Saturday, September 15, 2012

The Next Industrial Revolution Starts in this 20-foot Shipping Container

The guys at Re-Char, a small startup that makes carbon-negative products, were faced with a problem. They wanted to ship products to Kenya, but the options available were wasteful, costly, and not nearly as efficient as simply manufacturing near to the customers. To do it, in a place with little industry or infrastructure, Re-Char designed something new—a fully functioning, off-the-grid factory inside a shipping container.
It worked. It worked so well, in fact, that Re-Char will now send the self-sufficient, open-source Shop-in-a Box anywhere in the world. It's hard to exaggerate how significantly life can change for a community once one of these shipping containers shows up.
Brent reported live from Burning Man, in a possibly fruitless attempt to convince Joe that this trip should not come out of his vacation time.
Like the gang from ReAllocate, Re-Char came to Burning Man to prove a product could work in a harsh environment. In this example, the Shop-in-a-Box performed rapid fabrication, using software to make quick designs, and then turned to a CNC plasma torch to cut the pattern out of a sheet of steel. The two-foot long demo, a Gizmodo logo, was cut out in about a minute. It was damned impressive, but what was the point?
From Re-Char's perspective, the shop was a means to make the Climate Kiln, a specialized lid and chimney that adapts a 55-gallon drum so it can make the soil amendment biochar. (Quick background: In Kenya, farmers typically burn sugarcane debris in an open field, releasing tons of carbon. A Climate Kiln controls the burn to produce biochar, a carbon-rich charcoal that, mixed into soil, lets farmers use half the fertilizer they'd normally need to make crops thrive. In fact, crops grow even better with it.)

Read more: http://gizmodo.com/5942294/the-next-industrial-revolution-starts-in-a-20+foot-shipping-container

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