Creative, But Incomplete, Solutions

If you read The Mound of Sound regularly, you will understand that there is no quick fix for the myriad problems the world faces. As he has pointed out on more than one occasion, threats like climate change cannot be viewed in isolation. It is only part of a wide panoply of interrelated ills that the world faces, ills that include overpopulation, over consumption, and dwindling resources. Our lifestyles are growing well beyond the earth's capacity to sustain us.

With that proviso in mind, there are a number of developments that, while not a solution to our bloated lifestyles, nonetheless show us what is possible when we think "outside the box."

Last week, The Star's Edward Keenan wrote a thought-provoking piece asking whether or not there are straightforward solutions to intractable problems:

What happens when a serious problem we thought was incredibly complicated and nearly impossible to solve suddenly becomes easier to deal with?

That’s a question raised by a recent blog post by economics professor John Quiggin, who sits on the board of the Australian Climate Change Authority. With the announcement this week by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors electric car fame that his company would be mass-producing a home and utility battery to store solar energy at a fraction of the price of existing similar batteries, combined with developments in electric cars, “we now have just about everything we need for a technological fix for climate change, based on a combination of renewable energy and energy efficiency, at a cost that’s a small fraction of global income …”

But one of the big obstacles to such developments is the way we think:

Quiggin notes, correctly I think, that the long-standing seeming intractability of climate change has led people to draw some distinct conclusions, and based on them gather in warring political camps: those who think dealing with it requires ending capitalism and reshaping virtually all of society; those who think the first group is perpetrating an elaborate hoax; and those in competing camps who think the solutions require very big carbon taxes, or massive investments in nuclear energy or “clean coal.”

Therefore, there is real resistance to the notion that a quick fix is possible. This, Keenan says, is the same mentality that led doctors in the mid-1800s to resist the simple measure of washing their hands and their equipment to reduce maternal and child mortality:

Doctors had their own accepted theories about the cause of such deaths and refused to think they could be causing the problem.

And so it is with other developments which, more than anything else, seem to require an open mind and a willingness to move beyond a rigidly fixed world view. Take, for example, solar roadways:



This technology was put to the test near Amsterdam, where a bike path was lined with SolaRoad:

SolaRoad has generated more than 3,000 kilowatt hours of electricity since the 70-metre-long strip officially opened in November 2014, in Krommenie, a village northwest of Amsterdam, the project reported late last week. It said that was enough to power a single-person household for a year.

"We did not expect a yield as high as this so quickly," said Sten de Wit, spokesman for the public-private partnership project, in a statement that deemed the first half-year of a three-year pilot a success.

Based on what it has produced so far, the bike path is expected to generate more than 70 kilowatt hours per square metre per year, close to the upper limit predicted based on lab tests.

Creative thinking has also led to a development dealing with the millions of cigarette butts littering our streets and parks:

TerraCycle is one of a handful of companies that is working to collect and recycle spent butts, by turning them into plastic lumber that can be used for benches, pallets, and other uses.

Another company, EcoTech Displays, is working on a system to recycle butts into insulation, clothing, and even jewelry.

You can watch a video of the process by clicking on the above link.

Will any of these developments save our world? Not in themselves. But they do show us what is possible when we resolve to break out of old modes of thinking, sadly a task perhaps as difficult as the process involved in developing new technologies.