Every Friday, Circulate provides a roundup of some of the best circular economy articles, videos and podcasts that we’ve seen on the internet during the week. This Friday, we’re looking at a new form of bio plastic, the unbelievable growth of megacities, how NASA are pushing tech that could help develop a circular economy here on earth and more.
Seaweed plastics wins Lexus Design Award
In case you missed it: we’ve got a plastic problem. Plastics are the jack-of-all trades material of today’s economy, crucial to every industry from food, electronics, automobiles and the built environment. Trouble is, masses of material leaks from the plastics economy – as January’s New Plastics Economy report found – making it a system in need of a re-think. Core77 reports on one group doing just that. AMAM, the winners of the recent Lexus Design Awards show how agar, a common ‘jelly-like substance derived from seaweed’ can be used to create packaging with a range of desirable properties. By combining different quantities of agar powder with its fibrous by-product, the team were able to create a range of different products, from a clear film indistinguishable from plastic to a more organic paper-like material. The team’s design mentor Max Lamb succinctly described the specific problem the project aims to address:
“There’s a big problem in [creating] objects that don’t last that should last, or objects that don’t last that are made of materials that last forever, and I think [AMAM] has literally just scratched the surface of what this material could do.”
NASA: pioneers of circular economy?
Matt Damon might not be the first person you think of when it comes to circular economy experts, but if you’ve seen The Martian you’ll know that a stint in space could force astronauts and scientists to take new and creative approaches to energy and material flows.
This week the BBC gave a rundown of the technologies and practices NASA is employing to spend longer and travel further in space, and some characteristics will be familiar to circular economy advocates. Whether it’s growing food using LED light, filtering drinking water from astronauts’ urine, 3D printing tools time after time, or designing buildings for disassembly, scientists and researchers are pushing the envelope when it comes to resource optimisation, and it’s hoped that this tech will influence life on earth too. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Robo-drop
From the Starship Enterprise to Starship Technologies. Drone deliveries have been touted in the past few years, but how will a flying drone cope with deliveries of all shapes and sizes? Will a drone be able to deliver your order of, say, 5 pounds of replica human body fat? These are important questions, and thankfully Starship Technologies has been trialling a ground-based, six-wheeled autonomous delivery bot.
These rolling robo-mules have clocked up over 2000 miles on pavements around the world, and have been making deliveries in London, with a US expansion planned soon. Lauri Väin, Starship’s engineering lead, pictures a future with different types of autonomous vehicle taking care of different delivery tasks around the city. In an interesting aside, Väin also suggested that this technology could also help sharing economy platforms take off. Perhaps this added level of convenience could make borrowing a drill from a fellow citizen that bit easier.
Do cities run the world?
Is the city taking over from the nation state as the key social structure of our time? Author and strategist Parag Khanna thinks so, as outlined in an extract from his new book Connectography on Quartz. You’ve probably heard the usual statistics about the rapid growth of urban populations and the number of megacities, but Khanna shares analysis that further emphasises this trend and its potential influence. Like how “the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and greater Los Angeles together combine for about one-third of America’s GDP”, or how “China is in the process of reorganizing itself around two dozen giant megacity clusters of up to 100 million citizens each.” Khanna does admit that no city is an island, and all have “interdependencies…whether territorially, demographically, economically, ecologically, or socially”. This interplay between the city as a node and aggregator – of people, resources, creativity, economic activity and so on – and as part of a wider complex system should be encouraging governments to look for a framework that can offer resilient and prosperous growth.
Freakonomics does basic income
For every story of K-9 delivering your groceries, you deserve a story on universal basic income. With momentum growing around the topic of how we’ll subsist in an automated future, the consistently compelling Freakonomics podcast series focused on the subject for the most recent episode. It’s a fantastic primer on basic income, including history and context that extends wider than you may think.
That’s all for this week’s Circulate on Fridays. Got a tip for us? Tweet us @circulatenews. Remember, you can check out the What We’re Reading section any time to keep up to date with essential circular economy news, selected by the Circulate team.
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