Think about your dishwasher. You load it, set it, and close the door. Then for the next 2 hours, give or take, the device runs through phases that require large amounts of water and energy to heat, wash, rinse, and dry. And a lot of that water and energy being used is overkill, it’s wasteful, and it’s all happening behind closed doors.

Now, this episode isn’t about dishwashers or even home appliances. But the dishwasher analogy illustrates what occurs with process manufacturing, a branch of manufacturing associated with calibrating precise formulas and recipes for food and beverage manufacturing, consumer goods, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology industries, to name just a few. We interact with these industries daily, and if their manufacturing operations ostensibly operate like a dishwasher, as many of them do, then think about how much waste is being generated every minute, every day, every month, and so on.

One company is tackling this problem with some innovative tech. Laminar, based in Somerville, Mass, is taking the guesswork out of industrial-grade food & beverage manufacturing. Its spectral sensors are installed in factories and use physical AI to optimize automated workflows, and provide millions of data points in real time, all in the name reducing vast amounts of waste. This extends to wasted energy, wasted resources, and wasted time.

For today’s show I’m very happy to welcome Annie Lu. Annie is CEO of Laminar, where she is using physical AI to redefine the future of CPG, or consumer packaged goods manufacturing with self-driving processes that bring greater efficiency, quality and sustainability to a company’s bottom line. She co-founded Laminar with her brother, David, who serves as its CTO. At a moment when AI is reshaping practically every industry, Annie says she “is obsessed with making sure process manufacturing doesn’t get left behind.”

We talk a lot about circularity, circular systems, circular economies, and so on. It sounds great. It may even conjure images of the now-ubiquitous recycling symbol, with its three folded arrows running clockwise in triangle formation. Some may not know that that symbol was designed by an American architect named Gary Anderson, while he was a student at USC, and that was his winning submission in a competition sponsored by the Container Corporation of America.

That brief history lesson aside, circularity is attractive because, in practice, it leverages another growing innovation in the design, building, and manufacturing trades: closed loops. Closed loop systems represent a departure from linear production models, otherwise known as take-make-waste systems, in which raw materials are extracted and processed to form a product, that product is used, and then it is, inevitably, thrown away. Closed loops offer the promise of more sustainable and efficient manufacturing, of optimizing complex processes with data-driven solutions, and of mimicking nature’s course, like the ancient Ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail, symbolizing a never-ending cycle of destruction and regeneration.

So, here’s my question: are closed loops infallible? Is it truly sustainable to simply recirculate product waste streams to produce more the same product? Or does the real value of these systems come from expanding certain production loops to make them more inclusive of other waste streams? Circularity for its own sake isn’t always sustainable; sometimes it’s just a small loop with no net-benefit.

For this episode, I specifically wanted to connect with James Kitchin. James holds several titles with MASS Design Group, including Director of the Abundant Futures Design Lab. He also leads the Bio-Based Materials Collective, a quasi-independent organization focused on standardizing bio-based materials in our buildings and helping create healthy, just, and regionally focused cultures, economies, and ecologies.

The built environment has a 600-million-ton waste problem. onstruction and demolition (C&D) waste - comprising large volumes of concrete, wood, drywall, glass, and even furniture - significantly contributes to landfill volumes, with approximately one-quarter total waste generated in the U.S. ending up in landfills. It is worth noting those figures come from reports that are selectively submitted to the EPA by state and local governments, and much of the data are more than a decade old. So, while the numbers aren't reliable, we know without question that the scale of the problem remains massive.

One organization uniquely positioned to tackle that problem is Good Future Design Alliance (GFDA). The GFDA’s mission is to raise public consciousness around the problem of construction industry waste and its impacts on human health and climate change, as well as to advance the adoption of more sustainable practices in residential design and construction.

For this episode I welcome the GFDA’s Executive Director, Kathryn Soter. Kathryn began her career in advertising and magazine publishing, including 23 years working at Condé Nast magazine group. Prior to her work with GFDA, she worked in business development for manufacturers supplying furniture, fixtures and equipment for residential and hospitality projects.

Baie Verte, in north central Newfoundland, Canada, is one of several communities that comprise the island’s Emerald Zone. In the 1950s, a large deposit of asbestos was discovered, and Baie Verte (French for “Green Bay”) was quickly transformed into a company town, with a large-scale asbestos mining operation that supported the community for the next three decades.

Trina Barrett grew up in Baie Verte. Her father worked as a foreman in the asbestos mine. When the mine shut down in the 1990s, it left mountain-sized piles of un-remediated mine waste in her hometown, which Barrett calls “an environmental injustice.” Asbestos is a known carcinogen with respiratory toxicity; the orphaned mine waste also contains high concentrations of industrial and critical minerals.

The company Barrett co-founded with Mike Sullivan, BAIE Minerals, develops and commercializes technologies that can remove toxic asbestos fibers and extract high-value minerals, thus transforming an environmental liability into a source of economic value.

When we think about wood products and our domestic forests that supply them, we arrive at mental images of large swaths of forestland that populate the Pacific Northwest or the Southeast; those places that provide abundances of Douglas fir and spruce and southern yellow pine, but we rarely consider urban forests.

Urban forests are critical components for keeping our cities cooler and safer. Street trees, city parks, arboretums, and the like help with stormwater management, restore biodiversity, and mitigate the effects of urban heat islands. But when those urban forests are thinned and trees are felled to create more space for recreation, or to protect raised utility lines, the wood itself gets chipped or sent away to get burned for energy production.

The most recent estimates from the USDA Forest Service indicate that 46 million tons of sellable wood from urban areas is felled each year, most of which gets chipped, landfilled, or burned. There is a missed opportunity afoot; not one of those pathways – with the possible exception of biomass power generation – involves making something of tangible value that’s inversely proportional to the amount of waste being generated.

The Massachusetts-based timber product manufacturer Tridome Structures is rethinking a pathway for urban wood. Very recently, the company opened a sawmill in the Boston suburb of Millis; this new subsidiary is called TimberWise. In this episode, I connect with Edward (TJ) Thompson, Tridome's co-founder and Director of Innovation, to discuss the TimberWise mill, and how this relatively small operation is changing how we manage urban forests.

Supplementary cementitious materials, or SCMs, have completely transformed the global cement industry. Where Portland cement once enjoyed a near monopoly in the industry, it’s now rapidly losing market share to all kinds of blended solutions using SCMs, which replace a large percentage of the cement clinker – that’s limestone and clay, cooked in a kiln at a balmy 1500 degrees Celsius – that goes into making concrete. The biggest examples of SCMs are fly ash, which is the byproduct from coal mining, and blast furnace slag, the byproduct from steel production.

There’s just one issue: the steel industry is cleaning up its own act. Instead of melting pig iron in a coal-fired blast furnace, big steel makers have made the shift to electric arc furnaces. Now, this isn’t a problem in the strictest sense; electric arc furnaces emit significantly less carbon into the atmosphere. But the slag yield from this newer, cleaner production process, creates an inferior and chemically inert SCM. It’s a new form of waste, and it has no place to go.

Carbon Upcycling has a solution. The company has established a waste-to-value supply chain by turning something very few industrialists were paying attention to, into a sustainable feedstock. The company’s CEO, Apoorv Sinha, says he wants to convert industrial waste in virtually all forms into sustainable feedstocks. But you gotta start somewhere, and somewhere, in this case, is the global cement industry.

Featured guest Garrett Benisch is Chief Development Officer at Bioforcetech Corporation, a Bay Area company turning organic waste into carbon negative materials. Bioforcetech promotes a few basic tenets: Stop Landfill, Protect Ecosystems, and Utilize Waste, to name just a few. That last one is important.

In the company’s efforts to Fix and Store Carbon (two other tenets), Bioforcetech manufactures a distinct form of biochar called OurCarbon. Biochar is made when biomass sources like trees and plants undergo pyrolysis to yield an ashy and sterile carbon byproduct – has been used to improve soil fertility and boost agricultural yields.

OurCarbon is a form of biochar. But where it comes from, how it’s produced and scaled, and what it’s used for all represent something truly new in the waste-to-value economy.

For the inaugural episode of Waste to Value, I connected with Lew Epstein, CEO of Lot21, a non-profit content platform and resource for advancing climate action across the built environment to help decarbonize the world.

Lew’s environmental advocacy began decades ago with the emergence of the forestry stewardship movement and has since expanded to encompass a broader range of carbon removal solutions focused on restoring our climate.

Our conversation delves into the topics of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and waste-to-value solutions, highlighting the evolution of these areas and their impact on climate action and sustainability. It explores the challenges, advancements, and applications of CDR, as well as the local and global impact of waste-to-value initiatives.