From Consumers to Producers - adopting the Algae Lifestyle

Most of us are familiar with the sustainable citizen drill. We’ll have turned off the lights when we’re not using them, sorted the rubbish into the respective recycling bins, used the stairs instead of the lift, cut down on airline travel and are making conscious choices to buy ‘eco’ friendly products. But are our efforts working?

Well, if we’re to believe our scientists then - the ice caps are still melting, we’re still losing hundreds of species each year, our weather patterns are increasingly erratic, there are continent sizes islands of decomposing plastic in our oceans leaking feminising waste products into our global water supply - and the price of petrol is still going up …

To be fair, nobody said that change was going to be easy, or that there was quick way of addressing a century and a half of global, combustion engine driven manufacturing practices. Yet we’ve currently set ourselves on an incremental pathway of change that we’re calling sustainable. At the current rate of progress we’re simply not going to make any impact on the current situation whatsoever - because if the predictions are right about another third of the population on the planet in the next forty years - then making little compromises here and there as we’re currently doing – is simply going to be dwarfed by the forthcoming scale of consumption and production of waste that we can expect in the coming decades.



Right now our megacities are set to rise in a condition of scarcity. These are urban expanses that are home to more than ten million people that are densely packed together whose modern infrastructure is already leading to serious issues in traffic congestion, waste and resource management, crime, homelessness - and that’s not good news for companies – because their success depends on the welfare of their customers and some form of ‘excess’.

For those of us that agree with Thomas Malthus – that think we’ve reached our limits for growth – one of the answers might be that the human race as we know it will simply get smaller …

Dutch artist Arne Hendriks notes the exponential relationship between height and consumption and proposes that if we reach a target height of 50 centimetres – about the size of a newborn baby - we would only consume about three percent of our current resources and we’ll be back on track for business as usual.

The exciting news is that for those who want smaller offspring - this is viable option today. Plenty of biotechnologies are available like the hormone somatostatin, that can help you and your descendants become more resource efficient. It simply – stunts your growth.

But Hendriks’ provocation – that if we don’t want to make significant changes to our lifestyles, we will simply have to be become smaller - does not change the existing paradigm of commercial practice any more than making incremental subsitutional changes the way we currently do.

However, there is good news. A change in paradigm is on the horizon that may actually change our economic framework - as consumers start to become producers. And as 'money makes the world go around' this is a potential real catalyst for change!
 
This isn’t just an academic proposition. The beginnings of a revolution in manufacturing is taking place right now and is a whole new way of designing and engineering with living things in a new scientific practice called synthetic biology. You’re probably already familiar with the industrial version, called genetic modification, which needs expensive laboratories and large buildings.

But a different kind of synthetic biology practice is taking place in domestic environments and is much more like home brewing than a sterile, production assembly line for tiny machines. You probably won’t have some across it yet because it’s happening in domestic spaces – Cathal Garvey uses biotechnology in his bedroom in Cork, Ireland – working in a manner that already has a precedent in the way that sheds were the manufacturing outlets for the personal computer revolution started by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the 1970s.

The kinds of products that are being produced are much more (commercially) valuable than alcohol and include biodiesel and high value chemical products.

For example, Sustainable Now Technologies is a young algae biotech company set to create technology that could mean that you make enough home based biodiesel in your shed - so that you may never need to visit a fuel station again!

Sustainable Now Technologies harness the incredible power of strange plant-like creatures called algae. They have an incredible ability to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make complex substances like oils and alcohols. In fact, the ancestors of these life forms were also responsible for making the oxygen in the atmosphere that we breathe today.

These bioreactors – a fancy name for an aquarium that grows algae – can be likened to tiny farms that graze ‘little green cows’ (algae) on carbon dioxide and sunlight. The algae get fat with biofuel and are circulated into a shed (which is simply a copper pipe), by a small fish tank motor that is driven by solar energy. Here they are exposed to a low voltage shock, which ‘milks’ them by causing them to let out a little blob of ‘cream’. The oil is then dried and absolutely no algae are harmed in the process. Over a week enough biodiesel could be obtained from a thousand gallons of algae to keep a family car topped up for all your around-town journeys. There’s a double save here – one for not driving to the garage to top up and one for not having to pay at a fuel station for fuel.

What’s more is that it is possible to pipe the carbon dioxide coming from your natural gas (methane) burner into the bioreactor to feed the algae and not only make more fuel but also to reduce your carbon footprint in the process! It is also possible to make biofuel even if you don’t have access to natural light since these processes can be driven by a fluorescent light bulb that can be powered by renewables.

Domestic biotechnology adopters do not make products, they have lifestyles.

Let me share an algae lifestyle with you.

It’s a baking hot day in Los Angeles – remember the world will on average get hotter. There is a small courtyard, a terrarium, an algae barbecue, and in the shed there is a thousand gallon 'biodiesel' unit right next to the family car. Over on the house there are windows with little green particles in them that can dance to your iPod music that are making biodiesel for the home. These windows are connected to a series of different tanks that – can process waste and recycle water. The metabolic power of tiny organisms can be used in many ways to perform many different kinds of processes, such as the production of natural gas, bioluminescence (light) and the recycling of water within a building. Rather than thinking of our homes as being inert shells that are inhabited only by us - we could think of these bioreactors as co-inhabitants that make oil for us in exchange for shelter.

And they’re powerful. These bioreactors are vibrant enough to supply homes and also small businesses.

In the very near future we will see buildings that have installed the bioreactors as rather strangely developed ‘organs’ that are full of different tiny creatures doing different kinds of chemical work. Being ‘close’ to nature is a tangible feeling in these algae lifestyle communities – after all – everyone is simply hanging out in gardens while being at home – just much smaller versions than the ones the were once used to.



Algae lifestyle breeds community. Neighbors start to exchange fuel as currently directly and are more in touch with the physical natural world than those sitting in front of a digital screen. It is possible that – similar to the way computers shrank from mainframes to desktop size with increasing efficiency - this kind of trajectory may be possible for ‘green’ computers – which is all that a bioreactor is. Algae may in the next few decades act as rechargeable fuel batteries that do not need a power socket – just sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Right now, these units have to be custom made - so they’re still expensive to install. Yet, despite that - within around 5 years the price of installing one – it will have paid for itself. After this probationary period, these organs in your home will keep on producing value substances. And it is not only likely that the cost for one of these units will continue to fall but they can also be built from recycled materials.

Mainstream algae technology right now exists within an industrial model of practice and - when it imagines itself as a centralized energy company - it simply cannot go head to head commercially with the crude oil producers. However, from a local, domestic perspective algae technology may be the greatest opportunity to make a change from being consumers to producers.

Producers will be a very interesting and challenging set of customers for companies to be working with as, of yet, they are also an unknown.

However, ‘producers’ are likely to be 'richer' than consumers because they have natural assets. Biofuels and their products may be traded alternative kind of currency that may also be offset against carbon taxation. By being taxed less and spending less money on buying energy from centralized fuel providers ‘producers’ may also simply, have more conventional cash to spend than ‘consumers’. And because of who they are - they’ll be sure to do so in an ecological manner.

Companies will need to find new ways of forming a relationship with these producers and perhaps reflect their understanding of them by adopting algae/biotech lifestyles and demonstrating their leadership in these areas. Corporations may even decide to change their ‘old’ sustainability portfolios that practice ‘substitutional’ values [1] for new ways of embodying an environmentally positive (rather than less damaging) methods.

Perhaps one of the most interesting challenges of living with biotech is the appreciation of scale. This is not something that we’ve had to think about before so it’s also an opportunity for new markets and advertising.

Historically we design at a particular scale because we have the tools to do this. Now we have cheap printers that really struggle to produce objects bigger than a sheet of A4 paper. These will be the new workhorses of the home-based biotech industry.

For example, the Cronin group in Glasgow recently published a paper in Nature to show their one step chemical manufacturing process to produce silicon sealant in a low-end 3D printer. So making at a small scale is not a problem.

However visualizing what is being made is trickier. At the Cronin WETFab workshop we made a makeshift microscope by placing a CD lens over an i-phone and the beauty of biotech is that - at the tiniest scales it does not need control - as it self-assembles and manufactures itself - because of the nature of its materials. Producers do not need to do all the work. They simply shape the outcomes.

But once we’re familiar with the micro scale as a site for design and interaction - perhaps with home computers and better lenses - we can start to use DNA messaging and protein encryption codes to provide data about our daily lives. For example, small color changes could indicate how resources are being used that may directly create a response from the building to adjust the metabolism of its ‘remedial or synthetic organs’.

The micro scale may also provide the site for abundance and excess in overcrowded megacities.

At TED Long Beach Peter Diamandis noted that our basic resource problem is not the actual amount of stuff that we use - but how we access it. Perhaps by thinking in terms of folded surfaces than brute volumes - we can think of our living spaces as greatly expanded at the micro scale - so that they become abundant sites of biochemical synthesis to underpin our role as ‘producers’.

Here is an example from nature. Soil is a rich environment where huge amounts of biochemical synthesis take place. It actually only forms a tiny percentage of the material of the earth but is essential to all living processes. Soil therefore has a small volume but since it is riddled with little channels between soils particles it offers a rich environment in which water can be stored, creatures can live and materials can be produced and recycled. So if we imagine the surface of every building as being a potential site for the creation of soil - using home based manufacturing techniques - that work with living organisms selected to suit that particular environment – then we can build a new distributed production system within our densely packed megacities from the bottom-upwards and select different kinds of biology to inhabit and work with us in our homes This kind of lifestyle is more than sustainable - it has the potential to evolve alongside the unpredictable consequences of climate change!

We are in desperate need of a qualitatively different kind of economy that impacts on our environment. Our current practice of slow conservation is simply going in the wrong direction – no matter how strict we are about our ways of working. There are now more people looking for natural solutions to our current situations than ever before who actually want to MAKE a contribution - rather than sit back and minimize their existence through conservation - or a puritanical view of manufacturing practice and consumption. Ultimately this is no good for business and it’s not the way that life ‘actually’ works either.

Of course, this revolution in the making is not going to happen overnight. It took Steve Jobs and Bill Gates another 25 years from their sheds to turn their innovation into trillion dollar businesses. But this is a very short time in the scenario planning that we’re currently facing and it is a qualitatively different shift in the way that we think about how we make, consume and ultimately responsibly shape our environment.

Yet perhaps our biggest challenge is not of substance or approach but time. We understand that urgent action is needed to remediate the damaging impacts of industrialisation on the natural world. Instinctively, we seek quick fixes to existing challenges, to meet centralised targets and building standards. But truly sustainable impacts evolve in longer timeframes and are shared over generations and the choices that we make today will determine what direction we are taking our planet in and will shape our children’s future.








Notes




[1] Substitutional practices exchange an environmentally damaging product such as, concrete (which takes a lot of energy to make and releases a lot of carbon dioxide) and replace them with a less harmful product such as, concrete made with recyclable materials such as, high volume fly ash concrete which produces less carbon emissions and landfill. The disadvantage with this approach is that it does not tackle the manufacturing processes at a systemic level and ultimately still cause environmental harm as a necessary side effect.