Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World

From Wi-Fi to power stations, roads to pipelines, our infrastructure is stressed. Built for a climate that no longer exists, our systems are failing at an increasing pace. But to fix what’s broken goes beyond structural repair — we also need to address the inequities baked into our infrastructural systems and injustices from past developments. Amid these challenges, we have the chance to reimagine the future of infrastructure for a better world. On this episode of Solve for X, we sit down with Deb Chachra, author of the new book How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, to rediscover the hidden beauty of infrastructure and how we can harness the collective power these systems bring to our lives.

Featured in this episode:

• Deb Chachra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Her work spans across multiple disciplines, including engineering education, gender issues, materials science and the intersection of technology and culture.

Further Reading:

• It’s time for a radical rethink on Canada’s infrastructure planning
• How changes in building infrastructure can truly combat climate change
• How infrastructure has historically promoted inequality
• New report finds costs of climate change impacts often underestimated
• Three Infrastructure Issues To Solve In 2023

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com.

The future of the automobile is electric. Yet the surge in electric vehicles raises critical concerns regarding battery creation, disposal and recycling. What will happen once all those cars reach the end of the road? In this episode of Solve for X, we address the environmental footprint of EV batteries, confront the challenges posed by the existing regulatory landscape and highlight opportunities for second-life applications. It turns out that batteries are capable of more than you might expect, and can teach us a lot about how to design for the future.

Featured in this episode:

• Andy Latham is the founder and CEO of Salvage Wire, an auto recycling consultancy based in the United Kingdom. As an automotive engineer and entrepreneur, he teaches auto salvagers how to safely handle EV batteries, aiming to promote advancements in auto recycling globally.
• Jessica Dunn is a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Her research looks at the potential of recycling and repurposing of lithium-ion batteries.
• Claus Eckbo is the owner and director of God’s Pocket Resort, an off-grid scuba lodge in British Columbia that uses repurposed EV batteries for both energy generation and storage.
• Edward Chiang is the co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy. The company’s innovative solution converts electric vehicle batteries into sustainable energy storage systems for microgrid, commercial and industrial customers.

Further Reading:

• Canada is pouring billions of dollars into the electric vehicle industry
• Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries?
• Guiding Principles for EV Battery Recycling Policy
• God’s Pocket Scuba Diving Resort Goes Green with Moment Energy
• How old electric car batteries could power the future

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com.

Wastewater, the world’s dirty (not so little) secret, consumes nearly 3 percent of the global electricity demand. It’s a staggering statistic, and yet much of what actually happens with wastewater remains a mystery. Treatment plants typically purify water by infusing it with oxygen, creating an environment where bacteria can break down waste. But without proper sensors or data, the method is incredibly energy-intensive. Plus with an influx of unregulated chemicals, our waste streams are becoming more toxic and harder to clean. In this episode of Solve for X, environmental microbiologist Patrick Kiely shares his unusual solution that harnesses the power of bacteria to help solve our wastewater problem. Unpleasant yet fascinating, Kiely’s work offers a glimpse into what it takes to clean our water and why treating wastewater is the next big climate problem.

Featured in this episode:

• Patrick Kiely is the CEO and founder of SENTRY, a real-time monitoring biosensor system for wastewater treatment. With extensive training in environmental microbiology, his unique knowledge of bacterial growth across diverse environments forms the basis for advanced decision-making in water and wastewater technologies.

Further Reading:

• How tackling wastewater can help corporations achieve climate goals
• Phosphorus saved our way of life — and now threatens to end it
• “Water scarcity on a scale that we haven’t seen before” is coming
• The energy sector should care about wastewater
• Government of Canada backs innovative company pioneering new wastewater treatment technology

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com.

The next pandemic — it’s a question of when not if. Climate change is shifting the patterns of how and where diseases spread, and our insatiable love of travel means that viruses are now showing up in places they’ve never been before. Forecasting future outbreaks is becoming increasingly complex. But as infectious disease specialist Kamran Khan explains, this is where AI can help. Machine learning algorithms can detect patterns in data, model risk and project outcomes — and unlike humans they can work 24 hours a day. In this episode of Solve for X, host Manjula Selvarajah sits down with Khan to explore the connections between infectious disease and climate change — and how we can best harness the technology to help us prepare.

Featured in this episode:

• Kamran Khan is an infectious disease physician and founder and CEO of BlueDot, a startup that has created a tool that maps the spread of infectious diseases. BlueDot’s AI software uses natural language processing to interpret global health outbreak reports, integrating this data with flight patterns, demographic statistics, and human verification processes to alert and monitor disease risks worldwide.

Further Reading:

• My Prediction: We’re due for another global health emergency
• Over half of known human pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change
• This AI will help us get ahead of the next pandemic
• From Gateways to Sentinels: How Airports Can Use Detection to Control Infection
• An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com.

Trees have an incredible ability to absorb carbon — which means protecting, planting and restoring forests are a (relatively) easy way to address global warming. Climate change, however, is making it more complicated. Our forests are (quite literally) going up in smoke, which has far worse consequences than one might expect. In this episode, we explore the role forests play in carbon sequestration, how increasingly intense fires are threatening to turn them into a carbon bomb, and how technology (think drones, satellites and lasers) can assist in our replanting and conservation efforts. The forests have helped us, it’s time to help them.

Featured in this episode:

• Lola Fatoyinbo-Agueh is a NASA scientist. Working in the biospheric sciences lab, she studies forest ecology and ecosystem structure, using LiDAR to GEDI (more on that later) to map and measure the amount of carbon sequestered by trees.
• Faisal Moola, a biologist. He’s an associate professor at the University of Guelph, and an expert on forest conservation, biodiversity (conducting inventory of areas using drones) as well Indigenous partnerships. He helps us understand what we’ve done in the past to hurt forests, and how we can heal them.
• Amy Cardinal Christianson is a fire research scientist, who specializes in Indigenous fire stewardship and talks about the role of fire in the overall health of trees. She is also a host of a podcast called “Good Fire.”
• Stephen Elliott is the co-founder and research director of the Forest Restoration Research Unit of Chiang Mai University (FORRU-CMU) in Northern Thailand. He works with communities in replanting efforts and has a particular interest in automated forest restoration.

Further Reading:

• How to build forests to combat climate change
• Tree Planting Is Booming. Here’s How That Could Help, or Harm, the Planet
• One of Canada’s biggest carbon sinks is circling the drain
• Climate change could expand forests. But will they cool the planet? | Science
• Drone-based technology remotely assesses health of trees impacted by climate change
• Landsat’s Critical Role in Forest Management

The Mission from MaRS initiative was created to help scale carbon reducing innovations by working to remove the barriers to adopting new technology. Mission from MaRS thanks its founding partners, HSBC, Trottier Family Foundation, RBC Tech for Nature and Thistledown Foundation. It has also received generous support from Peter Gilgan Foundation, BDC, EDC and Mitsubishi Corporation Americas. Learn more about the program at missionfrommars.ca.

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com.