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BERLIN, Germany — Michael Braungart is in a hurry.
A former environmental activist who once scaled smokestacks to fight pollution for Greenpeace, the celebrity chemist has emerged over the past two decades as a dark horse in the race to find solutions for saving the planet.
Braungart wants to end the current drive for people to "reduce, reuse and recycle" goods in order to prompt the next industrial revolution. His core idea is for manufacturers and users to no longer "consume" raw materials that are turned into waste, but "borrow" them, a concept he calls cradle-to-cradle.
"It's really reinventing everything," he says.
But he's running out of time.
"We're losing our industrial base so fast in Europe that in the end we know what to do, but we cannot do it anymore," he says, talking as though he's trying to fit two hours of interview into a scheduled one-hour slot.
He points to a television set he helped develop for the Dutch electronics giant Philips. The first TV designed not to spew toxic fumes into your living room, it saved so much electricity the company "could have given it away for free, if you converted the energy savings," Braungart says.
Three months later, however, Philips sold its TV unit to a company in China.
With an unruly mop of sandy curls, wire-rimmed glasses and a rumpled denim blazer, Braungart looks like a Hollywood casting agent’s idea of a genius — Steve Jobs meets Dr. Who. Like a mad scientist turned gossip columnist, he peppers his nonstop riff with bizarre non-sequiturs and the names of luminaries who have embraced his ideas, from Brad Pitt and Steven Spielberg to Ford Motor Company scion Bill Ford and London Mayor Boris Johnson.
"I don't know your sexual preference," he begins, seemingly apropos of nothing, eventually coming around to comparing the goal of zero emissions to sadomasochism.
"I talked to Boris ... London wants to be climate neutral," he says. "How stupid! No tree is climate neutral. We want to be more stupid than a tree?"
"We think it's only organic when my own feces cannot go back [to the soil]?" he adds. "This is sick! This is completely perverse."
It's a heady mix of ideas. But there's substance, and progress, at its heart.
Working with U.S. architect William McDonough, Braungart aims to transform the world's economy through manufacturing processes that not only do no harm, but actually clean the air, replenish topsoil, and, like trees, turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.
It may sound like pie in the sky. But since first presenting the idea in his bestselling 2002 manifesto Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things, Braungart has proven the concept’s validity.
He's helped multinationals develop hundreds of products like Desso's EcoBase carpet tiles, designed for the backing to be easily removed and the fabric sent back to the yarn-maker for reuse, and Steelcase's Climatex compostable upholstery fabric, so green that the effluent flowing out of the mill was cleaner than the water coming in.
The best proof that cradle-to-cradle works, according to a recent Desso annual report, is that the company’s market share of commercial carpets in Europe rose from 15 percent to 27 percent in the period the changes were made, 2007 to 2013.
Still, change may not be coming fast enough.
Critics point out that the certification program Braungart and McDonnough started to push companies to adopt cradle-to-cradle manufacturing processes is woefully behind schedule: 353 certifications against a targeted 30,000.
In contrast, the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program, begun in 1994, covers more than 50,000 construction projects worldwide.
Meanwhile, as Braungart's experience with Philips suggests, globalization is driving manufacturers to low-cost countries — where environmental issues are only now beginning to gain prominence — far more rapidly.
Decades of research went into the development of non-toxic ink and compostable leather, for example, before the printing and tanning business pulled up stakes and migrated to China and India.
"It took us 18 years to have a leather which we can compost," Braungart says. "But in that period all the big tanneries closed down in Europe. Now, I can show you a leather sample which is amazingly nice, but we don't have anybody to use it."
His biggest obstacle may well be some of the world's most popular green ideas — in which his native Germany is an unquestioned leader.
Obsessively sorting their garbage and reusing bathwater since the 1970s, Germans have turned recycling into a religion. But that well-meaning, paper-or-plastic mentality has spawned huge industries predicated on the creation and incineration of waste.
Strange contradictions in so-called sustainability have resulted, Braungart says.
Among them, the construction of high-tech incinerators to dispose of magazines printed in China with ink made from toxic chemicals, and, more remarkably, the import of more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste to fuel those plants.
Citing Germany's ballyhooed energy transition or "Energiewende," Braungart says dramatic policy changes are needed to shift focus away from minimizing damage, which he says slows our inevitable destruction but also helps ensure it.
First up is encouraging innovation by targeting the elimination of waste incineration by 2030 through converting to the manufacture of products that can be returned to biological cycles.
"Just like socialism was never social, ecologism doesn't help the ecology," Braungart says about well-meaning but ultimately harmful recycling. "It just keeps us busy."
This article, by Jason Overdorf, originally appeared at GlobalPost.
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The trend in computing for decades has been packing more power into smaller spaces — your smartphone, after all, is leagues ahead of the network of computers that sent Apollo 11 to the moon and back. But the next wave of computers, for some dreamers, gets really, really small, down to the quantum level. A quantum computer, essentially, is a way to harness quantum mechanics to process information. Its fundamental unit is called the qubit, analogous to the bit in conventional computers.
What's it made of?
A bit in an ordinary computer records one of two states, which we usually think of as 0 or 1. In some of the earliest computers, a bit was recorded as either a hole or no hole, in a paper punch card or in a paper tape. As computers got more advanced, the ways to represent bits changed: You could translate a 0 or 1 from the "open" or "closed" position of an electrical relay, the magnetic polarity of a strip of film, the presence or absence of a tiny pit on a disc that is read by a laser, or two different levels of electric charge.
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A qubit, on the other hand, takes advantage of some of the quirky features of quantum mechanics. Since particles can exist in a superposition of states, a qubit is a mixture of both 0 and 1 at the same time. And if you could link qubits together, you could take advantage of quantum entanglement, also known as "spooky action at a distance," the ability of particles to instantaneously influence each other no matter how far apart they are.
What's the use?
So, what's the usefulness of all these odd features of quantum computing? Well, thanks to those quantum mechanical quirks, a quantum computer could crunch complicated calculations much quicker than the fastest computers today. Because the qubit exists in a superposition of one and zero, rather than one or the other, it can use ones, zeroes, and the superposition of both. By being able to encode multiple possibilities in its fundamental units, the quantum computer should be able to tackle problems beyond the reach of normal computers, like quickly calculating the factors (all the numbers that can be multiplied together to create another number — the factors of 12 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12) of very large numbers.
Calculating factors might not seem like a big deal — until you realize that factoring plays a huge role in encryption. Theoretically, a quantum computer could be the key to taking away the protections that are used to keep credit card numbers secret in online shopping or to create untraceable email addresses for whistleblowers.
"That is the 'killer app' in quantum computing: Stuff like factoring numbers, breaking code — basically being a big pain in the butt to the places with three letters…NSA, CIA, et cetera," says MIT mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd (who sparred with Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Edward Fredkin at the 2011 World Science Festival program "Rebooting the Cosmos" over whether any useful quantum computer could ever be made.)
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Just as quantum computers could allow for someone to easily bypass existing encryption methods, the technology could allow people to encrypt information in new and even more secure ways. And codes aren't the only use for quantum computers: We could use them to peer even deeper into the underlying fabric of reality.
"The bottom of the world is quantum mechanical — is digital," Lloyd says. "In my mind, the most important application of quantum computing is understanding the fundamentally digital nature of the universe."
Have we made one yet?
Scientists have already built some collections of qubits for use in experiments, but a lot of work remains to be done to make truly useful quantum computers. Researchers at IBM are making qubits from superconducting metal circuits, but are encountering high error rates. "Entanglement is necessary for quantum computing, but can also lead to errors when it occurs between the quantum computer and the environment (i.e. anything that is not the computer itself)," IBM researcher Jerry Chow wrote in a recent blog post. "Quantum effects disappear when the system entangles too strongly to the external world, which makes quantum states very fragile. Yet, there is a kind of tension, since the quantum computer must be coupled to the external world so the user can run programs on it and read the output from those programs."
Canadian company D-Wave Systems has already developed and sold quantum processors like the D-Wave Two, specifically designed for "quantum annealing," a way to find the absolute minimum of a certain mathematical function. A D-Wave processor has qubits hard-wired into a circuit to perform a certain type of task; they aren't general-purpose machines. But some scientists have cast doubt on whether D-Wave's processors really act like quantum computers, or whether any quantum effects they do exhibit actually help to speed up the calculations; in one test, the D-Wave Two crunched numbers 10 times faster than a regular computer, but could also go 100 times slower, according to Physics World.
Microsoft is trying its hand at building another kind of qubit called a "topological qubit," made by manipulating particles called non-Abelian anyons so the paths they take form a braid (a really good detailed explanation of the physics behind can be found at Quanta magazine). Theoretically, the topological qubit would be more immune to the errors of other qubits, but one major problem remains: Scientists have yet to conclusively detect a non-Abelian anyon.
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Even when the physics and engineering kinks are worked out, quantum computers probably won't be landing on your desk anytime soon. The superconductors that power them need to be kept very cold (usually in a container that "looks like a gigantic beer keg," according to Lloyd). But with the awe-inspiring power (theoretically) lurking in these quantum machines, it's understandable that so many scientists would throw their weight into this seemingly quixotic quest.
"When you start thinking about quantum computing, you realize that you yourself are some kind of clunky chemical analog computer," Microsoft's Michael Freedman told the MIT Tech Review. There's nothing more humbling — or, perhaps, weirdly invigorating — than that sentiment.
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