A talk I gave at Green Drinks: Bernelle Verster, 18 September 2011. It’s still a favourite.
Title:
Creating Community -what a bioprocess engineer is learning about life, tameness and our attempts at ‘sustainability’.
Bio:
Bernelle believes an integrated approach to education, waste management (a subsection of ‘sustainability’) and economic viability is achievable. As curator of TEDxCapeTown, she enjoys creating cooperative relationships between entrepreneurs, philosophers, creatives, academics and other beautiful people and exposing them to Ideas Worth Spreading. Together with public participation events like TEDx, she believes social entrepreneurship can be used to create positive change in the paradigms prevalent in society today.
Bernelle is for love of water. She is particularly interested in the resources-in-transition (otherwise known as waste) in ‘dirty’ water and is working hard to create ‘wastewater biorefineries’. She is currently doing her PhD at the Centre for Bioprocess Engineering Research (CeBER) at the University of Cape Town, rethinking the engineering industry with the help of Biomimicry. She is known as the Water Maverick. : approx 16 min (150words/min)
START
Firstly, thanks to Helene Smit, Candice Pelser and Justin Beswick for the discussions that are contained in this presentation. Specifically, Helene for the concept of ‘Beneath, Between and Beyond’ and Candice for the closing phrase. I also draw from practically all the presentations at TEDxCapeTown held in April this year. Opinions, misunderstandings and errors expressed are my own.
(numbers refers to clicks on prezi that can be accessed here: (16MB) http://prezi.com/jgqjjddzye2c/tame-is-not-sustainable/)
The big problem with the biological version of these products is that it is too expensive to produce at scale. So while it may be environmentally sustainable, economic sustainability is still poor. So my research is focused on producing it cheaply. The main costs in bioprocesses are the raw material, as well as the energy involved. This energy mainly goes in preparing the process: most of these processes occur in a sterile environment, and cleaning up afterwards. Other costs are purification and product formulation. Many engineering processes choose off-the-shelf ways of producing something, and only think about dealing with how to clean it up afterwards. Developing the process as a whole, with the units taking care of each other is still quite novel, but it’s happening.
I’m the type of person who wants it all, wants it all to be perfect, and want to invest the minimum amount of blood, sweat and tears to get it there. So I went looking for an abundant raw material that no one wants, and would preferably pay me to get rid of it. I found two things – glycerol waste from biodiesel production, and sewage.
Two examples:
- The Land Institute – Wes Jackson and Jon Piper has shown that they can get similar yields from ‘prairie crops’ – herbaceous, perennial seed bearing plants – than monocrops, (Biomimicry book by Janine Benyus, p 11- 25, roughly).
- Relevant to my research, the concept of Microbial Community Engineering, work done by Mark van Loosdrecht and Robbert Kleerebezem at TU Delft, the Netherlands. I first started thinking about going wild when I read about Biomimicry, and when I visited Mark’s group in June this year, I was sold. I’m going wild.
This granule you see here, measuring a bit less than 1 mm across, is the basis of Mark’s technology, called aerobic granular sludge, which I abbreviate into AGS, and if you see my facebook going on about Agnes, this is she. Sortof. I can carry on forever about this technology, and if you’re keen I’ll go on a bit after the talk.
I take two things from this:
- Much of what we know, scientifically, are based on conditions that are entirely irrelevant to nature. For environmental biotechnology, like bioremediation and wastewater treatment, this is important. Question everything.
- These bugs sound like humans. We don’t do so well on our own. It’s not natural. It’s fine when we’re handed everything on a plate. But those times are over, (and thank goodness, it was dull.)
I’ve cheated a little with the wild vs lab picture here, I couldn’t find a good picture of tame vs wild Bacillus. These are Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used in brewing beer, so here’s to you, SAB! [they sponsored the evening]
Apart from being tougher and more able to survive, the reason why I want wild Bacillus is that the PGA is found in these strands that bind the bacteria together, and they are less prevalent in the tame strains.
Not all wild Bacillus strains produce PGA, and the ones who do have noticeable presence, or even dominance in a stressed environment, like oil fields, very salty places like the salt lakes in Kenya and heavy metal contaminated rivers. This suggests that PGA fulfills an ecological function that gives these bacteria selective advantage. It is likely also to be a carbon and nitrogen storage compound too. This is important in the dynamic environment of wastewater biorefineries.
To this selective reactor system I am adding the concept of product recovery -designing the system to take the purification of the product into account from the beginning. We call this ‘wastewater biorefineries’. This bacterium already occurs in wastewater, and I will not modify it any way. In fact, I don’t even care if my bacterium survives. I want a bug in my reactor system that is happy producing PGA as dirty water flows by. I am engineering its environment so that it is happier than the other bugs, but not excluding their presence, because they have value too – specifically with regards to complete nutrient removal (to give a stable and robust reactor system).
The theme ‘Be Water My Friend’ – a quote from Bruce Lee – pulled water slightly out of context and drew in the qualities of water, especially with regards to entrepreneurship. A little bit of give and take. Never giving up, but going with the flow; being adaptable. In celebration of Water, TEDxCapeTown took its inspiration of technology, entertainment and design from water. Water is life. Life adapts and evolves, and Life creates conditions conducive to life. To have a successful business, lifestyle or philosophy, we need to create conditions conducive to our own efforts, without compromising those around us.
The event was a phenomenal success. This quote from Lise Pretorius, one of our speakers, sums it up for me: “New, fresh ideas from grassroots of society, tackling the biggest problems in society – technological or social. Everyone comes here to think about innovation – be it ideas, ways of thinking or physical things. It shows there a shift in the way people are thinking, [because] the traditional economic model no longer really applies anymore.”
15.
I want to end with another poem, or a part of it. It’s an excerpt from MILKWEED by James Wright. I printed it on my first set of business cards, many years ago. And, while this is not the end of my journey, I feel that, while I did not know then what attracted me to this poem, now I have come full circle. We are part of nature, it loves us. The time is ready to love ourselves and acknowledge that nature loves us too, if we’ll let it. We need to let go a little, go with the flow, embrace non-equilibrium, become a bit more wild, to become ‘sustainable’.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
16.end: big words TAME IS NOT SUSTAINABLE
thank you
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