Green Halo staff attends Greenbuild 2013 to meet with leaders and innovators in the green building industry and discuss the future of C&D waste tracking, new LEED version, facility certification and more. To schedule a meeting with Green Halo staff please call our main office at 1-888-525-1301 and our staff will connect you with our members on the ground in Philadelphia.
We produce a lot of trash. While many make efforts to reduce what they send to the landfill, and useful materials are more recycled now than ever before, the amount of waste produced every year keeps going up fairly rapidly:
Every day, we generate over 3.5 million tons of solid waste—a tenfold increase over the past century. That figure will likely double again by 2025. On our current path, it could balloon to over 11 million tons per day by 2100, a tripling of today’s rate, with sub-Saharan Africa fueling most of the growth.
This is based on a new study that looks at 3 different scenarios, trying to determine when we would reach “peak trash”. The “business as usual” scenario is described above, with a tripling of waste production to 11 million tons per day at the peak in 2100.
The worst scenario “assumes a future in which the world is starkly divided among regions of extreme poverty, moderate wealth and bare subsistence. Little to no progress has been made in addressing pollution and other environmental problems, and global development goals have abjectly failed to come to fruition. Acute poverty and poor education converge to drive the population up to a staggering 13.5 billion, of which only 70 percent is urbanized. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, waste production increases by only 1 million relative to [business as usual]—to 12 million tons per day.”
In the best scenario, waste production peaks around 8.4 million tons per day by 2075. In that world, human population stabilizes at 7 billion and 90% are living in cities. “People are more educated and environmentally aware, and poverty levels in developing countries are at an all-time low.”
The future is not written, though. We have to build our own world with our actions and by raising awareness and convincing others that they can have an impact.
Green Halo Systems attends DBIA Conference in Las Vegas. DBIA is a conference where builders, architects, service and product providers meet to discuss how to better design, spec and build projects more efficiently. Waste management is a key component and cost factor for all major projects from new construction to urban redevelopment. Green Halo is the tool that allows architects and builders to maximize return on recycling, manage waste haulers, facilities and reporting to achieve the highest diversion rate possible and smallest carbon footprint for their projects. To learn more visit https://www.greenhalosystems.com/ or call 1-888-525-1301.
Could 3D printing help solve the world’s shelter crises?
At a TED talk in Ojai, Calif., Behrokh Khoshnevis, director of the Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California, said nearly 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to adequate shelter, a situation that breeds poverty, disease, illiteracy, crime and overpopulation. To address this problem, Khoshnevis is developing a process called Contour Crafting to use 3D printing technology to build entire houses.
Khoshnevis said the giant 3D printers his team is developing can build a 2,500-square-foot house in as little as 20 hours. The Contour Crafting 3D printers could even do the electrical work, plumbing, tiling, finishing work and painting.
That may sound too good to be true, but Khoshnevis showed a video demonstrating prototypes of massive 3D printers in action. With a nozzle that secreted a dense, high-performance concrete, the 3D printer erected a wall layer by layer. The walls are hollow to save on materials and make them lighter, but their strength clocks in at about 10,000 psi — more than traditional housing walls, Khoshnevis said.
The buildings don’t have to be linear, he pointed out. To make the buildings structurally sound as well as beautiful, the 3D printers can print curves.
NASA is currently sponsoring the Contour Crafting project to construct 3D printers that can produce lunar structures. Khoshnevis said his goal with the project is to quickly, safely and more efficiently produce entire neighborhoods in impoverished areas. Since the design of each house could easily be customized on the computers, Contour Crafting can even avoid a nightmare of homogenous track homes.
Khoshnevis estimated that Contour Crafting will save the construction 20 percent to 25 percent in financing and 25 percent to 30 percent in materials. The biggest savings would come in labor, where Contour Crafting would save 45 percent to 55 percent by using 3D printers instead of humans. There would also be fewer CO2 emissions and less energy used.
But wouldn’t replacing manual laborers with 3D printers put thousands or even millions of people out of work? Khoshnevis doesn’t think so, as he compares it to the early 1900s when people feared that agriculture technology would ruin the economy by putting farmers out of work. Less than 1.5 percent of Americans are farmers today, but the world did not come to an end.
Khoshnevis even posits that Countour Crafting will create new jobs, particularly providing women and older workers a chance to work in new areas of construction.
“There will always be better economies resulted from the advancement and utilization of technologies that just make sense,” Khoshnevis said.
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