The futuristic cargo ship made of wood
bbc.com
bbc.com
I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.
Far too many people are locked into the consumerism cycle, that we must improve the things we consume and consume more of them, because "more good" must be the same as "better overall", right?
Sadly, the best solution is for corporations to make more robust, high-quality, long-lasting, expensive, products.
i.e. Make less money, and do better work.
So...who's first at bat?
I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning.
But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
Similarly, suggesting that there are situations where the cost function is both necessary and has such a high constant overhead that you're better off with a non-market system is a non-starter half of the time.
Let's say you've inherited a small fortune that includes a mansion. The mansion's upkeep is slowly eating away the fortune. What do you do? You can rationally make some scenarios how to deal with it. Maybe you sell it. Maybe you rent it out. Maybe you invest in it and start a hotel.
It doesn't really matter which industry sector does the improvements as long as the total improves. Doing it with free market ensures that they happen where they are cheapest.
Might be technically tricky to accomplish in a world where most manufacturing happens overseas, though.
Unfortunately we’ll also have to deal with IKEA style tactics of converting a single company into a complex web of disposable sub companies in order to dodge their tax or regulatory obligations.
Regarding your second point, don't we already have to do the latter anyway?
Now, I say this, owning and still using a Toastmaster Toaster which is older than myself; all my dinnerware and glassware is older than most people along with desk lamps now using LEDs but were produced in the 30s; but the point is people don't put any effort into taking care of items because for many they have reached the point of disposable.
Then when it comes to tech its not reliability but marketing has become so good people are quite willing to toss perfectly working items for the latest and greatest. Hell people do this with cars and anecdotally from a coworkers spouse who works in a home renovation company they toss perfectly good large appliances too.
I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to people without a pot to piss in, making things last waaaaaayyyy beyond their "sell by" date.
If I remember, Apple recently took a hit on their iPhone bottom line, because people are no longer getting a new phone every year.
Oh they do, they really do. I worked at a recycling factory in the UK, the amount of household appliances, TVs, computers and computer parts, laptops, phones that people toss away is staggering.
Many are in absolutely perfect working condition! Like, a 48" Samsung TV and a 52 inch 4K Sony TV would come in, we'd test them, nothing wrong with them. I can only assume someone moved house and just left everything, or they upgraded to bigger TVs.
Not even going to mention the washers, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, about a quarter of them would be in good working condition. Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.
It was against company policy, but employees would take them home, either for a low price (got myself a nice Neff microwave oven and a Bosch vacuum for £10 each... retail price in the hundreds) or just by being friends with a supervisor...
I'm actually glad about that, because otherwise they'd be loaded into containers and sent to Asia or Africa somewhere. Absolutely ridiculous.
When I first moved in my house I didn't have a job, so I bought a lot of cheap appliances. Most of them still work, and I expect them to keep on working with almost no maintenance for years to come. However, they have some serious downsides: they are energy inefficient, they make a lot of noise, and they do not necessarily fit my future needs.
For example, now that I have a partner, my fridge is a bit small. And instead of running the washer once every two weeks, we're running it two or more times a week. Every time I run the washer, the floor the washer is on becomes basically unlivable for about half an hour or so due to loud noise of the centrifuge.
I do not want to buy new stuff, particularly because the old stuff "still works". And getting rid of my old stuff in a nice way is not easy either: Because they have wear and tear, goodwill and second-hand shops are not overly enthusiastic about taking them from me. Unless I can find someone to take something over (for free!), I am left with moving it to the recycling place because I do not have any storage space in my house.
The cheaper models are the ones that go straight to scrap, because they're unfixable - poor electronics with no water protection, low quality bearings and drum spiders that fail catastrophically (and the drums are welded instead of using bolts = unfixable) and counterweights that simply crumble.
I get it when they break and there's no other choice but to chuck them. But throwing away good appliances is just unthinkable for me. I use them all until they fail, fix them and use them some more, until they're unfixable :D
Worst case, I'd try to sell them for cheap or give them to someone who needs them, there's plenty of people in every country.
The efficiency of washers and dishwashers has been the same for about two decades now. There's simply nothing that can be improved inside.
Dryers have had a decent improvement with heat pumps, other than that, it's the same design that's been around for decades.
The reason it matters lies with a desk lamp is because you probably aren’t still running incandescent bulbs in it.
They would regularly "crush" out-of-date equipment (like stuff that had passed its market prime, so the sales and marketing folks no longer needed it). By "crush," it meant taking the equipment to an old quarry, and smashing it with a sledgehammer.
Apparently, this was necessary for a tax write-off.
It was painful as hell, as most of the equipment was perfectly fine. It included things like bodies and lenses, still worth thousands.
The environment would likely be in worse shape if we were all still using CRT monitors, plasma TVs, old A/C units, incandescent lightbulbs, cars from the 70s.
Hm, seems to contradict this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Here I see energy consumption going straight up.
It leaves me wondering if the book (which I admittedly won't be reading; my existing reading list is already long enough) ends up functioning a bit like that satirical paper on smoking and long distance running from 10 years back. In it, the authors "convincingly" argued that marathon runners should all be smokers. The overall structure was a sort of numeric Gish Gallop: the paper focused on a constellation of individual measurements that are plausibly associated with both smoking and long distance running performance, while carefully steering clear of any measurement of smokers' actual athletic performance.
Building 120 year old ship designs without the aid of modern construction techniques is cool, but it's not going to change the shipping industry.
The wood framing is likely just the most accessible way to build a technology demonstration model.
Like this?
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/
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After some quick googling:
gliders travel 0.5-1.5 knots
large cargo ships max at 25 knots. downward trend to save fuel, 20 knots is becoming norm. future norm might be as low as 12 knots.
duration of trips between China and USA have been 2 - 4 weeks. so will lengthen to 4 - 8 weeks.
so... given 7947 nautical miles (China to USA), a glider would take 11 months. Hmmm.
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For future, imagine 12 knots satisfies majority of tasks. There may be payloads where 2 months transit may be acceptable. Is there some combo of sail, foil, rotor, glider, coasting that could sustain 6 knots? Would much smaller, more frequent cargo ships be acceptable.
One final notion: My original imagined use case for wave gliders is ocean cleanup. Various kinds of plastic sifting barges, forever at sea. Maybe bundle the plastic and drop it into a trench. Maybe have some kind of solar powered bio reactor that uses plastic as fuel. Maybe other bigger ships gathering the bails of plastic, like land based garbage trucks ply our neighborhoods.
Or maybe that was sarcasm? Better avoided in this forum.
Green steel, concrete or traffic from hydrogen is a far-out pipedream for quite some time.
Large wood based military navies caused large deforestation in the past.
Wood works great for constructing large buildings, but ships are not like buildings: unlike them, they are subject to large dynamic stresses. That’s why before widespread structural steel in 19th century, wooden ships were tiny. Mayflower was less than 30 meters long. They didn’t build it larger because they lacked lumber, they did it because previous attempts at larger ships tended to break apart at sea.
We are so far away from doing anything meaningful about climate change that any projects, including solar, we are pushing for today are meaningless.
Enjoy the 30 good years left where industrial civilization can be stably sustained and then be prepared for the bumpy ride to a world of 500 million over the next century or two.
I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK.
We won't solve climate change without dramatically changing our patterns of consumption. Trying to apply technical fixes is repeating the same patterns of thought that got us here in the first place.
I'm having a very hard time believing that. In Czechia there are companies building entire towns (for rent), and these are still small compared to some of the new industrial areas, surely that can't be less concrete than a nuclear power plant
The only solution we have, and I do mean the only solution is nuclear fusion. I understand why no one wants to throw money at this problem... cheap, unlimited power is nothing that old people running the world want, because they can't inflate their bank accounts by making that a reality, but we don't have a choice.
If we don't crack fusion, we're done as a species.
The actual problem is nobody knows how to make a fusion reactor work.
We can't crack fusion because we can't get all the first-world nations to throw 1% GDP at it. I guarantee you, if we threw $250 billion a year at fusion, we'd have it in 10 years.
Well that's ridiculous. Using the technology we have right now we could increase provision of renewables and reduce consumption and be completely fine as a species.
Manufacturing and later decommissioning the storage and solars is not nice to the nature too. I wonder if the oceans of the 22nd century will be full of plastics, or... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/solar-panel...
And while trash is indeed a problem, I don't think stopping global warming in exchange for more trash would count as no improvement at all.
I also don't think we should aim to generate the same amount of energy. We want more and better manufacturing, and if that should be done cleanly, it needs a lot of electricity, way more than the "renewables" could ever bring.
Since primary energy includes heat and transportation, both of which can be done much more efficient with electricity (e.g. a car is maybe 30% efficient, and a heat pump gets you 2-5J of heat per Joule of electricity) you can very conservatively cut that in half. I'm reasonably sure that it also includes power plant inefficiencies (another 40%?) but let's not account for those.
That gets you down to about 4%. Wind power is more efficient per m^2 than solar in Germany, and a lot can be produced offshore. That gets you down to the 2-3% range. And of course a lot of solar can be installed on rooftops and such where it doesn't consume any additional land at all.
We need fusion to bootstrap getting off this planet. We need fusion to provide the power to start terraforming either Mars or Venus. Either planet will require obscene power loads to terraform and will likely be 500-1000 year endeavors.
We not only have to get off this planet to survive as a species, we have to get out of this solar system.
We don't do that without extremely potent power sources that use abundant, cheap fuel.
We were told the same thing in the 60s. It didn't turn out to be true then, it won't turn out to be true now.
No one. No. One. Has made accurate predictions about long-term climate change effects so far. And I imagine 40 years from now, when I'm 80, I'll be hearing about some new climate disaster that will befall us.
This is Malthusianism all over again.
Technology allowed us to progress past Malthus, it'll allow us to progress past climate change... but only if its cheap, plentiful, usable 24/7, and shared with the world.
All things fusion could achieve.
Nuclear fusion is most definitely not an option, because it can't be built in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. Fission perhaps, but I'm skeptical there too. I don't believe we have the capacity to manufacture enough reactors quickly enough to rely solely on fission.
Best of luck to the Ceiba/sailcargo team though! The project -> https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel
Also, this is a prototype and effectively a research platform. And if you are going to build with wood, there are not many contemporary designs floating around. Starting with a proven design may be a good idea.
The ships and crews are expensive. Any time they aren't moving they aren't making money. Isn't the whole point of shipping containers that you can buffer them up and then rapidly load them onto a ship once it arrives?
...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades.
I do wonder if long-intended-lifespan wood materials, like the cross-laminated timber used to build this wooden skyscraper (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revoluti...) could consume enough volume to make a meaningful dent in the carbon balance for the near/mid term of the next decades/century.
Easy, shoot it into space! /s
For instance the lumber in a building might stay in use for 100 years. Even if we aim for sustainability instead of our exponential growth pyramid schemes, every wooden structure ties up that carbon for its life span, after which another will be built. If the number of buildings we needs declines, we can plant more forests in the space we are no longer using.
I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with.
I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
> The design of the Ceiba Line vessels boasts two cargo hatches to access the holds, which can be used simultaneously. This increases flexibility and storage options when loading and unloading cargo.
Construction [2] of the first ship started January 2019 in Costa Rica and is ongoing. The company strategy is ethical shipping that removes modern container ships from the supply chain. I suspect that this ship/company will be part of the marketing message for Fair Trade coffee and other organic/sustainable products from the tropics.
The story [3] is not about automation, engineering, or productivity; it is about pre-industrial purity.
[1] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel
I've spent a good deal of time gazing out at the docks at the Port of Seattle. There are train cars and last-mile tractor-trailers that are designed to have a cargo container bolted directly to them. Without the containers, you have to repack the cargo half a dozen times:
- factory to truck/train
- truck to docks
- docks to ship
- ship to docks
- docks to truck/train
- truck to warehouse/distribution center
With the shipping containers you have:
- warehouse to container
- container to warehouse/distribution center
The effort needed to move the container instead of the contents is a couple orders of magnitude less, which is the whole point of the containers.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...
These things aren't always as obvious as "cutting down trees is bad", if it's better than the alternatives and we can offset the impact then its an improvement right?