Protein bars from recycled plastic bottles? An indoor farm on wheels? Western prof gets innovative with green tech

Semi-transparent panels are affixed atop greenhouses, allowing light through to the plants while supplying energy to keep them warm.

This experimental farm on the outskirts of London, ON, features an indoor farm on wheels, a solar-powered hydrogen electrolyzer and a machine that makes protein bars from recycled plastic bottles – though no one wants to eat one until it passes food toxicity tests.

3D printers whir quietly as teams of students tinker in sheds and labs, collaborating with academics in dozens of countries worldwide through open-source research shared online.

There’s so much going on, it’s difficult to get professor Joshua Pearce to explain each project in depth, let alone pull back to reflect on the larger vision.

“I think of myself as the first ‘Open Source Chair’ in Canada,” he said.

“The collection of students that I have now, if you give us a technical problem, we can almost certainly solve it in the room,” he adds. “And if it looks like it’s going to improve the world in a material way and we have the resources, we’re on it.”

Pearce’s secret sauce is a combination of solar power and 3D printing, which provides virtually free electricity and allows anyone to manufacture custom parts quickly and cheaply.

Together, these technologies can radically alter the economics of virtually any industry.

Pearce, his students and his international collaborators focus on food and health care, hacking the obstacles to human well-being.

“I just see opportunities everywhere — anything that falls in the space of making the world more sustainable and helping out people,” he said.

When the Star visited, Pearce’s team was preparing to conduct one of Canada’s first tests of agrivoltaics, a practice that could revolutionize farming.

The idea is simple: instead of blanketing farmland with solar panels, you intersperse rows of solar with rows of plants. Early experiments in Europe and Japan show that you can actually increase crop yield thanks to the shading provided by the panels, while electricity production rises due to the cooling effect from the plants.

The solar power subsidizes the farm’s costs, reducing the need for fossil fuels and cutting emissions. Rather than having to choose between farming and a solar farm, agrivoltaics lets you have both.

“Energy costs are the biggest challenge anywhere in the world,” said Pearce. “Working with agrivoltaics extends the growing season, reduces water consumption and adds climate resilience.”

The game changer Pearce and his team have brought to agrivoltaics is wooden mounts for the solar panels, which drop the price of the solar installation by up to 75 per cent. Their designs have gone through several iterations in collaboration with researchers around the world.

“We make all of our own tools. To make them cheaper, we share them with everybody else. And then everybody else fixes things and feeds them back to us, which is how we get the speed. So the more we share, the more we get back,” he said.

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Pearce is appointed to both Western University’s Engineering Department and its Ivey Business School, and brings his revolutionarily collaborative approach to both academic fields. It starts with a wholesale rejection of patents.

“We’re showing the next generation of MBA students that this is how you can make money. There are proven business models that actually work, but they’re different than the typical ‘I’m going to make something then not let anybody else do it for 20 years.’ Instead, it’s: ‘I want to make something so good that other people want to join in.’ ”

Typically, if you want to commercialize a product, you patent it and licence it to a company to manufacture. But Pearce said we should emulate the software industry, where virtually everything is built on open source code so that different companies can build on each other’s work.

“You get a really fast innovation churn and it drops the cost,” he said.

Pearce’s team also works in the field of medical equipment, where they’ve developed an EKG machine and a fracture table — a specialized stretcher used for surgery — that can be 3D printed from plans available free online.

“If I can drop the cost of things by a factor of 100, that will be good even here in Canada. But if you’re talking about anywhere else in the world that doesn’t have much money, this is a way to get to much lower costs, more accessible and still high quality devices.”

Using the design they’ve developed, a fracture table which normally costs a hospital $200,000 can be built for $3,000.

It “has all the bells and whistles,” said Pearce. “It can do baby birthing, every kind of surgery you could possibly want: leg stuff, arm stuff. It can tilt to any angle. ”

“It has one weakness, that it’s not electric powered. So if you want to move it up and down, you’ve got to turn a crank.”

Working with researchers and medical practitioners in Uganda, the fracture table is now on its 2nd version, with several modifications.

Back in the lab, graduate student Riya Roy monitors a 3D printer making components from recycled plastic. Asked why she chose to study under Pearce, she doesn’t hesitate.

“He is not content with merely advancing scientific knowledge; he is driven by a deep-seated desire to use that knowledge and push the boundaries to improve the lives of people everywhere,” she said. “He embodies the spirit of turning impossible dreams into reality, into feasible solutions.”