Confronting Consumerism
Environmental activists in France and the United Kingdom are taking a different approach to tackling waste of resources. Just as the holiday shopping season is getting underway, a movement is targeting consumerism as an attack on the earth’s finite resources. The Black Friday shopping day imported from the United States was marked in France at shopping centers and elsewhere with an action called #BlockFriday. Protesters formed a cordon around stores to prevent access by shoppers. As a member of France’s parliament, Mattieu Orphelin, commented to The Telegraph, “Black Friday celebrates a model of consumption that is anti-ecological and anti-social.”
Concurrently, the latest environmental technology news comes from “Startup Nation Israel.” A company called UBQ Materials has invented a process for turning solid waste into a new composite material that looks and acts like plastic and is recyclable for further reuse up to five times. The process uses the waste left over after recyclable materials have been taken out. The company has been perfecting the process since 2013, through research and testing aimed at making the product “bulletproof,” recognizing the inevitability that it will face doubters.
UBQ material, in pellet and powder form, is being used in commercial trials by customers in the U.S. It has been used in a variety of products such as chairs, tubing, pallets, bins and pavers. During the conversion process, the raw material is reduced to its basic natural components – cellulose, sugars, fibers, lignin – that reconstitute and bind into a new composite sustainable material. The company believes UBQ material will revolutionize waste management worldwide.
UBQ’s current production site in Israel has a capacity to produce 11 million pounds of material annually. A new site is being planned with an annual capacity of 100 million pounds. UBQ also hopes to add sites in the U.S. An Israeli company, Plasgad, produced 2,000 recycling containers to the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority made from UBQ material.
Israeli media reported that UBQ had raised $27 million in venture capital funding to expand research and operations. One investor, Battery Ventures, believes that UBQ’s technology “removes all the past assumptions about waste disposal, providing a robust, energy-efficient and upcycling solution that disrupts what was once inconceivable in a bold new way.” The technology addresses a worldwide problem, because trash is ubiquitous, hence the name UBQ.
Activists in France and scientists in Israel have a common goal: Sustainability.