Transcript 0:00 It helps our communities adapt to the waste-related impacts of climate change. It helps us begin in restoring our ecosystem, and that kind of moves that needle I talk about all the time forward. 0:14 Beyond waste management, AI can help give our cities and our urban planners the data to improve the quality of services and manage resources better. 0:26 [upbeat music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation, with your host, Peggy Smedley. 0:44 Hello, listeners, and welcome to today's edition of The Peggy Smedley Show. I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. This month I'm talking all about rebuilding our smart cities. 0:53 I've talked about how to create a plan for businesses and cities, and actually how to secure our cities, the role of emerging facility managers, and I've even stressed the importance of our needing to keep our cities resilient, secure, inclusive, and smart. 1:13 Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics, sustainability, and even more what I want to do today is really kind of narrow in on how technologies can help us be more circular, or actually more what our circular world is going to be for our circular cities. 1:32 Later on in the show, I'll be interviewing some guests. 1:34 I will be talking to David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, and then I'm going to be wrapping up our show with show regular Scott Schober, CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, and he will be joined with S- Gary Berman, host of Cyber Heroes Adventure. 1:56 So we're gonna have some fun in that discussion. So let's get started. COVID-19 has forced professionals and building owners to move faster to achieve to a digital first thinking. 2:09 It has made us all consider how to reduce emissions to achieve a goal of carbon negative by twenty thirty and beyond. 2:18 Today I want to explore how artificial intelligence and the Internet of things, IoT, can help us move to a more circular economy and a more sustainable world. 2:29 It's interesting, a McKinsey report points to three main ways AI can enable a circular economy. The first is by di- designing circular products and components and materials. 2:44 Here AI can enhance and accelerate the development through iterative machine learning, assisted design processes. This allows for rapid prototyping and testing. 2:57 The second way AI can help us enable a circular economy is artificial intelligence can help operate circular business models. 3:07 Here we can imagine or even magnify the competitive strength of a circular economy business models, and this includes product as a service and leasing as just a few examples. 3:21 By combining real time and historical data from products and users, the technology can increase product circulation and asset use through pricing and even demand prediction and predictive maintenance and even smart inventory managent- ment. 3:42 Finally, I think the third way AI can help us enable a circular economy is optimizing circular infrastructure. 3:51 Here AI can help build and improve the reverse logistics infrastructure required to close that loop, so to speak, on products and materials. Here is what I mean by that. 4:03 By improving the processes to sort and disassemble products, remanufacture components, and recycle materials, we can move to a more circular economy. The economic value for businesses is huge too. 4:20 The potential value unlocked by AI in helping design out waste in a circular economy for food is up to, let's say, a hundred and twenty billion a year in twenty thirty. 4:31 The equivalent AI opportunity in accelerating the transition to a circular economy for consumer electronics is up to ninety billion a year in twenty thirty. 4:43 In food and consumer electronics are just a couple of pretty awesome vertical examples, if you can think about that right now. 4:53 And I want to get g- or maybe give you a better idea of how artificial intelligence can enable more of a circular world. I want to dive into just one c- kind of customer case study here. 5:08 Refine Technologies was founded in Sweden in twenty fourteen. Now, the company helps reduce e-waste by improving overall recycling and refurbishing rates. 5:21 It also identifies whether a product's condition is more suitable for refurbishment or recycling. The company also provides intelligent sorting and grading solutions using machine vision and learning. 5:38 This is where artificial intelligence enters the equation, which is really kind of interesting because the sorting system has sensors and cameras. 5:48 Visual recognition and supervised machine learning enable the system to classify the type of e-waste at a very granular level.The system also requires manually labeled images to train the AI algorithms. 6:07 This is really great stuff. I love this. So in my book, Sustainable in a Circular World, I give examples in the food industry and at a candy processing production plant. 6:20 Here, having data leads to breakthrough insights that help optimize and meet sustainability goals. That's really what it's all about. I mean, just think about it. 6:32 If we can do these kind of things in our cities using technology, we're really enabling what's sustainable in a circular world, as my book says, really achieves tremendous goals. 6:45 Technology can help us measure insights and meet targets and objectives that we have set for our companies. 6:53 This is true for just about everything we do in business, and it is certainly also true for sustainability and creating a circular economy. 7:04 So now that we have a good idea about how AI can help us, let's move to a more circular economy. Let's talk about what this looks like in our buildings, in our infrastructure, and our cities. 7:17 Certainly, this is how the low ha- This is when we actually talk about the low-hanging fruit. Good waste management offers huge benefits to our cities, to our communities. 7:28 We also want to talk about savings in time, money, and resources. But what is really important is it increases our resiliency, and it helps our communities adapt to the waste-related impacts of climate change. 7:45 It helps us begin and restoring our ecosystem, and that moves us, the needle, kind of moves that needle I talk about all the time forward. 7:54 Beyond waste management, AI can help give our cities and our urban planners the data to improve the quality of services and manage resources better. It also... 8:07 It's also about getting that right data to the right, into the right hands to enable predictive and proactive decision-making. 8:16 This can include everything from energy to water to waste management to regenerative approaches in planting more trees and so much more. Our cities need to become circular. Our buildings need to be sustainable. 8:32 And artifili- artificial intelligence and the Internet of things can help us get there. So okay, so here's my opinion for today because we have a lot... We've been kind of unpacking a lot of things. 8:45 We all know about attaining green buildings status. We'll address repairability, reuse, and recycling of waste and materials. Up until this point, that has been lacking. 8:58 We need to make the move from gray to green, and we need to do it fast. And if we don't do that, we are going to be sorely lagging. So here's my tip. 9:10 We really need to start considering about the technology to help us with all of this. We need AI-based solutions to achieve preventative and predictive maintenance. 9:24 We need to tap into this to improve circularity and green initiatives. And data needs to be central to this movement. 9:35 We need data to help us be regenerative in and regenerate the natural ecosystem that we've been talking about. 9:44 If your company has a target of carbon negative by twenty thirty, how are you leveraging that technology right now to meet that goal? How are you helping the city that you're in, in achieve that goal? 9:59 As I always say, the first step is to measure. We can't improve if we don't start measuring it. We need to see things to understand it, and the best way to do that is measure with data. 10:13 We have to be able to do those things and understand what more can we be doing, and how can we help our cities achieve those goals in our buildings, in our manufacturing plants? What other technologies can we implement? 10:29 And here's another spin on this idea. If you are a technology provider, what new technologies can you invent to help us reach those goals? 10:40 What is missing that can help us take sustainability in our cities to that next level, not just in the city, but from a global level? You know, as I always say, we've got to act locally, but think globally. 10:56 Let us all step up to reduce our waste and enable greater sustainability. This has been such a fun series to look at how our cities can rebuild, but we need to be thinking about what else can we do. 11:11 It's not just today, but what we have to be thinking about tomorrow, but acting today, all while keeping resiliency, security, inclusion, sustainability, and technology at the forefront. 11:25 If you want to add anything to this discussion, you know, I want you to share with me because we, if we all work together and we think about, you know, going from gray to green, just think about what our communities will look like. 11:40 Think about what our buildings will be, and think about how we will change our communities in our rural, our urban areas, and think about what our new world will look like. 11:50 It's, it's an exciting time, but we have to work together to make it happen. And I'm very curious about what you are thinking about how our buildings are going to be, how we're going to move in a different way. 12:02 And I think that's what we have to engage in that conversation. All right. If you have thoughts, I really want you to share them with me and send me a tweet. I want you to share with them with me at ConnectedWMag. 12:14 You might have a different abi- opinion about what circularity and sustainability means about e-waste, but your, your businesses might be doing it differently, and that's why we're trying to think about how clima- climate change is contributing to all this. 12:29 All right, I'm out of time. As always, check out our website at connectedworld.com or our show website at thepeggyסmedleyshow.com. And we've got some discussion we're going to continue as our guests come with us. 12:39 So we're going to take a quick commercial break, but I'm going to be right back. As always, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. 12:48 And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. We'll be right back. [outro music]
