Most of you living in Princeton are probably pretty familiar with Lake Carnegie, and if you’ve been in the Princeton area for a while, you may have noticed that it hasn’t been freezing over recently. In fact, the last time that Lake Carnegie froze solidly enough to allow for ice skating was over 5 years ago!
The summer after my freshman year, I researched lake freeze for my HMEI internship. Two of my mentors, Professor Vecchi and Dr. Jeevanjee, conceived this research project because they noticed that Lake Carnegie hadn’t frozen over for a few years. We wanted to see whether we could attribute this decrease in ice skating ability in recent years to climate change.
In order to answer this question, we had to take a look into the past. I wanted to figure out which years Lake Carnegie froze and which years it didn’t, so I dug into newspaper archives for mentions of ice skating or lake freezing.
Newspaper archives mentioning ice skating on Lake Carnegie
One of the most interesting findings was a newspaper from 1960 which expressed surprise that the lake didn’t freeze that year, suggesting that it was very uncommon for Lake Carnegie not to freeze back then. However, in 2007, people were surprised that the lake did freeze, instead of the other way around! These archives indicate that not only are freeze events decreasing overall, but also that climate change is actively shifting people’s expectations, from assuming the lake would freeze every year to being surprised when it does freeze.
On the plot below, we indicate every year with safe ice skating at the top and every year without safe ice skating on the bottom. The years without data are not present. The logistic regression curve shows the probability of safe ice skating in a given year, and we see that within a matter of decades, the probability of safe ice skating has decreased from 100% to 20%.
Time series of ice skating on Lake Carnegie
This reflects the newspapers we examined earlier, except now we’ve actually quantified the reversal of expectations. It makes sense that in the 1960s, everyone would be surprised if the lake didn’t freeze, because it had frozen almost every single year before that. Today, with a 1 in 5 chance of lake freezing, ice skating is treated as a rare and special occasion.
Overall, this was a really cool project to work on because I got the chance to use both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how climate change is impacting communities. I’m now a senior, and in all my time at Princeton, the lake has not been safe for ice skating. With any luck, it will freeze over this year, and I’ll finally experience the joys of skating that I’ve read so much about in the newspapers.
Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Jerry Zee, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, just about does it all. His research looks through the lenses of geophysics, literature, feminist studies, ethnography, aerosol science, and more, to fill gaps in our current knowledge of Chinese geopolitics in relation to changing weather patterns. Read this interview to dive into his complex and interdisciplinary world!
Image Credit: Jerry Zee via https://environment.princeton.edu/people/jerry-zee
What does sustainability mean to you? How do you engage with sustainability outside of your work?
Sustainability is an idea that […] there is an ethical, technical, political demand for us to think about what would be necessary that the planet outlasts us. It’s a concept that has roots in the fantasy of the sustainability of the planet for capitalism, but I think that we can tinker it, or tweak it, or undo it, so that it can orient us more broadly toward a relationship with things we can’t possibly imagine yet. I would like to think about it as an open ethical and political injunction, you know, our responsibility to both the past and the future. As an anthropologist, one cannot draw a clear distinction between work and not work.
Could you give a brief overview of your current research? What makes it interesting to you?
I write about what I call modern weather, or a meteorological contemporary in China. What I mean by this is that accounts of modern China are given in political and geopolitical terms, and parallel to this, I try to make sense of how the period that we understand as China’s modernity (its different adventures with socialism, late socialism, experiments with markets, and different kinds of political reform) has also been a time in which the weather across China has been changing in ways that are deeply linked to political transition. The things I think most specifically about are dust and aerosol events, so I’m interested in how in the last several decades, a crisis of large-scale land degradation across China’s interior, most conventionally known as desertification, has deep-rooted relations with the changing nature of Chinese institutions, politics, and society. There’s a tremendous number of strange things happening which confounds conventional ways of understanding what we think the Chinese state is and does, and what we think about the horizons of liberal environmental politics.
A sweeper walks with a broom along a road during morning rush hour as Beijing, China is hit by a sandstorm.
Image and Caption Credit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-weather-sandstorm/beijing-choked-in-duststorm-stirred-by-heavy-northwest-winds-idUSKBN2B703
How do you approach your research problems? What resources do you use to navigate a research journey?
I’m trained as an anthropologist, but I think across a couple of different fields that inform the way I do research. I really like engaging with the humanities, especially in literature, and then I think across feminist traditions and science studies. Ethnographic research in the way I understand is based both on long term fieldwork and what we call participant observation, which means going and living in the rhythms of a certain kind of community or place for a long time – thinking from within the logics and tensions and textures of lives in these places. To think concretely my research involves working with state bureaucrats, scientists, and everyday people in China. That means everything from working with ecologists and geophysicists at state environmental research stations to forestry officials and planting teams from China and Korea to aerosol scientists in the US, to living with herders and pastoralists as they figure out how to manage the degradation of their pastures.
How do you avoid observer bias?
You can’t. We are all people who have backgrounds and who come from places and who are trained in certain ways. One of the questions that, as an ethnographer, I think about all the time is, “How is it that the specificity of who I am shapes the kinds of claims and arguments I make?” One of the things you learn to do is undercut your own arguments and think about the ways that you may be deeply committed to them. I fully believe that if another person did exactly the same project it would be a different question, but at the same time, I’m committed to an empirical truth as it appears through the encounters I’ve had.
What are some issues with our current understanding of Chinese geopolitics?
I think we need better accounts of China as an environmental agent and state. Many of the accounts that we get in the US either oppose China as an environmental hellscape in which the environment is collapsing in freefall, when in fact there are many kinds of political experiments that are emerging in tandem with the ecological catastrophe that is modern China. On the other side, there are sort of very hopeful and messianic accounts of Chinese environmental politics that pose it as a viable alternative to what people see as impasses in either the American or the international systems. Often people will point to China’s energy sector and its investment in clean energy transition as proof that the Chinese system is somehow better, and I wanted a way of doing research that doesn’t fall either into one of these pools, so that’s what moves me.
Are there any sustainability or climate science resources you know of that you would suggest for readers?
I would check out an organization called APEN, which is the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. They are at the very cutting edge of doing environmental justice work and research in communities that are affected, and they are good at thinking about the inter-relationship of environmental and social processes.
Check out my syllabi – I’m learning new things all the time. One of the more compelling things over the last couple of years since I’ve started teaching is that I learn a lot from the passion and energy and creativity and resolve of students. Learn from yourself.
When nuclear power is used on a commercial level to produce electricity, one unavoidable byproduct is high-level nuclear waste (HLW) in the form of spent fuel rods. Currently, the only strategy the United States has to manage this waste, which takes thousands of years to decay, is to build a site underground, known as a permanent repository, where the waste can be stored until no longer dangerously radioactive. The only problem with that plan? The U.S. does not have a permanent repository built, and the only substantive plans for a storage site in Nevada have been plagued by political obstacles and local opposition.
For my junior independent work as part of my task force for the School of Public and International Affairs, I analyzed the current state of repository policy, why climate change might make the need to figure out a permanent solution even more urgent, and what policy changes could be implemented to streamline federal decision making on nuclear waste. My paper is titled “Commercial High-Level Nuclear Waste in the United States: Overcoming Political Barriers to Short- and Long-Term Storage Solutions.” I chose to examine nuclear waste because with climate change growing worse, there are a lot of questions about whether nuclear power, as an emissions-free electricity source, should be part of a renewable energy transition; these questions, however, tend to ignore existing issues of nuclear waste, which will only grow if nuclear power increases. I also was really interested in the idea of bringing climate change directly into this debate.
Map of the continental United States with all on-site temporary storage locations for spent nuclear fuel (SNF), a type of high level waste (HLW). My independent work focuses on the commercial SNF storage sites, especially those on the coasts, which could potentially be threatened by climate change-driven sea level rise. (Image Credit: Congressional Research Service, 2020)
On-Site Waste Storage, Political Obstacles, and Climate Change
Due to the lack of a permanent repository, America’s 80,000 metric tons of domestic HLW from commercial nuclear power (CNP) is temporarily stored on-site at nuclear power plants, as the map above shows. The operation of existing nuclear power plants increases that HLW by 2,000 metric tons/year. In my analysis of the causes and consequences of this on-site storage dependence, I found:
The federal government is obligated to build and manage a national permanent repository under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982;
Utility companies that produce nuclear energy have been forced to manage on-site HLW, leading to lawsuits against the Department of Energy (DOE) that have resulted in $8 billion worth of payouts to utilities;
Many temporary storage sites are financially unsustainable, threatened by the limited lifespan of temporary facilities, and at risk of flooding from climate change-driven sea level rise;
Yucca Mountain, the only possible repository location currently capable of being licensed under the NWPA, is not in operation mostly due to political opposition rather than technical obstacles; and
Funding mechanisms for the Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) hinder the DOE’s ability to implement short-term solutions made necessary by the above financial and environmental concerns and which would reduce some of the urgency to build a permanent repository.
In other words, my analysis found that the United States’ nuclear waste problem will grow more expensive, unsafe, and dire the longer a solution is delayed.
Dry cask storage barrels, a common type of temporary on-site storage for HLW. At best, this storage method can last for approximately 100 years, far less than the thousands of years required for HLW to lose its dangerous radioactivity. (Image Credit: Nuclear Information and Resource Service)
Fixing the Problem
In light of my findings, I made a list of policy-based recommendations which could reduce the current strain on temporary on-site storage in the short term and/or bring the United States closer to constructing and operating a permanent repository in the long term:
A working fund for DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) repository siting/licensing efforts (i.e., finding and approving new feasible repository locations) should be established outside of the NWF. Fees on nuclear power producers should be reinstated and added to this fund.
The NWPA should be amended to allow for the use of federal and private consolidated interim storage facilities (CISFs) to fulfill the growing need to move HLW away from on-site storage.
A consent-based repository siting approach should replace the existing process to overcome political hurdles. Yucca Mountain should be reevaluated under this new siting system.
HLW that is most threatened by sea level rise and/or is most expensive to keep in temporary storage should be prioritized for transportation into CISFs and/or repositories, once available.
America’s nuclear waste storage problem is a complicated one, but that is all the more reason why it cannot continue to be ignored. Questions of nuclear power’s role in America’s energy transition to confront climate change cannot be fully and accurately answered until short- and long-term HLW storage solutions are implemented.
Sea-level rise is a local phenomenon just as much as it is a global one. While melting ice sheets, mountain glaciers, and the expansion of the oceans all have far-reaching impacts, every coastline will experience sea-level rise differently. I focused my senior independent work for the Department of Geosciences on the effects of sea-level rise in one location in particular: the Chesapeake Bay.
In my senior thesis, titled Sea-Level Rise on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: Vulnerability, Adaptation, Environmental Justice, I analyzed sea level rise data in Cambridge, Maryland, and conducted a survey to understand residents’ experience with rising sea-levels and their adaptation preferences. I chose to study the Eastern Shore because it is an area close to my own home in Washington, DC. Having visited the Bay many times, I’ve seen the beauty of the environments and the wonderful residents. The Eastern Shore is home to a large African American population, a group that is particularly vulnerable to the effects of sea-level rise because of a lack of access to resources, lack of representation in decision-making circles, and historical discrimination.
Map of the Chesapeake Bay with Percentage of African American Population by County; The highlighted counties (Talbot, Dorchester, Wicomico, Somerset) are the counties that I will be focusing on in this study. Adapted from the United States Census Bureau 2010
Sea Level Rise Analysis
From an analysis of local sea-level projections until 2100, I found that the sea level may increase by an average value of 88 cm, relative to mean sea level in 2000, if global temperatures rise 2˚C by the end of the century. If global temperatures rise by 5˚C, then the average sea levels may rise by an average of over 140 cm. Additionally, there is around a 36% probability that sea levels will rise by 1 meter or more in a 2˚C scenario and about 75% probability of this in a 5˚C scenario.
For some historical context, Hurricane Isabel made landfall in Maryland on September 19th, 2003 and caused water levels to rise to 1.26 m. This event flooded almost half of Dorchester County, cut off power to 1.4 million Maryland residents, injured 200 people, and even killed 1 person. The current frequency of a 1.26 m water level rise occurring is 1 in 286 years. By 2100, we will see these events amplified by 2000 in a 2˚C warming scenario with 7 events per year, and amplified by over 8500 in a 5˚C warming scenario, with 30 events per year.
Survey of Residents
In my survey, I asked if residents would support a seawall, a barrier parallel to the shoreline which defends the coast against sea-level hazards, or would rather a relocation program such as managed retreat. The majority of residents supported a seawall, but had mixed feelings towards relocation, with a most opposed to leaving their homes. Community preservation was a big explanation for supporting seawalls, which many saw as a plausible solution when used with other techniques. Some saw managed retreat as the best option while others saw it as a last resort. Others believed that by relocating their homes, their land would be given to more wealthy individuals, which made them unwilling to move. Residents gave many reasons for taking different positions on adaptation efforts, yet many of them are rarely heard by the groups that make decisions. When the voices of the community are not heard, the people that need the most help could actually end up being more hurt than helped by adaptation efforts.
The bar chart demonstrates the survey respondents’ answers (Yes, Maybe, No) to 1) Whether or not they would participate in a government-sponsored voluntary buyout of flood-prone property, and 2) Whether or not they would support the construction of a seawall along the coast.
It is important to remember: How we take action is equally important to or even more important than taking action. The people who make adaptation decisions should change how they operate to accommodate these communities. This could mean increasing the transparency in decision-making process, increasing the consideration of social injustices in long-term adaptation planning, and engaging in participatory planning. Improving these practices can help to decrease the environmental injustices present in the Chesapeake Bay, but we shouldn’t stop there. These practices should be implemented beyond the Chesapeake Bay in order to pursue environmental justice on a global scale.
Environmentalist Rachel Carson’s famous book Silent Spring (1962) first brought public attention to organic contaminants such as DDT, a common insecticide that caused detrimental impacts to numerous ecosystems until its EPA cancellation order in 1972. Organic contaminants are a wide class of carbon-containing chemicals, encompassing familiar names such as glyphosate (RoundUp) and BPAs. They are created and discarded by human industry and are often transported into ecosystems through runoff water. To get a better understanding of modern research involving these contaminants, I interviewed Ian Bourg, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Professor Bourg leads the Interfacial Water Group at Princeton, which focuses on understanding the microscopic processes which occur when water is in contact with air, clay, and organic contaminants.
Image Credit: Ian Bourg via https://cee.princeton.edu/people/ian-bourg
Why do you study processes at the microscopic scale?
Mostly what we’re doing is trying to understand the fundamental properties of matter, focusing on systems that are relevant to the environment – either in the natural environment or in engineered systems that are being used for protecting the environment. When a typical engineering group is doing work, they’re trying to design ways to manipulate the world and on the human scale to reach certain desired outcomes. Because many engineers work on the macroscopic scale, they use equations that represent the world at the macroscopic scale. In a lot of cases, we think that we can improve these equations if we gain more fundamental insight into how matter behaves at smaller scales.
Could you give a brief overview of your current research? What makes it interesting to you?
I’m interested in water in general because water is cool and water is important. Most water on the surface of the earth, or model that people are familiar with, is […] bulk liquid water, so like water in the ocean or in a glass. The properties of bulk liquid water are pretty well understood by now. Water near a surface remains kind of not that well understood, right? [For example] if I look at water near the water-air interface or near a solid surface or something like that, it changes its properties in various interesting ways depending on what’s on the other side of the interface.
The reason why we study clay is coming from our interest in water at interfaces, in that […] if you look at the average chemistry of the Earth’s crust, it’s mostly oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. There’s one way of packing together oxygen, silicon, and aluminum inside a crystalline structure that is apparently extremely stable and pretty close to the composition of the crust. That clay structure is a kind of structural motif that makes up half of the sedimentary rock mass, half of the mineral mass in soils, and about a third of the rock mass of the surface. If we’re interested in the interfaces between water and a mineral, most of it near the surface of the Earth would be water in contact with those specific minerals. So just kind of like by sheer abundance, if we’re interested in mineral-water interfaces, [clay] is the most logical one to be looking at.
Simulated clay-water interface with organic contaminant PFBS and calcium chloride ions.
What are some common obstacles in removing or remediating contaminants in our natural systems?
My Ph.D. advisor always used to say that science doesn’t solve problems, it just replaces one problem with a different problem. It kind of seems a little bit bleak, […] but then, on the other hand, you’re just basically hoping that you’re replacing a big problem with a smaller problem, right? Organic contaminants that are present in natural systems tend to decay naturally with some kind of exponential decay, both through interaction with sunlight, like if they’re in a river or lake and also by being accidentally broken down by microorganisms. There’s some trickiness with that in that it often generates collections of byproducts or degradation products, that in some cases can actually be more toxic than the initial contaminant. A lot of engineered processes for removing contaminants from a system basically just remove them by transferring them to a different system. It doesn’t take [the contaminant] out of the system completely, so it’s always going to be there. Historically a lot of environmental engineering has kind of focused on protecting humans, basically preventing contaminants from coming into contact with humans, whereas a more sustainable approach would be actually removing contamination from the Earth.
What does sustainability mean to you?
I think sustainability to me means thinking about the entire lifecycle of some kind of environmental issue, I guess it’s easier for me to think of in terms of contaminants or carbon. I feel like sustainability kind of in a way also forces you to think more about natural processes. We try to focus on what we think are the most pressing kind of environmental concerns that humanity is facing, and often those happen to be concerns where [the] most pressing environmental issues are the ones where humans are clearly behaving in a very unsustainable way.
Are there any sustainability or climate science resources you know of that you would suggest for readers?
I did read Silent Spring six months ago and I was like this book is amazing! I don’t know why I didn’t read it before, you know. It’s also scary, but interesting.
Image Credit: National Museum of American History via https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1453548
One thing that I try to do in in CEE 207, the Intro to Environmental Engineering course, is to take a 10-minute break and talk about environmental news in like the major news outlets that that came out since the previous lecture. The Guardian has had a ton of really nice kind of environmental coverage for the last several years.
In its current state, only a fraction of the plastic types we use on a daily basis is actually recyclable, accounting for an 8.7% recycling rate. While the process may be limited, sustainability researchers have been working to make improvements in the materials we recycle in order to reduce our consumption of single-use plastics. In this interview, I discuss the chemistry of recycling with Paul Chirik, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, whose lab recently discovered a plastic material with the potential to be recycled more effectively.
Image Credit: Paul Chirik via https://chirik.princeton.edu/
Could you give a brief overview of your current research? What makes it interesting to you?
So, what I do is I study catalysis. That’s a key component of sustainability because what catalysis does is by definition it makes chemical processes use less energy. The question we asked is: Is catalysis as sustainable as it can be? That’s the cool part of sustainability research – you can always do better. You can always save a little bit more [energy] here and there. One of the big things we’ve been after for a long time is that we’ve looked at the way people use catalysts; usually, they’re based on rare elements like platinum and palladium (all the stuff in the catalytic converter in your car). Nobody would argue catalytic converters are bad, they’ve completely cleared up the air and the environment from car exhaust, but at the same time, we’re using elements that come out of mines that have really huge carbon footprints. So, the [goal] is to use these great catalysts with iron and try to make all these reactions go better with less energy input [and] generate less waste. I think the most exciting thing is that we started doing this trying to make catalysts to insert into existing processes, and then when you start playing with new metals and new catalysts, you discover things you never thought you would see.
Image Credit: BBC News via https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45496884
What does the current recycling process for plastics look like? How would you like to further improve it?
I think people are now appreciating how bad it is. You know, I actually feel a little guilty as a chemist, I didn’t realize how bad it was until we started studying it. I figured every week we put our milk jugs at the end of the curb and they went away and all is well, and you don’t realize the percentage of plastic that gets recycled is so low. That tells me there’s a chemistry problem here, the biggest part of it is we need new materials. We use a lot of plastic that it doesn’t make sense to recycle.
What does sustainability mean to you? How do you engage with sustainability outside of your scientific work?
Sustainability to me means a way of life, right? I think it should be how you interact with the environment around you. Outside of my job, I try to practice what I preach which is looking at how much stuff I throw away, how much I consume […]. You have to ask yourself what kind of carbon footprint you think you have and compare that to what you actually have. I think the most impactful thing I can do is educate people, because of the kind of science we do.
What is your favorite source of sustainable energy and why?
If you ask me as a chemist where we need to be in 100 years, we need to rely on the sun. It’s free, there’s lots of it. The problem is we don’t know how to do most of [the chemistry] yet. We have a long way to go but that doesn’t mean you give up, because it’s a really hard problem.
What are some common misconceptions about energy sources?
I think the biggest misconception is that people think that fossil fuel is only for gasoline in their car. They don’t realize that you cannot live without interacting with multiple products [of fossil fuels], whether it’s your clothes or carpets, [even] the food you eat was grown from fertilizer that was made from fossil fuels. Just about every single product you interact with […] had an interaction or derivation from fossil fuels.
Are there any sustainability or climate science resources you know of that you would suggest for readers?
I pay a lot of attention to elemental usage. Hopefully, people worry about their carbon footprint, but that’s still very narrow, you should worry about your element footprint. Your cell phone has 65 of them in it, and some of those elements take a lot of energy [to obtain].
Discover where the elements which make up your smartphone are sourced from:
In my climate science class, GEO 202: Ocean, Atmosphere, and Climate, we frequently talk about the ways human activity is affecting the planet, with increased carbon emissions, rising temperatures, and shifting atmospheric/oceanic dynamics. It always interests me to understand the positions of those so close to climate research on living a sustainable lifestyle and the current state of their research. This week I interviewed my professor, Graeme MacGilchrist, who is an oceanographer and climate scientist doing his post-doctorate at Princeton in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences. We discussed his relationship with sustainability and its intersection with his scientific research, specifically surrounding the ocean’s response to climate change.
Image Credit: Graeme MacGilchrist
What does sustainability mean to you? How do you engage with sustainability outside of your scientific work?
If you want to talk about sustainability you need to address the internalized concept of how we live our lives [and contribute to a] society that is thinking about sustainability as a core function in everything that it does. The thing that’s the most worrisome is that the effects of climate change are going to be so unequal. It’s hard to convince somebody who is in a very comfortable situation, […] so you have to tap into something deeper in people which is really about compassion and empathy. Climate justice and climate equity are inseparable from the sustainability effort. I try to be a good community citizen in the sense […] of all the classic ways of trying to limit my broad environmental impact [by] cycling and walking much more than driving.
Could you give a brief overview of your current research? What makes it interesting to you?
I really think about the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle; the amount of carbon that’s in the atmosphere has a significant impact on the […] absorption and retention of energy by the ocean. The ocean is playing this critical role in determining how much carbon stays in the atmosphere as a massive storage unit of carbon. I try to understand through modeling how ocean circulation is playing a role in determining the uptake and storage and movement of carbon, both in terms of future change […] as well as past changes. The reason I like that is that it involves every science that you can imagine.
Image Credit: Graeme MacGilchrist
With what you have seen through your research, what are the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature rise on the oceans? I did some work early on in my career on ocean acidification, so as we put carbon into the atmosphere it makes the ocean less alkaline, and the impact is felt by calcifying organisms which a lot of the base of the food chain of the ocean is made up of. In terms of the ocean, we’re really moving into the unknown in regard to the ecosystem functioning and the impact in a broad way.
Where do you see the climate in the next few centuries?
I feel like we’re at this particularly fraught moment, where we could go either way. There are some really positive indications the corner is being turned here. I think a lot of genuine conversations are occurring about carbon mutual features, […] climate change, and emissions.
Have you seen the effects of improper waste disposal in person, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? How does that make you feel?
I have not seen the Pacific Garbage Patch and funnily enough, there’s a misconception about it. It’s not all plastic bags sitting on the surface of the ocean. It’s mostly small particles of plastic that have made their way there […] and high concentrations of plastics on the surface of the ocean. I worked on a project very briefly tracking plastic waste from an island called Aldabra in the Indian Ocean […] using ocean currents to do some back trajectories to determine where these particles came from.
Are there any sustainability or climate science resources you know of that you would suggest for readers? There’s a book by […] Alastair McIntosh called Riders on the Storm. I actually ended up being like a science advisor for it. He puts together basically the spiritual keys for addressing the climate crisis.
Image Credit: Alastair McIntosh via alastairmcintosh.com
In the Fall 2019 semester, I worked on a project which incorporated the S.C.R.A.P. Lab (our campus composter, fondly known as Scrappy) for my class ENE321: Resource Recovery for a Circular Economy taught by Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Z. Jason Ren. This class discussed the topic of a circular economy which is the idea that resources should be reused and repurposed instead of how our linear economy simply puts items into waste. Our final project for this course was to create a business idea and pitch for a company that incorporates elements of the circular economy, and when I first heard of this idea my mind immediately turned to compost.
Composting takes food scraps and uses it to create a soil additive that enriches the earth which can assist in growing new food and/or keeping the environment healthy. My team also wanted to incorporate a new element and produce something from compost. Through our research, we learned that the process of composting emits biogenic CO2 and we wanted to repurpose that gas and produce something new. Our minds turned to the process of photosynthesis in which water and carbon dioxide contribute to building organic matter so we wanted to find a product that we could grow easily and then sell to consumers. This is when we came across the algae species, Arthrospira maxima and Arthrospira platensis more commonly known as Spirulina.
Spirulina (Arthrospira platensis and Arthrospira maxima) contains 55-70% protein by dry weight, as well as high amino acid content and nutrients. It grows best in environments with high CO2 concentrations, a high pH, and high temperatures.
Spirulina are a globally cultivated algae species for food production because of their high protein content and nutritional value. We decided that the nutritious algae would be an excellent food product to sell as our business product and the only thing left to decide was how to grow the spirulina. We decided that the best way to grow them and incorporate the compost would be to use a photobioreactor which is a closed system that would allow us to control the inputs and outputs of the spirulina growth mixture. We could also take the CO2 from an industrial composter like Scrappy and feed it into our photobioreactor to cultivate the spirulina.
After settling on an idea, my team had to settle on a company name and company roles. The members of my team were myself as the Chief Technological Officer, Jivahn Moradian ‘20 as the Chief Financial Officer, and Gabby D’Arcangelo ‘21 as the Chief Executive Officer. When deciding on a name we wanted something that represented both the algae and the use of carbon dioxide from the composter. So the name we settled on was AlgaeHG or AlGHG. The GHG in the title is short for Greenhouse gases which we are using to create our product in the form of CO2.
Gabby D’Arcangelo ‘21, Wesley Wiggins ’21, and Jivahn Moradian ‘20 (from left to right) presenting the AlgaeHG business pitch and presentation in ENE321: Resource Recovery for a Circular Economy. Photo Credits: Professor Z. Jason Ren
Though the company was created for a class project, the three of us had quite a fun time brainstorming the science, engineering, finances, and algae puns for our little class project. And we were thankful to Gina Talt and the S.C.R.A.P. Lab for letting Gabby and Jivahn visit the Lab during my shift, and for all of the other assistance, we were able to receive.
