Checkerspot x Autodesk: A Better Future for Snow Sports (and more)

In the summer of 2023, our field trip from the Salt Lake City ASM summer teacher camp was to WNDR / Checkerspot.

When the trip was initially described to me, I thought we were going to see how snowboards and skis are made. I'm not a winter sport guy, so I figured it could be interesting but not necessarily my scene.

When we got there, though, I found that WNDR - the winter sports equipment maker and retailer - wasn't the real business. The real business was Checkerspot, a materials company that was producing polymer raw materials from microalgae as a replacement for petroleum sourcing. 

That company needed some way to demonstrate the utility of their materials, so they found a consumer-focused industry with high margins and a strong environmental conscience among its consumers. In the Salt Lake City area, skiing and snowboarding made sense for them because the final products - the snowboards and skis themselves - are high users of polymers in their composite materials, and the people who buy tend to be willing to spend a little more to buy environmentally friendly products.

The tour was outstanding, and I highly recommend getting to see their process if you're ever out in Salt Lake City. You can see some of their facility in this next video.

Roads Can Be Recycled Forever, Why Don't More Cities Do It? | World Wide Waste | Business Insider

I toured an asphalt research lab when I helped lead the second year ASM camp at Rowan University a few years back. Before that I'll admit that I hadn't put much thought into the different compositions that make up asphalt roads or the research that went into 'perfecting' the recipes used in road building.

Today's video introduces us to Green Asphalt, a company that is taking asphalt removed from roads and processing that asphalt into a reusable product, preventing hundreds of thousands of tons of asphalt from landfills every year.

I think I wrote it a few weeks back, but man, we make a lot of waste.

Roads Can Be Recycled Forever, Why Don't More Cities Do It? | World Wide Waste | Business Insider

I wasn't initially excited to tour a research lab when I was helping out with our second year ASM teacher camp at Rowan University, but the research lab where they were working on different formulations of roadbed asphalt was surprisingly fascinating.

They went over the ingredients in modern asphalt and how they were adjusting the ingredients of the mixture to vary the performance in different climate conditions. It was a really interesting lab tour, easily the best of the three labs that we got to tour on that field trip.

Clearly there's a lot to learn about pavement, especially when I hear - from the above video - that asphalt roads can be recycled pretty much indefinitely with only minor additions along the way.

Least I Could Do: the Comic

Source: https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20211003

 Yup...good questions there, young Rayne.

Fractionating column videos

Last spring - when the schools all went quarantine from Covid - we were just beginning our polymer unit in material science. 

So we went looking for videos and demonstrations that would 'teach' what we would have covered in class.

Among the better videos were these explaining how a fractionating column works to separate the various hydrocarbons found in crude oil.

Green materials for a greener world: Athanassia Athanassiou at TEDxRoma

Ah, TED in Rome...discussions of pizza and gelato, gladiators and forums, Catholicism and plastics...

You know, plastics. The worst thing that we've done for our environment and that we keep using more of every day.

This video opens with an enumeration of the environmental horrors of plastics - volatile gas releases, effects on our hormones, increasing petroleum needs, oil spills and seeps, toxic discharges into the environment - and shifts to alternate options to our uses of polymers.

The speaker, Athanassia Athanassiou (seriously, that's what the title says), illustrates some of the polymer replacements or adaptations that her research group is working on to either modify polymers to actually help the environment or to replace the polymers with other materials.

The video is more a survey of some research than it is an inspirational TED talk. Neat ideas, though.

(As an aside, why would the foreign TEDx conferences be presenting in English? None of the TEDx conferences in America are in foreign languages. Just wondering...)

How It's Made Crude Oil

For a video about crude oil, the accent of the narrator seems fairly refined.

When I was teaching one of our ASM summer camps in Houston a few years back, I was lucky enough to get to go to a working (but not producing) oil rig where the management company (I really should remember their name, but it escapes me at the moment - started with a W) tested their equipment and helped troubleshoot the rigs they managed for their customers. That experience - going their even once - made the drilling of crude oil much more real for me.

The above video goes through the process of drilling and purification - though they stop short of the fractionating columns, but I have a few videos lined up for that over the new few months.