Fishfood For Thought

In a previous post, I told you about my good fortune in meeting a guy I call Fish, who is now my neighbor. Along with solving all my logistical problems in one fell swoop, he has quickly become a good friend and mentor.
 
I don’t directly work with Fish, but we swim and eat together, so have plenty of time to talk. A lot of it revolves around the idea of people finding paths where they can achieve their goals (for production, profit, sanitation, etc.) while minimizing or eliminating harmful environmental impact. There are many names for the various forms of this, call it what you will: Recent buzzwords include “green building” and “sustainable development”; in my home state the slogan goes - “Don’t mess with Texas”; Growing up, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” became popular; Mufasa’s ghost warns young Simba to rejoin “The Circle of Life”. You get my drift. They are all talking about the same thing - in everything we do and create, there is a right way, and a wrong way. Actually, I should say: there is one optimal solution amongst many (mostly bad) options. People will go after what they need and want. We need/want food, stuff, energy for our stuff, and happiness. So we need agriculture, factories, power plants, and for the Mavericks to win a championship. The last one is easy (Free Roddy B!), but the others require some intelligence. Fortunately we are considered “intelligent life forms” - supposedly even more so than dolphins and octopi! Let me give you some concrete examples that come from Fish’s experiences, after I tell you why I respect the guy so darn much.


1.) He’s smart – after studying Civil Engineering in college, he applied for a special division of the Air Force along with 50,000 other young men and ranked 9^th. His mother crushed his dreams by forbidding him from going, and he obeyed.

2.) We share the same dream (he is much further along): to work for the benefit of others and the environment. Originally he studied Civil Engineering so he could design and build things for man that would last. Seeing how destructive projects like China’s Three Gorges Dam could be, he decided anything he built would be done with foresight, in harmony with nature. So he returned for grad school to study Environmental Engineering under a very famous professor, and has since worked for some of the country’s best companies. Wanting to be able to do it all, he has left each job when he felt he learned all he could. He’s worked with bridges, buildings, factories, clean water plants, wastewater treatment centers, etc. and he is now the go-to freelance engineer in all of Hualien, involved in several projects.

Two 7/11's, facing each other!

3.) He has sacrificed a lot to become a family man. One thing he gave up (so his children would get a better education in a different city) was the 7Eleven he ran. “Say-vens” as people call them here in Taiwan, are far different from the convenience stores back home. Here they form a network of institutions where people go for banking needs, paying bills, printing images, faxing, ordering taxis, sending and receiving packages, setting up cell-phone plans, ticketing, bike rentals, hot breakfasts and dinners, tasty Taiwan Beer, and much more… It is a difficult job, but when Fish implemented his ideas and ran it well, it was a 24-hour money making machine that netted him more than double what he makes now as a top engineer.

4.) He has/likes ideas and interesting projects. Discussing them keeps my time here from ever being dull.

Chinese Sugar Factory
Fish was approached by a factory in China that processed sugar cane to produce sugar. Their problem was that the process left them with much waste plant matter, and disposing of it was very expensive. Also they were emitting CO₂ and a lot of heat waste.

So he first designed for them a fertilizer plant. Basically, by adding a certain type of bacteria into the fibrous, nutrient rich plant matter, all the waste could be converted into a very effective organic fertilizer. This was then packaged and sold to local farmers. Many of these were the farmers that grow sugar cane, and their plants would end up back at the factory, having grown better and faster with the fertilizer. Fish also designed for them a system that grew and harvested algae – another product that could be sold. Algae is used in medicines, foods, and combating global warming. [The production of biofuels from algae does not reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), because any CO₂ taken out of the atmosphere by the algae is returned when the biofuels are burned. They do however eliminate the introduction of new CO₂ by displacing fossil hydrocarbon fuels that would have otherwise been used]. The algae is grown in water, absorbing CO₂ and providing oxygen (mmm… oxygen). The wet algae produced need to be dried before being packaged and sold. To achieve this, that hot air that was being wasted before is sent through beds of piping, upon which the wet algae are dried. Every metric ton of CO₂ reduced is then sold as a unit in the emissions trading market.

By carefully analyzing the problem and applying some clever techniques, Fish helped the company to:

1. Cease spending money on waste disposal
2. Create healthy cycles by implementing processes that use what was once considered waste
3. Generate three new profitable products (fertilizer, algae, and units of CO₂)
4. Improve public image, set a good example for others

An elegant solution, wouldn’t you say?

Diapers vs. Desertification
Desertification is a problem Fish has been thinking about lately, and he has a good idea in the works. Desertification is exactly what it sounds like: in many parts of the world, healthy land has been degraded to the point of eventually becoming desert. Surely you remember learning about the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930’s! I saw desertification firsthand in Inner Mongolia a couple years ago. Much of what is produced on the grasslands goes to feeding the rest of China, and they are severely stressed and overgrazed. The people depend on the land and their animals, but the government has banned the raising of sheep, to allow time for the grasses to grow back. We still saw many people with giant herds of sheep… You want to assist the grass in growing rather than wait years for nature to heal itself. But there is too much land to cover, and you can’t go around watering everything manually. So how do you fix this problem?

Diapers. (Maybe.) Fish was thinking about it one day and thought of his kids and changing diapers - about how diapers can hold nearly a quart of liquid without spilling a drop. This is accomplished using a special ingredient called sodium polyacryalte, a.k.a. “water lock”. So Fish found an organic, biodegradable solution that does something similar, and when added to a cup of water, he found that it formed a semi-solid, and evaporation was slowed nearly to a halt. His idea is to drop a few seeds in this stuff, and scatter it around the land. The seeds would be kept in that state ready to plant, and you could just sit back and rely on the sky, or perform a rain dance. Whenever it rains, it usually isn’t much, but this time the water would release the seeds by diluting the solution, which would provide some additional moisture needed for the seeds to plant and sprout. An added bonus is that no chemicals would be required.

This is just a pet project, mostly theoretical, and much more testing is required. I wonder if the extra water might cause more erosion. Whether it will work or not, I won’t pretend to know. But what I picked up was that a lot of times, solving a problem doesn’t require inventing anything new - the important things to have are creativity, a wide breadth of experiences to draw on, and a strong network; these are what really allow for unique ideas to surface. I believe these could be more important than having deep knowledge or specialization, since now anyone can access expert material with an internet connection. Too narrow a focus would reduce time and opportunities for acquiring a range of experiences, and that could lead to being limited to thinking only in the context of the one field, reducing the chances for discovering the unique idea that might lead you down that optimal path. If this is the case, then maybe our beloved internet has changed the entire game these past couple of decades, and the current model of highly specialized training is not the best way. Perhaps we should opt for a more diverse course of study, or job training. Then again, we might end up with many Jacks of all trades, and masters of none…