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Theres no question that Amazon is known for its packaging. Boxes and mailers with the ubiquitous smile logo now dot the porches of every neighborhood in the country. And with the companys 2017 purchase of Whole Foods, it became a major player in food packaging as well, wrapping everything from produce to potato chips. Since then, the chain has expanded to 535 locations and increased its sales 40%. That means that every day, millions of people take home some food wrapped in plastic from Whole Foodsbut probably rarely think about the packaging. But in a nondescript warehouse in a still-industrial part of Seattle, five scientists at Amazons Sustainable Materials Innovation Lab are trying to design a better package.This work is twofold. First, researchers are putting dozens of bio-based plastics through a gauntlet of tests on things like tensile strength, tear strength, and seal strength to see how they compare to their fossil-fuel-based counterparts. Second, theyre working with a handful of partners to make sure that when this packaging hits the market, theres a recycling infrastructure already in place that can support it.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our long-term objective is to enable simplicity and recycling of plastics in the same way that you have paper today, says Alan Jacobsen, the director of Materials and Energy Sciences at the lab. You dont need to know, is it a 1, 2, 3, 4. You just throw it.The intense focus on circularity sands in stark contrast to the overconsumption that Amazons business model entailsand the vast amounts of junk it distributes, particularly with the recent launch of Haul, where every item is under $20. Jacobsen, for his part, says that he knows people are going to buy products at a range of price points. . . . We try to figure out how to enable that in the most sustainable way. And the company says it intends to make the research and technology available beyond Amazon, which means that if its successful, it could lead to a fundamental change in packagingand recyclingthroughout the economy.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]The challenges of designing food packagingLast October, Amazon announced that it had swapped out all of its plastic fillers with paper, part of its overall commitment to reducing plastic use. Paper isnt just more environmentally friendly than plastic, it also has much higher rates of recycling (68% compared to 6%). When youre at home recycling paper, you just throw it in the bin and you know its going to get recycled, Jacobsen says. Because its easier to recycle, its recycled more.But for some applications, paper just isnt a viable solution. Thats especially true for food packaging because of the physical properties of the material, says Jacobsen. Sometimes this has to do with the tear strength or puncture strength; sometimes it has to do with the moisture barrier properties or oxygen barrier propertiesjust properties that it is not possible for paper to meet.Food packaging has to keep potato chips crispy and pretzels salty and baby carrots wet; it has to be tough enough that a pile of apples dont tear open the bag, with a seal strong enough that frozen peas dont spill all over the floor (while still being easy to open). Food has way more demands of its packaging than something like a book, a tube of lipstick, or even a set of dishes. The default solution to this has always been plastic. But Jacobsen and his team are working on a replacement: biopolyesters. That means the plastic is biodegradable and uses biological materials, waste, or recycled content as the feedstock (or raw material used to make the plastic). [Photo: courtesy Amazon]But this packaging doesnt just have to be developed, tested, and producedAmazon also wants it to be easily recyclable, which is where things get even more complicated. Our current recycling infrastructure is finicky: Its not good at differentiating between different types of plastic, and if it gets confused, it errs on the side of landfill. (Because if the different types of plastic get bundled together, it downgrades the entire bale, which means less money for the recycling facility.)Jacobsen and his team want to eliminate this problem entirely. They want to make biopolyesters that are a blend of feedstocks (including different types of recycled plastic) and then have recycling plants (called materials recovery facilities, or MRFs) be able to take it all in, easily separate it, and find a home for these streams.But one new type of material is not going to work, says Jacobsen. Youre going to need a range of different materials. You often have to blend these materials together. You have to put them in different layers to meet the requirements for a particular application. But most recycling facilities arent set up to deal with these kinds of mixed waste streams in a single piece of packaging. So Amazon is working with a network of other companies to help redesin the plastic recycling infrastructure to make it simple for their designs to always be made into something new.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Glacierdesigning robots to go through the trashMuch of the recycling infrastructure in the United States is built on MRFs. These massive warehouses take in gobs of recyclingcardboard boxes and wine bottles and take-out containers and everything in betweenand sort hundreds of tons of waste each day. But in the course of that sorting, a lot of otherwise recyclable stuff can get missed or thrown out, maybe because the machines cant tell what it is, maybe because it gets mixed in with other items. That means a lot of theoretically recyclable materials get sent to the landfill, and also that a lot of bundles of recycled plastic are too degraded with other materials to be properly reused. Glacier, a San Francisco-based company that Amazon invested in last fall, designed a robot to eliminate these pain points. It can sort through more than 30 different types of material, meaning the end bales are more accurate, and fewer items get trashed. (One company, for example, added a Glacier robot, and found that its paper bales were 17% more pure as a result.)[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our society tends to view recycling as a nice alternative to landfilling our trash, says Rebecca Hu-Thrams, one of the cofounders. [But] we very much see recycling as an absolutely crucial pillar of societys necessary transition toward circular manufacturing. In other words, recycling is at its core a way to get your hands on more raw feedstocks, more materials to turn into new stuff.Hu-Thrams referenced a customer in the Midwest that installed one of Glaciers AI cameras on whats known as a last chance line, where all the trash leaves the facility and theres one more shot to pick out recyclable items. This facility quickly realized that about two-thirds of its total leakage was coming from beverage bottles; when they identified where and why this was happening, they were able to fix the issue. So in the span of a couple of weeks or less, they actually are now on track to rescue 15 million more of these PET bottles every single year that wouldve ended up in landfill, says Areeb Malik, Glaciers other cofounder.[Image: courtesy of the author]Amazon plans to install one of these robotic systems in its lab next month. The goal is that as they develop new biopolyesters that are a mix of materials, they can simultaneously be training the system to recognize them and mark them as recyclablenever getting confused and thinking they belong in the trash.We want to make sure that once the materials are out in the market, we know that theyll be identified in these systems right away, says John Shane, a principal materials engineer who worked in Amazons lab for three years. And well be able to generate data sets here that we can share with Glacier and then they can share with their customers. As that information is fed back to the companies, theyll ideally be able to design packaging thats easier to recycle (and better identified by the robot).Thats a huge priority for Amazon, which plans to share what it learns from its biopolyester development. We dont want to own the IP and keep it to ourselves, says Jacobsen. We want everybody to have access; we have no financial motivation.[Photo: Amazon]EsterCycledesigning chemicals to break down the plasticsBut even if Glaciers tech scales up and is able to identify much more theoretically recyclable plastic, the current recycling infrastructure isnt necessarily able to transform that into new products. And thats the problem EsterCycle is trying to solve. The Denver-based startup spun out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last August, after completing a successful project with Amazon on mixed recycling waste. Julia Curley was a postdoctoral researcher at NREL working on the project; shes now EsterCycles founder and only full-time employee. Curley stresses that EsterCycle isnt looking to upend traditional recycling processesits developing an entirely new one. The goal is to be additive to the current system, taking what MRFs now see as contaminated, lower quality plastic and transforming it into materials that can be made into new products.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our existing system essentially collects bales of similar plastic; shreds, washes, and melts it; and then turns it into something new: Its a mechanical process. EsterCycle, on the other hand, is working on chemical recycling. Plastics are made of these long chains of molecules called polymers, Curley says. And what were doing is actually cutting that chain into its individual components, kind of like taking apart a large string of Legos into its individual pieces. And then they can be remade into new plastics. (Some environmental groups criticize wide-scale chemical recycling as being a pipe dream of Big Oil, although most of the research in this area thus far solely relates to fossil-fuel-based plastic.)This will be especially relevant for compostable plastics, which are commonly used in food packaging. While this is still a small portion of overall plastic (just 1%, as of 2024), its projected to keep increasingand our current infrastructure isnt designed to recycle it. Curley says that currently, if too much of it is in a recycling bale, it will significantly lower the quality and price that a MRF can ask for it. Commercial composters, meanwhile, often dont accept it either, because of contamination issues, or because theyre skeptical that it actually breaks down.EsterCycle is now using a lot of these compostable plastics as feedstocks to demonstrate how well its chemical process works at breaking them down and making them usable for the supply chain. As EsterCycle breaks down these kinds of plastics, the resulting building blocks can be sold to any kind of manufacturer. The idea is that they can be drop-in additions to existing manufacturing, meaning the process doesnt have to change at all, Curley says.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Novamontdesigning packaging to be recycledNovamont, an Italian company, has been working on biodegradable and compostable products since its launch in 1990and its exactly the kind of company that might buy those building blocks. Its Mater-Bi is used in things like shopping bags and packaging; while it was originally made out of fossil-fuel-produced polyesters, the company has been working to increase the amount of renewable content in this material. While EsterCycle isnt yet sending its feedstock their way, the idea is that ultimately, Novamont and similar companies would be able to seamlessly incorporate those biopolyesters into their products. In the meantime, Amazon and Novamont are testing out bio-based plastic grocery bags in Amazon Fresh stores in Valencia, Spain. That was a great application where paper was being used and it wasnt meeting the requirements, Jacobsen says. The grocery bags were being put in the fridge before being delivered to customers and because of the moisture, they were falling apart when people took them out. Switching to the plastic bags has made it better for the folks that are delivering them and improved it all around.In the U.S., Jacobsen and his team have been testing out produce bags made from biopolyesters at some Whole Foods locations and at Amazon Fresh stores in the Seattle area. There, they have QR codes where customers can give feedback on the bags.The Amazon lab collects that feedback, shares it with Novamont, and then they keep iterating on the design until it gets closer to what they want. We learned that lettuce wilted faster [in the early bags], says Jacobsen. Is it the end of the world? Probably not, but to some customers, its not ideal. Researchers at the lab could then take that feedback and reexamine the moisture barrier properties in the bags to see how that element could be adjusted. Once these bags have been used, the goal is that theyre fed back into the recycling stream. To that end, Novamont is also conducting trials with one of Glaciers AI models to ensure that the bags can be properly sorted once they reach a MRF. And then, of course, the ideal is that EsterCycle would be able to chemically break down the bags to be fed back into Novamonts production system.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Designing a better recycling systemno matter whos in the White HouseMany of these developments are still years from being widely used in the market. That would seem compounded by the fact that the Trump administration appears actively hostile toward anything that benefits the environment and is cutting funding and staffing at research institutions across the country. (Just last week, 114 people were fired from NREL as part of massive cuts to the Department of Energy.)Jacobsen admitted that its a bit of a wait-and-see period, and notes that while their funding isnt necessarily dependent on the government, they do partner with government labs where theres an opportunity to accelerate progress. He hopes that will continue to be possible over the next four years. [Image: courtesy of the author]The Glacier team, meanwhile, is cautiously optimistic about what Trump means for their business. Recycling in the waste industry as a whole tends to be extremely bipartisan, says Glaciers Hu-Thrams. Whether youre thinking about recycling from a climate crisis mitigation angle, or an onshoring and workforce development and job creation angle, theres so many reasons why advancing recycling infrastructure and recycling efficiency is a really, really good thing to do for our society. Much of this work is also done at the state and local level, where decisions are more insulated from Trumps rhetoric and slapdash executive orders. Thats where Jacobsen hopes to make the most progress, noting that cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver are interested in incorporating these products into their recycling infrastructure. It can be a bit jarring to try to square the innovations coming out of Jacobsons teamand the genuine passion that they have for a fossil-fuel-free supply chainwith Amazons position as the largest online seller of stuff in the U.S. But our addiction to consumptionand Amazons commitment to fulfilling itmeans that this cycle is unlikely to end anytime soon. Ensuring that its not wrapped in plastic made from fossil fuels is a big deal. And if theyre successful at transforming food packaging, it has implications far beyond just what we eat.
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It is hard to believe that in 2025, we are still dialing to schedule doctor appointments, get referrals, refill prescriptions, confirm office hours and addresses, and handle many other healthcare tasks. In fact, I created Zocdoc nearly 20 years ago to help patients avoid the dysfunctional phone experience and schedule appointments online. But I must confess that I have to pick up the phone sometimes, tooand I dread it. I am not alone. According to a recent survey my company conducted, most Americans say they dread calling their doctor about as much as they dread getting a shot. At best, it is an inconvenience. At worst, the phone is a barrier to care and a wildly inefficient and costly channel for providers. Given that billions of healthcare interactions occur over the phone each year, this is a calamitous liability. Relying on technology that was revolutionary in 1876 is no way to manage Americas healthcare administration. Especially because 150 years later, a new technology has emerged that will transform how healthcare operates: artificial intelligence. While AI incites a range of feelings when it comes to its clinical implications and possibilities, I am much more focused on leveraging AI to solve healthcares administrative challenges. Considering these burdens cost $600 billion to $1 trillion annually, AI offers a remarkable opportunity to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and deliver first-class experiences for everyone. As I see it, the effort to leverage AI to improve healthcare administration will unfold in three stages: Assistive, Autonomous, and Augmentative AI. Assistive AI: Supervised Intern In the Assistive stage, I view AI as a capable but dependent intern. It supports healthcare workersbut requires ample supervision. Take AI scribes, for example. Although the technology takes records and transcribes patient encounters, physicians must still review and revise the notes to ensure they are correct. However, because AI scribes cannot yet work autonomously, documentation burdens remain and there is not a pure efficiency gain. And they do not even begin to clear the waste and friction burdening office staff and patients. Autonomous AI: Productive Peer AI that works independently defines the Autonomous stage. Instead of an intern, think of the technology as a peer. This is where efficiency gains begin to accrue, and it is where we are now. To understand Autonomous AIs potential, lets return to the phone. In healthcare, the phone is bad for business. Up to 20 percent of calls go unanswered, with each missed call costing provider organizations $200 to $300 in lost revenue. Half of Americans say theyre likely to switch providers if they cannot get through to their doctors office. The phone is also bad for health outcomes. More than half of patients admit to delaying care when they cannot reach their doctors office, while a third admit to giving up on scheduling a visit entirely. Autonomous AI is perfectly suited to remove these challenges. Appointment management is high volume, with billions of calls a year. It is highly volatile, with fluctuating peak times that are hard to efficiently staff. And it is highly rote, with most scheduling tasks being simple and repetitive. This makes appointment management a prime area for AI, freeing staff to focus on more valuable, complex responsibilities. In fact, the best AI phone assistants can successfully and independently handle more than 70 percent of a practices inbound scheduling calls. The AI phone assistants ability to scale efficiency, improve the patient experience, and help practices counter macroeconomic headwinds and bolster their bottom lines is compelling. Augmentative AI: Superhuman Colleague When AI surpassesand then scalesanything humans can do, we enter the Augmentative stage. Soon, polyglot AI phone assistants will detect and then offer to converse in a patients preferred language. AI models will recognize patients appointment preferences, from cadence of visits to time of day and day of the week. AI will even predict the likelihood of a patient attending an appointment and then create custom engagement plans to increase those odds. Augmenting AI will also excel at anticipating patients needs. It may contact a patient before a prescription runs out and offer to refill it with their pharmacy, or it may proactively schedule a checkup at their preferred appointment time. This might sound futuristic, but given AIs rapid advances, this stage is fast approaching. My prediction is this is likely only 12 to 18 months away. AI or Obsolescence It is tempting to point AI toward healthcares moonshots, but our biggest and most immediate opportunities for transformation lie in fixing the basics. With AI, we finally have the technology to bring Americas healthcare experience out of the 1800s and into the modern age. In doing so, we can remove the friction, barriers, and waste that have disempowered patients and saddled providers for decades. Change will happen suddenly, and then all at once. Because AI improves by the minute, healthcare organizations that wait to adopt this technology lose more ground every day. In no time, they will find themselves as relevant as a rotary phone.
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Greenlands coastline is huge: a sprawling 27,394-mile labyrinth of fjords, glaciers, and ice-choked waters, longer than Earths circumference. Its length and topography makes it one of the planets longest and most logistically hostile to patrol in peacetime. Now, with countries like Russia and the United Statess neo-imperialist plans to grab as many Arctic natural resources as possible, it is one of Europes frontlines. Which is why people like Jens Martin Skibstedglobal partner and VP of foresight and mobility at design studio Manyoneare thinking about how to better protect a wonderland that is key for the future Denmark and the European Union.For decades, Denmark has relied on the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol (yes, soldiers using sleds and good boys), satellites, and sporadic aerial surveys to monitor this vast expanse. These methods are slow, costly, and imprecise. For example, in 2023, a tsunami in Dickson Fjord went unnoticed for a year, clearly exposing the systemic gaps in this mixed surveillance system. [Image: Manyone]Skibsted and his design team originally thought drones could be a solution. Drones are efficient, they can act in swarms, and they can be fitted with cameras and sensors that can feed an artificial intelligence system to keep track of that vast ice landscape at all times. But traditional drones have problems. The big ones are long range but expensive to operate and require human crews. The small ones dont have enough range: Their batteries run out after a short time and they need to return to a base to reload. Skibsted and his team thought that they needed a new solutionone that could fly, so they could quickly cover large patches of territory, but also one that could operate entirely on its own, landing, recharging, and taking off again. The AquaGlider, as they called their drone, is a solar-powered autonomous drone. It reimagines the USSRs ekranoplan, a large airplane-like vehicle once feared by NATO, which the Red Army wanted to use for coastal invasions. Its origins trace back to the 1960s, when Soviet engineer Rostislav Alexeyev designed a hybrid aircraft-boat that exploited ground effect, an aerodynamic phenomenon where wings gain increased lift and reduced drag when flying within one wingspan of a flat surface. By skimming 1030 feet above water, these mammoth craft, like the 550-ton Caspian Sea Monster, achieved fuel efficiency double that of airplanes, hauling military assets at 300-plus mph. Soviet GEVs were plagued by instability in rough seas, navigational hazards, and political abandonment after the USSRs collapse. [Image: Manyone]Its ironic that a machine inspired by Soviet ingenuity could become Europes first line of defense in a region where Russia is rapidly militarizing (and which Trump also wants to control). But Skibsted saw potential in this forgotten tech to create a new kind of vehicle. The proposed AquaGlider would fly on its own for weeks at a time, taking off and landing on water; its designed to recharge while floating thanks to solar panels, and avoids storms by simply sitting on the water rather than flying. The drones make the most efficient use of energy, dozens of them zipping along the huge coastline a few feet above the water to absorb information and transmit it to base, surveilling everything from illegal fishing to Russian submarine activity.[Image: Manyone]Engineering perpetual motionThe AquaGlider is basically a wing that uses two propellers to speed forward, trapping air against the ocean or ice. This creates an air cushion that allows it to glide with minimal energy. This ground effect lets it travel twice as far as a conventional aircraft on the same power. During takeoff, retractable hydrofoils lift the hull above waves, reducing drag until the craft transitions to flight. If storms surge, electric thrusters enable vertical takeoff, though Skibsted told me in an email interview that this zaps the battery and is a last resort.[Image: Manyone]Solar panels cloak its wings and underbelly, harvesting energy even in twilighta critical feature near the Arctic Circle, where summer brings 24-hour sunlight and sometimes the sun rays go almost parallel to the ground for most of the day. Still, Greenlands winters, with months of darkness, pose a problem. Here, the AquaGlider docks with buoys that store energy from waves and offshore wind farms. These buoys double as communication relays, transmitting data to satellites or coastal stations.[Image: Manyone]Durability is baked into its graphene-coated composite hull, which resists corrosion and iceberg collisions. It avoids obstacles like any driverless car, Skibsted tells me, relying on Lidar and thermal sensors to navigate. For icinga fatal flaw in Soviet designsthe drone borrows deicing systems from modern aircraft designed to work under extreme conditions, like those of Air Greenlands he says, using heated surfaces or pneumatic boots to shed frost.[Image: Manyone]The geopolitical iceberg aheadFor now, however, after all the technical work done with an unnamed drone manufacturer that was Manyones client, the AquaGlider remains a design on paper. The client aborted the project because they were too busy making drones for the Ukraine war, Skibsted says. So, basically we own it ourselves. We dont know what will happen, but Denmark is investing heavily in the arctic.Indeed. Denmark knows that things may get really bad. Russias Arctic ambitions loom large. Its shadow fleet patrols the GIUK Gap (Greenland-Iceland-U.K.), mapping underwater cables and wind farms for potential sabotage. Danish intelligence warned that Russia could mobilize for regional war within five years, which now have been updated to just two if NATO appears divided, according to Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister: Russia is likely to be more willing to use military force in a regional war against one or more European NATO countries if it perceives NATO as militarily weakened or politically divided. In response, Denmarks 20242033 defense agreement has committed $570 million to maritime upgrades, including autonomous drones, underwater sensors, and 21 new Home Guard vessels.[Image: Manyone]The AquaGlider fits neatly into this strategya low-cost, persistent patrol akin to Ukraines low cost maritime drones, which have destroyed or damaged at least 26 Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea since the war began including the Red Navys Moskva flagship. But Denmarks immediate investments are pragmatic: four minelaying ships and underwater drones will deploy by 2030. But theres also a section of the budget that will be dedicated to autonomous surveillance crafts that can monitor the coastlines, Skibsted tells me. Thats where AquaGlider can fit. It makes sense from a design perspective. It will be up to the engineers to make it a reality, if it picks up the interest of the Danish government.
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