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      in Environment

      Empowering people to adapt on the frontlines of climate change

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      On April 11, MIT announced five multiyear flagship projects in the first-ever Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to tackle complex climate problems and deliver breakthrough solutions to the world as quickly as possible. This article is the fifth in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them.

      In the coastal south of Bangladesh, rice paddies that farmers could once harvest three times a year lie barren. Sea-level rise brings saltwater to the soil, ruining the staple crop. It’s one of many impacts, and inequities, of climate change. Despite producing less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions, Bangladesh is suffering more than most countries. Rising seas, heat waves, flooding, and cyclones threaten 90 million people.

      A platform being developed in a collaboration between MIT and BRAC, a Bangladesh-based global development organization, aims to inform and empower climate-threatened communities to proactively adapt to a changing future. Selected as one of five MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects, the Climate Resilience Early Warning System (CREWSnet) will forecast the local impacts of climate change on people’s lives, homes, and livelihoods. These forecasts will guide BRAC’s development of climate-resiliency programs to help residents prepare for and adapt to life-altering conditions.

      “The communities that CREWSnet will focus on have done little to contribute to the problem of climate change in the first place. However, because of socioeconomic situations, they may be among the most vulnerable. We hope that by providing state-of-the-art projections and sharing them broadly with communities, and working through partners like BRAC, we can help improve the capacity of local communities to adapt to climate change, significantly,” says Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

      Eltahir leads the project with John Aldridge and Deborah Campbell in the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners across MIT include the Center for Global Change Science; the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. 

      Predicting local risks

      CREWSnet’s forecasts rely upon a sophisticated model, developed in Eltahir’s research group over the past 25 years, called the MIT Regional Climate Model. This model zooms in on climate processes at local scales, at a resolution as granular as 6 miles. In Bangladesh’s population-dense cities, a 6-mile area could encompass tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of people. The model takes into account the details of a region’s topography, land use, and coastline to predict changes in local conditions.

      When applying this model over Bangladesh, researchers found that heat waves will get more severe and more frequent over the next 30 years. In particular, wet-bulb temperatures, which indicate the ability for humans to cool down by sweating, will rise to dangerous levels rarely observed today, particularly in western, inland cities.

      Such hot spots exacerbate other challenges predicted to worsen near Bangladesh’s coast. Rising sea levels and powerful cyclones are eroding and flooding coastal communities, causing saltwater to surge into land and freshwater. This salinity intrusion is detrimental to human health, ruins drinking water supplies, and harms crops, livestock, and aquatic life that farmers and fishermen depend on for food and income.

      CREWSnet will fuse climate science with forecasting tools that predict the social and economic impacts to villages and cities. These forecasts — such as how often a crop season may fail, or how far floodwaters will reach — can steer decision-making.

      “What people need to know, whether they’re a governor or head of a household, is ‘What is going to happen in my area, and what decisions should I make for the people I’m responsible for?’ Our role is to integrate this science and technology together into a decision support system,” says Aldridge, whose group at Lincoln Laboratory specializes in this area. Most recently, they transitioned a hurricane-evacuation planning system to the U.S. government. “We know that making decisions based on climate change requires a deep level of trust. That’s why having a powerful partner like BRAC is so important,” he says.

      Testing interventions

      Established 50 years ago, just after Bangladesh’s independence, BRAC works in every district of the nation to provide social services that help people rise from extreme poverty. Today, it is one of the world’s largest nongovernmental organizations, serving 110 million people across 11 countries in Asia and Africa, but its success is cultivated locally.

      “BRAC is thrilled to partner with leading researchers at MIT to increase climate resilience in Bangladesh and provide a model that can be scaled around the globe,” says Donella Rapier, president and CEO of BRAC USA. “Locally led climate adaptation solutions that are developed in partnership with communities are urgently needed, particularly in the most vulnerable regions that are on the frontlines of climate change.”

      CREWSnet will help BRAC identify communities most vulnerable to forecasted impacts. In these areas, they will share knowledge and innovate or bolster programs to improve households’ capacity to adapt.

      Many climate initiatives are already underway. One program equips homes to filter and store rainwater, as salinity intrusion makes safe drinking water hard to access. Another program is building resilient housing, able to withstand 120-mile-per-hour winds, that can double as local shelters during cyclones and flooding. Other services are helping farmers switch to different livestock or crops better suited for wetter or saltier conditions (e.g., ducks instead of chickens, or salt-tolerant rice), providing interest-free loans to enable this change.

      But adapting in place will not always be possible, for example in areas predicted to be submerged or unbearably hot by midcentury. “Bangladesh is working on identifying and developing climate-resilient cities and towns across the country, as closer-by alternative destinations as compared to moving to Dhaka, the overcrowded capital of Bangladesh,” says Campbell. “CREWSnet can help identify regions better suited for migration, and climate-resilient adaptation strategies for those regions.” At the same time, BRAC’s Climate Bridge Fund is helping to prepare cities for climate-induced migration, building up infrastructure and financial services for people who have been displaced.

      Evaluating impact

      While CREWSnet’s goal is to enable action, it can’t quite measure the impact of those actions. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a development economics program in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, will help evaluate the effectiveness of the climate-adaptation programs.

      “We conduct randomized controlled trials, similar to medical trials, that help us understand if a program improved people’s lives,” says Claire Walsh, the project director of the King Climate Action Initiative at J-PAL. “Once CREWSnet helps BRAC implement adaptation programs, we will generate scientific evidence on their impacts, so that BRAC and CREWSnet can make a case to funders and governments to expand effective programs.”

      The team aspires to bring CREWSnet to other nations disproportionately impacted by climate change. “Our vision is to have this be a globally extensible capability,” says Campbell. CREWSnet’s name evokes another early-warning decision-support system, FEWSnet, that helped organizations address famine in eastern Africa in the 1980s. Today it is a pillar of food-security planning around the world.

      CREWSnet hopes for a similar impact in climate change planning. Its selection as an MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship project will inject the project with more funding and resources, momentum that will also help BRAC’s fundraising. The team plans to deploy CREWSnet to southwestern Bangladesh within five years.

      “The communities that we are aspiring to reach with CREWSnet are deeply aware that their lives are changing — they have been looking climate change in the eye for many years. They are incredibly resilient, creative, and talented,” says Ashley Toombs, the external affairs director for BRAC USA. “As a team, we are excited to bring this system to Bangladesh. And what we learn together, we will apply at potentially even larger scales.” More

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      in Energy

      New England renewables + Canadian hydropower

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      The urgent need to cut carbon emissions has prompted a growing number of U.S. states to commit to achieving 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 or 2050. But figuring out how to meet those commitments and still have a reliable and affordable power system is a challenge. Wind and solar installations will form the backbone of a carbon-free power system, but what technologies can meet electricity demand when those intermittent renewable sources are not adequate?

      In general, the options being discussed include nuclear power, natural gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and energy storage technologies such as new and improved batteries and chemical storage in the form of hydrogen. But in the northeastern United States, there is one more possibility being proposed: electricity imported from hydropower plants in the neighboring Canadian province of Quebec.

      The proposition makes sense. Those plants can produce as much electricity as about 40 large nuclear power plants, and some power generated in Quebec already comes to the Northeast. So, there could be abundant additional supply to fill any shortfall when New England’s intermittent renewables underproduce. However, U.S. wind and solar investors view Canadian hydropower as a competitor and argue that reliance on foreign supply discourages further U.S. investment.

      Two years ago, three researchers affiliated with the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) — Emil Dimanchev SM ’18, now a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Joshua Hodge, CEEPR’s executive director; and John Parsons, a senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management — began wondering whether viewing Canadian hydro as another source of electricity might be too narrow. “Hydropower is a more-than-hundred-year-old technology, and plants are already built up north,” says Dimanchev. “We might not need to build something new. We might just need to use those plants differently or to a greater extent.”

      So the researchers decided to examine the potential role and economic value of Quebec’s hydropower resource in a future low-carbon system in New England. Their goal was to help inform policymakers, utility decision-makers, and others about how best to incorporate Canadian hydropower into their plans and to determine how much time and money New England should spend to integrate more hydropower into its system. What they found out was surprising, even to them.

      The analytical methods

      To explore possible roles for Canadian hydropower to play in New England’s power system, the MIT researchers first needed to predict how the regional power system might look in 2050 — both the resources in place and how they would be operated, given any policy constraints. To perform that analysis, they used GenX, a modeling tool originally developed by Jesse Jenkins SM ’14, PhD ’18 and Nestor Sepulveda SM ’16, PhD ’20 while they were researchers at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

      The GenX model is designed to support decision-making related to power system investment and real-time operation and to examine the impacts of possible policy initiatives on those decisions. Given information on current and future technologies — different kinds of power plants, energy storage technologies, and so on — GenX calculates the combination of equipment and operating conditions that can meet a defined future demand at the lowest cost. The GenX modeling tool can also incorporate specified policy constraints, such as limits on carbon emissions.

      For their study, Dimanchev, Hodge, and Parsons set parameters in the GenX model using data and assumptions derived from a variety of sources to build a representation of the interconnected power systems in New England, New York, and Quebec. (They included New York to account for that state’s existing demand on the Canadian hydro resources.) For data on the available hydropower, they turned to Hydro-Québec, the public utility that owns and operates most of the hydropower plants in Quebec.

      It’s standard in such analyses to include real-world engineering constraints on equipment, such as how quickly certain power plants can be ramped up and down. With help from Hydro-Québec, the researchers also put hour-to-hour operating constraints on the hydropower resource.

      Most of Hydro-Québec’s plants are “reservoir hydropower” systems. In them, when power isn’t needed, the flow on a river is restrained by a dam downstream of a reservoir, and the reservoir fills up. When power is needed, the dam is opened, and the water in the reservoir runs through downstream pipes, turning turbines and generating electricity. Proper management of such a system requires adhering to certain operating constraints. For example, to prevent flooding, reservoirs must not be allowed to overfill — especially prior to spring snowmelt. And generation can’t be increased too quickly because a sudden flood of water could erode the river edges or disrupt fishing or water quality.

      Based on projections from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and elsewhere, the researchers specified electricity demand for every hour of the year 2050, and the model calculated the cost-optimal mix of technologies and system operating regime that would satisfy that hourly demand, including the dispatch of the Hydro-Québec hydropower system. In addition, the model determined how electricity would be traded among New England, New York, and Quebec.

      Effects of decarbonization limits on technology mix and electricity trading

      To examine the impact of the emissions-reduction mandates in the New England states, the researchers ran the model assuming reductions in carbon emissions between 80 percent and 100 percent relative to 1990 levels. The results of those runs show that, as emissions limits get more stringent, New England uses more wind and solar and extends the lifetime of its existing nuclear plants. To balance the intermittency of the renewables, the region uses natural gas plants, demand-side management, battery storage (modeled as lithium-ion batteries), and trading with Quebec’s hydropower-based system. Meanwhile, the optimal mix in Quebec is mostly composed of existing hydro generation. Some solar is added, but new reservoirs are built only if renewable costs are assumed to be very high.

      The most significant — and perhaps surprising — outcome is that in all the scenarios, the hydropower-based system of Quebec is not only an exporter but also an importer of electricity, with the direction of flow on the Quebec-New England transmission lines changing over time.

      Historically, energy has always flowed from Quebec to New England. The model results for 2018 show electricity flowing from north to south, with the quantity capped by the current transmission capacity limit of 2,225 megawatts (MW).

      An analysis for 2050, assuming that New England decarbonizes 90 percent and the capacity of the transmission lines remains the same, finds electricity flows going both ways. Flows from north to south still dominate. But for nearly 3,500 of the 8,760 hours of the year, electricity flows in the opposite direction — from New England to Quebec. And for more than 2,200 of those hours, the flow going north is at the maximum the transmission lines can carry.

      The direction of flow is motivated by economics. When renewable generation is abundant in New England, prices are low, and it’s cheaper for Quebec to import electricity from New England and conserve water in its reservoirs. Conversely, when New England’s renewables are scarce and prices are high, New England imports hydro-generated electricity from Quebec.

      So rather than delivering electricity, Canadian hydro provides a means of storing the electricity generated by the intermittent renewables in New England.

      “We see this in our modeling because when we tell the model to meet electricity demand using these resources, the model decides that it is cost-optimal to use the reservoirs to store energy rather than anything else,” says Dimanchev. “We should be sending the energy back and forth, so the reservoirs in Quebec are in essence a battery that we use to store some of the electricity produced by our intermittent renewables and discharge it when we need it.”

      Given that outcome, the researchers decided to explore the impact of expanding the transmission capacity between New England and Quebec. Building transmission lines is always contentious, but what would be the impact if it could be done?

      Their model results shows that when transmission capacity is increased from 2,225 MW to 6,225 MW, flows in both directions are greater, and in both cases the flow is at the new maximum for more than 1,000 hours.

      Results of the analysis thus confirm that the economic response to expanded transmission capacity is more two-way trading. To continue the battery analogy, more transmission capacity to and from Quebec effectively increases the rate at which the battery can be charged and discharged.

      Effects of two-way trading on the energy mix

      What impact would the advent of two-way trading have on the mix of energy-generating sources in New England and Quebec in 2050?

      Assuming current transmission capacity, in New England, the change from one-way to two-way trading increases both wind and solar power generation and to a lesser extent nuclear; it also decreases the use of natural gas with CCS. The hydro reservoirs in Canada can provide long-duration storage — over weeks, months, and even seasons — so there is less need for natural gas with CCS to cover any gaps in supply. The level of imports is slightly lower, but now there are also exports. Meanwhile, in Quebec, two-way trading reduces solar power generation, and the use of wind disappears. Exports are roughly the same, but now there are imports as well. Thus, two-way trading reallocates renewables from Quebec to New England, where it’s more economical to install and operate solar and wind systems.

      Another analysis examined the impact on the energy mix of assuming two-way trading plus expanded transmission capacity. For New England, greater transmission capacity allows wind, solar, and nuclear to expand further; natural gas with CCS all but disappears; and both imports and exports increase significantly. In Quebec, solar decreases still further, and both exports and imports of electricity increase.

      Those results assume that the New England power system decarbonizes by 99 percent in 2050 relative to 1990 levels. But at 90 percent and even 80 percent decarbonization levels, the model concludes that natural gas capacity decreases with the addition of new transmission relative to the current transmission scenario. Existing plants are retired, and new plants are not built as they are no longer economically justified. Since natural gas plants are the only source of carbon emissions in the 2050 energy system, the researchers conclude that the greater access to hydro reservoirs made possible by expanded transmission would accelerate the decarbonization of the electricity system.

      Effects of transmission changes on costs

      The researchers also explored how two-way trading with expanded transmission capacity would affect costs in New England and Quebec, assuming 99 percent decarbonization in New England. New England’s savings on fixed costs (investments in new equipment) are largely due to a decreased need to invest in more natural gas with CCS, and its savings on variable costs (operating costs) are due to a reduced need to run those plants. Quebec’s savings on fixed costs come from a reduced need to invest in solar generation. The increase in cost — borne by New England — reflects the construction and operation of the increased transmission capacity. The net benefit for the region is substantial.

      Thus, the analysis shows that everyone wins as transmission capacity increases — and the benefit grows as the decarbonization target tightens. At 99 percent decarbonization, the overall New England-Quebec region pays about $21 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity with today’s transmission capacity but only $18/MWh with expanded transmission. Assuming 100 percent reduction in carbon emissions, the region pays $29/MWh with current transmission capacity and only $22/MWh with expanded transmission.

      Addressing misconceptions

      These results shed light on several misconceptions that policymakers, supporters of renewable energy, and others tend to have.

      The first misconception is that the New England renewables and Canadian hydropower are competitors. The modeling results instead show that they’re complementary. When the power systems in New England and Quebec work together as an integrated system, the Canadian reservoirs are used part of the time to store the renewable electricity. And with more access to hydropower storage in Quebec, there’s generally more renewable investment in New England.

      The second misconception arises when policymakers refer to Canadian hydro as a “baseload resource,” which implies a dependable source of electricity — particularly one that supplies power all the time. “Our study shows that by viewing Canadian hydropower as a baseload source of electricity — or indeed a source of electricity at all — you’re not taking full advantage of what that resource can provide,” says Dimanchev. “What we show is that Quebec’s reservoir hydro can provide storage, specifically for wind and solar. It’s a solution to the intermittency problem that we foresee in carbon-free power systems for 2050.”

      While the MIT analysis focuses on New England and Quebec, the researchers believe that their results may have wider implications. As power systems in many regions expand production of renewables, the value of storage grows. Some hydropower systems have storage capacity that has not yet been fully utilized and could be a good complement to renewable generation. Taking advantage of that capacity can lower the cost of deep decarbonization and help move some regions toward a decarbonized supply of electricity.

      This research was funded by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, which is supported in part by a consortium of industry and government associates.

      This article appears in the Autumn 2021 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Environment

      Ocean vital signs

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      Without the ocean, the climate crisis would be even worse than it is. Each year, the ocean absorbs billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, preventing warming that greenhouse gas would otherwise cause. Scientists estimate about 25 to 30 percent of all carbon released into the atmosphere by both human and natural sources is absorbed by the ocean.

      “But there’s a lot of uncertainty in that number,” says Ryan Woosley, a marine chemist and a principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT. Different parts of the ocean take in different amounts of carbon depending on many factors, such as the season and the amount of mixing from storms. Current models of the carbon cycle don’t adequately capture this variation.

      To close the gap, Woosley and a team of other MIT scientists developed a research proposal for the MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition — an Institute-wide campaign to catalyze and fund innovative research addressing the climate crisis. The team’s proposal, “Ocean Vital Signs,” involves sending a fleet of sailing drones to cruise the oceans taking detailed measurements of how much carbon the ocean is really absorbing. Those data would be used to improve the precision of global carbon cycle models and improve researchers’ ability to verify emissions reductions claimed by countries.

      “If we start to enact mitigation strategies—either through removing CO2 from the atmosphere or reducing emissions — we need to know where CO2 is going in order to know how effective they are,” says Woosley. Without more precise models there’s no way to confirm whether observed carbon reductions were thanks to policy and people, or thanks to the ocean.

      “So that’s the trillion-dollar question,” says Woosley. “If countries are spending all this money to reduce emissions, is it enough to matter?”

      In February, the team’s Climate Grand Challenges proposal was named one of 27 finalists out of the almost 100 entries submitted. From among this list of finalists, MIT will announce in April the selection of five flagship projects to receive further funding and support.

      Woosley is leading the team along with Christopher Hill, a principal research engineer in EAPS. The team includes physical and chemical oceanographers, marine microbiologists, biogeochemists, and experts in computational modeling from across the department, in addition to collaborators from the Media Lab and the departments of Mathematics, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

      Today, data on the flux of carbon dioxide between the air and the oceans are collected in a piecemeal way. Research ships intermittently cruise out to gather data. Some commercial ships are also fitted with sensors. But these present a limited view of the entire ocean, and include biases. For instance, commercial ships usually avoid storms, which can increase the turnover of water exposed to the atmosphere and cause a substantial increase in the amount of carbon absorbed by the ocean.

      “It’s very difficult for us to get to it and measure that,” says Woosley. “But these drones can.”

      If funded, the team’s project would begin by deploying a few drones in a small area to test the technology. The wind-powered drones — made by a California-based company called Saildrone — would autonomously navigate through an area, collecting data on air-sea carbon dioxide flux continuously with solar-powered sensors. This would then scale up to more than 5,000 drone-days’ worth of observations, spread over five years, and in all five ocean basins.

      Those data would be used to feed neural networks to create more precise maps of how much carbon is absorbed by the oceans, shrinking the uncertainties involved in the models. These models would continue to be verified and improved by new data. “The better the models are, the more we can rely on them,” says Woosley. “But we will always need measurements to verify the models.”

      Improved carbon cycle models are relevant beyond climate warming as well. “CO2 is involved in so much of how the world works,” says Woosley. “We’re made of carbon, and all the other organisms and ecosystems are as well. What does the perturbation to the carbon cycle do to these ecosystems?”

      One of the best understood impacts is ocean acidification. Carbon absorbed by the ocean reacts to form an acid. A more acidic ocean can have dire impacts on marine organisms like coral and oysters, whose calcium carbonate shells and skeletons can dissolve in the lower pH. Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has become about 30 percent more acidic on average.

      “So while it’s great for us that the oceans have been taking up the CO2, it’s not great for the oceans,” says Woosley. “Knowing how this uptake affects the health of the ocean is important as well.” More

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      in Security

      Q&A: Latifah Hamzah ’12 on creating sustainable solutions in Malaysia and beyond

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      Latifah Hamzah ’12 graduated from MIT with a BS in mechanical engineering and minors in energy studies and music. During their time at MIT, Latifah participated in various student organizations, including the MIT Symphony Orchestra, Alpha Phi Omega, and the MIT Design/Build/Fly team. They also participated in the MIT Energy Initiative’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) in the lab of former professor of mechanical engineering Alexander Mitsos, examining solar-powered thermal and electrical co-generation systems.

      After graduating from MIT, Latifah worked as a subsea engineer at Shell Global Solutions and co-founded Engineers Without Borders – Malaysia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding sustainable and empowering solutions that impact disadvantaged populations in Malaysia. More recently, Latifah received a master of science in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, where they are currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering with a focus on water and sanitation in developing contexts.

      Q: What inspired you to pursue energy studies as an undergraduate student at MIT?

      A: I grew up in Malaysia, where I was at once aware of both the extent to which the oil and gas industry is a cornerstone of the economy and the need to transition to a lower-carbon future. The Energy Studies minor was therefore enticing because it gave me a broader view of the energy space, including technical, policy, economic, and other viewpoints. This was my first exposure to how things worked in the real world — in that many different fields and perspectives had to be considered cohesively in order to have a successful, positive, and sustained impact. Although the minor was predominantly grounded in classroom learning, what I learned drove me to want to discover for myself how the forces of technology, society, and policy interacted in the field in my subsequent endeavors.

      In addition to the breadth that the minor added to my education, it also provided a structure and focus for me to build on my technical fundamentals. This included taking graduate-level classes and participating in UROPs that had specific energy foci. These were my first forays into questions that, while still predominantly technical, were more open-ended and with as-yet-unknown answers that would be substantially shaped by the framing of the question. This shift in mindset required from typical undergraduate classes and problem sets took a bit of adjusting to, but ultimately gave me the confidence and belief that I could succeed in a more challenging environment.

      Q: How did these experiences with energy help shape your path forward, particularly in regard to your work with Engineers Without Borders – Malaysia and now at Stanford?

      A: When I returned home after graduation, I was keen to harness my engineering education and explore in practice what the Energy Studies minor curriculum had taught by theory and case studies: to consider context, nuance, and interdisciplinary and myriad perspectives to craft successful, sustainable solutions. Recognizing that there were many underserved communities in Malaysia, I co-founded Engineers Without Borders – Malaysia with some friends with the aim of working with these communities to bring simple and sustainable engineering solutions. Many of these projects did have an energy focus. For example, we designed, sized, and installed micro-hydro or solar-power systems for various indigenous communities, allowing them to continue living on their ancestral lands while reducing energy poverty. Many other projects incorporated other aspects of engineering, such as hydrotherapy pools for folks with special needs, and water and sanitation systems for stateless maritime communities.

      Through my work with Engineers Without Borders – Malaysia, I found a passion for the broader aspects of sustainability, development, and equity. By spending time with communities in the field and sharing in their experiences, I recognized gaps in my skill set that I could work on to be more effective in advocating for social and environmental justice. In particular, I wanted to better understand communities and their perspectives while being mindful of my positionality. In addition, I wanted to address the more systemic aspects of the problems they faced, which I felt in many cases would only be possible through a combination of research, evidence, and policy. To this end, I embarked on a PhD in environmental engineering with a minor in anthropology and pursued a Community-Based Research Fellowship with Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service. I have also participated in the Rising Environmental Leaders Program (RELP), which helps graduate students “hone their leadership and communications skills to maximize the impact of their research.” RELP afforded me the opportunity to interact with representatives from government, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], think tanks, and industry, from which I gained a better understanding of the policy and adjacent ecosystems at both the federal and state levels.

      Q: What are you currently studying, and how does it relate to your past work and educational experiences?

      A: My dissertation investigates waste management and monitoring for improved planetary health in three distinct projects. Suboptimal waste management can lead to poor outcomes, including environmental contamination, overuse of resources, and lost economic and environmental opportunities in resource recovery. My first project showed that three combinations of factors resulted in ruminant feces contaminating the stored drinking water supplies of households in rural Kenya, and the results were published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Consequently, water and sanitation interventions must also consider animal waste for communities to have safe drinking water.

      My second project seeks to establish a circular economy in the chocolate industry with indigenous Malaysian farmers and the Chocolate Concierge, a tree-to-bar social enterprise. Having designed and optimized apparatuses and processes to create biochar from cacao husk waste, we are now examining its impact on the growth of cacao saplings and their root systems. The hope is that biochar will increase the resilience of saplings for when they are transplanted from the nursery to the farm. As biochar can improve soil health and yield while reducing fertilizer inputs and sequestering carbon, farmers can accrue substantial economic and environmental benefits, especially if they produce, use, and sell it themselves.

      My third project investigates the gap in sanitation coverage worldwide and potential ways of reducing it. Globally, 46 percent of the population lacks access to safely managed sanitation, while the majority of the 54 percent who do have access use on-site sanitation facilities such as septic tanks and latrines. Given that on-site, decentralized systems typically have a lower space and resource footprint, are cheaper to build and maintain, and can be designed to suit various contexts, they could represent the best chance of reaching the sanitation Sustainable Development Goal. To this end, I am part of a team of researchers at the Criddle Group at Stanford working to develop a household-scale system as part of the Gates Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, an initiative aimed at developing new sanitation and toilet technologies for developing contexts.

      The thread connecting these projects is a commitment to investigating both the technical and socio-anthropological dimensions of an issue to develop sustainable, reliable, and environmentally sensitive solutions, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I believe that an interdisciplinary approach can provide a better understanding of the problem space, which will hopefully lead to effective potential solutions that can have a greater community impact.

      Q: What do you plan to do once you obtain your PhD?

      A: I hope to continue working in the spheres of water and sanitation and/or sustainability post-PhD. It is a fascinating moment to be in this space as a person of color from an LMIC, especially as ideas such as community-based research and decolonizing fields and institutions are becoming more widespread and acknowledged. Even during my time at Stanford, I have noticed some shifts in the discourse, although we still have a long way to go to achieve substantive and lasting change. Folks like me are underrepresented in forums where the priorities, policies, and financing of aid and development are discussed at the international or global scale. I hope I’ll be able to use my qualifications, experience, and background to advocate for more just outcomes.

      This article appears in the Autumn 2021 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative More

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      in Energy

      How to clean solar panels without water

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      Solar power is expected to reach 10 percent of global power generation by the year 2030, and much of that is likely to be located in desert areas, where sunlight is abundant. But the accumulation of dust on solar panels or mirrors is already a significant issue — it can reduce the output of photovoltaic panels by as much as 30 percent in just one month — so regular cleaning is essential for such installations.

      But cleaning solar panels currently is estimated to use about 10 billion gallons of water per year — enough to supply drinking water for up to 2 million people. Attempts at waterless cleaning are labor intensive and tend to cause irreversible scratching of the surfaces, which also reduces efficiency. Now, a team of researchers at MIT has devised a way of automatically cleaning solar panels, or the mirrors of solar thermal plants, in a waterless, no-contact system that could significantly reduce the dust problem, they say.

      The new system uses electrostatic repulsion to cause dust particles to detach and virtually leap off the panel’s surface, without the need for water or brushes. To activate the system, a simple electrode passes just above the solar panel’s surface, imparting an electrical charge to the dust particles, which are then repelled by a charge applied to the panel itself. The system can be operated automatically using a simple electric motor and guide rails along the side of the panel. The research is described today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT graduate student Sreedath Panat and professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

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      Despite concerted efforts worldwide to develop ever more efficient solar panels, Varanasi says, “a mundane problem like dust can actually put a serious dent in the whole thing.” Lab tests conducted by Panat and Varanasi showed that the dropoff of energy output from the panels happens steeply at the very beginning of the process of dust accumulation and can easily reach 30 percent reduction after just one month without cleaning. Even a 1 percent reduction in power, for a 150-megawatt solar installation, they calculated, could result in a $200,000 loss in annual revenue. The researchers say that globally, a 3 to 4 percent reduction in power output from solar plants would amount to a loss of between $3.3 billion and $5.5 billion.

      “There is so much work going on in solar materials,” Varanasi says. “They’re pushing the boundaries, trying to gain a few percent here and there in improving the efficiency, and here you have something that can obliterate all of that right away.”

      Many of the largest solar power installations in the world, including ones in China, India, the U.A.E., and the U.S., are located in desert regions. The water used for cleaning these solar panels using pressurized water jets has to be trucked in from a distance, and it has to be very pure to avoid leaving behind deposits on the surfaces. Dry scrubbing is sometimes used but is less effective at cleaning the surfaces and can cause permanent scratching that also reduces light transmission.

      Water cleaning makes up about 10 percent of the operating costs of solar installations. The new system could potentially reduce these costs while improving the overall power output by allowing for more frequent automated cleanings, the researchers say.

      “The water footprint of the solar industry is mind boggling,” Varanasi says, and it will be increasing as these installations continue to expand worldwide. “So, the industry has to be very careful and thoughtful about how to make this a sustainable solution.”

      Other groups have tried to develop electrostatic based solutions, but these have relied on a layer called an electrodynamic screen, using interdigitated electrodes. These screens can have defects that allow moisture in and cause them to fail, Varanasi says. While they might be useful on a place like Mars, he says, where moisture is not an issue, even in desert environments on Earth this can be a serious problem.

      The new system they developed only requires an electrode, which can be a simple metal bar, to pass over the panel, producing an electric field that imparts a charge to the dust particles as it goes. An opposite charge applied to a transparent conductive layer just a few nanometers thick deposited on the glass covering of the the solar panel then repels the particles, and by calculating the right voltage to apply, the researchers were able to find a voltage range sufficient to overcome the pull of gravity and adhesion forces, and cause the dust to lift away.

      Using specially prepared laboratory samples of dust with a range of particle sizes, experiments proved that the process works effectively on a laboratory-scale test installation, Panat says. The tests showed that humidity in the air provided a thin coating of water on the particles, which turned out to be crucial to making the effect work. “We performed experiments at varying humidities from 5 percent to 95 percent,” Panat says. “As long as the ambient humidity is greater than 30 percent, you can remove almost all of the particles from the surface, but as humidity decreases, it becomes harder.”

      Varanasi says that “the good news is that when you get to 30 percent humidity, most deserts actually fall in this regime.” And even those that are typically drier than that tend to have higher humidity in the early morning hours, leading to dew formation, so the cleaning could be timed accordingly.

      “Moreover, unlike some of the prior work on electrodynamic screens, which actually do not work at high or even moderate humidity, our system can work at humidity even as high as 95 percent, indefinitely,” Panat says.

      In practice, at scale, each solar panel could be fitted with railings on each side, with an electrode spanning across the panel. A small electric motor, perhaps using a tiny portion of the output from the panel itself, would drive a belt system to move the electrode from one end of the panel to the other, causing all the dust to fall away. The whole process could be automated or controlled remotely. Alternatively, thin strips of conductive transparent material could be permanently arranged above the panel, eliminating the need for moving parts.

      By eliminating the dependency on trucked-in water, by eliminating the buildup of dust that can contain corrosive compounds, and by lowering the overall operational costs, such systems have the potential to significantly improve the overall efficiency and reliability of solar installations, Varanasi says.

      The research was supported by Italian energy firm Eni. S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Security

      Using soap to remove micropollutants from water

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      Imagine millions of soapy sponges the size of human cells that can clean water by soaking up contaminants. This simplistic model is used to describe technology that MIT chemical engineers have recently developed to remove micropollutants from water — a concerning, worldwide problem.

      Patrick S. Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, PhD student Devashish Pratap Gokhale, and undergraduate Ian Chen recently published their research on micropollutant removal in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials. The work is funded by MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).

      In spite of their low concentrations (about 0.01–100 micrograms per liter), micropollutants can be hazardous to the ecosystem and to human health. They come from a variety of sources and have been detected in almost all bodies of water, says Gokhale. Pharmaceuticals passing through people and animals, for example, can end up as micropollutants in the water supply. Others, like endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA), can leach from plastics during industrial manufacturing. Pesticides, dyes, petrochemicals, and per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, more commonly known as PFAS, are also examples of micropollutants, as are some heavy metals like lead and arsenic. These are just some of the kinds of micropollutants, all of which can be toxic to humans and animals over time, potentially causing cancer, organ damage, developmental defects, or other adverse effects.

      Micropollutants are numerous but since their collective mass is small, they are difficult to remove from water. Currently, the most common practice for removing micropollutants from water is activated carbon adsorption. In this process, water passes through a carbon filter, removing only 30 percent of micropollutants. Activated carbon requires high temperatures to produce and regenerate, requiring specialized equipment and consuming large amounts of energy. Reverse osmosis can also be used to remove micropollutants from water; however, “it doesn’t lead to good elimination of this class of molecules, because of both their concentration and their molecular structure,” explains Doyle.

      Inspired by soap

      When devising their solution for how to remove micropollutants from water, the MIT researchers were inspired by a common household cleaning supply — soap. Soap cleans everything from our hands and bodies to dirty dishes to clothes, so perhaps the chemistry of soap could also be applied to sanitizing water. Soap has molecules called surfactants which have both hydrophobic (water-hating) and hydrophilic (water-loving) components. When water comes in contact with soap, the hydrophobic parts of the surfactant stick together, assembling into spherical structures called micelles with the hydrophobic portions of the molecules in the interior. The hydrophobic micelle cores trap and help carry away oily substances like dirt. 

      Doyle’s lab synthesized micelle-laden hydrogel particles to essentially cleanse water. Gokhale explains that they used microfluidics which “involve processing fluids on very small, micron-like scales” to generate uniform polymeric hydrogel particles continuously and reproducibly. These hydrogels, which are porous and absorbent, incorporate a surfactant, a photoinitiator (a molecule that creates reactive species), and a cross-linking agent known as PEGDA. The surfactant assembles into micelles that are chemically bonded to the hydrogel using ultraviolet light. When water flows through this micro-particle system, micropollutants latch onto the micelles and separate from the water. The physical interaction used in the system is strong enough to pull micropollutants from water, but weak enough that the hydrogel particles can be separated from the micropollutants, restabilized, and reused. Lab testing shows that both the speed and extent of pollutant removal increase when the amount of surfactant incorporated into the hydrogels is increased.

      “We’ve shown that in terms of rate of pullout, which is what really matters when you scale this up for industrial use, that with our initial format, we can already outperform the activated carbon,” says Doyle. “We can actually regenerate these particles very easily at room temperature. Nearly 10 regeneration cycles with minimal change in performance,” he adds.

      Regeneration of the particles occurs by soaking the micelles in 90 percent ethanol, whereby “all the pollutants just come out of the particles and back into the ethanol” says Gokhale. Ethanol is biosafe at low concentrations, inexpensive, and combustible, allowing for safe and economically feasible disposal. The recycling of the hydrogel particles makes this technology sustainable, which is a large advantage over activated carbon. The hydrogels can also be tuned to any hydrophobic micropollutant, making this system a novel, flexible approach to water purification.

      Scaling up

      The team experimented in the lab using 2-naphthol, a micropollutant that is an organic pollutant of concern and known to be difficult to remove by using conventional water filtration methods. They hope to continue testing with real water samples. 

      “Right now, we spike one micropollutant into pure lab water. We’d like to get water samples from the natural environment, that we can study and look at experimentally,” says Doyle. 

      By using microfluidics to increase particle production, Doyle and his lab hope to make household-scale filters to be tested with real wastewater. They then anticipate scaling up to municipal water treatment or even industrial wastewater treatment. 

      The lab recently filed an international patent application for their hydrogel technology that uses immobilized micelles. They plan to continue this work by experimenting with different kinds of hydrogels for the removal of heavy metal contaminants like lead from water. 

      Societal impacts

      Funded by a 2019 J-WAFS seed grant that is currently ongoing, this research has the potential to improve the speed, precision, efficiency, and environmental sustainability of water purification systems across the world. 

      “I always wanted to do work which had a social impact, and I was also always interested in water, because I think it’s really cool,” says Gokhale. He notes, “it’s really interesting how water sort of fits into different kinds of fields … we have to consider the cultures of peoples, how we’re going to use this, and then just the equity of these water processes.” Originally from India, Gokhale says he’s seen places that have barely any water at all and others that have floods year after year. “There’s a lot of interesting work to be done, and I think it’s work in this area that’s really going to impact a lot of people’s lives in years to come,” Gokhale says.

      Doyle adds, “water is the most important thing, perhaps for the next decades to come, so it’s very fulfilling to work on something that is so important to the whole world.” More

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      in Security

      Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination

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      An estimated two-thirds of humanity is affected by shortages of water, and many such areas in the developing world also face a lack of dependable electricity. Widespread research efforts have thus focused on ways to desalinate seawater or brackish water using just solar heat. Many such efforts have run into problems with fouling of equipment caused by salt buildup, however, which often adds complexity and expense.

      Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in China has come up with a solution to the problem of salt accumulation — and in the process developed a desalination system that is both more efficient and less expensive than previous solar desalination methods. The process could also be used to treat contaminated wastewater or to generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without requiring any power source other than sunlight itself.

      The findings are described today in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT graduate student Lenan Zhang, postdoc Xiangyu Li, professor of mechanical engineering Evelyn Wang, and four others.

      “There have been a lot of demonstrations of really high-performing, salt-rejecting, solar-based evaporation designs of various devices,” Wang says. “The challenge has been the salt fouling issue, that people haven’t really addressed. So, we see these very attractive performance numbers, but they’re often limited because of longevity. Over time, things will foul.”

      Many attempts at solar desalination systems rely on some kind of wick to draw the saline water through the device, but these wicks are vulnerable to salt accumulation and relatively difficult to clean. The team focused on developing a wick-free system instead. The result is a layered system, with dark material at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, then a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of material, sitting atop a deep reservoir of the salty water such as a tank or a pond. After careful calculations and experiments, the researchers determined the optimal size for the holes drilled through the perforated material, which in their tests was made of polyurethane. At 2.5 millimeters across, these holes can be easily made using commonly available waterjets.

      The holes are large enough to allow for a natural convective circulation between the warmer upper layer of water and the colder reservoir below. That circulation naturally draws the salt from the thin layer above down into the much larger body of water below, where it becomes well-diluted and no longer a problem. “It allows us to achieve high performance and yet also prevent this salt accumulation,” says Wang, who is the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

      Li says that the advantages of this system are “both the high performance and the reliable operation, especially under extreme conditions, where we can actually work with near-saturation saline water. And that means it’s also very useful for wastewater treatment.”

      He adds that much work on such solar-powered desalination has focused on novel materials. “But in our case, we use really low-cost, almost household materials.” The key was analyzing and understanding the convective flow that drives this entirely passive system, he says. “People say you always need new materials, expensive ones, or complicated structures or wicking structures to do that. And this is, I believe, the first one that does this without wicking structures.”

      This new approach “provides a promising and efficient path for desalination of high salinity solutions, and could be a game changer in solar water desalination,” says Hadi Ghasemi, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston, who was not associated with this work. “Further work is required for assessment of this concept in large settings and in long runs,” he adds.

      Just as hot air rises and cold air falls, Zhang explains, natural convection drives the desalination process in this device. In the confined water layer near the top, “the evaporation happens at the very top interface. Because of the salt, the density of water at the very top interface is higher, and the bottom water has lower density. So, this is an original driving force for this natural convection because the higher density at the top drives the salty liquid to go down.” The water evaporated from the top of the system can then be collected on a condensing surface, providing pure fresh water.

      The rejection of salt to the water below could also cause heat to be lost in the process, so preventing that required careful engineering, including making the perforated layer out of highly insulating material to keep the heat concentrated above. The solar heating at the top is accomplished through a simple layer of black paint.

      This gif shows fluid flow visualized by food dye. The left-side shows the slow transport of colored de-ionized water from the top to the bottom bulk water. The right-side shows the fast transport of colored saline water from the top to the bottom bulk water driven by the natural convection effect.

      So far, the team has proven the concept using small benchtop devices, so the next step will be starting to scale up to devices that could have practical applications. Based on their calculations, a system with just 1 square meter (about a square yard) of collecting area should be sufficient to provide a family’s daily needs for drinking water, they say. Zhang says they calculated that the necessary materials for a 1-square-meter device would cost only about $4.

      Their test apparatus operated for a week with no signs of any salt accumulation, Li says. And the device is remarkably stable. “Even if we apply some extreme perturbation, like waves on the seawater or the lake,” where such a device could be installed as a floating platform, “it can return to its original equilibrium position very fast,” he says.

      The necessary work to translate this lab-scale proof of concept into workable commercial devices, and to improve the overall water production rate, should be possible within a few years, Zhang says. The first applications are likely to be providing safe water in remote off-grid locations, or for disaster relief after hurricanes, earthquakes, or other disruptions of normal water supplies.

      Zhang adds that “if we can concentrate the sunlight a little bit, we could use this passive device to generate high-temperature steam to do medical sterilization” for off-grid rural areas.

      “I think a real opportunity is the developing world,” Wang says. “I think that is where there’s most probable impact near-term, because of the simplicity of the design.” But, she adds, “if we really want to get it out there, we also need to work with the end users, to really be able to adopt the way we design it so that they’re willing to use it.”

      “This is a new strategy toward solving the salt accumulation problem in solar evaporation,” says Peng Wang, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, who was not associated with this research. “This elegant design will inspire new innovations in the design of advanced solar evaporators. The strategy is very promising due to its high energy efficiency, operation durability, and low cost, which contributes to low-cost and passive water desalination to produce fresh water from various source water with high salinity, e.g., seawater, brine, or brackish groundwater.”

      The team also included Yang Zhong, Arny Leroy, and Lin Zhao at MIT, and Zhenyuan Xu at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. The work was supported by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, the U.S.-Egypt Science and Technology Joint Fund, and used facilities supported by the National Science Foundation. More

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      in Environment

      Reducing food waste to increase access to affordable foods

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      About a third of the world’s food supply never gets eaten. That means the water, labor, energy, and fertilizer that went into growing, processing, and distributing the food is wasted.

      On the other end of the supply chain are cash-strapped consumers, who have been further distressed in recent years by factors like the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation.

      Spoiler Alert, a company founded by two MIT alumni, is helping companies bridge the gap between food waste and food insecurity with a platform connecting major food and beverage brands with discount grocers, retailers, and nonprofits. The platform helps brands discount or donate excess and short-dated inventory days, weeks, and months before it expires.

      “There is a tremendous amount of underutilized data that exists in the manufacturing and distribution space that results in good food going to waste,” says Ricky Ashenfelter MBA ’15, who co-founded the company with Emily Malina MBA ’15.

      Spoiler Alert helps brands manage distressed inventory data, create offers for potential buyers, and review and accept bids. The platform is designed to work with companies’ existing inventory and fulfillment systems, using automation and pricing intelligence to further streamline sales.

      “At a high level, we’re a waste-prevention software built for sales and supply-chain teams,” Ashenfelter says. “You can think of it as a private [business-to-business] eBay of sorts.”

      Spoiler Alert is working with global companies like Nestle, Kraft Heinz, and Danone, as well as discount grocers like the United Grocery Outlet and Misfits Market. Those brands are already using the platform to reduce food waste and get more food on people’s tables.

      “Project Drawdown [a nonprofit working on climate solutions] has identified food waste as the number one priority to address the global climate crisis, so these types of corporate initiatives can be really powerful from an environmental standpoint,” Ashenfelter says, noting the nonprofit estimates food waste accounts for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. “Contrast that with growing levels of food insecurity and folks not being able to access affordable nutrition, and you start to see how tackling supply-chain inefficiency can have a dramatic impact from both an environmental and a social lens. That’s what motivates us.”

      Untapped data for change

      Ashenfelter came to MIT’s Sloan School of Management after several years in sustainability software and management consulting within the retail and consumer products industries.

      “I was really attracted to transitioning into something much more entrepreneurial, and to leverage not only Sloan’s focus on entrepreneurship, but also the broader MIT ecosystem’s focus on technology, entrepreneurship, clean tech innovation, and other themes along that front,” he says.

      Ashenfelter met Malina at one of Sloan’s admitted students events in 2013, and the founders soon set out to use data to decrease food waste.

      “For us, the idea was clear: How do we better leverage data to manage excess and short-dated inventory?” Ashenfelter says. “How we go about that has evolved over the last six years, but it’s all rooted in solving an enormous climate problem, solving a major food insecurity problem, and from a capitalistic standpoint, helping businesses cut costs and generate revenue from otherwise wasted products.”

      The founders spent many hours in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship with support from the Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and used Spoiler Alert as a case study in nearly every class they took, thinking through product development, sales, marketing, pricing, and more through their coursework.

      “We brought our idea into just about every action learning class that we could at Sloan and MIT,” Ashenfelter says.

      They also participated in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and received support from the Venture Mentoring Service and the IDEAS Global Challenge program.

      Upon graduation, the founders initially began building a platform to facilitate donations of excess inventory, but soon learned big companies’ processes for discounting that inventory were also highly manual. Today, more than 90 percent of Spoiler Alert’s transaction volume is discounted, with the remainder donated.

      Different teams within an organization can upload excess inventory reports to Spoiler Alert’s system, eliminating the need to manually aggregate datasets and preparing what the industry refers to as “blowout lists” to sell. Spoiler Alert uses machine-learning-based tools to help both parties with pricing and negotiations to close deals more quickly.

      “Companies are taking pretty manual and slow approaches to deciding [what to do with excess inventory],” Ashenfelter says. “And when you have slow decision-making, you’re losing days or even weeks of shelf life on that product. That can be the difference between selling product versus donating, and donating versus dumping.”

      Once a deal has been made, Spoiler Alert automatically generates the forms and workflows needed by fulfillment teams to get the product out the door. The relationships companies build on the platform are also a major driver for cutting down waste.

      “We’re providing suppliers with the ability to control where their discounted and donated product ends up,” Ashenfelter says. “That’s really powerful because it allows these CPG brands to ensure that this product is, in many cases, getting to affordable nutrition outlets in underserved communities.”

      Ashenfelter says the majority of inventory goes to regional and national discount grocers, supplemented with extensive purchasing from local and nonprofit grocery chains.

      “Everything we do is oriented around helping sell as much product as possible to a reputable set of buyers at the most fair, equitable prices possible,” Ashenfelter says.

      Scaling for impact

      The pandemic has disrupted many aspects of the food supply chains. But Ashenfelter says it has also accelerated the adoption of digital solutions that can better manage such volatility.

      When Campbell began using Spoiler Alert’s system in 2019, for instance, it achieved a 36 percent increase in discount sales and a 27 percent increase in donations over the first five months.

      Ashenfelter says the results have proven that companies’ sustainability targets can go hand in hand with initiatives that boost their bottom lines. In fact, because Spoiler Alert focuses so much on the untapped revenue associated with food waste, many customers don’t even realize Spoiler Alert is a sustainability company until after they’ve signed on.

      “What’s neat about this program is that it becomes an incredibly powerful case study internally for how sustainability and operational outcomes aren’t in conflict and can drive both business results as well as overall environmental impact,” Ashenfelter says.

      Going forward, Spoiler Alert will continue building out algorithmic solutions that could further cut down on waste internationally and across a wider array of products.

      “At every step in our process, we’re collecting a tremendous amount of data in terms of what is and isn’t selling, at what price point, to which buyers, out of which geographies, and with how much remaining shelf life,” Ashenfelter explains. “We are only starting to scratch the surface in terms of bringing our recommendations engine to life for our suppliers and buyers. Ultimately our goal is to power the waste-free economy, and rooted in that is making better decisions faster, in collaboration with a growing ecosystem of supply chain partners, and with as little manual intervention as possible.” More