The Future Is Green: Joshua Pearce Of Western University On Their Top Strategies for a Cleaner Planet
An Interview With Wanda Malhotra
Following this same train of thought you will want to replace your gasoline vehicles with e-bikes or electric vehicles (EVs). If you can arrange to work from home or near your home, you might be able to get away with an e-bike and only borrow a vehicle or using a taxi/Uber depending on the type of city you live in. If you still need a car EVs are already more economic than fossil-fuel powered vehicles. This will expand the potential investment you can make for your home or business into solar and largely eliminate most of your emissions.
As we face an unprecedented environmental crisis, the need for sustainable solutions has never been more urgent. This series seeks to spotlight the innovative minds and passionate advocates who are leading the charge in environmental conservation and sustainable practices. We aim to explore the most effective strategies, breakthrough technologies, and transformative policies that are shaping a more sustainable future for our planet. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Professor Joshua Pearce.
Joshua Pearce is the Thompson Chair in Innovation where he holds appointments at Ivey Business School and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada. He runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) lab, which freely shares all of their work with open source licenses. Anyone can download any of their green technical solutions from solar to recycling including his latest book To Catch the Sun, an open source book of inspiring stories of communities coming together to harness their own solar energy, and how you can do it too!
Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
Sure. I earned my PhD in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. Then I developed the first Sustainability program in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and helped develop the Collaborative Applied Sustainability graduate engineering program while at Queen’s University in Canada. Then I moved back to the U.S. and became the first endowed Witte Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Michigan Tech. At this point I really learned the power that an open source technology development paradigm provided and I inaugurated and was the faculty advisor for the Michigan Tech Open Source Hardware Enterprise and ran the Open Sustainability Technology Research Group. As my research took off using open source principles I won a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair and a visiting professor of Photovoltaics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University as well as a visiting Professor Équipe de Recherche sur les Processus Innovatifs at the Université de Lorraine, France. Then I moved to Canada to join Western University and continue to bring open source innovation acceleration to both engineering and the business community.
Can you share with us the most interesting story from your career? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Several years ago, when most additive manufacturing was still dominated by large multi-national companies and the least expensive metal 3D printer you could buy was over half a million dollars (and you needed to buy a half million dollar blast room to hold it in) my team made a $1200 metal printer you could set up in your garage. It was an upside-down delta robot based on open source plans with a moving substrate that used a cheap MIG welder as a stationary print head. It worked the very first time and we were pretty excited to push the technology further. I contacted some welding companies about sponsoring us because this would mean a massive new potential market for them. We set up a meeting and a giant firm brought a dozen or so senior engineers on a conference call with us to talk about it. We had no welding experience and no metal 3D printing experience other than what we had just done. The consensus from all of the professionals in the room with hundreds of years of collective experience was what we were proposing was impossible…but I knew it was possible as we had already done it! Now many have followed our lead and there are lots of companies working with this approach to additive manufacturing.
The takeaways are the risks of succumbing to professional hubris. Simply because something has not happened yet, does not make it impossible. Nor do the best solutions automatically come from those that have the most experience. We annihilated the cost of metal 3D printing by automating a welder and no one on our team could even weld. We were able to do this by standing on the shoulders of giants as it were — by harnessing free tools from the open source community. Many times, innovation can be drawn from the open source collaborations to push technology much faster than is possible in the standard model to do the ‘impossible’.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Three character traits that I think make a successful leader are hard work, persistence and what I will call ‘finishing’. When I was selecting an undergraduate major I chose physics because in my opinion it was the hardest and ended up double majoring in chemistry. I was not disappointed — it was hard. Often there were problems that were so difficult it took weeks to hammer through and I think having what appeared to be an endless rain of extremely challenging problems eventually provided me with a habit of persistence — hammering on a problem until it was solved. This leads to what I actually think is the most important trait — finishing. If you set up a goal and work towards it you need to get all the way to the end and finish. This last trait is largely what I attribute my group’s publishing record to — we publish so much specifically because we push projects all the way over the finish line — rather than either giving up or letting projects drag out.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that might help people?
We have a couple of very exciting projects on the go in the FAST lab, but probably the most sci-fiction-like project was funded by DARPA to develop a food source from plastic waste. We are very close to success and when we make it over the finish line it will be possible to take plastic and upcycle it into protein powder for food. This sounds impossible at first — but we have worked on each step and are in the final animal trial now. If successful you could literally eat your plastic water bottle. Here is how it works. First the plastic is mechanically shredded into little pieces. Then if the plastic is something like PET water bottle it is chemically deconstructed back into an oil. If the plastic is something like HDPE shampoo bottle it goes to pyrolysis and is cooked until it similarly turns into an oil. These oils are then put into an open source bioreactor we developed along with a consortia of microbes that we gathered from the lake that like to eat oil These microbes eat the oil and then we harvest them as a food stuff. So far everything looks promising. Here is the best part — the entire apparatus could fit on the back of a truck in a box made out of solar panels. The solar panels can power the whole process. Such boxes would be easy to send all over the world and I am hopeful that this process can directly help people both clean up plastic waste but also provide a source of resilient food.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. What pivotal moment led you to dedicate your career to sustainability, and how has that shaped your approach to environmental challenges?
In university I was sitting next to one of my friends who was a mathematics physics double major. We used to share tricks from the discipline we did not have in common. One day the professor was talking about applications of physics and my friend said something like “I want to work on problems with no applications — pure mathematics.” This struck me as somewhat wrong -he was super smart, and the world has so many problems so why not work on the biggest problem. I started to look at what the biggest problems were and how I could develop my skills to be the most helpful. I was doing something like an 80,000 hours analysis before that was an organization. My conclusion was that if we had a sustainable low-cost form of renewable energy it could be used to solve most of our problems. To me solar panels, that turn sunlight directly into electricity, seemed the most promising so that is what I did my PhD in — low-cost solar power. Since then, for the last twenty years or so I have been pushing hard to make solar economic — and I am happy to report (with the help of a lot of other people) it is. Solar electricity is now generally the lowest-cost form of electricity.
Could you describe a groundbreaking project or initiative you’ve been involved in that significantly contributed to sustainability?
The biggest project I have a part of trying to make solar power economically competitive with the highly-subsidized fossil fuel industry. During my thesis we made solar cells cheaper than glass, but that still was not enough. A few years later, with increased efficiency and efforts to cut manufacturing and balance of systems costs my lab was the first to show that the levelized cost of electricity of solar power had become lower than some areas of fossil fuel power in North America. This was a big deal that pushed solar to scale — now I am happy to report pretty much everyone would save money on their electric bills if they switched to solar.
How do you navigate the balance between economic growth and environmental preservation in your sustainability strategies?
In my case everything my group does is environmentally beneficial, and we have the life cycle analysis to prove it…and it makes money. A good example would be agrivoltaics — the purposeful colocation of solar panels and conventional agriculture. My research has shown that agrivoltaics easily beats either agriculture or a solar farm working independently both on the environmental impact as well as the profit. The solar arrays are designed to optimally shade the crops to get the most growth while creating a microclimate that conserves water. Thus, farmers can enjoy a higher yield on the crops and thus more economic growth while feeding more people on the same amount of land. Then on the other side the crops cool the solar panels, which helps them operate and a higher efficiency. For the same land that would normally just be used for farming you generate a lot of solar electricity, which has a high value. Put it all together and you extract an enormous amount of economic good from the land that would not be possible conventionally.
What emerging technologies or innovations do you believe hold the most promise for advancing sustainability and why?
We talked a bit about agrivoltaics already. I think that technology has enormous promise to completely eliminate fossil fuels. Consider if we just use Canada as an example — if we convert only 1% of the agricultural land in Canada to agrivoltaics we could eliminate all the fossil fuels that remain from providing electricity to the grid. If we add in another 1–2% we could electrify all of our heating and another 1–2% to electrify transportation. Overall, for less than 5% of the country’s agricultural land switching to agrivoltaics (to make more profit and more food) we could cut all fossil fuel related energy emissions.
One of the other areas I think has great potential to change our lives and push sustainability is the concept of DRAM or distributed recycling and additive manufacturing. The basic idea is recycling is generally a bust if we don’t make it economic for consumers. So, for example, less than 10% of all plastic made to date has been recycled. It has a low density and low value and is just very challenging to do in our current centralized material flow model. What if instead you could take your own waste and in your neighborhood or even your own house turn it into valuable products for yourself? Such a technology would close the loop on recycling and be excellent for the environment. That technology already exists. We developed a recyclebot that converts shredded waste plastic into 3D printing filament. Then with a low cost 3D printer you can use additive manufacturing to make high value products — everything from medical and scientific technologies to toys and games for your kids. Already millions of free open source designs exist you can download and print. Our work has already shown consumers are saving tens of millions of dollars doing this.
This reality points to the third area of innovation that I think is really going to help move global society towards sustainability — that is open source sharing. The reason that 3D printers dropped from ½ million dollars down to a few hundred dollars and are now readily accessible is the RepRap project. RepRap stands for self-replicating rapid prototyper — a 3D printer that can print its own parts. A professor in the UK open sourced the first one and then thousands of people from all over the world contributed to designs and improvements. When 3D printing technology went open source there was an enormous churn in the innovation because the licenses demanded that any improvements were shared back with the community. This in turn led to an explosion of companies offering continually lower cost and higher performance options. Today companies like Lulzbot in the US and Prusa in the EU actively use their own open source printers in their manufacturing lines to make more printers. They sell hundreds of thousands of them and their customers often share their designs for products you can print that has resulted in a vast free ecosystem of designs you can make at home. When you do this it cuts out the manufacturing waste, packaging and embodied energy of transportation of getting a product to you. If your house is solar powered — when you do your own local manufacturing it is pretty clear how we could get to a sustainable state.
Based on your research or experience, can you please share your “5 Top Strategies for a Cleaner Planet”?
1 . Generate electricity to meet your needs as close to where you need the power as possible. This is most easily done with rooftop solar photovoltaics that convert sunlight directly into electricity you can use in your home. Solar is already the lowest cost electricity source and if you have access to capital you will almost certainly earn a return on your investment by investing in solar for your home or business. My house and office at the university are all powered with solar. It is good for the environment and my wallet.
2 . Electrify as much of your energy needs as you can so you can earn an even higher ROI with your solar investment. When you think about buying solar you should think of it as a guaranteed 25-year investment that is inflation proof and provides after-tax income. You want to make that investment as large as possible. The way to do that is to first get rid of natural gas in your home and business. You can do this by replacing your furnace with a heat pump, your gas stove with an electric stove with an induction cooktop and an electric heat pump for water heating. Our work has already shown this is a money maker for the northern US and Ontario in Canada.
3 . Following this same train of thought you will want to replace your gasoline vehicles with e-bikes or electric vehicles (EVs). If you can arrange to work from home or near your home, you might be able to get away with an e-bike and only borrow a vehicle or using a taxi/Uber depending on the type of city you live in. If you still need a car EVs are already more economic than fossil-fuel powered vehicles. This will expand the potential investment you can make for your home or business into solar and largely eliminate most of your emissions.
4 . Manufacture as much as you can in-house. I first learned this lesson in my research laboratory. I run one of the most productive research labs globally and nearly all of our research tools we make ourselves. Although we are highly technically competent, many of the devices we use every day come from open source designs shared by others that we digitally replicated with 3D printers, PCB mills, laser cutters and milling machines. There are millions of free designs for most things you want and incredible savings/profit to be had by bringing manufacturing as close to you as possible. This has a bunch of environmental and economic advantages. As we learned during COVID being as self-reliant as possible absolutely helps with resilience whether we are talking about business sustainability or simply maintaining your family during a disaster.
5 . As you start to use distributed manufacturing techniques more you will notice that you are buying a lot of feedstock. To offset both the environmental and economic costs of purchasing these feedstocks you can start to develop your own waste into feedstocks. For example, 3D printing filament costs about $20/kg. You can make your own from commercial pellets for $5/kg or manufacturing them from waste for less than ten cents/kg. It is remarkably easy to manufacture something worth several hundred dollars for less than ten cents of waste plastic and solar electricity and the ROIs for doing this get into the silly range of over 1000%. As more and more of us continue to add to the free design repositories it only enhances the incredible potential for wealth for all of us to enjoy without wrecking the planet.
In your view, what are the key steps individuals, communities, and governments need to take to achieve a more sustainable future?
We really need to put more effort into allowing economics to work properly. Today, many companies succeed by transferring their costs onto the environment and global community. We also have a terrible habit of propping up failing industries like the fossil fuel industry.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Take a look at some of the dozens of repositories that are holding millions of open source designs — find something you like and take a try at distributed manufacturing for yourself. https://www.appropedia.org/Create,_Share,_and_Save_Money_Using_Open-Source_Projects
What is the best way for our readers to continue to follow your work online?
All of our work is posted on appropedia — https://www.appropedia.org/FAST
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.
About the Interviewer: Wanda Malhotra is a wellness entrepreneur, lifestyle journalist, and the CEO of Crunchy Mama Box, a mission-driven platform promoting conscious living. CMB empowers individuals with educational resources and vetted products to help them make informed choices. Passionate about social causes like environmental preservation and animal welfare, Wanda writes about clean beauty, wellness, nutrition, social impact and sustainability, simplifying wellness with curated resources. Join Wanda and the Crunchy Mama Box community in embracing a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle at CrunchyMamaBox.com.
