Four Cycles of a Sustainable Economy

Featured in Innovation Futures

Thanks David, cheers!

Great article!

1. McDonough & Braungart referred to a differential recycling cycle of inorganic materials.

2. Also renews soil and eliminates demand for fertilizers.

3. Water is going to be an increasing source of conflict - likely within ten years. A problem with desalination, I have heard, is the residue. Any thoughts about that? Otherwise, renewables, by now, should be a no-brainer.

4. Carbon capture, in the form of "artificial trees"

You think too comprehensively and specifically at the same time, Sam. No one will ever get this. Great plan, though....

BTW, are you working in the new administration? If not, you should be. Need a reference?

1. and 2. Good points, Steve, I've slightly edited to article and added The Next Industrial Revolution by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart as the link of the article. I cannot wait to see the movie!

3. Steve: "A problem with desalination, I have heard, is the residue. Any thoughts about that?"

The article has a link to Desalination with zero sea discharge by CSIRO Australia. My article tries to show that, while recovering lithium and magnesium from brine may not be commercially attractive at the moment, when looked at as part of a cycle it may just tip the balance to make the whole cycle commercially viable. Add the need for clean water to produce hydrogen and several new industries can become successful because they complement each other. What was previously regarded as waste can become the input of such new industries.

4. Yes, the Carbon Capture link to Klaus Lackner's work is great, Steve, I've watched that BBC documentary many times since it was aired. I've added two more links with details of more recent work in this area (my links 14 and 15).

Steve: You think too comprehensively and specifically at the same time, Sam.

Yes, I agree, yet the message of the article is quite simple: we should stimulate new industries that can help with global warming and this is best done by means of feebates. The details of the article are mainly there to illustrate the complementary nature of such industries - market mechanisms can further sort out what works best.

Thanks for pointing out the link on desalination, Sam. That is good information.

Sam: "...we should stimulate new industries that can help with global warming and this is best done by means of feebates."

No doubt about it. I was only half-way kidding re: "BTW, are you working in the new administration? If not, you should be. Need a reference?"

This is really a superb plan, Sam, and I'll refer to it often. Thinking comprehensively and specifically at the same time is a fairly rare quality (ergo, my comment on it, which was meant to be humorous).

Good article Sam their are many good ideas and the only problem nothing gets started. Its going to be a long up hill battle against the energy giants to move us away from the oil and coal industry that is destroying our environment.

All steps on the way to The Great Turning. Thank you for this, Sam.

Thanks, Steve, Jack and Ann. Yes, please do refer to the "bigger picture", Steve, I do appreciate the humor (in our urge to get the message across, we all do need to lighten up from time to time, especially after spending too much time responding to climate change denial spammers who don't want to listen to reason). I just hope that our message of reason will reach some of the people in the new administration, in particular on the topic of "cap and trade".

As Jim Hansen says: We have only four years left to act on climate change - America has to lead. As Al Gore says: We can switch 100% of America's electricity to clean energy sources – within 10 years. Both Jim Hansen and Al Gore support carbon taxes. Even Exxon supports carbon taxes. Now is the time to articulate policies that work.

As the Houston Chronicle reported recently in Debate flares over how to cut greenhouse gases: "Attacking climate change through a complex greenhouse gas trading system is a centerpiece of the incoming Obama administration’s energy policy. But economists and energy analysts of all ideological stripes are saying a better approach to getting a cleaner atmosphere might involve a political dirty word — tax."

A feebate approach would be more effective than a carbon tax, as it uses the proceeds of fees to fund rebates on better alternatives. This makes that feebates can be budget neutral and self-funding. Feebates can also be implemented locally and adjusted when appropriate. Feebates optimize consumer choice and market mechanisms. Feebates can stimulate sustainable economic activity and create numerous local employment and investment opportunities, while assisting the poor with getting clean and safe energy, and giving investors the confidence to start clean and safe industries, etc. Such feebates will not just help the environment, they will also contribute to health and prosperity, decrease national debt, decrease the need for importing fossil fuel and policing the supply of fossil fuel by sending troops abroad, etc.

Sam, this is a great article. I do agree with the modifications to the inorganic recycling ideas as suggested by Steve B, and now incorporated by reference in your article.

One aspect of this that Steve alludes to, but might need clarification for the nontechnical reader, is than nitrogen is "inorganic", so although we can fertilize with things that are as organic as imaginable by many (i.e. manure), both the trace and bulk inorganic elements are vital parts of any complete solution to fertilizing and keeping soil healthy.

Not all inorganic materials, molecules or substances are suitable for use in sustainable processes, but some are required for specific things. I love the idea of recovering lithium from desalination plants and using it to make rechargeable batteries.

Bulk elements like calcium, nitrogen and magnesium are essential for all life as we know it, as are trace elements such as cobalt, iron, copper, and even vanadium and molybdenum (some of the enzymes that fix nitrogen use vanadium, though the most famous nitrogenases are based on a molybdenum- and iron-containing active site).

Of course, your agrichar contains all those key bulk and trace minerals since they were in the "organic matter" to begin with. This is where, as a chemist, I have trouble with the concept of dividing the world into inorganic and organic portions (let's call them sets). The sets represented by these two "elemental worlds" overlap quite a lot at times, and there is no such thing as living organic matter without inorganic components. This is poorly understood by the public, and I could and should probably say it better. I'll work on it.

The public is also very confused about the term "organic," itself: it means many things to many people. The scientific definition is pretty straightforward, but the public has trouble accepting it.

Sam: am I not right that the feebate approach does, at its heart, change the economics of pollution and fossil fuel use, etc., driving people to be sustainable for economic rather than altruistic reasons? Altruism isn't worth counting on in the long run, or even in the short run with today's economy.

I linked to this article from the discussion in Jack's recent post about Hansen, since I think you address Dan's question about whether we can hope to affect CO2 levels at all.

Just as an aside, my son is in DC for the inauguration. He is 16 and volunteered for Obama (but he is in DC for unrelated reasons). He was completely on cloud 9 after spending the day listening to VP Al Gore ("great speaker") and Archbishop Desmond Tutu ("hilarious and lovable, I wanted to hug him"), and then heading to the mall for some of the festivities (Springsteen, Obama's speech , Herbie Hancock). It is exciting to see my son so engaged, and there were 7,000 honors students in the auditorium, all listening to Gore and Tutu. The energy on the room was palpable, according to the organizers, and my son confirmed this. We all watched "An Inconvenient Truth" last Friday night as part of his preparation. It gives me hope! I'll probably write this up separately (or maybe he will... as long as I don't suggest it... I must keep my mouth shut!).

p.s. There is a report on conversion of a home to solar power with no batteries, just a grid tie in, 6 months after installation that I link to on my solar power site. There are some hard numbers about power bills, etc., for California.

James, I agree that waste handling is a complex issue and the terminology can be confusing. In most places, plastics with resin codes 1 and 2 are recycled. Some places, such as Los Angeles recycle all clean plastics numbered 1 through 7.

Many people welcome bioplastics (also called organic plastics), as they are made from vegetable oil or starch, rather than from fossil fuel. However, these bioplastics can cause recycling confusion. Included in resin code 7 (other) is polylactic acid, or polylactide (PLA), a transparent bioplastic (made from sugar cane or corn starch) that looks much like PET plastic (code 1), but that cannot be recycled together with PET plastic. In 2007, a State Senate bill in California (SB 898) proposed adding a '0' code for polylactic acid, but this provision of the bill was removed before passage.

I hope that I didn't create further confusion with the above image - it doesn't refer to recycling according to resin codes, but the image instead uses letters to picture cycles. I want to distinguish between inorganic (A) and organic (B) waste, and I suggest to pyrolyze much of the organic waste. But I further avoid using terms like organic and bio. Some like to refer to the char and fuel that's made from bio-mass (organic material) as biochar and biofuel, but char and fuel could also contain carbon that was captured by devices from the air, as I pictured in the image in Cycle D. That's why I use the term agrichar.

Similarly, I wouldn't refer to hydrogen as a biofuel, I prefer to refer to it as zero emissions fuel. Decades ago, Iceland pioneered the hydrogen society by using cheap 'surplus energy' to split hydrogen from water by means of electrolysis, in order to produce ammonia for fertilizers, as discussed by the BBC back in 2001. There's nothing biological or organic about this process, but I like it because it results in less greenhouse gases.

We should impose fees on products that cause greenhouse gases and use the proceeds to fund local rebates on clean and safe alternatives. Whether alternatives are organic, biological, renewable, biodegradable or recyclable is not crucial. So, what is the measure of sustainability? If we focus on global warming, then to be cleaner, a product must result in less greenhouse gases. At the same time, to be safe, a product must not harm our health. Market mechanisms can further sort out what works best.

What I'm trying to show in this article is that there may be clean and safe ways to do things that - when looked at in isolation - do not seem to be commercially viable. However, when looked at as part of a larger cycle, feebates may just tip the balance to make such a whole cycle economic. As GE says, the cost of wind energy is some 3.5 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour and declining. That's less expensive than coal, oil, nuclear and most natural gas-fired generation. Furthermore, wind turbines produce a lot of surplus energy that could be used for processes that would otherwise be too expensive. Surplus energy could be used to run desalination plants. Surplus energy could also be stored in car batteries. That way, we can get rid of the many back-up oil generators that are now switched on at times of peak demand or are kept ready for emergencies. I've been saying this for years, but since few seem to be listening, I'm trying to paint that picture that's worth a thousand words.

BTW, James, I hope that your son has a good time in DC and I do hope that Obama succeeds where I have trouble articulating things. Cheers!

It's becoming increasingly clear we have the technical means to achieve sustainability. This is particularly true, as you say, when we look at things as systems rather in isolated. We lack the political will to bring about these changes, however, as well as the economic orientation. This seems to be changing rapidly, so we'll see what the next few years bring.

Happy inauguration!

Thanks for commenting, Ethan, I too cannot wait to see Obama's action plan. I look forward to see further photos from you of the inauguration. Cheers!

"We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories."
President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009

Great article, Sam, spot on!

In the article One last chance to save mankind, James Lovelock says:

"There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. [We could get] farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference..."

Wonderful article, Sam, very well written with an excellent image that very well pictures the broad cycles described in the article. Thanks for sharing!

Sam: "I just hope that our message of reason will reach some of the people in the new administration, in particular on the topic of 'cap and trade'."

Have you sent a message to the WH?

Good article, Sam.

Thanks, guys!

Towards a Sustainable Economy - an updated version of above post.