Hi.
I'm Judy Cole, the Executive Vice President and CEO
of the MIT Alumni Association.
And I'm delighted to welcome you to this web production
of the MIT Alumni Association.
Thank you, Jessica.
That was marvelous.
So thanks to the real time questions,
we have a fabulous transition that came in,
which is that there was a question about,
does Professor [? Transic ?] and what she's shown you here
today, does she think about the impact of manufacturing?
And does she think about the impact of disposal?
And I know she does, because she's a materials
scientist by training.
But that's what my research and my group
talks about, what we focus on.
So Jessica talked about our energy use, the direct impacts
of that energy use, the direct opportunities of that energy
use, the benefits.
And what I want to delve just for a couple of minutes
here, because we definitely want to get
to a good discussion and questions,
is what about sort of the indirect?
Or what about the sort of cascade
of manufacturing events?
Or as my plots illustrate here, I've got a copper mine in Utah
in the upper left.
So what are we doing upstream of the energy technologies
that Jessica talked about?
And then what's happening downstream?
So on this side here, we've got bales of aluminum cans
that are in our municipal recycling facilities.
So that's the work that we do.
And I'm going to just touch on that briefly today just to give
you guys a little bit of a sense of what we focus on,
and where we think the opportunities are,
and particularly why I love thinking
about these problems at MIT.
They're nuanced.
They're complicated.
They're juicy.
And so, it's a fabulous place with the set of resources
and the set of the students that we have here,
why it's just a ton of fun.
So we love this polling thing here.
Let's see if mine are going to cooperate.
So I'm actually going to skip this first one.
I'm going to give you the answer already for the first one,
because we want to get to the scope of things.
But just to give a little sense about scale--
I like to think about scale in one dimension.
So my question to you, where I have given you the chance
to answer it was, how much trash do you throw out per day?
Just to give you a sense.
You know, what do you directly interact with when
you're thinking about disposal?
So this is a plot from the US EPA over time,
past several decades.
So 2013, so it's a little bit old.
But takes the EPA a little while.
We throw away per person about four pounds of trash per day.
So then here's the question you guys get to answer.
So that's your direct impact.
Your direct outflow.
So let's expand this question.
What if we think about instead, what base of materials
is required for you to live your lives?
To drive your cars?
For the mining that you do?
The devices that you carry?
So let's think about how much material
is roughly associated with your daily life
if you consider all these indirect and direct flows,
if you can think about that, manufacturing disposal.
So we're talking about inflows now, right?
What base of materials is required in pounds please.
So we've got 100 pounds.
We've got 50.
Those numbers are pretty cool.
So it's weighting them.
The bigger number is the most popular vote.
That's what we're seeing there.
So we're going to say that we're getting about 100.
Does anybody see 200?
I see 200.
Does anybody see higher?
Oh, 50,000 pounds!
Nice.
Per person per day, right?
So let's not forget to divide.
OK.
So I'm going to cut to the chase here.
So it's about 180 pounds per person per day.
It's about 40 times what we throw out day
to day is an inflow to support the way we live.
And so, that's my snapshot of scale.
That's why thinking about this problem from a material science
perspective is important on a scale level.
So the other dimension that I just
want to give you a little bit of a snapshot of is complexity.
So Professor [? Belcher ?] told us this morning,
we all love to exist in periodic tables, so I do too.
We've got this tremendous volume on once axis.
And then we've got something about the complexity
of these flows on the other axis.
So my two second snapshot of that for you of this
is over time tracing the number of elements
that are in a circuit board.
So elements of the periodic table
that are in a circuit board.
Let's think about it associated with a cell phone.
So in the 1980s, we had 11 elements.
And then in the '90s, we added four.
And then in the 2000s, we're up to 45.
And now we essentially carry the periodic table
in our pockets every day, right?
And not just cause Professor [? Belcher ?]
gave you one as you walked in the door.
So those are the two dimensions that I like to think about.
That's my basis of motivation.
It's a tremendous volume, and it's really complicated.
And I'm going to just give you just a couple of quick stories.
I'm going to skip a bit here.
About how we like to think about this.
So I've got I've got all sorts of periodic tables,
but we're going to skip that one.
So in terms of thinking about recycling.
So if we have this tremendous volume that we're producing
and we need to get rid of, and it's very complicated,
what do we do about that?
So we hear a lot about recycling as beneficial,
but it's a nuanced complicated story.
So I'm going to tell you a very simple study that we
did that was looking at recycling
of alkaline batteries.
So you think about just the primary batteries
that you probably interact with and throw out
on a regular basis.
California, a couple of years ago, passed a landfill band.
So we weren't going to be throwing them in the trash
anymore.
If you're in California or in New York,
we needed to recycle them.
So we looked at, was it environmentally beneficial
given the state of technology and the distribution
of that technology, in the United States
to recycle an alkaline battery?
Here's an alkaline battery.
It's dominant materials are manganese, steel, and zinc.
There are basically four facilities
within the United States that were managing these batteries.
Because the battery industry had worked very hard to get mercury
out of them.
They were sort of essentially as close to dirt as you could get.
And now we were proposing driving them
to pretty significant distances around the country
to recycle them in these four pretty isolated facilities.
And what we learned through this research
is given the policy as it was put in place,
and the financial support to manage it,
given the kind of stuff that Jessica just talked through,
it was actually an environmentally better
given the same technology to throw
the batteries in the trash than it was to recycle them.
And still today, that is largely true.
But based on the fact that we did this research,
we discovered that really what we needed for batteries--
because what we're getting for them is not
super valuable compared to things like cobalt,
or nickel, other sort of higher value
materials that are available in rechargeable batteries.
We needed to have a distributed low energy solution, lower
temperature solution.
And so, one of the things that we worked with the battery
industry to do is to introduce these alkaline batteries
into electric arc furnaces, steel mini-mills that
are scattered throughout the country.
And as long as we could manage the copper concentration, so
that we weren't poisoning the steel,
that was a much better decision from an energy efficiency
perspective and environmental perspective.
So that's just a tiny snapshot on the disposal side.
I'll tell you one more quick story
on recycling, because I'm very passionate about recycling.
Then I'm going to show you a brick that we've made that I've
become very popular for.
So before I get to that, another very basic--
I even have the piece of paper here--
another very basic thing we're always taught
is to put your paper in the recycling bin, right?
We all do that?
This is a snapshot of the paper and paperboard
industry in the US in 2013.
And it's complicated, right?
We call this the spaghetti chart.
So something as simple as paper is incredibly complicated.
What you're seeing in these yellow bars in the middle
there are all the different kinds of paper
that we interact with, right?
There's copy paper.
There's toilet paper.
There's tissue paper.
There's cardboard boxes.
And all of the flows of recycled material, which
you see in blue, and virgin fiber from trees you
see in brown.
They all need to end up in the right places
in the right concentration, so that they
can be recovered into the kinds of products
that we want to interact with.
So if we have policy that's requiring
certain recovered content of recovered fiber in paper
like this, what that's doing in the US,
because we're not matching it with increased recovery
of these sorts of products, we're not
recycling as much as we should, but we're
asking for the recycled fiber to appear in these products,
is that means that we're putting fiber from trees into things
like toilet paper, which as you can imagine
is a dispersive media, right?
We don't recover a lot of that
And so, that's putting this sort of strange tension
and strange challenges for the paper industry,
and for all of us as we try to increase
the overall lifecycle, manufacturing disposal,
in addition to the direct energy that Jessica
talked about into the material flows that we interact with.
So very simple systems I've talked about from a high level,
right?
A piece of paper, a battery.
But because of the complex systems
in which these things interact, there's
a ton of nuance and juicy questions to answer here.
So not only do we like to think about it from a systems
perspective and from the full lifecycle perspective,
we also like to think about it in technology development.
So I'm going to just end on this brick
that we've developed that's based on waste ash.
Taking some of the kinds of industrial waste
that would be associated with things, like paper
production in the US, this is actually a project
that's based in India.
So not only is there an opportunity
to solve these things from an analytical perspective,
there's also technology innovation.
So we worked with an industrial cluster in northern India,
and recovered the ash that they were producing from their paper
mills.
And based on taking advantage of the chemistry associated
with this brick-- so it's activated
with sodium hydroxide, plus the ash, plus a little bit of clay,
a little bit of lime.
And we're basically working with this community
to replace their redbrick.
Typical bricks you think about that
are centered at 1,000 degrees C with this room
temperature cured brick that's made of the ash of the region.
So there's tons of opportunity here
that we're really excited about.
And so, we've been working with this town in India
to make these bricks from their paper production,
and now build them into structures of buildings.
And so, what I want you to think about,
as John is now going to tell you about sort
of the global flows of materials and energy
as we think about our urban populations,
is think about each of these bricks.
That you're replacing the red bricks and concrete blocks
that we work with today to try and build
the cities of the future.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks again for joining us.
For more information on future MIT Alumni Association
productions, please visit our website site.