Eco-Innovation: Fueling The Green Transition In Capitalism
You must have heard the terms “Eco-friendly” or “eco-design.” Now, you might think you are familiar with all the eco-like words. But do you have any idea about “eco-friendly innovation”?
If not, then you are in the right place.
The concept of eco-friendly innovations mainly refers to creating various eco-friendly products. It can also include practice. It just needs to aim to promote sustainability without abandoning your business.
This article will help you learn about eco-friendly innovations, their benefits, and the concept of green architecture.
Moreover, I will also help you learn how to integrate eco-friendly innovations for your business to achieve sustainability.
The Concept Of Eco-friendly Innovations
According to the UN environment definition, eco-friendly innovation is more like a new business approach that can help your business promote sustainability successfully. This approach enables you to practice sustainability throughout the product life cycle.
Moreover, it can help improve a company’s performance and competitiveness.
Eco-innovation helps businesses of all sizes gain new access to the market. In addition, it creates an opportunity to increase productivity and attract new investors to invest in the industry.
In simple words, the concept of eco-friendly innovations helps develop new effective technologies, products, and even business models that are more environmentally friendly.
On the other hand, these eco-friendly innovations can also help reduce energy waste while improving efficiency.
Geothermal, Solar, and wind power innovations can significantly impact sustainability and eco-friendly business practices.
As a business owner, you can find noble ways to manage waste or efficiently utilize energy.
What Is Green Architecture In Cco-Friendly Innovations?
Green architecture plays a pivotal role in eco-friendly innovation and is one of the prime examples of successful eco-friendly innovations.
This concept aims to reduce the negative impact on the environment while constructing buildings. It also works to reduce carbon footprints.
For example, according to green architecture’s principle, sunlight and the site of a building can be utilized in a certain way so that there can be a natural flow of cold wind, heating, and daylighting. Green architecture also promotes better building quality and durable construction structures to reduce waste.
The philosophy behind green architecture is not easily recognizable to the common eye. However, green architecture helps reduce carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency, prioritize safe materials, and manage waste.
Successful Eco-Friendly Innovations
Vertical Farming And Hydroponics
Vertical farming and Hydroponics are known for being eco-friendly and innovative. This section will delve into them and their effectiveness for sustainable living.
The Concept Of Vertical Farming
In vertical farming, you grow your crop vertically by stacking it into layers. This farming is done in a controlled environment, and it allows you to use various technologies, such as LED lights and IoT sensors.
With these eco-friendly innovations, you can manage and control factors like light, humidity, and temperature. You can also grow your crops or plants through Hydroponics, which does not require soil.
You can vertically align the shipping containers and reuse them for farming purposes. This allows you to do vertical farming in warehouses and skyscrapers, which helps increase the scalability of urban agriculture.
The Concept Of Hydroponics
Hydroponics are some eco-friendly innovations for you if you are looking for a soilless method to grow your plants. The plants dissolved into water, which is full of nutrients. The roots deliver the nutrients to the plants.
In summary, Vertical farming and Hydroponics can be space-efficient, allowing you to grow a maximum number of crops in a minimum amount of space.
In both cases, you can use the resources effectively. This helps you take control of water use and reduce your land footprint.
Vertical farming and Hydroponics both solve issues related to metropolitan food needs. The hydroponics model allows urban farmers to grow crops with greater flexibility.
Wind Power
Wind power is known for being a clean and renewable energy source. These eco-friendly innovations can help you to produce energy wind turbines, help harness wind power and generate power with mechanical power.
As we already know, Wind is an exhaustible energy source that allows you to produce electricity without burning fuels. This energy generation doesn’t pollute the air, making it capable of becoming a clean energy source.
The wind turbines with large turbines, smart control, and innovative design play a crucial role in the global shift towards green capitalism.
In 2019, offshore wind farms, or OWFs, installed 10% of new wind power worldwide. By 2025, they are expected to contribute more than 20% to global wind energy.
Electric Vehicles
EVs or Electric vehicles, are one of the eco-friendly innovations in the automobile industry, and they are responsible for reducing carbon footprints on the road.
These electric vehicles require a lower running cost rate than any other petrol vehicle. They also require low maintenance costs, making them convenient and cost-effective.
When petrol and diesel are destroying our planet, electric vehicles can be a suitable solution for you to reduce long-term health effects on the population.
Electric vehicles are also responsible for reducing carbon emissions. In addition to cost-effectiveness and less pollution, you can reduce your environmental impact by charging your vehicles with renewable energy.
Big automobile companies such as Toyota, BYD Motors, Volkswagen, and BMW have taken part in the global shift toward green capitalism.
Plant-Based Packaging
Packaging is responsible for a large amount of waste. According to reports, packaging alone can produce more plastic than the industrial sectors combined.
To reduce this waste, plant-based packaging is considered an eco-friendly innovation.
Sugarcane and other plant-based resources are used instead of fossil fuel-based plastic. This plant-based packaging has a lesser environmental impact than plastic. Moreover, it helps in lowering the carbon footprint.
If you can replenish plant-based packaging while creating a sustainable loop in the system, you can also help reduce waste from the environment.
Orbisk’s Food Waste Monitor
Orbisk is an eco-friendly innovation that can help you handle food waste from your kitchen.
This device has an automated monitoring process, helping you to track how much or how often you throw away food.
Orbisk’s food waste monitor is a potential tool for addressing food waste. It notifies you about how much food is discarded, resulting in savings and an increased profit margin.
These eco-friendly innovations can be effective for the hospitality sector. Hotels and restaurants can monitor how much food is being wasted and how it can be saved.
As for future expansion, the company is considering going beyond kitchens. They plan to introduce their products to a new marketplace and make a difference by managing food waste.
RocketBook’s Reusable Notebook
Rocketbook is a brand known for their eco-friendly innovations. They make smart and reusable notebooks specially designed to reduce paper waste.
These Rocketbooks allow you to share, save, and organize all your notes in cloud services. They support Google Drive, Dropbox, and more, so you can choose for yourself. The app also offers optical character recognition or OCR and app integration.
The design of RocketBook is eco-friendly and innovative. The features will motivate you to ditch the traditional paper. Once you reuse the same page from the notebook, you can simply reduce the overall paper waste.
Each RocketBook can potentially replace up to 100 traditional notebook pages or more.
Climeworks’ Direct Air Capture And CO2 Storage Plant
As an initiative for green economy and sustainability, Climework announced their direct air capture plant to absorb CO2 from their surroundings. Here’s what they have done in their mammoth and orca plants.
Mammoth Plant
Developed by Climeworks, the mammoth plant has become the world’s largest facility to capture direct air. It is in Iceland. The plant’s main goal is to capture carbon dioxide or CO2 from the surrounding area.
The plant can remove over 36000 tons of CO2 each year. After mixing with water, this CO2 is injected underground. Later, through chemical reactions, it turns into rock.
Climeworks claims that it can capture half a million tones of CO2 each year and initiate the same process in other plants.
Orca Plant
Climeworks also developed the Orca plant, which is currently operating from Iceland. This Orca plant is known as the world’s largest direct air carbon capture and storage (DAC) plant.
The function of the Orca is like that of the Mammoth plant; however, this plant can only remove 4000 tones of CO2 per year.
The mammoth plant has more capacity for CO2 removal than the Orca plant. However, DAC storage has been significantly contributing to carbon removal.
GAF StreetBond For Mitigating Urban Heat
For the last 30 years, extreme heat has become one of the most weather-related reasons for death in the US.
To mitigate it, GAF StreetBond can provide support to preserve pavements. By adding urban beautification, GAF has been successful in saving time, money, and resources.
Moreover, it helps in mitigating the entire impact of climate change on the surroundings.
The GAF StreetBond coating comes in 59 colors, which can make cities look beautiful and add more life to asphalt. StreetBonds also has a unique solar reflective additive that can help keep pavement cooler. It lowers the temperature by about 10 to 12 degrees.
These cooling community projects and pavement protection have been useful in mitigating urban heat islands and improving overall sustainability.
Conclusion
Achieving a green economy will always require technological shifts to transform the traditional industry into a sustainable industry. The eco-friendly innovations will add more value to such initiatives.
To achieve the desired outcome, this would require collaboration between industries, private organizations, government bodies, and humans.
So, if you are still looking for ways to transform your business into a sustainable business, you need to think about capitalist approaches.
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