Last October, we posted this TEDTalk given at TEDGlobal 2011 by plastic engineer Mike Biddle, Founder and President of MBA Polymers, which has developed an incredibly energy and economically efficient method to recycle plastics — by turning it into the raw material  again.

The TEDtalk elicited over 1000 comments and questions on TED.com, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, including direct emails to Biddle and to the TED staff. Faced with the impossibility to answer them individually, Mike has grouped them together and addressed them below.

And now over to Biddle…

 I want to thank the TED community for all of the heartfelt comments and great questions. Although many of the comments were directed to me as I am the one that gave the TEDtalk, I’m replying here on behalf of the whole MBA Polymers team.  Much like the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”, it takes an incredibly dedicated team to reinvent one of the world’s largest industries and MBA has indeed attracted such a team.

In my personal blog at MikeBiddle.com, I talk a bit about the habits that my family and I practice in our efforts to tread more lightly on this planet and “walk the talk”.   Below, I direct my responses more to our work at MBA Polymers.

Why recycle?  Isn’t it better to reduce our use of plastics?

Absolutely!  I am not only a strong believer in the hierarchy of (1) Reduce, (2) Re-use, (3) Recycle, I try my best to be a practitioner of this hierarchy in my business and personal life.  I appreciate the sentiments expressed in this area, including the frustration some expressed for plastics waste.  And I believe that this type of concern should apply much more broadly to all types of waste.  We should all try to be more thoughtful about how we waste energy, materials and even time (see my personal blog for a few examples).

What can I do to help?

We at MBA have a crucial need: we need to recover more materials in more places, and to do that faster and better. It might sound strange, but our biggest resource constraint is raw material.  Yes there are hundreds of billions of pounds of plastics consumed every year around the world.  It comes down to a collection and aggregation issue.  You may have heard about the challenge of getting technology to your house referred to as the “last mile” problem.  I live in Northern California and I don’t have the highest speed broadband internet to my home.  It’s very difficult and expensive to get technology to every single home.

With recycling it’s the “first mile” problem.  Getting the recyclable end-of-life products and materials from your home and transported to a recycling facility has always been the most difficult and costly part of the recycling value chain.

Great strides have been made regarding plastic bottle collection and recycling, but the rates in California and much of the US for bottle recycling are still relatively low, even with a deposit (albeit a small one) on the bottles and curbside collection in most communities.  My kids and I still collect amazing numbers of plastic, metal and glass bottles at a high school parking lot near us on weekends.  Collecting 50 bottles from the high school parking lot and surrounding grounds after a sporting event is typical, even with plenty of trash and recycling bins within easy reach.

It’s even more difficult with other types of more complex waste from end of life durable goods like I showed in my TED talk.  People don’t discard these items as often as packaging (thankfully) and there are few organizations that will take them, unless they have high inherent value like a computer or are regulated and supported with an advanced disposal/recycling fee like TVs and CRT monitors (usually because of the leaded glass).

So you can help by spreading the word to your local communities and larger government agencies (states, provincial, federal, etc.) that you want collection systems for such items like they have in Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.  These systems are also being put in countries like India, Canada and other forward-thinking areas due to policies adopted by those regions.  China, with a rapidly growing domestic consumption of electronics and automobiles, is also adopting recycling policies for these durable goods and is creating eco-parks where recyclers work together to maximize recycling rates and economies.  These countries clearly understand that there are valuable resources that their domestic industries can use in a more sustainable manner – more sustainable in both an environmental and economic sense.

Can you please build recycling plants here? Why aren’t there more in the US?

Our plants are currently in Europe and China. We need to locate our full processing plants, or at least what we call “preprocessing plants”, near the “mines”.  And while the US generates far more waste per capita than any other country, particularly from durable goods, the US doesn’t have the collection and recycling policies in place like those in most other “high consumption” countries.  So most of the materials are not effectively collected, aggregated and concentrated into above ground mines like they are in many other countries.  Tom Friedman dedicated three pages on our company and this problem in his newest book, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.  See pages 307-309.

We decide where to build a plant mostly based on assured access to raw materials (i.e. plastic waste).  The key words here are assured and access.  Access is provided by having the infrastructure in place to collect and process the materials – which came into being in many parts of the world due to “take-back” and recycling policies.  But not yet in the US.

The other key word is about assurance of that supply.  No recycler can afford to make big investments in equipment and people, especially those required to handle these complex waste streams in manners that protect people and the local eco-systems, if they don’t have some strong assurances of supply and that they will be operating on a level playing field.  In some places in the world, like the US, many waste streams and materials can be pretty much freely traded without any restrictions on where or how the materials are processed or how the waste materials from the processes are handled.  As I pointed out in the TEDTalk, this can often lead to recycling that is low cost in the sense of dollars per pound, but which can have very high local human health and safety and eco-system costs that we’ve managed to “externalize” to others, typically in emerging countries, via what I call “environmental arbitrage”.

Europe, Canada and Japan, for example, have various types of regulations that govern where and how their recyclable materials can flow.  The US is also one of the few countries not to ratify the Basel Convention that prohibits the export of hazardous materials to places that aren’t equipped to handle it.  But we need to move beyond even that limited standard.

Much like the public and NGOs pressured brands in markets such as sportswear to develop and adopt standards for how their products were being manufactured in developing countries, we should demand the same accountability for how our end-of-life products and materials are being recovered and reprocessed.  And the processing and recycling of materials is often more intense and risky from an environmental and human health and safety standpoint compared to product manufacturing or even product recycling.  We should also realize that many of these recovered materials will end back up in our new products – recall the concerns over heavy metals in toys and jewelry.

On the environmental costs of recycling: What about waste to energy and bio-degradability of plastics?

As I mentioned in my talk, there are usually enormous energy and CO₂ emission savings in recycling plastics compared to making plastics from petrochemicals.  These savings depend on the type of virgin material being compared and the specific plastics recovery process being used by the recycler, but the range of savings are usually between about 80 and 90%!

We are often asked about turning plastics to energy, since most are made from petrochemicals to begin with.  The plastics industry is a big supporter of this notion as it allows them to make more virgin plastics using their existing plant and equipment.  Energy recovery is a far poorer answer for plastics than recycling, but it is better than putting the plastic into landfills or burning without energy recovery if recycling is not possible.  We are looking at this for some of our organic byproduct streams (wood, foam, paper, cardboard and mixed plastics residues) that we can’t yet economically recycle.  But we first try to recycle as much of the material as possible because it has better economics and it is certainly better for the environment.

The benefits to recycling over energy recovery are obvious to most environmentalists and LCA (life-cycle analysis) practitioners.  EMPA, a leading Swiss research institute, presented such results at the International Electronics Recycling Congress in Salzburg, Austria in January 2010.  EMPA took actual data from waste to energy and plastics recycling plants and compared many different environmental metrics.  It showed that recycling plastics was far superior to waste-to-energy from an environmental impact standpoint.

We are also often asked about biopolymers, which are a rather new family of plastics.  We are certainly not experts in this area, but we do know a bit about the issues being discussed by various stakeholders.  To the best of our knowledge, what I present as a brief overview below is accurate, at least today.

It’s very important that we first differentiate between biopolymers and biodegradable polymers.  Many of the initial biopolymers were developed to bio-degrade to address the plastics litter and numerous plastics in the ocean problems.  Many environmental groups initially embraced biodegradable polymers thinking it would solve the plastics waste issue, but they soon realized that this simply insured single-use of the materials and was actually a very poor alternative from an environmental footprint standpoint because the energy, water and chemicals required to grow, extract, synthesize and produce the plastics would have to be repeated again and again.  There is also concern that some biopolymers might compete with land and water that could be used for food production.  Many groups now express concerns about biodegradable polymers, except for possible use in cases where recycling of the products can’t be imagined.

Might biodegradability help with the plastics in the ocean problem?  Possibly.  It largely depends on how quickly and to what extent the plastics “disintegrate”.  The reports on actual real-world degradation rates have been mixed, at least in landfills.  Furthermore, as they disintegrate into small pieces, just like less biodegradable plastics (nearly all plastics degrade over time at different rates with exposure to sunlight and other environmental factors), seabirds, fish and mammals will sometimes eat the particles with dire consequences.

If biopolymers are recyclable, from our perspective there is no fundamental reason why they shouldn’t be considered on equal ground with plastics from petrochemicals, or perhaps even more favorably if they can actually be produced with a lower OVERALL footprint that includes end-of-life considerations.

On the overall economics of recycling: Why isn’t this spreading more quickly if it’s such a great idea?

It sounds great, so why isn’t it spreading more quickly?  Good question!  I believe that there are at least 3 major reasons (and many small ones – as they often say “the devil is in the details”):

1. The lack of infrastructure discussed above – a bit of the “chicken and egg” problem.
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2. We (and other recyclers) are still rather new at this:A. Our current plants are large by recycling standards, but tiny compared to global petrochemical companies.  So some of the efficiencies we enjoy in energy consumption and raw material are forfeited in other areas in comparison to virgin-plastic companies because they have much larger economies of scale.  This is a common problem for any new equipment-intensive business.  But we are working on this one:  our 3^rdplant, which started ramping-up during 2011, is twice as large as either of our first two.B. While the process works well and our plants are selling to Fortune 100 companies, like any new business/industry with a breakthrough technology (actually MANY different ones that all have to work extremely well together), we are still increasing the efficiencies of our various separation, purification and upgrading technologies every year.  We made great efficiency improvements during 2011 and have more planned for 2012, but the virgin plastics industry has been perfecting their processes for many decades.
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3. Still-developing supply chains.  Oil is still rather cheap and the traditional plastics industry has not only been perfecting its technology, it’s been perfecting and rationalizing its supply chains for decades.   In fact, much of the plastics industry is part of the oil industry, using its low cost crude oil to make value-added products like plastic and plastic pre-cursor chemicals.   We are still working with a developing, somewhat bulky and widely dispersed supply of shredded materials of widely varying qualities and quantities.  Such wide variations in the availability, composition and quality of supply make it much more difficult to optimize a business and multi-step process.
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4. Given our small scale, the cash-flow from our plants is not sufficient to fund the growth we’d like.  A common issue for young companies is securing financing, particularly for ventures needing to invest in plant and equipment.  Venture capital and private equity prefers to invest in less capital-intense ventures (such as software and Internet) and banks prefer to loan to larger and well established companies with long and successful operating histories.  And, of course, this has become even more difficult during the challenging economic climate of the last few years.

What about all the technical details?

I didn’t talk very much in my TEDTalk about the details of the technology. I can absolutely sympathize with those of you wanting more information.  I’m a sponge for technical information myself, but I also understand that I’m not usually going to learn about trade secrets practiced by a company (that’s why they are called secrets) and I survey the patent and other literature in areas in which I’m interested.

Like most process-intense companies, we protect our technology and the interests of our shareholders with a combination of patents and trade secrets.  Governments grant companies patent protection for a period of time in trade for making the patented technology public and “teaching the art”.  This gives others the opportunity to improve upon it and/or use it directly once the patent period expires.  Without patent protection, many inventors would instead keep their technologies completely private for as long as possible.

This also means that you can look up our patents if you wish.  Some TEDsters looked up our patents and pointed out that besides my confidentiality obligations as an employee of MBA Polymers, I certainly didn’t have time to go into many details about the numerous different technologies we’ve developed.

When we enter into discussions with companies that might be developing technology in our space, we usually ask them to NOT tell us any of their secrets because we don’t want to be accused of stealing anyone’s technology.  When multiple organizations are working on similar problems, there is always the chance that groups will stumble upon similar solutions at similar times.

We work with communities and other companies all over the world to make it happen faster.   We also use a wide variety of venues (including the World Economic Forum and all types of conferences around the globe) to spread the word about why it’s important and that it can be done.  Just getting the word out that it’s both important and possible to recycle plastics from complex waste streams is extremely valuable.  I’ve often felt that the two most valuable things to know about a problem or opportunity is its size/impact and if it’s “really possible”.   That simple knowledge paves the way for competition, creativity and investment.

Finally, we work around the globe to promote government and business policies to recover more materials from waste.  I believe that this helps everyone, including our existing and potential competitors.  We are helping to pave the way and like many pioneering organizations, we have the scars to show for it.

Thank you for your interest and engagement!

What’s your vision and motivation for making this art?

I think it’s more a compulsion than a vision. It all started with The Uncle Phone. If you’ve seen my TED Talk, you’ll know it’s the very long phone I made for my uncle, who used to sometimes insist that I assist him in making a phone call by dialing the number for him.

In the Indian context, it’s a really bad thing to deny these simple requests and others, such as, “Can you get me a glass of water?” You can’t say, “No, I won’t do it.” And yet, if these requests become the cause of so many disruptions in your daily life, there is a need to rationalize it somehow. Just the proposition of having to communicate something very simple and innocuous to an uncle can become a very complex and difficult thing due to the issue of respect — it’s all so culturally coded.

I felt a need to deal with this complexity, which is so hard to put into words, yet occupies such a big space in my mind. Somehow I needed to find a way to express or even think about it. That was how it all started. I am quite satisfied with how the phone addressed this need – in an inquiring and affectionate way, without making a really big drama.

And what was your uncle’s response to it?

Actually, I didn’t really want to tell him because it would be too much of a confrontation. So I just kind of casually brought it home one day and didn’t address the story directly. He rightly assumed that it was a gift for him or inspired by him, but the funny thing is, he only realized the meaning and motivation behind it nine years later, after my TED Talk went live. So the talk was personally quite a highlight in my relationship with my family. They publicly came to understand what our work is about, and a lot of it is about them!

When my uncle finally understood the piece, he laughed. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t take things to heart. And the object is very affectionate. It’s humorous and flamboyant, like him. He also felt really happy being the hero of the TED Talk in a sense, because he inspired some of the objects, which others have also appreciated so much. I think he knows somehow he had a big role.

The complexity of the cultural struggle seems to inform your work. I’m curious about Missing Person — in which one spectator in a room is always invisible in the monitors — and where the idea of invisibility might fit into that.

A lot of people find the intercultural aspect of our work confusing, because my collaborator, Søren Pors, is Danish, while I’m Indian. So while the intercultural dynamic is there, we’re more interested in interpersonal relationships. About Missing Person — we just had this idea about experiencing a sense of invisibility, how it would feel to be invisible. The first time I experienced it, my brain went into a bit of a flip: “Okay, what the hell?” It’s a strange sensation, which I’d never had before. So that was exciting.

Probably, on one level, Missing Person is about the superhero idea of invisibility – being omnipresent and able to do your own thing without being seen. And on another level, maybe it is also a reference to the culture of domestic help in India. The usual practice is that you don’t acknowledge them on the same social level — mostly not at all. You don’t say hello, you don’t speak with them. It’s like they are furniture, to the extent that it is quite common to discuss deeply private things in their presence because you just forget they’re there. This seems to be a mutually comfortable arrangement.

When I came back to my home country after being away for six or seven years, I found the whole thing quite strange, interesting and comical – as did Søren. Also, many other things had prompted us to think about invisibility, both in a physical sense and a social sense.

But we found that people access this work on many different levels. For us, it was fun to be able to play with invisibility in a group – the work allows you to transfer your invisibility to others in the room by your movements in it. However, in Japan, they have a cultural phenomenon called Hikikomori, where people isolate themselves in a room, confining themselves for several years at a time, and society just stops acknowledging their existence. When we showed this work there, some people experienced it as a very dark piece.

Everyone just loves Pygmies — the fact that the pygmies appear to respond to the viewers by hiding away in reaction to sounds, and just the fact that they’re so charming. There’s a mischievous sense of humor in your work. Did you used to play practical jokes on people when you were a kid?

No, actually I was very quiet and shy, and didn’t engage much with others. We just think humor offers a lot of space to address certain things that may be difficult or complex to understand or deal with.

Also, it’s not a conscious decision to use mischief or humor. It’s just maybe a state of mind, a natural expression of what comes out. To me, Pygmies — or even Missing Person or The Uncle Phone — is a very serious work. I was quite surprised in the initial years when people found the work funny. I actually didn’t experience it that way myself. So that was an interesting dimension to reflect upon.

Actually, the pygmies are also shy – they hide a lot. This whole theme of hiding and being invisible is a part of, I think, who Søren and I are. But it’s very difficult to analyze humor. We think it’s just a sense of enjoyment, in a lot of ways, which is translated and called “fun.”

Have you had any other unexpected reactions to your work?

Two that I can recall now. The pygmies were made to respond to the natural environment. But we found that people would literally play with the pygmies, doing things — jumping, clapping, peeping, which we found incredibly annoying – to figure out how they would respond. That was quite unexpected.

But the most surprising response was for a work called Decoy. We got no response at all! That was quite a disturbing experience. We’d struggled and struggled to make this work and were so excited about how it had turned out. We had put our heart and soul into it and then got no reaction from someone whose opinion mattered. But later, as it turned out, a lot of other people really responded to it. I believe the initial reaction had to do with context: it was a preview situation where the viewer was trying to contextualize the piece in terms of Indian art history, rather than simply experiencing the piece directly as a spectator. This taught us that the context of the experience (both the psychological and the physical) makes all the difference in the subjective experience of the work.

But we have found — and this makes us very happy — that many different kinds of people are able respond to our work. It could be a child. It could be an arts-educated person. Recently we came across a situation where a very low-income, illiterate person who’d had no exposure to art saw the work and was genuinely absorbed and delighted by it. So it’s not really made with anybody in mind, but we enjoy the fact that most or many people can find some aspect of our work to relate to.

What is the experience of bringing an artwork to completion?

Søren and I have been working together for almost ten years now, and work occupies 90 percent of our lives, though we produce quite little, a maximum of three or four new artworks in a year. We have had coincidentally parallel experiences, though our backgrounds are so different in that we came from such diverse places and cultures. Somewhere along the way, we start getting drawn to similar things, and certain thoughts and expressions begin to crystallize. Most of our artworks have been stewing in our minds for at least three or four years — some artworks we’ve been thinking about for ten years! Usually the only way to stop thinking about them is to make them.

Then we go through a very much more structured process, which involves drawing, research, making physical models with cardboard, wire mesh and sometimes clay. We bring these into the computer by scanning them, and we make 3D models and animations. They we add the physics and create simulations to discover how they should move, and start working with companies that specialize in the technology required to make the movement happen.

On the practical level, we collaborate with each other throughout the process, but I take care of more of the mechanical and physical aspects — like fabrication, hardware, materials – while Søren focuses more on the behavioral aspects, the algorithms and the software. Each of our projects takes a minimum of a year and a half. We operate a studio and workshop where we have five full-time people who work with us. We’ve a very tight team.

Making our work is very much like conceiving and raising a child. We go through excitement when a new thought crystallizes, then the hard work and waiting follow. When it comes together, we live with it in our homes and start to refine its movement and behavior. And when we think it’s finally done, there’s a sense of euphoria — but also a disappointment or bewilderment sometimes. But we are always excited to see if there is something new that we can contribute to the art world.

What role does technology play in your ideas? Do you have a particular interest in it?

We think of technology more as a tool and as a natural part of the world we live in — just as artists go to flea markets and pick up stuff to work with, or to a hardware store for canvas and paints. I received my undergraduate degree in visual communication, but the gap between studying communication and not being able to communicate with my mother, my father or my best friend was too big. A year later, I went to do my master’s at a small but specialized institute in Italy, which really gave me space to look into myself and find something that I could clearly identify with on a deeper level. Here I understood that technology around us can be appropriated and even shaped into a personal purpose and direction.

How has the TED Fellowship influenced the way you work?

The most prominent way the fellowship has had an impact — and this is what we were hoping for — is getting the acceptance of the technical community as a whole. Even though our work isn’t really about technology, the quality of the end experience requires a certain finesse that must be delivered by technology. And each project is so different. For example, for the invisibility project we needed a special kind of video digital signal processing expertise, and for the pygmy project we needed mechanical expertise of miniature systems.

The people we need to collaborate with are quite specialized, and they often find it very difficult, when we bring them an idea, to understand WHY — why it would be valuable for anyone to experience hiding pygmies, for example. So we’d find ourselves low on their priorities list or not taken so seriously.

Now that we have TED’s support, they’re more curious and appreciative because TED represents a standard they aspire to. We’ve also gotten some invitations from international universities to collaborate, and that is really exciting.

Late in January, Robin Ince tweeted:

balls, 7 months too late I’ve just realised what i should have done my TED talk on

So the TED Blog asked: What?

And here is what he wrote:

Every year I attempt to say yes to things that are out of my comfort zone. These are never physical things such as parachute jumps or mountain climbs — I am not so keen on actual death, I am happy to make do with the death of my own self-regard. A TED talk was one of those leaps into abject terror I made in 2011. I had admired these talks for some time and frequently fallen into bouts of voluntary insomnia playing TED talk tag until dawn.

My mistake was that I had never watched the funny ones. I didn’t even know that they existed. So I spent my first month of preparation for TED mulling over how I could create the illusion of being smart. This has been made even more difficult now you are no longer allowed to smoke a pipe onstage, a surefire device to create the illusion of thoughtfulness as successive British Prime Ministers demonstrated.

About a week beforehand I suddenly realized I had gone in totally the wrong direction. I had been asked for to provide levity, not compete with people who were clearly qualified to talk of astrophysics and the evolution of empathy. The wastepaper basket was rapidly filled and a new notebook opened. I gathered together some words on whether it was possible to be happy if approaching the world scientifically. In 8 minutes I hoped to cover love, death and the strong anthropic principle. As it was, I had to drop the strong anthropic principle due to time constraints. It appears that love and death take up more of your allotted eight minutes than you might imagine.

The night before my morning session (“morning session” is a term that strikes terror into the hearts of the predominantly nocturnal comedian), I sat alone in the hotel bar, scribbling and re-scribbling until I had nervously chewed all the ink from the pen.

The blessed relief of not overrunning, and saying most of what I had planned, meant I didn’t start mulling over the talk until I was on the train home. But by the time I walked through the door I had demolished all I had said and, as so often on these occasions, the clear picture I had wanted to see in the buildup only became transparent in the aftermath. To attempt eight minutes summing up happiness through science was preposterous. I now knew the TED talk I should have done, which was about the daily problems I face of attempting to write comedy routines about contemporary physics which both I and a reasonably broad comedy club audience can understand. A world of quark-based conundrums and neutrino dilemmas flooded my mind with a revelation at 7 minutes 34 seconds, which would have been like opening a box and a cat leaping onto your lap.

There is not time for regret — actually that’s not true; if you read French literature you’ll find it can occupy your life. Nevertheless I can’t look back too much and wish I had done something else. The process of terror was in itself fascinating, and I got the chance to enjoy coffees from around the world while listening to speakers who hotwired my mind (coffee and hotwired minds is a stimulating mix). And thanks to Hugh Everett and the many-worlds interpretation, I can be safe in the knowledge that in another world I did deliver the speech I wished I had, and also safe in the knowledge that in that other world I walked off and wished I had attempted something about happiness through science.

– Robin Ince

Watch his TEDTalk, which is really very funny >>

What do you think of the aggressive atheism we have seen in the past few years?
I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don’t feel the need to mock anyone who believes. I really disagree with the hard tone of some atheists who approach religion like a silly fairy tale. I am deeply respectful of religion, but I believe in none of its supernatural aspects. So my position is perhaps unusual: I am at once very respectful and completely impious.

What is it you’re most interested in in religion?
The secular world believes that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them just when it matters. Religions don’t agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us, that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too.

You propose to reform schools and universities to teach humans how to deal with the most important existential problems; loneliness, pain and death for example. Why? Can existential lessons be taught at school?
The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

Don’t you think that, in order to truly appreciate religious music and art, you have to be a believer – or, at least, don’t you think that non-believers miss something important in the experience?
I am interested in the modern claim that we have now found a way to replace religion: with art. You often hear people say, ‘Museums are our new churches’. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not true, and it’s principally not true because of the way that museums are laid out and present art. They prevent anyone from having an emotional relationship with the works on display. They encourage an academic interest, but prevent a more didactic and therapeutic kind of contact. I recommend that even if we don’t believe, we learn to use art (even secular art) as a resource for comfort, identification, guidance and edification, very much what religions do with art.

Watch Alain de Botton’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

How did you get interested in innovating solutions for problems in developing nations?

I first went to Tanzania as part of MIT’s D-Lab, a multidisciplinary course on development of appropriate technologies, innovation, and creative capacity-building to alleviate poverty. Among the principles taught is the concept of co-creation. Are you familiar with it? There was a phase in development where Westerners were saying, “Oh, if we just give people in developing nations tractors — i.e., technology that worked for us — it’ll be great.” What we didn’t realize was that we were dumping technology into a market where people had no idea how it worked. So now there’s lots of tractors all over, rusting. No spare parts are available because they were designed for the Western world. In contrast, co-creation is the concept of inventing new technologies alongside the people who will use it — having their input as well as ours. When two rivers meet, they meet at a confluence. Co-creation involves making confluent technologies: merging two ideas into one that’s better than either one on its own.

Did you go to Tanzania with an idea in mind, or did you go to identify a problem and come up with a solution?

We had to identify a problem before going, and build community partners, and then come up with the technology or solution that we thought would work. My project was a pedal-powered maize sheller. I actually started with a design from Guatemala, which had been used for the past 20 years. I didn’t invent this technology, but adapted it so it could be packed into a suitcase and moved more easily. But when I got to Tanzania, I saw that the technology was still completely inadequate — expensive, bulky. Why would a smallholder farmer want to own this machine? If he has two acres, he’ll have finished everything he needs to do with it after two days. Alternatively, who would want to lug their maize from place to place to get it shelled?

So we turned the idea on its head. I thought, “Let’s plug the machine into a bicycle — and also use the bicycle as a platform to bring the technology to the people.” So now the technology is shared among the community: it can be biked from place to place. Then when it’s out of season, a new machine can be plugged in, leveraging the bicycle as a tool of empowerment in itself.

At first, we rode the bicycle shellers out to the farms to shell maize. But then people started renting the bike shellers themselves, and some began offering it to others as a service, giving rise to an entrepreneurial model.

How does the bicycle sheller fulfill a need?

The bike sheller serves as a bridge technology. There are actually two extremes in maize shelling technology. Most people beat maize with a stick, or use their fingers. The “high tech” alternative is a large tractor which travels to villages offering to shell maize for 1,000 shillings, equivalent to 60 cents, for every sack filled. But tractor companies don’t want to visit small-holder farmers: they want to go someplace where they can shell 500 sacks of maize, not just 10 or 15. A bike-shelling entrepreneur can shell one sack of maize in 40 minutes, giving him the potential to earn $10 per day.

We think the ideal model would be that one person in the village buys the bicycle, becomes an entrepreneur and shells the maize for the rest of the village. Right now we’re working with village chairmen who would select a youth to be the one to provide the service to the whole village. So it’s his job, and he gets money from each of the villagers. That way, everybody benefits. During the maize harvest, he can use the sheller. During the off season, he can still make a living as a bicycle taxi, for example.

We’ve also developed other technologies to accommodate those who don’t want to be entrepreneurs, but just need useful technology. For instance, it’s not appropriate or comfortable for some people, like grandmothers or little kids, to use a bike sheller. For them, we developed a tiny $2 hand-sheller, which allows them to shell while protecting their fingers.

What else you can do with the bike?

We’re still developing more tools that can be plugged into a bike, but the one closest to being finished is a maize grinder, which basically grinds maize into flour. Another attachment is a rice thresher. We have a bicycle phone charger as well, which charges your phone as you bike from place to place. The possibilities of things you can do with a bicycle are endless, which is why the concept of GCS is so exciting.

What’s your ultimate goal, and when will you feel like you’ve succeeded?

The metric for success in terms of being sustainable as a company is getting sales and breaking even. But for me, it’s about getting the technology into the hands of people who need it. Even if I can get 1 percent penetration in Tanzania, which is still 40,000 farmers, I’d be delighted.

My grand vision is really to develop a portfolio of attachments and be able to achieve worldwide distribution. I want to break even in Tanzania after two years, and then to expand to Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia, and then to be able to travel.

We’re also expanding to the US market for our phone chargers, which were designed from spare bike parts by a 40-year-old Tanzanian inventor, Bernard Kiwia. He’s an amazing man who has made a pedal-powered drill press, pedal-powered hacksaw, a solar water heater out of fluorescent tubes. Selling in the United States would help us bring in revenue faster so we can expand faster elsewhere. And I want to celebrate Bernard’s story, not just to bolster him, but also to publicize our company to a wider audience and make people aware of the technology gap.

Too often, you hear about sustainable development projects that get started, and then the leaders leave and the project dies. I’d like this project to survive beyond my lifetime.

Making sure your project will carry on would require a lot of education and training.

Exactly, and that’s what we’re doing right now. We’ve realized customers need a lot of support, so we’ve trained technicians throughout the country to offer help if anyone has trouble assembling the machine. We’re also working on building relationships, interacting with all the chairmen who have maize farmers in their villages, and letting them know about the product. Last year we didn’t sell very many, but this year sales are suddenly exploding. It’s simply because we’re going into the villages and making personal contact.

What do they make of you, a young Asian-American woman trying to sell them this gadget?

Most of the time, my sales reps, who are Tanzanian, do the community contact, but I encourage my Western colleagues to integrate into local culture as much as possible, living as Tanzanians do. When I visit villages, I do think they’re always shocked and don’t know what to think of me. I actually have become quite fluent in Swahili, so that excites people. Attitudes towards foreigners can be tricky. People can be either excited and honored at your presence, or they think you’re going to donate something, because that’s been the history of Africa in general. Then we have to explain that it’s a business, which can be hard. It kind of helps that I’m Asian, because they don’t know how to perceive me at all. I’m not quite the typical European or American.

What’s the best part of what you do?

I love showing people how bicycles are really tools for empowerment. You can build a full business around a bicycle. You don’t even need a house. Just get a business card, your bicycle, your machine, your phone charger, and your phone — those are all the elements you need to start your own business. So I hope it takes off, but I think the biggest thing is just making sure the technology is accessible. I think a big failure right now in sustainable development initiatives is that there are a lot of technologies being developed at the university level, but they never go anywhere. No matter how good your innovation, if you don’t take it to the people that need it, it won’t have any impact.

What’s it been like to be a TED Fellow?

My favorite part about being a TED Fellow is meeting all the other Fellows. They are all amazing, passionate people, and it was incredible to spend time with all of them. The Senior Fellows were great advisers in preparing us for the TED conference and how to make the most of it, and the Fellows staff are extremely entertaining and supportive. I’m really glad we all got to take the main stage and learn how to give a TED talk. Hopefully, it will come in handy later in life!

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

Follow your passion and just dive in to start your company. You may not know what you’re doing, but for sure, you’ll learn and grow. That is, if you have the right attitude! Me, I have no regrets.

Watch Karen Tse’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Watch Pavan Sukhdev’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

You’re an artist and designer primarily concerned with how our bodies interact with the world.

I’m concerned with finding alternatives that challenge the disconnect we have between our bodies and the environment, and the fear that we have of our own bodies. I think ultimately it speaks to our denial of death, our fear of death. Our bodies are essentially our primary reminders that we are mortal –- that we are physical beings. We eat, we defecate, we decay.

Can you tell me the idea behind the Infinity Burial Project?

I became very interested in the relationship between death denial and the fact that death has become harmful to the environment. I think death could provide an opportunity to reconcile all of our energy and resource consumption and pollution. Instead, in the West, at least, we fear death –- a fear which leads us to embalm the body with toxic chemicals.

I wanted to create a project and set of tools that would challenge this by promoting the actual process of and acceptance of decomposition.

But if you’re dead, why does it matter?

By simply living, eating and breathing, our bodies become storehouses of toxins, energy, and resources that are accumulated over a lifetime. Contemporary funeral practices both return those toxins to the environment and, in the case of a “traditional” funeral, increase the toxin load. In the practice of embalming, the body is drained of fluids and replaced with a formaldehyde-based fluid, which preserves the body so that it looks “alive” for open-casket viewing. Meanwhile, the body itself becomes a toxic site, which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel.

When a body is cremated, it releases all those toxins into the atmosphere, not to mention the additional energy used –- about 5 kilowatt hours, a tremendous amount. There’s no control over how the toxins then get reintegrated back into the environment -– all the mercury goes into the air, which falls back into the water, which goes into the plant life and the oceans and the fish, and then cycles back into our bodies. And many people think cremation is the most green option. It may be better than some funeral practices, but it’s not really green at all.

Have you found a species of mushrooms that already breaks down human tissue, are you developing one?

I am in the process of training edible mushroom species to break down human tissue –- cultivating them on my own discarded body tissue –- because they are known to remediate some of our environmental toxins. Of course, there’s no single mushroom or cluster of mushrooms that remediates all the toxins involved, but it’s a start. Paul Stamets has proven you can train some mushrooms to grow on any organic material. He has trained them to eat petrochemicals.

How does one train a mushroom?

Although the mushrooms I’m using prefer wood-based food sources, mushrooms will pretty much eat anything. The training process involves introducing different food sources to the mushrooms and then slowly depriving the mushrooms of wood-based substances. One mycologist has even trained mushrooms to eat plastics like Bakelite.

Your spore-embroidered ninja suit, which is in development, is a prototype. So tell us how this works: the corpse will be dressed and buried in the suit? What’s it made of?

The suit is made of a cotton base layer that is overlaid with a crocheted cotton netting. The netting is embedded with mushroom mycelia and spores. The pattern of this crocheted netting is a visual representation of how mushroom mycelia grow.

I’m also working on other delivery mechanisms. One is a second skin made of a nutrient gel, embedded with bacteria and spore-filled capsules.

Are people donating their bodies to you already?

Yes, a number of people have offered to do so. My TED Talk has allowed me to reach a broader audience, and as a result more folks have signed up to become decompinauts. But no formal agreements have been made. I’m exploring what language and legal instruments are needed to allow donations.

What else are you working on now?

I’m planning a workshop on the ins and outs of choosing, then declaring — both legally and socially — one’s desired postmortem corpse-disposal method. The workshop is meant to be educational and facilitate the selection of alternative postmortem options such as the Infinity Burial System.

Do your ideas spring from doing art? Or do they originate from life experience, then find expression in art?

The ideas often develop initially out of a lived experience such as a specific event, physical condition, etc. But then each project expands to become a platform for inquiry about larger issues. The design or product is not the end goal, but rather the beginning of an intentional dialogue.

For example, the MIT FEMA Trailer Project grew out of my work with the City of New Orleans and its soil remediation efforts. We received a single surplus FEMATrailer and converted it into a mobile composting site with a vertical garden, rainwater recycling apparatus, and Permaculture library. We used the trailer transformation as an opportunity to understand and create dialogue about the history of the trailers (via a timeline), their part in the longstanding and entrenched environmental justice issues in the Gulf Coast, and government waste.

In the case of the Infinity Burial Project, the Mushroom Death Suit, the Decompiculture Society, and the alternative postmortem gear are tools in themselves, but are also ways to investigate and create a dialogue around our funeral practices, death denial, and the relationship between our postmortem practices and the environment.

Tell me about the art program at MIT, and how you came to this very interesting intersection of science and art.

The visual arts program at MIT (now called the Program in Art, Culture and Technology) grew out of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies that was founded by Gyorgy Kepes in the 1960s, then later directed by Otto Piene in the spirit of facilitating greater integration of art, technology, and science.

Today, the program is based in the Department of Architecture and directed by curator Ute Meta Bauer. Many of the students and faculty are involved in research-based, transdisciplinary practices that don’t necessarily fit into a typical art or design structure.

I studied psychology and was pre-med as an undergrad, and just prior to entering the program I was involved in social work and social policy research. So when I started to look at art programs, I wanted to be in a place where aesthetic, social, and scientific inquiry could work together.

How has being a TED Fellow changed the way you approach your work?

I’ve been truly inspired by meeting the other Fellows and joining a community of discipline-agnostic game changers. What’s been really illuminating is learning that our methodologies are often interchangeable or transferable -– such as the strategies used to build a community around one’s work. This has imparted a feeling that I no longer operate in an art ghetto, that the definition and reach of my work, the processes, and dialogue are much broader than I realized.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

A friend of mine came up with the phrase “Input thinking, output feeling” — in other words, don’t take things personally, and treat others with sensitivity and empathy. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about Abraham Lincoln’s legendary empathy, which he exercised both in political strategizing and in his personal interactions with soldiers and young children, among others. He denounced criticism of Southern slave owners, and instead tried to understand their motivations, which allowed him later to mold and shift attitudes.

Watch Robin Ince’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.