Source: Silicon Bay Partners’ Staff with assistance from ChatGPT
Photo: Smoke from wildfires in the Boundary Waters creates haze on Big Sandy Lake in McGregor on July 15, 2026 (Lorie Shaull/KAXE)

These two have proven that they are the most destructive duo in modern American history. Through DOGE, they’ve cut many essential programs, including those that work to prevent wildfires. The result: thousands upon thousands of acres are ablaze. As for Musk: taxpayers helped make him the world’s richest man and he continues to show absolutely no gratitude. As for Trump: There are so many other priorities that do not include a Golden Ballroom and other Washington, D.C. vanity projects. You’ve suggested that raking forest floors will eradicate the problem. Donald, stop blowing smoke!

Critics argue that these two have become one of the most controversial duos in modern American politics. Through DOGE, the administration has reduced funding or staffing for numerous federal programs, including some related to wildfire prevention and management, prompting concerns from experts about long-term preparedness.

As for Elon Musk, many point out that his companies have benefited from billions of dollars in government contracts, loans, and tax incentives over the years, helping fuel the rise of one of the world’s richest individuals. Critics say there has been little acknowledgment of the public investment that helped along the way.

And then there’s President Trump. With wars overseas, a growing national debt, inflation concerns, and countless domestic challenges, critics question whether projects like a lavish White House ballroom should be anywhere near the top of the national priority list.

Trump has also suggested that better forest management—including clearing or raking forest floors—could help reduce wildfire risk. While land management is one factor experts consider, they generally point to a combination of drought, extreme heat, climate conditions, high winds, and fuel buildup as contributing to today’s increasingly destructive wildfires.

Donald, enough with the smoke. The country needs solutions—not just smoke signals.

In an article for the Minnesota Reformer titled “Trump and Musk Cut Funding for Wildfire Mitigation — and Then the Northland Started Burning,” author Brian Martucci (who is not responsible for the paragraphs aove) examines the relationship between federal funding cuts for wildfire prevention and the increasing number of devastating wildfires. The article explores how reductions in mitigation efforts may have affected preparedness and response, while placing those decisions within the broader context of escalating wildfire risks.

The U.S. Forest Service lost more than 100 Minnesota employees and delayed $10 million in grant funding for wildfire mitigation in the Superior National Forest during the chaotic first year of President Trump’s second term.

Democratic elected officials say those setbacks left Minnesota ill-equipped to face the fires that have burned more than 60,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness since early July and repeatedly billowed smoke across the Great Lakes region and beyond.

“The Forest Service diverted forest management funds that Congress provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to pay for the Deferred Resignation Program,” DFL Rep. Angie Craig told U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Schultz at a July 22 congressional hearing. Craig is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee.

The move had “obvious consequences: the Forest Service treated 23% fewer hazardous fuels acres last year compared with 2024,” Craig added.

The Forest Service did not respond to a Reformer request for comment.

The Boundary Waters have seen several major fires since a 1999 derecho left tens of millions of mature trees to decay — or burn — on the forest floor. Repeated droughts made worse by climate change have also encouraged the spread of spruce budworm, a native insect that can weaken or kill spruce and fir trees, leaving yet more fuel in the wilderness. These natural conditions exacerbated what some conservationists say were decades of misguided forest management practices, which favored fire suppression at all costs over the beneficial, low-intensity fires that periodically sweep the Northwoods.

Forest management today is a more holistic practice that combines selective tree thinning and prescribed burns with efforts to boost ecological diversity and protect “keystone” species, which in northern Minnesota include the towering white and red pines that make the Boundary Waters so special.

The delayed Forest Service grants would have supported prescribed burns and other fuel-reduction efforts on thousands of acres near the Echo Trail, which has borne the brunt of this year’s fires. These “shovel-ready” projects “would have been effective in stopping or slowing down these fires,” a former Forest Service official who retired in December told the Washington Post last week.

Citing current and former Forest Service officials, some of whom spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, the Post reported that the grants were among countless earmarks paused or canceled by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which aimed to cut federal spending and especially Biden-era programs connected to social justice or climate change.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the Forest Service, joined several high-ranking colleagues in signing a letter in February 2025 raising “significant concerns” about the funding pause and a separate hiring freeze that kept the agency from adding permanent and seasonal firefighters.

Craig, who is running against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in the DFL primary to replace retiring Sen. Tina Smith, said at the hearing last week that the agency lost about 16% of its workforce due to the DOGE cuts. Those losses put the agency on the back foot ahead of fire season, she said.

“‘We only have so many resources to go around,’” Craig said, repeating a July 17 warning from National Incident Management Organization official Jason Loomis, who said his teams would need to focus equipment and personnel on protecting nearby communities and public infrastructure over the wilderness itself. By then, the entire Boundary Waters had been evacuated and closed to new entry.

“That would certainly suggest that the lack of staffing was at least partially related to the closure,” Craig said.

The agency unfroze the two wildfire mitigation grants in December after state and local officials went to Washington to advocate for the funding, but not before requiring modifications to allow more of the thinned vegetation to be marketed for timber, the Post reported.

On a webpage touting “2025 Forest Service Accomplishments,” the agency said it “strengthened America’s timber supply and forest industry and exceeded timber targets” while launching a “long-term strategy for forest productivity and rural economic growth” that would see timber volume grow 25% by 2028 to 4 million board-feet, a level not reached since 1993.

State Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, whose sprawling district covers the Boundary Waters and surrounding state and national forest lands, told the Reformer in an interview that reducing wildfire risk requires a “multifaceted approach” that includes fuel reduction in vulnerable forests.

“One of the things we could have done is supported the federal grant to help clear the fuel around the Echo Trail,” he said. “That’s not to say we couldn’t have done more than that…(but) we can’t just have across-the-board cuts to Forest Service staff and we can’t have cuts to grants that help with wildfire mitigation.”

In last week’s hearing, Craig accused Schultz of the Forest Service of redirecting large chunks of wildfire mitigation funding and reassigning hundreds of Forest Service staff without receiving congressional approval, which she said the law required.

Schultz pushed back, saying the agency was well within its rights.

“We did not receive approval because we did not think it was required by law,” he said.

Brian Martucci

Brian Martucci is a Minneapolis-based writer covering energy, the environment and commercial real estate. In addition to the Reformer, his work appears in Utility Dive, Finance & Commerce, MinnPost and other local and national publications.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/07/31/forest-service-faced-budget-and-personnel-cuts-and-then-the-northland-started-burning

Source: The Guardian, Damian Carrington in Cambridge Bay, Canada
Photo: Across the Arctic sea lice is vanishing rapidly because of the climate crisis (Brodie Larocque)

Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success

‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

Pumping seawater on to Arctic sea ice in winter to help it last longer in summer

Five months earlier, the team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface. It froze almost immediately, thickening the 1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to the new measurements.

That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least, and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.

‘The coldest was -63C’

All around us now, the ice is melting fast, turning the crunchy white surface into shin-deep blue pools and revealing air bubbles in the clear ice below. Temperatures in the bay are above 5C, much higher than the normal -6C to 1C expected at this time of year. “It’s really out of whack,” says Ceccolini.

It’s happening not just in Cambridge Bay, called Ikaluktutiak by Inuit, which means “the place of good fishing”. Across the Arctic, sea ice is vanishing rapidly because of the climate crisis. Summer ice has shrunk by about 40% in the last 45 years. That has triggered one of the climate system’s most dangerous vicious circles.

Ice reflects 70% of the sun’s heat back into space, while open ocean reflects just 7%. The more that melting exposes the sea, the warmer it gets and the more melting there is. Summer sea ice could be gone as early as the 2030s and scientists worry that the heat boost could push the climate beyond catastrophic and irreversible tipping points.

On the ice, the team are busy measuring everything they can: temperature every 2cm down through the ice, long cores for salinity, ice structure and biological analysis and, crucially, how reflective is the area they have re-iced. A drone buzzes through its daily circuit overhead, recording the area down to 5cm resolution.

Despite the blue sky and strong sun, it’s still chilly on the ice thanks to the wind. But winter was a whole different level of cold. “The coldest day was -63C with wind chill,” says Simon Woods, Real Ice’s cofounder with Cían Sherwin. The extreme temperatures kept the team off the ice then, but they worked in temperatures of -40C, keeping a keen eye on each other for signs of frostbite.

Ceccolini says: “In a whiteout, without the Inuit guides we would not know how to get home – you can’t see anything 10m in front of you.” Wildlife is another hazard, from the possibility of polar bears to arctic foxes chewing through the cables of the equipment.

In January and February, the pumps ran for a total of 1,080 hours, icing over a square area about 450 metres on a side. The small pumps require less power than a toaster as they are only lifting the water from just under the ice to just on top.

Before and after satellite images of Cambridge Bay

The results can now be seen from space, with the team members excited to view the latest satellite images in their morning meeting. They show the test area emerging as an island of white in a sea of blue a few days after the melt season began.

The ice-thickening process gets a boost because the pumped seawater turns the highly insulating snow layer on top into slush and then ice. This means the extreme cold of the air penetrates through the ice better, stimulating extra ice growth on the bottom.

The team now pump later in the winter, so a new snow layer has less time to build up, and they have also found that doing two separate rounds of pumping improves results.

Last year, Real Ice added about 30cm, and this year’s extra thickness is 50cm, Ceccolini says. That may not sound huge, but a pickup truck can drive over 30cm of ice, and it may add 7-10 days to the lifespan of the ice, he says.

There’s also been a bonus: the ice created by the team is brighter and more reflective than the surrounding natural ice. “That was totally unexpected,” Ceccolini says. A possible explanation is that the fast-frozen artificial ice traps more air bubbles, which make the ice more opaque than the gradually frozen natural ice.

Sea ice experts from the University of Washington are working independently at the site to determine the answer. Prof Roger Marchand and Melinda Webster spend hours every day on the ice to measure precisely how reflective the ice is, and how salty. The latter is important as salty ice will melt at a lower temperature.

Webster, a polar scientist who has worked in the Arctic every year since 2009, says global heating has radically changed the landscape over that time. “It looks so different because the ice has been thinning over the decades.”

Sherwin, who cofounded Real Ice with Woods, is watching a gleaming whirlpool where water is rushing into a hole in the ice. It’s a test of another tool to fight the melting of the Arctic. A couple of years ago, the team noticed a few such holes formed naturally, so they decided to drill test holes themselves.

The day before, Sherwin drove a long silver drill bit into the ice, its whirring leaving half a dozen holes, each 5cm wide. It was like pulling the plug out of a bath. Within a few minutes, water was swirling down the hole.

But that was just the start: the ice holes rapidly widen themselves, most likely due to the warmth of the meltwater. “It’ll be the size of a dinner plate in 45 minutes,” Sherwin said. A day later, the holes are the size of maintenance hole covers – and a new hazard for the researchers.

By draining the melt pools, the bright ice underneath is exposed once again, boosting reflection of the sun’s heat. The aerial drone images show the six test holes drilled have visibly brightened the area. The experiment is in its early stages but Ceccolini says: “Perhaps that will give the ice an extra week.”

‘Everybody uses the ice’

“The ice is very important to us,” says Kyle Weese, one of the Inuit guides working with Real Ice. About 83% of the population of Cambridge Bay are Inuit. “Everybody uses the ice for transport, gathering food, fishing. You use it to get across to the mainland and do some good caribou or moose hunting. It’s very plentiful there.”

Weese, 34, has seen climate change up close. “The ice is thinner. The freeze-up takes longer than normal and the thaw happens faster now. It’s definitely changing.” The warming is also bringing new risks from the south: “Grizzly bears are coming around too.” His rifle is close at hand.

Weese is happy to work with Real Ice: “At first, the idea does sound crazy but it is not trying to hurt the environment, it’s actually trying to help it. It’s good to know how it’s changing so we can try to adapt with it and try to preserve it.”

Real Ice, which has a £3.5m grant from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) as part of the agency’s rethickening Arctic sea ice programme, consulted with the community and was given approval for the research from local authorities and, importantly, the Ekaluktutiak Hunters and Trappers Organization.

“The biggest thing is that we learn from the Inuit,” says Sherwin, including in determining the exact location of the test site – away from hunting areas – how to travel on the ice and where best to make the holes.

There’s no sign of opposition to the project in Cambridge Bay, with one local official telling the Guardian: “Their local engagement is the best I have seen – it’s been community-first from the beginning.”

Underwater drones

The big question is: if further research can show this experiment is effective and safe in restoring sea ice, could it be done at scale? Using teams of people on the ice to do this would be unfeasibly expensive, but an alternative is being tested: autonomous underwater drones.

A prototype undertook trials this February in Finland’s Gulf of Bothnia, poking holes in the sea ice using an electrically heated probe. It is now being refined in collaboration with the BioRobotics Institute in Pisa, Italy. Doing everything from under the ice, perhaps counterintuitively, is far easier than trying to navigate across ice fields in extreme cold, says Ceccolini.

Below the sea surface, the temperature is a constant -1.6C. “Everything works comfortably: electronics, batteries, pumps – you just stick your nose out of the ice, pump water and go back in,” he says. The vision is of a swarm of hydrogen-powered underwater drones targeting key areas at the leading edge of ice loss.

The area of summer sea ice that has vanished since 1979 is about 3m square kilometres – about the size of India. A further 80,000km2 is lost every year on average – the area of Scotland or Kansas.

“So that’s a possible start,” says Ceccolini. “Even if you have just 20cm of ice, you still reflect the sun.” And at a much more local level, sea ice rethickening could make the routes relied on by Inuit people safer.

If the underwater drones cost about $5,000 each, Real Ice’s rough estimate is that bringing the annual shrinking of Arctic sea ice to a halt would cost $10bn over the longer term. For comparison, that is the same as the windfall profits made by the top 100 oil companies in less than a fortnight after the Iran war sent the oil price soaring. If only drilling drainage holes is effective, that would be substantially cheaper as no pumping is needed.

Marchand, from the University of Washington in Seattle, says: “Whether you can do this on a scale that’s large enough to be climatically important is a difficult and open question.

“But I feel like Real Ice are doing the right things. They’re trying to understand the physics of what’s going on and then using that knowledge to answer the question, rather than just assuming that this is doable. They’re going step by step.”

Environmentally dangerous?

Geoengineering is controversial, and a significant number of polar scientists are opposed to the idea of sea ice thickening: they published a critique in September arguing that it was unfeasible, would be “environmentally dangerous” and posed a dangerous distraction to the core climate need to cut carbon emissions rapidly.

Prof Shaun Fitzgerald, the director of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, who is regularly on the ice with the team, agrees that emissions reduction is “critically necessary” but thinks it is important to understand additional options.

“Anything new has the potential for unintended consequences,” he says. “I liken it to clinical trials: new drugs have the potential to really help people, but we have to go incredibly carefully and understand what the risks are.”

Fitzgerald is concerned about the potential for moral hazard, that geoengineering could be seen as a magic bullet and lessen the drive for emissions cuts, though he argues there is little evidence for that to date. “I think doing research is the right thing to do. But I do respect those who have a different viewpoint.”

Ceccolini says: “We are here to resolve the research questions. Is ice thickening effective, does it have side-effects and can it be scaled economically? Then there are bigger questions, like: are governments, policymakers, communities interested? Is a society open to this type of solution?”

One outstanding question is what effect pumping seawater on to the ice has on ecology. On the ice, signs of wildlife sit in little wells of water: scraps of seaweed, fox scat, goose droppings. Their dark colour soaks up the sun and melts them into the ice.

Natural sea ice tastes fresh because virtually all the salt is squeezed out as the water molecules form ice crystals. Pumping seawater on to ice brings the salt up, as well as nutrients and microbes. Samples are now being examined by a biologist at the University of Cambridge.

Another possible concern is that drowning the winter snow with seawater could prevent polar bears and seals from digging dens for their cubs and pups, though none use the Cambridge Bay site to reproduce.

“It’s all research that has to be done and will be done as we go forward,” says Sherwin, who trained as a zoologist and was obsessed with wildlife from early in his childhood in County Cavan in the Republic of Ireland.

When Woods and Sherwin founded the project, the first thing they did was go up to the Arctic. “We went up to Iqaluit [the capital of Nunavut in Canada] and simply asked key stakeholders the question: ‘Is this interesting or valuable to your community?’,” says Woods. “We got an overwhelmingly positive answer and thought, OK, let’s try to do this.” Real Ice, which is in effect a non-profit company, was formed in 2022.

It is not the only group trying to refreeze the Arctic. This year Arctic Reflections, also funded by Aria, produced a similar-sized patch to Real Ice, which preliminary results indicate was up to 45cm thicker. However, these researchers are pursuing a different strategy, aiming to strengthen “ice arches” that span narrow straits and could hold back sea ice from flowing south and melting, and it is still too early to tell if the idea can work.

Back on the ice, Sherwin is taking the latest set of measurements. His view of the future is straightforward: “We’d like to see the research just continue to go forward in a way that we can have an informed opinion on what this looks like at scale, if it scales at all.”

Ceccolini says: “The dream is that sea ice thickening will be undertaken by the Indigenous communities. Imagine what they are going through, with the risk of losing their culture, losing their youth, people just moving away.

“They could do something that can help preserve their culture, basically doing conservation, because this is what we are talking about. This is an ecosystem conservation project.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/16/arctic-sea-ice-rethickening-climate-geoengineering

Source: ZME Science (MSN), Tibi Puiu
Photo: Unsplash © ZME Science

Step outside in any major city on a blistering summer afternoon, and you will smell it. It is the distinct, heavy scent of hot asphalt.

We pave our modern world with it. If you gathered all the pavement in Phoenix, Arizona, and piled it into one place, it would blanket San Francisco four times over. Roads and parking lots cover roughly 40% of the Arizona capital.

They absorb the sun’s heat by day and radiate it by night. And that’s a problem because this urban heat island effect drives up energy use and makes cities swelter.

But scientists now warn that the real threat lies hidden in the fumes.

As petroleum-based roads age and bake in the sun, they release toxic, microscopic vapors that infiltrate our lungs and bloodstreams.

Now, an international coalition of engineers and biologists has proposed a radical, green solution. They want to replace the crude oil in our roads with fast-growing algae.

This bio-bitumen should cut carbon emissions, but, most importantly, it captures the worst toxic fumes, heals its own cracks in freezing weather, and could completely transform how we build the arteries of our civilization.

The Hidden Cost of the Open Road

Historically, sustainable road and pavement design mostly focused on the carbon footprint. Elham Fini wants us to look closer to home.

Fini serves as a senior scientist at Arizona State University’s Global Futures Laboratory. For her, the health impacts of our built environment demand urgent attention.

“To make something truly sustainable,” she said, “you cannot ignore the human side of it.”

Fini spent years investigating why asphalt crumbles. Asphalt consists mostly of crushed rock and sand. To hold it all together, builders use bitumen — a black, sticky sludge left over from refining crude oil.

When bitumen breaks down, it releases volatile organic compounds. These carbon-based vapors escape continuously. On hot, bright days, they spike.

In the short term, breathing them leaves people dizzy and gasping for air. Over time, construction workers who inhale these fumes face a sharply elevated risk of lung cancer.

Worse, the danger grows as the road ages. Recent studies show that ultraviolet sunlight and heat change the chemical profile of bitumen. The aging pavement starts emitting smaller, more toxic, and often completely odorless compounds.

These tiny molecules easily breach our body’s defenses. They slip into arteries and travel directly to vital organs. Tests and models link these specific emissions to significant neurological damage, especially in women and elderly people.

“Heat is worsening the situation,” Fini said. “It’s exacerbating the emissions from asphalt.”

So, how do we fix a material that covers millions of miles of the Earth’s surface?

The answer might surprisingly lie in the nearest puddle.

Algae grow with terrifying speed. Some species double their entire mass in a single day.

They act as nature’s ultimate carbon sponges. Through photosynthesis, they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and trap it in organic matter. A single acre of cultivated algae yields up to ten times more biomass than a field of corn or soybeans.

But how does a green, watery plant become thick, black road tar? Some experimental studies have used a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. They essentially put harvested algae into a high-tech pressure cooker.

This mimics the immense heat and pressure the Earth uses to turn ancient organic matter into crude oil over millions of years. But instead of waiting epochs, scientists produce a rich bio-oil in mere hours.

They refine this bio-oil into bio-bitumen, just like the traditional variety is made from fossil fuel. Even better, we do not need pristine drinking water or fertile farmland to grow the raw material.

Fini teamed up with Peter Lammers, a chief scientist at the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation, to cultivate specific algae strains. They feed the algae using wastewater straight from a Phoenix treatment plant.

“It’s a great setup,” Lammers said, “because we use water that’s far too high in nitrogen and phosphorus to be released anywhere. And instead, we reuse it to grow more algae.”

Fini then bakes this algae in a low-oxygen oven. She creates a sticky binder that road crews can easily fold into standard asphalt mixes.

Freezing Winters and Self-Healing Streets

You might wonder if roads made from algae can survive a harsh winter. It turns out they handle the cold far better than traditional petroleum.

In a recent study led by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and ASU, scientists tested how algae-infused pavement handles subzero temperatures.

Adding just a 6% blend of bio-binder derived from wild-type Ulva (a common macroalgae) radically changes the physical properties of the pavement.

Petroleum asphalt turns brittle in the cold. It snaps and forms dangerous thermal cracks. But the algae bio-binder seems to make the material flexible. It absorbs the stress of heavy traffic without breaking too much.

Even more incredibly, the algae give the road a self-healing quality. It resists the deep fatigue cracking that destroys highway infrastructure.

When researchers tested a bio-oil made from another species, Haematococcus pluvialis, they watched the asphalt’s elastic recovery under heavy loads jump from a dismal 0.1% to a staggering 71%.

Moreover, every time you replace 1% of the petroleum binder with algae bio-binder, net carbon emissions drop by 3%.

Pumping, refining, and heating crude oil spews massive amounts of ancient, trapped carbon dioxide into the air. Algae do the exact opposite. As they grow, these tiny plants act like microscopic trees. They breathe in and suck carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere to build their cells. When engineers bake those harvested algae into a bio-binder, they permanently lock that captured carbon inside the sticky black material.

Theoretically, if a city paves a road using a 33% bio-binder blend, that road achieves total carbon neutrality. Push the blend higher, and the highway actively removes more carbon from the environment than it creates.

Turning Down the Toxicity

But what about the deadly fumes? Does adding green algae solve the neurological and respiratory threats posed by black tar?

Fini and her colleagues at the Mayo Clinic are working hard to answer that exact question. They want strict protections for communities and construction crews. And they believe the algae binder provides an immediate shield.

Lab tests on algae-infused asphalt have been promising. While it does not entirely stop the road from releasing vapors, it traps the most dangerous ones.

The algae binder locks in the highly toxic compounds that penetrate human arteries. Tests show that incorporating the algae drops the overall toxicity of the asphalt emissions by roughly 100-fold.

Furthermore, the algae slow down the natural degradation of the pavement. The road stays intact longer and releases fewer fumes, requires less maintenance, and costs cash-strapped cities far less money over its lifespan.

Fini is already looking beyond algae. She is experimenting with binders made from the crushed branches of forest-thinning projects.

Currently, she is collaborating with the city of Phoenix to pave an actual test section of road with the algae-infused asphalt.

Air quality experts frequently ignore the volatile organic compounds bleeding out of our sidewalks and streets. Testing these bio-roads in the intense Arizona sun will provide undeniable data.

The Long Road to Commercial Reality

For over a century, our infrastructure relied almost entirely on fossil fuels. Moving toward a bio-based economy forces us to rethink everything from the ground up.

However, challenges loom on the horizon.

Right now, producing bio-bitumen costs significantly more than pumping crude oil. Scaling up production to meet global demand requires massive investment in biorefineries.

We also need years of rigorous traffic testing to ensure these bio-roads do not fail unexpectedly under the weight of millions of commercial trucks. Real-world, practical infrastructure often behaves differently than in lab tests, no matter how well researchers design their experiments.

But the global push has already begun.

In France, the Algoroute project has successfully placed bio-bitumen on test tracks, proving that the material slashes carbon emissions by up to 70%. In the United Kingdom, construction giant Tarmac is running similar pilot projects.

Governments and private industries recognize the urgent need to divest from petroleum. And as Fini points out, the sheer scale of the opportunity demands action.

“We have 4 million miles of roads in America,” Fini said. “We should make those 4 million miles do more for us than just get from A to B.”

This story originally appeared on ZME Science. Want to get smarter every day? Subscribe to our newsletter and stay ahead with the latest science news.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/pavement-made-from-algae-could-cut-toxic-asphalt-fumes-by-100-times-and-make-roads-last-longer

Source: ModernRetail, Mitchell Parton
Photo: Courtesy of Flashfood

Kroger has partnered up with a fast-growing mobile app to turn what would have been food waste into an extra bit of profit.

The app, Flashfood, is a marketplace for grocers to sell almost-expired food before it goes to the landfill. The app sells produce, meat and dairy nearing its best-by date. Shoppers can download the Flashfood app and look at items, just like on Instacart or any other grocery marketplace, and then pick them up in stores. The company says, since its inception close to a decade ago, it has diverted 170 million pounds of food to customers instead of landfills.

With Kroger, the app has now caught the attention of one of the nation’s largest grocers. The grocer piloted Flashfood in 16 stores in Richmond, Virginia last summer and is now implementing it throughout its Mid-Atlantic region. That includes more than 100 stores across Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

“Flashfood, first and foremost, meets customer needs by providing fresh, affordable, quality groceries that help them stretch their dollars and even potentially improve variety in nutrition in the meals they’re able to afford to serve to their families,” Kate Mora, president of Kroger’s Mid-Atlantic division, said in an interview. “This is often food that would go to waste, and now through this process, we divert that food away from a landfill and into somebody’s grocery cart.”

To implement the app, Kroger has installed coolers and racks in participating stores to house goods to be sold on Flashfood. Products across different fresh and dry grocery departments — especially meat and dairy — will typically be placed on the marketplace for up to 50% off on the day they expire. This is usually food that was already marked down for a couple of days before its expiration date and didn’t sell, Mora said.

According to Mora, during the pilot in Richmond, Kroger and Flashfood diverted more than 320,000 pounds of what would have been food waste.

“We are able to reach more customers through their app and offer even more affordable fresh groceries, … that can help our customers feed their family, have a nutritious diet and maybe more variety available in their weekly food plans,” Mora said. “Less food in landfills is something we all want, so we’re really proud of the impact we’re able to make there.”

Flashfood is currently in about 2,000 locations across North America; it has also worked with Loblaws, Meijer and Giant Eagle, among others. It launched about nine years ago in Canada and about four years ago in the U.S. Jordan Schenck, CEO of Flashfood and former head of global consumer marketing at Impossible Foods, told Modern Retail she expects the app to surpass 3,000 stores this year.

Schenck said grocers, after donating some products, “still have this massive volume of food that’s finding its way to landfill, just by the nature of, specifically, fresh food.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates up to 40% of the food supply is food waste. This comes as consumers in this economy are often trying to stretch their dollars.

“We should not be wasting at the volume we have with the amount of people that need access to [food] and are feeling that pinch,” Schenck said. “We’ve historically been able to mobilize that inventory that used to just be a complete write-off into a store traffic driver.”

Anne Mezzenga, founder and CEO of Retail Field Report and a former Target executive, said the moves grocers have made to improve inventory visibility have made it easier to deploy an app like Flashfood. These moves include putting RFID stickers on meat products and having shelf-roaming robots like those from Simbe Robotics track out-of-stocks and expiration dates.

“When Flashfood came online and was doing pilots years ago, I don’t think it was ready for enterprise because of the resources it required to get a handle on inventory,” Mezzenga said. “Now, as technology for inventory management, for task prioritization and for out-of-stock visibility has become more affordable, … [grocers] are now able to have a better picture of [out-of-stocks and wasted food] and are now able to pass those options or opportunities onto their consumers through an app like Flashfood.”

For example, Mezzenga said it’s now more possible for grocers to see if they have excess inventory, like a large amount of strips steaks they may have purchased for the Fourth of July that is all about to expire, and can quickly decide to put them on Flashfood.

“I think we’re going to start to see a lot more grocers start to look into this and invest in this, but it’s because they built the road with other technology for other purposes, like better planning, better out-of-stock management and better fulfillment for online orders,” Mezzenga said. “This is a really big bonus side benefit that they’re getting from this technology that’s better for the environment and better for their customers.”

https://www.modernretail.co/technology/kroger-brings-its-near-expired-food-to-flashfood-app-in-100-plus-stores

Source: Axios, Mary Helen Moore
Photo: A Plantd lab worker uses a scalpel to divide plant clones. (Mary Helen Moore/Axios)

North Carolina company Plantd is raising big bucks to scale up production of a carbon-negative building material made with its own crop of fast-growing grasses.

Why it matters: Globally, the buildings and construction industry is “by far” the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

The big picture: Most progress so far in cutting construction emissions has come from reducing heating, cooling and lighting costs, UNEP reported in 2023.

Decarbonizing the actual building materials is considered the next frontier.

What they’re saying: “I want to take over the entire lumber industry,” Plantd co-founder and CEO Nathan Silvernail tells Axios.

“The way that we build all infrastructure for the planet is silly, right? You have a huge amount of emissions when you produce steel, concrete and lumber,” he says.

How it works: The first traditional timber product Plantd is targeting is oriented strand board (OSB), the engineered wood panels widely used in residential construction.

Plantd’s panels are made instead with compressed cuttings of fast-growing grasses that the company clones at its headquarters in Oxford, North Carolina, about 30 miles northeast of Durham.

The grass, whose exact species is proprietary — agriculture director Janel Ohletz calls it “biomass” — grows year-round into 20-foot-tall stalks that resemble sugarcane. It can be mowed down for harvest several times a year.

Zoom in: The boards are cut to the same dimensions as and are interchangeable with traditional OSB.

“That’s key, so that you can get mass adoption,” Silvernail says. “It weighs the same, it looks the same. You put nails through it the same.” He adds that Plantd’s materials are stronger and warp less when exposed to moisture.

“That’s what won D.R. Horton over,” he says.

D.R. Horton, the largest U.S. homebuilder, is in a multiyear deal to purchase 10 million Plantd panels, enough to build 90,000 homes. That’s more than the company reported selling in all of 2025. A housing development built entirely with Plantd materials is underway.

He moved on because he felt they were not “necessarily solving a really large problem for humanity, for the Earth.”

He founded Plantd in 2021 with chief technology officer Huade Tan, another former SpaceX engineer, and Josh Dorfman, who guided early business strategy and now heads up marketing.

State of play: After securing USDA permission to grow an invasive species, the company picked North Carolina because it was the most “willing to try it out.”

Local farmers were receptive, too, especially those who lost money pivoting from tobacco to hemp. Hemp carried promise a decade ago, but it has extensive regulatory burdens and wound up being far less lucrative than most growers expected.

Between the lines: “A lot of people blame agriculture for a lot of the environmental degradation, and this is a way to be able to use it as a solution,” says Ohletz, the plant scientist.

By the numbers: The Oxford-headquartered company has harvested more than 100 metric tons of grass since late fall and has raised $47.5 million in capital.

That includes a new investment from North American building material supplier Amrize, the company first told Axios, to co-engineer more sustainable materials.

More than two-thirds of Plantd’s 70 employees are engineers or techs, Silvernail says.

What’s next: Standing up a new supply chain requires custom machinery — and also, in this case, farmland. Plantd is acquiring agricultural land in North Carolina and surrounding states to scale up operations.

It’s working to produce a wider range of products — including some designed for the furniture industry — and entering new international markets like Australia, where most timber products are imported.

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that Oxford is 30 (not 45) miles northeast of Durham and that the 100 metric tons of grass were harvested since late fall (not over the past five years).

https://www.axios.com/local/raleigh/2026/03/25/plantd-north-carolina-carbon-negative-building-materials-osb-alternative-grass-panels

Source: TheEpoch Times, Louise Chambers
Photo: Courtesy of Anja Nordvålen via Eveline Lunde

Disclaimer: This article was published in 2023. Some information may no longer be current.

A former design student from Norway gave up city life for a remote Arctic island after a boat trip rocked her outlook, and she’s never looked back, despite the huge adjustment.

Originally a city-dweller from Asker, Norway, 31-year-old Eveline Lunde has lived in an apartment in the small town of Longyearbyen, the northernmost town on Earth, on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago for the past four years.

Just 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) from the North Pole, Lunde has grown used to permafrost, the northern lights, snowmobiles, the midnight sun, and a thriving polar bear population—a far cry from life at design school in Oslo.

“While studying … I discovered a newfound passion for outdoor life,” Lunde told The Epoch Times. “I moved to northern Norway after completing my bachelor’s degree to pursue a one-year study program on outdoor activities. During my time there, I got to know a group of guys who lived on a sailing boat, with their sights set on reaching Svalbard during the summer.”

When one sailor dropped out of the trip at the last minute, Lunde took his place. She had never seen Svalbard before but after spending six weeks exploring its many Arctic wonders, Eveline was smitten. Returning to Oslo, she grieved the loss.

“I soon realized that I had undergone a transformation,” she said. “The fast-paced city life no longer held the same appeal for me. Svalbard had left an indelible mark on me, prompting me to make the life-changing decision to relocate there.”

The Svalbard archipelago consists of several islands in the Arctic Ocean. The official discovery of Svalbard dates back to 1596, according to World History Encyclopedia, and became Norwegian territory through the Svalbard Treaty (originally the Spitsbergen Treaty) of 1920.

Most of its human residents live on Spitsbergen, and the main island has some unusual features, said Lunde, who works in tourism.

“Due to the permafrost, trees do not grow here,” she said. “Additionally, the harsh climate limits the diversity of animal life. However, the animals that do inhabit this region have adapted remarkably well to the conditions. It’s quite normal to see reindeer and polar foxes roaming around in Longyearbyen. During the summer, we are also visited by numerous geese.”

A town of around 2,300 people, Longyearbyen is also home to a “significant” polar bear population numbering several hundred. The bears are monitored and protected. Nonetheless, residents are required to carry a flare gun as a deterrent, and a rifle as a last resort, when venturing out on hikes or longer journeys.

Lunde said: “It is strictly prohibited to kill a polar bear, except in cases of self-defense. In the event of a polar bear being killed, a thorough investigation would be conducted, treating it with the same seriousness as if it were a human fatality.”

Innumerable natural wonders make life on the Arctic archipelago a magical, if challenging, experience.

“Experiencing the extremes of the polar night and the midnight sun evokes a mix of emotions within me,” Lunde said. “It’s both challenging and awe-inspiring. I appreciate the unique and distinct seasons that Svalbard offers. However, maintaining a sense of routine and staying positive are essential to cope with these conditions.”

During the phenomenon of the “midnight sun,” lasting from April to August, it can be a struggle to sleep with sunlight streaming in through the windows. But during the “polar night,” from October to February, the island experiences total darkness 24 hours a day.

To avoid depression, Lunde prioritizes routine, staying active, and maintaining a social life with the island’s close-knit community at local pubs, cafes, and high-end restaurants. She even hikes through the winter, with a headlamp and spikes on her shoes for the snow-covered icecaps.

Sunlight aside, the weather in Svalbard goes through rapid changes and frequent harsh conditions.

“During the winter, we often face intense storms,” said Lunde, reflecting, “[W]hat I find amusing is that we’ve become accustomed to such weather and continue with our daily routines unaffected, whereas, on the mainland, similar weather would lead to widespread shutdowns and be considered a serious threat. In Svalbard, it’s just another typical day, where wearing goggles for the walk to work is part of our regular routine.”

The Longyearbyen road network covers only about 27 miles (43 kilometers), and cars don’t cut it in winter. Instead, residents drive snowmobiles or dog sleds. In summer they use boats to access cabins and other settlements on the island.

There is one small emergency hospital in Spitsbergen for minor ailments only. Pregnant women are not permitted to give birth on the island and must relocate to the mainland around one month before their due date. Anyone who requires ongoing care or is unable to take care of themselves is not allowed to live on the archipelago at all.

Yet, the challenges of Arctic life amplify the “stunning beauty of Svalbard on those perfect days” by contrast, Lunde said. Locals enjoy hiking, skiing, dog sledding, and snowmobiling year-round, and even the occasional concert, art exhibit, and theater show. Not to mention, they have the world’s greatest light show, the Aurora Borealis, in permanent residence overhead.

The population of Svalbard comprises a diverse mix of people, not only Norwegians. The archipelago at large used to be a hotspot for whaling and trapping but has since moved through coal mining into tourism and Arctic exploration, research, and education.

Lunde cannot speak highly enough of her chosen home.

“As a local, I wholeheartedly recommend visiting this extraordinary place,” she said. “The opportunity to witness the pristine Arctic landscapes, encounter majestic wildlife, and immerse oneself in the unique culture and warmth of the community is truly unmatched.”

Louise Chambers is a writer, born and raised in London, England. She covers inspiring news and human interest stories.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/the-northernmost-town-on-earth-woman-tells-of-her-unusual-life-on-an-island-800-miles-from-the-north-pole

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: David Esquivel/UCLA

Nearly 10 months after the Eaton wildfire, the rebuild process is slowly getting underway. Now, residents are turning to prefab to build their houses faster, more cheaply, and largely in factories.

At 3:20 a.m. on January 8, Steve Gibson and his wife were jolted awake by a phone call: the Eaton fire was approaching their home in Altadena, California, and they had to evacuate.

“We left in about 15 minutes,” Gibson says. “So we only took our passports, our insurance papers, three pairs of underwear, and our little dog, Cantinflas.” They thought that they’d be able to come back within a few hours. But they soon learned that their house—and their entire block—had been destroyed.

They spent the next few weeks moving from short-term rental to short-term rental, and finally moved into an apartment, though they knew that insurance would only cover the cost temporarily. Then they faced the next challenge: what would it take to rebuild their home?

More than 10 months after the L.A. fires, the rebuilding process in the fire zone is painfully slow. In Altadena, where more than 5,000 houses burned in the Eaton fire, only a few hundred are currently being rebuilt. (Only one, an ADU, has been completed as of mid-November.) But some—including Gibson’s—are moving faster than others because homeowners have turned to prefab construction.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91445960/prefab-housing-rebuild-effort-altadena

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker/courtesy Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates

Once home to oil refineries and factories, this stretch of Toronto waterfront now features a sprawling park that doubles as flood protection.

For more than a century, a stretch of riverfront in Toronto was an industrial wasteland, with oil storage tanks, factories, and shipping infrastructure sitting on former wetlands. Now, part of the site is a sprawling new park, and next year, construction will begin on a new neighborhood inside it.

“It’s incredibly transformed,” says Emily Mueller De Celis, a landscape architect at the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which won a competition to “renaturalize” the area in 2007. “Rather than walking around in and amongst oil refineries and other industry, now you are immersed in nature, walking along the banks of a river with spectacular views back to the city.”

The area was dotted with factories in the late 1800s. The river was dredged and corralled into a channel as the city tried to flush pollution from the factories into the nearby harbor. By the early 1900s, the wetlands in the area—now overrun with toxic waste—were filled in to build a new industrial district. Pollution kept getting worse.

The changes to the river also caused new flooding. By the 1980s, activists were calling for the restoration of the river. By the early 2000s, the government launched an effort called Waterfront Toronto to revitalize the area and create new flood protection, and it started to demolish some of the old industrial infrastructure.

The scale of the $1.4 billion project, along with inevitable delays, meant that it’s taken a very long time. “This is the largest infrastructure project in North America,” says Mueller De Celis. The project carved out more than 1.3 million cubic meters of soil, reshaping a new mouth for the river and creating a new island where the park, called Biidaasige Park, now sits. The design helps protect adjacent areas from flooding.

From the beginning, Waterfront Toronto wanted to use green infrastructure for flood protection. “They had the vision to identify that this wasn’t going to be an engineering solution,” Mueller De Celis says. “It would be a solution that really tied us back into the naturalized system of the [river] valley, and into the public realm to get people access to nature.”

The excavated river is now deeper and surrounded by new wetlands where the water can spread, with berms that help hold water back from other neighborhoods. The island where the park sits was built high enough to avoid flooding.

A coalition of partners working on the project carefully designed the park to help bring back wildlife to the area. The park is filled with trees that will eventually form a canopy forest. Along the edge of the river, where engineers might typically use stone or concrete, the team brought in large trees and locked them together in a pattern that helps prevent erosion—and creates new “fish hotels” in the empty spaces as habitat. Other felled trees were laid down hanging over the water to add more new space for amphibians, fish, and birds. Red-tailed hawks, eagles, and otters have returned.

This summer, the first phase of the park opened to the public, and the next phase will open in 2026. The park surrounds the new island, and the center will soon become a mixed-use development. Design work started this year on streets and infrastructure, and construction of new homes is expected to begin next year. Eventually, the island will be home to 15,000 residents, 3,000 jobs, and another 15 acres of park space.

Nearly a decade ago, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary focused on urban technology, hoped to build a smart city along a nearby part of the waterfront. But it abandoned the project in 2020. Toronto is now focused on using the whole area to help deal with its housing shortage. At the beginning of 2025, the Canadian government, along with the city and provincial governments, invested another $975 million to build new housing on the waterfront.

The park and redesigned river had to come first, to make sure any new development would be protected from floods. “It’s a different way of thinking about building within a city,” Mueller De Celis says.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap.. She contributed to the bestselling book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and a new book from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design 2023.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91420442/in-toronto-a-polluted-industrial-wasteland-is-now-a-beautiful-park

Source: NBC, Jing Feng and Vicky Nguyen
Photo: Walmart’s Great Value sports drinks will no longer have added coloring. Drinks with, right, and without, left, artificial food dye at Walmart’s Culinary Innovation Center. (Jing Feng/NBC News)

Big changes are coming to the food aisles of America’s largest retailer.

Walmart announced Wednesday it will eliminate synthetic dyes from all its private-label brand food products. Those brands include Marketside, Bettergoods and Great Value, which is the nation’s largest consumer packaged goods brand, found in 90% of households, according to NielsenIQ.

The retailer has set a full implementation deadline of January 2027. It also pledged to eliminate 30 other ingredients, including certain preservatives, artificial sweeteners and fat substitutes.

The shift to natural dyes will mean reformulating and testing more than 1,000 products, though Walmart says 90% of its store-brand food items are already free of artificial colors. The company said the move reflects changing customer preferences.

“This is a direct response to what the customer is telling us,” said Scott Morris, senior vice president of Walmart’s private food brands. “They’re looking for simpler ingredients, simpler nutrition panels.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Food and Drug Administration have been pushing food makers to phase out artificial colors by the end of 2027. So far, the agency has leaned on voluntary commitments from companies rather than imposing a blanket regulatory ban. Companies including PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and General Mills have announced similar plans to remove synthetic dyes from food products.

Walmart said the shift to natural food dyes has been in the works for years, but the timing of the announcement reflects current industry trends. “The customer is louder than they ever were, and we felt like the industry was ready for us to move to scale,” Morris explained.

Will the change drive up prices, though? Morris acknowledged “it’s an item-by-item dynamic,” but emphasized Walmart’s commitment to low prices. “Our history is: We’ve done an outstanding job of shielding our customers from these moves,” he said.

Food scientists at Walmart are working to ensure that foods reformulated with natural dyes keep the same taste and texture, while matching colors as closely as possible. Some products may take on more subdued shades, while others may lose their color completely.

Walmart gave NBC News exclusive access to its Culinary Innovation Center in Bentonville, Arkansas, where product developers showcased some of their reformulated products compared with the old versions.

In one demo, naturally colored cupcake frosting was nearly indistinguishable from the original artificially dyed versions. Katie Miles, Walmart product developer and pastry chef, explained that the bright colors were achieved by using ingredients like spirulina, beets and other root vegetables. It was a three-year effort, she noted, with challenges that included masking the earthy flavor of the vegetables and getting the right pH balance for shelf stability.

The reformulated version of Great Value Fruit Spins, the brand’s colorful ring-shaped cereal, was noticeably less vibrant. Prabhat Kumar, Walmart director of product development, said extensively processed foods like cereal pose a challenge because processing can distort the natural colors. “Blue, green and purples are not as vibrant,” Kumar noted, but consumers will get the same flavor and texture. The cereal still needs to undergo consumer testing to gauge whether shoppers accept the new look before Walmart puts it on shelves.

Walmart’s private-label sports drinks are going dye-free, leaving the liquid a cloudy white instead of the bright blue of its artificially colored version. When it comes to customers shopping for sports drinks, “color drives the decision,” Walmart product developer Andie Garcia said, but “we could not get this blue in a natural color.” Instead, her team decided to wrap the bottle in a blue plastic sleeve, since consumers link bold colors with stronger flavors.

Morris said consumer feedback suggests that shoppers are open to the visual changes. When it comes to food color, “the customer is continuously telling us that it’s not necessary everywhere,” he said. Walmart’s key message, he added, is that taste and quality remain unchanged, even if the colors look different.

Some research has linked synthetic dyes to hyperactivity and restlessness in certain kids. But the FDA said the dyes are safe for most.

Walmart’s announcement also includes the removal of 30 additional ingredients, including certain preservatives, artificial sweeteners and fat substitutes. These include ingredients that California has already moved to ban, including potassium bromate, an oxidizing agent for dough, and propylparaben, a preservative. Morris said they were targeted because of the availability of alternatives on the market that “don’t compromise the quality or cost.”

Renee Leber, a food scientist at Institute of Food Technologists, said the shift to natural dyes has been underway for more than a decade, fueled by the clean label movement of the 2010s, but the FDA’s latest actions have given it new momentum.

The challenge now isn’t just reformulating, she said, but convincing customers to accept the visual changes. Food companies haven’t always succeeded at this, she noted, pointing to Trix cereal as an example, which removed artificial dyes but brought them back in 2017 when customers complained.

As colors become less vibrant, companies “might have to start leaning harder into the messaging of why they are making this change,” she said, “and to bring the consumers along that journey with them.” Because when it comes to food, Leber noted, what people see can be just as important as what they taste.

Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, welcomed Walmart’s move.

“Given the incremental steps that have been announced by some food companies, this commitment is a bold declaration and response to consumer sentiment that has become increasingly wary of the long list of chemicals found in so many processed foods,” Ronholm said in a news release. “Walmart’s decision shows that food companies don’t have to wait for the FDA’s regulatory process to catch up with the science. Hopefully, others in the food industry will take notice and follow suit.”

Jing Feng

Jing Feng is a producer at NBC News covering business and the economy.

Vicky Nguyen

Vicky Nguyen is the senior chief investigative correspondent for NBC News. See her reports on “TODAY,” “Nightly News with Tom Llamas,” MSNBC and NBC News Now.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/walmart-eliminate-synthetic-food-dyes-store-brands

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Polar Night Energy

Thanks to a new thermal energy storage system, when residents in this small town north of Helsinki need hot water, it comes from a giant tank of super hot sand.

A small town in Finland is experimenting with a new type of infrastructure: the world’s largest sand battery.

The battery—a 42-foot-tall, nearly 50-foot-wide silo filled with 2,000 tons of crushed stone—sits on the edge of a parking lot. When there’s extra renewable electricity on the grid and power is cheap, the system uses electricity to heat up the crushed stone. That heat is stored in the battery until nearby buildings need to use it.

The basic approach is simple. “We just heat air and [circulate it] through sand,” says Liisa Naskali, COO of Polar Night Energy, the Finnish startup that designed the technology. Sand, or other material crushed into sand-size particles, has the ability to store heat for weeks. Unlike some other batteries, the system doesn’t rely on chemicals, doesn’t degrade, and won’t catch on fire.

The town, called Pornainen, relies on a district heating network to heat a group of buildings, from city offices and the local school to some businesses and apartment complexes. Until recently, the network burned oil or wood chips to run. But the municipality is aiming to become carbon neutral, and realized that it needed to make a change.

Now if someone in a nearby apartment turns on hot water for a shower, the heat comes from the sand battery. Like other district heating systems, the heat from the battery travels to other buildings via pipes filled with hot water; each building has its own equipment to distribute the heat to radiators, floor heaters, or other HVAC systems.

The battery started running this summer, and was officially inaugurated this week, meaning the district heating system no longer uses oil at all. Over the summer, it relied entirely on the sand battery.

As the weather gets colder, the system will use both the battery and wood chips, but the use of wood chips can drop by around 60%. (Burning wood chips is technically carbon neutral since trees take in carbon as they grow, but since trees are slow to grow and burning is fast, it’s not a good short-term climate solution—and it also produces a lot of other pollution.)

Though the startup calls the technology a “sand” battery, it can use other materials. For the new installation in Pornainen, the company turned to soapstone scraps from a nearby fireplace manufacturer. That helped reduce waste and avoided the environmental challenges of sourcing sand, which is typically excavated from rivers, lakes, or shorelines.

Inside the silo, the company uses a heat exchanger and a closed-loop system to circulate heat. Software runs heaters when electricity prices are low. Throughout the summer, Naskali says, the utility paid around 10% of the average price of electricity by charging only at optimal times. That helps make the technology cost-competitive, though the initial installation cost is high, she says.

The startup is now in talks with other utilities. Factories can also use the technology to replace fossil fuels for high-heat processes. Other startups, including Rondo Energy and Antora Energy, are also pioneering new approaches to thermal energy storage.

For Polar Night Energy, the project in Pornainen is a critical proof point. “This is really important for us,” Naskali says, “because now we can show that this really works.”

The application deadline for Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, October 3, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap.. She contributed to the bestselling book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and a new book from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91393820/in-finland-this-giant-battery-is-helping-heat-apartments-and-offices-using-sand