Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Environment

Net zero building.  It’s a boom!

“A mix of high-tech and old-fashioned energy efficiency tactics can deliver carbon-neutral buildings, right now. But the U.S. needs to pick up the pace” writes James S. Russell for Bloomberg.

Oil shortages are a hot topic since Russia invaded the Ukraine, prompting the International Energy Agency to release a 10-point-plan for cutting oil use. But the plan only focuses on transportation and overlooks substantial energy savings that might be found in the built environment. Buildings consume about 40% of our energy in the US, but reducing fossil fuels is still seen as a detrimental impact to our comfort. In reality, we could pretty quickly decarbonize by implementing some simple measures already available to us. These include better insulation, energy star appliances and more efficient heating and cooling. The technology sector has also provided us with sensors, controls, and advanced energy modelling.

Paul Schwer, is the president of PAE, an engineering firm that designs mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for low emission buildings. He dramatically reduced the energy emissions of his own home by electrifying everything. And his company built a 58,000-square-foot net zero building in Portland through the use of natural lighting and ventilation (lots of windows that open), radiant floor heating, good exterior insulation and a solar array. Paul is convinced that the majority of buildings in the US are good candidates for retrofitting for energy reduction.

The high performing energy-efficient ‘Passiv Haus’ is the gold standard for new construction, achieving energy reductions of up to 75%. But even without following the exacting Passiv Haus methodology, energy efficiency can be accomplished through the use of freely available passive measures, such as natural daylight, sun shading, wide overhangs, sun louvers and natural ventilation.

But what about the carbon footprint or embodied energy of buildings themselves? The materials used to construct a building, such as steel, concrete and aluminum, are a large proportion of a building’s carbon footprint. KierenTimberlake, an architecture firm known for its innovative approach to energy efficiency, devised a digital tool to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the manufacturing of an existing building’s materials which they intended to develop. When they compared it to how much carbon would be emitted by building a new net zero building, they found that it would take 186 years to reach parity. 

Embodied energy is one of the reasons that mass timber, or cross-laminated timber (CLT), has become so popular. Mass timber is more environmentally friendly as it’s made from small strips of timber, can be locally sourced and can replace carbon-heavy materials such as steel and concrete. US building codes will soon allow mass timber buildings of up to 18 stories to be built.

President Biden’s March spending bill includes $3.2 billion for retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. That’s a good start. But to achieve scale in the reduction of energy in the building sector will require much more. If all new buildings were net zero, as well as our transport vehicles electrified, we could cut our emissions dramatically by 2030.

Read the original article here.

Image of New US Embassy facade by Images George Rex from Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Why transit matters.

“Public transportation is nothing new, but with modern technology, cities can create better infrastructures like never before.” Remix

City living has many advantages with cultural attractions, restaurants and nightlife topping the list. But what are those amenities worth if you can’t get to them easily? Good infrastructure is equally as important and by that, of course, we mean public transit. Public transit promotes connectivity, density and vibrancy, adding to that city vibe, not only in city centres but also in ex-urban areas. And that brings increased productivity and economic growth. And public transit reduces each person’s carbon footprint, making cities more sustainable.‌

Good public transportation should be:

  • Accessible and available to everyone.
  • Convenient with stops at the most frequented places – for locals and visitors alike.
  • Affordable for all and an attractive alternative to using a car.
  • Frequent and reliable so that riders can depend on it.
  • Flexible, providing options for riders to get where they want to go.
  • Visitor friendly, easy to understand and use.
  • App friendly so that you can pay for or track your ride easily.

Over the last few decades, rapid urbanization has propelled the construction of mass transit systems all over the world. But the United States is lagging far behind. We don’t have a great reputation when it comes to public transit. While the country is lagging, many cities are working hard on meeting the population’s needs when it comes to transit. Here are ten cities we can all learn from. Or listen to rail advocate David Peter Alan. He knows a thing or two about public transit. He’s ridden the entire Amtrak system and about 300 transit providers in the U.S. and Canada as well.

Image courtesy of John D. Norton

Repairing the urban environment.

As a university student, Tracy Gabriel blended city planning with international affairs. As a Fulbright Scholar she studied in Damascus. She built a career in planning and development in New York and Washington D.C. that led her, in 2018, to the leadership role for the National Landing BID in Arlington, Virginia, being billed as the state’s ”largest walkable neighborhood” (which even if true may. in fact, be a tad misleading). Formerly known as the Crystal City BID, under her tenure which coincided with the Amazon HQ2 project, the service district increased by over 70%, incorporating portions of Pentagon City and Potomac Yard-Arlington.

Previously, Tracy spent six years across the river as associate director at the D.C. Office of Planning focusing on community revitalization, sustainability, economic development and design. This included the redevelopment of federal assets such as Walter Reed and St. Elizabeth’s Hospitals, as well as working plans for neighborhoods in transition such as Southwest, Mid-City East and Adams Morgan. She also was involved in sustainability projects like the EcoDistrict model and Sustainable DC, and served as citywide lead for Anacostia Waterfront’s planning and development coordination. Before D.C. Tracy worked at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which handled notable design-rich projects like Cornell-Technion Applied Science Campus at Roosevelt Island and Hunter’s Point South on the Long Island City Waterfront. She is a native New Yorker.

Crystal City has a fascinating, sometimes contentious development history. The riverfront runs essentially south to north starting with Crystal City (and Reagan National airport), the Pentagon complex, Arlington Cemetery, and the office tower skyline of Rosslyn. This entire metro area is surrounded and divided by a chaotic spaghetti of thruways for suburban commuters. Crystal City (technically a neighborhood) was originally planned around the car commuters in the 1970s, using ‘superblocks’ and pedestrian tunnels. And so, today, much of the current planning has been working towards corrective development. Tracy has worked on both sides of the Potomac, and probably understands their relationship better than most. Additionally, now that Amazon started putting down roots in Northern Virginia, with property values that are probably skyrocketing, it should make for an interesting conversation.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:07] Tracey Gabriel works at Repairing Urban Environments. She’s president and executive director of the National Landing BID. There she puts her experience as urbanist, planner and place maker to work, leading the makeover of Virginia’s largest downtown with over $8 billion in private investment in the pipeline. Crystal City was designed with the best of intentions and the best of planning principles in the 1970s. It’s a car-centric place spotted with pedestrian tunnels and underground malls. It’s Tracy’s job to turn this inward-looking place into an outward looking one. Walkable, livable and vibrant at street level is the goal. It’s quite a tall order. For a woman who is committed to addressing complex urban challenges and building great neighborhoods, this is the ultimate role.

Eve: [00:02:06] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts and blog posts.

Eve: [00:02:34] Hello, Tracy, I’m really excited to hear about your work today.

Tracy: [00:02:39] Eve I’m so happy to be here.

Eve: [00:02:41] So a really big question, how do you transform a very large neighborhood built for the car with underground pathways into a paradigm for 21st century urban centers?

Tracy: [00:02:53] Well, that is our grand challenge. So if you aren’t familiar with it, we’re talking about the National Landing area, which is comprised of Pentagon City, Crystal City and Potomac Yard in Arlington, Virginia, just minutes from downtown D.C., Washington, D.C. And you know, this area came to fruition during the sixties and seventies with a very, you know, auto centric sensibility. We had actually like urban density, drivable density, but the sensibility was one of inverted or introverted buildings, mega blocks, retaining walls, just a hostile environment.

Eve: [00:03:44] And this. And I read underground retail, too, so…

Tracy: [00:03:47] Oh underground, exactly. It’s again that introverted nature of the buildings. And we know today that it’s so critical for our urban centers that we actually are competing on place and the experience of place. And so much of that is about walkability. It’s about street level activity. It’s about engaging storefronts. It’s about interesting businesses that create authenticity and the identity of place. As we’re looking at sustainability, it’s also about green and bringing nature into our urban environments. It’s about having every mode of access and getting around. So we are trying to right now in the National Landing area is take that sixties and seventies paradigm and turn it on its head. And actually, our goal is to become the most connected downtown in the country. It’s very ambitious.

Eve: [00:04:51] It’s a pretty big goal, yeah.

Tracy: [00:04:52] It is a big goal. How do you do it, you ask the question? You do it through very good planning. First off, I think as someone who comes from an urban planning background, I’ve appreciated how much our local jurisdiction has focused on planning and important inflection points, including a plan just approved this past weekend and the idea of actually planning for growth. And through that growth and development, making those on-the-ground changes to our urban infrastructure that really have a people-centered transformation at its heart. So whether that’s block-by-block buildings that now have activated retail and storefronts, it’s reclaiming streets for multiple modes and for people. It’s about extroverts eating our buildings, even repositioning, you know, our existing portfolio buildings and making them have the kind of urban sensibilities that we have today. And of course, it’s investment in new infrastructure. Parks connected to place and then actual transportation options that are really about next generation mobility.

Eve: [00:06:03] I love the idea of going from introvert to extrovert for a city. That’s a great way to describe it. But like, let’s start talking first about the actual National Landing BID. What is that and why was it formed?

Tracy: [00:06:17] The National Landing BID was formed back in 2006 as the Crystal City Business Improvement District, and it was really in response to base realignment and closure and the shrinking of the federal sector locally. BIDs are often, come in at the moment where an area needs extra place management

Eve: [00:06:37] And BID stands for Business Improvement District, right?

Tracy: [00:06:39] Yes. And just to tell what a business improvement district is, it’s a public private partnership financed by property owners to focus on the vibrancy and vitality of a central business district or downtown. And the focus has typically been around clean and safe and business attraction. And I think what’s different for, I think the National Landing BID, is that we are really focused on being place makers, storytellers, ideas generators and community builders

Eve: [00:07:15] Who are the major players in a BID. I mean, I know we have a BID locally here in Pittsburgh, and I know they exist everywhere, and they all function a little differently. So, what was the idea behind this particular BID and who pushed it forward?

Tracy: [00:07:30] Yes. So, we expanded three years ago and then became the National Landing BID. We increased our geography to reflect the entire downtown. But it came on the heels of the announcement of Amazon…

[00:07:43] Oh, okay.

[00:07:45] …locating its HQ2 in our area, which, you know, in truth it was a long-standing goal of our area to expand the BID to reflect our entire downtown, and I think with the advent of Amazon coming to the area and the opportunity to actually unify our district is really an essential moment to see the importance of a BID in managing change and growth in the area and being, having a local steward for our business owners and our property owners.

Eve: [00:08:21] It sounds like this might be one of the largest BIDs in the country.

Tracy: [00:08:25] In terms of budget, we’re at just about five million dollars, which is probably mid-sized, but I think what we have going for us in terms of biggest is, I think the biggest transformation underway. We have eight billion dollars in private sector investment, of which many people have read about the $2.5 Billion that Amazon is bringing to the area. We are a downtown that is comparable in scale to downtown Oakland or downtown Austin. We’re set to be a downtown Miami soon and we’ll continue to grow from there. So, I think it’s the notable component of our downtown is just how much change is underway in terms of the pipeline of investment and the emphasis on innovation and the repairing of the urban experience is what is a distinguishing feature of our area.

Eve: [00:09:28] So when you repair the urban experience and there’s this focus on transformation, what does that look like for residents or for workers or for retail activities?

Tracy: [00:09:40] Yes, repairing the urban fabric is all about, I think, stitching together our area more seamlessly. I think what we know is that walkability is increasingly important, as is having spaces for surprise and delight and respite in an urban environment. We know that during the pandemic, how important that is. So, the kind of ease of getting around, the ability to have everything that you need in one district to be able to access the small businesses that you love to shop, to eat locally. So that’s all part of the transformation. It’s really about a live work balance. I think one of the things we also know is that, you know, monolithic places don’t feel great. And I think building a place in terms of the urban repair, it’s about balancing the mix of uses and ensuring that workers and residents and live work is and embodied abundance.

Eve: [00:10:43] So just tell us in detail what have been the residential and workplace transformations. What’s been built so far, what’s been accomplished to date and what’s still being planned? It’s probably a really long list.

Tracy: [00:10:56] One of the things we’re seeing and, as we speak, I am looking at several cranes right across the street from me. And what we’re seeing is sort of a block-by-block transformation now. Some are, you know, rehabbing of existing buildings to again go back to our first metaphor of extroverted buildings, we’re seeing, you know, retail that was once internalized being brought to the street front. Bringing more green on a block-by-block basis. Just recently, we reclaimed the front door to our neighborhood or metro system, made that into really a park experience as people came out, come out of our metro. And so, we are building lots of new housing. So we already have 26,000 residents. But each new building in the past 10 years has added to mostly our residential staff, and we have about 7,000 more units already approved and set to be constructed. So, we’ll be actually the fastest-growing residential neighborhood in the Washington, DC area.

Eve: [00:12:04] And what about like from a zoning point of view? Have you made any changes? I ask this question because I was really impressed by a neighborhood in Australia a few years back where they had just left industrial and retail and residential sort of all mixed up, and it was an incredibly vibrant place. It was, you know, really the sort of, a very enticing idea to live in a place like that rather than segregated into like, you know, a neighborhood.

Tracy: [00:12:34] Absolutely. So, I mentioned that good planning has been at the heart of the faith in a blueprint for sustainable growth, for yielding the kind of environments we want to live in. And one example of that is the fact that in the plans, there has been incredible intentionality in retaining a 50/50 balance between office and housing. And in some ways, I think the Arlington County, our local jurisdiction was ahead of its time because what we’re discovering now is that office markets that are just office are feeling very under loved at the moment.

Eve: [00:13:18] The pain? Yeah,

Tracy: [00:13:20] In pain.

Eve: [00:13:21] Absolutely.

Tracy: [00:13:22] And there’s cascading effects where retail can’t survive in that environment. So, the fortunate thing that we have here is that we plan for that balance and we actually have a 1:1 ratio by presence between jobs and housing. And we’re going to continue that with all the growth and development. We’ll continue to have that 1:1 ratio, that ideal balance between jobs and housing. And why is that important? It means that our streets are going to have people on them, no matter what the back to office environment or the new work experience for everyone is, that we will have a vibrant, very characteristically urban place and we’ll be able to sustain the small businesses that again are the lifeblood of how people experience and identify with places on the ground, street level activity.

Eve: [00:14:13] I imagine that you are also able to reduce the amount of parking and the number of cars being used when you have that sort of relationship, right?

Tracy: [00:14:22] Absolutely. You can reduce that, and you want there to be walkable trips to do most of what we have. The other benefit we have locally is that we are investing in the larger-scale transformation of transportation assets. So how do you make it super easy for anyone who lives here or works here to get anywhere else in the region? And so, there’s been a lot of investment in big infrastructure in terms of how we are going to connect people to where they want to live or work, but also then focusing very locally on the micro mobility, the human-scaled streets. How do you get the last mile that you need to get in? And I think, yes, we are overbuilt in terms of parking. Again, we came of age at a time where it was very auto centric, and we have lots of empty garages. So much so that we annually have a bike race in our garages on the three lower floors that that are not used. On weekdays. So, it just shows you we know that we are overbuilt and we actually, only I think 20 percent of our trips are single occupancy vehicles. So, we are extremely transit oriented in how people go to and from our area. And I think the way people want to live is to be able to take some individualized, maybe a scooter, maybe their bike or maybe walking to this and we can offer, our goal is to be able to offer seamless ways to do any of that.

Eve: [00:15:55] Interesting. So, what’s going to happen to all those empty garages? Are they going to be torn down, converted into lofts? Like, what’s the goal?

Tracy: [00:16:03] Very interesting, because if you, look, there’s so much complexity, because one of the things that we have going on here is that we have a lot of concentrated ownership and that’s historically, and it’s changed hands, but the portfolio has stayed largely intact, which means you have multiple buildings sitting on large parking garages. So very complex urban infrastructure when you don’t have the garages just tied to one building, but you have the fortunate circumstance that with large-scale property owners, they can make investments that are transformative because they see the value, the entire portfolio. So, what the future of our underground is that you mentioned before, the underground retail, what the future of our garages are, I think are yet to be seen. But I think what we know is that we need more of the street-oriented retail and less of the parking garages and more multimodal options. And I think having what we have is an asset, but we don’t need, we don’t need more.

Eve: [00:17:08] Right, right. Interesting. So, I have to ask, who decides on how to rebuild this place? Is this a top-down project or is the community involved?

Tracy: [00:17:18] We have one of the most engaged local communities. I’m so impressed. As an urban planner myself, my history and work experience has been largely in community-based planning, so I’ve always been on the public side of the planning equation doing that engagement. And the thing that strikes me locally is just how engaged. As I mentioned, we have a number of plans that were community-based plans, but we’ve even had the community go further to create their own plans around livability and joint visions beyond, even. So, you have a lot of bottom up planning, and we’re seeing how that has dovetailed into the plans for the county. Ideas like green ribbons going through our neighborhoods, green networks tying together our places have, came up from the community and have made it to our plans. And of course, during the development review process, it is a case study in community conversation over the scale and the benefits of development. So, I think one of the unique things with that level of engagement and involvement and the amount of planning and what is pretty exceptional in this area is just how much commensurate investment in parks and transportation and great design is able to be achieved, which could mean that growth actually can equal greater liveability, which isn’t always the case. And I think so much of that is because of the robust dialogue about how you balance development with the needs of who’s living here.

Eve: [00:19:03] Interesting. So, what does the demographic look like there?

Tracy: [00:19:07] In our downtown area, we have about 26,000 residents, and like much of Arlington County, we probably skew pretty heavily in a Millennial demographic. So, a lot of folks in early to mid-career. And, but we have the full gamut. We have a lot of people who have naturally occurring retirement communities here as well. People who moved here at the outset and then, from a diversity perspective is something that the BID has been really passionate about, is making sure that we retain the diversity that we do have. We are in a very diverse region. Washington, D.C. is a metro area, is a minority majority region, and that is a quintessential component of what great cities are, is having great diversity. And we’re very interested in not just retaining but also growing, making this an inclusive place that is really for everyone. And as you know, I think affordability always is the greatest challenge for ensuring that we retain the diversity that we do.

Eve: [00:20:19] That was going to be my next question. How is affordable housing part of this mix?

Tracy: [00:20:23] I think one of the things that we know is that the perils of growth and development are really what it does. It can potentially do to an already existing affordable housing crisis. I think we have two parallel things happening. One is just growing the inventory of housing generally, as a release valve. So, we I mentioned we have a lot of units in production and it is a hope that that helps to deliver on the demand that exists. Additionally, unfortunately, we started off here with a baseline that there wasn’t very many committed affordable housing units, but that has been a joint focus of the county, of our property owners, of Amazon, to up the focus on affordable housing. And that’s incrementally on a project-by-project basis on what they can deliver in terms of affordable housing, either on site or through funding for affordable housing. And then there were game-changer investments. We had the fortunate circumstance of being Amazon’s housing equity fund, which is a $2 billion fund. Their very first initial investment was in a property that’s just a block from their current campus and that, through the Washington Housing Conservancy, turned an existing housing development into what will be long-term affordable housing, especially workforce housing, over time. So those kinds of investments, where that’s to the scale of like 800 units and another, potentially another 800 units that go with infill development around it. You have 1600 units that are within, or will be, within a block from a major job centre. I think it’s that combination of policy of incremental steps towards affordable housing. And then, we’re fortunate to have this, kind of the game-changer, large-scale investments that really change the conversation and change the metrics that we could accomplish.

Eve: [00:22:40] Yeah, I suppose that’s always the worry. Like if you the more gorgeous you make it place, the more unaffordable the housing becomes, and 800 units just seems to kind of scratch the surface. It’s a problem…

Tracy: [00:22:52] Oh, absolutely.

Eve: [00:22:53] Every country is having. So yeah, I don’t know how you solve it.

Tracy: [00:22:58] Yeah. The other issue that exists broadly in the housing market is just that predominantly in our market, it’s almost all rental. And that’s a product of the fact that we mostly have REITs here and other things and just historically what has been built. And so, opportunities for kind of multifamily condos and home ownership hasn’t been in abundance and in terms of zoning, I think tackling some of the single family areas to see what other missing middle housing can get developed is also in a joint effort.

Eve: [00:23:35] I think D.C.’s had a pretty transitory population to right, which is kind of pushed it towards more rental than ownership. What I understand, I don’t know. So, tell me the really big things that you’re excited about for the next five years and maybe even the next 10 years.

Tracy: [00:23:52] I’m excited on multiple fronts, but I mentioned before I’m excited about a people-oriented transformation. We actually, as a BID, have tried to be the spokesperson for that transformation, and we have a People Before Cars campaign. But People Before Cars Coalition, bringing together transit advocates to really elevate the conversation. And we have four billion dollars in transportation projects in our area. Four billion. So astounding number. That includes Big Rail that can seamlessly connect our region, transformation of our airport, which is actually adjacent to our district, and one of those projects that we’re talking about is a big idea that the BID spawned and that was, that’s a pedestrian or multimodal connection to the airport, from the airport to our main street, which will be a five+ minute walk.

Eve: [00:24:55] Wow.

Tracy: [00:24:56] And is currently in the planning and will be in the design phase going forward. So, things like that, where we will go from maybe a hidden edge city to the only downtown in the country where you can walk a comfortable and attractive walk to an airport in five minutes?

Eve: [00:25:15] Wow, that’s pretty significant.

Tracy: [00:25:19] Yeah.

Eve: [00:25:20] Are all those funds, federal dollars? Where do the funds come from, the four billion dollars?

Tracy: [00:25:25] It’s a mix, right? So, some of it is state and federal on the big rail projects. Some of it is state on our rail multimodal facilities and other ones are the complete streets projects and the kind of human scale work is being done by our county. So, it is a rich tapestry of transportation funding sources, but also we have public private partnerships to execute new metro station entrances and the like. So many players and, which is why we had put together a report called Mobility Next because there are so many different actors doing different projects, they just see the complete picture. You could understand the scale of the impact of those investments. And you know, quite honestly, from the standpoint of the BID, the thing I’m excited about is to be one of those ideas champions and be able to kind of push the envelope on what it can mean to have people-oriented infrastructure. So, we’re quite excited about that. I personally am excited to see, hopefully in the next five to 10 years in our role as a steward, is to hope that we can have shared benefits of all this development. I think we are a case study in urban development and urban transformations, given the pace and scale of what we’re experiencing and how we do it and how well we do, will be a measure and hopefully a model for how this can get done. And so we’ve been very focused at the BID and amongst our stakeholders having conversations around everything from racial equity to how do we build an inclusive community and, so I’m hopeful that we see advances there. And I think on the horizon, I think that we could have a real innovation district, a hub of activity between Amazon and we have the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus to the South. So, we’re really kind of interested in seeing what a living lab of innovation might be in our area.

Eve: [00:27:28] So I mean, what I love about this is that I think the powers that be understand that this is a really long-term hold on investment, but eventually there’ll be a return, right? And it’s not going to be in a year, but it’s going to be worthwhile because it’s a pretty big investment to make. That’s me thinking like a developer.

Tracy: [00:27:47] Yes. No, absolutely. And it’s precisely that. It’s that being able to think about the future and the impact and what the benefits can be and the return on investment.

Eve: [00:28:01] I’m going to just move to you now. You’ve always been a planner. And what led you to this career?

Tracy: [00:28:08] I would say planning is somewhat in my blood. I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I was raised in Manhattan, lived on the twenty first floor of an apartment building, a rent stabilized unit that my parents still live in, but, you know, I probably spent a lot of maybe too much time dreaming, staring out my window at the cityscape and being kind of a voracious observer of city life. So, it builds a compassion for cities in terms of their form, function, energy, but also I think cities are the top expression of community living and so I really also am interested in community and urban policy. And so what is the well-being of city dwellers? It’s also been kind of front of mind, but I think that foundation and that passion was born out of my experience as being.

Eve: [00:29:14] It sounds like you’re living your dream.

Tracy: [00:29:16] Yes, it is. It is a dream role.

Eve: [00:29:20] Yes. So where did you work before taking on this particular project?

Tracy: [00:29:25] It’s funny that I feel like taking on growth and change or being able to talk about and have conversations and convene around managing change, around, you know, discussing what is a best community outcome for an area that has been part of, I think, a through line in my career because I realize that if we’re going to have a sustainable future, growth is not optional in certain places, that is if you have a great infrastructure then we need to build around it. So many of the places in my career have been in a state of growth or re-envisioning. And so, before this role, I was focused on neighbourhood planning for all of Washington D.C. So, a community based planning role, really trying to think at the start of what equity driven planning might be and design-forward planning. So was talking to, you know, doing all the work throughout the neighborhoods and in D.C., it was a time of, I think, demographic shifts and lots of development. And so, I think that community conversation and upping the bar for engagement and just doing more to outreach to people and have a conversation was a big part of my role in development. And prior to that, I worked at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. And again, I think that was kind of an era of take it or leave it. A lot of mega-project thinking, but some of those around big ideas for affordable housing. So, I worked on the Queens portfolio, a central business district projects and on projects like Hunter’s Point South, which again, a combination of affordable housing and parks. And how do you create growth in existing neighborhoods.

Eve: [00:31:29] I just want to ask one final question. A project like this makes me wonder or a goal like this makes me wonder what went wrong in the first place. You know, and it makes me wonder, you know, what’s being built today that we’ll have to fix in 20 or 30 years? And I’m sure you’ve thought about that. I think about that a lot when I see projects emerge in the urban landscape. Some are pretty horrifying. I mean, how can we ensure, or can we ensure that the places we build today will work for many years to come?

Tracy: [00:32:04] Yeah, I think it’s a great question. How do you future proof? And I don’t, I mean, and how can you identify your blind spots in the moment? I often ask that question to my myself. And I even think that right now, urban planning lacks a paradigm to to work through some of this because I think the mantra of community engagement has always been the central component of that. And the idea of revitalization. But right now, we’re in an era where we need to know what that next thing is. It’s really about equity and planning, about inclusion, about growth, about really attacking, systemically the affordable housing crisis. I think that planning is lacking that toolbox to really tackle that. So, I think we know some of the places where we have blind spots like, as you mentioned the affordability that we’re achieving, it’s a drop in the bucket for what the overarching need is. Having a focus that’s predominantly on rental doesn’t have the diversity of options that you would want. And then of course, I think we’re already living this now, is like thinking about street level activity is so important. But you can’t have ground level activity everywhere because it kind of erodes the ability to be able to attract it and not every place can sustain it. So, making sure that when we think about how important that is to us that we’re actually more targeted about where that goes and it doesn’t have to be everywhere. I think there’s a growing understanding of that. But I think there will always be misses and then we’ll have vacant storefronts and trouble. And of course, future proofing the future of office is something I think we’re all trying to muddle through and discern what the changes and workforce and kind of what is the permanency of COVID-related shifts in behavior and what will that mean for the future of office going forward?

Eve: [00:34:20] I really appreciate what you’re doing, and I especially appreciate it because I worked for a planning department for a while, and I think you are probably an extrovert, which is why you’re able to drag this place from introvert to extrovert. I’m an introvert, and I found it very difficult managing community engagement. I mean, you haven’t talked about that much, but that is a really tough part of the job because people are so scared of change. You’re in the role of having to convince them, right?

Tracy: [00:34:47] Yeah. You know, I think that one of the things that is a little bit different here and there’s an incredible appetite for community engagement and conversation. We might have meetings like nearly every night, even virtually in this virtual context.

Eve: [00:35:02] Oh, wow.

Tracy: [00:35:03] Right. I think that the thing that is very heartening is just how much alignment there is in terms of what people want as goals and outcomes and where that aligns between the community and the business community and then the county’s planners. There’s so much alignment about what is good for residents and community is actually good for business. So, retail parks, great transportation, walkability, vibrancy, these are all things that, affordability. We want to live in richly textured places and those are actually the places that perform well. So, I feel like the alignment that exists between having the same goals of what, some of what success means, it’s so critical.

Eve: [00:35:56] So it makes your job a little bit easier. Well, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and the next time I’m down in D.C., I’m going to be heading over to Crystal City and all the other places and checking it out. It sounds amazing.

Tracy: [00:36:10] Well, we’d love to have you. So, thanks so much.

Eve: [00:36:13] Thank you. That was Tracy Gabriel. Tracy loves cities. She’s had a remarkable career as an urbanist, planner and place maker, committed to addressing complex urban challenges and building great neighborhoods. Now she’s turning her passion towards the remaking of Virginia’s largest downtown. We can’t wait to see the final outcome.

Eve: [00:36:53] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Tracy Gabriel, National Landing

More housing, less parking (in Toronto).

“Sending a clear message that cars are finally taking a backseat in Toronto planning, City Council has just changed regulations for parking spots” writes Erin Nicole Davis for STOREYS. “Late yesterday, the City announced it has adopted zoning bylaw amendments that will remove most requirements for new developments to provide a minimum number of parking spaces. At the same time, limits on the number of spaces that can be built will be added. This will permit developers to build spaces based on market demand.”

With a population of almost 3 million, Toronto is Canada’s largest city. Its climate action plan, TransformTO Net Zero Strategy, has an ambitious goal with 75 percent of school/work trips under 5km made by walking, biking or using public transit by 2030. It is hoped that new zoning bylaw amendments will align with this action plan by discouraging car use and encouraging alternative transport methods.

The zoning bylaw amendments are also expected to help to make housing more affordable. Parking spaces are expensive to build, especially underground, and removing the required minimum will reduce both the costs and the time to construct ground up housing developments, which costs are inevitably passed on to the consumer. Data from the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) shows a significant rise in parking stall prices over the last few years with an average of one third of parking stalls remaining unsold in new condo developments. “Forcing developers to provide parking that might not be used just didn’t make any sense” says RESCON president Richard Lyall.

And with less cars, Toronto will be able to transform more parking lots into green spaces.

Read the original article here.

Image courtesy of J. D. Norton, modified

Next Gen recycling.

A bit of a technology ‘man for all seasons’, Harri Holopainen started his career in computer graphics on a Commodore 64. He worked on smart card payment systems, co-founded a small graphics software company, and even designed and implemented a prototype online gaming world, a subject he did his university thesis on. Upon graduating, he and his partners grew their computer graphics software company, Hybrid Graphics Oy, until NVIDIA stepped up and bought the company in 2006. Harri later struck out on his own again, as a partner at Love of Technology Strategies, and co-founder of Microtasks, a microwork company.

In 2013, Harri stepped into the world of machine learning and robotics, at ZenRobotics, a company that builds smart robots for waste sorting and recycling. Founded in 2007, they are at the cutting edge of applying AI-based (they call it “ZenBrain”) robotics to sorting all kinds of trash. Their mission is nothing less than defining Next Generation Recycling. They have two main products, a ‘fast picker’ that is aimed at traditional mixed recycling streams, and a ‘heavy picker’ that can sort construction and demolition waste materials. The latter makes up to 6900 picks per hour using multiple sensors and can be found in Scandinavia, throughout mainland Europe, China, Japan and Singapore, and even in the U.S. There is even a system running on wind power, in Sweden.

Over the last nine years, Harri has served at ZenRobotics as Robot Lab Head, Head of Technology, and now, CTO. He describes himself as a generalist, having worked on VC rounds, defined product strategies, negotiated licensing agreements with Ericsson and Nokia, headed R&D development teams, and even hand-built critical robot components. But as he notes now, “Lately I’ve also been up to my elbows in trash.”

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:00:53] Harri Holopainen has a mission. To define Next Generation recycling. A bit of a technology ‘man for all seasons’, Harri started his career in computer graphics on a Commodore 64. He moved onto smart card payment systems, co-founded a small computer graphics software company, and even designed and implemented a prototype online gaming world, a subject he did his university thesis on. But in 2013, Harry stepped into the world of machine learning and robotics at ZenRobotics, a Finnish company that built smart robots for waste sorting and recycling. And there he helped build their A.I. based ZenBrain robots, which sort all kinds of trash, first as a robot lab head and now as CTO. Harry describes himself as a generalist. He’s worked on VC rounds, defined product strategies, negotiated licensing agreements, headed R&D development teams, and even handled critical robot components. But lately, he says, “I’ve been up to my elbows in trash”. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:02:23] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to RethinkRealEstateForGood.co where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:02:55] Hi, Harri, thanks for joining me today.

Harri Holopainen: [00:02:58] Hi Eve, glad to be here.

Eve: [00:03:00] So I was really fascinated reading about your career. You did early work on a Commodore 64 and technology has defined your career. So, like everything from computer science to online gaming, I’d really love to hear about this trajectory and what the common thread is for you.

Harri: [00:03:22] Well, I think the common thread has always been in working with technologies that at some point will have an impact in everyday life and that sounded quite sort of absurd actually when we started to work with computer graphics, but then along the way came computer game consoles that started to bring home computer graphics into living rooms. And then you’ve got PCs and finally, you got mobile phones and I remember the first things, when there was a big customer asking for us that they would like to have these graphics very advanced graphics on a cell phone display that had, maybe, I don’t know, 80 times 60 black and white pixels. And we were thinking kind of like, yeah, like, what’s this is never going to go anywhere. But then again, a couple of years later, we realized that it’s the user interfaces of these mobile phones that actually will require quite sophisticated graphics. And this sort of graphics portion of my life ended in 2006. We sold the company that we founded to Nvidia, who was then and is still the number one graphics software and hardware company. And also the movie Avatar came out. And I remember seeing Avatar, and my first realisation was that, OK, so I have been in computer graphics long enough, so my work is done. Time to find something else to do.

Eve: [00:05:13] Interesting. So, you moved on to many other things and you have ended up in machine learning at ZenRobotics.

Harri: [00:05:26] Yes. And I’ve been here now for eight years, and this is, well, I would say that the primary sort of thing that comes to mind is that nobody really is against robots picking up our trash, and everybody agrees that there’s quite a lot of trahs out there and it ain’t going to recycle itself. So, it’s kind of a no brainer thing to do to apply robots there. And that’s also another kind of technology, which has been in people’s imaginations for over 100 years. But then this idea of smart robots actually doing something useful outside assembly lines, it still hasn’t quite happened. And I feel that this waste sorting is one big step towards that direction.

Eve: [00:06:24] So ZenRobotics sorts waste, all sorts of waste. And what’s your role there?

Harri: [00:06:33] My current title is CTO. The first thing that I did in the company was that I made the first prototype of the current type of robots that we currently use. Made it big for the first time. And then after that, I have been working in basically, since we are sort of a smaller company and need to move fast, so the research is very fast paced activity. So the research is the things that you think you can sell in 12 months’ time. And basically, those are the projects that I’ve been spending almost all of my time in, and it involves things like mechanisms for grouping waste and, of course, mechanisms that actually can survive in a waste plant and then also a lot of higher-level software to make the robots really earn its pay at the customer site.

Eve: [00:07:32] Let’s step back a bit. So ZenRobotics is a company that basically sorts waste using robots.

Harri: [00:07:40] Yes.

Eve: [00:07:41] And I read somewhere about the ZenBrain. What’s the ZenBrain and what are the products you’ve developed to sort waste

Harri: [00:07:52] ZenBrain is basically the collection of technologies that use a variety of sensors to look at the waste on a conveyor belt and then recognize the objects on the belt and then figure out how the robot could actually grip the objects on the belt. And then finally, the pieces of software that tell the robot to move over. So that the object from the belt actually ends up in the correct place, and the first application area was construction and demolition waste. And there are the objects can be quite large. I think we are talking about maybe 30 kilograms of maximum weight for pieces of concrete and stuff. And then the second robot that we have done is a robot designed for handling packaging and light waste. And the difference there is that that robot is much faster. But of course, it doesn’t need to lift 30 kilos because most of the things that it picks are things like hamburger cartons and plastic bottles and things like that.

Eve: [00:09:09] So they have different brains. So, what’s the problem that Zen Robotics is trying to solve? Why was the company launched?

Harri: [00:09:17] The company was founded by two old friends of mine and then some waste sorting experts. And the first slogan for the company was that’s basically “let’s do something cool with robots and A.I.” And then they try to figure out what that might be. And they actually did quite a lot of, sort of, small-time projects. I think there was discussions about going to fisheries and make a robot that picks up the dead fish from those containers before they make all the other fish sick. And that’s an interesting challenge in gripping that fish. And then there was another project done for a nuclear power company where the challenge was to, Recycling of these fuel rods that was apparently required some, some high level A.I. So then, at one point my friend, who has often trouble getting sleep in the evening, he was basically just at his home watching TV and there was Discovery Channel on showing images about these staggering piles of waste that’s, that you can find in all around the world. And then he realized that how about applying A.I. to make a robot that actually can sort waste? And it sounded very easy because, of course, you have these industrial robots, and they are not really that expensive. So that’s problem solved. And then there’s already, back then there was equipment that was used to identify materials on a conveyor belt. So, just put those two things together and we will have a robot that sorts trash. And it didn’t turn out quite, to be quite that simple.

Eve: [00:11:16] Simple, yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Sounds simple, but probably not.

Harri: [00:11:20] Yes.

Eve: [00:11:21] So I’m really fascinated by the whole construction industry and how this might impact it. And have you seen a change in approach to recycling materials over the years? And how readily is this being adopted in real estate projects or demolition projects or anything like that?

Harri: [00:11:42] Back when we started, the idea of using robots to sort construction and demolition waste was quite sort of novel. And when we were discussing people, then there was this category of people who were forward-looking. Back then they quickly realized that, actually, this makes a lot of sense and also so that it’s, it should be also quite profitable. And today we are in a situation where pretty much all the recycling industry agrees that robots are one important piece in this puzzle of getting circular economy work. So there’s quite a big, sort of, change in overall attitude. And of course, on the practical side, the waste industry is, first of all, it’s quite conservative. It’s not really the kind of an industry that immediately jumps into all the new things out there. And also the existing waste processing plants are quite large and expensive. So, even if today we would invent something completely sort of ground-breaking, then it would take quite a lot of time before the customers could actually employ it because these new breakthroughs, they don’t make any practical difference. If you have a 20 million, year old plant that you just built last year, and it’s incompatible with that. But now, actually this year, we have seen an opening of two new plants, one here in Helsinki. It’s about 30-40 million Euro plant, and it’s designed around robots. And most of all, the plant is designed to recycle waste so that none of it goes to landfill. And that’s quite a fantastic sort of starting point.

Eve: [00:13:43] That’s amazing. Yeah!

Harri: [00:13:45] And there’s also another plant in Switzerland that’s opened, also this year, and they are employing robots to recycle actually concrete and other inert materials. As you may know, cement industry is one of the biggest CO2 polluters. And the point of their plant is that they will take in concrete, stone and all the other inert mineral materials and then recycle it into something that can be used to make a concrete with less cement in it.

Eve: [00:14:18] Interesting.

Harri: [00:14:19] And that’s also a kind of plant and process that you can’t have without robots because there’s no other way to sort that kind of material.

Eve: [00:14:29] So what countries are at the forefront of this Next Gen recycling trend?

Harri: [00:14:35] I think that the waste industry itself is quite interesting because it’s especially, in C&D, it’s quite a regional industry and there’s a lot of regional differences. And that means that there is not that much competition globally. Because obviously, if you do C&D sorting in Finland, it would be completely unfathomable to just not be competing with companies in the US, for example, because you can’t transfer the waste itself, nor you can really transfer the end results of the recycling. And so, our customer, first customers ended up being the first adopters, essentially, all around the world, which is and has been quite challenging because we are a small company in Finland and our then first customers were, well, one of them was, well, a couple of them on in Central Europe, then one in the U.S., then I believe we have one in Australia and then one in, I think, Singapore or Japan.

Eve: [00:15:49] Oh, interesting. So, I’m Australian, you know, so that’s thumbs up for Australians. So, your company is in Finland, but when you say that customers, do they buy these robots from you? Is that what you’re selling?

Harri: [00:16:03] Yes, we sell the, basically the robots and then our customers are the companies that operate waste sorting facilities. And of course, we are in close cooperation with the companies that design these waste processing plants and processes and equipment.

Eve: [00:16:27] Ok. It’s really interesting. So, you have a fast picker and a heavy picker. And you describe, the heavy picker is really used for the construction industry, and the fast picture is for light boxes and things and like, what’s next? I mean, there must be other pickers in the, I’m a Picker too, but that’s not what we’re talking about. There must be other pickers in the works, right?

Harri: [00:16:58] At this point we have about, I think, maybe 60 arms around the world in production and we are currently scaling up. And it’s really no problem for us of identifying potential new use cases because there’s basically one new potential use case coming up every week. And there’s the, yeah, there’s like, for example, textile recycling is one big area where there are very few existing solutions. And then there’s obviously scrap metal and all that entails.

Eve: [00:17:38] Salvage yards, yeah.

Harri: [00:17:40] Yeah. And then recycling processes for cars and electronics. And there’s the recycling process for used batteries. Like practical problems like if you have a facility that recycles lead acid batteries, then it’s rather straightforward because you strip out the plastic shell and take out the lid and then basically, you’re done. And but then again, in that pile of batteries, you have a used lithium-ion battery, if you put that battery in that process, it may explode there, and that’s going to be a big problem for them. So that’s a typical kind of place where this added complexity of basically the everyday products out there will pose these interesting new challenges to companies that are already recycling things. And then there’s obviously, there’s a potentially very large amount of waste categories that are not really yet recycled at all because there is no economic way of doing it.

Harri: [00:18:51] And construction and demolition waste, there are other ways to do it than with robots. One thing to separate, for example, wood and light plastics from stones is to dunk them in water and then skim what floats. And that kind of works but of course, it makes everything wet, and soon that pool of water itself will be contaminated. And then, of course, there’s manual waste sorters are what are currently used in the quality control of municipal waste and also in construction and demolition waste and pretty much every sort of waste process where there is a significant sort of operation going on. And of course, one of our entries to the market has been that we will reduce the number of manual sorters required. Well, the possibilities are, of course, endless and unlimited. So that has never been our problem. So this picking and sorting is the easiest thing that makes a difference and has commercial value. But of course, after you have a robot that’s good at picking these things, why not use the robot to tear them apart as well?

Eve: [00:20:10] One thing that springs to mind, I saw a amazing show where a woman had an architect design a house for her and they used the wings of a decommissioned airplane for the roof, which was just fascinating, you know? But the fields of decommissioned airplanes are just crazy. I don’t know if anyone’s tackling those.

Harri: [00:20:30] Yeah, that’s also, and I would think that that entails a massive amount of manual labor. I guess a similar use case is decommissioning of ships, which I believe basically happened by, I don’t know, stranding them on a beach somewhere and having them [???]

Eve: [00:20:49] And then they just rust.

Harri: [00:20:51] Yeah. Or then there’s like 200 guys that come with, I don’t know, pliers and angle grinders and that, and put it into tiny pieces and.

Eve: [00:21:02] Interesting.

Harri: [00:21:03] Very, very manual, intensive, and very hazardous work.

Eve: [00:21:07] So I have to ask, what is the economics of this look like for someone who wants to deconstruct a building manually using a robot? Is it cheaper than sending out a crew?

Harri: [00:21:17] Well, I think if you have a building that needs to be decommissioned, then today I’m not really sure if our customers use the robots as a unique selling point, because the point of the robots for our customers is basically just to be able to give you a better price because there’s less, the operation has less cost. And of course, especially in the municipal waste, the regulatory bar is obviously rising constantly, and that obviously applies also to C&D sorting. That means that there are higher sort of regulations for the total operation of demolishing a building because you can’t demolish a building and then just dump it somewhere. So at the end of the day, that, at least it will mean that the prices of putting stuff in landfill, they are quite steeply rising and that forces the operators of these recycling facilities to make their processes more efficient.

Eve: [00:22:30] Interesting, so can you tell me what your team looks like? And you said you’re a small company? What does that look like?

Harri: [00:22:38] In the early, earlier days when a lot of the stuff that we had to do was quite sort of exploratory in nature, then I think I maybe had a 10-person team at that point. And I think we are about 60 persons at the moment. And then nowadays, when our focus is on delivery and maintenance and making sure that our customers get basically, professionally built and maintained equipment, then that means that the role of sort of rocket science is something that is luckily less needed today than five years back, when we still had problems in making sure that the robots actually keep working. And now, at the moment, we are focusing on making sure that our first about 50 customers are happy. And also, my team is now basically focusing on measuring and estimating the performance of the robot. And that’s actually quite a fascinating problem because one thing that people really don’t realize about waste is that waste is extremely hard to measure. The only thing that is easy to measure is to drive a truck on a weigher and notice that there’s 20 tons of waste in the truck. But then again, measuring what’s inside that container. The only known way of measuring it is actually to have some guy come over and take a peek.

Eve: [00:24:10] Interesting. That’s the manual bit, right?

Harri: [00:24:14] Yes. And that’s currently a quite a massive blocker in the waste industry, because if you think of an industrial process, it works because it’s measured. Whereas in the waste industry, it’s a bit difficult to even notice whether the process is actually working well or not. So, if you have a facility that sorts plastic, let’s assume, let’s say that this facility provides 10 tons of HTP plastic a year. So how do you know that there’s actually 10 tonnes of plastic instead of nine tons of plastic and one ton of other stuff? Well, you don’t really know. And of course, you will know if you have a process that really dislikes these contaminants, then you notice that something went wrong when you put into that HTB plastic in the process and you notice that there’s an explosion, then you notice that maybe there was a couple of these nice lithium-ion batteries inside that 10 tons of HDP. And of course, that’s too late. And in order to prevent that, there’s manual checks that are done more or less sort of consistently and the problem of this manual checking is that it’s expensive and it’s also very difficult to get a statistically relevant measure of basically a pile of waste by just a guy eyeballing it. And connection with robots is that the robots actually do look at every single object that comes under their sensors, and they take a really hard look at it and they may determine whether it should be picked or not. And that means that the robots actually can tell you quite a lot of what the customer actually had flowing in his waste process. And there are also some other sorting equipment that can tell that but they are not quite widely used yet, and they definitely are not used at the front gate of these waste processing facilities. So whatever people put in the waste basket that will at some point end up in one of these facilities, and no one really knows what the stuff is, we see one glimpse of it, and we are working in making sure that the robot can actually tell something useful of the waste itself. And over time, it may be that the knowledge of the waste itself, that might even be more valuable to the customer than the sorting result.

Eve: [00:27:00] So, yeah, I always wonder about sorting residential waste, which, I can’t imagine is an exact or efficient process, I think most people probably ignore the guidelines for recycling, and everything ends up being dumped in one place, so it feels like all that waste you’ve got to go back to the beginning.

Harri: [00:27:20] That’s an interesting question about how much people should be sorting at home. And I guess the extremes are that, especially in the US, there’s, in a lot of public places, there’s a big container where you dump everything, and it says that it’s sorted somewhere else. And then another extreme was that I was skiing in Austria some years back and that flat that we rented, it had nine garbage bins.

Eve: [00:27:50] You know, that’s very common in Germany, too. My husband has shared photos of me of these recycling bins and even more so there’s limited hours when you can put glass in them because it might disturb the neighbors.

Harri: [00:28:03] And you need to have nine of these in your kitchen. So, they’re under the sink there’s three, and I don’t know beside the sofa, there’s two and there’s a couple of in the cupboard over there and it’s just complete insanity because if you have nine categories to think of then it just, it’s ridiculous. It will just get people annoyed. And it’s also not efficient at all, because the problem is that you need to have nine different trucks visiting your home, or you have, need to have one truck that has nine compartments. And they all fill at different sort of pace,

Eve: [00:28:41] And you have to have someone who’s diligent enough to fill them properly, right? Yeah, the human element.

Harri: [00:28:46] I don’t mind that because of course, we’ll happily sell robots that fix those issues later on at the plant. But I personally, I think that there’s like, first of all, this bio stuff, leftover food and that should be kept separate because that’s really a nasty thing because it will foul up everything else. And then after that, well, I would say that glass is quite straightforward. Uh, in Finland and other European countries, at least we have this, and I guess in the US too, there’s

Eve: [00:29:26] Some places, not everywhere.

Harri: [00:29:28] Yeah. You’ll return empty bottles, and you get some money back.

Eve: [00:29:32] Yeah.

Harri: [00:29:34] And so that makes sense. And then cardboard and paper, probably. But then if you put people starting to sort of recycle different kind of plastics, then it’s just not going to work.

Eve: [00:29:48] But even the paper like, yeah, some people argue that they put the dirty pizza box in the paper recycling, but it’s dirty, it’s got food in it.

Harri: [00:29:58] Yeah, yeah there’s a lot of this. My wife has also lived in Germany, and she also lived in Switzerland for a while, and they are absolutely sort of fanatic about what the neighbors put in the trash.

Eve: [00:30:12] So recycling is a really big business, and maybe your robots have to develop a sense of smell as well. In the ZenBrain,

Harri: [00:30:20] I felt that for a long time we have all the technology that we will ever need. So, the technology is are not really the difficult bit. The difficult bit is actually finding a customer who can make a business out of a process that has a robot. And for these new areas where they are no working large scale solutions, it’s going to be really hard because they would need quite a massive capital to set up a shop that would produce enough of these, whatever resulting fractions that would be, where the volumes would be so high that using those fractions would be a business for someone else. So, if you want to recycle textiles, I guess recycling textiles itself is not necessarily that hard. Uh, but the problem is that exactly what are you going to recycle, what are your fractions and what’s going to happen to those fractions? And that’s, what are you going to do with, for example, cotton that has been reclaimed from textiles. Do you, like, it would be really stupid to like, incinerate it. It would be even more stupid to put it into a landfill. There’s a company that does these sound insulation panels out of the reclaimed fiber.

Eve: [00:31:45] There’s a company in Pittsburgh that makes fabric and is done very well out of plastics.

Harri: [00:31:49] Yes.

Eve: [00:31:50] So actually, plastics from Haiti, so they’re very, very specific. I don’t imagine they have robots sorting that in Haiti, but that’s what they do. Yeah, interesting. So just to round up, what are some of your favorite success stories, you know, people where things really change because of one of your robots?

Harri: [00:32:14] I would really say that this recently opened facility at one of our customers, Remeo, here in Finland. It has 12 robot arms, and the plant is designed not to send anything to landfill. That’s quite a remarkable achievement.

Eve: [00:32:31] Yeah, that is.

Harri: [00:32:33] And the plant is brand new and it’s quite, sort of, well it’s something else. I’ve seen a lot of waste processing plants and all of them are fascinating in their own manner. But this is something new and it’s enabled by robots, and it has taken us basically 10 years of work to get there.

Eve: [00:32:52] Interesting. So that’s a glimpse of the future for sorting waste. Nothing goes to a landfill.

Harri: [00:32:59] Yep.

Eve: [00:33:00] Well, thank you very much. You’ve been heard to say “lately, I’ve also been up to my elbows in trash”.

Harri: [00:33:07] Yes.

Eve: [00:33:08] So I’m just wondering, are you having fun? Is this interesting work?

Harri: [00:33:13] Yeah. Waste is fascinating because going to a waste plant, well, the first thing you notice basically might be the smell, but the big thing in these waste facilities is the conveyor belt. That’s where the waste is flowing and it’s just mesmerizing. And you’ll see all of the, basically, by-products of humans living, and for some really completely inexplicable reason when we go at the site where our big robots sort construction and demolition waste, there’s, like, uncanny amount of shoes on the belt. Yes. And I just, at some, we looked at data on one of our sites in Norway, and that was only for one day, and I just basically had to calculate the rate of shoes appearing on that line. And the conclusion was that if that rate holds for a month, they will have a ton of shoes. And it’s really like, absolutely amazing because if you go on the belt, it goes like half a meter per second and there’s a shoe and then, whoa, that’s a shoe, and then wait for 10 seconds or a minute, hey, there’s another shoe. But you can’t figure out how many shoes there actually are over a one day, or one week, or one month of production. And that’s the kind of things that’s really…

Eve: [00:34:42] Really fascinating.

Harri: [00:34:43] You never get bored.

Eve: [00:34:45] No. So, I have to ask, are there more women’s or more men’s shoes?

Harri: [00:34:50] We haven’t really made statistics, but I’m actually absolutely positive that at some point, our A.I. will have this built in function in detecting shoes.

Eve: [00:35:02] This is really fascinating. Well, thank you very much for joining me. I really enjoyed it, and I can’t wait to see what you scale up to.

Harri: [00:35:11] Thank you.

Eve: [00:35:11] Wonderful.

Harri: [00:35:12] Yeah, me neither.

Eve: [00:35:17] Smart brains building smart robots to sort trash in very smart ways.Eve: [00:35:24] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Harri Holopainen, ZenRobotics