TED Radio Hour - The Future of Sustainability: Repair, repurpose, reimagine

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

"Reduce, reuse, recycle." We've heard that for decades - but does it work? This hour, TED speakers reimagine the well-known slogan and reconsider how we think about what we consume and throw away. Guests include right-to-repair advocate Gay Gordon-Byrne, materials scientist Andrew Dent, technologist Jamie Beard and animal scientist Ermias Kebreab. Original broadcast date: May 20, 2022TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. Getting a fancy new phone or computer can feel so exciting like you have a superpower. Until it inevitably slows down, freezes, or stops working altogether. It is so aggravating. But there are some people who actually find it thrilling if their stuff stops working. Yeah, yeah. Fixing things is a puzzle. I just find it enormously satisfying. This is Gay Gordon Byrne. Gay does not have the latest iPhone.

I think I have an iPhone 8. Okay, so how old is your phone then? I don't know how many years it was in use before I bought it. I bought it two years ago. Used. What about your laptop that you work on? Pretty sure that's about five years old. Have you ever needed to fix it? Yeah, several times.

It was overheating, and I suspected I needed a new fan, so I ordered a fan. I opened it up, saw the fan was clogged with cat hair. Gross. I've also had to replace some keys on my keyboard. I've replaced the battery. I just enjoyed every minute of it to see how these things work. So, gay is unusual. Don't feel badly if you've never pulled apart your laptop.

because the companies who manufacture our products, they purposely make it hard for us to fix them. When people started getting personal computing equipment and cell phones and things like that, they were told these things are so complicated and so difficult. Only the manufacturer is capable of making these repairs. And people largely bought into that whole idea. Look at all the old companies that used to be in our towns.

There was always an appliance repair shop. there was a TV repair shop, there was a computer repair shop. Those places are gone. And they're gone not because people didn't want to fix stuff, but because they can't repair things if they can't get the essential parts and tools. And as you can see, with the success of companies such as Apple, they have made a killing by making it impossible to repair without help from the Apple store. Gay worked in the tech industry for decades.

And this corporate behavior ticked her off. So in 2013, she founded the Digital Right to Repair Coalition. And because that's a mouthful, we are also known as Repair.org. Their mission? It's to fight for repair-friendly legislation, standard regulations, and policies. When I first heard it, I was like, what do you mean the right to repair? That's like the right to fix something. Well, duh, yes.

I mean, but what you're saying is we are at a point where we need the law to tell these companies that we should be allowed to repair the things that we buy, right? When you first started talking about the phrase, what was the response from lawmakers, from manufacturers, what did they think? Oh, they had exactly the same reaction you did. They said, what is that? And we were able to explain it mostly in the context of cars because everybody understood that they need to be able to go to the local mechanic. And we say, well, those problems exist now for everything else. We are stuck with whatever the manufacturer feels like doing because we don't have the consumer protection laws to require them to do what we need them to do. People need to fix their stuff.

And if they can't, there are some really bad consequences. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Since the 70s, that's been the slogan for the environmentally conscious. But today, we often feel unsure if our daily habits make any difference at all. Are the items we toss in the recycling bin really recycled? Why are we getting new phones and laptops rather than fixing them? And does clean energy or eating sustainably truly have to be a political issue. Well, on today's show, ideas that put a twist on reducing, reusing, and recycling,

and could upend entire industries. We'll meet people working to radically change what we consume and what we see as disposable. Let's get back to Gay Gordon-Burn. If we are going to have any control over our e-waste problem, we have to talk about repair. Here she is on the TED stage. Back in 2013, the EPA estimated that the average U.S. household already owned 28 digitally driven gizmos and gadgets. It was everything from garage door openers and hot tub controls to smart toasters. If we just do a little math and multiply 28 times our roughly 123 million households, we come up with a pretty staggering three and a half billion pieces of e-waste. that don't belong in our landfills, and they are costly and difficult to put back as raw materials.

When we look a little more closely at what's even possible with recycling, I think we've been ignoring some really ugly truths. By the time a laptop or refrigerator or even an electric toothbrush gets in our hands, almost all of the environmental damage has already been done. All the costs of mining and refining and smelting and smelting and transatlzing, and transportation, and we don't see these costs when we go to the store, and we don't see the human costs of terrible labor conditions and exposure to toxic materials. So fixing more and throwing away less just makes sense.

Let's talk about where we are then in terms of the law and legislation. The law says that they're not supposed to be monopolizing repair. They do. So more enforcement would be helpful. But enforcement is not the same as making a requirement that they sell parts and tools. And that can only be done in states because states have the power of general business law. And states can say, Mr. Manufacturer, if you're going to do business in my state, you must do X, Y, and Z. And those laws are very powerful and they work. There was a successful wheelchair right to repair bill that we finally got passed in Colorado. Wait, why would you not have the right to repair your own wheelchair? Because they won't sell you the parts. It's a ridiculous situation where the wheelchair manufacturer

says, I can't sell you a battery until like three months from now. And meanwhile, you're sitting in a chair and you can't move. That's why it went through so quickly because it's so absurd. But the same absurdity applies to all these other things. The arguments that big manufacturers make to keep their customers from fixing their things. My understanding is that Apple has said you could hurt yourself. In other states, tech companies have argued that will create hubs for hackers. Are any of those things true? What are some of the reasons that you've heard?

There are no reasons. There's only excuses. You are responsible for your own personal safety from the moment that you purchase something. That's in every contract I've ever seen. and I've spent 40 years in commercial contracting. The responsibility for safety and cybersecurity, by the way, transfers at the cash register. I think a lot of people don't even know a world where they could take something to get fixed, right? They think, well, every two years, my carrier says that I'm available for an upgrade.

They go to the store and they get a new phone. Where does the old one go? The phones that are taken back in trade tend not to reappear on the U.S. used market. They tend to be shredded or pulled apart very prematurely, and the parts that they're pulling out could be used for repairs, but that's not their business. Their business is to sell new phones. So that is what happens when a manufacturer controls the secondary market is they want to keep as much used equipment off the market as possible. You mentioned earlier that most repair shops have gone away. If we get the right to repair our stuff, would there even be enough

people to repair them? So these jobs that have gone away will come back, and they will come back in droves because there's a heck of a lot more equipment out there that needs repair services. There's hundreds of thousands of people that have the capabilities and the qualifications, and there will be jobs in towns that will support a family because these are not low-level factory jobs. They're great jobs, and they don't require an advanced degree. I'll give you a new example. There's a charity in Minnesota called TechDump, and they take in donated electronics, and then they hire adults that are hard to employ, many of whom coming out of the criminal justice system. They train them to make repairs.

They then take the repaired goods to sell them and use the proceeds to fund more training. And secondary markets are why used equipment is so affordable, because the used seller has to compete with new. So if a new gadget is $1,000, we expect a pretty big discount to buy that same item used. Let's start with 50%. So now we have an affordability capability that is central to crossing the digital divide. We had 5 million students that went to virtual school this past year that didn't have enabling technology. And that's because parents and school districts couldn't buy new. we still have a lot of chip shortages, and these are going to be with us for a while.

And I think we have to think very seriously about doing more repair, not just to make things last longer, but also to be more resilient as an economy. The work that you do, do you find that your supporters fall along predictable party lines? Actually, there's almost no partisan divide at all. It cuts across every possible socioeconomic, political, or geographical, or geographical, line. I'd say the only real divide we seem to see is almost an age divide. I see that the older, the legislator, the less familiar they are with, A, technology, and B, with the limitations of modern technology. The last kitchen remodel they did was 20 years ago. All of those appliances still work.

But if they've done one in the past five years, they will have already experienced some pretty severe problems. That's so depressing. You're saying that the newer your appliances are, the more likely they are to crap out sooner. Absolutely. You put a computer in a refrigerator. It's not going to last 20 years anymore. So bottom line, I need a new refrigerator or phone. What should I keep in mind?

Buy the least high-tech product you can in a home appliance. Don't buy the one with the fancy screen on the outside because the screen craps out way faster than the compressor. or don't buy the bells and whistles because they don't last and they won't be supported. And one day, they might drop support on it altogether. And now you've got to replace and reprogram your entire household. So low tech, as low tech as you can get. I think we've been told that we want bright and shiny more so than we actually want bright and shiny. Cell phones, tablets, whatever, people do want to buy things that'll last.

And repair is the way that you get to long. useful life of the product. That's Gay Gordon Byrne. She's the executive director and founder of Repair.org. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Today on the show, repair, repurpose, reimagined. We'll be right back. Before we get back to the show, I want to ask you to please consider becoming a member of TED Radio Hour Plus. You'll get extra advice, stories, and expertise for

from TED speakers every other week and no ads ever. And you'll be supporting public radio. Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcast app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. Today on the show, repair, repurpose, reimagined. So, Andrew, where are we going?

The other day I took the subway to lower Manhattan to go to a library. It's just through here. But this isn't a library for books. Housed on the sixth floor of a skyscraper right near Wall Street is a library for materials. It's innovative and sustainable stuff. So things which is new, different materials that perhaps you wouldn't have expected. My guide, the librarian. is scientist Andrew Dent.

I work as a material researcher for a company called Material Connection. The company acts as a kind of matchmaker. Yes, yes. We like to match the innovators, the people who manufacture these materials or create these materials, and the people who use them. Whether it's an architect, designer, or a manufacturer of product themselves.

And we do, of course, have resources for the more standard materials, the stuff that you make shampoo bottles out of or the leather for your couch, but designers kind of want to see what's new and what's next. So this is like walking in the future. The Materials Library is a large room filled with movable walls, each with dozens of samples of different materials, mounted on display from floor to ceiling. Okay, I'm following you.

So we go through the wall after wall, after wall of materials. And some of these are just like little box. Watch this one. This is a method for turning eggshells and tomato peels into automobile tire. Oh, my God. This is 100% vegan love. made of apple peels. That's so cool. I mean, just in front of me here is a sound-absorbing panel made from natural hand-picked Scandinavian reindeer moss. Is it okay if I touch it?

Yes. That's okay. It's very soft. It's soft. I would love to have a wall made out of that. What's the criteria for something to make it into the library? Yes, we have a panel that judges the materials. You know, we of course want to include as much stuff as possible. We want to ensure that our designers have access to as many different options as possible. But for us, we want really just the stuff that will be wow, but also the stuff that will offer a more sustainable lower carbon future and will resonate with consumers. When you throw something away, it typically goes into a landfill.

Andrew says we need to reimagine how we make and build things and use materials that will never end up as garden. Here he is on the TED stage. The industry that are not doing so well is the architecture industry. One of the challenges with architecture has always been. When we build up, we don't think about taking down. That's a challenge, because it ends up that about a third of all landfill waste in the US is architecture. We need to think of differently about this.

There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material. A good example is this. There's actually bricks that are made from old demolition waste, which includes the glass, includes the rubble, includes the concrete. We put it up a grinder, put it all together, heat it up and make these bricks we can basically build more buildings from. But it's only a fraction of what we need. My hope is that with big data and geo-tagging,

we can actually change that, and we can be more thrifty when it comes to buildings. If there's a building down the block, which is being demolished, are the materials there that the new building being built here can use? can we use that ability to understand all of the materials that are available in that building that's still usable? Can we then basically put them into a new building without actually losing any value in the process? Okay, so let's say I'm one of your clients and I arrived here and I said, you know, Andrew, I have, look at my beautiful design for, I don't know, a sneaker, a new fashionable sneaker. but I definitely want to market it to a conscientious consumer. You would then take me into the library and show me what?

We would show you two types of things. We would show you materials. We'd also show you new manufacturing processes as well. Ew, Andrew, that looks like a box with somebody's old chewing gum in it. Exactly right. So there's a company in London that is taking, well, basically has put containers around the city. So when you finish chewing your gum, rather than leaving it on the floor, which is in itself not a good thing.

You can put it into one of these receptacles, and they will collect it, they will clean it, and then they will take that material, because it's basically a rubbery material, and they'll synthesize it and manufacture it into products. Like what? Coffee cup lids, coffee cups themselves, even the soles of shoes.

Because the material, it's just a chemistry. So, yes, it's been inside my mouth, and I've been chewing it, and it's got bacteria from my mouth. And once we clean that off, the raw material itself has value, as basically a rubbery, durable and colorable product. So is this a proof of concept or is this actually?

Okay, so what's this? So this is a, it's a rigid panel material, perhaps used as a countertop, 100% from fish scales. No way. Fish scales, so, okay, tell me where this, okay, explain the process here. It looks, by the way, it really looks just like a, maybe quartz, quartz countertop. Yes, or something like that.

So, yes, turns out that Kaida-San, which is what fish scales are made of, is a very wonderful engineering material. So they're going to clean it first, so it doesn't smell of fish. You know, do you smell it? It doesn't smell like anything. Okay, exactly. You know, because we're not able to clean these sorts of things very effectively. So it doesn't smell a fish.

There's no salt. So we just take the raw material, clean it well, presses together hard with a binder, and it becomes a viable, valuable material. Is this going to happen soon? Are there, I don't know, fish canneries in Alaska also turning into kitchen countertop companies? This company sells kitchen countertops.

You can purchase kitchen countertop from this company, which is 100 fish scales. Do I get a discount? Okay. This one I thought might be interesting. Mereda Cotta. It's actually some rough looking cups and bowls that are manufactured out of cow menu. Really? Okay, so it looks like a terracotta mug.

Oh, you're taking it off. Yes. Can I touch it again? Yes, of course. Okay. You drink out of it as well. It was more of a concept. Okay.

But this is poop. This is cow poop. This is cow poop, yes. But it looks really nice. Well, it's also very functional. The thing was you had a farmer, a dairy farmer, who basically was worried about the amount of manure they were producing. They had to discard it somehow. And there wasn't any other use for it.

So they thought, okay, well, since it's mostly just cellulose fibers, it's still usable material. So they decided that, okay, well, let's fashion. it into cups and then just fire it and manufacture these products out of it. But I'm guessing that's, that's a hard sell, right? I mean, eat, right? Well, it doesn't need to be a cup. It can be, it can be, it can be flortiles. It can be anything, it can be something else that perhaps you wouldn't be drinking out of. I have to ask you, as a consumer, I mean, it's really depressing. Everything I read basically says, that's very nice that you're recycling your milk jug or your laundry detergent jug. But the chances of

it actually being recycled and reused again is pretty limited. Do you feel that way, too? Is that true? I feel like we don't even know what to believe anymore when it comes to recycling as consumers. It is confusing, yes. And our recycling rates are abysmal. if we take the most easily recyclable and the most valuable material, say a water bottle or a soda bottle. So that material is amorphous polyester. It's clear. It recycles very easily. We've got a very efficient system to recycle it.

It ends up as chairs or as clothing. So it's got a second life. It has value. And we still only recycle about a quarter of it. Compare that to other plastics. Let's say the polyethylene used in milk. cartons or in shampoo bottles, that number gets down to sort of five or ten percent. But it is possible to do it efficiently. There are some Scandinavian countries, yes, I know they

always do it better than we do, where their recycling rates are up in the 80s and 90 percent. So almost everything that they are using then gets recycled back into something else. We have a unique challenge here in the US, but it is possible to improve. And yes, it can be sometimes that you lose faith in it, but there have been so many new methods. of recycling and our efficiencies of actually repurposing that material once it does actually get recycled are so good. I believe that there is still hope. I just want to have you think about if you make anything, if you're any part of a design firm, if you basically are refurbishing your house, any aspect in which you make something, think about how that product could potentially

be used as a second life or third life or fourth life. Design in the ability for it to be taken apart. In the meantime, it sounds like we also need to consider changing the way we manufacture things so that they are, is it, is the right term circular? Is that the right term? Yes, that is the ideal, that everything should work in circles, because everything in nature works in circles. The water circle, the circle of life. Nature basically finds a second life, a third life, a repeatable life for everything it has. There is no waste in nature. and we are thinking about designing products so they have the potential for a second life. So trying to remove glues, which make it very hard to pull things apart,

trying to make things which are what we call monomaterial, so all from the same material. So therefore you can put it in the same recycling bit. So this design evolution has tried to approach design as a way of ensuring that any product can have a second or third life. I just want to ask you what comes to your mind as a measurement. material scientist when I say, I mean, it's a phrase that's been said in infinite number of times, reuse, repurposed, recycle. Is that still the right message or is there a new message that we need? It's still a viable message. I think reuse for me is possibly one of the most valuable ones.

Because no matter how sustainable you can make a product, if it can last two or three times the length of another product, then that is always going to be the better choice. But I think, I think the standard three of reduced reuse cycle are iterative. They are steps we can take for existing solutions. I think for me it's very much about reimagined. I know it's a tired old example, but from CDs to iTunes. We've just reimagined and now it's a process that uses no material at all. So I think a lot of examples which are the most successful is where a designer or an architect

or a brand owner has completely reimagined the product or its use and therefore has gone away with any concern about the three original arts. So reimagined, I think, will probably be the best new solution if we can. That's Andrew Dent. He's the executive vice president of Materials Research at Material Connection. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, repair, repurpose, reimagined. When you hear the term renewable energy, what do you think of?

Maybe solar power, wind, big hydroelectric dams. But if you've ever swam in a hot spring or visited a geyser... Or for me, I just sat under Mount Rainier for a week, and that's a volcano. Well, then you've seen another source of potential power, geothermal. It's a gigantic source of energy that emanates through the earth. and parts of it actually escape the surface. This is Jamie Beard. You have rock with pore space in it.

You have water inside that pore space in the rock. And then you have a lot of heat close to the surface. And when you have all of those conditions together, that is a gigantic resource. And in areas that have these resources, the opportunity for cheap, renewable energy is huge. 30% of Iceland's electricity is geothermal. Kenya, 38%. But Jamie says that for most of the world, geothermal power is... Nothing.

Like, it's so small now that it's barely a blip on the radar. Which is why she no longer practices environmental law, but is instead working to grow the geothermal industry. Geothermal is beneath us anywhere and everywhere in the world. And the only difference between Iceland and right here in Boston, where I'm sitting, is the depth that you need to drill to get to the heat, right? In some places, you have to go deeper. It's not right at the surface.

But it's still there. You know, that's what's really, really exciting about it to me. The core of the Earth is 6,000 degrees Celsius. It's the same temperature as the surface of the sun. But it's not 94 million miles away. It is right here beneath our feet. Jamie Beard continues from the TED stage. There are teams of innovators that are working on figuring out how to most efficiently and effectively tap this enormous heat source beneath us.

But in order to do that, we've got to figure out how to mimic the conditions that occur in places like Iceland that make geothermal easy to tap and extract and harvest. And those conditions are hot rocks, pour space in the rocks, and water filling those pores. Those conditions seem simple, but they actually occur naturally in very, very few places in the world. But the past couple of decades, there have been really disruptive and breakthrough technological innovations that enable us to engineer the subsurface to mimic Mother Nature's geothermal. So technological innovations like directional drilling, where no longer we can just drill straight down,

but instead we can actually turn and steer drill bits to reach very precise and specific locations in the subsurface miles underground. And we can also fracture rock now, which means that we can create poor space where poor space does not exist naturally. So if you take these innovations that I just listed and you put them on, all together, you end up enabling an entirely new breed of scalable geothermal concepts. Geothermal concepts can be done anywhere in the world. Okay, so let's talk more about how you actually tap this geothermal energy. Let's get a little technical. Can you explain one of them, EGS? Sure. So the first type of hot,

dry rock system is engineered or enhanced geothermal systems. And in those, you drill a well, and then you fracture the rock. So it's, remember, this is dry, so there's no fluids down there, and it may not be porous enough, so you want to make more pores. And then you send a fluid down that well, and circulating that fluid through the rock, the fluid heats up. It comes, you produce it in a well at the surface, and you run a turbine to produce electricity. so you're actually running a power plant.

So it's basically the same as geothermal plants in Iceland or Kenya, just like much, much deeper under the ground. Right. Okay, but you said that there's another way to get at that energy that you're psyched about. Yeah, so the second concept that's really interesting is closed-loop systems. And closed-loop is actually, it leans really heavy on the use of directional drilling techniques. And that's essentially the ability to turn your drill bit, and to aim for a specific place underground that you want to go.

And you don't need to use fractures in closed loops because they're closed, right? And so you have an underground radiator that you circulate a fluid through, and that fluid is produced at the surface and runs a power plant just like EGS. These are not moonshots. We are talking about making very incremental changes to existing technologies with an eye on, more hotter and deeper geothermal development. There are teams in the field demonstrating these concepts. Teams like Sage Geosystems, a team that I mentor.

This is a well, and get this, Texas. This is a Texas pasture where you would never suspect the enormous geothermal resources that lie below. And this well is an existing, abandoned oil and gas well that they have repurposed for this geothermal demonstration. In the past 18 months, more geothermal startups have launched than in the past 10 years combined. If even one of these startups is successful

at proving a scalable geothermal concept, we are literally off to the races in developing this massive, reliable, 24-7 clean energy source anywhere in the world. So if we've got the technology, what's holding us back from a new technology? a geothermal power boom. Jamie says it's politics. When we come back,

her proposal for bringing together the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. On today's episode, repair, repurpose, reimagined. And we were just hearing from Jamie Beard, who described herself as a geothermal instigator. The thing I love about geothermal is it's clean and renewable in that it's this naturally occurring

energy source that is ubiquitous, near limitless. Jamie believes that we are on the cusp of turning geothermal energy into a massive new source of alternative power. So how do we do that? It brings me to my proposition. Here she is again on the TED stage. To scale geothermal, we need to efficiently, effectively, and safely drill below the surface over and over and over and over again. And who does that now? The oil and gas industry does that now. The oil and gas industry is a global, specialized workforce of millions,

backed by almost 200 years of breakthrough technological innovation, all aimed at producing energy, from deep underground. You flip the switch, and you have green drilling. And oil and gas keeps its current business model, the business model that keeps them firmly rooted in hydrocarbons now. They're doing what they know how to do, which is exploring for, drilling for, and producing a subsurface energy asset.

So, Jamie, you went from being an activist who was against the fossil fuel industry to working with that industry and trying to get it to transition into geothermal. Why? That doesn't sound like a natural progression to make. I would have agreed with you when I was 18, 19, early 20s vehemently. In fact, I started my career working in renewables like solar and wind. One thing that I did realize, though, over the past years is that, you know, if we want to go, and there is an enormous amount of climate urgency.

We literally have a Ferrari in the driveway. You've got millions of highly skilled workers. You've got a ton of relevant technologies and 100 years of know-how. You have an existing global footprint with spot-on core competencies in this area. Why not use that? That is a gigantic resource. So when you talk to people who are in the oil and gas industry and you propose to them this idea of turning their teams and resources into geothermal power plants, what's their response? So one of the first individuals that I contacted was a former chief scientist at Shell named Lance Cook.

And he was skeptical at first and we had a lot of fights. And over a period of months, he came around and decided that he was excited enough about geothermal and the ability to reduce costs using oil and gas technologies and methodologies that he went and started a company. But now there are more than 25 teams that I'm working with now, all pursuing different concepts and types of projects in geothermal. So I need to ask, fracking for fossil fuels is very difficult. A lot has been reported on the pollution that fracking rock for oil and gas can cause. My understanding is that fracking for geothermal would be far less dangerous. But do you think people are ever really going to believe that? If there is something that I lose sleep over, it's that.

I mean, this is something that, technologically speaking, I'm not worried. Like, that is going to be solved fast. What I'm worried about here is the human resources problem. And it's a big one, right? How do you deal with the fact that we're talking about essentially here green fracking, right? Is green fracking going to be a thing? And will environmental groups and climate activists, of which I'm one, you know, except. But geothermal is just too awesome to become this like political football.

It's a cause that like every single one of us could get behind. But we need to make sure that we're doing the work in, you know, know, inclusion of voices, talking to one another, compromising. And that's hard. But why would we go re, why would we start from scratch and rebuild industries, you know, or start, you know, start from scratch and build new industries that are going to take us 100 years to power of the earth that we don't have when we've already got one, that we can just pivot toward geothermal. That's Jamie Beard. She's the founder of the nonprofit Project Interspace.

You can find her full talk at ted.com. So on this episode, we've talked about reimagining what we make things with. We've heard about why we should repair our products and how we could repurpose oil drilling technology to tap into geothermal power. But what about what we eat? Can we remake what goes on our plates? Yeah, so I've been working. with cows for about 20 years or so.

This is biologist Hermius Kaprab. Growing up in Eritrea, Hermia saw how important milk and meat were to the nutrition of his family and his community. The majority of people in the world live in low-income countries where the main source of nutrition, the good nutrition, is animal source food. I wanted to have ample opportunity for people

to drink milk and to eat meat and basically lead a healthy life. That's what I wanted to do and that's what I studied biology and agriculture. I've had a relationship with cows for quite a long time. Now, Armius is a professor at UC Davis where he studies cows, specifically a problem with cows. They're burps. Those burps are full of methane, one of the greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change. In fact, cows account for 4% of U.S. greenhouse greenhouse. gas emissions every year. I always thought that cows were particularly flatulent. Is this true?

It is not. Oh. So most of the gas is formed in their stomach, in their gut, particularly in the first chamber, and so they bitch it out. By some estimates, between 95 to 97 percent of the methane comes from the front end of the cow. So the back end of the cow is really, really, maybe 3% or less. So for the past several years, Hermias and his team have been experimenting with how changing a cow's diet could safely and quickly

lower the amount of methane in its belches. Here's Hermia's Kabraab on the TED stage. So how can you reduce this methane burps? My colleagues and I may have found a solution. Seweed. Let me explain. A couple of years ago, an article was published that showed almost complete elimination of methane

when seaweed was added to chopped grass in the lab. Great. But as an agricultural researcher, I know lots of additives work well in the lab, but not in real animals. But there was something different about seaweed in the way in which it reduced methane. Some seaweed contain ingredients

that directly inhibit microbes in the cow's gut from forming methane without interfering with food digestion. So we thought we should test this in live animals. This was the first ever experiment in dairy cattle, and we had no idea how much to give them. Okay, so your team starts mixing in just a little bit of seaweed into the cow's regular feed. And what did the cows think?

Like, did they like it? Well, the ones that we gave too much, they did not eat as much as we would like them to do it. Okay. Because, you know, just like cows are very picky eaters. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. They sort their feed.

They will find the bits and pieces that they like. It's like my dog. All right. So they didn't get used to it right away. But so we gave them for about three weeks and then we switched them around and then another three weeks and then we switched them around and that was it. And all the while, though, you're collecting their burps. That's not a sentence I thought I would ever say, Hermias. How do you do that?

The way we do it is we have a device called Green Feed, and what it does is it will entice them to come to this machine where they stick their head into this machine, and they feed from that machine. So as soon as they come in, the Green Feed Machine will drop some, what we call cow cookie. So they just eat this cow cookie, as they are eating, they will be breathing into this machine,

and the machine will take out their breath and then right away analyze and they are burping how much methane, how much carbon dioxide, how much hydrogen there is, and then automatically sense that information wirelessly. And the cows love it. I mean, you would see them lining up to try to get into this machine. Okay, great.

So you have very willing participants in your study. And what was your hypothesis? What did you sort of hope you would see? What I was hoping was that we see 10, 20, 30% at most reduction in emissions. That would make me very, very happy. But then when we start doing this and I started getting this report from my graduate student that the reduction was quite high, I couldn't believe it. In that first experiment, the emissions were reduced by up to 6%.

67%. And I thought at first, the occupant must have malfunctioned, but it was real. But we were left with more questions than answers. Would the microbes in the gut get used to it and start producing methane over time? Would the seaweed be stable over a long period of time in storage?

Would the taste be affected and the cows turn up their noses? Or would the seaweed affect the cow's health or milk production. So we teamed up again to conduct another trial. Over a five-months period, we saw the seaweed reduce emissions by over 80%. Our colleagues in Australia, they saw up to 98% reduction in a similar trial.

That kind of reduction is simply staggering. We have also seen an improvement in bulking up of the beef cattle with no adverse health effects. So it's a win for the environment, it's a win for the farmers and consumers. A panel of 112 people got to taste steak made from the steers, offered seaweed and control. And they did not detect any difference. We also did a nutritional quality of the meat, and we found no difference between animals that were offered seaweed and the control.

Okay, so you do your first study with cows. It's highly successful. You do another study. It's even more successful, 80% methane reduction, plus it doesn't seem to affect the cow's health. It makes them fat, healthy, and still delicious. What does that make you want to do? I assume this is the researcher's dream, right, to prove that something works. but how do you go from having the solution to actually implementing the solution?

What do you do with this knowledge? Yeah, that's a very good question. So not too long ago, the California Department of Food and Agriculture has given their approval that it be generally recognized as safe. So a certain formulation can now be sold in California as well. So it's moving in the right direction. the ultimate dream is then to get it into farmers' hands and be able to use it as soon as possible. And what I'm thinking is that, you know, maybe there's a premium product with low-emission milk or meat as well. So maybe I would go to the grocery store and I'd say, you know what, I'll pay the extra 25 cents to get the reduced methane milk.

Absolutely, yes. We've done that with energy. I mean, a number of states, they have this initiative where you pay a little bit more. you get a renewable source of energy instead of from fossil fuel. The same thing could apply for here as well. You know, I have to ask, I'm sure there are people listening. Maybe they're vegetarian. Or like me, who are trying to eat less meat and maybe thinking like, well, there's a very

easy solution to this problem with cows and methane. Just don't eat them. Don't drink milk. Just don't have as many cows, period. What do you think of that response? Yeah, so I think in a lot of high-income countries, you may be able to get the nutrients and the micronutrons that people need to lead a healthy life. But most people don't live in high-income countries. And the other issue is that, you know, there is this issue of hidden hunger.

Wait, what is that? What is hidden hunger? You have enough calories and maybe even protein, but you don't have the trace minerals that their body needs to have a properly function. system. So particularly for children, children below five years of age, and what you see is the stanting levels are very much correlated with the animal source food consumption. In countries that have high consumption of animal source food, the stenting levels are much, much lower. In countries that do not, for example, in Sudan and India and others, the stanting levels of children under five years of age has over 40%. So the solution is, you know, for example, in Sudan, in India and others, the stanting levels of food, for children under five years of age,

is to have those animals' foods in a way that is enough to be able to live a normal life. So I think what we can do in the West or in high-income countries is consume animals' food according to our requirements. If you are over-consuming, then yes, you have to reduce the intake. Okay, so reduce the intake, meaning like if we live somewhere where nutritious food is easy to get, we still need to cut back on eating meat. But you're also saying that we need to accept the reality that we need to feed everyone in the world. That's absolutely right, yes. So, Hermias, do you believe that if we radically rethink the ways we've been doing agriculture for years,

in this case the way we've been feeding livestock, that we've got at least one solution to help stop global warming? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, who would have thought that we are talking about the climate-neutral livestock industry? I mean, that's the kind of goal that we need to have. And, you know, use it in a complete, instead of saying, stop eating meat, stop doing this, stop doing that, we have to be realistic of what needs to happen. And reality is that, you know, people are not going to stop eating meat. And so let's figure out a way in which we can help people and help the environment at the same time. Climate change is happening and it's not waiting for anybody.

We have the solution. We need to implement it because we will see the results. fairly quickly. Methane, in 12 years of time, the reduction that you have now would actually translate into even cooling of the climate. We will see that result. I believe that we can reach into a climate-neutral situation where what we eat is actually does not have an impact on the warming of the climate. That was Ermius Cabraab, a professor and associate dean at the University of California, Davis. You can see his full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week, repair, repurpose, re-imagine.

This episode was produced by Fiona Guren, Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, and Ramel Wood. It was edited by Katie Simon, Rachel Faulkner, and me. Our TED radio production staff also includes Matthew Cloutier, Diba Motisham, and Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.