Cleantech Insights

Intelligent Traffic Systems: Implementation and What’s Down the Road?

Leo Zhang
Posted on by Leo Zhang
According to INRIX’s 2017 Traffic Scorecard study, the estimated total economic costs from traffic congestion for the US, UK, and Germany amounted to almost $461 billion in 2017. The dollar value increases when the calculation includes data from the other 35 countries in this study. Furthermore, several major developing countries were excluded from this study, so total global economic impact from traffic congestion could be significantly higher than what INRIX has reasonably estimated. In other words, the economic cost of... Read More »

July Was Smart Irrigation Month: How Sensor-based Smart Irrigation Tools Influence Agriculture

Yuanzhen Pan
Posted on by Yuanzhen Pan
According to the World Bank, agriculture uses approximately 70% of global water withdrawals, with as much as 50% being wasted due to overwatering and inefficient systems. Meanwhile, farmers continue to make significant capital investments in on-farm irrigation facilities; over $2.64 billion was spent on US farms in 2013. To improve water use efficiency, startups are innovating, and farmers are deploying sensor-based smart irrigation systems utilizing irrigation intelligence based on real-time field data. A sensor-based irrigation system can be broken down into... Read More »

Closing the Circle on Textiles

Lily Lin
Posted on by Lily Lin
The world generates 92 million tons of textile waste annually, with an estimated increase of 60% to 147 million tons in 2030. Textile waste management is a global challenge that that is likely to become a source of regulatory and reputational risk. Just ask Burberry after burning £28M of products, or H&M who was called out for burning an average of 12 tons of unsold product a year. If dealt with correctly, textile waste could become a business opportunity. According... Read More »

Where Synthetic Biology Meets Textiles

Lily Lin
Posted on by Lily Lin
Synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary field combining biology and engineering that is being applied to textiles, where living organisms have the potential to become both the machine and operating system of bio-fibers and bio-fabrics. Two notable areas of innovation are: bio-leather (lab-grown, but biologically identical to traditional leather) and spider silk. Demand Push Towards Cultured Leather The global leather goods market was USD $93.2 billion in 2016 and will reach USD $121.16 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 4.47%... Read More »

Power to the People: Remote Microgrids Across Southeast Asia

Louis Brasington
Posted on by Louis Brasington
Across the world around 1.3 billion people still have no access to electricity, and 87% of these people live in rural areas where extension of the grid is impracticable. Microgrids can help to provide electrification, as well as stability and resiliency to these areas, ultimately helping to pull a large portion of society out of energy poverty. [caption id="attachment_18557" align="alignright" width="395"] Active partners of the REIDS microgrid project.[/caption] One of the regions that has transformed in the past years is... Read More »

Innovative Applications in Geospatial Analytics

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Since Charles Piquet and John Snow first applied the concept of spatial analysis to maps of cholera outbreaks in 19th century Europe, analysis of geographic location data has become a huge industry. Today’s technologies are accelerating innovative analysis and providing solutions to problems in multiple sectors like agriculture, environmental monitoring and supply-chain tracking. In this article, we will explore some of the key features of today’s geospatial analytics market, and where to look for future innovation. [caption id="attachment_18498" align="aligncenter" width="600"]... Read More »

We Need More Wizards

Julio Friedmann
Posted on by Julio Friedmann
This guest blog by Julio Friedmann, CEO of Carbon Wrangler LLC, is part of an ongoing series on CarbonTech. I misspent a large fraction of my youth playing Dungeons and Dragons and re-reading “Lord of the Rings”. Gary Gygax and J.R.R. Tolkein owe me money. In my defense, my adolescent brain was ensorcelled by the idea of wizards. Magic bent the laws of physics and allowed creation out of thin air. Magic could hurtle energy and transmute matter. Magic was... Read More »

Strength in Numbers: Long Term Solutions for CO2 Reuse

Louis Brasington
Posted on by Louis Brasington
Industrial clusters are geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, benefiting from shared infrastructure. For CO2 reuse, this creates a wider set of opportunities to connect elements along the carbon, capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) value chain. Standalone projects have been challenged by having to finance all the related infrastructure costs. One example is the first commercial-scale CCUS project at Boundary Dam which captures 1 million tons per year of CO2 from SaskPower's coal-fired power for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR).... Read More »

Between a Rock and Hard Place: Commercializing CO2 Through Mineralization

Louis Brasington
Posted on by Louis Brasington
The geosphere refers to the solid materials found within the Earth that contain a vast number of different minerals. Just as a sponge can hold liquid, these minerals can hold huge volumes of carbon. An estimated 2000 times more carbon is stored within the geosphere than in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere combined. This natural storage bank offers us a solution to permanently hold CO2 through a process known as CO2 mineralization. This process refers to a chemical reaction that occurs... Read More »

We Wanted Flying Cars, and They Gave Us… Flying Cars! Catching up with Lilium

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) cars have been in the public’s imagination from the cartoon The Jetsons in the 60s to movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars and even the Weasley’s Flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter. Where imagination leads, innovators create - and now we have growing competition to commercialize electric VTOL (eVTOL) vehicles that will change the face of individual transportation. At our Cleantech Forum Europe last month in Antwerp, we had the pleasure of welcoming Patrick Nathen,... Read More »