Wine industry embraces sustainable development

Clean vineyards, ‘green’ wines and lighter bottles? Many in the global wine and spirits business believe their only chance of long-term survival lies with sustainable development.

“Within five years, there will be a global standard of sustainability and a level below which you cannot be,” said Robert Joseph, a London-based writer and wine producer. Joseph and his partners at Hugh, Kevin & Robert Wines, have launched a new line called ‘Greener Planet Sustainable’, which is a low carbon footprint wine. One of these, retailing at roughly $10 and packaged in a lighter plastic PET bottle, has been snapped up by importers for Norway and Holland.

Sustainable development, independent of organic or biodynamic production, was very prominent at the recent Bordeaux Vinexpo, the largest wine trade show in the world. Val d’Orieu, a wine cooperative whose members’ vineyards stretch over 9 000 hectares along the French Mediterranean, even rethought its stand at Vinexpo. The cooperative ordered an ecologically designed exhibit stand, including re-useable glass and wood panels, rented furniture, and eco-friendly paint. According to the stand creator, it was the first such order they had ever received.
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Waste material becomes very efficient insulation

Your next refrigerator might be sheathed in renewable rice, if a team of students from the University of Michigan have anything to do with it. With just 12.5mm of rice husk ash they reckon they can achieve the equivalent of over 100mm of conventional petroleum-based insulation.

With claims that the 11 million fridges sold annually in the US could be made 50% more efficient, the judges of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Clean Energy Prize obviously saw the potential in such technology. Such that they awarded the students first prize, which came with a cheque for $200,000. That will now no doubt help them as they launch a start-up company, Husk Insulation, to commercialise their product.

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Real-Life ‘Wall-E’ Recycling Robot Takes to the Streets of Italy

It may not be as tiny or nimble as Wall-E, but this real-life DustCart robot traversing the streets of Peccioli, Italy is just as cute. The robot, part of the $3.9 million DustBot research program, collects trash and measures atmospheric pollutants like sulphur oxide, benzene, ozone, and nitrogen oxide with its on-board sensors. The robot can even be summoned with a cell phone and can go door to door, identify residents with a personal ID number, and sort their trash into organic, recyclable, or waste!

Nimble enough to navigate where conventional gas-guzzling garbage trucks cannot, the electric DustCart robot aims to clean up a dirty industry. Once garbage has been classified, the DustCart whisks it away into its belly and takes it to a waste management site. The DustCart avoids obstacles during its travels with pre-loaded maps and sensors.
The pear-shaped robot is still in the prototype stages since its response time is still too slow for it to work on crowded streets and robots aren’t legally allowed to roam around without human guidance in Peccioli. But who knows — someday soon you may see a friendly green robot zipping down your street to save the day.

Original article: Ariel Schwartz. July 9, 2009. Inhabitat. Read more…

BoP Learning Lab – Waste Management

The Fourth 2009 Lunch-hour workshop will take place on Thursday, 25 June 2009.

TIME: 12:30 – 14:00 (coffee/tea & sandwiches supplied)
VENUE: Open Innovation Studio, 27 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town

Waste management: a business opportunity at the BoP?

The City of Cape Town, with its huge wealth gap, geographical constraints and human diversity, is faced with some of the world’s most interesting challenges with regards to urban planning, spatial organisation, public transport and the environment, to name but a few. Mr Barry Coetzee, Head of Integrated Waste Management Policy, will talk to us about the City of Cape Town’s approach to serving the needs of lower income communities in terms of waste management, tackling the dual challenge of providing urban waste management solutions in poor, high-density urban environments while at the same time creating employment opportunities and encouraging entrepreneurship at the base of the pyramid.

A vast majority of Southern Africa’s more than 240m people live below the poverty line. Even in South Africa, by far the region’s strongest and most modern economy, 75% of the population earn less than R1800* per month.

It is the mission of this generation, our generation of Southern Africans, to reduce this gap, and allow us to build a better society. Brick by brick, the work of each contributes to the progress of all. In this battle for a common ideal, businesses are vehicles of social transformation. Their ability to engage at the base of the economic pyramid (BoP) is crucial to our development and prosperity.

Businesses are emerging as an engine of positive social change as well as economic upliftment. But the challenges are huge. Identifying the right business models, learning from each other’s experience, exchanging intelligence and keeping pace with new developments is crucial in order to have a meaningful impact on the lives of people at the BoP.

The BoP Learning Lab is meant to provide sources of inspiration, to be the toolbox with which the Southern African corporate fabric can maximise its social impact at the bottom of the pyramid.

* World Resource Institute, 2008

More info on www.bop.org.za.

To confirm your attendance, please phone Norma Saayman on 021-918-4238 or e-mail to ns5@usb.sun.ac.za.

From waste to high-tech logistics solution

EnviroServ is a leading South African waste management company. One of their recycling initiatives involves the recycling of Tetra Pak cartons – the containers in which you buy long-life milk, juice and similar products. These cartons are composites, made of three layers (paper, aluminium and polyethylene), so they would previously have required peeling and separation into three different recycling bins. But, the company developed a way to recycle Tetra Pak cartons lock, stock and barrel into pallets to transport more Tetra Pak cartons. It is an elegant solution.

Wood has been the traditional material for pallet manufacture in South Africa and 95% of all pallets for materials handling and storage are still manufactured from wood. But wood is getting scarcer and more expensive. Composite pallets solve a lot of problems. They are made of plentiful waste-stream materials, are more durable, easier to clean and are more UV-resistant. Composite pallets don’t harbour microbes, as wooden pallets potentially do, so they do not need to be heat-treated for the export market. Heat treatment makes the pallets brittle.

Unfortunately, the price gap between timber and plastic pallets is still huge. Wooden pallets average from $9 to $16; plastic pallets cost from $40 to $80. So EnviroServ came up with a smart plan: rather than selling the Bid Pallets, it rents them out. During the development and roll-out of the pallet model, it became apparent that a logistics partner would be needed to manage, track and transport the pallets. An associated company, Rennies Distribution Services, now has a rental pool of Bid Pallets and carries the costs associated with their maintenance, repair, cleaning, storage and circulation, plus the associated risks.

One of the major risks of renting out the pallets is keeping track of their movement. The solution was to microchip them. So now they have green pallets, made of rubbish, yet carrying high-tech radio frequency identification devices.

EnviroServ Polymer Solutions aims to increase production and market demand to 30,000 new pallets a month. This will save 680 tonnes of Tetra Pak a month, or the equivalent of 2,4-million beverage cartons, that would otherwise go into the landfill.

Community Cooker in Kibera

The Kibera slum outside Nairobi, Kenya, does not have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease. Now a Kenyan architect, Jim Archer, has built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands.

After nine years of development, the prototype “Community Cooker” is close to being rolled out in overcrowded refugee camps as well as slums around the country.

Behind a black-painted corrugated iron cooking area, rubbish collected by local youths dries on racks before being pushed into the furnace. Technicians have spent three years modifying the firebox to produce enough heat to destroy toxins in the rubbish, particularly plastics. The stove reaches around 650° C at present and the aim is 1000° C, but UNEP who provided funding is happy that the prototype has proven rubbish can be turned into energy.

The Red Cross is looking at taking these stoves countrywide. They hope to build at least a 100 over the next five years, depending on donor funding.

The Kibera stove cost about $10,000 to build as a prototype but the designers estimate each would cost $5-6,000 once produced in larger numbers. This compares with $50 million for industrial incinerators in Europe.

Original article: Barry Moody. Reuters. 2 April 2009. Read more…

Sustainable petroleum product

In the early 1990’s an Australian engineer had an idea: ‘What if we can stop consuming oil and better use the resources we have without compromising quality and reliability?’ Many years of research and development later, this idea has transformed into Hydrodec Group plc.

The company provides advanced oil and chemical process technology, products and services to industry. Their advanced technology specialises in environmentally sustainable, small carbon footprint chemical processing and high performance oil refining, in a closed loop, de-minimus emission process.

Hydrodec’s key technology application allows Transformer Oils to be re-refined an indefinite number of times into Superfine™ transformer oil, which has specifications equivalent to or better than that of new transformer oil. This allows the electricity industry to reduce its exclusive reliance on new oil supplies without having to make compromises in quality and performance. The annual global demand for transformer oil is about 5 billion litres and the production thereof emits about 20 million tons of CO2. Each tonne of transformer oil refined through the Hydrodec system represents a direct saving of several tonnes of CO2 emissions. With the prevalence of low levels of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) in used transformer oils, each ton of transformer oil refined through the system represents significant reduction in the background emission to atmosphere of PCB, PCB like chemicals and Dioxin.

Hydrodec also owns patented and unique processes that enable ‘re-manufacture’ of hazardous persistent organic chemical materials, wastes and by-products into valuable products. This breakthrough creates a paradigm shift in the sustainable management of many hazardous chemicals, both at the source of production and in the environment.

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