-waste but also fosters a circular economy, advocating sustainability and mindful consumption.
Implementing an effective device reuse strategy requires careful consideration. Based on the considerations above, organizations should adopt a holistic approach to ensure their strategies are in line with their organizational sustainability goals and that their device reuse practices can be easily integrated with their ongoing operations.
Here are a few ways that businesses can implement device reuse within their organization:
1. Create a device reuse policy. An organizational device reuse policy should establish clear parameters for selecting IT assets that can be reused. This policy should consider parameters like devices’ computing power, feasibility of repurposing, cost of repair, upgrades required, device refresh cycles, etc.
2. Perform data erasure. Removing sensitive data from the devices before they are reused is a must to ensure data confidentiality and comply with data privacy laws. Use a certified data wiping tool to ensure permanent data removal and also generate proof of destruction for audit purposes.
3. Repair or refurbish. Perform hardware diagnostics to get a real-time picture of the device’s health. Repair or replace the parts that are faulty and reuse the device to its fullest extent.
4. Repurpose devices. Older devices should be repurposed for different roles. For example, a laptop previously used by the R&D team for high computing tasks can be reassigned to the admin department, where only basic computing power is needed.
5. Recycle faulty parts. Computer components that have stopped working or are faulty should be responsibly recycled to ensure that they don’t end up in landfills. Recycling conserves resources and reduces the environmental impact of mining for new raw materials, reducing Scope 3 emissions and thereby promoting sustainability.
The time has come to prioritize reuse over destruction and proactively tackle the e-waste challenge. With these best practices, organizations can take the necessary proactive steps to help effectively address the e-waste crisis.
Published By: Geneva Environment Network View the original article here
About E-Waste
E-waste, electronic waste, e-scrap and end-of-life electronics are terms often used to describe used electronics that are nearing the end of their useful life, and are discarded, donated or given to a recycler. The UN defines e-waste as any discarded products with a battery or plug, and features toxic and hazardous substances such as mercury, that can pose severe risk to human and environmental health.
According to the UN, in 2021 each person on the planet will produce on average 7.6 kg of e-waste, meaning that a massive 57.4 million tons will be generated worldwide. Only 17.4% of this electronic waste, containing a mixture of harmful substances and precious materials, will be recorded as being properly collected, treated and recycled. Many initiatives are undertaken to tackle this growing concern, but none of them can be fully effective without the active role and correct education of consumers.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) also indicates that e-waste is one of the largest and most complex waste streams in the world. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020, the world generated 53.6 Mt of e-waste in 2019, only 9.3 Mt (17%) of which was recorded as being collected and recycled. The fourth version of the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 shows an increasing trend in the generation of e-waste as by 2022, the world generated 62 billion kg of e-waste, (7.8 kg per capita). Only 22.3 percent (13.8 billion kg) of the e-waste generated was documented as properly collected and recycled.
E-waste contains valuable materials, as well as hazardous toxins, which make the efficient material recovery and safe recycling of e-waste extremely important for economic value as well as environmental and human health. The discrepancy in the amount of e-waste produced and the amount of e-waste that is properly recycled reflects an urgent need for all stakeholders including the youth to address this issue.
Tne United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also estimated in a 2015 report “Waste Crimes, Waste Risks: Gaps and Challenges in the Waste Sector” that 60-90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly USD 19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year.
Environmental Risks
E-waste can be toxic, is not biodegradable and accumulates in the environment, in the soil, air, water and living things. For example, open-air burning and acid baths being used to recover valuable materials from electronic components release toxic materials leaching into the environment. These practices can also expose workers to high levels of contaminants such as lead, mercury, beryllium, thallium, cadmium and arsenic, and also brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polychlorinated biphenyls, which can lead to irreversible health effects, including cancers, miscarriages, neurological damage and diminished IQs.
A 2019 joint report “A New Circular Vision for Electronics – Time for a Global Reboot” calls for a new vision for e-waste based on the circular economy concept, whereby a regenerative system can minimize waste and energy leakage. The report supports the work of the E-waste Coalition, which includes the ILO, ITU, UNEP, UNIDO, UNITAR, UNU and Secretariats of the Basel and Stockholm Conventions.
According to the report, the improper handling of e-waste is resulting in a significant loss of scarce and valuable raw materials, including such precious metals as neodymium (vital for magnets in motors), indium (used in flat panel TVs) and cobalt (for batteries). Almost no rare earth minerals are extracted from informal recycling; these are polluting to mine. Yet metals in e-waste are difficult to extract; for example, total recovery rates for cobalt are only 30% (despite technology existing that could recycle 95%). The metal is, however, in great demand for laptop, smartphone and electric car batteries. Recycled metals are also two to 10 times more energy efficient than metals smelted from virgin ore. Furthermore, mining discarded electronics produces 80% less emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of gold compared with mining it from the ground.
In 2015, the extraction of raw materials accounted for 7% of the world’s energy consumption. This means that moving towards the use of more secondary raw materials in electronic goods could help considerably in reaching the targets set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Climate Change
It is also worth considering the effects electronic goods have on climate change. Every device ever produced has a carbon footprint and is contributing to human-made global warming. Manufacture a tonne of laptops and potentially 10 tonnes of CO2 are emitted. When the carbon dioxide released over a device’s lifetime is considered, it predominantly occurs during production, before consumers buy a product. This makes lower carbon processes and inputs at the manufacturing stage (such as use recycled raw materials) and product lifetime key determinants of overall environmental impact.
Lack of Recycling
Recycling rates globally are low. Even in the EU, which leads the world in e-waste recycling, just 35% of e-waste is officially reported as properly collected and recycled. Globally, the average is 20%; the remaining 80% is undocumented, with much ending up buried under the ground for centuries as landfill. E-waste is not biodegradable. The lack of recycling weighs heavily on the global electronic industry and as devices become more numerous, smaller and more complex, the issue escalates. Currently, recycling some types of e-waste and recovering materials and metals is an expensive process. The remaining mass of e-waste – mainly plastics laced with metals and chemicals – poses a more intractable problem.
Circular Approach for Electronics
A new vision for the production and consumption of electronic and electrical goods is needed. It is easy for e-waste to be framed as a post-consumer problem, but the issue encompasses the lifecycle of the devices everyone uses. Designers, manufacturers, investors, traders, miners, raw material producers, consumers, policy-makers and others have a crucial role to play in reducing waste, retaining value within the system, extending the economic and physical life of an item, as well as its ability to be repaired, recycled and reused.
Changes in technology such as cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) could hold the potential to “dematerialize” the electronics industry. The rise of service business models and better product tracking and takeback could lead to global circular value chains. Material efficiency, recycling infrastructure and scaling up the volume and quality of recycled materials to meet the needs of electronics supply chains will all be essential. If the sector is supported with the right policy mix and managed in the right way, it could also lead to the creation of millions of decent jobs worldwide.
International E-Waste Day
Each year, International E-Waste Day is held on 14 October, an opportunity to reflect on the impacts of e-waste and the necessary actions to enhance circularity for e-products. International E-Waste Day was developed in 2018 by the WEEE Forum to raise the public profile of waste electrical and electronic equipment recycling and encourage consumers to recycle. Learn more about the activities for each edition below:
International E-Waste Day 2023
International E-Waste Day 2022
International E-Waste Day 2021
Role of Geneva
Organizations are listed in alphabetical order
Basel Convention
The overarching objective of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal is to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects of hazardous wastes. E-waste is categorized as hazardous waste due to the presence of toxic materials such as mercury, lead and brominated flame retardants are considered as hazardous waste according to the Basel Convention. In addition, transboundary movements of hazardous and other wastes, including e-waste ending up in dumps, are deemed to be illegal traffic under the Basel Convention, Article 9.
As part of the Convention, the Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE) was launched at the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention, on 23-27 June 2008. PACE is a multi-stakeholder partnership for governments, industry leaders, non-governmental organizations and academia to tackle the environmentally sound management, refurbishment, recycling and disposal of used and end-of-life computing equipment, taking into account social responsibility and the concept of sustainable development, and promoting the sharing of information on life cycle thinking.
Furthermore, the Mobile Phone Partnership Initiative (MPPI) was launched in 2002 on the environmentally sound management of end-of-life mobile telephones. Under the MPPI five technical guidelines (awareness raising – design considerations, collection of used and end-of-life mobile phones, transboundary movement of collected mobile phones, refurbishment of used mobile phones, and material recovery/recycling of end-of-life mobile phones) were developed.
Under the Basel Convention, Parties and other stakeholders have also been working on a set of global policies on specific challenges related to the trade of WEEE and used equipment through the technical guidelines on transboundary movements of electrical and electronic waste and used electrical and electronic equipment, in particular regarding the distinction between waste and non waste, which was adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention, on an interim basis, in 2019. The guidelines focus on clarifying aspects related to transboundary movements of e-waste and used equipment that may or may not be waste.
E-Waste Coalition
In addition, on 21 March 2018 at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum, seven United Nations entities signed a Letter of Intent paving the way for greater collaboration in the area of e-waste management in developing a UN E-Waste Coalition. Its aims include a commitment by the signatories to increase collaboration, building partnership and supporting Member States to address the global WEEE challenge. Further to this, at the 2019 WSIS Forum, three new UN entities signed the Letter of Intent.
The coalition brings together the following organizations, the majority based in Geneva:
ILO
ITC
ITU
UNEP
UNU
United Nations Human Settlement (UN Habitat)
United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)
United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)
World Health Organization (WHO)
Secretariat of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions
The coalition is supported by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Economic Forum, and was coordinated, until 31 October 2020, by the Secretariat of the UN Environment Management Group (UNEMG). UNEP is now hosting the temporary secretariat of the coalition.
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
Founded in 1906, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the world’s leading organization for the preparation and publication of International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies, known collectively as “electrotechnology.”
IEC provides a platform to companies, industries and governments for meeting, discussing and developing the International Standards they require. All IEC International Standards are fully consensus-based and represent the needs of key stakeholders of every nation participating in IEC work.
International Labour Organization (ILO)
The only tripartite U.N. agency, since 1919 the International Labour Organization (ILO) brings together governments, employers and workers of 187 member States, to set labour standards, develop policies and devise programmes promoting decent work for all women and men. More than 1.2 billion jobs depend on a stable environment and ecosystems. ILO’s Green Initiative aims to scale up the its knowledge, policy response and capacity to manage a just transition toward greener economies and a sustainable future.
In addition, the Green Jobs Programme signals ILO’s commitment to act on climate change and to promote resource efficient and low-carbon societies. Decent work is a cornerstone for effective policies to green economies for achieving sustainable development. This implies that efforts to reduce adverse environmental impact must lead to socially just outcomes with employment opportunities for all.
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Founded in 1865 to facilitate international connectivity in communications networks, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies – ICTs. ITU’s Development Bureau (ITU-D) has been given a mandate to “assist developing countries in undertaking proper assessment of the size of e-waste and in initiating pilot projects to achieve environmentally sound management of e-waste through e-waste collection, dismantling, refurbishing and recycling.” (WTDC Resolution 66). To this end ITU-D is developing e-waste guidelines to help countries identify best policies. It is also carrying out an electronic waste management project, and recently launched a new partnership to help improve global e-waste statistics.
ITU, in cooperation with the United Nations University (UNU), have joined forces to form the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership (GESP). Its main objectives are to improve and collect worldwide statistics on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The GESP also raises visibility on the importance of compiling WEEE statistics and delivers capacity building workshops using an internationally recognized, harmonized measurement framework. The initiative informs policy makers, industries, academia, media and the general public by enhancing the understanding and interpretation of global WEEE data and its relation to the SDGs.
The publication of the Global and Regional E-Waste Monitors are key achievements of the GESP which highlight global growth in the generation of WEEE. These reports also introduce the wider public to the global WEEE challenge and include national analysis on WEEE.
International Trade Centre (ITC)
The transition to a digital world is offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship and growth, and how the global consumption of electrical and electronic equipment is generating extraordinary amounts of e-waste. Large dumps sites around the world have been created due to the e-waste generated.
One of the key challenges for the more environmentally sound management of e-waste in developing countries is linking the informal and formal e-waste processors and providing coaching opportunities to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
SMEs and industry associations can play a key role in unlocking collaboration within values chains to ensure more circular and sustainable approaches. The International Trade Centre (ITC), in collaboration with other signatories of the E-Waste Coalition will use their expertise to help solve these pressing issues.
The ITC has a growing focus on environmental sustainability and social inclusion as important elements for SME competitiveness and for fostering Good Trade. ITC will contribute with these experiences to the important work of the e-waste coalition.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
UNEP has provided several reports and guidance manuals on dealing with e-waste. The Chemicals and Health Branch is leading UNEP’s activities on chemicals and waste and is the main catalytic force in the UN system for concerted global action on the environmentally sound management of chemicals and waste.
World Health Organization (WHO)
A WHO report on e-waste and child health Children and Digital Dumpsites, released in June 2021, calls for urgent effective and binding action to protect the millions of children, adolescents and expectant mothers worldwide whose health is jeopardized by the informal processing of discarded electrical or electronic devices.
As many as 12.9 million women are working in the informal waste sector, which potentially exposes them to toxic e-waste and puts them and their unborn children at risk.
Meanwhile more than 18 million children and adolescents, some as young as 5 years of age, are actively engaged in the informal industrial sector, of which waste processing is a sub-sector. Children are often engaged by parents or caregivers in e-waste recycling because their small hands are more dexterous than those of adults. Other children live, go to school and play near e-waste recycling centers where high levels of toxic chemicals, mostly lead and mercury, can damage their intellectual abilities
Children exposed to e-waste are particularly vulnerable to the toxic chemicals they contain due to their smaller size, less developed organs and rapid rate of growth and development. They absorb more pollutants relative to their size and are less able to metabolize or eradicate toxic substances from their bodies.
Switzerland and the Canton of Geneva
Retailers, manufacturers and importers are obliged to accept used items of electrical and electronic equipment, in which they deal, free of charge. This obligation also applies if the customer does not purchase a new device or appliance. Consumers, in turn, are obliged to return equipment. The disposal of used equipment through municipal solid waste or bulk waste collections is prohibited. These regulations are contained in the Ordinance on the Return, Taking Back and Disposal of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (ORDEE).
Specialized disposal companies dismantle the electrical and electronic equipment partly manually and then process it mechanically. Problematic components (mercury switches, PCB capacitators, batteries) are dismantled or separated and undergo special disposal. The remaining fragments are separated. Fractions that can undergo material recycling are produced in this way: plastics, iron, aluminium and tin, zinc, nickel and precious metal alloys.
The dismantling and separation of equipment into fractions is mainly carried out in Switzerland. The other processing stages are often carried out abroad because non-ferrous metals processing systems, in particular, are not available in Switzerland.
In accordance with the Ordinance on Movements of Waste (OMW), electrical and electronic equipment is classified as “other controlled waste”. Waste disposal companies in Switzerland that accept such equipment require the authorization of the canton in which the equipment is located. The export and import of such waste requires the authorization of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). Export to states that are not members of the OECD or EU is prohibited.
In the Canton of Geneva, electronic waste should also be sorted separately by consumers and businesses, in addition to various actors from Recycleurs de Genève.
Google’s model showing ‘before and after’ components of its packages including paper-stay tape, silicon adhesive, and a tray made from pulp rather than polystyrene plastic. Source: Heather Clancy/GreenBiz
Google will eliminate plastic from its consumer electronics packaging six months ahead of its self-imposed 2025 deadline. Google made its “plastic-free” pledge in October 2020.
The search giant will publish a 70-page guide in June so that other companies can see how it was done, said David Bourne, lead sustainability strategist for Google, during a session last week at Circularity 24, a GreenBiz event.
The company’s Pixel 8 smartphone, launched in October, was the first product under the new approach.
“You might think it’s sort of strange to enable other companies, potentially to enable other competitors,” Bourne said. “But our point of view on sustainability is that it really should be a collaborative endeavor. Innovation should be shared in sustainability, because if we sincerely want to create a sustainable future, then just a handful of companies being more sustainable isn’t going to achieve that.”
Google is encouraging those who use the guide to offer feedback.
Making sure design changes don’t frustrate consumers
The idea for the guide originated with the Google team working on the heaviest of its consumer products, TVs. They can weigh up to 40 pounds, said Katy Bolan, Google’s lead for environmental sustainability.
Google doesn’t make televisions, so it worked with manufacturing partners to deliver the goal, she said.
A major issue was ensuring that design changes weren’t frustrating for consumers, that they met Google’s aesthetic requirements and that they could be disposed of within existing recycling systems, said Miguel Arevalo, packaging innovation lead at Google. “It’s a bad experience if you have to think about it,” he said.
Google’s key design considerations
The new packaging is predominantly paper- and fiber-based, so it can be recycled easily. It required Google engineers, designers and suppliers to rethink lamination and coatings, box assembly, enclosures and labels, among other factors.
The company’s biggest challenges were:
Assessing how the elimination of plastic shrinkwrap would affect the durability and reliability of packages.
Determining whether size or shapes needed adjustments to accommodate “drop dynamics,” or what happens when an item is dropped.
Selecting new coatings and inks that met Google’s branding requirements: At least 50 solutions were reviewed. Suppliers that weren’t transparent about their impacts were eliminated quickly.
New ways to seal and waterproof the box, and to make sure it stays closed.
The reliability of closure labels and how easy they are to remove.
Weighing the future implications of substitutions, particularly for chemicals that could inadvertently result in higher greenhouse gas emissions.
One way to justify the extra cost
New paper-based packaging is likely to be more expensive than plastic, since they aren’t produced at the same scale. “When you first achieve something, it will be the most expensive version,” said Bourne.
That increase can be easier to support when considered as part of the total cost or if the expense is likely to decrease over time, the Google executives said. “We also see this as an investment,” Bourne said. “We are looking at sustainability as an augmentation of the consumer experience.”
Even zealots of the electric vehicle will tell you that public charging can be a fraught affair. If all goes well, and it often doesn’t, your charging session will likely entail sitting in a dark corner of a parking lot for upwards of an hour. You might have to stand in the rain or snow to operate the charger because most stations lack awnings. You might have to go hungry because many lack access to food. And, perhaps worst of all, your session may be made extra uncomfortable by a typical lack of restrooms.
But hopefully that’s changing. This year, Electrify America opened an indoor flagship location in San Francisco. Situated at 928 Harrison Street, this bank of 20 high-speed chargers is unique not only for its location—occupying some very expensive real estate—but also for its amenities. While charging, you can grab a drink from a vending machine, host a meeting from one of the lounges, and, yes, even use the bathroom.
Electrify America’s new flagship location in San Francisco. ELECTRIFY AMERICA
It’s a massive upgrade from what many EV early adopters have become accustomed to, but it’s just the beginning. With familiar roadside refuges such as Love’s Travel Stops and Buc-ee’s getting in on the game, the future is finally looking a bit brighter when it comes to electrification’s infrastructure.
Just as with buying a new house, the three most important factors in EV charging are location, location, and location. After all, the fastest, most reliable charger in the world is worthless if it isn’t where you need it. The good news? If you have off-street parking, you can likely put a charger in the best possible spot: your home. More than 90 percent of EV owners charge where they live. While slower than the high-speed units at public stations, at-home chargers more than make up for it in convenience.
The latter can typically bring an empty car to full in under ten hours, which is plenty of time for most folks to replenish their EV’s battery pack between returning from work and heading out again the next day. That potentially means a full charge every morning, so public installations take a back seat for many who use an EV as their daily commuter. That’s why we need far fewer of them than we do gas stations. However, whether road-tripping or just going for an extended Sunday cruise, most EV owners will still need to replenish their batteries in the wild at some point. And while location is still crucial, other factors are gaining significance.
The fastest, most reliable charger in the world is worthless if it isn’t where you need it. KENA BETANCUR/VIEW PRESS/GETTY IMAGES
Amaiya Khardenavis, an analyst of EV Charging Infrastructure at the energy-research firm Wood Mackenzie, says that there was a lot of “land grabbing” by the larger networks in the early days of EVs. That is, just throwing down chargers as close to major highways as possible with little regard for amenities. According to Khardenavis, today’s locations are more “customer-centric” than before. “The landscape in 2020 was dominated by only a few players in the market,” he says, “and these were all pure providers, like of course Tesla, but EVgo, Electrify America, ChargePoint, and that’s about it.”
Tesla gained an early advantage with its Supercharger network in 2012. Now, with more than 2,000 domestic locations, it’s the largest operator of fast chargers in the United States. But it wasn’t the first. ChargePoint is the nation’s largest network in general, launching back in 2007 and offering over 30,000 locations. Others weren’t far behind, including EVgo, which has about 3,000 chargers spread across 35 states.
“We’re addressing a lot of our legacy equipment . . . some of our chargers are getting close to a decade old,” says Katie Wallace, EVgo’s director of communications. Yet some newer players are helping to raise the bar. One of those is EV manufacturer Rivian, which launched its Adventure Network just 18 months ago and has since deployed 433 fast chargers across 71 locations. “We’re opening sites each week,” says Sara Eslinger, director of the program for Rivian.
The EVgo network comprises about 3,000 chargers across 35 states. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
While the name “Adventure Network” infers that these chargers are at off-road trailheads, and indeed Rivian offers some of those, Eslinger says the company is still focused on serving major transportation corridors, while ensuring availability of amenities like 24-hour food services and restrooms, even going so far as to bring in their own lighting if necessary. As increased EV adoption pulls new investment from some familiar names, features like these are becoming the next battleground.
According to Khardenavis, “More retail stores, retail chains, and travel centers [are] entering the space—Walmart, Pilot, and Flying J, as well as Love’s, everyone is trying to be involved in this space to some extent.” Though many of these partnerships are still developing (Mercedes-Benz just announced a deal with Buc-ee’s in November, for example), the net result should be a significantly improved charging experience.
The CEO of Rivian, Robert Scaringe, talks about the automaker’s Adventure Network plan at a presentation last month. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Why are all these players getting into the market now? The money is starting to flow. In the beginning, running an EV-charging business was brutally complicated and expensive, and served only a small segment of early adopters. Today, utilization rates for public chargers are surging, and so is revenue.
“In our last earnings call, we reported that EVgo’s network throughout was growing five times faster than EVs in operation,” Wallace says. She adds that people are getting more comfortable driving their EVs, relying on chargers further afield.
Anthony Lambkin, vice president of operations at Electrify America, sees the same trend: “Some of our sites, especially in parts of California, are routinely over 50 percent utilization.” Lambkin refers to this as “massive growth,” and that it has driven the company to redesign some of its chargers, which were not up to surviving that intensity of use. Higher utilization means more money, and more money means more profits. But, as volume increases, so does the opportunity for other revenue streams.
Unlike these chargers in Oyster Bay, N.Y., an increasing number of future stations may have a retail-store component. ALEJANDRA VILLA LOARCA/NEWSDAY RM VIA GETTY IMAGES
“In today’s gas-station business model, over 60 percent of the revenue really comes from store purchases, not from fuel retail,” Khardenavis says. “The future of the EV-charging model will be some sort of co-located retail-store presence.” More chargers at nicer locations, though, means nothing if they’re constantly broken. “The bigger question is going to be how reliable are these chargers?” Khardenavis says. A 2022 study out of the University of California, Berkeley, found that roughly one out of four chargers evaluated in the Greater Bay Area was non-functional (Tesla stations were not included). More troublingly, when the researchers visited those sites a week later, nearly all of them were still not fixed.
Khardenavis says that such historically poor reliability is directly related to profitability: “I think with that kind of cash flow coming in . . . there is now an impetus to develop this model, which is more customer-centric than just earlier focusing on expanding to locations.”
More chargers at nicer locations means nothing if they’re constantly broken. JOHN TLUMACKI/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
In the world of public charging, there’s Tesla’s Supercharger network, and then there’s everybody else. Tesla’s network not only earned a reputation for being the most readily available and reliable, but using a single plug across every new Tesla model meant owners only had to show up, plug in, and wait while the electrons flowed.
Various plug standards have come and gone for other manufacturers, but that too is changing. Virtually every major manufacturer has agreed to use what’s being called the North American Charging Standard. It’s essentially the same plug that Tesla uses.
Soon EVs from Ford, Rivian, and plenty of others will not only use the same plug, but will be able to easily charge at Tesla’s Supercharger stations across the nation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that all the non-Teslas on the road today use a combination of different plugs, most featuring the Combined Charging System, or CCS. While Tesla is updating some of its Supercharger installations to support CCS, it’s going to be a slow transition. “We’re going to be in a land of adapters for a while, because the soonest that any non-Tesla OEM is going to come out with the NACS port is probably the fall of 2025,” says Wallace.
Soon other EVs will not only have the same plug as Tesla models, but will be able to use Tesla’s Supercharger stations across the nation. CELAL GUNES/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rivian has updated its vehicles to show the location of all Superchargers on its integrated navigation, routing drivers appropriately depending on whether they have an adapter. Yet Khardenavis is concerned that this transition could slow down EV adoption further, with some buyers deciding to wait for the port transition to be completed before investing in a new EV. He fears that EVs with the “now-obsolete” CCS port could sit on dealership lots for longer.
Increased utilization raises the potential for long lines at chargers, but the process of building new stations entails dodging numerous roadblocks. One of those is working with local municipalities, which often aren’t used to moving at the pace of a startup. Electrify America’s Lambkin says that processes are improving, but it’s still a challenge. “Permitting is going much better for us now than it was five years ago because there are far more cities and towns and municipalities that are used to seeing this type of equipment,” Lambkin says. “Back in the day, it was like alien technology.”
The federal government is helping as well. The 2021 National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program provides funding to help cover planning, construction, and even maintenance of chargers. “Folks are going to see a lot more stations coming online in the next year and a half,” says Wallace, who attributes this to the various Department of Transportation outposts at the state level becoming “more comfortable and more familiar with how to implement the NEVI program.”
U.S. President Joe Biden gets a demonstration of an EV charging setup at the White House. JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Another issue is grid capacity. Khardenavis notes that, for a larger installation, it can take upwards of a year just for the necessary upgrades to power the site. “Project delays are a very common theme in the fast-charging space especially,” he says. But the charging companies are finding ways around this, too. According to Lambkin, Electrify America routinely uses on-site batteries to offset energy usage during peak times and has a so-called “mega pack” in Baker, Calif. “That’s actually to allow us to build that site well in advance of when the utility, SCE in this case, had the capacity to be able to serve the number of dispensers and the amount of power that we needed.”
And finally, there’s construction. It takes time to design a given charger layout, run the conduit, lay out the chargers themselves, and wait for all that concrete to cure. Even that process is changing. “We just deployed our very first station using prefabrication in Texas,” says EVgo’s Wallace. “It’s just a more efficient way to deploy because everything is assembled off-site, in an assembly facility, and then dropped into a skid-frame. So this construction timeline is much shorter.”
Tesla owners line up for an available charger in Utah. GEORGE FREY/GETTY IMAGES
According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), current growth and demand for EVs will require 1.2 million U.S. public chargers by 2030. As to the current reality, Khardenavis notes that there are about 165,000 available today, and he’s skeptical about that 2030 target. “It’s almost ten-X growth, which is extremely challenging in today’s environment,” he says, adding that predicting the need for six years in the future is itself difficult given the unpredictability of consumer behavior. “I don’t see us reaching that number anytime in the next four- to five-year timeframe. But I think it’s a target that we need to have in mind before we deploy and make plans around making EV charging more ubiquitous.”
A couple wait on their EV to charge in Texas. SHELBY TAUBER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
But merely adding more chargers isn’t enough. It’ll take a better all-around charging experience to meet the needs of a new generation of luxury EV owners, such as drivers of the Mercedes-Benz EQS and the Rolls-Royce Spectre, for example. Meeting those standards will take more installations like Electrify America’s indoor flagship. “We’re really competing with the traditional fueling industry, and that’s been around for 100 years,” says Lambkin. “If you think about where we are today and where we’ve come in just five years, think about the levels of improvement that we can expect to see over the next five years.”
While that dingy charger in the back of the shopping-mall parking lot is still the norm for now, there’s work underway to make it the outlier. The real issue remains whether public adoption of EVs and the requisite infrastructure expansion will both maintain enough juice.
