[theme music fades in]
[fades out]
Taylor: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We’re highlighting the latest in clean energy research and innovations happening at the lab. It’s Wednesday, October 18. I’m Taylor Mankle.
Kerrin: And I’m Kerrin Jeromin.
Taylor: As you know Kerrin, NREL is situated in the foothills of the beautiful Rocky Mountains.
Kerrin: That it is. I love the views We’ve got great views of those beautiful foothills. Well, not from here inside the soundbooth, but other spots in the office you can see them and it’s stunning.
Taylor: Totally, but while you and I are here in bustling Golden, Colorado, NREL has multiple campuses, and I want to take you up to our Alaska Campus in Fairbanks, previously called the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. There, NREL researchers are working on some difficult challenges in a unique and pretty remote part of the world.
Kerrin: Absolutely. NREL's Alaska campus research focuses on the built environment, including building-science research, sustainable home design, and social and economic research. Central to its mission is engaging with local and Indigenous people to incorporate traditional knowledge into technology solutions.
Taylor: Alaska's extreme climate—combined with its remote communities, lack of infrastructure, and abundant renewable resources—offers tremendous opportunities to solve the sustainability challenges faced by the rest of the world. And our story today is about the Native Village of Gakona, located about 200 miles south of Fairbanks. Here, NREL researchers are working with seven homeowners to improve the health, safety, and energy-efficiency of their homes.
Kerrin: Yeah these homeowners, and many others Alaska Native communities, face enormous challenges when it comes to energy, housing, and health, despite having a rich culture and knowledge of the land. More than 3,000 households in rural Alaska still lack running water and wastewater. Alaska Native elders and children suffer from the highest rates of upper respiratory distress in the United States, in part due to housing that was not designed for the local climate.
Taylor: Right, housing that was not built for Alaska’s extreme weather. Alaska Native people traditionally lived in seasonal shelters, but in the late 20th century they moved into prefabricated homes provided by the federal government. And the homes just can’t stand up to the climate—causing mold to grow, foundations to shift, and more.
Kerrin: When those new homes were introduced, many families received no training on how to operate or maintain them, which caused those problems you mentioned, Taylor.
Taylor: Derrick Sinyon, the environmental coordinator for the Native Village of Gakona, talked with NREL writer Molly Rettig about this learning curve.
Derrick Sinyon: We knew that a lot of our tribal members didn’t have the resources to be able to fix their homes, nor the education. Because you know it does take skill in learning to maintain a home. People don’t really realize that. I knew there was a need for it out here.
Taylor: So NREL, working through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Healthy Homes program, is assisting locals in Gakona with training and improving the homes that are in their village.
Kerrin: Vanessa Stevens, a scientist at NREL’s Alaska Campus who is overseeing the Gakona Healthy Homes project, said that while new technologies play a key role in the clean energy transition, it is also critical to improve what is already there.
Taylor: And while much of NREL’s work is doing groundbreaking research and development that will move us through the energy transition, NREL’s Alaska Campus focuses on deploying those technologies to get them in the hands of frontline communities that need them now.
Kerrin: Now, being the key word there. Effects of climate change is a daily reality in Alaska. The region is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and many Alaska villages are already losing their homes and schools to erosion of the ground and warming permafrost. Gakona is no exception.
Taylor: While typical homes on permafrost are elevated, the homes in Gakona sit directly on the ground. For some locals, this can cause major foundation problems. For Roselyn Neeley, the ground underneath her house has thawed and settled, causing the foundation walls to sink and slump inward. This has created a bow in the middle of her house and thrown everything out of level.
Kerrin: Neeley told NREL researchers that because the floor level is off, her doors and windows don’t shut properly, and there’s mold and rot in those areas. The foundation, it seems obvious to say, is really foundational to a good home.
Taylor: It is! And through the Healthy Homes program, Neeley’s house has been properly leveled.
Contractor: We made everything nice and plumb. All the beams are nice and straight. They’re not twisted. Some of the beams underneath there had to be completely replaced. We were able to take them out and install new beams where they had bent in half due to the compression bow on those lumbers.
Kerrin: That was the contractor on the leveling crew talking about what they did for Neeley’s home. You can hear the work happening there in the background. This program is really impacting the lives of people today! Science sometimes feels like a far-away thing, theory and books … but in this case, NREL researchers are bringing solutions to people—now.
Taylor: Absolutely and, like you said, it has an immediate difference for the families living in them, but it also has research value–long-term value–as well. The techniques being used to stabilize foundations, improve air quality, and reduce energy use will inform the next generation of technologies that will be deployed in rural communities and extreme environments nationwide.
[interstitial music]
Kerrin: Taylor, its a big day here on Transforming Energy. We have another special correspondent segment for this episode! We had Nataleah Small join us last month to talk about NREL’s community, and today we’re welcoming Jason!
Taylor: That’s right! We have Jason Youngstrom joining us today. Jason is a librarian at NREL who has his finger on the pulse of publications across the lab. He’s joining us to talk about some rather complex research happening at the lab. Hi Jason!
Jason: Hi, Kerrin; hi, Taylor. I’m so glad to be here today.
Kerrin: Excited to have you here, Jason, you are joining us with information about plastics recycling and NREL’s work to create a circular economy.
Jason: As a librarian at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, my friends ask me all the time about fascinating science we are doing here. And I’ll often talk about our thrilling grid-modernization work or a novel solar cell chemistry (and yes, I am very popular at parties). But lately, I’ve been talking about something much more personal: Wishcycling.
Taylor: Wishcycling, you say?
Jason: Yeah, wishcycling. We’ve all experienced it. You are holding something in your hand, making the decision to recycle, compost, or trash it. If you have doubts about whether it’s recyclable (and we all have those doubts!) our system is designed for you to recycle it and let the experts make the call. Honestly, I do this all the time. That one decision, made millions a time a day, creates the bulk of the work of the recycling system in the United States. That item is intermingled with the rest of the recycling and is then picked out at a facility that is dealing with tons of material, then it’s eyeballed and sorted. Our quest to make recycling easy for consumers effectively throws the needle in the haystack for the professionals to find. This is a problem that NREL is approaching in several ways.
At the personal level, there is a staff driven program to recycle plastics labeled 3–7. That familiar triangular code on plastics represents recyclable potential. In practice the probability that a particular item is recycled is very different depending on the number. That disposable soda bottle in your backpack and the milk jugs in the fridge are made of Polyethelene terephthalate (PET) that’s labeled No. 1. and high-density polyethelyene is labeled No. 2. These are some of the most recycled plastics, but they are still thrown away at alarming rates. Unfortunately, most single-use plastics do not get recycled. The sorting program at NREL aims to capture all types of plastic waste before they hit the landfill, sending them directly to facilities that can recycle them. Even with the sorting and collection though, the next step for some of these plastics faces two major problems. There are still very few industrial uses for some of these plastics, and the processes for recycling are very sensitive to contamination. And, they produce a recycled material that is less and often has a lower performance than the original plastic.
To address these systemic issues, NREL is turning its considerable experience in biofuels to the problem of plastic waste. NREL has worked with enzymes and bacterium to chemically alter various feedstocks from sawdust to corn stover into better biofuels. Now we are using those same strategies to break down and upcycle plastics. NREL is leading the Department of Energy’s BOTTLE Consortium, of course that’s an acronym, “Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of the environment.” BOTTLE. Our research focuses on two aspects of the problem. One, develop upcycling technologies that creates value for these materials and incentives to recycle, and two: redesigning plastics to be more recyclable by design.
This circular economy is the end goal, making sure that every plastic that is produced has a viable path to reuse from the start. In the meantime, we are working to make recycling today’s plastics commercially viable, from the plastics collection stations on the NREL campus, to the groundbreaking research of the BOTTLE consortium.
Kerrin: Wow, this sounds like really complex but incredible work!
Jason: Isn’t it? This mix of individual action, short term problem-solving and visionary reimagining is just another day at NREL. And, today is National Bioenergy Day! Making this research all the more relevant.
Taylor: Love it, thanks for sharing, Jason! And Happy Bioenergy Day!
Kerrin: Yes, thanks so much Jason! Great to have you join us.
[interstitial music]
Taylor: Our last story is all about keeping a childlike sense of curiosity.
Kerrin: I love living that. Never grow up. It’s a trap. More a way to live than a science story, huh?
Taylor: Well, it’s got plenty of science, but I think there are some life lessons to learn there. Science and curiosity go hand-in-hand for Malik Hassanaly.
Kerrin: As a computational science researcher, Hassanaly works in uncertainty quantification, machine learning, and computational fluid dynamics. All things that have him asking “why” and thinking about things differently.
Taylor: Not just thinking about things differently but working in really different research areas. His computational science work spans many different areas at NREL like solar energy, wind energy, bioenergy, energy storage, and cybersecurity.
Kerrin: Totally, and that broad range of topics and approaches is really helpful for research.
Malik Hassanaly: I think that that definitely helps on the scientific perspective from a scientific point of view, being able to link different ideas, different applications, that's something that is always helpful to design your next set of methods. But I would say from up from a more practical perspective, having a broader understanding of what are the use case of computational science, this helps put your work into better context.
Kerrin: That was Hassanaly. He says working on topics he is not familiar with might help him think of familiar problems differently or might allow him to bring a perspective to a new problem that other researchers benefit from. Often something we’re faced with as science communicators at the lab, right Taylor?
Taylor: Exactly! It’s just such a great way to approach not just science, but life!
Kerrin: There is a great article that goes in depth on the ins-and-outs of Hassanaly’s research. You can check it out on NREL.gov. The story also talks about something interesting I’d like to point out here, how he developed an algorithm to optimize guest seating at his wedding. How appropriate, leading us into this next story which is the most important one of all.
[wedding music]
Kerrin: [sings with the music] Okay, I’ll just let the sound effects do the work here. Taylor, you’re getting married! I’m so excited to share this. By the time everyone hears this episode you will be a married man.
Taylor: That’s right! I sure wish I knew about Hassanlay’s seating chart algorithm earlier …
Kerrin: We won’t embarrass you too badly but from all of us on the podcast team—our amazing team of producers Allison, David, Kaitlyn, and from me, of course—we just want to say congratulations. We’re so happy for you and this exciting time of your life.
Taylor: Thank you so much everyone, it’s a very exciting time and I’m so excited to marry my partner of five years, Jessie. We’ve had a long journey up to this point and I’m so happy to finally make it fully official.
Kerrin: And to our listeners, hop on our social media to share your well wishes with Taylor— we are NREL or National Renewable Energy Laboratory on most social platforms. Drop a fun gif or something. You can also email us to learn more about the podcast or provide episode suggestions, drop us a line at podcast@nrel.gov. Seriously Taylor, congratulations. We’re all excited for you.
Taylor: If you really care, give us a positive review on your favorite podcast app, wherever you’re finding us. Thanks again and we’ll be back in two weeks with more news from the lab.
[theme music]
Taylor: This episode was adapted from NREL articles from September 2023 authored by Molly Rettig and Justin Daugherty. Special thanks to correspondent Jason Youngstrom. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift B-C. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land.
[theme music]