Clean technology

Clean technology (or cleantech) is an umbrella term for a class of technologies and services that reduce negative environmental impacts through energy efficiency, sustainability, and environmental protections. Clean technologies and products are expected to be competitive with and even superior to conventional technologies and products while reducing costs, inputs, energy consumption, waste, or pollution and offer investors the possibility for significant return on their investment. Clean technology has increased as an investment sector since 2000 with the rise of awareness of human impact on the natural environment.

The term has been differentiated from "green" or "environmental" technologies, with the idea of "green" or "environmental" covering regulatory-driven technologies (such as smokestack scrubbers) with limited opportunities for returns. Greentech remains a term often used interchangeably with cleantech. However, as the technologies have advanced, the terms have become less distinguishable, with many of the technologies falling under all three terms, and clean technology tends to be the preferred term.

Although strict definitions of what is included in the clean technology sector differ among industry participants, the most cited definition comes from the Cleantech Group. This definition focuses on investment and includes water purification, eco-efficient production techniques, renewable energy, green technology, materials and chemicals, sustainable and renewable agriculture, and sustainable business.

Generally, clean technology encompasses any measure taken to reduce and preferably eliminate negative environmental impacts while encouraging economic and social development and preserving natural resources, especially those that need to preserve non-renewable resources. Further, clean technology can be defined as technology that aims to reduce or eliminate pollution and waste while improving productivity and efficiency at the same time, which can include using waste cycles and waste byproducts as raw materials where possible. The term does tend to be broad.

The primary goal of cleantech is to reduce the negative impacts of humans on the environment and the planet, such as plastic pollution in the ocean, the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and deforestation. Cleantech works to accomplish this in a variety of ways, such as using renewable energy sources, inventing new methods and products, identifying and replacing existing wasteful or harmful habits developed over time, and course-correcting for a resource-rich future. Cleantech is also expected to generate greater profits for those engaged in the practice, reduce resource anxiety, offer new sources for energy generation, and offer new paths to economic development for developing economies. Other goals of cleantech include cradle-to-cradle design, innovation, viability, source reduction, and sustainability.

Cradle-to-cradle design is considered a shift in manufacturing processes to create products with the ability to be used more than a number of times and even to be reintroduced into the supply chain where they could be recycled or reused in part or in whole and therefore allow for a circular economy. This reduces the need for new resources to be extracted for raw materials. This is considered a replacement of the "cradle-to-grave" method of production more commonly used, in which products are developed to be used only a limited number of times and are sometimes intended to be used only once.

Innovation refers to the development of new technologies with more efficient means through constant research, design, and development. This can include more efficient manufacturing practices, innovation in materials, and innovation in the production of raw materials (especially from recycling practices), among many others. These innovations are intended to move beyond the traditional technology that can have poor results for the environment, global health, and the survival of future generations.

Viability is considered to be the adoption of new methods considered to be clean or green, which can create new careers, facilitate the preservation of and design supportive measures for local and global economies, and pursue economic measures that embrace sustainability to enable the success of preservation efforts.

Source reduction refers to changing production methods and reducing the consumption of resources in a manner that reduces waste and pollution while facilitating the success of conservation efforts, thereby creating more circularity within the economy. The source reduction can refer to raw materials, energy consumption, and new materials, among others.

Many of the above goals work toward fulfilling the goal of sustainability. Sustainability is often seen as key to preserving resources and changing practices, procedures, materials, and philosophies around products and services can work toward increasing sustainability. Cleantech is seen as achieving sustainability, and any technology that is considered cleantech has to be considered and proven to be sustainable. The goals of sustainability have been enshrined in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, which include seventeen specific goals to achieve sustainability. Of those goals, many are considered to relate directly to clean energy:

• Goal 6—"Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all," in which various kinds of clean water technology are used to fulfill this goal, such as water filters, wastewater management, and technology for desalination.
• Goal 7—"Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all," in which countries and economies promote the development of renewable energy and switching traditional infrastructure to renewable energy infrastructure.
• Goal 11—"Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable," in which cities and communities are designed around sustainability, and cleantech can enable the architectural, transportation, and city environments of those sustainability efforts.
• Goal 13—"Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts," in which cleantech can help reduce emissions of harmful greenhouse gas that have been shown to negatively impact the climate.

The term cleantech has origins in the venture capital investment community and grew to include industries such as solar, wind, water purification, and biofuels. Cleantech now includes investment asset classes, technology, and business sectors that provide products and services related to clean energy, environment, sustainability, or “green.” The investments into the sector have helped generate and perpetuate interest as a business category, especially with the rise of investors who want to invest in companies and technologies that can make positive impacts and with growing concerns over the continued impact of non-renewable energy production and wasteful manufacturing and consumption practices.

A look at the cycles of investment in two of the largest cleantech sectors.

However, investment in the category has led to various cycles of interest and high levels of investment, followed by bust periods when capital is harder to come by and start-ups are being acquired or failing. This tends to be due to the capital-intensive nature of these start-ups and the competition in any given sub-sector of the cleantech market. As well, these companies tend to have to compete with traditional industries that have no, or less, concern about the pollution, waste, and emissions of their production and practices. But, with increasing government regulations and government targets toward clean technology, and with many of those larger corporations looking for solutions to meet emissions goals, cleantech investment began to increase again around the beginning of 2021.

Similarly, cleantech is a research-heavy industry category that touches all different industries where it can be adopted. The science and research of cleantech are focused on developing technological advancements and improvements, or new approaches, to reduce the human impact on the environment. Some fields of research include cleaner energy sources, improved energy efficiency in transportation and buildings, and methods that decrease or prevent pollution. The field draws on various sciences, including chemistry, ecology, and biology, and has relied on innovation and advances in various technological fields to increase the capability of the technology and solutions to meet commercial and consumer needs without requiring those entities to make drastic changes in their lifestyle.

Since the foundation of cleantech as an identified industry segment in the early 2000s, one of the biggest impacts on the success or failure of cleantech has been government regulation and mandates. For example, earlier in the twenty-first century, cleantech was generally motivated by interested entrepreneurs and investors, those who wanted to develop clean technologies and reduce waste while increasing sustainability, but during this period, there was little, if any, government regulation, funding, or mandates in this direction, and few of those early companies survived the capital-intensive development of these technologies.

However, since then, government regulations, mandates, and funding have been directed in larger amounts toward clean technology. This is as the different governments and their constituents have been concerned about the negative potential of climate change and their interest in supporting technologies that increase sustainability. To support this, governments have been increasingly adopting regulatory regimes that require industry and individuals to reduce their environmental impact, while corporations have also engaged in voluntary reduction and carbon trading schemes. There have also been carbon trading schemes that have been introduced to meet the mounting pressure from global communities and organizations toward the adoption of clean technology.

World governments have also come together over time, in various agreements and conferences, to set global targets through accords sometimes enshrined in law. Often these combined targets and accords are encouraged to help governments develop these regulations and allay fears that one government will use traditional, wasteful technologies to out-produce and out-compete these other governments. Some agreements have seen various governments set specific zero-carbon emission goals based on specific dates—such as 2030 for Uruguay, 2035 for Finland, and 2050 for most other countries—while specific policies have been developed to meet these goals. For example, the EU has worked to set the global pace using policies such as the EU Green Deal and Climate Law, which set binding targets to cut emissions by 2030 and reach climate neutrality by 2050.

While regulations can make a big impact, if there are no developments and advancements in the necessary technologies and practices to achieve the goals of those regulations, the regulations may not be met. Government funding is essential in terms of research assistance programs for universities, academics, and start-ups; grants for cleantech start-ups; procurement contracts for cleantech products and technologies; and tax refunds for companies replacing traditional, wasteful practices or procedures with cleantech procedures and technologies, to help offset the cost. This can all help to encourage corporations and other large entities to shift toward cleantech.

Carbon capture and storage/sequestration is the process of capturing carbon dioxide formed during power generation and industrial processes and storing (sequestering) it so the carbon dioxide is not emitted into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is often stored underground in depleted oil and gas fields or in deep saline aquifers. The carbon can be used as a raw material in a process known as carbon conversion. The use of carbon dioxide as a raw material can be applied to the production of urea, methanol, polycarbonates, cyclic carbonates, and specialty chemicals. Other uses of carbon as a raw material have included plastics, fibers, and rubber.

Part of carbon capture and storage or sequestration is the use of direct air capture. This ambitious technology works to pull carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and has been an idea for climate change mitigation research for a while, before it was able to be developed and implemented. The technology has been used to capture carbon dioxide from the ambient air and can generate a concentrated stream of CO2 for sequestration or utilization. The technology uses large fans that push the air through a filter, which removes CO2. Many believe this technology can be used to absorb emissions from distributed sources, but this comes at a high cost, which makes the technology difficult to deploy on a large scale. Some are also concerned that the technology would reduce efforts into emission reduction if deployed.

Environmental monitoring is a tool or system used to assess environmental trends and support policy development and implementation. These tools are used to gain information that can be reported to policymakers, forums, and the public. Over the past decades, only a few European and Central Asian countries have maintained monitoring activities, particularly the monitoring of urban air pollution. Solid and hazardous waste monitoring has been weak, and as a result, industrial emissions have not been carefully monitored before recently. Environmental monitoring has increased in its importance for understanding a given area and the impact of pollutants of clean technology on cleaning an area.

The goal of clean water and air technology is to help reduce pollutants in natural resources and ensure higher quality in both. Clean water and air technology rely on filtration systems, quality assurance, and monitoring of businesses to ensure pollutants aren't let out into the environment. A lot of this technology is called "end-of-pipe" technology, in that they tend to be at the end of a process before waste is emitted. This includes technologies such as scrubbers on smokestacks or catalytic converters in automobiles. While these tend to be included in clean technology, most clean technology works toward cleaner production in which potential waste and emissions are eliminated before they can become a problem.

A part of clean air and water, or emission control, is the use of monitoring stations, which allow various states and state agencies to track the volume of pollutants in various environments. These can include environmental sensors, satellites, drones, and other monitoring techniques to create impartial, accurate monitoring capable of measuring existing baselines of pollution while tracking the impact clean technology is having on the environment.

Another impact of pollutant monitoring can be used for the remediation of polluted sites. Without monitoring, knowing when a polluted site could be reused can be difficult, and knowing if the remediation efforts have rendered the site safe can be difficult. Remediation can be used to allow a government or other actors to make a site safe for humans and animals, through cleaning soil, groundwater, surface water, or sediment through the removal of pollutants and contaminants.

Clean mining has multiple unique challenges, especially considering the regions that tend to have major mining economies. Third-world countries account for most of the mining in the world, and they tend to mine in areas with large amounts of biological diversity, fresh water, and forests. Key obstacles for clean mining include finding cost-effective management instruments and tools, reclamation and rehabilitation of affected land, treatment and stabilization of soil, water management systems, gas emissions, energy use, and waste management.

Recycling is one of the older clean technologies. Recycling allows users to take waste products or waste byproducts and return them into the lifecycle of new products. Especially in the case of product packaging and products that reach a "post-consumer" stage, recycling can be used to turn the end-of-life products into new raw materials rather than filling landfills. Since it is an older technology, new methods have been developed, especially as more traditional recycling methods can be energy intensive. Some of these include using enzymes to convert linear waste streams into circular supply chains, solving many of the challenges and difficulties in various waste supply chains. Similarly, new products and techniques are looking at waste products previously considered not capable of being recycled and techniques are being developed to convert these waste items into raw materials to generate new value propositions for these waste streams.

Upcycling is a part of the recycling schema in which companies and organizations find new ways to turn waste into new usable materials or products, such as fuel, fertilizer, clothes, or bicycles. Upcycling is often considered separate from recycling, as more traditional recyling methods work to turn finished products back into raw materials, whereas upcycling tries to reuse the waste in part or whole to create a new product.

Wastewater treatment is the process of treating wastewater from various industries and municipalities with an acceptable environmental impact. The process works to return the treated water to the water cycle. Clean technology companies in the wastewater treatment industry work to create less environmentally impacting treatment processes and use for the effluent and waste. With increasing difficulties to reach clean and safe drinking water in certain regions and greater contamination in water supplies, wastewater treatment is increasingly important to secure water supplies. The development of new wastewater treatment options and cleantech wastewater treatments has been propelled by the demand for new water resources, safety concerns from those water resources, and stringent environmental regulations and policies.

Clean waste management involves treating and dealing with municipal and commercial wastewater, solid waste, and excess material from business processes. Clean solid-waste management addresses a number of possibilities, including gasification, pyrolysis, plasma arc, waste-to-energy, anaerobic digestion, mixed waste processing, and plastic-to-fuel alternatives.

The Internet of Things (IoT) tends to be considered an enabling technology for clean technology rather than a strictly clean technology itself. IoT technologies can be used to monitor and improve air and water quality while also reducing costs by monitoring and reducing energy use where possible. IoT can be used to connect various equipment and systems to allow it to better communicate its needs. This can include consumer technology, such as smart thermostats to reduce unnecessary heating or cooling use; it can include commercial applications, where it can be used in manufacturing or logistics to increase efficiencies and remote monitoring capabilities to reduce personnel visits and offer remote troubleshooting; it can be integrated into the development of smart and energy-efficient cities; and it can be used in agriculture, where IoT can be used to monitor crops, livestock, soil nutrients, and moisture levels to increase efficiencies and reduce unnecessary watering, fertilizing, and use of pesticides.

Like in many industry and technology sectors, artificial intelligence is an enabling technology that allows users to develop efficiencies into existing systems and develop new systems with new efficiencies. AI is also being used to develop new technologies and new materials that can help toward the next development of materials and technology for the next clean technology products. Similarly, AI is also being used to examine existing systems to find places where processes can be improved and waste reduced. Another development in AI for clean technology is the development of deep learning for visual tasks where computer vision can be used to monitor water levels, drive autonomous vehicles, and reduce travel to people, such as in damage assessment in the case of accidents or environmental disasters.

Green concrete (or clean concrete) is a technological response to the manufacturing and carbon demands of conventional concrete. These technologies include reduced-carbon manufacturing, carbon sequestering concrete, concrete recycling, environmentally-friendly concretes, mixed-materials concretes, and concrete alternatives.

Reducing carbon emissions for the manufacturing of concrete includes the greater efficiency of the conventional concrete industry, technologies capturing and including carbon dioxide from the manufacturing process and mixing it in the concrete, recycling concrete, or the recycling of other waste or cast-off materials (such as fly ash, steel slag, or recycled glass) into the manufacturing of concrete.

Environmentally-friendly concretes are conventional concretes mixed or manufactured to provide an environmental result. The two best examples of these are insulated concretes and pervious concretes. Insulated concretes are considered environmentally-friendly for their energy efficiency qualities in larger buildings, allowing for less energy usage in heating and cooling. Pervious concretes allow water to pass through them, reducing wash-out of nearby soil and reducing water buildup and the possibility of flooding.

Bioplastics are plastics made from renewable biomass sources, including corn, potatoes, wood, food waste, agricultural by-products, and lobster shells. The name bioplastic is also applied to biodegradable plastics, which break down into natural substances, such as water, carbon dioxide, and compost. The two most common bioplastics are polylactic acid (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA).

Clean technology in the textile industry involves reducing environmental impact in a number of processes and resources, including water, fiber resources, solid waste, and chemical waste. Chemical waste in this industry includes dyes, salt, glues, laser engraving runoff, transfer materials, and ink. Clean technology aims to monitor and reduce multiple waste and chemical processes, including dye baths, excess fabrics, machine operations, boilers, ovens, storage tanks, and treatment tanks.

Clean energy and power is a large field dealing with environmental stability in multiple sub-industries, including gas, petroleum, coal, electricity, and other energy mediums. Many alternative and renewable energies are focused on lessening the dependence on polluting fossil fuels, such as coal and crude oil, while generating alternative and, preferably, renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric power. This also includes the development of alternative or cleaner fuel sources, such as biofuel and hydrogen.

Non-renewable energy tends to be any energy source that cannot be reused. This includes energy sources such as coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, and hydrogen. Some of those non-renewable sources do tend to be considered clean energy sources due to their processing means or their lack of emissions. For example, hydrogen is often considered a clean energy source because it does not have emissions, but it can be energy-intensive in its generation.

Renewable energy, on the other hand, describes any source of energy generation that is not considered to consume a natural resource that may otherwise be non-recoverable. For example, the burning of oil is considered non-renewable because the oil has to be sourced and extracted, and the generation of new oil takes millennia; whereas the use of biofuel is considered renewable because the natural resource used to generate the biofuel is grown yearly. Other renewable energy sources include solar power, hydroelectric power, wind power, and geothermal power.

A key problem that has slowed the transition to renewable energy sources, other than the cost of building out the infrastructure necessary, has been the lack of stability in the generation of power for many of the most popular sources of renewable energy: solar and wind. The most commonly considered solution for this difficulty is energy storage. Energy storage allows the renewable energy sources reliant on the climate conditions for energy generation. In this case, excess energy generated could be stored to be deployed on days when the climate condition does not allow for energy generation. This would allow these renewable technologies to take over from traditional sources, as without storage solutions, any day the climate conditions do not allow for energy generation, traditional energy generation systems are required.

The cleantech approach to energy does not rely solely on energy production means but also looks at using smart energy devices, such as connected thermostats, to monitor and optimize energy consumption, automate energy distribution, and develop responsive energy supply. These tend to rely heavily on IoT devices and artificial intelligence. This can help reduce the amount of energy people, industries, and cities use. The demand-side reduction using automated systems, human behavior management, sustainable development, and sustainable building management can reduce the reliance on energy production and means.

Transportation is a major driving factor of environmental waste, producing about 1.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year in the US. The range of processes and vehicles used in transportation and the logistics sector makes it an important target for clean energy companies and upcoming technologies.

The environmental impact of vehicles has long been a focus of clean technology, and electric vehicles have been considered a low-emission or no-emission alternative to combustion engines, as they use one or more electric motors powered by energy stored in rechargeable batteries. These vehicles have been around for a while, but since 2008, the interest in them and production have increased. Electric vehicles are considered cleaner and less harmful because they do not produce carbon emissions and do not contribute to air pollution. Increased incentives have been offered by governments to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles, including tax credits and subsidies.

Clean agriculture and food technology aim to meet consumers' demands for food while minimizing chemical input, monitoring environmental stress, and developing ways to promote safe and responsible systems to produce food. One of the most prominent ways of achieving this has been called sustainable agriculture, in which technology including IoT, environmental monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be used to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture and offer increased efficiencies in fertilizer use and watering and solutions for soil exhaustion.

Food waste accounts for over an estimated one billion tons of food each year. This has led to developments to optimize the use of, production of, and consumption of the food cycle to reduce waste and emissions. Monitoring technologies are being developed to help reduce food waste at the point of production and to increase efficiencies in those systems. Companies are working to improve food shelf-life stability to reduce the amount of food that is wasted in a store before being purchased. Packaging solutions are being created that are less damaging to the environment. And a lot of development in clean technology for agriculture focuses on developing food redistribution cycles and creating new products from food waste, such as using them for bioplastics or biofuel.

Vertical farming, urban farming, and hydroponic farming represent newer ways of farming than traditional methods. The vertical farming concept involves stacking racks of layers of vegetables in vertical rather than horizontal layers. In this schema, the plants in some cases do not require soil, and the water usage can be closely monitored and reduced compared to traditional agricultural systems. Vertical farming can use enriched water to decrease growing time, and these foodstuffs can grow year-round regardless of the weather. However, depending on the type of vertical farm, the up-front costs can be incredibly high, and the use of some technologies—such as AI systems to monitor plants and UV lights to offer decreased growing times—can be expensive to run. These expenses are intended to be offset by the constant growing times.