UW-Madison puts entrepreneurship at the center of the symposium

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Office of Sustainability hosted its fifth annual Sustainability Symposium at the Discovery Building on Oct. 28. Dr. Andrea Hicks, the office’s director of Sustainability Education and Research, said: “This year's theme is sustainability and entrepreneurship. What does it take to turn promising ideas into real-world solutions?”

The Office said the program gave students and faculty five-minute presentation slots on sustainability research. Topics ranged from advancing a circular agriculture bioeconomy in Wisconsin to eliminating CO2 emissions in UW hospitals. The symposium also reserved time at the end for poster presentations, where researchers and students discussed their work.

The Office offers a range of research and involvement opportunities focused on improving campus and city sustainability. Its work toward UW-Madison’s sustainability goals earned a STARS Gold Rating last year, according to the Office.

Hicks framed the event’s reach as deliberately broad. “Sustainability is for everyone. Not just engineers…and not just folks from the School of Business, our partner this year, but everyone.” She identified the School of Business as the event’s partner for the year.

Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies, used his opening speech to press attendees to think about good ideas. “They require a plan of what it's going to cost, and what it's going to benefit… ideas that can innovatively hit the road in new ways, I hate to say it, they require entrepreneurship,” he said.

His framing set three practical conditions for moving research into use: a cost plan, a benefit case and a way to put an idea into operation. For the symposium, that connected the Office’s academic presentations with the market mechanisms discussed in the main speech.

What business problem did Plambeck identify?

Dr. Erica Plambeck, a UW-Madison alum, delivered the main speech, according to the Office. She presented what she called a “deadly circular economy” and outlined five papers she and her colleagues are currently working on regarding lead exposure in Bangladesh.

Plambeck identified informal battery recycling, used for electric vehicles, as one of the main drivers of lead poisoning in Bangladesh. “Bangladesh had been importing electric vehicles and batteries for the electric vehicles from China,” she said.

Domestic manufacturing of those batteries began to rise in 2015, she said. Manufacturers “are making the lead acid batteries for those vehicles…in the country, and recycling it in Bangladesh,” she said, tying local production to the informal recycling system.

Plambeck said Bangladesh ranks among the countries with the highest risk of lead poisoning. She said the impact is severe for children and can result in lifelong neurological and physical impairment. Lead poisoning also has links to cardiovascular and kidney disease, she said.

Can policy alone solve the problem?

Plambeck argued that identifying the causes and remedies requires business participation. “If we’re going to improve something…we need business to come in and figure out why people are getting lead poisoning, and what to do about it.”

She contrasted that approach with the pace of government action. “You engage in policy action, but it’s going to take forever to get anything actually happening. So you need market-based solutions today while we’re waiting for the government,” she added. Her case linked product design, financing and waste handling to a public-health problem.

Where did the market solution emerge?

Plambeck and her team saw an opening in the short battery life of lead acid batteries. They moved to beat the LAB industry by selling lithium batteries. The team “managed to sell lithium batteries with seven-year durability,” she said.

Plambeck claimed customers were more likely to buy the lithium batteries when offered a three-year loan with a full-term warranty rather than LAB options. The purchase terms accompanied the team’s effort to overcome what she described as LAB’s short battery life.

Her battery work carried a broader environmental rationale. “Globally, we need to stop digging up the lead and moving it into the biosphere, and that means figuring out how to improve things from an entrepreneurship perspective.”

The next test is whether the research presented at the Discovery Building can produce durable market solutions for campus, city and global needs. That prospect follows directly from Hicks’s question about real-world solutions and Robbins’s cost-and-benefit test. It also gives Plambeck’s battery case a concrete scale: longer-lasting lithium units, purchase support and an alternative to moving more lead into the biosphere.