During the Envirocare Green Awards 2021 event Dr Sarit K. Das, ITT Roorkee, held his key note on the topic of Innovation & Sustainability. His presentation was packed with innovative ideas and solutions for a sustainable future, green innovations leapfrogging our massive global problems today. The measures are meant to help creating a sustainable environment for us as well as our future generations.
Dr Sarit Kumar Das, Doctorate in Hydrolitics & Water Resources, is a scientist specialized in Environmental Engineering, with international experioence and international publications. He is consultant of Sikkim Government. He wants to establish a global network of sustainable professionals.
Dr Das emphasized that we have a lot of environmental problems today and that it is necessary to develop tools that bring us forward to a sustainable future. Inspired by his grandfather, the Dreams of Greens paper and some of his professors and scientists he met during his studies, his research activities were driven and he was searching for solutions on major problems of our days like climate change, air pollution, waste management etc.
"We do innovation every day", he stated, "but to find really sustainable solutions is not easy." He described 10 major challenges we have and some sustainable innovations for these. Dr Das complete presentation you can find on Envirocare Labs YouTube.
The Path to NetZero emission
This is a quite complicated and complex topic that asks not only for clean energy that can be delivered by renewables as solar, wind and tidal power but also energy efficient buildings are needed. But this is by far not enough and there are a lot more things to think about and there are bottlenecks, too!
Using key innovations (renewables) and natural resources in a way that does not exhaust them but only in a way that they can regenerate, some innovative products are already on the market. Dr Das presented r.g. geothermal boilers or air conditioning on solar or salt water basis. But he stated that sometimes it is necessary to leapfrogging to achieve SDGs and NetZero in an effective way.
Solid Waste Management
Mountains of waste are covering the planet, poisoning the ground water and when burning them our air. There are already methods for smoke free incineration of solid waste (with very high temperatures). For plastic waste recycling in form of plastic bricks for roads and buildings are a sustainable way.
Renewable Energy
Harvesting wind, solar or tidal energy is done in a big scale already the problem is to store it. Safe and sustainable solutions like salt water or organic batteries have to be developed.
Storm Water Management
Urban floods are more and more common as too many areas in the cities are sealed by buildings, streets or compressed by high intensive agriculture. Natural sponge parks for storage of water, inflatable flood barriers made from recycled plastic or big installations like damms are helpful.
Shortage of Drinking Water
Not only in dessert areas but meanwhile in big cities and even on the countryside safe and clean drinking water in sufficient quantity is rare because the ground-water level is going down and the consumption of water and the pollution of water is going high. Dr Das mentioned Solar Purifier and plant based Water Purifier as solutions. An intact nature with rich ecosystems is delivers pure healthy water.
Demand for Protein rich food
Growing population and the demand for more protein rich food brings industrial animal keeping and environmental problems. Sea weed and plant based meat can help to solve this demand in a sustainable way.
Nutrient Cycles
Life depends and develops very much in cycles. To restore our ecosystems and keep them going is essential for the future. There are self restoring systems like the forest ecosystem that leads the way for models like Permaculture, Food Forests or compost fed aquaponics.
Urban Air Pollution
One of today’s most challenging problems is the air pollution. Also here some innovation is on the way: Road Air Scrubber or Green walls with plants are effective to clean polluted air.
status quo
solutions
Final remarks: There are several initiatives to promote and support the sustainability movement and to help reaching the 17 Sustainability Goals of the United Nations.
Dr Das, Dr Amritkar (Envirocare Green Awards) and others are involved to brings these initiatives forward, e.g. the L.E.A.P.F.rog green tech or „Stunning Green Alternatives“.
The summary is given by Karin Heinze, Be in Organic - BiO Reporter International.
Comentarios