Jay Trang

Day 8 of Sustainable Innovations (One week down, woot woooot!):
For today's post, I am leaving it open for everyone here to discuss AI's role in sustainability. In the replies, please talk about how AI can help or hurt sustainability efforts.

For my two cents about it, AI isn't a perfect solution, but it's nevertheless an empowering tool. There is the issue of what will power the data centers powering the AI (tomorrow, I am going to talk about one such energy source), but that does not mean in my book that it needs to be discounted as a tool to use to improve sustainability. It's ability to make sense of a lot of complex data very quickly enables decisions to be made that could not be done before. I've been hearing about AI algorithms in finance that can estimate how much carbon is emitted or saved from certain investments, moving us towards true ESG accounting. I myself have found out about publicly-traded sustainable companies that I would have to take several weeks or months to figure out before Perplexity. Now, I can find them more quickly with a good prompt and understand what they do in one day.

One other thing I will say about AI and sustainability. From one of the books I have read for the Ecochallenge, I found out how many countries and programs even in the U.S. have very poor information management and record-keeping procedures. Without good data, forget AI, there's no chance the decision-makers of these organizations can ever make the best-informed decisions to hit their targets. Heck, they won't even have an honest idea if they are hitting their targets or not! For these firms, it would not make sense to build their own AI systems then. They need to get their IT systems down and embrace a culture of true integrity, transparency, and accountability first before even thinking about building their own AI.

Day 7 of Sustainable Innovations:
In light of my recent donation to the World Wildlife Fund, I'll be putting the spotlight on one of the financial instruments they made through their Conservation Fund - the debt-for-nature-swap. It's pretty self-explanatory - it's an instrument to free up debt from governments, provided they make arrangements to preserve biodiversity or reduce deforestation.
The success of these swaps are limited, but I want to highlight this as an innovation because it highlights something I see many people overlook. Even the financial services industry has a role in facilitating sustainable development in a meaningful way with their own ingenuity in a very direct way, not just through charitable donations to fund labor. In fact, providing financial services to developing countries is so critical that it's a target that comes up as a target under multiple SDGs. Wall Street may have it's notoriety, but by no means does that mean finance is in no place to make a meaningful impact on sustainability. (I even learned about how banks doing business in Africa can help African farmers secure safe revenue in spite of changing weather conditions thanks to the commodity trading services of the bank in one of Coursera's courses about the SDGs.)

Day 6 of Sustainable Innovations:
For this innovation, it's so profound that it effects all the operations of companies. Toyota pioneered this process - Lean Manufacturing - and now it has been adopted as a guideline for startups as well. There's a lot that goes on with this process, but in essence, Lean Manufacturing is all about eliminating waste, continuous improvement, and building each piece "just in time" for the next step. More info here: https://www.amper.xyz/post/lean-management-understanding-the-toyota-production-principles
The recent lockdown put a challenge to this process as it's very reliant on continuous trading of resources and does not allow for reserves or stockpiling of inventory. However, at it's heart, it still highly values making products better by getting input from all parties, including the customer, as rapidly as possible and reducing costs by eliminating waste as much as possible.

Day 5 of Sustainable Innovations: (Oh yeah, I'm going ALL 30 DAYS of this challenge with these posts, so buckle up!):

This one hits home for me as I am working with the family restaurant and we're contributing to this. It turns out, used cooking oil does not just get dumped in the water or a furnace. Trucks can collect used cooking oil and bring it to facilities that can then turn used cooking oil into diesel fuel. Some companies can treat this biodiesel so that any diesel car can run on it without modifications. Some have even found ways to turn used cooking oil into jet fuel now too! How's that for a circular economy?!

Day 4 of Sustainable Innovations:
For today's post, it's a 3-in-1 special! These 3 innovations fit into one idea - energy recovery for car engines. Any hybrid car owners or Formula 1 fans here may recognize these innovations.

Starting off with what I think is the most significant of the three - regenerative braking, or in F1 terms the MGU-K. Essentially, it's when the electric motor goes in reverse. Not reverse as in reverse drive, but rather it lets backwards motion turns the motor, bringing some electrical power back to the battery. Relatively simple idea, yet so effective.
In Formula 1 (at least for now), they can also recover electrical energy from the car's exhaust through what they call their MGU-H systems. Most generators in power plants need motion of some kind - mostly boiled, pressurized steam - to run a generator to produce power. In F1 cars, they take this idea and attached a generator to it's turbocharger, which is already collecting the exhaust to run a compressor to push in more air into the car's engine. When done right, as Mercedes has done for many years, the engine becomes so efficient that it can get more energy out of it's fuel than it wastes in the exhaust. (That's when they boast that their engines have "over 50% thermal efficiency.")
Although the Prius does not have a turbocharger, it does have a way to recover some of the exhaust. There's some pipework that allows some of the exhaust gas to recirculate back into the engine, helping to heat up the engine to optimal temperatures and allow some unburned fuel to get reburned.

I am sharing all this to show that even with gasoline-powered engines, there are still ways carmakers can ramp up the efficiency of their cars, making them more sustainable for the environment. Ideally, we would want transportation that doesn't pollute, but until then, finding ways to make our current technology more efficient and sustainable is an option that ought to be adopted too.

Day 3 of Sustainable Innovations:
Here's something that I thought I understood until I did some research and found out otherwise. I want to cover steel slag recycling here today. It's not quite the same as recycling soda cans. Steel slag is a by-product from the furnaces in a steel mill. In essence, it's some of the debris that gets splashed out when metal gets melted. It's not all metal either; there are some silicates and oxides in the mix. But after some reprocessing of steel slag, the material can be used to make all sorts of things - asphalt, fertilizer, rails, the list goes on. More details here: https://youtu.be/F_icE5rMEBo?si=VoZh0vPcV9-v3hnX
I thought I should bring up metal recycling today in particular because now with more steel tariffs in place, it actually makes recycled metals more desirable. In fact, as of now, recycled metal is exempt from tariffs.

Day 2 of Sustainable Innovations:
There's one tool I'm looking to use in a research project for my degree. It's the data ecosystem from a PBC called Planet Labs. Simply put, they are a data company that gives people access to daily geographic data from their large array of satellites. They have been using their surveillance to, among other things, track illegal deforestation activity the minute it happens. I am using it to see if I can find patterns in the SoCal region in the weeks leading up to the Palisades fire to see just how at-risk of a wildfire the area really is.