Chapter 54 10.5 Closed Loop Manufacturing

In the mechanical community, or in the mechanical ecosystem, some machines seem to be more willing to combine with other machines, just like red-winged blackbirds like to nest in wetlands with cattails.The pump matches the pipe; the heater matches the air conditioner; the switch matches the wiring. Machines combine to form food webs.In an abstract sense, one machine "preys" on another: the input of one machine is the output of the other.Steel mills devour the salivation of iron mining machines.The steel it extrudes is eaten by the machines that make cars, and transformed into cars.When the car dies, it's digested in a crushing machine at the scrapyard.The iron slag regurgitated by the crusher is later eaten by the recycling plant, and when it is excreted, it may become the galvanized iron plate for the roof of the house.

If you trace the journey of an iron particle from being dug out of the ground to being fed into the industrial food chain, you can see that it follows a criss-crossing loop.In the first round, this particle may be used on a Chevrolet; in the second round, it may land on a ship hull made in Taiwan; in the third round, it may be finalized on a certain section of rail; in the fourth round, it may be on another boat .Every raw material roams within such a network.Sugar, sulfuric acid, diamonds, oil, each follow different circuits, contact various machines on the way of each network, and may even be reduced to their basic forms as elements again.

The intertwined flow of production materials from machine to machine can be seen as a networked community—an industrial ecology.Like all living systems, this intertwined artificial ecosystem expands, circumvents obstacles, and adapts to adversity.From a proper perspective, a robust industrial ecosystem is an extension of the natural ecosystem of the biosphere.Fragments of wood fiber go from tree to chip to newspaper, and from paper to tree fertilizer, and the fibers slip easily in and out between natural and industrial biospheres that are part of a larger , a global meta-system.Materials flow from the biosphere to the artificial sphere, and then back into the natural and man-made grand biomimetic ecology.

However, the weedy nature of the man-made industry threatens the natural world that supports it, creating a confrontation between advocates of nature and advocates of the artificial, with both sides believing that only one can prevail.But, over the past few years, a somewhat romantic idea — that “the future of machines is biology” — has infiltrated science and transformed the poetic into something practical.The new view asserts that both nature and industry can triumph.Using the metaphor of an organic machine system, industrialists and (somewhat reluctantly) environmentalists can outline how manufacturing can clean up its own mess the way biological systems do.For example, there is no garbage problem in nature because everything is used for its best use.By emulating biological principles such as these, industry can become more compatible with the organic world around it.

Until recently, it was an impossible instruction for isolated, ossified machines to "act like nature."But as we empower machines, factories, and materials with adaptive capabilities, co-evolutionary dynamics, and global connections, we can turn the manufacturing environment into an industrial ecology, reversing the conquest of nature by industry and creating a partnership between industry and nature. Harding Tibbs, a British industrial designer, learned while advising on large-scale engineering projects such as NASA's space station that machines are whole systems.When building an outer space station, or any other large system, ensuring its reliability requires constant attention to the interacting, and sometimes conflicting, requirements of the various mechanical subsystems."Seeking common ground while reserving differences" between machines made the engineer Tibbs gradually have a global concept.As an enthusiastic environmentalist, Tibbs wanted to find out whether this global mechanistic view—that is, the orientation that emphasizes the maximization of system efficiency—can be generally applied in the industry to solve the pollution emitted by the industry itself .The idea, Tibbs says, is to "use patterns of the natural environment as templates for solving environmental problems."He and his fellow engineers call it "industrial ecology."

In 1989, an article published by Robert Forosh in "Scientific American" revived the concept of "industrial ecology".Forosh, who is in charge of the research laboratory of General Motors and once served as the head of NASA, defined this fresh concept: "In an industrial ecosystem, energy and materials are used most effectively and waste is produced. The amount is minimized, and the effluent of one process ... becomes the raw material for the next process. An industrial ecosystem works exactly like a biological ecosystem.” The term "industrial ecology" has been used since the 1970s, when it was used to consider health and environmental issues in the workplace, "for topics such as whether there are small bugs in the dust of factories", Tibbs said.Foroche and Tibbs extended the concept of industrial ecology to include networks of machines and the environment they form.According to Tibbs, its goal is to "imitate the overall design concept of natural systems to shape the overall design of industry" so that "we can not only improve the efficiency of industry, but also find more satisfactory ways to connect with nature. .” So the engineers boldly hijacked the age-old trope of machines as organisms and brought the poetry into practice.

"Designing to disintegrate" was one of the earliest ideas conceived in the organic notion of manufacturing.For decades, ease of assembly has been paramount in manufacturing.The easier a product is to assemble, the less expensive it is to manufacture.Ease of maintenance and ease of disposal are almost completely ignored.Ecologically, products designed for disassembly allow for efficient disposal or repair as well as efficient assembly.The best-designed cars not only drive well and are cheap to build, but they should also be easily disassembled into common parts once they are scrapped.Technologists are working to invent more effective and reversible bonding devices than glue or one-way adhesives, as well as tougher but more recyclable materials like Kevlar or molded polycarbonate.

By requiring manufacturers, not consumers, to take responsibility for disposing of their waste, the incentive to invent these things is incentivized, pushing the burden of waste upstream.Germany recently passed a law forcing automakers to design cars that can be easily disassembled into disaggregated parts.You can buy a new electric tea kettle that features the ability to be easily broken down into recyclable parts.Aluminum cans are designed to be recycled.What if everything could be recycled?When making a radio, a pair of running shoes, or a sofa, you have to consider the fate of its corpse.You have to work with your eco-partners—the guys who eat your machine effluent—to make sure that someone is responsible for disposing of your product's carcasses.Every product has to take into account the waste it creates itself.

"I think you can think of every waste material you can think of as a potential raw material," Tibbs said. "Any material that isn't useful today can be eliminated at source by design so that it won't be produced. We already know roughly how to build a zero-pollution process. The reason why we haven't done this yet is that It’s because we haven’t made up our minds yet. It’s not so much a question of technology as a question of determination.” All evidence points to some cost benefits, if not staggering profits, from ecological technologies. Since 1975, the multinational corporation 3M has saved $500 million by reducing pollution per unit of product by 50%.Through product modifications, manufacturing process improvements (such as using less solvent), or simply capturing "contaminants," 3M has made money from technological innovations applied within its internal industrial ecosystem.

Tibbs gave me another example of a self-benefiting internal ecosystem: “A metal polishing plant in Massachusetts has been dumping heavy metal solvents into local waterways for years. Environmentalists are raising water purity thresholds every year until they can’t anymore.” Improve. The plant either shut down and moved the plating production away, or built a very expensive state-of-the-art full-scale water treatment plant. However, the polisher took a more radical approach - they invented a completely closed loop system. The The system is unprecedented in the electroplating industry." In a closed-loop system, the same material is recycled over and over again, like in Bio2 or a space capsule.In practice, more or less substances seep into or leak out of industrial systems, but in general most substances circulate in a "closed loop".The Massachusetts electroplating company's innovation was to recover the bulk of the water and hazardous solvents required for the process and recycle it all within the plant walls.The revamped system reduced its pollution output to zero and saw benefits within two years.Tibbs said: "It would cost half a million dollars to treat the sewage by the water treatment plant, but their novel closed-loop system only costs about $250,000. Also, because there is no need for half a million dollars a week gallons of water, they also save on water bills. Recycling metals results in lower chemical usage. At the same time, their product quality improves because their water filtration system is so good, regenerative The water is cleaner than the local water purchased from outside before.”

Closed-loop manufacturing is a mirror image of natural closed-loop production in living plant cells—the vast quantities of material in cells that are internally recycled during periods of non-growth.The zero-pollution closed-loop design principle in the electroplating factory can be applied to an industrial park or the entire industrial area. From the perspective of globalization, it can even cover the entire network of human activities.Nothing is discarded in this big cycle, because there is no such thing as "discarding".Ultimately, all machines, factories, and human institutions become members of a larger biomimetic system on a global scale. Tibbs can cite a prototype that is already in the works.Eighty miles west of Copenhagen, local Danish businesses have given birth to the embryonic form of an industrial ecosystem.More than a dozen companies cooperate in an open-loop manner to dispose of the "waste" of neighboring manufacturers. While they learn from each other how to reuse each other's effluent, this open-loop gradually "closes".A coal-fired power plant supplies an oil refinery with waste heat from steam turbines (formerly vented to a nearby fjord).The refinery removes the polluting component sulfur from the gas released during its refining process and supplies the gas to fuel the power plant, which saves 30,000 tons of coal per year.The sulfur removed is sold to a nearby sulfuric acid plant.Power plants also extract pollutants from the soot to form calcium sulfate that is used by asbestos cement board companies as a substitute for gypsum.The dust removed from the soot is sent to the cement plant.Other excess steam from the power plant is used to heat a biopharmaceutical factory as well as 3,500 homes and a sea trout farm.Nutrient-rich silt from fishing farms and fermented feed from pharmaceutical factories are used to fertilize local farms.Perhaps in the near future, horticultural greenhouses will also be insulated with waste heat from power plants. To be honest, no matter how clever the closed loop of the manufacturing industry is, there will always be a little bit of energy or useless substances that enter the biosphere as waste.The effects of this inevitable diffusion can be absorbed by the biological world, provided that the mechanical systems that produce them operate at a pace and within the limits of natural systems.Living organisms such as water lilies can concentrate impurities diluted in water into economically valuable concentrates.To paraphrase the words of the 1990s, if industry and nature are perfectly connected, biological organisms are sufficient to carry the very small amount of waste produced by industrial ecosystems. Taken to the extreme, our world is filled with highly variable material flows and scattered, diluted recyclables.Nature is good at dealing with things that are dispersed and diluted, but man-made is not.A multi-million dollar recycled paper mill requires a constant, consistent supply of used newspapers.If one day a paper mill shuts down because people are no longer bundling their old newspapers, the loss is unacceptable.The usual approach of building huge storage centers for recycled resources has wiped out already modest profits.The industrial ecology must be developed into a networked just-in-time production system that dynamically balances the flow of materials so that local surplus or shortage materials can be shuttled and distributed, thereby minimizing contingency stocks.Increasingly, network-driven "flexible factories" are able to use adaptable mechanisms to produce a greater variety of products (but smaller quantities of each product) to handle resources with greater variability in quality.