This message comes from NPR sponsor Stripe. Tap to pay on iPhone and Stripe can help you grow your businesses revenue and reach through accepting more in-person contactless payments right from an iPhone.
To learn how visit Stripe.com slash tap iPhone. This is the Ted Radio Hour.
Each week, groundbreaking Ted Talks.
Our job now is to dream big. Deliver it at Ted Conferences. To bring about the future we want to see.
Around the world. To understand who we are.
From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
You just don't know what you're going to find.
Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves why is it noteworthy?
And even change you. I literally feel like I'm in different bursts.
Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From Ted and NPR.
I'm Anusha Zomarodi. Getting a fancy new phone or computer can feel so exciting like you have a superpower.
Until it inevitably slows down, freezes or stops working all together.
It is so aggravating. But there are some people who actually find it thrilling if their stuff stops working.
Yeah, yeah. Fixing things is a puzzle. I just find it enormously satisfying.
This is Gay Gordon Bern. Gay does not have the latest iPhone.
I think I have an iPhone 8. Okay, so how old is your phone then?
I don't know how many years it was in use before I bought it. I bought it two years ago.
Used. What about your laptop that you work on?
Pretty sure that's about five years old. Have you ever needed to fix it?
Yeah, several times. It was overheating. And I suspected I needed a new fan. So I ordered a fan.
I opened it up. Saw the fan was clogged with cat hair.
I've also had to replace some keys on my keyboard. I've replaced the battery.
I just enjoyed every minute of it to see how these things work.
So gay is unusual. Don't feel badly if you've never pulled apart your laptop.
Because the companies who manufacture our products, they purposely make it hard for us to fix them.
When people started getting personal computing equipment and cell phones and things like that,
they were told these things are so complicated and so difficult.
Only the manufacturer is capable of making these repairs.
And people largely bought into that whole idea.
Look at all the old companies that used to be in our towns.
There was always an appliance repair shop. There was a TV repair shop. There was a computer repair shop.
Those places are gone. And they're gone not because people didn't want to fix stuff,
but because they can't repair things if they can't get the essential parts and tools.
And as you can see, with the success of companies such as Apple, they have made a killing
by making it impossible to repair without help from the Apple store.
Gay worked in the tech industry for decades.
And this corporate behavior ticked her off.
So in 2013, she founded the Digital Right to Repair Coalition.
And because that's a mouthful, we are also known as repair.org.
Their mission?
It's to fight for repair-friendly legislation, standards, regulations, and policies.
When I first heard it, I was like, what do you mean the right to repair?
That's like the right to fix something.
Yes, I mean, but what you're saying is we are at a point where we need the law
to tell these companies that we should be allowed to repair the things that we buy.
When you first started talking about the phrase, what was the response from lawmakers,
from manufacturers, what did they think?
Oh, they had exactly the same reaction you did. They said, what is that?
And we were able to explain it mostly in the context of cars
because everybody understood that they need to be able to go to the local mechanic.
And we say, well, those problems exist now for everything else.
We are stuck with whatever the manufacturer feels like doing
because we don't have the consumer protection laws to require them to do what we need them to do.
People need to fix their stuff, and if they can't, there are some really bad consequences.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Since the 70s, that's been the slogan for the environmentally conscious.
But today, we often feel unsure if our daily habits make any difference at all.
Are the items we toss in the recycling bin really recycled?
Why are we getting new phones and laptops rather than fixing them?
And does clean energy or eating sustainably truly have to be a political issue?
Well, on today's show, ideas that put a twist on reducing, reusing, and recycling
and could upend entire industries.
We'll meet people working to radically change what we consume and what we see as disposable.
Let's get back to Gay Gordon Burn.
If we are going to have any control over our e-waste problem, we have to talk about repair.
Here she is on the TED stage.
Back in 2013, the EPA estimated that the average US household already owned 28 digitally driven gizmos and gadgets.
It was everything from garage door openers and hot tub controls to smart toasters.
We just do a little math and multiply 28 times our roughly 123 million households.
We come up with a pretty staggering 3.5 billion pieces of e-waste.
They don't belong in our landfills and they are costly and difficult to put back as raw materials.
When we look a little more closely at what's even possible with recycling,
I think we've been ignoring some really ugly truths.
By the time a laptop or refrigerator or even an electric toothbrush gets in our hands,
almost all of the environmental damage has already been done.
All the costs of mining and refining and smelting and transportation,
and we don't see these costs when we go to the store,
and we don't see the human costs of terrible labor conditions and exposure to toxic materials.
So, fixing more and throwing away less just makes sense.
Let's talk about where we are then in terms of the law and legislation.
The law says that they're not supposed to be monopolizing repair.
They do, so more enforcement would be helpful,
but enforcement is not the same as making a requirement that they sell parts and tools.
And that can only be done in states because states have the power of general business law,
and states can say, Mr. Manufacturer, if you're going to do business in my state,
you must do X, Y and Z.
And those laws are very powerful, and they work.
There was a successful wheelchair right to repair a bill that we finally got passed in Colorado.
Wait, why would you not have the right to repair your own wheelchair?
Because they won't sell you the parts.
It's a ridiculous situation where the wheelchair manufacturer says,
I can't sell you a battery until like three months from now.
And meanwhile, you're sitting in a chair and you can't move.
That's why it went through so quickly, because it's so absurd.
But the same absurdity applies to all these other things.
The arguments that big manufacturers make to keep their customers from fixing their things.
My understanding is that Apple has said you could hurt yourself in other states,
tech companies have argued that will create hubs for hackers.
Are any of those things true? What are some of the reasons that you've heard?
There are no reasons. There's only excuses.
You are responsible for your own personal safety from the moment that you purchase something.
That's in every contract I've ever seen, and I've spent 40 years in commercial contracting.
The responsibility for safety and cybersecurity, by the way, transfers at the cash register.
I think a lot of people don't even know a world where they could take something to get fixed, right?
They think, well, every two years, my carrier says that I'm available for an upgrade.
They go to the store and they get a new phone. Where does the old one go?
The phones that are taken back in trade tend not to reappear on the used market.
They tend to be shredded or pulled apart very prematurely,
and the parts that they're pulling out could be used for repairs, but that's not their business.
Their business is to sell new phones.
That is what happens when a manufacturer controls a secondary market as they want to keep as much used equipment off the market as possible.
You mentioned earlier that most repair shops have gone away.
If we get the right to repair our stuff, would there even be enough people to repair them?
These jobs that have gone away will come back.
They will come back in droves because there's a heck of a lot more equipment out there
that needs repair services. There's hundreds of thousands of people that have the capabilities and the qualifications.
And there will be jobs in towns that will support a family because these are not low-level factory jobs.
They're great jobs and they don't require an advanced degree.
I'll give you an example.
There's a charity in Minnesota called TechDum and they take indonated electronics
and then they hire adults that are hard to employ,
many of whom coming out of the criminal justice system.
They train them to make repairs.
They then take the repaired goods, sell them and use the proceeds to fund more training.
And secondary markets are why used equipment is so affordable because the used seller has to compete with new.
So if a new gadget is a thousand dollars, we expect a pretty big discount to buy that same item used.
Let's start with 50%.
So now we have an affordability capability that is central to crossing the digital divide.
We had five million students that went to virtual school this past year that didn't have enabling technology.
And that's because parents and school districts couldn't buy new.
We still have a lot of chip shortages and these are going to be with us for a while.
And I think we have to think very seriously about doing more repair, not just to make things last longer,
but also to be more resilient as an economy.
The work that you do, do you find that your supporters fall along predictable party lines?
Actually, there's almost no partisan divide at all.
It cuts across every possible socio-economic political or geographic line.
I'd say the only real divide we seem to see is almost an age divide.
I see that the older the legislator, the less familiar they are with a technology and be with the limitations of modern technology.
The last kitchen remodel they did was 20 years ago.
All of those appliances still work.
But if they have done one in the past five years, they will have already experienced some pretty severe problems.
That's so depressing. You're saying that the newer your appliances are, the more likely they are to crap out sooner.
Absolutely.
You put a computer in a refrigerator. It's not going to last 20 years anymore.
So bottom line, I need a new refrigerator or a phone.
What should I keep in mind?
By the least high tech product you can in a home appliance.
Don't buy the one with the fancy screen on the outside because the screen craps out way faster than the compressor.
Don't buy the bells and whistles because they don't last.
And they won't be supported. And one day they might drop support on it all together.
And now you've got to replace and reprogram your entire household.
So low tech as low tech as you can get.
I think we've been told that we want bright and shiny more so than we actually want bright and shiny.
Cell phones, tablets, whatever, people do want to buy things that will last.
And repair is the way that you get to long useful life of the product.
That's Gay Gordon Bern. She's the executive director and founder of repair.org.
You can see her full talk at TED.com.
Today on the show, repair, repurpose, reimagine.
We'll be right back.
On this week's episode of Wild Card, Poet Laureate Ada Lemo tells us how to give yourself a little grace.
The nice thing about being in my mid-dual grade 40s, yeah, I forgive myself a little time.
Join me, Rachel Martin, friend, PR's new podcast Wild Card.
The game where cards control the conversation.
On the inheriting podcast, Carol Park was 12 years old, working at her family's gas station.
When a big moment in US history changed her life.
Korean businesses in South Central have been torched.
Dozens looted.
The 1992 LA uprising.
Why would this happen?
I didn't get to answer that until I was an adult.
Listen to inheriting from LA studios and the end-parent network, wherever you get your podcasts.
Humans are kind of overrated.
Over on Shortwave, a science podcast were only kind of kidding.
We're bringing you the wondrous world of animal science to your daily life.
From queer animal love stories to songbird memories, we're showing you how critter knowledge informs human science.
Listen now to Shortwave, a podcast from NPR.
In any great story, there's a moment that sparks your curiosity.
It tells you there is more to uncover.
How did this happen? How did we get here?
That's where Embedded comes in.
We are NPR's home for documentary journalism, immersive and intimate stories.
I was stone-called speechless.
Nothing will ever, ever, ever, ever be the same here.
Find Embedded Wherever You Get Your Podcasts.
On the inheriting podcast, one event can change a family for generations.
We call it Ta-E-Goop.
Did you ever realize when you were a child that you became a orphan?
Camp was such a hard time. How do you think you got through it?
Listen to inheriting, our new podcast about Asian American and Pacific Islander families.
From LA studios and the end-parent network, wherever you get your podcasts.
Before we get back to the show, I want to ask you to please consider becoming a
member of Ted Radio Hour Plus.
You'll get extra advice, stories and expertise from Ted Speakers every other week
and no ads ever.
And you'll be supporting public radio.
Listener Support is crucial to keeping us going.
Go to plus.npr.org slash Ted.
Or give it a try right in the Apple Podcast app.
It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anouche Zomerodi.
Today on the show, repair, repurpose, reimagine.
So, Andrew, where are we going?
Red is the library.
The other day, I took the subway to Lower Manhattan to go to a library.
It's just through here.
But this isn't a library for books.
Housed on the sixth floor of a skyscraper right near Wall Street
is a library for materials.
It's innovative and sustainable stuff.
So, things which is new, different materials that perhaps you wouldn't have expected.
And we do.
My guide, the librarian, is scientist Andrew Dent.
I work as a material researcher for a company called Material Connection.
The company acts as a kind of matchmaker.
Yes, yes. We like to match the innovators, the people who manufacture these materials
or create these materials.
And the people who use them, whether it's an architect, designer or a manufacturer
of product themselves.
And we do, of course, have resources for the more standard materials,
the stuff that you make shampoo bottles out of or the leather film for your couch.
But designers kind of want to see what's new and what's next.
So, this is like walking in the future.
This is like a pie.
The materials library is a large room filled with movable walls,
each with dozens of samples of different materials,
mounted on display from floor to ceiling.
Okay, I'm following you.
Let's go through the wall, after wall, after wall of materials.
And some of these are just like little boxes.
This one.
This is a method for turning egg shells and tomato peels into automobile tires.
Oh my god, this is 100% vegan leather made of apple peels.
That's so cool.
I mean, just in front of me here,
is a sound absorbing panel made from natural hand-picked Scandinavian reindeer moss?
Is it okay if I touch it?
Yes.
That's okay.
It's very soft.
It's soft.
I would love to have a wall made out of that.
What's the criteria for something to make it into the library?
Yes, we have a panel that judges the materials.
You know, we of course want to include as much stuff as possible.
We want to ensure that our designers have access to as many different options as possible.
But for us, we want really just the stuff that will be wow.
But also the stuff that will offer a more sustainable lower carbon future
and will resonate with consumers.
When you throw something away,
it typically goes into a landfill.
Andrew says we need to reimagine how we make and build things
and use materials that will never end up as garbage.
Here he is on the TED stage.
The interesting thing they're not doing so well is the architecture industry.
Where the challenges with architecture has always been.
When we build up, we don't think about taking down.
That's a challenge because it ends up about third of all landfill waste in the US
is architecture.
We need to think of a different about this.
There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material.
A good example is this.
It's actually bricks that are made from old demolition waste,
which includes the glass, includes the rubble,
includes the concrete.
We put it up, put it all together, heated up,
and make these bricks we can build more buildings from.
It's only a fraction of what we need.
My hope is that with big data and geotagging,
we can change that and we can be more strifey when it comes to buildings.
If there's a building down the block, which is being demolished,
are the materials there that the new building being built here can use?
Can we use that build to understand all of the materials that are available in that building
that's still usable? Can we then basically put them into a new building
without actually losing any value in the process?
Okay, so let's say I have one of your clients and I arrived here
and I said, you know, Andrew, I have looked at my beautiful design for,
I don't know, a sneaker, a new fashionable sneaker,
but I definitely want to market it to a conscientious consumer.
You would then take me into the library and show me what.
We would show you two types of things. We would show you materials.
We'd also show you new manufacturing processes as well.
Oh, Andrew, that looks like a box with somebody's old chewing gum in it.
Exactly right.
So there's a company in London that is taking, well basically has put containers around the city.
So when you finish chewing your gum, rather than leaving on the floor,
which is not a good thing, you can put it into one of these receptacles
and they will collect it, they will clean it,
and then they will take that material because it's basically a rubbery material
and they'll synthesize it and manufacture it into products.
Like what?
A coffee cup lid, coffee cups themselves, even the souls of shoes.
Because the material is just a chemistry.
So yes, it's been inside my mouth and I've been chewing it.
It's got bacteria from my mouth.
And once we clean that off, the raw material itself has value as basically a rubbery, durable, and colourable product.
So is this a proof of concept or is this actual, right?
So what's this?
So this is a, it's a rigid panel material, perhaps used as a countertop.
100% from fish scales.
No way.
Fish scales.
So, okay.
Tell me where this cut, okay, explain the process here.
It looks, by the way.
It really looks just like a, maybe quartz, quartz countertop.
A countertop, yes, also my, so yes.
Turns out the Kairasan, which is what fish scales are made of,
is a very wonderful engineering material.
So they're going to clean it first.
So it doesn't smell a fish.
You know, if you smell it.
It doesn't smell like anything.
Okay, exactly.
You know, because we're not able to clean these sorts of things very effectively.
So it doesn't smell a fish.
There's no salt in it.
So we just take the raw material, clean it well,
press it together hard with a binder, and it becomes a viable, valuable material.
Is this going to happen soon?
Are, are there, I don't know, fish canneries in Alaska also turning into kitchen countertop companies?
Yes, this company sells kitchen countertops.
You can purchase kitchen countertop from this company, which is 100% fish scales.
Do I get a discount?
Let's keep going.
Okay.
This one I thought might be interesting.
Merida Cotta.
It's actually some rough, rough looking cups and bowls that are manufactured out of cow manure.
Really?
Okay, so it looks like a terracotta mug.
Oh, you're taking it off.
Yes.
Can I touch it again?
Yes, of course.
Okay.
So it was more of a concept.
Okay.
But this is poop.
This is cow poop.
This is cow poop, yes.
But it looks really nice.
Well, it's also very functional.
The thing was you had a farmer, a dairy farmer, who basically was worried about the amount of manure they were producing
to discard it somehow.
And there wasn't any other use for it.
So they thought, okay, well, since it's mostly just salulose fibers, it's really still useable material.
So they decided that, okay, well, let's fashion it into cups and then just fire it.
I manufacture these products out of it.
But I'm guessing that's a hard sell, right?
I mean, eat, right?
Well, it doesn't need to be a cup.
It can be, it can be floor tiles.
It can be anything.
It can be something else that perhaps you wouldn't be drinking out of.
I have to ask you as a consumer.
I mean, it's really depressing.
Everything I read basically says,
that's very nice that you're recycling your milk jug or your laundry detergent jug.
But the chances of it actually being recycled and reused again is pretty limited.
Do you feel that way too?
Is that true?
I feel like we don't even know what to believe anymore when it comes to recycling as consumers.
It is confusing.
Yes.
And our recycling rates are abysmal.
If we take the most easily recyclable and the most valuable material, say a water bottle or a soda bottle.
So that material is a Morphus polyester, okay?
It's clear.
It recycles very easily.
We've got a very efficient system to recycle it.
It ends up as chairs or as clothing.
So it's got a second life.
It has value.
And we still only recycle about a quarter of it.
Compare that to other plastics, let's say the polyethylene used in milk cartons or in shampoo bottles.
That number gets down to sort of 5 or 10%.
But it is possible to do it efficiently.
There are some Scandinavian countries.
Yes, I know they always do it better than we do.
Where there are recycling rates are up in the 80s and 90%.
So almost everything that they are using then gets recycled back into something else.
We have a unique challenge here in the US.
But it is possible to improve.
And yes, it can be sometimes that you lose faith in it.
But there are so many new methods of recycling.
And our efficiencies of actually repurposing that material once it does actually get recycled are so good.
I believe that there is still hope.
So have you think about if you make anything, if you're any part of a design firm,
if you basically are refurbishing your house, any aspect in which you make something?
Think about how that product could potentially be used for the second life or third life or fourth life.
Design in the ability for it to be taken apart.
In the meantime, it sounds like we also need to consider changing the way we manufacture things so that they are...
Is the right term circular? Is that the right term?
Yes, that is the ideal.
That everything should work in circles.
Because everything in nature works in circles. The water circle, the circle of life,
nature basically finds a second life, a third life, a repeatable life for everything it has.
There is no waste in nature.
And we are thinking about designing products so they have the potential for a second life.
So trying to remove glues, which make it very hard to pull things apart,
trying to make things which are what we call mono-material, so all from the same material.
So therefore you can put it in the same recycling bin.
So this design evolution has tried to approach design as a way of ensuring that any product can have a second or third life.
I just want to ask you what comes to your mind as a material scientist.
When I say, I mean it's a phrase that's been said in infinite number of times,
reuse, repurpose, recycle. Is that still the right message or is there a new message that we need?
It's still a viable message.
I think reuse me is possibly one of the most valuable ones.
Because no matter how sustainable you can make a product, if it can last two or three times the length of another product,
then that is always going to be the better choice.
But I think the standard three of reduced reuse recycle are iterative.
They are steps we can take for existing solutions.
I think for me it's very much about reimagined.
I know it's a tied old example, but from CDs to iTunes,
we've just reimagined and now it's a process that uses no material at all.
So I think a lot of examples which are the most successful as where a designer or an architect or a brand owner has completely reimagined the product or its use
and therefore has gone away with any concern about the three original hours.
So reimagined I think will probably be the best new solution if we can.
That's Andrew Dent. He's the executive vice president of Materials Research at Material Connection.
You can see his full talk at TED.com.
On the show today, Repair Repurpose Reimagined.
When you hear the term renewable energy, what do you think of? Maybe solar power, wind, big hydroelectric dams?
But if you've ever swam in a hot spring or visited a geyser?
Or for me, I just sat under Mount Reneer for a week and that's a volcano.
Well then you've seen another source of potential power, geothermal.
It's a gigantic source of energy that emanates through the earth.
And part of it actually escape the surface.
This is Jamie Beard.
You have rock with pore space in it. You have water inside that pore space in the rock.
And then you have a lot of heat close to the surface.
And when you have all of those conditions together, that is a gigantic resource.
And in areas that have these resources, the opportunity for cheap renewable energy is huge.
30% of Iceland's electricity is geothermal. Can you? 38%.
But Jamie says that for most of the world, geothermal power is...
Nothing. Like it's so small now that it's barely a blip on the radar.
Which is why she no longer practices environmental law, but is instead working to grow the geothermal industry.
Geothermal is beneath us anywhere and everywhere in the world.
And the only difference between Iceland and right here in Boston where I'm sitting is the depth that you need to drill to get to the heat.
Right? In some places you have to go deeper. It's not right at the surface, but that it's still there.
You know, that's what's really, really exciting about it to me.
The core of the earth is 6,000 degrees Celsius. It's the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
But it's not 94 million miles away. It is right here beneath our feet.
Jamie Beard continues from the TED stage.
There are teams of innovators that are working on figuring out how to most efficiently and effectively tap this enormous heat source beneath us.
But in order to do that, we've got to figure out how to mimic the conditions that occur in places like Iceland that make geothermal easy to tap and extract and harvest.
And those conditions are hot rocks, pore space in the rocks, and water filling those pores.
Those conditions seem simple, but they actually occur naturally in very, very few places in the world.
But the past couple of decades, there have been really disruptive and breakthrough technological innovations that enable us to engineer the subsurface to mimic Mother Nature's geothermal.
So technological innovations like directional drilling, where no longer we can just drill straight down, but instead we can actually turn and steer drill bits to reach very precise and specific locations in the subsurface miles underground.
And we can also fracture rock now, which means that we can create pore space where pore space does not exist naturally.
So if you take these innovations that I just listed and you put them all together, you end up enabling an entirely new breed of scalable geothermal concepts.
Geothermal concepts can be done anywhere in the world.
Okay, so let's talk more about how you actually tap this geothermal energy. Let's get a little technical. Can you explain one of them? EGS.
Sure. So the first type of hot dry rock system is engineered or enhanced geothermal systems. And in those, you drill a well.
And then you fracture the rock. So it's, remember, this is dry. So there's no fluids down there. And it may not be porous enough. So you want to make more pores.
And then you send a fluid down that well and circulating that fluid through the rock, the fluid heats up. It comes, you produce it in a well at the surface and you run a turbine to produce electricity. So you're actually running a power plant.
So it's basically the same as geothermal plants in Iceland or Kenya, just like much, much deeper under the ground. Right. Okay. But you said that there's another way to get at that energy that you're psyched about.
Yeah. So the second concept that's really interesting is closed loop systems. And closed loop is actually really heavy on the use of directional drilling techniques.
And that's essentially the ability to turn your drill bit and to aim for a specific place underground that you want to go. And you don't need to use fractures in closed loops because they're closed. Right. And so you have an underground radiator that you circulate a fluid through.
And that fluid is produced at the surface and runs a power plant, just like EGS.
These are not moon shots. We are talking about making very incremental changes to existing technologies with an eye on more hotter and deeper geothermal development.
There are teams in the field demonstrating these concepts teams like sage geosystems a team that I mentor. This is a well and get this Texas. This is a Texas pasture where you would never suspect the enormous geothermal resources that libel and this well is an existing abandoned oil and gas well that they have repurposed for this geothermal demonstration.
In the past 18 months, more geothermal startups have launched in the past 10 years combined. If even one of these startups is successful at proving a scalable geothermal concept, we are literally off to the races and developing this massive, reliable 24 seven clean energy source anywhere in the world.
So if we've got the technology, what's holding us back from a geothermal power boom? Jamie says it's politics. When we come back, her proposal for bringing together the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists, I'm Manouche Zamorodi.
You're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
Summer is for going to the movie theater because it's too hot to stay home. It's for driving the windows down listening to your favorite music. It's for stretching out while you're on vacation to gobble up a TV show. For a guide to some of the TV movies and music, we are most excited about this summer. Listen to the pop culture happy hour podcast from NPR.
Do you wish stories could unfold over three hours rather than three minutes? You tired of doom scrolling, trying to find humanity? Or maybe a deeper understanding of where the world is the way it is? Listen to embedded NPR's original documentary series. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Sam Brigger, longtime fresh air producer and sometime interviewer. In a special extended podcast episode, I talk with Maggie Rogers about nostalgia, her new album, and her decision to go to Harvard Divinity School.
I think at its core, music has always been the most sacred and most spiritual thing that I've ever been a part of. Find NPR's fresh air wherever you get podcasts.
The embedded podcast brings you eye opening reporting. There's something that hasn't been disclosed yet. Immersive journalism. I could smell smoke, I could smell the dust.
Personal stories. I was scared. Like I can't protect you. We are NPR's home for documentary storytelling. Find embedded wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm a new summer Odie. On today's episode, repair, repurpose, reimagine. And we were just hearing from Jamie Beard who describes herself as a geothermal instigator.
The thing I love about geothermal is it's clean and renewable in that it's this naturally occurring energy source that is ubiquitous near limitless.
Jamie believes that we are on the cusp of turning geothermal energy into a massive new source of alternative power.
So how do we do that? Brings me my proposition. Here she is again on the Ted stage.
To scale geothermal, we need to efficiently, effectively and safely drill below the surface over and over and over and over again.
And who does that now? The oil and gas industry does that now. The oil and gas industry is a global specialized workforce of millions backed by almost 200 years of break through technological innovation.
All aimed at producing energy from deep underground. You flip the switch and you have green drilling. And oil and gas keeps its current business model, the business model that keeps them firmly rooted in hydrocarbons now.
They're doing what they know how to do. Which is exploring for drilling for and producing a subsurface energy asset.
So Jamie, you went from being an activist who was against the fossil fuel industry to working with that industry and trying to get it to transition into geothermal. Why? That doesn't sound like a natural progression to make.
I would have agreed with you when I was 18, 19 early 20s, vehemently. In fact, I started my career working in renewables like solar and wind.
One thing that I did realize though over the past years is that, you know, if we want to go fast and there is an enormous amount of climate urgency, we literally have a Ferrari in the driveway.
You've got millions of highly skilled workers. You've got a ton of relevant technologies and a hundred years of know how you have an existing global footprint was spot on core competencies in this area. Why not use that? That is a gigantic resource.
So when you talk to people who are in the oil and gas industry and you propose to them this idea of turning their teams and resources into geothermal power plants, what's their response?
So one of the first individuals that I contacted was a former chief scientist at Shell named Lance Cook. He was skeptical at first and we had a lot of fights. And over a period of months he came around and decided that he was excited enough about geothermal and the ability to reduce cost using oil and gas technologies and methodologies.
But he went and started a company. But now there are more than 25 teams that I'm working with now all pursuing different concepts and types of projects in geothermal.
So I need to ask fracking for fossil fuels is very divisive. A lot has been reported on the pollution that fracking rock for oil and gas can cause.
My understanding is that fracking for geothermal would be far less dangerous. But do you think people are ever really going to believe that?
If there is something that I lose sleep over, it's that. I mean this is something that technologically speaking, I'm not worried. Like that is going to be solved fast.
What I'm worried about here is the human resources problem and it's a big one. How do you deal with the fact that we're talking about essentially here green fracking?
Is green fracking going to be a thing and it will environmental groups and climate activists of which I'm one.
You know, except, but geothermal is just too awesome to become this like political football. It's a cause that like every single one of us could get behind.
But we need to make sure that we're doing the work in inclusion of voices, talking to one another, compromising. And that's hard.
But why would we go re why would we start from scratch and rebuild industries, you know, or start, you know, start from scratch and build new industries that are going to take us a hundred years to power the earth that we don't have.
When we've already got one that we can just pivot toward geothermal.
That's Jamie Beard. She's the founder of the nonprofit project in her space. You can find her full talk at Ted.com.
So on this episode, we've talked about reimagining what we make things with. We've heard about why we should repair our products and how we could repurpose oil drilling technology to tap into geothermal power.
But what about what we eat? Can we remake what goes on our plates?
Yeah, so I've been working with cows for about 20 years or so.
This is biologist, Hermius Caprab, growing up in Eritrea, Hermius saw how important milk and meat were to the nutrition of his family and his community.
The majority of people in the world live in low income countries where the main source of nutrition, the good nutrition, is animal source food.
I wanted to have ample opportunity for people to drink milk and to eat meat and, you know, basically lead a healthy life.
That's what I wanted to do and that's what I studied biology and agriculture. I've had relationship with cows for quite a long time.
Now, Hermius is a professor at UC Davis where he studies cows, specifically a problem with cows. They're burps.
Those burps are full of methane, one of the greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change.
In fact, cows account for 4% of US greenhouse gas emissions every year. I always thought that cows were particularly flatchalant. Is this true?
It is not.
Oh.
So most of the gas is formed in their stomach, so they are in their gut, particularly in the first chamber. And so they built it out.
By some estimates between 95 to 97% of the methane comes from the front end of the cow. So the back end of the cow is really maybe 3% or less.
So for the past several years, Hermius and his team have been experimenting with how changing a cow's diet could safely and quickly lower the amount of methane in its belches.
Here's Hermius Cabrab on the TED stage.
So how can you reduce these methane burps? My colleagues and I may have found a solution.
See weed.
Let me explain. A couple of years ago, an article was published that showed almost complete elimination of methane when seaweed was added to chopped grass in the lab.
Great. But as a agricultural researcher, I know lots of additives work well in the lab, but not in real animals. But there was something different about seaweed in the way in which it reduced methane.
Some seaweed contain ingredients that directly inhibit microbes in the cow's gut from forming methane without interfering with food digestion.
So we thought we should test this in live animals. This was the first ever experiment in dairy cattle and we had no idea how much to give them.
Okay, so your team starts mixing in just a little bit of seaweed into the cow's regular feed. And what did the cows think? Like did they like it?
Well, the ones that we gave too much, they did not eat as much as we would like them to do it. Because cows are very picky eaters. They thought they were feed, they will find the bits and pieces that they like.
It's like my dog.
So they didn't get used to it right away, but so we gave them for about three weeks and then we switched them around and then another three weeks and then we switched them around and that was it.
And all the while though, you're collecting their burps.
That's not a sentence I thought I would ever say, Hermia. How do you do that?
The way we do it is we have a device called green feed and what it does is it will entice them to come to this to this machine where they feed they stick their head into this machine and they feed from that machine.
So as soon as they come in, the green feed machine will drop some, some what we call cow cookie. So they just eat this cow cookie.
As they are eating, they will be breathing into this machine and the machine will take out their breath and then right away analyze and they are burping how much methane, how much carbon dioxide, how much hydrogen there is and then automatically sense that information wirelessly and the cows love it.
I mean, you would see them lining up to try to get into this machine.
Okay, great. So you have very willing participants in your study and what was your hypothesis? What did you sort of hope you would see?
What I was hoping was that we see 10, 20, 30% of the reduction in emissions. That would make me very, very happy.
But then when we start doing this and I start getting this report from a graduate student that the reduction was quite high, I couldn't believe it.
In that first experiment, the emissions were reduced by up to 67%.
And I thought at first the equipment massabmal functioned, but it was real. But we were left with more questions than answers.
With the microbes in the guts, get used to it and start producing methane over time.
With the seaweed, be stable over a long period of time in storage, with the taste be affected and the cows turn up their noses. Or with the seaweed affect the cows health or make production.
So we teamed up again to conduct another trial over a five month period.
We saw the seaweed reduce emissions by over 80%.
Our colleagues in Australia, they saw up to 98% reduction in a similar trial. That kind of reduction is simply staggering.
We have also seen an improvement in bulking up of the beef cattle with no adverse health effects.
So it's a win for the environment. It's a win for the farmers and consumers.
A panel of 112 people got to taste steak made from steers, offered seaweed and control. And they did not detect any difference.
We also did a nutritional quality of the meat and we found no difference between animals that were offered seaweed and control.
Okay, so you do your first study with cows. It's highly successful. You do another study. It's even more successful. 80% methane reduction.
Plus it doesn't seem to affect the cows health. It makes them fat, healthy and still delicious.
What does that make you want to do? This is the researcher's dream to prove that something works. But how do you go from having the solution to actually implementing the solution?
What do you do with this knowledge?
That's a very good question. So not too long ago, the California Department of Food and Agriculture has given their approval that it be generally recognized as safe.
But a certain formulation can now be sold in California as well. So it's moving in the right direction.
The ultimate dream is to get it into farmers' hands and be able to use it as soon as possible.
And what I'm thinking is that maybe there's a premium product with low emission milk or meat as well.
So maybe I would go to the grocery store and I'd say, you know what, I'll pay the extra 25 cents to get the reduced methane milk.
Absolutely, yes. We've done that with energy. I mean, the number of states that they have this initiative where you pay a little bit more and then you get a renewable source of energy instead of from fossil fuel.
The same thing could apply for here as well.
You know, I have to ask, I'm sure there are people listening, maybe they're vegetarian, or like me who are trying to eat less meat and maybe thinking like,
there's a very easy solution to this problem with cows and methane. Just don't eat them, don't drink milk. Just don't have as many cows. Period.
What do you think of that response?
Yeah, so I think in a lot of high income countries, you may be able to get the nutrients and the micronutrients that people need to leave out of the light.
But most people don't live in income countries. And the other issue is that, you know, there is this issue of hidden hunger.
Wait, what is that? What is hidden hunger?
You have enough calories and maybe even protein, but you don't have the trace minerals that the body needs to have a properly functioning system.
So particularly for children, children below five years of age and what you see is the standing levels are very much correlated with the animal source food consumption in countries that have high consumption of animal source food.
The standing levels are much, much lower in countries that do not, you know, for example, in Sudan and India and others, the standing levels of food children under five years of age as over 40%.
So the solution is to have those animals whose foods in a way that is enough to be able to live an under one life.
So I think what we can do in the West or in in high income countries is consume animals whose food according to our requirements.
If you are overconsuming, then yes, you have to reduce the intake.
Okay, so reduce the intake if we, meaning like if we live somewhere where nutritious food is easy to get, we still need to cut back on eating meat, but you're also saying that we need to accept the reality that we need to feed everyone in the world.
That's absolutely right. Yes.
So Ermias, do you believe that if we radically rethink the ways we've been doing agriculture for years, in this case the way we've been feeding livestock, that we've got at least one solution to help stop global warming?
Yeah, absolutely. I think who would have thought that we were talking about the climate neutral livestock industry?
That's the kind of goal that we need to have and use it instead of saying stop eating meat, stop doing this, stop doing that.
We have to be realistic of what needs to happen.
And reality is that people are not going to stop eating meat.
And so let's figure out a way in which we can help people and help the environment at the same time.
Climate change is happening and it's not waiting for anybody. We have the solution that we need to implement it because we will see the results fairly quickly.
Methane, in 12 years of time, the reduction that we have now would actually translate into even a cooling of the climate.
We will see that result. I believe that we can reach into a climate neutral situation where what we eat is actually does not have an impact on the warming of the climate.
That was Ermias Cabrab, a professor and associate dean at the University of California, Davis.
You can see his full talk at TED.com.
Thank you so much for listening to our show this week. Repair, repurpose, reimagine.
This episode was produced by Fiona Gearen, Katie Montellione, James De La Housi and Ramelle Wood.
It was edited by Katie Simon, Rachel Faulkner and me.
Our TED Radio production staff also includes Matthew Cloutier, Deba Motasham and Catherine Cipher.
Our theme music was written by Romteen Ara-Blui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna-Felin, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Balorezzo.
I'm Manouche Zomerodi and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Stripe. Tap to pay on iPhone and Stripe can help you grow your businesses revenue and reach through accepting more in-person contactless payments right from an iPhone.
To learn how, visit Stripe.com slash tap iPhone.
Bridgerton is back and the Netflix series is as gossipy and over the top as ever.
I love the dialogue as ridiculous as it is sometimes.
We're talking about the romance, the clothes, and the nudity, and obviously the Queen's hair.
Listen to the pop culture happy hour podcast from NPR.
Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people in communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
More information is at WaltonFamilyFoundation.org.
