The Art of Engineering

Mercury in compact fluorescent tubes (CFLs) is a health hazard and therefore we should not use CFLs....at least that is the false message being spread by many people.

Yes, there is mercury in CFLs (typically less than 5mg), and yes, they need to be recycled correctly to ensure that the mercury (and electronic components) stay out of landfills. The thing is, the benefits of using CFLs and the associated reduction in mercury emissions far outweigh any issues associated with the mercury in a CFL.

So why do CFLs contain mercury? All fluorescent lamps contain mercury (compact fluorescents as well as conventional straight tubes). The mercury is excited by an electrical current which causes the mercury to emit ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light stimulates phosphor in the tube which produces visible light. Interestingly enough normal fluorescent tubes have escaped the mercury stigma even though they can contain more mercury that a CFL.

What does coal have to do with it? The burning of coal to produce energy is one of the largest sources of mercury from human activity (in South Africa 80% of our energy comes from coal). This mercury enters the atmosphere and eventually lands in our water systems. Mercury entering into aquatic systems can be transformed by microbial action into methylmecury which bioaccumulates in the food chain.

Incandescent bulbs release more mercury into the environment than CFLs. When you take mercury emissions from coal into accout it turns out that a normal incandescent bulb results in more mercury being released into the environment than a CFL, even when a CFL is disposed into a landfill rather than properly recycled. The US EPA estimates that 1.8mg of mercury enters the environment from a dumped CFL while the use of an incandescent bulb results in 5.8mg (for 8000 hours of use). See the Energy Star's mercury fact sheet for their assumptions.


What about CFL breakages in the home? Breakages need to be dealt with carefully, but do not pose a serious hazard. Ventilate and have any people or pets leave the room. Follow the recommended clean–up guidelines in the EPA mercury fact sheet. There is an old and false story about expensive clean–up procedures which came about due to a misunderstanding – snopes.com has the full history of that story, which makes for interesting reading.

What do we need to do? Switch to CFL or LED bulbs wherever and as soon as possible. This reduces both energy consumption and mercury emissions which is good for our well–being. Consider LEDs where suitable – they contain no mercury and have a longer life span than CFLs (although they only available in certain light formats, provide a different type of light, and you need to compare their efficiency to CFLs). Correctly dispose of your CFLs (and LEDs) for recycling, as this keeps the mercury out of the landfills and allows it to be reused in new lights.

Please share this, blog about it, write newspaper articles, tweet (and retweet) it, stumble it, tell your friends, and explain it to anyone who does not know that using CFLs will actually reduce your exposure to mercury. CFLs help us to reduce energy consumption and keep our environment clean – let the world know.

More resources:
[1] "Global Atmospheric Mercury Assessment: Sources, Emissions and Transport," UNEP 
[2] UNEP mercury programme

Image courtesy of Energy Star.

eWaste is a particularly difficult issue to deal with as it contains many different materials and lots of extremely hazardous substances. Incorrect disposal of electronic items can result in many of those dangerous chemicals entering into our environment through water systems and air pollution.

eWASA, the eWaste Association of South Africa, is an organisation concerned with the handling of eWaste and represents the various industry stakeholders (like eWaste recyclers and disposers). Their website provides useful information about where to recycle your eWaste and how the eWaste recycling process works. They also have a really fascinating (and distrubing) list of hazardous substances and what items those substances are contained in. I recommend that everybody read that list (compulsory reading for engineers and product developers).

Refurbishing, reuse and extending the life–cycle of electronic products is an important (and preferable) way to reduce eWaste and the hazards associated with recycling and disposing of these products.

eWaste recycling is expensive and the costs are not necessarily covered by the resale of recovered materials. eWASA would like to introduce an advanced recycling fee (ARF) for products which will eventually become a part of the eWaste stream. This fee will be collected by the supplier at the time of sale and used to fund end–of–life recyling. Exactly how the ARF will be collected and distributed is not yet clear. Will certain items, such as CRTs, attract a higher ARF due to greater recycling costs? We will have to wait and see.

South Africa currently has no legal framework which deals specifically with eWaste, and unlike the EU's RoHS directive, we have no laws to govern the materials used in the products that we make. I have been quite surprised in my dealings with manufacturers of printed circuit boards and assembly houses that they even still offer leaded products (because people are still using them). There are many benefits in removing these hazardous substances from your product and any issues with the alternative lead–free options have already been resolved. It is our responsibility as designers to remove these substances from our products. South Africa should introduce legislation to govern the use of hazardous materials so that we can avoid future health crises.

We need more people to be aware of, and start recycling eWaste. Fortunately Makro and Fujitsu–Siemens have partnered together with an eWaste recycler, Desco Electronic Recyclers, and begun providing eWaste collection bins in some of their stores. This will help to create awareness of how to correctly handle and recycle eWaste. eWASA's website has a full list of eWaste collection points in South Africa.

Please design and recycle wisely – it is good for you, me, and our environment.

Photo courtesty of Stephen Bullivant, licensed under a creative commons license.

I visited the Natural & Organic Expo last weekend and learned a few things.

1. Polystyrene can be and is being recycled in Cape Town.
   

   From the reading that I have done I thought that polystyrene was expensive and inefficient to recycle, mainly due to the problems associated with transporting such a light plastic, but polystyrene is actually collected, melted into ingots and recycled into picture frames, stationery, cornices, skirting boards, hangers and seedling trays. In Cape Town EPS Reclaim in Montague Gardens collects and smelts polystyrene. Find your nearest polystyrene drop off point.

2. There is clearly a big demand for natural cleaning products.
   

   I was amazed at how many different natural, organic and bio–degradable household cleaning products were on show. The demand and acceptance of these products is growing not just for environmental reasons, but also due to health concerns such as allergic reactions.

3. Oxi-degradable plastics are creating headaches for recyclers.
   

   I have written about oxi–degradable plastics before. It is important to realise that oxi–degradable plastic is very different from bio–degradable plastic. Companies like Green Home make bio–degradable plastic from plant sources (in their case bagasse, a byproduct of the sugar industry), while oxi–degradable plastics are normal plastic (like polyethylene) with the addition of a metal salt which causes them to break down over time. In South Africa oxi–degradable plastics have been used mainly for fruit and bread bags. The problem with these types of plastics is that they are indistinguishable from normal plastics and it is difficult to know how far the degradation process has progressed. Oxi–degradable bags pollute the recycling stream and result in a poor quality end product.


4. Bio–degradable plastics require education and infrastructure.
   

   Bio–degradable plastic products made from sustainable sources (such as bagasse, mentioned above) may provide a viable alternative to plastic in some cases. It is important that they are manufactured from sources other than food crops (plastic from corn is unsustainable). A problem that needs to be addressed (and is being addressed by manufacturers such as Green Home) is how to manage the waste from these products. Simply dumping bio–degradable plastic into a landfill is undesirable. Bio–degradable plastics will not degrade in a landfill, which means effective collection and composting needs to take place. Consumers can compost these packages at home, but without education it is unlikely that this will happen. Education, collection and composting infrastructure is an important aspect of bio–degradable plastic.

5. Egg yolks contain colourant.
   

   Pick 'n Pay is selling a new range of indigenous free range eggs, and one of the marketing points is "No yolk colourants." Yolk colourants? It turns out that chicken feed is often supplemented to increase its carotenoid content to obtain a more consistent colour yolk. The supplements used appear to be natural or "nature identical" such as lutein and canthaxanthin.

It was good to meet new people, get exposed to a few new ideas and to find new sources of organic and environmentally aware products. If you are in Cape Town and the surrounding area then make a point to go next year.

Nature strives towards efficiency. Efficiency can be defined as any waste which occurs in achieving a goal, or, "The ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system."

Efficiency is the perfect use of material. Packaging is inefficient, as the "goal" is what is inside the package, while the packaging becomes waste. Packaging can be efficient if it is reused, as it never exits the system. Recycling requires extra energy, and is therefore less efficient than reusing, but more efficient than throwing away packaging. Using less to achieve the same is material efficiency. Smaller products, less packaging, lower material consumption. Have you ever considered how you could design exactly the same thing but smaller? Electronic engineers, think about small 0402 or 0201 size resistors over larger ones – in most cases they are functionally equivalent, but use less material and require less space on a PCB.

Efficiency is the perfect use of fuel. Internal combustion engines are around 20% efficient – that means 80% of the energy you put into your car is wasted. If cars were 100% efficient they would have zero emmissions and generate no heat. Did you know that cycling is the most energy efficient mode of transport?

Efficiency is the perfect use of water. Polluting potable water with waste such as sewerage and chemical cleaners requires energy and further chemicals to restore the water to a usable state. Efficient water usage means reducing consumption and leaving it in a usable state. Reducing waste and chemicals entering the water system means more efficient processing of water. Processing waste on site (composting toilets, greywater systems) reduces both waste and water consumption.

Solar energy is time efficient. Oil and natural gasses are the result of thousands of years of energy from the sun. Using the sun directly is an efficient time short cut.

Increasing crop yields makes more efficient use of space. Decreasing the use of fertilizers moves towards the perfect balance of an efficient ecosystem. Growing food near where it will be consumed is transport efficient. All our environmental goals centre around efficiency.

We need to learn from nature – waste nothing, strive towards perfect efficiency.

Reuse is the forgotten R of the three R's.

We currently have a materials chain that goes something like this: harvest resource, manufacture, distribute, use, dispose.

Recycling adds an extra step where things are collected during disposal and reintroduced into the manufacturing stage as raw materials. There are two things about recycling that need to be noted:

1. Many materials are unsuitable to be recycled into the same thing. Plastics are probably the best example. They are either used to supplement the virgin (new) feedstock, or made into entirely different products (e.g. PET from drinking bottles is recycled into clothes, insulation, credit cards, etc.)
2. Recycling often involves breaking down the product into something as close as possible to the original feedstock. This means that all the energy that went into it is lost. Glass is a good example.

Recycling uses far less energy than creating a product from raw virgin materials and it is very important that it occurs, but why do we destroy things that are in perfectly usable condition?

The things that I have read about reuse have all been focussed on reusing items in the home and giving or selling them to other people who can use them (which are both important).

I want to see industry take responsibility and start collecting items for reuse, rather than recycling (wherever possible). We have seen this happening our whole lives: glass soda bottles. Every time you took a glass soda bottle back to the store and had your deposit paid back you were putting a bottle into the reuse chain.

The reuse chain works like this: instead of disposing of something it is taken back to the distributor (the store it was bought from). When the manufacturer makes deliveries they also collect the items for reuse. At the factory the items are inspected and cleaned. Any items that are unsuitable for reuse are recycled, and the rest is reused.

This means far less energy is expended on recycling and manufacturing new items which could have been reused. The easiest thing to imagine this working with is glass bottles and jars of any type, but why not expand this to everything? Why not start designing reuse into our products?

There would be huge savings for manufacturers, as they would not need to keep buying new materials. The only costs are the collection and logistics, which are already in place for the distribution of the product.

Packaging is a great example. If packaging can be made durable enough to be reused multiple times then consumers could just keep returning that packaging until it reached the end of its life cycle.

It does require a rethink of how we design, package and distribute things, but the benefits would be great for everyone – both manufacturers and consumers.

"As meaningless as changing a CFL may be, the people that change the CFL bulbs get engaged in the discussion – and that's important." – Colin Bevan, aka No Impact Man

There seem to be a lot of people who challenge individual action. I have often found that those same people shift responsibility.

I am sure you have heard it before:

• "What difference can I make? The government should..."
• "For every plastic bag you recycle, someone else throws ten away."
• "How does it help if I ride my bicycle to work while someone else drives their 4x4?"

The biggest difference that our small actions make is that they change what goes on inside of us. Let's look at my personal experience with recycling in Cape Town.

I decided that it was time to start recycling as much of our waste as possible. I already had a compost heap which was taking care of any organic waste. Now it was time to deal with plastics, cardboard, paper and the likes. After dutifully sorting my plastic waste I went to the Morning Star dump expecting to be able to deposit my various recyclables. Well, things did not turn out quite as I would have hoped. There just did not seem to be the facilities that were advertised.

Being me I sent off an email to find out what was supposed to be happening. After some emails back–and–forth it seemed like things should be better. So off I went for my second attempt at recycling. This time things were organised and clear. Everything went into the proper recycling bins. I was pleased.

Third visit...unfortunately it was exactly like the first. No recycling bins. Confusion. So back to square one with another email sent off.

So what is the point of my story? My action (recycling) has got me engaged with a problem within my community. It has me engaged in a conversation around the problems and challenges that we face. Suddenly I care about the quality of the dump in my area. That one small action has changed me.

So I encourage you to take action. Just choose something you care about and start doing something. It may or may not change the world, but it will change you.

I recently bought some apples and spotted an intriguing little logo on the back of the plastic packaging. I look carefully at just about all plastic packaging these days in an attempt to identify what type of plastic it is (and therefore how recyclable).

What I found was a bit different to what I was expecting. Below a little logo was a website reference, www.degradable.net. So, off to the website to find out what this was all about.

It turns out that these smart guys have developed a low cost additive for polyethylene and polypropylene which causes the plastic to break down into a biodegradable form (the long plastic chains break down into shorter chains which can then be accessed by micro organisms which break them down to carbon dioxide and water. You can read the full details on their site). Astrapak are the South African suppliers of these plastics. There are also some alternatives to the d₂w process which make use of light sensitive, or starch additives.

The great benefit of this is that plastics which are disposed degrade much faster (they can be set to degrade after 60 days or up to 6 years later). One of the issues that this technique creates is that it impacts on recycling. The degradable plastic can be recycled, but in their words, "..there are many different and complex permutations of both input feedstock and output materials which need to be individually considered," i.e. it's complicated. It seems like it is easier to create recycled material that is degradable, while creating non–degradable recycled products is trickier.

This seems like a big disadvantage, but according to the EIA only 5% of plastics produced in America are recycled (I am sure that figure is much lower for South Africa). That means that up to 95% of the plastic produced ends up in land fills, water ways and generally strewn around the country side. At least using degradable plastics means that they will have a smaller, and shorter impact on our environment.

I am sure that a lot of people would rather argue the case for bioplastics. Personally I have always been sceptical of the benefits of bioplastics (and biofuels), mainly due to the pressure they place on food prices. More recently there have been some studies revealing that biofuels may damage the environment more ^[1][2] than emissions due to conventional fuels (bioplastics come from the same process, and therefore have a similar impact). So bioplastics may not currently have all the benefits that they claim.

Degradable plastic is a great product due to its reduced impact on the environment, but we do need to examine how we use and dispose of plastics. The reality is that plastic feedstock (oil) is a limited resource ^[3] and we need to use it wisely. Biofuels and bioplastics may not be the panacea that many people have hoped for. Only a small percentage of plastics are recycled. Plastics that are recycled are typically used to make other products rather than replace the recycled product, which means virgin feedstock is constantly required.

The real long terms solution is to reduce the amount of plastic we use, as well as reuse it as much as possible, and to continue recycling when a product reaches the end of its lifetime. So, in my mind, the question is this: how do we create plastic products with longer lifetimes? That is what really needs to change.

References:
[1] "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change" by Timothy Searchinger, et al.
[2] More on the negative impacts of biofuels.
[3] According to Waste Watch,

"It is estimated that 4% of the world's annual oil production is used as a feedstock for plastics production and an additional 3-4% during manufacture."

I finally got around to watching "The Story of Stuff" and was absolutely blown away by the compelling and simple way that its message is presented. Spend 20 minutes of your time to watch this video (here, on the site, or download it)



It is really important that this message gets spread, as we all have a role to play in fixing what we have helped to create. As consumers we need to change how we purchase, as engineers we need to change how we create, as marketers we need to change the message that we spread.

There are some things we need to carefully consider. Take this comment from the brilliant Seth Godin,

"So I'm hoping that what you make is worthy. Marketing is a powerful tool especially when it associates a product with a desire and instinct we already have."

Does what we create help people to live a better happier life? Does it protect the precious world we live in? We have a great responsibility when we create, market and sell things – we need to make sure we carry that responsibility well.

And then the final line of the video,

"Remember that old way didn’t just happen by itself. It’s not like gravity that we just gotta live with. People created it. And we’re people too. So let’s create something new."

We have created the system that we currently have. Does the current system protect our world? Does it help us to be happier? I don't think so.

Even though some people may think "there is no other way" we have to remember this: we created this system, and we can create a new one. We can find a new way.

Further reading:
[1] Happiness versus consumption on No Impact Man
[2] Sustainable consumption's "double dividend" on No Impact Man
[3] Slower consumption by Dr Tim Cooper – Journal of Industrial Ecology (via No Impact Man)

I recently received some samples from Texas Instruments and was pleasantly surprised — actually blown away — by their fill packaging. Blown away by fill packaging? Let me explain...

Most of the fill packaging I have seen before normally involved polystyrene "chips" — basically plastic. What happens to those polystyrene chips normally? Well, expanded polystyrene is considered uneconomical to recycle^[1] (in South Africa at least^[2]) and ends up in landfills (or strewn around the countryside, waterways, etc.)

So I take out my samples and they are wrapped in paper — not just any paper, but a special expanded paper. Lucky for me, the manufacturer was smart enough to put their website onto the packaging: www.geami.com.

Go check it out. It is paper with little slits cut into it. The slits cause the paper to expand when removed from the roll. This is a really great way to avoid bubble wrap, polystyrene chips, and other plastic packaging. They have some videos and cost comparisons that are worth checking out. If TI is using them for the free samples they ship all over the world (and most likely everything that they ship), then that alone must imply that this packaging is a good and viable option.

Other than the direct advantages of the Geami packaging, it can also be transported in its unexpanded form, which reduces the toll that transportation has on the environment.

The beauty of this product is that it is a simple and elegant packaging solution that is easily recyclable and improves not just the environmental friendliness of the packaging, but ALSO reduces the cost. A great example of engineering simplicity.

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There are some other alternatives to polystyrene which are similar, but made from biodegradable compounds. It is hard to compare these with polystyrene because I do not know enough about them, but there are a couple of questions that come to mind (if anyone can answer these for me, please do):

• How do these products compare on cost?
  
• What is the impact of bioplastics on food prices? (I believe this is a big issue with biofuels and bioplastics)
• How recyclable are they? (recycling is generally better than allowing them to degrade in landfills)
  

To me there is just no way that these bioplastics can compete with the Geami packaging in terms of environmental friendliness.

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[1]From The Plastics Federation of South Africa (scroll to the part about "The Plastics Recyling Sequence" and find polystyrene),

"The polystyrene mostly seen is the white, very light, friable, expanded or foamed polystyrene (PS-E). Although this material is recyclable it has such a large volume to mass ratio that it is completely uneconomical to transport and recycle at present."

Also see polystyrene recycling on Isolite's website.

[2]Notice how expanded polystyrene products are absent from the list of recyclables for Cape Town, and on the non–recyclable side for Johannesburg.

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