The Canadian Electricity Association estimates Canada will need to spend nearly $294 billion by 2030 to upgrade old equipment and accommodate more distributed resources. The American Society of Civil Engineers says the U.S. needs a $94-billion upgrade by 2020 in order to modernize its grid. Meanwhile, in both countries, more than half of the utility workforce is nearing retirement age.

In a positive sign for utilities, a growing number of “Millennials” are moving into the electric sector. Interested in addressing the complex challenges of decarbonization, grid resiliency and distributed energy integration, these young entrepreneurs and engineers are bringing new ways of thinking to a sector undergoing seismic changes.

That’s where a startup like eRespond comes in. Founded by three students at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, the company is developing a software platform that combines drone technology and social media aggregation to pinpoint outages quickly and manage the grid more effectively.

Many power companies use social media as a one-way communications tool to tell customers about outages; eRespond wants to use it as a way to identify the outages themselves. “Everyone is carrying a smart phone and using these outlets; yet very few are trying to create a centralized engagement platform for them,” said Payam Yeganeh, a master’s student at Marshall and one of eRespond’s co-founders.

The software analyzes all texts, emails, social media messages and telephone calls coming into a utility in order to gain insights into where outages are occurring, and then communicates targeted messages back to customers. The tool also analyzes images from unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and compares them to messages from the field. In theory, it could be used by utilities with limited advanced metering infrastructure.

“There’s been a lack of solutions in the space. The more we look at it, the more we realize it’s needed. Social media today is not effectively used at all as a two-way communications channel. We enable that,” said Yeganeh, who worked in the utility sector for a decade before enrolling in graduate studies.

The idea emerged from student competition run by the non-profit business incubator Spark Clean Energy, based out of Chicago, Illinois. The competition, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s innovation arm, ARPA-E, identified grid management problems faced by utilities and then challenged graduate students to create the solutions. First place went to eRespond, giving it the chance to validate its software with ComEd and Exelon, two major U.S. utilities.

If it gains traction, eRespond would come into a crowded market where big grid engineering firms such as ABB, GE and Siemens are developing products designed to tie meters, outage management systems and social media together to boost grid resilience. But utility adoption has been modest so far, and no single company has market dominance.

Mark Silberg, executive director of Spark Clean Energy, believes there are lots of ideas brewing among young business leaders that could change energy markets. He compared the competition to the XPrize, which puts aside monetary rewards for entrepreneurs to solve “unsolvable” challenges.

“There are a lot of ideas incubating outside traditional businesses. Our role is to democratize access to these resources and pull in new talent,” said Silberg.

Spark has supported numerous other student-led startups addressing similar challenges, including rare earth recycling, realtime residential energy analytics, and a completely new control infrastructure designed to decentralize the grid.

This type of competition is not just beneficial for funding new ideas, it’s also important for attracting the next generation of talent for utilities shedding legacy workers.

In a 2013 report on the changing utility landscape, the consultancy PwC outlined the importance of hiring younger workers, who “tend to be more tech savvy” and bring new ideas for building smart grid infrastructure and deploying renewable energy.

“A rapidly evolving workforce is re-shaping the risk profiles of America’s power and utilities,” wrote the PwC analysts. “One possible solution: a more systematic approach to capturing and keeping core know-how – and new ways of transmitting that knowledge to a younger generation.”

Click here to view our complete Tech Savvy series.

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That’s what executives at Arby’s Restau­rant Group figured out in 2012 when they reviewed yearly expenditures and saw that electricity and water were some of the sand­wich chain’s biggest controllable expenses. But even with that knowledge, the company had no comprehensive plan to reduce re­source consumption across its hundreds of company-owned restaurants. Executives on the financial side of the business were talk­ing a different language than the employees managing the stores.

That’s when Arby’s turned to Ecova, a sustainability software and services compa­ny, to help bridge the gap.

Based in Spokane, Washington, Ecova has become one of the leading software providers for monitoring electricity use, water consumption, recycling programs and car­bon emissions. The company was founded in 1995 with a simple utility bill management tool to help corporate customers navigate deregulated electricity markets in the United States. Over the years, it has expanded into nearly every offering related to corporate sustainability and resource efficiency.

When Arby’s approached Ecova, it was in need of a corporate-wide strategy, not just a one-off efficiency upgrade at a few outlets. The restaurant chain initially started tracking billing data in 2009. But as Ecova analyzed consumption patterns over the proceeding years, it was able to uncover $5.5 million in annual savings opportunities across Arby’s portfolio of buildings.

That granular data helped Ecova’s ser­vice team identify equipment scheduling adjustments and retrofits, water conserva­tion opportunities and encourage employee behaviour changes. As the restaurant-level changes were initiated, the software was used to communicate savings to employees, as well as show executives the company-wide impact of the initiative.

It “led to broad organizational under­standing of energy management opportu­nities,” said Scott Boatwright, Arby’s senior vice-president of operations. This resulted in resource productivity efforts becoming fully funded within the company.

By mid-2014, Arby’s had cut its energy consumption by nearly 8 per cent and is on target to achieve 15 per cent savings by the end of 2015. It also cut enough water to fill 115 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Ecova has delivered similar results for numerous resource-hungry food service companies, including Cheesecake Factory, California Pizza Kitchen, Domino’s Pizza, and Jack in the Box. Along with saving ener­gy and water, Ecova has helped food chains cut food waste by up to 20 per cent.

But it’s not just the restaurant industry. Ecova has accumulated 700 customers, in­cluding one-quarter of corporations on the Fortune 500 list that are looking at resource productivity more holistically. With a bil­lion data points being processed each day, the company now claims to have a near-complete picture of resource consumption in 10 per cent of commercial and industrial buildings.

Ecova’s expansion from tracking utility bills to analyzing a broad range of sustain­ability metrics came amidst a stark change in the software market. Over the past five years, many vendors have strayed from “sus­tainability” and have chosen much more targeted offerings, such as HVAC optimiza­tion, demand response and real-time energy monitoring. For example, there are over 200 companies now offering different variations of energy monitoring software in North America.

However, Ecova has chosen to keep a ho­listic sustainability strategy at its core. In the spring of 2014, it rolled out a new product that blended together all its offerings into a major package, dubbed the Sustainability Management Technology Platform.

“Sustainability metrics have definitely changed over the years. A big one is that we’re actually seeing a broadening of the metrics that clients are looking for, and they’re asking us to tie them together,” said Indigo Teiwes, Ecova’s senior manager of strategy and program management. “Man­aging costs and the environmental footprint are tied to one another. It’s not a silo.”

Some software companies are choosing the straight energy route – in other words, the silo. Others, like Ecova, believe that more holistic offerings are what the market will in­creasingly demand. So far it’s right.

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Sharing is becoming second nature to consumers armed with mobile phones and constant connections to the Internet. But it’s not just limited to individuals.

Collaborative consumption is also becoming more important for large corporations looking to make their operations more efficient and less costly. Some of the products used by companies are a natural extension of the web: document sharing, project management tools and sales software are just a few. But sharing is also extending to physical assets.

Transportation is one of the most promising places to start. That’s where California-based startup Local Motion says it can use mobile technology to substantially cut the required size of corporate vehicle fleets – potentially saving companies millions of dollars on investments in new cars and trucks.

“Companies are getting used to sharing things. They share calendars, schedules, and other things – why not share mobility?” asks John Stanfield, chief executive of Local Motion.

Local Motion is somewhat similar to consumer-focused car sharing services. Corporations with large fleets hire Local Motion to install small boxes in their vehicles’ computer systems, allowing them to monitor driving data, remotely lock and unlock doors and track location in a company-wide sharing calendar. Employees can then use the mobile app to easily find a vehicle, while employers can see how they’re being used.

The result: nearly every Local Motion customer has been able to reduce the number of cars in their existing fleets by double digits.

“They are able to get much more out of every vehicle,” says Stanfield. “Through optimization, scheduling and sharing, we are reducing vehicles by up to 30 per cent.”

Since launching in 2011, Local Motion has secured a few high profile customers, including Google, Verizon and the City of Sacramento. It has also raised $6 million from venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz to expand its sales team.

One might think that Google already had the technology and insight to track the hundreds of cars around its campus. But until Local Motion came in, Google was as blind as any other company. Over the last 18 months, however, Local Motion has been able to take dozens of vehicles out of Google’s fleet.

The search giant also faced another challenge that Local Motion helped solve. Before installing the tracking service, Google’s plug-in hybrid fleet was almost always low on charge. By monitoring how the cars were being used, it found that plug-in rates were extremely low – sometimes only five per cent. Local Motion used its software to remind drivers to plug the cars in after use, and that rate climbed up to 90 per cent. 

Sacramento has seen similar results. Over the past few months, the city’s electric vehicle fleet has seen a 10 per cent increase in use, providing 30 per cent more employees with access to shared cars. The increase is a double win: it gets more workers driving electric cars and will allow Sacramento to use them more effectively, thus preventing the city from overbuilding the fleet.

Keith Leech, the city’s fleet manager, now wants to expand the service to a wider range of vehicles. “The City of Sacramento plans on expanding our vehicle sharing beyond routine passenger vehicles to several of our specialized vehicles that are considered to be low usage, yet mission critical to city operations,” he says.

Google is also expanding its relationship with Local Motion by adding the application to vehicles used for its new express shopping service, an offering designed to compete with online retailer Amazon.

There are a number of other companies providing tracking services for corporate fleets. The most direct competitor to Local Motion is Zipcar, which has used its considerable size and first-mover advantage to break into the corporate market. Others provide tracking services for safety or fuel optimization, but don’t have the same focus on sharing, says Stanfield.

There are 10s of millions of vehicles operating in corporate fleets around North America. Local Motion only has around 500 automobiles under management to date, so it has barely begun to tap the market potential.

Research consultancy Frost & Sullivan estimates there could be between 75,000 and 100,000 fleet vehicles being shared across enterprises by 2020.

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Yet more recently, industrial scale farming has tainted natural rubber’s reputation. As Ford’s Model T ushered in the automotive age, demand for tire rubber soared. Intensive plantation farming of Hevea – the dominant variety of rubber trees – emerged as an early cause of tropical deforestation.

Today, with demand exceeding global supply, Hevea is facing a host of new worries. Pressure to boost the yield of natural rubber has inflated the use of harmful pesticides, and disease is a rising worry. More than 90 per cent of natural rubber is grown in a few East Asian countries, leaving growers vulnerable to the sort of catastrophic blight epidemic that had swept away Latin America’s plantations by the 1950s. Rubber trees are also water hogs, making them vulnerable to climate change-induced drought.

Jeffrey Martin, chief executive and co-founder of Yulex, sees the answer to natural rubber’s proliferating problems in a low-growing shrub named guayule – pronounced why-YOU-lee. A native to the arid U.S. southwest, guayule thrives with little water and zero pesticides, and can be made into latex that doesn’t trigger allergies.

In studying the plant, Martin unearthed a cache of research reaching back decades. Guayule, he found, had been temporarily commercialized many times. In the 1910s, during World War II and again in the 1970s and ’80s, industrial and government labs pursued large-scale guayule cultivation as an alternative to Hevea rubber. Each effort collapsed, however, in the face of lower-priced supplies of natural or synthetic rubber.

These mishaps didn’t daunt Martin. He used them to develop a business plan designed to avoid the mistakes of those earlier ventures. So in 2000, Martin started Yulex in Chandler, Arizona, armed with $20,000 in patents and 20 guayule seeds.

Unlike earlier efforts, which targeted the tire market from the get-go, Martin is putting off sales to high-volume, low-cost markets. Instead, he’s lowering costs and scaling production by first selling into high-margin, niche markets and plowing the proceeds into technologies that can help grow capacity. “You can’t just go straight after a commodity market like tires,” says Martin. “You have to sell the benefits of the technology first.”

California-based Patagonia, a manufacturer of performance gear, is among the first to commercialize a product made from guayule rubber. Following a four-year search for alternatives to petrochemical-based neoprene for its wetsuits, Patagonia found a match in guayule.

The company liked that growing and processing guayule had less impact on the environment in terms of water use and chemicals used in processing. Plus, “its performance is great,” says Todd Copeland, environmental product specialist for Patagonia and an avid surfer.

This winter Patagonia planned to release a wet suit made of a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional neoprene. Yulex is also exploring new product lines including latex mattresses, athletic shoes and yoga mats.

Looking ahead, Martin is focusing on a variety of ways to scale up production and lower costs. Developing a more productive strain of guayule is at the top of this list. To that end, Yulex has teamed up with California-based SGB, an agri-biotech company, to apply advanced crop science methods that will accelerate the natural process of breeding more productive strains of guayule.

Already, compared with data from the 1980s, when the crop was last intensively grown, Yulex has tripled yields. Yield improvements are on track to double again by 2020, says Martin, and will match or better today’s average output of Hevea rubber trees, which can yield about one metric ton of latex per acre.

The company is also looking to dramatically expand the area of guayule being cultivated. Today, farming is limited mostly to Arizona. But given the crop’s suitability to arid regions, it could be grown on every continent, save Antarctica, says Martin.

Fields of Yulex-licensed guayule will sprout next in Southern Europe, thanks to a $270-million deal with Versalis, a global leader in biomaterials and a subsidiary of Italy’s Eni.

Since Yulex’s incorporation, the company has raised $75 million in private equity. Last March, it signed a deal with Italy’s Pirelli Tire to help develop guayule polymers and resins for tire applications. That deal could, in time, pave the way to the very tire market that foiled earlier efforts to commercialize guayule.

In the Yulex boardroom, Martin keeps a souvenir from one of those earlier failed eras: a faded, decades-old tire made from guayule. It serves as a reminder of the huge potential market opportunity if Yulex can get volumes up and pricing down.

Martin is convinced it’s achievable. That at the right price, guayule can win a major share of the $50-billion-plus market for tire rubber now split between Hevea and synthetic rubber.

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In September last year, some 300 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan, many because they were trapped behind locked emergency exits. Six months later, another 1,100 seamstresses were crushed to death when an eight-storey building collapsed in Bangladesh, despite warnings it was unsafe.

As the multi-trillion-dollar textile industry struggled to respond to these tragedies, the much smaller global toy industry was able to call on a resource no other consumer product industry can match.

In short order, big toy brands and retail members of the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) were able to tap into a one-of-a-kind database they have built over the past decade known as the ICTI CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical) Process (ICP).

The trove of data, which includes wage rates, hours worked, worker age and 200 or so other metrics at thousands of toy factories, allowed big toy buyers to rapidly identify manufacturers located in the areas affected by the recent labour disasters for focused follow-up. Within weeks, industry executives started to develop and roll out tougher rules to all of the factories in the ICP network, guiding inspectors to enforce stricter requirements for fire escapes and building integrity.

The quick response was made possible by a combination of ICP’s carefully cultivated industry collaboration together with a recent decision to port its unique database onto a web-based platform provided by Enablon, a supply-chain software service provider founded in 2000.

“Not long ago, this sort of information was considered proprietary. A single factory might have two dozen clients, but they didn’t want to talk to one another, for fear of competitive disclosure” says Philippe Tesler, co-founder and CEO of Enablon North America.

A combination of factors has rewritten these habits. There’s a growing recognition that risks can be lowered and costs minimized through collaboration. “Reporting has gone from a defensive response to a more proactive process,” says Tesler.

Back in 2002, the toy industry was facing a series of relatively small-scale labour mishaps at overseas factories. “Pressure was building from retailers, from consumers, NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and investors to boost regulation,” recalls Christian Ewert, president and CEO of the ICTI CARE Foundation, which oversees the supply chain program.

Instead, the industry group pushed for self-regulation and established the ICP, a framework in which toymakers would share and compare information towards the end of “ensuring safe and humane workplace environments for toy factory workers worldwide,” says Ewert.

Notably, the ICP was established as a standalone not-for-profit, overseen by a board that includes NGO and civil-sector experts, and on which active toy industry executives are in a minority.

Streamlining inspection efforts has been a central priority from the beginning. When Ewert started in the toy industry in the 1990s, he worked with a manufacturer that faced 64 audits per year, each asking for similar information. “I’d much rather have seen those auditors inspecting 64 different factories, rather than the same factory 64 times,” he says.

The move to Enablon’s platform has helped transform this process from a cumbersome paper chase into a more scalable, easier to use and fast-evolving technology. On a factory floor in China, auditors and factories can input data wirelessly. On the other side of the planet, ICP members can log in and tweak standards on the fly, and do deep data analysis across the factories they are working with.

Today, the system tracks data on roughly 2,500 factories that employ some one million workers. Most are based in China, home to a vast majority of the world’s toymakers. Just 1,600 factories are currently certified as meeting ICP’s criteria. New factories join each year, but year to year about 13 per cent lose their approved status.

The most frequent causes for such a loss? A lack of transparency about whether workers are paid correctly or companies are demanding too many hours of work, says Ewert. Picking up such malpractice early can nip bigger problems in the bud, lowering the risk to corporate reputation.

“Companies don’t want to be named and shamed,” says David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix, an independent analyst firm focused on energy, environment and sustainability issues.

Over time, Metcalfe adds, the best employee health and safety plans can evolve to do more than protect workers. They can also proactively improve supply chain operations by identifying potential trouble spots, focusing corrective responses and avoiding the cost and hassle of switching factories following a crisis.

ICP, for example, goes beyond simply tracking auditors’ reports. It reaches out to workers directly. Factories are required to post a hotline to which workers can anonymously phone in problems. The organization receives up to 350 such calls per month. When the software detects a spike in calls from a given factory, ICTI CARE can increase its training efforts with both staff and management, before a crisis breaks.

And if early action doesn’t work, the threat of being de-certified is a potent motivator, says Ewert. After all, it’s not a single buyer pulling out, but the entire ICP network. Ewert is confident the transparency will continue to grow as technology advances.

“Workers can call us today,” he says. “In time, they’ll be able to send pictures of dangerous conditions too,” as smart phones emerge as another tool to help the industry identify and repair risks before they become tragedies.

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To help cut cement’s supersized carbon footprint, Halifax, Nova Scotia-based startup CarbonCure Technologies is tinkering with the age-old recipe for how cement cures into concrete, its final rock-like form. The company’s answer: carbonated cement.

“Every day millions of tonnes of concrete is produced globally,” says Robert Niven, chief executive and founder. “Every tonne is a lost opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide.”

Devising greener concrete is no easy task, in part because the recipe is deceptively simple and has proven to be such a remarkably good building material for so long.

It is, quite literally, the stuff from which civilization has been built. Today’s cement traces back to formulations first used 7,000 years ago. Some Roman-era structures, such as the domed Pantheon, are as sturdy today as when they were erected two millennia ago.

Today’s megastructures are likewise possible only because of concrete’s peculiar mix of performance and affordability, from the biggest dams to our tallest towers.

The problem? The manufacturing of cement emits 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, on par with about half of all emissions from car, truck and other road transport. Among industrial sources of CO2, the industry trails only the much larger petrochemicals sector.

Making cement emits roughly equal shares of CO2 at two stages: first, from the fuel used to heat a mix of limestone and traces of other minerals to 1,450 degrees Celsius; and second, from the resulting chemical reaction, where limestone breaks down into lime, giving up nearly half its mass as CO2.

Unless better recipes are devised, emissions will keep growing. A building binge across the developing world is expected to more than double global cement production this decade, according to the Carbon War Room, a London-based think tank.

CarbonCure is tackling that problem by focusing on how cement cures into concrete. The company’s proprietary process injects anthropogenic CO2 – captured from big industrial sources such as natural gas reformers – into the mix as concrete is being formed into an array of masonry products, including blocks and pavers.

As the CO2 percolates through the mix, it triggers a chemical reaction, remaking microscopic bits of limestone in the concrete matrix, permanently locking the gas into a rock-like structure. The resulting concrete block is not only greener; it turns out stronger than the standard stuff.

The carbon savings can stack up quickly. As a rule of thumb, every standard concrete block made using CarbonCure’s recipe sequesters around 30 grams of CO2. Thus, some 3,000 of them can lock up as much CO2 as a mature tree does in a single year.

The first U.S. structure to be built with CarbonCure’s green blocks was completed at the University of California, Davis in the spring. Exterior walls of the Jess S. Jackson Sustainable Winery Building, a one-storey, 8,500-square-foot research facility, were built with more than 2,500 specially manufactured blocks made by Basalite Concrete Products, based in Dixon, California. The result, says Niven, is the lowest-carbon concrete-block wall ever built in the U.S.

CarbonCure is currently working with four partners in North America that are producing its low-carbon blocks, pavers and other masonry products. Atlas Block, a major Canadian concrete manufacturer, is in negotiation to supply the low-carbon blocks for several sports complexes being built for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. “This is easily the most exciting technological improvement I’ve seen in years,” says Atlas chief executive Don Gordon.

Another dozen partners are in the pipeline, says Niven. In time, he hopes to expand the company’s reach to China – where more than half of the world’s concrete is currently being produced – and other global markets.

He also hopes to see CarbonCure move beyond masonry to apply its process to larger precast structures and ready-mix, the wet slurry of concrete and aggregate delivered in big mixing trucks.

Given that roughly 12 billion tonnes of concrete is produced every year around the world, if CarbonCure can adapt its technology to all concrete types, “the potential to reduce carbon is huge,” Niven says.

Indeed, green efforts are advancing in other aspects of concrete production. Industrial waste, such as fly ash or slag, offers a low-carbon alternative to cement. And major manufacturers such as Lafarge and Holcim are using more low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels, such as biomass, to replace fossil fuels used in cement kilns.

Taken together, these green steps suggest that concrete could someday be “carbon neutral, or even carbon negative,” says Niven.

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The plastic in question isn’t the familiar debris that accumulates in rail tracks, along roadways and on the sidewalk. Rather, the trains’ journeys are smoothed by super-rugged railroad ties made up of veritable mountains of plastic waste recycled from consumers’ trash.

At a quick glance, the dark plastic ties are tricky to distinguish from the heavy wooden beams they replace. Their performance is vastly different, however.

Where conventional wooden ties degrade, sometimes in just a few years, the recycled plastic composite ties do not.

In fact, the material “is basically impervious,” says Steve Silverman, president and chief executive of New Jersey-based Axion International Holdings, which supplied its Ecotrax composite ties to Miami-Dade Transit.

“It doesn’t rot. It doesn’t corrode. It doesn’t absorb water. Bugs don’t eat it,” he adds.

Silverman estimates the longevity of the plastic ties to be at least 40 years, compared with a few years for wooden ties in harsh environments. What’s more, it needs no maintenance, such as painting or re-sealing.

On a run of heavily used Long Island Rail Road commuter rails, a batch of Axion ties in service over the past eight years showed no signs of material degradation, according to a recent independent lab study.

If anything, the ties’ performance had improved slightly. As the plastic weathered, it hardened slightly, tightening its grip on the spikes, screws and hardware that attach the rails to the ties.

More than 150,000 of Axion’s ties can be found in rail beds on six continents. The company is also pushing into the construction industry, where its composite I-beams, planks and structural members are being used to rebuild bridges formerly made of wood, concrete or steel.

If Axion’s approach takes off, the environment may prove to be the biggest winner.

Using recycled composites in these heavy-duty applications has the potential to usefully absorb enormous flows of plastic waste. Today, just 8 per cent of plastic is recaptured, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More troublesome still, a significant share of waste plastic is lost to the environment.

Because plastic waste does not degrade it does cumulative harm to the environment, whether in your backyard or floating far out in a Pacific Ocean gyre.

On land and on water, loose plastic waste often ensnares wildlife. It has also begun to penetrate natural food chains. As it breaks up into microscopic bits, plastic debris is consumed by tiny creatures, which are in turn eaten by bigger fish or birds. At each step in the food chain, traces of plastic and related additives accumulate, explains Susan Freinkel in her 2011 book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

Humans are tainted by plastic, too. Blood tests reveal widespread exposure to synthetic chemicals used in plastics circulating in our bodies.

Axion’s Miami project offers a glimpse at the impact that recycled composites could have in diverting the growing tide of plastic.

So far, Miami has purchased around 2,000 composite ties, made up of roughly one million pounds of recycled plastic. By comparison, every year, the U.S. rail system replaces some 20 million ties.

As a thought experiment, if all those replacement ties were made of recycled plastics, the effort could usefully sequester some 10 billion pounds of waste, more than twice the volume of all the plastic recycled in the U.S. in 2010. Besides being stable and enormously strong, the composite ties can also be recycled at the end of their life.

For now, Axion is focusing on rail and construction markets where the relatively high upfront costs of its composites pencil out by avoiding more frequent future replacements. In the U.S. and overseas this dictates a focus on regions similar to Florida, where it’s hot, wet and salty, and insects are rife – conditions where wood products are short lived.

Longer term, Silverman sees bigger opportunities using plastic garbage to help remake America’s crumbling infrastructure. A 2011 Federal Highway Administration report estimates that more than 143,000 bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, largely due to the sort of corrosion, wear and tear to which recycled structural composites are immune.

But first the company has to drive down the cost of its raw material. Though the world is awash in plastic, too little of it is recycled.

“If the U.S. recycled more, our prices would come down,” says Silverman.

That could be a triple win: for Axion, the country’s infrastructure and the environment.

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One of Ford’s highest profile eco-efforts can best be seen by looking down on the roof of its River Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Originally constructed starting in 1917 by Henry Ford, the complex debuted as an industrial pioneer, among the first fully-integrated industrial complexes, where steel mills, glass works and chemical plants were built side by side to speed the flow of raw materials into Ford’s burgeoning Model T plants.

It was there in 2000 that company chairman William Clay “Bill” Ford Jr., the founder’s great-grandson, unveiled another pioneering effort, of a greener hue. He announced plans to build the largest “living” roof ever installed on an industrial building, comprising 10 acres of hearty, green sedum plants.

Green roofs have since become a favourite of building designers. But at the time, Ford’s plan, part of a broader $2-billion site renovation, ran counter to energy-guzzling conventions in the auto biz. U.S. auto sales hit an all-time high that same year, buoyed by record sales of high-margin SUVs and sub-$2 per gallon gas.

Against this backdrop, and even though the roof was estimated to cost about the same as a conventional design, critics carped that Ford was risking money on greenwashing efforts. Yet when the roof was completed in 2002, Bill Ford stood firm. “This is not environmental philanthropy,” he said at the time. “It is sound business.”

Since then, much has changed. Gas prices have nearly doubled, endangering SUVs, and Ford’s green roof gamble continues to pay back by passively lowering the factory’s energy use for cooling, displacing electric illumination with skylights and reducing costs to filter stormwater runoff.

Elsewhere throughout Ford’s global operations, eco-roof features pioneered at River Rouge – such as day-lighting, rain water capture and cool-white materials that reflect sunlight – have become standard design features. Though the most visible, the River Rouge roof wasn’t the only water-focused effort Ford rolled out in 2002. That same year, the company began a long process to radically reduce the amount of water, energy and other resources used in its manufacturing operations.

From the start, metal-cutting machines were a top target. These computer-controlled devices shape hunks of steel and aluminum into precision auto parts, everything from big engine blocks to fine-toothed gears.

The problem? “It can be a messy process,” explains Sue Rokosz, principal environmental engineer at Ford.

Flood machining, as the conventional process is known, uses a steady stream of oil and water to cool cutting tools. This slurps up huge inflows of fresh water, requiring a lot of energy and plumbing infrastructure to keep flowing. And at the back end, it yields a slurry of oil, water and metal particles that are costly to dispose of and difficult to recycle.

As a fix, Ford turned to a process known as near-dry machining, or minimum quantity lubrication (MQL). The process replaces the stream of oily water with micro-spritzes of atomized oil delivered via articulated arms or hollow drill bits to precisely the point of contact where friction and heat build up.

It’s a small improvement that delivers outsized benefits. By making the switch, a typical manufacturing line – capable of machining roughly half a million parts every year – can lower annual water use by about 280,000 gallons and avoid the consumption of more than 28,000 gallons of lubricants.

What’s more, oily wastewater is all but eliminated and the metal shavings are relatively dry and clean, ensuring a higher share is recycled. Line workers benefit too, with drier, safer work areas, says Rokosz.

Though dry-machining systems cost slightly more upfront, their overall lifetime costs pencil out at 17 per cent less than old-style wet machines, according to Ford data.

While the technology has become Ford’s de facto standard, it can be set up only as fast as new manufacturing lines are built or old ones are replaced. So far, it’s been installed in more than a third of Ford’s 28 powertrain plants, with more on deck to make the switch.

Drop by drop, Ford’s water-savings efforts are adding up. According to its sustainability report, Ford has cut water consumption, per vehicle produced, by about half in the past decade. It is on track to cut per-vehicle consumption to around 900 gallons by 2015, compared with over 2,500 gallons in 2000. That’s roughly equivalent to taking 100 fewer five-minutes showers.

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The technology is a relative of the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) pioneered by Toyota’s Prius, which achieves enviable mileage by recapturing much of the energy lost during braking. Instead of saving that braking energy in batteries, UPS’s new hydraulic hybrid vehicle (HHV) delivers a 35 per cent boost to mileage by storing hydraulic fluids in super strong tanks.

“The hydraulics are the muscle, managed by very sophisticated electronics,” says Mike Britt, director of maintenance and engineering for the company’s international ground fleet.

Hydraulic systems may be new to delivery trucks, but they’re widely used elsewhere. The strength and durability of hydraulic systems have made them a mainstay in countless heavy-duty machines, from fighter planes and garbage trucks to bulldozers and car crushers. But until now, high costs have made it difficult to use hydraulic drives in everyday vehicles.

As part of a long-term government-backed program to study and scale up this technology, UPS began at the end of 2012 to introduce 40 of the advanced Daimler-built hybrids on delivery routes in Atlanta, Georgia, the shipping giant’s hometown, and Baltimore, Maryland.

From the outside, UPS’s hybrids are the same familiar brown boxes-on-wheels that have delivered catalogue orders and holiday gifts for generations. Pop open the hood, however, and you’ll begin to see differences. Inside is a powerful diesel engine, but instead of connecting to a drive axle and transmission, as in a regular truck, the motor drives an advanced pump that pressurizes a tank of hydraulic fluid.

Upon acceleration, digital controllers send bursts of highly pressurized fluid via narrow pipes to pump motors, which set the wheels spinning. The system works in reverse during braking. The pumps act as generators, recapturing more than 70 per cent of the vehicle’s kinetic energy. At idle, the engine doesn’t run. Rather, it switches on and off intermittently to top up hydraulic pressure.

The design’s main attraction is that it consumes less energy. Using the diesel engine to generate hydraulic pressure, rather than propel the van, allows the motor to run at a fixed, optimal speed.

What’s more, the regenerative braking process is about 50 per cent more effective at recapturing energy compared with a Prius-style hybrid electric vehicle, Britt adds.

There are also secondary savings in the form of less wear and tear. Compared with conventional designs, UPS anticipates the brakes will last four or five times longer.

Likewise, running the engine at its “sweet spot” should extend its lifespan two- or three-fold compared with a diesel engine used conventionally, Britt says.

Given that a typical UPS brown delivery van has an average lifespan of up to 25 years, less day-to-day downtime means many more deliveries and lower lifetime operating costs.

Performance improves, too. Drivers like that the system delivers enormous torque – or pushing power – immediately. That’s an advantage when moving a 27,000-pound van up to speed, then back to a stop, scores of times every day. “Hydraulic power is really well suited to stop-and-go delivery routes,” says Britt.

The design is the result of a project that started in 2006, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Cities program.

In the six years since, the department has orchestrated the development of a series of pilot vehicles in collaboration with three vehicle manufacturers (Eaton, Parker Hannifin and FCCC) and three major shippers (FedEx, Purolator and UPS).

With a fleet of 93,000 delivery vehicles – running the gamut from big rigs down to three wheelers – UPS has proven itself an eager early adopter of green vehicle technologies. The hydraulic hybrids join a fleet of 2,500-plus “unconventional” vehicles, which includes HEVs, compressed natural gas (CNG), clean diesel and pure electric vehicles (EVs). Taken together, this fleet has motored more than 200 million miles since 2000.

The hydraulic hybrids are hitting U.S. roads at around $120,000 per vehicle, Britt estimates. That’s roughly twice as much as a standard diesel version. To help validate the long-term cost advantages, and to amass data on the real-world performance of the technology, the Environmental Protection Agency subsidized about a third of UPS’s total costs.

Britt believes there’s room for costs to fall and energy savings to rise. “If we do this right, we can set a standard for the whole industry.”

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At a Walkers Crisps factory in Leicester, England, PepsiCo is turning this soggy challenge into a water-saving innovation. The goal: to extract so much water from inbound spuds that the factory can go “off grid,” drawing little or no water from public taps. Doing so, PepsiCo hopes, will help save the plant roughly $1 million a year in avoided water costs.

“The idea for taking factories off the water grid came from a simple observation by our front-line teams that potatoes are 80 per cent water,” says Martyn Seal, PepsiCo’s European director of sustainability.

PepsiCo’s efforts to turn off the taps at its Walkers plant in the U.K. is one sliver of a bigger batch of initiatives to make its global operations run with less water. In 2010, the food-and-drink giant, which turned over $66.5 billion (U.S.) in sales last year, released its first comprehensive water report. The effort, similar to initiatives out of rival Coca-Cola, set out details of its water consumption alongside plans on how to use that water more productively.

One of its headline goals is to improve the efficiency of water use – measured by water consumed per unit of production – by 20 per cent by 2015, using 2006 as a baseline. PepsiCo hit this target last year, four years ahead of schedule. Another goal is to strive for “positive water balance” in water-distressed areas. This means for every unit of water PepsiCo uses, it strives to restore, replenish or prevent loss of the same amount or more in the same region. It also aims to provide access to safe water for three million people in developing countries before 2016.

Early on, potato-chip plants emerged as a juicy target for these goals. Making chips is surprisingly water intensive. In a normal year, some 350,000 metric tons of fresh tubers is shipped to the Leicester factory – the equivalent of some 13,000 tractor-trailer loads.

In the plant, potatoes are washed, peeled and sliced. A steady flow of H2O is used at each of these steps. In Leicester, this process demands roughly 700 million litres of water annually, the equivalent of roughly 280 Olympic-sized pools. Yet as crucial as water is while preparing the raw spuds, it’s an unwanted troublemaker thereafter. The thin slices are plunged for a few minutes into oversized fryers filled with oil boiling at 190°C (375°F). Water trapped in the potato slices vapourizes instantly, turning the otherwise inedible starch into an addictively crunchy treat.

In a conventional set-up, the cloud of steam that rises from these vats is vented out into the air. PepsiCo engineers recognized that the vapour represents a huge waste of both water and energy. To recover these wisps of moisture, PepsiCo fit a contraption onto the plant’s exhaust towers. Inside, the hot steam passes over a network of thin, cooled tubes. Moisture from the potato vapour condenses on the cooler tubes for easy collection. The process also recaptures traces of cooking oil from the exhaust. Both the oil and water can be reused. About four-fifths of the moisture that is normally lost is recovered.

Together with systems that recycle about two-thirds of the plant’s wastewater, the steam-recapture project is on track to supply enough water to hit PepsiCo’s goal of drawing zero freshwater in Leicester. The company is already testing the technology at similar sites in Holland and Belgium, part of a plan to extend these practices to other large European operations and, later, worldwide.

A successful pilot in the Leicester plant “will provide us with a technology suite that we will be able to reapply at other PepsiCo plants, particularly in areas of severe water scarcity,” Seal says. “This is an opportunity to realize meaningful cost savings while reducing our impact on the environment.”

Combined with other projects across PepsiCo’s operations, the steam-recapture efforts contributed to savings of $45 million in water and related energy costs last year, compared with the 2006 base when the company began these efforts. By volume, in 2011 it used 16 billion fewer litres of water, compared with 2006.

As much as PepsiCo execs crow about the bottom-line impact of these efforts, they point to strategic benefits too: The company must plan for operating risks that droughts pose to future operations. By 2030, global demand for freshwater could exceed supplies by 40 per cent, explains Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s senior director of sustainable development.

“If this gap is not closed, there will be no business as we know it today,” he says.

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