Green Tech

Most Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs are more comfortable talking about software algorithms and chips than bricks and concrete. But some of them are trying to reinvent the building industry with green tech.

Calstar Products later this year plans to open a factory to manufacture a brick that uses fly ash--the residue from burning coal at power plants--as an ingredient while drastically reducing the amount of energy used in production.

The company is now in the process of raising $15 million in series C funding from venture-capital firms to help finance the operation, which will be in Wisconsin near a coal-fired power plant run by We Energies, according to Calstar Products CEO Michael Kane. It plans to officially launch the product at the GreenBuild conference in November.

(Credit: Calstar Products)

Calstar Products is one of many green-tech start-ups designing different materials and processes to make builders greener. Along with energy storage and smart grid, it's a busy area of investment. Another company, Serious Materials, which makes a drywall that requires less energy to produce, said on Tuesday it raised an additional $60 million.

With Calstar's bricks, the company says it can reduce the "embedded energy" by 85 percent compared to existing brick-making techniques. Building materials are very energy-intensive: to make bricks, clay is melted at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a day. Brick production creates 13 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year and the cement industry is said to be the second largest emitter of pollutants after utilities.

Calstar's process replaces the clay and concrete used in bricks with fly ash so that 40 percent of the product is recycled material, Kane explained. It uses a small percentage of its own additive, which it can adjust for the different chemical properties of the coal that generated the fly ash. The process "captures" the fly ash within the brick so there's no leaching, Kane said.

The business plan is to sell the bricks, which are identical in look to traditional bricks, as replacements for buildings, pavers, and retaining walls at the same price as traditional bricks. Initially, it will be targeting architects and builders seeking out materials for green buildings.

In the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating, there aren't points for embedded energy, but Kane thinks that architects can get four points for using innovative and recycled building material.

Kane, who joined the company from the buildings material industry earlier this year to commercialize the product, said that incumbent companies would never have developed this sort of brick.

"Conventional companies can't get their heads around why they should do it. That's why we needed a technology disruptor from the outside the change the rules of the game," he said.

The company plans start manufacturing at full scale early next year and, to try to compete with those incumbents, Calstar Products is establishing a distribution channel in some Midwest states.

The venture may not deliver the giant-size returns that tech-oriented venture capitalists typically expect. But once the company starts selling products, its cash flow should be able to finance additional plants, Kane forecasts.

"When this company was started, it was a highly speculative concept. If it weren't for Silicon Valley, this concept probably wouldn't have happened," he said.

BioSolar has filed a patent application for a new type of backing for photovoltaic cells.

A backsheet is the bottom layer of a photovoltaic cell used by solar manufacturers to protect the cell from moisture, temperature fluctuations, and the elements.

BioSolar's BioBacksheet-A, a new addition to the company's line of backsheets, consists of a sheet of aluminum foil sandwiched between two layers of polymer made from renewable plant sources. The aluminum used in the sheets is also 100 percent recyclable.

The company announced that it was developing plant-based plastics for solar-cell components, which included the use of cotton and castor beans, in August 2008.

BioSolar's biomass backsheets for solar cells will work with existing industrial manufacturing machines.

(Credit: BioSolar)

The BioBacksheet-A can meet the requirement of thin-film photovoltaics "to have a water vapor transmissions rate of nearly zero," according to BioSolar.

"BioSolar's goal is to reduce the costs of solar modules and make solar energy greener by replacing petroleum-based module components with bio-based materials made from renewable plant sources," David Lee, CEO of BioSolar, said in a statement.

The company is also trying to make it easy for interested solar manufacturers to make the switch from petroleum-based components. BioSolar's rolls of biomass backsheets can be used with existing industrial machines, according to the company.

Click on this image for an image gallery of independent, green product labels.

(Credit: Jeremy Faludi)

With so many "green" options appearing on everyday products, navigating the marketplace can be tricky if you're attempting to green your life.

Home Depot stamps efficient lightbulbs, low-toxic paints, and other goods as "Eco Options." SC Johnson sells Windex certified by Greenlist, the company's internal effort to reduce toxicants in its product line. Canon labels printers as "Generation Green."

Environmentalists may applaud corporate efforts to sell fewer polluting and poisonous goods and services. But some consumer watchdogs warn that the proliferation of green claims will confuse or mislead shoppers, and prefer that companies agree on industry-wide standards.

This CNET guide to green labels covers popular, third-party markings on electronics and other products. Their logos represent pooled efforts by experts not on the payroll of companies selling the labeled products, such as scientists, nonprofit groups, designers, and government officials.

Click here to see all of News.com's Earth Day 2008 stories, photo galleries, and more.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is revising its guidelines (PDF) for green marketing claims (PDF), which haven't been updated for nearly a decade.

The Consumers Union directory of eco-labels describes in detail what's behind labeling on food, home cleaners, pesticides, wood, and other goods.

Whether marking printers or produce, the increasing number of "green" claims on products can make it hard to separate sincere efforts at sustainability from marketing fluff.

Environmental watchdogs warn that corporate "greenwashing" will lead jaded consumers to abandon efforts to shop responsibly.

However, individuals can counteract the confusion and police the marketplace using online tools, according to Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com.

"In this age of the Web, the blogosphere, and social media, I don't think greenwashers are going to get very far or that fraudulent, hugely misleading companies are going to gain traction."

A wiki-style Greenwashing Index, run by an environmental marketing firm, invites people to upload suspicious-looking ads. Eco-themed groups have sprung up on MySpace and Facebook. A steady stream of new green blogs continues to join a chorus of thousands. Flock, known as the "Web 2.0 browser," will release an Earth Day edition pre-loaded with green media feeds.

Most notably, perhaps, is the emergence of dozens of "green" Web sites, many from tech industry veterans, that aim to put like-minded people on the same page. These social-networking efforts enable users to assess products personally, offering a balance to green labels and ad campaigns.

"The more you get into the business of green, the more you see there are no one-size-fits-all magic-bullet products," said Makower, who sees social media as helping to fill the gap left by the lack of green-business standards. "Can you have a green product from a company that's less than perfect and if so, how much less?"

One of the more popular Web sites inviting users to answer that question is Sustainlane, which has collected more than 20,000 user-generated listings of products and services since 2004.

"So many people have different values," said Christine Volden, a Sustainlane spokeswoman. "Someone may be looking for most inexpensive product and another may say, 'I'm not concerned about price; I want the best, safest product.' You can find a person most similar to yourself."

Ratings site Alonovo enables users to weigh ratings according to their personal values. Someone could, for instance, tailor a score to reflect a greater concern with the humane treatment of animals over the use of toxic chemicals.

The landscape of green networking and news Web sites, independent and "mainstream," is sure to shift as some flop and larger companies snap up others.

However, mobile tools that could help to inform a decision at a store are only beginning to bubble up. Along the lines of natural disaster alerts delivered via mobile phone, Twitter, or Facebook, several new tools harness text messaging to inform shoppers.

Amazon's TextBuyIt text-messaging system, unveiled last week, enables people to comparison shop while strolling store aisles.

Consumer advocacy group Healthy Toys offers a service whereby shoppers can send the name of a toy via SMS, then receive a reply noting the possible presence of toxic ingredients at a low, medium, or high level.

The nonprofit Blue Ocean's FishPhone service launched in the fall as a mobile Web page and service enabling users to SMS message the name of a fish and receive a note back about likely fishing practices and potential toxic chemicals in the species. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in September released a PDA-friendly version of its pocket guide to sustainably caught seafood.

But where can one find an all-in-one, Web-tied listing of a vast range of products for a mobile device?

"It has been very difficult to develop applications for handsets without the huge expense of porting across the four major carriers," said Dara O'Rourke, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Berkeley. "They have not made it simple, which is why most people focus on simple SMS."

O'Rourke and other researchers at Berkeley's Consumer Information Lab have experimented with a prototype mobile service that would enable shoppers to scan a bar code to pull up a menu of product details.

However, technical hurdles and the challenge of pooling data from myriad sources hamper the development of sophisticated mobile tools, O'Rourke said.

"There's a huge void in information that's becoming increasingly important to consumers. The day the iPhone was released, we knew everything about the feature set. Yet, probably 99 percent of people had no idea where it was manufactured, what the environmental impacts of the phone or battery would be, or what the impacts on workers were."

And user-generated content can flesh out a portrait of a product's value and sustainability, but it can't exist in a void, he added.

"There's a really important role for base data, not just people's opinions, but information based on science and an evaluation of the supply chain."

But is it shower-safe?

(Credit: Angstom Power)

Oh, the humanity!

Fuel cell maker Angstrom Power and cell phone maker Motorola have teamed up to create a prototype mobile phone that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. Hydrogen is produced--by cracking water molecules--with a desktop fueling station and then inserted into a metal hydride storage container on the phone, says Aron Levitz, manager of business development for Angstrom. When the hydrogen molecules pass through a membrane in the fuel cell, electrons are stripped away and get diverted to run the phone.

The two companies are trotting the phone to various trade shows. Start-up Angstrom has received investments from of Chrysalix Ventures.

A number of companies have been working on miniature fuel cells for portable electronics for a while, but nearly all of them run on methanol. Toshiba, for instance, last year at the Ceatec electronics show in Japan showed off a methanol fuel-cell powered portable TV. Using hydrogen has its advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, you have to harvest the hydrogen yourself. With methanol fuel cells, you just pour in the methanol.

But on the other hand, with a hydrogen fuel cell, you never have to go to the store to get fuel feedstock. You get it out of the faucet. Basically, you can think of it as a water-powered phone.

The water-to-hydrogen generator can also be powered by solar panels, making the phone about as green as you can get. Horizon Fuel Cell's H2 racer, a toy hydrogen car, runs on solar-generated hydrogen. It's also good to see more experimentation in storing hydrogen in a solid metal tank, rather than a compressed tank. is doing something similar with its portable generator. Hydrogen proponents point out that, although the hydrogen highway may not get built, the small molecule can be used to provide power to boats, fork lifts, and electronics.

And for those of you worried about blowing up, remember, hydrogen didn't burn the Hindenburg. It was the paint that caused it to go up in flames.

The topic of sustainable or green design is of increasing urgency to companies involved in product development. Last year, it reached a tipping point in public interest and concern over global climate change, fueled by massive media interest.

Companies that fail to address it risk legislative punishment, as well as negative brand and sales consequences. But green also provides a huge market opportunity: recent surveys have indicated that key customer segments are willing to pay more for greener products.

Lots of companies at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were touting green design and environmental thinking, though as my colleague Adam Richardson observed, "in some cases, it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep."

Not surprisingly, the backlash is rampant. Because green has become a forceful business imperative, it is getting harder these days to tell green design from "greenwashing" and to tell those who jump on the bandwagon from the ones driving it.

Consumers are harder to please too: increased demand for green products and services is contrasted by growing skepticism about moral free riders who take advantage of the public's goodwill for all things green.

Designers, and in particular industrial designers, who are uniquely positioned at the intersection of business, technology, and culture, may bring some clarity into the many shades of green. Since their work covers both the beginning and the end of the product development chain, they not only obtain privileged insights into user behavior, materials, and manufacturing, but they also possess a unique environmental responsibility, as well as the conceptual and practical power to actually make a difference.

As such interdisciplinary, enlightened vanguards of the new green conscience, they can drive an industrywide conversation and establish universal standards: "Sustainability promises to be one of the defining issues of our time, one with profound effects on our personal and professional lives," states the Web site of the Compostmodern conference on sustainable design. "For designers, it represents unique challenges as well as tremendous potential--nothing less than an opportunity to redesign how the world works."

Designers are hearing this call and beginning to institutionalize and externalize the knowledge that had previously been tacit and dispersed. Several leading design consultancies, including Design Continuum, Frog Design (full disclosure: my employer), Ideo, and Smart Design, have entered "The Designers Accord," an industrywide coalition to promote positive environmental and social impact.

The call to arms, which was first introduced in Frog's Design Mind magazine last summer, has since been endorsed by the influential design blog Core77, and it is growing as more firms pledge their involvement. In the coming months, the initiative will expand to include an open-source Web site in which member firms may share resources and ideas.

Cynics may say signing the agreement requires not much more than lip service, as most adopters will already practice many of the not-so-demanding principles outlined: "Undertake a program to educate your teams about designing sustainably; initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client; measure the carbon, or greenhouse gas, footprint of your firm, and pledge to significantly reduce that footprint annually," and so on.

Fair enough, but that's not the point. What is more remarkable about the agreement is its open, "coopetitive" nature: for the first time, and disregarding their traditional competition, design firms (and also the two leading professional organizations, Industrial Designers Society of America and AIGA) commit to sharing their experience and pooling their resources for a greater cause.

That's a real paradigm shift, and it may indeed provide the lever that the Accord adopters are hoping for: "Our rationale is that, by collectively committing to having this conversation, our client base--the world's manufacturers, distributors, and services providers--will be compelled to evaluate sustainability as a key vector in decision making around the products and services they create for their base, the global consuming audience."

Cheap, clean hydrogen is the holy grail in the green-technology world, and Nanoptek says it could have part of the answer.

The Maynard, Mass.-based company, which Wednesday announced that it has raised $4.7 million, has come up with a low-cost, durable titania electrode that can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Sunlight hits the electrode, and the electrode splits the light into a positive charge (called a hole) and an electron. Before the two charges can rejoin, the electron gets captured by the electrode and then is exploited to split water. Silicon solar cells operate on the same principle.

Other companies have tried to use titania electrodes for this job in the past, but they broke down relatively rapidly, according to Nanoptek. The company's electrodes work better because, ironically, they are more brittle. The crystal lattice in the electrode is stressed, i.e. additional materials are added. (Semiconductor makers similarly stress their chips with germanium to create strained silicon, which improves performance.)

"This stretches the titania crystal lattice so that electrons (red areas in the image) are held less tightly in the lattice and so can be knocked out of the titania with (the) light of lower energy, meaning visible (light)," Nanoptek says.

A space 50 feet by 50 feet on a sunny roof could provide enough surface area for a Nanoptek hydrogen generator. This generator could, hypothetically, provide enough hydrogen to meet the driving needs of a family of four, the company says.

This electrode is stressed.

(Credit: Nanoptek)

Stanford University's Jim Swartz has identified a microbe that metabolizes sunlight and makes hydrogen and oxygen out of water. The problem, however, is that the microbe dies when oxygen levels rise. His team is working on genetically enhancing the organism. (Swartz also has a start-up called Fundamental Applied Biology that has raised $21 million.)

If Nanoptek's technology can move from the experimental stage, it could prove to be a boost for the hydrogen industry. Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it's not fun to make.

Currently, most companies make it by combining methane with water and heating up the mix to 815 degrees Celsius. That takes a lot of energy, but it also produces . Whoops. Hence, critics like Joseph Romm assert that hydrogen cars actually pollute more than regular cars.

Some have said the energy for the cleaner water electrolysis process can be generated from the waste heat at nuclear power plants, but that solution requires nuclear plants, always a contentious issue. (Some have proposed building nuclear plants in India that can provide electricity and waste heat for running desalination plants.)

Another solution for cheap hydrogen could lay in metal alloy pellets that react with water to produce hydrogen. Purdue University, New York's Signa Chemistry and Ecotality are all working on this. Typically, the metals in the alloys come from the part of the periodic table that includes sodium.

And for you crazy people, some believe, years from now, that it might be possible to harness wave power to drive water electrolysis plants built far offshore. The hydrogen produced in these offshore plants would then be delivered by underground pipelines, which would compress it, further saving energy in the hydrogen distribution process. Who knows? It could actually work if enough pieces fall into place.

Toyota, BMW, and Ford all have active hydrogen car programs and hope to move beyond the experimental stage sometime in the second half of the next decade.

Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it's a royal pain to make.

Most industrial hydrogen producers currently make the gas by heating methane and water to 815 degrees Celsius and causing a reaction. Unfortunately, this process generates 9.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilo of hydrogen, so it's not environmentally friendly or cheap.

Other companies like Signa Chemistry have come out with chemical catalysts that can strip hydrogen from water.

Then there is electrolysis, which involves cracking water molecules with electricity. Electrolysis doesn't produce any greenhouse gases or chemical residues so it's the most environmentally friendly. It's also expensive and time consuming. QuantumSphere says it has a way around this problem.

It has devised an iron-nickel power for coating an electrode that speeds up the electrolysis process, according to CEO Kevin Maloney. It's a classic nano play. Coating a surface with small, independent particles increases the reactive surface area, which means more simultaneous reactions between molecules. Quantum's Stingray electrodes have more than 2,000 times more catalytic surface area than standard electrodes coated with standard sized particles, he said.

The Stingray can produce 2.4 kilograms of hydrogen in 25 minutes. Standard electrodes can take hours or days, he said. As a result, the Stingray can produce hydrogen at $2.50 to $9 a kilo, not including subisidies. That's in the range that excites the Department of Energy.

No, the hydrogen economy doesn't exist yet. But researchers around the globe continue to ponder ways to produce, store and transport the stuff cheaply. Some car makers still maintain that hydrogen cars will come out within a decade or so.

A spin-out from Caltech, QuantumSphere also makes particles for rocket engines and other industrial applications. We wrote about them a few years ago here.

Environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found that many retail products overstate their environmental attributes, a practice which risks causing skepticism among consumers.

The company sent people to big-box retail stores to find products labeled as green. In the process, it found that almost all of them committed at least one of what it calls "sins of greenwashing."

(Credit: TerraChoice)

Most common was the "Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off," where manufacturers claim a product has a green feature, such as recycled paper content, but don't pay attention to potentially more important issues, such as global warming or water use.

Second most common was the Sin Of No Proof, where consumers don't have the means to verify claims. Click here for a PDF of the study which details the other "sins." It was released this month.

To many people, this may sound like nitpicking. If manufacturers use more recycled material or make an effort to use benign chemicals, they should be able to label their products as such. And clearly, you'd expect a company like TerraChoice, whose business is environmental marketing, to have high standards.

On the other hand, the more information that manufacturers can provide, the better. If a "green consumer" is purchasing in part on the basis of environmental attributes, why not be as explicit and detailed as possible?

TerraChoice calls for better standards and labels and for consumers to be more savvy in their purchases.