so many of us care a great deal about
the environment at least over here in
Europe back in my home country they can
be a little bit confused but here we do
tend to mostly care about the
environment because we care about the
environment we like to think about
whether there’s something we could do
about it whether there’s something we
can help with aside from just thinking
about it and talking about it so we have
individual actions that we do to try to
consider the environment and let me give
you a couple of examples so my first
example is Earth Hour some of you may
have heard of this it’s coming up in the
next couple of weeks it’s a time when
there’s a coordinated shutdown where
everyone turns off their lights their
electricity and tries to preserve power
for about an hour and as I said it
happens in a coordinated way across the
globe so that people in your local city
would all be doing it at the same time
and because of that it does actually
seem to have an effect you can measure
the decrease in power consumption
because of the fact that everybody’s
turned that their lights off however I
had this realization a couple of years
ago but there were a large number of
people live tweeting Earth Hour
so they were sitting with phones with
laptops unplugged running on battery
power but not thinking through what that
meant about the fact that they were
eventually going to have to plug those
devices back in and of course there was
also power to the servers and the
websites that they were using to send
these messages maybe not so effective
I’ll give you another example I being a
person who has to follow both football
and soccer end up flying across the
Atlantic quite a bit
because of this I have a lot of air
miles and if you go to buy an airplane
ticket these days
you find that there’s often an option to
offset your carbon footprints by paying
a little bit of money now this raises
some really interesting ethical
questions about the fact that there’s a
question about whether it’s you as the
consumer or the airline who should be
really thinking about the carbon miles
but there’s also an issue of should you
just be paying two sways your own guilt
now these examples that I’ve given are
about individual actions so maybe
instead of thinking individually we
should be thinking collectively as a
society about the things that we could
do to help with reducing the carbon
footprint and that’s where I think it’s
important to look at some of the maybe
less obvious things that we could be
doing and the example that I want to
give today is thinking about the
materials that we use to build things
maybe not something you’ve thought about
before but actually concrete and steel
are two very large contributors to our
global carbon footprint how could that
be why is that well it’s because they
have to be processed at very high
temperatures and if something is being
processed at high temperatures you have
to have a lot of power for the power
plants to heat your kilns and your
furnaces and so therefore if you
actually look at a pie chart of the
global carbon footprint each of those
two materials concrete and steel takes
up a chunk that you would find
surprising and in fact if you add those
two together and compare them to the
entire global airline industry the
materials are about three times the size
of the carbon emissions from all of
airfare so that’s good I feel better
now if we want to think about that
global carbon footprints of these
materials then we as materials engineers
are the sorts of people to think about
it but I come from a little bit
different background I’ve actually been
working in biomaterials and
bioengineering and actually did my PhD
studying how bone heals around metal
implants so it’s maybe not an obvious
area for someone like me to be working
on but actually it was at a Materials
Research conference a number of years
ago where I first heard about this I was
at the conference and there were
lunchtime seminars that were supposed to
be general interest and my real interest
was that there was going to be free
pizza so if you’ve ever attended an
academic conference you will know that
they can be exhausting and so the lure
of free pizza was something I could not
resist and I figured I could listen to
the talk whoever it was it was an
environmental minister from Germany and
he was the one who put up these pie
charts showing the global carbon
footprint and showing how materials
which was the subject of the conference
could be playing such a significant
effect so that’s the question what can
we do about that so if we think about
materials through history we know that
early man mostly used natural materials
building shelters would have been using
things like rocks tree branches things
that were found in nature may be
slightly processed like something based
out of clay bricks then we had the
Industrial Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution is when we became really
really addicted to concrete particularly
reinforced concrete and steel so we had
these materials that could do things
that we could never have done before we
could build bridges that spanned very
large bodies of water
we could build towers and skyscrapers
and buildings that we had never
considered previously but we were doing
so at the expense of our environment and
we weren’t really thinking about it the
engineering was very cool and so this
sort of side effect of spending a lot of
our carbon budget on materials didn’t
really truly come up for a long time so
we have this tradition of building with
very carbon intensive materials how can
we innovate how can we think to get away
from that now as engineers we can try to
innovate by making it less carbon
intensive to use these materials and to
keep building the kind of cool things
that we like to build that is a process
that’s going on today there are people
working very hard on making more energy
efficient furnaces so that you can
continue to process concrete and steel
but do so in a way that uses less energy
and is less bad for the environment
however is that really innovation if we
truly want to innovate doesn’t that mean
we have to do something radical and
maybe a little bit different that’s
where the theme of this conference is so
interesting jumping off the shoulders of
giants I have three examples of giants
that I want to talk about too from the
past in one more contemporary so in the
past there was Leonardo da Vinci and da
Vinci is very well known for his
sketchbooks and in his sketchbooks
there are some really interesting flying
machines that he designed based on being
inspired by the anatomy and the flight
of birds my second example from the
history comes just after World War 2
there was a professor at what happens to
be my alma mater University at the
University of Minnesota and this
professor Otto Schmidt had a really
unusual background he had degrees in
both physics and zoology so he was an
early
20th century pioneer in bioengineering
crossing this disciplinary divide and he
coined this term biomimetics
so literally copying nature my third
giant is Julian Vincent who was a
professor and has been one of my mentors
as I’ve come up through my own career
and he and his group wrote a really
seminal paper about the fact that nature
and engineers just do things differently
Engineers as we’ve seen tend to throw
energy at problems whereas nature
doesn’t use as much energy but uses
information well information biology
that’s DNA so in every one of your cells
depending on how you counted and some of
these estimates are a little bit dodgy
something around tens of gigabytes up to
over or tens of megabytes up to over a
gigabyte of information and what is that
information do well the information is
there because you have the DNA it gets
translated into proteins proteins have
many many different functions of which
some of them are really as materials and
you might say wait materials I thought
we were talking about biology but
actually if you look at something like
bone it’s only three percent living
cells
and 97% non living material so don’t
think of bone just as a medical thing
think of it as a structural thing so if
we want to mimic bone we have to
understand how it’s made and so we can
look at that DNA gets expressed as
proteins in particular the protein
collagen which is the most important
structural protein in mammals that
collagen is stretchy and rubbery so we
need something to make it stiffer and
for that we have ions of calcium and
phosphate floating through our system in
our body fluids and those combine and
deposit directly on the College
and that’s bone mineral so you have a
composite structure now where you have
the protein and you have the mineral
each contributing different things but
when you put them together you get
materials that are stiff strong and
tough especially for their weight which
is relatively light and this is the
theme we see all throughout natural
materials that they tend to be
composites which engineers only kind of
figured out in the 1980s when we started
building really cool airplanes with
composite materials nature’s been doing
it this whole time another example of a
composite material that I’m really
interested in is eggshell so you have
this membrane which oh is also collagen
and it’s full of the liquid innards of
the egg and that goes from soft and
squishy to a hard substantive egg in the
chicken in only 18 hours and you know
that that’s a mechanically robust system
because you have to work really hard to
get to your breakfast so we have these
interesting materials and the most
revolutionary thing about them is
actually the fact that they’re made
under near ambient conditions so chicken
temperature not being that different
from room temperature certainly not
anything like what you have if you’ve
got a high temperature furnace in order
to process really high temperature
materials such as concrete and steel so
we have an opportunity here we can make
materials and we can make them in any
shape we want
remember the disadvantage of taking
something like a piece of wood out of
the forest is that the shape of it is
whatever you get you may have kinks in
it you may have changes in the
cross-section there may be knots in the
wood you have no control over that but
if we make a nature mimicking material
like an artificial bone an artificial
eggshell then you can control the shape
of the thing that you make in my lab
that’s what we’re doing right now those
are the two
materials we’re working with and I’m not
going to pretend like we’ve got it all
figured out nature is pretty complicated
but we can actually make chunks of
material that we can test and we can
show that the chemistry and the physical
properties are similar to what is found
in nature to the materials that we’re
trying to copy so here we have this
great opportunity as the society we can
decide that we want to do something
different in order to dramatically
change the carbon footprint by just
saying we’re not going to use these
materials that require high temperature
processing and reformulate our building
and construction industry in order to
focus on materials that are inspired by
nature when we do that we’re really
engineering things and actually that’s a
very important point the base word of
engineering is not engine its ingenuity
[Applause]
the environment at least over here in
Europe back in my home country they can
be a little bit confused but here we do
tend to mostly care about the
environment because we care about the
environment we like to think about
whether there’s something we could do
about it whether there’s something we
can help with aside from just thinking
about it and talking about it so we have
individual actions that we do to try to
consider the environment and let me give
you a couple of examples so my first
example is Earth Hour some of you may
have heard of this it’s coming up in the
next couple of weeks it’s a time when
there’s a coordinated shutdown where
everyone turns off their lights their
electricity and tries to preserve power
for about an hour and as I said it
happens in a coordinated way across the
globe so that people in your local city
would all be doing it at the same time
and because of that it does actually
seem to have an effect you can measure
the decrease in power consumption
because of the fact that everybody’s
turned that their lights off however I
had this realization a couple of years
ago but there were a large number of
people live tweeting Earth Hour
so they were sitting with phones with
laptops unplugged running on battery
power but not thinking through what that
meant about the fact that they were
eventually going to have to plug those
devices back in and of course there was
also power to the servers and the
websites that they were using to send
these messages maybe not so effective
I’ll give you another example I being a
person who has to follow both football
and soccer end up flying across the
Atlantic quite a bit
because of this I have a lot of air
miles and if you go to buy an airplane
ticket these days
you find that there’s often an option to
offset your carbon footprints by paying
a little bit of money now this raises
some really interesting ethical
questions about the fact that there’s a
question about whether it’s you as the
consumer or the airline who should be
really thinking about the carbon miles
but there’s also an issue of should you
just be paying two sways your own guilt
now these examples that I’ve given are
about individual actions so maybe
instead of thinking individually we
should be thinking collectively as a
society about the things that we could
do to help with reducing the carbon
footprint and that’s where I think it’s
important to look at some of the maybe
less obvious things that we could be
doing and the example that I want to
give today is thinking about the
materials that we use to build things
maybe not something you’ve thought about
before but actually concrete and steel
are two very large contributors to our
global carbon footprint how could that
be why is that well it’s because they
have to be processed at very high
temperatures and if something is being
processed at high temperatures you have
to have a lot of power for the power
plants to heat your kilns and your
furnaces and so therefore if you
actually look at a pie chart of the
global carbon footprint each of those
two materials concrete and steel takes
up a chunk that you would find
surprising and in fact if you add those
two together and compare them to the
entire global airline industry the
materials are about three times the size
of the carbon emissions from all of
airfare so that’s good I feel better
now if we want to think about that
global carbon footprints of these
materials then we as materials engineers
are the sorts of people to think about
it but I come from a little bit
different background I’ve actually been
working in biomaterials and
bioengineering and actually did my PhD
studying how bone heals around metal
implants so it’s maybe not an obvious
area for someone like me to be working
on but actually it was at a Materials
Research conference a number of years
ago where I first heard about this I was
at the conference and there were
lunchtime seminars that were supposed to
be general interest and my real interest
was that there was going to be free
pizza so if you’ve ever attended an
academic conference you will know that
they can be exhausting and so the lure
of free pizza was something I could not
resist and I figured I could listen to
the talk whoever it was it was an
environmental minister from Germany and
he was the one who put up these pie
charts showing the global carbon
footprint and showing how materials
which was the subject of the conference
could be playing such a significant
effect so that’s the question what can
we do about that so if we think about
materials through history we know that
early man mostly used natural materials
building shelters would have been using
things like rocks tree branches things
that were found in nature may be
slightly processed like something based
out of clay bricks then we had the
Industrial Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution is when we became really
really addicted to concrete particularly
reinforced concrete and steel so we had
these materials that could do things
that we could never have done before we
could build bridges that spanned very
large bodies of water
we could build towers and skyscrapers
and buildings that we had never
considered previously but we were doing
so at the expense of our environment and
we weren’t really thinking about it the
engineering was very cool and so this
sort of side effect of spending a lot of
our carbon budget on materials didn’t
really truly come up for a long time so
we have this tradition of building with
very carbon intensive materials how can
we innovate how can we think to get away
from that now as engineers we can try to
innovate by making it less carbon
intensive to use these materials and to
keep building the kind of cool things
that we like to build that is a process
that’s going on today there are people
working very hard on making more energy
efficient furnaces so that you can
continue to process concrete and steel
but do so in a way that uses less energy
and is less bad for the environment
however is that really innovation if we
truly want to innovate doesn’t that mean
we have to do something radical and
maybe a little bit different that’s
where the theme of this conference is so
interesting jumping off the shoulders of
giants I have three examples of giants
that I want to talk about too from the
past in one more contemporary so in the
past there was Leonardo da Vinci and da
Vinci is very well known for his
sketchbooks and in his sketchbooks
there are some really interesting flying
machines that he designed based on being
inspired by the anatomy and the flight
of birds my second example from the
history comes just after World War 2
there was a professor at what happens to
be my alma mater University at the
University of Minnesota and this
professor Otto Schmidt had a really
unusual background he had degrees in
both physics and zoology so he was an
early
20th century pioneer in bioengineering
crossing this disciplinary divide and he
coined this term biomimetics
so literally copying nature my third
giant is Julian Vincent who was a
professor and has been one of my mentors
as I’ve come up through my own career
and he and his group wrote a really
seminal paper about the fact that nature
and engineers just do things differently
Engineers as we’ve seen tend to throw
energy at problems whereas nature
doesn’t use as much energy but uses
information well information biology
that’s DNA so in every one of your cells
depending on how you counted and some of
these estimates are a little bit dodgy
something around tens of gigabytes up to
over or tens of megabytes up to over a
gigabyte of information and what is that
information do well the information is
there because you have the DNA it gets
translated into proteins proteins have
many many different functions of which
some of them are really as materials and
you might say wait materials I thought
we were talking about biology but
actually if you look at something like
bone it’s only three percent living
cells
and 97% non living material so don’t
think of bone just as a medical thing
think of it as a structural thing so if
we want to mimic bone we have to
understand how it’s made and so we can
look at that DNA gets expressed as
proteins in particular the protein
collagen which is the most important
structural protein in mammals that
collagen is stretchy and rubbery so we
need something to make it stiffer and
for that we have ions of calcium and
phosphate floating through our system in
our body fluids and those combine and
deposit directly on the College
and that’s bone mineral so you have a
composite structure now where you have
the protein and you have the mineral
each contributing different things but
when you put them together you get
materials that are stiff strong and
tough especially for their weight which
is relatively light and this is the
theme we see all throughout natural
materials that they tend to be
composites which engineers only kind of
figured out in the 1980s when we started
building really cool airplanes with
composite materials nature’s been doing
it this whole time another example of a
composite material that I’m really
interested in is eggshell so you have
this membrane which oh is also collagen
and it’s full of the liquid innards of
the egg and that goes from soft and
squishy to a hard substantive egg in the
chicken in only 18 hours and you know
that that’s a mechanically robust system
because you have to work really hard to
get to your breakfast so we have these
interesting materials and the most
revolutionary thing about them is
actually the fact that they’re made
under near ambient conditions so chicken
temperature not being that different
from room temperature certainly not
anything like what you have if you’ve
got a high temperature furnace in order
to process really high temperature
materials such as concrete and steel so
we have an opportunity here we can make
materials and we can make them in any
shape we want
remember the disadvantage of taking
something like a piece of wood out of
the forest is that the shape of it is
whatever you get you may have kinks in
it you may have changes in the
cross-section there may be knots in the
wood you have no control over that but
if we make a nature mimicking material
like an artificial bone an artificial
eggshell then you can control the shape
of the thing that you make in my lab
that’s what we’re doing right now those
are the two
materials we’re working with and I’m not
going to pretend like we’ve got it all
figured out nature is pretty complicated
but we can actually make chunks of
material that we can test and we can
show that the chemistry and the physical
properties are similar to what is found
in nature to the materials that we’re
trying to copy so here we have this
great opportunity as the society we can
decide that we want to do something
different in order to dramatically
change the carbon footprint by just
saying we’re not going to use these
materials that require high temperature
processing and reformulate our building
and construction industry in order to
focus on materials that are inspired by
nature when we do that we’re really
engineering things and actually that’s a
very important point the base word of
engineering is not engine its ingenuity
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: