{"id":7861,"date":"2022-03-01T22:26:53","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T22:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pabconference.com\/architecture-professor-finds-profitable-uses-for-industrial-byproducts\/"},"modified":"2022-03-01T22:26:53","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T22:26:53","slug":"architecture-professor-finds-profitable-uses-for-industrial-byproducts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/2022\/03\/01\/architecture-professor-finds-profitable-uses-for-industrial-byproducts\/","title":{"rendered":"Architecture Professor Finds Profitable Uses For Industrial Byproducts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ahmed K. Ali is a Texas A&M associate professor of architecture.<\/p>\n

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Texas A&M College of Architecture<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Not many people can say they have a love-hate relationship with waste.<\/p>\n

An exception is Ahmed K. Ali, a Texas A&M associate professor of architecture who considers waste in his work and research. He has even dubbed himself \u201cthe wasteman,\u201d as he says the moniker helps him start critical conversations around design, architecture and sustainability.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love waste because I make use of it, but I also hate it at the same time and don’t want people to produce more of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Ali is on a mission to find creative and attractive solutions to industrial waste-flows and byproducts, ways to reduce waste in design, and move the world’s economy from one that produces billions of tons of waste to one in which resources are used as long as possible for maximum value \u2014 the circular economy.<\/p>\n

The Rubbish Reality<\/h2>\n

\u201cWaste is a modern idea; it’s not found in nature. We use more than 100 billion tons of raw materials worldwide each year in manufacturing,\u201d said Ali, the founding director of Texas A&M’s Resource-Based Research Design Lab. \u201cMost of it goes to landfills. It’s not sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until recently, many companies simply sold their industrial waste and byproducts as a commodity. It once was a $57 billion industry in the United States. But new policies in Asian countries, the largest buyer of US industrial waste, now restrict those imports, and American companies are having to deal with their own mess.<\/p>\n

Other established recycling practices often use substantial energy, and go unused or overlooked because they’re hidden away or seen as more expensive or a bigger hassle than they’re worth. This is why, according to Ali, the attractiveness of waste-based solutions is imperative.<\/p>\n

\u201cSustainability has to be beautiful,\u201d said Ali. \u201cWhen we talk about using our existing resources, we must bring the idea of \u200b\u200bbeauty to the forefront of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Living Wall<\/h2>\n

A proof of concept of Ali’s ideas is a modular living wall, an innovative \u201cgreen\u201d wall made of galvanized sheet metal byproducts, called offal, generated by the automotive industry.<\/p>\n

With a $300,000 competitive grant from Texas A&M’s Tier One program in 2017, Ali and Bruce Dvorak, associate professor of landscape architecture, who helped plan the custom irrigation system and sourced Texas native plants for the project, and Jorge Alvarado, professor of engineering technology, created a leap forward in \u201cgreen\u201d wall design and technology.<\/p>\n

The partnership resulted in 300 diamond-shaped planters made of 20 tons of byproducts sheet metal from General Motors Company on a custom 14X18-foot frame on Building B of Texas A&M’s Langford Architecture Center. The invention is modular and can be used as a building skin.<\/p>\n

In addition to the planters’ unique shape, design and material, the frame they’re on is connected to Langford B at only a few points; Because the frame holds the planters slightly away from the building, acting as a double building envelope, the Langford B wall is protected from damage caused by water from the planters or traditional felt or textile material in planters. The entire wall system is designed to be easily accessible, changeable and sustainable. Planters are supported only by the law of gravity.<\/p>\n

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The Langford Living Wall, a unique structure of 300 planters made from auto industry waste, sits on the Texas A&M campus on the side of Langford Architecture Center Building B.<\/p>\n

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Texas A&M College of Architecture<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\n

Inspired Design<\/h2>\n

\u201cAs soon as the wall was up, it generated critical research questions from scholars across campus,\u201d Ali said. \u201cPeople from agriculture wanted to work with us to see how they could grow food vertically in cities. Water resources engineering wanted to collaborate on rainwater harvesting and wastewater irrigation. Other researchers from material sciences and engineering said they wanted to study the effects of bending sheet metal and energy savings.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, students walking by started to take photos at the wall, and it became a popular campus picture spot. The buzz created more inquiries about the project, which has been featured in dozens of articles and journals.<\/p>\n

This is the power of beautiful design, according to Ali.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe waste discourse layer is a hidden part of the story that you don’t find out about until you ask questions,\u201d he said. \u201cThe most important story is that it is beautiful, functional and it works. There is no subjectivity. Even if the plants are dormant in a season, it is still beautiful because it acts as a building skin. This beauty inspires further research and curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali said innovative design thinking can inspire positive change, help solve global problems and build future generations of consciously-oriented designers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a misconception about architects that we are just responsible for creating a nice drawing or rendering,\u201d said Ali. \u201cBut that is not all we are capable of. We can tackle some of the most challenging problems of the world through design thinking and with our uniquely investigative architectural education, which allows us to think creatively about out of the box solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

High Rise Dreams<\/h2>\n

Ali has filed patents for the living wall system, and is in talks with Zahner, a world-renowned architectural metal surfaces company, about commercializing the product.<\/p>\n

This could allow living wall systems to be incorporated with building skin systems into large-scale construction projects but also potentially available at home improvement stores for smaller-scale use.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to make this available to the public,\u201d Ali said. \u201cAs a product in the market you could perhaps buy 50 of them and use them in your backyard or on your exterior walls for planting to grow vegetables and flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reforging Supply Chains<\/h2>\n

As more and more people move to cities, Ali said these types of systems, which could be implemented along the sides of apartments or city buildings, could help grow food for residents instead of relying on already taxed shipping and transportation lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pandemic showed how fragile the supply chain is,\u201d Ali said. \u201cIf you’re in an apartment in Dallas and the only way to get food is at the grocery store that relies on highway transportation, you could be in trouble. If we could grow our own food on city walls, and reuse material to reduce cost and make these systems affordable \u2014 it’s very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

To further explore global interdisciplinary innovations in the circular economy paradigm shift, Ali and his partners were awarded a $50,000 Texas A&M Global Engagement Grant to develop a Global Collaborative Learning Environment for Architecture Product Innovation and Sustainable Manufacturing.<\/p>\n

He’s been awarded additional T3 President’s Excellence Fund grants to explore other circular economy projects, including $32,000 to work on solutions for college student homelessness and $37,000 for a recently completed project for alternate uses for plastic waste technology, namely transforming computer microchip carriers known as matrix trays into building products.<\/p>\n

His projects are also regularly funded by the industry including General Motors, Zahner and the United States Business Council for Sustainable Development.<\/p>\n

Creative Design Minds<\/h2>\n

In his design studios, Ali presents waste-related, theoretical and real-life challenges to teach creative design thinking to his students.<\/p>\n

While architects typically design and then figure out materials, Ali uses something he calls \u201csynergistic means-oriented design\u201d to put the materials first, such as manufacturing waste, and then identify an application to use it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you give students this type of project-based assignments, they are excited to think about the problem, rather than just the goal of designing a building,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen they start with the waste problem, they have to learn about things that aren’t just architecture. They investigate ecology, manufacturing, steel production, industrial symbiosis, etcetera, before they design and start to employ creative design thinking to come up with solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali said the difference is \u201cvast\u201d when working with architecture students versus others.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe design education allows you to be critical, incredibly creative, and constantly push boundaries,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Ali hopes to encourage that way of thinking in undergraduate and graduate programs by collaborating with colleagues in engineering, agriculture, and business on an interdisciplinary degree program that will allow students from all colleges to collaborate and learn from each other for ideas to create a better, more circular economic future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will help them when they graduate to be and to have the skill to entrepreneurs think about resources and positive impact on communities as they design or consider architectural projects,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Everyone Wins<\/h2>\n

Designing with waste-flow or byproduct materials first has multiple beneficial applications, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinding ways to use manufacturing waste can generate jobs and make new opportunities for people to start their own businesses,\u201d Ali said. \u201cWe aren’t just helping the environment, we are trying to help everyone win in this scenario, even those producing the waste. Right now, factories see no value in it, but there could be a multifaceted impact not just for the environment but for the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali hopes to have more industries become open to creative, new uses of manufacturing waste.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can create solutions for your waste that you would never think of,\u201d Ali said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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