Without cooling, the supply of food, medicine and data would simply break down. We consume large amounts of energy and cause a great deal of pollution keeping things cool yet compared to electricity, transport or heat, cold has received very little attention in the energy debate; neither the UK, USA nor the EU yet has an explicit policy on cold.

Global demand is booming – and incremental efficiency improvements are unlikely to contain the resulting environmental damage. We need radically new technology.

In rapidly developing nations investment in cooling is starting to boom as rising incomes, urbanisation and population growth boost demand. But the industry remains rudimentary and has enormous headroom to grow: in India, just 4% of fresh produce is transported in refrigerated vehicles currently compared to more than 90% in the UK; China has an estimated 66,000 refrigerated vehicles to serve a population of 1.3 billion, whereas France has 140,000 for 66 million. But these disparities seem unlikely to persist. India projects that it needs to spend more than US$15 billion on the cold chain over the next five years.

For industrial use, cold must generally be maintained through a whole supply chain – think of how seafood can remain frozen from trawler to supermarket. We call this the cold chain.

Cold chain growth is currently based on diesel-powered technologies that produce grossly disproportionate emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM). The fridge you might find on a supermarket home delivery van consumes up to 20% of the vehicle’s diesel, but emits up to six times as much NOx and 29 times as much PM as the engine. It also uses HFC refrigerants harmful to the atmosphere.

At the same time, however, vast amounts of cold are wasted, for example when liquid natural gas (LNG) is turned back into gas at import terminals. This cold could potentially be stored as liquid air or liquid nitrogen then recycled to reduce the cost and environmental impact of cooling in buildings and vehicles.

This insight has stimulated new thinking aimed at creating business and environmental value from the efficient integration of cold into the wider energy system, now known as the “cold economy”. The cold economy crucially involves the recycling of waste cold and “wrong-time” energy such as excess wind power generated at night when demand is low to provide, through novel forms of energy storage, low-carbon, zero-emission cooling and power.

Big changes in the energy market over the next decade will spur the adoption of tidal power, solar power, offshore wind and other novel technologies. This in turn will require far greater integration of different forms of energy generation and consumption – and it is increasingly clear this now means joining up not only heat, power and transport, but also cold.

This is an important opportunity: with the right support, the cold economy could develop into a large industry that simultaneously reduces greenhouse gas emissions, improves air quality and replaces environmentally destructive refrigerants with benign alternatives – as well as generating thousands of new manufacturing jobs.

The cold economy is the subject of a new policy commission entitled Doing Cold Smarter, launched by the University of Birmingham this month. It will assess not only how the growing demand for cooling can be met without causing environmental ruin, but also the potential benefits both in the UK and emerging markets.

What will we come up with? You’ll have to wait until the commission’s final report is published this autumn. But it should be full of thought provoking – even cool – ideas.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Final details of Apple’s new smartwatch have finally arrived at the firm’s glitzy Spring Forward event. But while the hype machine steps up another notch, there are other issues regarding health and self-tracking and, possibly even more important, over wearable tech companies’ interest in our emotional lives.

Apple’s Watch records exercise, tracks our movements throughout the day, assesses the amount of time we are stood up and reminds us to get up and move around if we have been sat for too long – let’s not forget Tim Cook’s “sitting is the new cancer” line. It achieves this by means of an accelerometer, a heart rate sensor, WiFi and GPS. There are already many smartwatches on the market such as the Pebble and offerings from LG, Sony, Samsung and Motorola, among others. Of course, these haven’t had the Apple marketing Midas touch.

Whether the Watch will be a flop or success, Apple’s entry is a significant contribution to industry-wide attempts to get us using wearable devices. The market is predicted to grow from 9.7m units in 2013 to 135m in 2018, according to CCS Insight, while a report from UK retailer John Lewis also records steady growth in wearables for health and well-being: sales were up 395% from 2013. This is notable because John Lewis is not aimed at the tech-savvy, and therefore presents a reasonable indicator of mass-market take-up of wearables.

Information is power

To understand the significance of Watch and other self-tracking wearables, we should look to Silicon Valley and the Quantified Self movement. This began in San Francisco around 2007 as the editors of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, initiated a group of like-minded people interested in “self-knowledge through numbers”, a motto and philosophy of sorts for the Quantified Self movement. It entails a deeply libertarian outlook of de-centralisation, a shrunken state, autonomy and self-reliance, and pre-emptive and preventative measures based on the use of data.

Apple’s move into wearables is inevitable as the market grows, but the broader interest in health is also notable. It reflects an interest from corporations and national health providers alike in promoting preventative and anticipatory technologies. The promise wearable technology offers is information: about consumers’ and patients’ behaviour, their health, and whether they stick to prescribed treatments.

This has ushered in an age of medical self-interrogation, in real time and real life contexts, whether this be from office pressure, in relationships, or the impact of disease or physical stresses on the body. Wearables are only part of the health story, as advocates of digital health care foresee how the doctor-patient approach would be radically altered by means of wearable monitors and sensors in the home. Technology behemoths such as Apple and Google alongside many startups would clearly be interested in the possibilities offered by reorganising health provision along these lines.

Think and act

Beyond health, Apple’s interest in emotion is key to understanding the significance of its watch. Apple’s website promises that we will reach out and connect in ways we never have. Watch will allow us to draw doodle pictures and observe others as they create theirs, give loved ones a “tap” on the wrist to show we are thinking of them, send real-time heartbeats to others, and so on.

The message is to use connectivity to be intimate even at a distance, with the language Apple uses an attempt to claim intimacy and sociability from afar, and to humanise and make palatable what are essentially tracking technologies.

There is however a more literal emotional dimension to biometric technologies: the Watch is an example of what I term empathic media – machines able to assess, collect and make use of data about our emotions. This can be achieved through interpretation of speech patterns and tone, gesture, gaze direction, facial cues, heart rates, and respiration patterns. While Apple’s product does not offer all this (although earlier iterations of Watch made similar promises), it still sits within a wider context of technologies that quite literally feel our bodily reactions.

Until now the online world has understood our preferences through the search term keywords we use and what we click; empathic media will quite literally feel our reactions. This is important because if companies can understand moods, emotions or states of arousal, they have access to information that may sway the decisions we make.

We have yet to see Apple’s privacy policy for the watch. While I’m sure it will state that no personally identifiable information will be disclosed to third-parties, what remains to be seen is what can be drawn from aggregated biometric and emotional data, and where that data ends up. This is a key revenue stream for other empathic media and wearable companies. Will Apple be doing the same?

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We’re in the midst of fevered discussions about communications and security. Cybertarian campaigners want to stop collusion between corporations and governments to intercept citizen chat; attention-grabbing adolescents at Anonymous want to disrupt murderers who dislike mockery of their principal prophet and the gilt-edged grown-ups in national security services want to listen in on plans to revenge such blasphemy.

But away from these dramatic debates over speech, privacy, the state, a less exciting conversation is underway, beyond the third-sector moralism of cybertarians, the attention span of adolescents, and the Olympian speechifying of spymasters. This conversation touches on security and communications in a less spectacular way.

Do you know what your old phone is up to?

Electronic waste (or e-waste) is the largest source of materials left in municipal dumps around the world.

A high proportion of it is derived from the gadgets you are reading this article on: phones, tablets, and computers, which quickly move from being vital sources of everyday life to discarded garbage once an upgrade becomes available. Where did that old fat-screen analogue television go when it was replaced by the slim, flat-screen digital version? Where are those phones you threw out?

A vast proportion of these deadly gizmos, with their lethal cocktails of carcinogenic gases and chemicals, end up being unsafely recycled by the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Pre-teen girls in Chinese and Indian villages are expert at the dangerous work of extracting recyclable minerals from our detritus.

Increasingly, of course, the trade in e-waste is domestic. Asian middle classes are booming and as keen as their so-called “Western” counterparts to fetishise the fresh and new by dumping the toxic and the old in the villages and bodies of the desperate. The result is horrendous disease, a poisoned water table, and drifting air pollution.

Because this trade occurs in what is politely known as “the informal sector” – translation, where there are no taxes, benefits, health and safety protections, or retirement payments – it is difficult to trace the precise dimensions of e-waste. But the International Telecommunication Union, a technology booster if ever there was one, acknowledges the existence of a problem as annual amounts reach a reported 53 million metric tonnes (2013), with an additional 67 million metric tonnes sold in various forms.

And after recycling? E-waste ends up in some very interesting places.

E-waste in the military

Two years ago, the Pentagon and the US Senate Armed Services Committee reported that vital components of the nation’s military hardware routinely include “counterfeit” electronic materials, from China (70%), the UK (11%), and Canada (9%). The Pentagon defines counterfeiting as recycled materials wrongly sold as new, or misuse of others’ intellectual property.

Often these counterfeits come from recycled e-waste – the committee estimated more than a million counterfeit parts were in service in US planes. It’s no surprise much of this can be traced back to China, where counterfeiting operates at an industrial level, with factory floors populated by thousands of workers dedicated to the task.

Take the Boeing P8 Poseidon, a plane used by the US Navy to drop torpedoes, depth charges and carry surveillance equipment. In 2011, Boeing reported it had discovered a faulty ice detection system in the aircraft, according to the senate committee report. Further investigation revealed the part was previously used, and made to appear new.

After tracing the parts through companies in California and then Florida, it turned out the ice detection equipment had originally come from “an affiliate of A Access Electronics in Shenzhen, China.” And before that? Who knows? Investigators from the senate committee wanted to find out but were denied Chinese visas.

Now the story is in the news again. Forbes has just published a column on the topic as did National Defense magazine, an obvious mouthpiece for the military industrial complex. The principal beneficiaries of the complex are warning that this malfeasance continues unabated, and at a massive level, despite 2012 legislation designed to quell it.

The senate committee report refers to “risks to national security and the safety of US military personnel” posed by this trade in counterfeit e-waste. There is no mention of the risks posed to people all over the world by the United States’ very use of matériel, of course.

But the fact that e-waste is on the agenda in such powerful quarters bodes well for real reform towards managing it properly.

The technology is available to recycle our electronic pleasures in a much safer way than is generally the case. In many instances, laws exist to mandate that. What we need is proper use of the technology and serious enforcement of such legislation. But beyond that, we need an end to the built-in obsolescence and advertising-fuelled clamour surrounding innovation.

It would help if the cybertarians, adolescents, and spies were able to let go of their shared obsessions for a moment and question the very devices and systems on which they rely for their self-anointed roles. Then they might recognise that the much-vaunted internet of things is also and equally an internet of junk.

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