World is Green

Japan, the world’s second largest economy has been languishing for more than 15 years now. How do change this? How do you create a innovative Japan?

One project is the Innovation 25. Red Herring has some notes from Kiyoshi Kurokawa’s Powerpoint presentation.

One theme from the Innovation 25 is the big opportunity in environmental or sustainability.

Opportunities for Japan’s Innovation Strategy

Japan is known throughout the world for its strengths in manufacturing (in the broad sense of the term) and “environmental or green” technology such as that for clean energy. We need to further develop these strengths by offering these products and services to Asia and the world.

Society that Contributes Significantly to Resolving Global Environmental Issues

By 2025, innovation could see Japan become a society where:

-The public as well as the government and corporations make daily efforts to resolve environmental issues at the global level . These efforts will include radical reduction of the sources of global warming, efficient energy use, and waste and water management. Japan would lead the world by taking these initiatives.
-The public will be exposed to issues related to the natural environment and will take voluntary actions to save energy and implement the 3R’s (Re-use,Reduce and Recycle) in everyday life. For example, grade schools will provide children with opportunities to learn about the environment and energy use .
- Corporations will support such activities using multiple measures including paid-holidays for those undertaking such activities.
- Ongoing and ambitious efforts will establish Japan as a model of sustainability in the world. Abundant opportunities will be given to young people from Asia and elsewhere at universities and corporations in Japan so that they learn the skills to balance environmental, social and economic development in their home countries in a sustainable way.

Global Environmental Issues as a Driver for Economic Growth and International Contribution

Environmental and energy issues will increase in significance as efforts continue to promote world economic development. Clean energy, green technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology developed in Japan should serve as the main drivers for economic growth. This will provide Japan with an ideal opportunity to contribute to the resolution of these global issues.

Not only for Japan but for every country and company; sustainability provides a great new opportunity to solve some of the world’s problems and create huge new opportunities.

Red Herring has an interesting story about a start-up, Ecovative, in the US where two Whiz kids have demonstrated the use of mushrooms and fungi to create organic insulation. (the article is not yet available online)

To make Ecovative’s insulation, living cells from mushrooms are injected into a panel mold along with a waste feedback (flour or starbucks coffee grinds, for instance), water, and mineral particles like perlite, a potting soil ingredient.[...]After a week or two, the panel is baked, killing off all fungal life. “the magic of what we are doing is we’re letting fungi do the manufacturing on the micro-scale”, says Mr. Bayer…these fungi are taking the food and reassembling it into a cellular body.[It's] kind of a low-tech biotech”.
[...]
Industry observers sat Ecovative stradles two very hot, yet still emerging subsectors of cleantech - industrial biotech, which leverages biological processes and organisms for use in industrial production, and “green” building, a growing movement for environmentally sustainable building materials.
[...]
“The questions is: can they really deliver on the price, and is the performance equal or better than the existing product that’s out there?”

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at a college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” –Howard Ikemoto

Source: Daily Good Newsletter

Nikhil Swaminathan in Scientific American: (hat tip: Atanu Dey)

The researchers mathematically modeled these factors according to population growth to see how each respond when more people move to a city. They found that human needs, such as employment, utility consumption and housing, correspond directly with the population: As the number of people doubles so does the need for housing, jobs and electricity infrastructure, which encompasses the number of roads, gasoline stations and the like already in place and does not necessarily keep pace with individual growth—the ratio of user to facility simply rises. (And so, for example, there are simply more customers at the available gas stations.) At the other extreme, researchers found that increases in social activity and production outpace population growth. In other words, if the number of city denizens doubles, these factors—both negative (crime) and positive (wealth creation, total wages and gross domestic product)—will more than double.

“These scaling laws give you some suggestion of …[how] … your city will behave as it grows,” in terms of economic activity, resource consumption, etc., Bettencourt says, adding that smaller cities, like Portland, Ore., and huge epicenters, like New York City, fall along the same continuum and are subject to the same multipliers.

“The practical application of this work is that the problem is not large cities, the problem is the conditions in which some people live in large cities,” says study co-author Jose Lobo, an economist at A.S.U.’s School of Sustainability in Tempe. “Policies should be directed to making large cities more livable”—for instance, enacting legislation or spending money to alleviate poverty and crime, the negative effects of growth.

Thomas Parris, director of sustainability programs at iSciences, a Burlington, VT, research company dedicated to improving understanding of sustainability, agrees that the main message of the paper is a recharacterization of cities so that better decisions can be made as urban areas continue to grow. “This is a fascinating paper that quantitatively explores the complex interactions between urbanization, sustainability and social innovation,” he says. “Insights, such as those presented in this paper, will help guide our collective choices as the pace of socioecological change accelerates.”

You can read more about the importance of cities in the context of India in the Ten part series on Cities and Urbanization by Atanu Dey.