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THE FRONTIER LINE
Hosts Wayne Aston and David Murray explore the critical global pillars of infrastructure development and energy production, from traditional methods to future-forward advancements. The Frontier Line covers the latest industry news, energy innovations, and sustainability trends that are shaping the future. Through expert interviews with industry leaders in renewable energy, utility-scale battery storage, and waste-to-energy technologies, the podcast provides insights into the evolving landscape of energy efficiency and sustainable infrastructure. By focusing on the intersection of innovation and the politics of energy, The Frontier Line highlights transformative ideas and technologies poised to deliver cost-efficient, resilient, and sustainable solutions for global industries.
THE FRONTIER LINE
Waste to Energy
What if over two petawatts of renewable energy were just waiting to be tapped in the U.S., yet remain frustratingly unconnected to the grid? Join us as we unravel this perplexity and promise to enlighten you on the financial twists and regulatory tangles that have led to this gridlock. From the role of private equity funding and government subsidies to the potential reluctance of existing power companies, we navigate the intricate landscape that developers and investors must traverse. We also confront head-on the pressing need for interconnection assurances and binding power purchase agreements that could unlock this vast potential.
But we don't stop there. We shift gears and ignite a lively discussion on the transformative world of waste-to-energy technologies. Imagine turning trash into treasure, converting waste into valuable resources like biochar and jet fuel, and offering a sustainable alternative to finite fossil fuels. We explore the innovative methods that make this possible—such as pyrolysis and hydrogen conversion—and highlight pioneering companies that are leading the charge. By embracing a cradle-to-cradle mindset, we aim to inspire a revolution in waste management that not only addresses environmental hazards but also contributes to a sustainable energy future.
Finally, we shine a light on the critical role of baseload power in our energy landscape and how waste-to-energy solutions could redefine this concept. As we confront the challenges of transitioning from traditional landfill methods to more sustainable practices, we delve into the logistical hurdles that must be overcome. From consistent waste feedstock to efficient sorting facilities, the path to a greener future is complex but promising. We wrap up by exploring the exciting potential of upcycling and decentralized waste management, envisioning a future where waste is not just managed, but transformed into a resource of greater value.
welcome back, dave. I'm happy to see you today, so happy to see you when there's been a question festering in my mind since that, only one, a big way, it's a big one, it's a bigger question than usual, and it came up after that last conversation. We were kind of getting into the conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories Us. And the question is you brought up a statistic of, I wanted to say, a couple terawatts of renewable energy that's been developed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the US uses about four and a half a year, four and a half petabytes Petawatts per year. And there's a little over two petawatts out there available, not connected, okay, not connected on that grid that we talk about all the time Not connected, not connected, not connected Over two. So half of what we use in a year as the us is sitting there, available that number one is an inordinate amount of power available yes but my question for the conspiracy theorists is how in the hell did that get funded?
Speaker 1:who, who, what? Well, I'm sure it's blackstone kkr, I'm sure it's the big funds, private equity combined with government subsidies. But how in the world did they convince investors to go in probably hundreds of billions of dollars with no power purchase agreements or no interconnection capability? Interconnection, right, yeah, I bet they have the PPAs.
Speaker 2:They probably have the power purchase agreements or no interconnection capability Interconnection, right, yeah, I bet they have the PPAs, they probably have the power purchase agreements for everybody. It's connection and I think it leaves me thinking it had to be. Well, you know, we've got some tax benefits and this and that and the other, and the subsidies are covering this, and so the government footing the bill you know bill to do this, to let it sit. It's not how I mean I understand it, but I'm sure it's. You know how do you do that, like, oh no, we're going to build basically half our grid over again, or half the amount of power over that we produce, but we're not going to have a way to connect it.
Speaker 1:I just am thinking. I mean, the reason the question is so pressing on my mind is because we're actively raising capital, we're developing power, we're looking at developing transmission, we're developing industrial and we're having conversations with investors all the time and they want to know. They want the guarantee we've got interconnect. They want the guarantee we've got interconnect. They want the guarantee we've got an off-taker for whatever we produce in a binding PPA power purchase agreement. And I just imagine the pitch it would have taken to successfully entice hundreds of billions of dollars to go in on that proposal with no interconnect. That's a feat in and of itself. It is.
Speaker 2:I don't know how it was done. I hope somebody can explain it to us because, holy shit, yeah right, I mean there are probably 17 different reasons as to how it came to that. But, on a very fundamental level, I don't know how you do any of this without having at least some idea of how this gets connected at some, at least some close time in the future. Yeah, because that right now I look at that and you know everything I know about it. That's not getting solved next year, no, or the following year or the year after that. I, this is a long that is not going to get solved immediately. So how does that capital go in? Be fine, with it sitting there for that long? I don't understand. Well, unless there's again, if you combine tax and tax, you know tax incentives and things and maybe a tax strategy, I mean all kinds of things. Maybe there's, maybe a pencils, but I don't get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe maybe big funds are looking at tax equities and they're looking for a loss, you know, maybe maybe they need a loss to hedge. It's a loss, right, but but with, I mean, the interconnect seems to be one of those critical things where the power company doesn't necessarily want to take that renewable onto the grid. No, so there's a fundamental resistance to all to two petawatts coming onto the grid. Yeah, because you've got the, the dominant power companies that control all of that are getting their power elsewhere. Yeah, that that, that is a. It's to me, that's a dicey situation. I I we have to find out more about that it's.
Speaker 2:It's. It's shocking, actually, I mean, I think that's the thing. It's just shocking. It's shocking that we have that much sitting there. Yeah, then you think about the point you raised. It's shocking that people wrote the checks. Yeah to that. Yeah, without any sort of at least it's seemingly guarantee that we're going to build it, and it's truly a oh well, we'll build it and they will come, but we're not into this to the level they are into this industry, and it's obvious to us that the biggest problem is, well, one of the biggest problems is the grid. That's a really big challenge and you're right. People we've talked to have said exactly well, who are you selling it to, or how does it connect and how are you going to solve?
Speaker 1:transmission. Oh, we'll give you 100 million if you got that ppa executed, right.
Speaker 2:No problem, no problem, uh yeah yeah, maybe they're going on that like oh, ppa is executed, they'll eventually buy, and yeah a lot.
Speaker 2:I, I don't get it. Yeah, I mean, it's above my pay grade. As far as, like that, I I don't. I don't understand, yeah, how that could be done, because it's, it's. It just seems like it's highly irresponsible and, and again, there's still no good solution. There's no national, as far as I can tell, no national organization, or I mean because you've got states, yeah, you've got the utilities the states have. You know, the states have their own control over their own area. Then you have the feds. If all of these entities and if anything, it's probably lost in the minutiae of that, of that thing right there who is who's, who's overseeing all this? Like, yeah, how, how are we solving this right?
Speaker 1:listen, I don't know. Disclaimer we have never said we have all the answers. We've never said we have any of the answers. We're stimulating some conversation and we want to have our listeners start thinking about the things we're thinking about.
Speaker 2:We're trying to get to the answers we can all say, we can all agree on, and say you know what? That's right Now, that feels right, like everybody can get in. Okay, that that's the best, and you know that's. That's kind of where I'm at. But, yes, and I know you are too. It's like we do not, but I think we're asking the right questions. I think we're seeing some of the obstacles. You know, I didn't think I'd be. I didn't think, like a year ago, I would be steeped in a conversation about our national power grid and security, safety and how these things are working and right, talking to elected officials about how you solve these things, even even in the state, and how you know how, how, how, how. Never thought about it because I didn't think that was going to be the issue that we needed to tackle. Yeah, turns out I was wrong.
Speaker 1:It's okay to be wrong. We're going to be wrong fast and we're going to pivot quickly, right, yeah, no kidding, let's. Let's dive into one of my favorite. You know we've covered a few really exciting modalities of energy and power production in the last few episodes and we've talked about the, the infrastructure and the grid and all these things. Let's, let's dive into the waste to energy conversation. Shall we, let's, let's. It's an exciting waste to energy.
Speaker 1:Folks Using garbage or bio waste or refuse of of any type. There's lots of categories in this. This kind of goes back to recyclables, recycling the kind of the big buzz of recycling that started maybe 20, 30 years ago, recognizing a need to use materials more effectively. So we've been asked to recycle our plastic bottles forever. We've been asked to recycle our cardboards and things like that forever, with scattered success, scattered results, depending on how effective, whatever's happening in a, in a local area.
Speaker 1:Um, it seems to me and to the layman that that waste in general, if, if there was a way to to effectively use it, would be a phenomenal feedstock because it's always growing with the population. Like the average household is producing, you know, several pounds of waste every single day and the population is expanding in an exponential growth rate right now, except for China, right. But. But as population grows and pop and, and we continue to produce waste, we're using landfills, and we touched on this on, like episode two, the dangers of landfills. But now that I've kind of laid this out, let's get your initial thoughts on the waste to energy. Where do you want to start with this conversation, Dave Boy?
Speaker 2:I didn't think it would be such an exciting space. How about that Meaning? There's a lot going on in this area. There are a lot of really smart people that have been trying to solve this for a while. Why waste If we can deal with waste and we can do something, that is, literally if we can just take this thing that we're all discarding and we can turn it into something valuable. It gets to this concept of this cradle to cradle Instead of just putting something using one thing and then putting in cradle to grave, which has been talked about. You get a thing, you have a product, you have a phone, you use it, you throw it away. The idea behind cradle to cradle, which is where this whole conversation goes, is that you have a thing, maybe you discard it, but it goes in and it gets reused in another fashion.
Speaker 2:And in the energy space right now the waste energy space it's exciting because the technology is moving away from incineration. So we've had incineration for a while. You burn garbage, it produces power, but what does it also do is it kicks off a lot of carcinogens. There's all kinds of stuff. But then some of the new methodologies around hydrogen, using pyrolysis and some other kinds of methodologies have really borne out some really cool stuff, and that's what, collectively as the US, have companies that are successfully testing and producing energy from organic waste.
Speaker 2:You know, say, 15% of what you could find in a landfill, probably more than that, probably like 30 or 40, 30, 35% of what you could find in a landfill can be put into one of these processes, and there's a couple of different.
Speaker 2:Actually there's a or in a couple. There are a handful of different approaches on how to do that, and so it's taking this, this, this stuff, turning it into usable energy or into a different kind of fuel, or with byproducts like biochar or jet, a fuel for for planes, or there are all kinds of ways they're approaching this and solutions and they're having good success. They're proving out their models and some of these groups are already getting into that point where they're scaling up. And that's exciting to me because I think, to your point, waste is a huge problem, a huge, huge, huge problem, that it is truly one of those things where we're like outside, out of mind until we have to go and throw something away or we have to take a drive to the local dump, or then we kind of see that like oh, that mountain wasn't there last time I came out here.
Speaker 2:You know, wayne and I had a chance to be in, to visit the Cayman back in May I think it was May and what's happening down there is their garbage problem is so significant. They've planted trees and put up fencing and it sits on the middle of the island. It's just this giant pile that keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. Well, that is a really good use case, and that's everywhere in America. Oh, it came as a thought. But they don't know what to do with it. They can't offload it Right, and so now they're just hiding it from view.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, culturally, I think it's time we stop hiding from this problem. I think there's a lot of people who agree with that and it's time to start tackling this problem because it's caused a lot of issues. There are, there are there's good data to say it's led to jump in cancer rates there. You know, there's the fact that we're extracting all of this material and then we're throwing it away and then say, ok, now we need some of the material, some more material, as opposed to saying, well, maybe we can use this and actually get some value out of it and get some life out of it. So I mean, all of those things just lend itself to saying this is a really interesting time because I think we're on the cusp of some very significant solutions that solve some of these decades-long problems we've all had when we have addressed power density or energy density, it seems to me waste to energy probably falls right in the middle of that spectrum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, a waste conversion plant that we're aware of could be done on a relatively small footprint. I think the most exciting thing you've been touching on here is, uh, as we consider feedstock in the commodities markets coal, oil and gas all very expensive to mine or extract and refine, so just pulling it out of the earth is an expensive and arduous process, whereas waste is not. I mean, that's an exciting thing that it's just piling up because we don't have so, unlike our traditional fossil fuels, those aren't necessarily a problem. We could leave all the coal in the earth and there would be no problem. The earth would be healthy and we'd just continue to do what we do. Same with oil, same with gas. We could just leave it alone. Right, if we had an alternative to it.
Speaker 1:But waste, on the other hand, waste is the problem, and so, as we look at and explore all of these modalities of energy and power production, waste to energy seems like the most bang for your buck, because you have a massive problem, a debilitating problem in many countries like India and Africa and other third world countries where waste is just the problem of the day. So take the problem of the day and convert it into the solution that we maybe need more than anything, which is power to do all of it. That's a home run. That's a home run, so it is the grand slam. It is the grand slam. It has all these advantages that all of our traditional power production means don't have, and solving multiple problems. So let's dig into the benefits real quick of what would it be like if we were effectively able to eliminate landfills. How could we measure that? What are the KPIs inherent with eliminating landfills?
Speaker 2:Number one is carbon reduction right, right, because the methane that's coming off landfills. Number one is carbon reduction, right, right? Uh, because the the methane that's coming off landfills is significant and we know that and that's you know, that's why actually they get, they get measured right as soon as they get capped, or whatever. They mean that it will continue to produce and produce, and produce, and produce and produce that's right.
Speaker 1:That's right, and I'm also we touched on this, I think, in episode two. You know the methods of landfill development and capping those landfills are faulty. They're archaic and faulty anyways, you know. And so we have these other leaching issues impairing our water sources and the water tables, and you know, impairing our water sources and the water tables and you know bodies of water that are in proximity to these landfills. So that's another major reason why we should be addressing landfills and try to actually eliminate a landfill as the primary means of managing our waste globally, right, right. So there's, there's huge incentives here beyond efficient power production of dense power, production ability and potential just at the core level here of solving this waste to energy in a global fashion on a utility level scale. And I think what we've seen so far is we've got pilot projects, we've got demo projects, so different levels, but we're not seeing anyone on a utility scale just yet, not yet being able to consume enough waste to produce utility scale power effectively. Right. So it's a transition.
Speaker 2:It's one of these transitions where we see opportunity absolutely uh well, and I, and, and I know some of their challenges and we've talked to some of these groups um, it's getting that consistent feedstock right and that is actually a a. You know something that has to be solved when we talk about, you know, getting feedstock, you've got them, you've got a. You know, in fact, you might actually get paid to take it or they might pay you to take it because it's it's doesn't go in landfill. But it's also getting that done, like anything else, getting that on a consistent basis. You want to have that consistently going and we've talked, you've mentioned it a couple of times. We probably ought to quickly address and probably ought to continue to address it. But there's, we say, baseload power. Yeah, you want to tell everybody what that means in terms of why we talk about baseload power and how important that is and why some is and some isn't.
Speaker 1:We've had to really get clear about baseload power, as we've been interacting with data center operators and what we would have to deliver to them as a developer to build a data center and have them be able to operate it effectively. And we're talking about redundancy and latency, and that means that that baseload power has to be bulletproof. You can't have brownouts, you can't have weather outages, you can't have those things impacting that business's critical, critical infrastructure. So you know, we've been focusing on baseload power because that's 24 7 dependable power, rain or shine, um, and and there are very few things that could impact that not not being properly, you know, provided, yeah, okay, and, and right now, that's. That's basically coal, oil and gas fired plants. For the most part, it's our traditional plants that are providing baseload, which is why it's our strong opinion that that's always going to be the case. But we provide baseload.
Speaker 2:I think geothermal is going to get added, probably fourth. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think geothermal is one of those things. Once they get there, it will be able to have a. It's going to be consistent. I think we're seeing that here in utah. Yeah, that's what they're proving out. Uh, down at furbo, that's absolutely right. Yeah, but the but the industry and all the industry has got they've got to adopt that and be like good with it, like right, yeah, we're fine, right, we're fine with geothermal, but that's going to be a while and that's not every geothermal location. Some of them are far, far hinkier. Some of them are very consistent. Anyway, I just think that's going to be the fourth.
Speaker 2:One comes out which is good, yes, but none of these things happen quickly. And that's the interesting part is like, as developers, everything else we have to, like deliver what the to the you know, and build to the the stipulations. And if they say, no, we need, we need baseload power, we might want wind, we might want solar, we might want all these things, they'll say, sorry, not trustworthy enough for us. It doesn't check all the boxes, it has to be X, and so all of that is taking time too. So it's not just a it's need to have nice to have taking time too.
Speaker 2:So it's not just a it's need to have nice to have. There are real reasons why you have to choose um, oil gas, maybe geothermal in the future in order to provide base load power. Because no one is, at least on the data center side as far as I'm aware of right now. No one, no company, no group is okay with that Right. That it's that it would say most of your power could come from solar Right, or short-range, that's absolutely true.
Speaker 2:I think it's going to be solar combined with batteries. It's going to have to be these combined solutions where you can prove you have enough run time. That's why we talk about baseload power and we talk about those kinds of solutions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and so it's important to understand with to provide baseload power, you have consistency in feedstock. You know if you're talking about natural gas, that's a pipeline. That's still. That's still what they call just in time energy, because that pipeline flows based on the demand. Um coal can be stored site, so that's still the most dependable. You can store a future reserve of coal on site to feed that plant Waste to energy.
Speaker 1:There's some challenges around that because the sorting to your point, sorting the waste means that you've got to construct a facility. We know that we refer to that as a MRF or an MRF. That's a materials reclamation facility, and the way we're designing and looking at the MRF design is it's basically a recycling operation but it's more of a sorting operation. You're going to take in this truckload of garbage or train carload of garbage, sort it, send recyclables where they need to go and then the balance of that you can determine what could be properly used for production of energy or some other advanced material. And so there's a cost associated with the sorting and the facilities that were required to actually take such an inconsistent mass of stuff and sort it into the stuff that could be effectively burned in pyrolysis or using one of the other modalities to convert that to energy. That's right, right, that's right, right, that's right. There are a few companies that are quite exciting that we've had the recent opportunity to interact with.
Speaker 2:Very, very smart people really know what they're doing and it's exciting to talk to them because they are very excited about the future in this space.
Speaker 1:I'm confident we'll be able to get them on the show.
Speaker 2:I certainly hope so, because I have a lot of questions I know you do too and also be able to introduce our listeners to them. And these are groups you're going to want to. These are companies you're going to want to pay attention to. If you're looking for that early, like hey, who's maybe coming up who might need some investment, that kind of a thing. They're also interesting companies to maybe invest in. They've got some at least the two I'm thinking of. They've got great traction and they're solving some problems, and these are solutions that they came up with years ago, I mean decades ago. Scientists have been all over. They're just finally getting this into production, being able to solve it, but now's the time.
Speaker 1:You know when I think about some of the pros and cons and in contrast with geothermal I love geothermal because the technology is so good, it's so efficient if you have the geographical location, if you have the proven reserve, two miles under the Earth's surface, of a certain heat in that salty brine that the Earth naturally produces, which is pretty much unlimited. If you can hit one of those reservoirs, then that's a very dependable, that is base load, could qualify as base load 24 7 power. But you got to be in the right location. So you can't, by default, you can't do that anywhere in the us or in the world. Nope, yeah, you've got to do. You've got to drill those, those wells and you've got to find the and confirm it with the studies. I'm not not not dissimilar to oil and gas.
Speaker 2:No, in fact actually. I mean, that's Vervo's kind of claim to fame, and their approach is they're using an oil and gas approach. They're drilling like oil and gas. They're going down and they're going down deep and they've had great success.
Speaker 1:So I consider the geographical limitation maybe a disadvantage of geothermal Yep, whereas when I look at waste to energy landfills, are everywhere.
Speaker 2:Every little town on Earth has garbage.
Speaker 1:Anywhere we are, it's garbage Anywhere humans exist, and so this conversation of decentralization is relevant. It is If we could somehow get to a point where you don't drive your stuff to the landfill or you don't, the garbage trucks don't pick it up and take it to one spot. The garbage trucks collect it and they bring it to the power plant directly. So direct collection services instead of landfilling it. We're talking about replacing a landfill with a better way of managing the waste. That's right.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, that's right. And combined with some other things out there in the waste to solutions we'll call it waste to solutions you could effectively take a landfill and deal with 90% of the landfill on a daily basis. So 90, 95% of what comes in you could deal with in other ways that are far more productive, great solutions. And you start looking at that, going, okay, what if you could deal with 90% plus of the garbage we produce on an annual basis? So you know, that is I would imagine, if you had. Well, I imagine some I haven't talked to somebody I know you have you've had conversations with people who are in the in that space. They they see it as a game changer, Absolutely Like huge, like an entire shift of how we deal with garbage.
Speaker 2:I mean, and even in the case of maybe how we recycle, which has been kind of one of my pet peeves. You know, I always, every time I'm washing out a plastic item, I'm always asking myself how much water I'm wasting, right, and I get it Again. This is where I'm like saying there's probably some real data out there. Uh, they could say maybe it's not a big deal, maybe it is, but let's just say we have a milk jug, right, yeah, instead of having to wash it out, I just throw it in a recycle bin and that gets picked up, because the group that's using that doesn't care that there's milk in there. Right, doesn't matter. Um, we're getting there, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:The exciting part is that maybe that also changes stuff, so it has all these little micro follow on effects where I don't have to. I don't have to waste water cleaning out something that I know. If there is one ring, you know hard plastic ring in that entire mix, that whole batch might be thrown out. Right, that's kind of some of the problems is it's not a very efficient industry right now as it stands's.
Speaker 1:Still, it's being used, it's, it's been, it's been a good start you know, but yes it, I think, we think it could be a lot better you know, you remind me of a conversation I had, maybe maybe a year ago, with a large recycling facility in Northern California, and we were talking about this whole waste to energy conversation, and I wanted to go down and tour this recycling plant, because we were talking with them about the nuances of kind of taking some of the stuff they couldn't maybe recycle, and it shocked me when the owner of this plant shared with me that um, I want to say this was maybe a covid related thing, where pre-covid uh, they were shipping all of their, their recyclables, over to china china, no, that was yeah, I heard that and the cost of that was like 15 cents a ton, or maybe it was like $15 a ton. And post-COVID transition, like two years later, all the Chinese tariffs and things we have all these boycotts happening with China. We have all this disruption with China. China stops accepting it and leaves these big facilities in the US finding another solution. Well, we do have recycling areas where they can work together in the US. They can process the stuff, whatever China was doing for them. There's only a handful in the US that can handle this material, and the cost cost, though, went from fifteen dollars a ton to like three thousand dollars a ton. Now it doesn't pencil.
Speaker 1:Now the recycling plant in northern california is like we, you know we. We can't stay in business on those more. There's no margin because our all of our shipping just went up exponentially. So another big reason is logistics and the handling of recyclables. The whole recycling camp I think has become dramatically reduced over the last decade. I think we were really excited about that historically, maybe 10, 20 years ago. It's not as exciting these days because there's less that can be recycled and we're just finding it's more difficult to do it. So to have a system, an energy system, that could take on not just those recyclables but take on waste that isn't recyclable and have a solution for all of it, we can still get the benefit of the metal that we have efficient means of recycling, we can still do that and that can't go toward energy production. So we're talking about a big gap of solutions to the extent that these waste-to-energy facilities can develop that tech.
Speaker 1:As we're talking with some of these startups again, multiple opportunities the two main ones have been hey, we've got a prototype or hey, we've got a pilot plant operating. We're looking for growth capital, we're exploring that and we have a huge interest in seeing them become successful and seeing them scale that. It would behoove us to help them bridge the gap from processing 50 tons a day to 1,000 tons a day, for example, like just scaling into utility energy production. Right, that is a major interest of ours. The other major interest is because every community we enter into with a new development has the same waste management problem. How cool would it be if we could incorporate waste to energy or waste to materials on each of our sites as part of that unique energy mix and solve even more.
Speaker 1:We talk about dollars follow value. Solve even more that. We talk about dollars follow value. And we talk about entering a community and providing value. Providing value to our investors, to our community, uh, to the political constituents involved in that community, like you know, figuring these ways out to provide value to all constituents involved.
Speaker 2:What is that? Well finding? Well, finding that, when, when, when, what, what does everybody want? Right? And oftentimes you and I have probably we both run into this when you start talking to the groups. You find these common, these threads of commonality, like, okay, we need this, we need this. Okay, well, they want this. Okay, Maybe it's opposite, but maybe there's a solution that they can both live with. It's finding those things right, that's right.
Speaker 1:We're going to get deeper into the waste, to materials, way deep, so deep In another episode, or all of them, yeah that's right. But waste to materials is particularly interesting, because now we're talking about you've used this term cradle to cradle, and what is so cool about cradle to cradle? And you can be certified to be cradle to cradle you can?
Speaker 2:There's a whole institute.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so to become cradle to cradle means that you're manufacturing a product that you could then recycle over and over and over, pretty much in perpetuity. That is an interesting, that's a very interesting solution, because waste to energy, I mean, there's a limitation to that you consume it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a one-directional thing. It's consume, it probably deal with it and it's probably going to be some version of energy. It's not biochar. If it's biocharchar, well it could go in the reconstitute soils and all like that, but it's, it's a one-way street, yeah it is, but it's, it's a good. It's a good one because it's either going to be it's going to be sitting in the landfill kicking off methane, or it can be dealt with to where it's actually can be used the right way, and we it's not kicking off, though nothing yeah so, but it is one way, but we're talking about something that is a it's this, it's this constant and the cradle, the cradle concept, um is, I mean, it was a you know,
Speaker 2:it was. There was a book, so go find the book. It's a. It's a good book, it's worth a read. Um, it's provocative. Uh, it's this idea of you know. They call everything. That's it all.
Speaker 2:It all talks about bad design. Yeah, is that when we can't solve a problem, it's we're probably dealing with bad design. You know their, their thesis is that we should be designing things to be ultimately just taken apart and then repurposed. So microphone, you know, designing a microphone that at at the end its life, these parts easily come, you know, go to whatever. Okay, we're going to take this metal part here, this part goes there, this part goes there, and that they can be broken apart and then reused in whatever process.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's to build another microphone, maybe it's to do something else. But the problem happens when you start combining materials, as we, you know. We know this. Like you put a table together and you put the table together with screws or nails or whatever. Well, all of a sudden now you've got metal inside of wood and you can't deal more effectively with it. Anyway, that's kind of where they kind of go and they talk about it on a macro level, about how we can solve a lot of these big problems by just doing better, by designing and by thinking about the end use of these things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that'd be used over and, over and over well, that reminds me of another term that I want to introduce that we're going to use on on an ongoing basis. That's upcycling. We've talked about recycling. Upcycling is like gen 2 yeah of of recycling, and, as as recycling has become much less sexy over the last decade, upcycling is the new way to be addressing this, and that's that's taking the old thing that served its life purpose, landfilled, now being used to create something of even greater value. Potentially so, and one of the things I was thinking about you were talking to on the you know, the recycled thing.
Speaker 2:I mean what some of the at least's right and one of the things I was thinking about you were talking too on the. You know, on the recycle thing, I mean what some of the, at least I'm familiar with. One of the one of the issues I want to go back just a little bit. One of the issues has been and I think this is why it's maybe lost some, I don't know, I think it's why it's it we were fine with recycling plastic bags and then we weren't. Yeah, part of it was cleanliness. You know, our trash isn't necessarily as clean as the trash you need for more pure stock, right. And so to your point about the $3,000,. You know, the $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000, it costs extra. Part of that is they've got to deal with kind of a dirtier feed so they can't do the stuff they want to want to with it.
Speaker 2:So you start thinking about it like, okay, well, the recycling, the way we were doing it wasn't really very good anyway. And this is why I mentioned the cleaning out jugs and stuff. Well, okay, yeah, but then we're using water, right, you know, should we be using a lot of water to clean out our jugs, to do go into, and again, I'm open to like somebody disagreeing with me, but I, I, it would be better designed if we could just use the product as is, put it somewhere and we know that product goes then into some some other, uh, for some other purpose. It gets upcycled into something else. So milk jug becomes this thing right, and it didn't matter whether or not there was milk byproducts or not, because for whatever it's being used, it's fine. I mean, that's the idea.
Speaker 1:Well, I can appreciate you bringing it up, because we're always thinking about efficiencies. Where can we find efficiencies, energy efficiency, efficiencies within our structures? Water efficiency is a huge, huge topic. Water itself is a huge time, so water reclamation comes to the picture. So so there's a contrasting idea that just came to mind, as you're you're sharing that if we're using water in our homes potable water, by the way, which would, which costs money to to process into a consumable, it didn't just come off the mountain and you could use it.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are some communities that have that clean water, but, but a lot of communities, like california, are reusing yeah, they're reusing sewer water and and processing it into potable water. But you consider all of the water it might take to clean off just those milk jugs? That just is wasted water. Whereas if we had a factory that received truckload of waste they're going to use, if it's waste to materials, if it's being upcycled, it's going to go through a cylindrical washing machine and a drying machine. Well, that water gets reclaimed 100%. That's a closed-loop system that will reuse that water over and over. And, by the way, when the waste is actually delivered to a MRF, roughly 32% of the weight of that truckload of garbage is water, so as it gets processed in that whole system, we're extracting wastewater into a processing and water reclamation facility and process beneath the building and that's a highly efficient way to manage water and that's picking out organic waste that goes into energy waste energy.
Speaker 2:Maybe it gets used, so it actually we anyway. Just just a hint, yeah, about how this all starts to work together that's right.
Speaker 1:Well, it's really exciting to talk about efficiency, really excited to talk about how we can engineer things. You talked about bad design, how we can use good design and new tech to better engineer these facilities. Now I'm going to ask you questions. So, looking in the development world of land, we can use good design and new tech to better engineer these facilities.
Speaker 2:Now I'm going to ask you a question. So, looking at the development world of land development, so what's your thesis on developing better, better efficiencies, like, how do we design better developments, for example? I mean, I kind of know the answer to this, but I'm curious, because I think that's been part of your motivator for a while is we can develop differently, smartly, as opposed to not? There's anything wrong with some of the developments that are out there right now, but we're all very familiar with a typical industrial development. Industrial development it's going to be a lot of very, very big box locations, stored probably, uh, cooled facilities all in place, maximizing space. But there's also maybe a different kind of approach. Do you want how much you want to get into?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, we have a whole episode that we're going to drill into our projects. Yeah, the valley Forge, impact Parks, and talk about that in detail.
Speaker 2:You bring it up.
Speaker 1:High level. I mean it is decentralized power, it is decentralized food supply and make it so that it's community-level waste management. If we're using, if we're mandating, within those industrial parks, high-efficiency standards that don't currently exist. The state and municipal codes are not going to mandate LEED certifications or net zero certifications. Those are excellent ways to make power more efficient, power use and consumption more effective, water consumption more efficient. To the extent that we can improve all of those things, it takes the pressure off of having to produce that much power and water. And you know everyone's worried about where's the water coming from. Well, if we could take a smaller amount of water and just be more effective with it, that in its core is a win. And then how much of that can we assimilate into a development? That's really where I'm focused. I love it.
Speaker 2:Quick story I got to help a company out over a decade ago now. They were in the smart sprinkling system. It was a Utah company. It launched they were one of the first out of the box back for testing at the fed level. They, they literally broke the test. Um, the, the, the group came back and said we, we can't. Well, we, we did test it. We can't test it because you passed so well like nothing's ever done this.
Speaker 2:And the idea was and this is really interesting this is when, when california was experiencing a lot of their, their major drought and other they've not that that you know, a lot of that doesn't happen often but, um, you know, their, their systems, their system proved out, their algorithms proved out that if you, if you defer your water management at a home level or even at a you know, you know industrial level, corporate level or at a public level, a corporate level or at a public level to AIML and some algorithms, you could increase efficiency proven by about 40%. You could cut your water usage damn near in half and still have green lawn, wow. So it was a very at the time, a very kind of a provocative thing, but it taught me it's like okay, just by the introduction of a little bit of technology and you let it. You know, and this is using obviously it was using all these complex algorithms to talking about transpiration rates and how windy it was and where you were, but you could still have green lawn, yeah. And so California's solution at the time was Nope, cut it off, cut the water off and do these things, and what ends up what ended up happening in California A lot of is that people would have their water days and they would water for hours and hours, and hours, and hours and hours, because they could. Okay, well, that's absolutely inefficient, it doesn't work, and the what? The water goes down to the bottom of the roots and that's it. And once you're there, anything else is waste, right. Well, we worked with a town down there. The entire town agreed to purchase the town. They wanted to purchase one of these for each of their residents because they saw the value that, instead of solving it the way of like, nope, you just can't do this, or we've got to restrict, and not really dealing with the side effects of that, which was, yeah, you restrict it, but a lot of people would abuse it, and then you were still wasting water. Sure that there was a far better, far more elegant solution and that was just a little bit of a technology switch and it changed. And that taught me a huge lesson, in that we need to be open to those ideas and those different ways of doing things and that we should leverage technology where it can be used and it works. Yeah, and it doesn't take.
Speaker 2:You know, in this case, your bill, I mean, in the case of their, their bills got cut in half. Wow, and they got, but they got cut in half. Here's the here's the funny bills started to get cut in half. Their their, their water usage dropped similarly, but they started to get cut in half. Their water usage dropped similarly. But they started to get criticized for green lawns. They're like how are you doing that? How is that possibly happening? You're wasting water? Well, they weren't wasting water. In fact, they were saving water and they were doing a better job saving water, being more official with it than any of the surrounding areas, because they weren't wasting it on the days that you got. Anyway, that's kind of the moral of the story, and I think we see that in a lot in this space right now there's going to be all these new things, of finding these really intriguing efficiencies with maybe just a small tweak.
Speaker 1:And I think we've come back to trash Well and just bundling the things all together. All together, it's the sum of all of these possibilities that we can cost-effectively change the way we develop. I think that's the essence of it. So bring it all together.
Speaker 2:And our story, my story took us over time. Sorry, no man, it was awesome.
Speaker 1:There is no time.
Speaker 2:Time doesn't even exist. We're shooting back for 45 minutes. We have our own time, yeah.
Speaker 1:I have my own time. We're shooting back for 45 minutes. We have our own time. Yeah, I have my own time. So anyway, thank you guys for listening in. Hopefully you're enjoying what we're putting down and we look forward to the next episode. Thanks, see you next time.
