Day 3

I woke up deliberately early, trying to match the eagerness of the man running the Korean booth on Day 1. His excited advertisement of Korea's newest recycling tech motivated me to wake up at 6 AM. The presentation was due to start at 10, but transit takes about an hour, and I take even longer to get out of bed.

Morgan and I were welcomed into the pavilion by a young woman wearing hanbok. (The word was mentioned on the pavilion's display--it's a general term for traditional Korean clothing.) She wore a beautiful floor-length silk skirt and a wraparound top with a high collar. I wanted to take a picture, but that felt impolite, so here's one of the small-scale models at the pavilion instead.

This model is a cheery example of South Korea's new cement production technology.

South Koreans tend to make up for their lack of perfect English with enthusiasm. I had to focus a little extra in order to understand them, which I was happy to do--there's no reason that they should be forced to have a particularly great grasp of English. The scientific process functions well in other languages, too. We settled into our seats, and our host played a video introducing the Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (or, KIGAM). He insisted that it was a series of "three short video clips." Altogether, the videos ate up a half an hour.

They were pretty hilarious. Words are much more easily translated than culture--the tone was too saccharine, proud, and dramatic for my cynical American eyes. The videos featured a lot of post-production lens flare, booming orchestral music, and odd slogans. My favorites were "Dream technology in limestone. Dream technology in KIGAM" and the Big Brother-esque "KIGAM will always stand right by your side." Also, halfway through the videos, the production company ran out of money for a fancy American narrator and just plugged their script into a souped-up Microsoft Sam.

Despite the cultural differences, I learned a lot about KIGAM. The institute has been around since 1918 and they've put a lot of research into uses for low-quality limestone. They partner with private companies like Hanil Cement and Hansol Paper, encouraging cooperation: for example, a byproduct of Hansol Paper's new recycling system can be used as a filler in construction, helping Hanil Cement. There was less about carbon sequestration than I had hoped, but there's a lot more detail on KIGAM's website.

I was excited to see a presentation with science that goes over my head. Plenty of the policymaking already does--I've said before, I'm not a policy person--but I've been able to understand the majority of the science I've seen in the conference. I don't mean to say that I'm a better scientist than the entire UNFCCC. Rather, most of the events I'd been only cover the fundamentals of climate science. The Koreans blew me out of the water.

A student of Kyungpook National University named Hyunwoong Park presented his research on solar powered water purification. Forgive me while I try to make sense of my frantic notes--I think that he developed a method to disinfect wastewater using sunlight and hydroxide as an oxidizer. Hydroxide is apparently very good at breaking up pharmaceutical pollutants, though it was tested on urine and algae, too. He mentioned that their electrode also had the capacity to generate ozone during the purification process. I think. (I'm not sure I'm getting this right. I was typing very quickly. I'll correct myself later, when I have more time for research.) Anyway, if that's true, he has a very powerful solar purifier on his hands. "Very easy to make," he insisted, flipping through prototype images of plumbing systems outfitted with his purifiers.

Rather than trusting my summary of this research, I'd advise a visit to the website for Kyungpook National University's Photoenergy Conversion Lab.

The host of the presentation sent Park away. "Thank you for showing us good toilet," he said, and he called up Ji-Whan Ahn, an engineer with her own lab under KIGAM.

Unfortunately, her English was very poor, even compared to the previous presenters. I say unfortunate only because her current project is fascinating, and I would have liked to understand it better. She's taking the calcium carbonate from shells and using it to kill algae. Algal bloom is a huge problem in Korean rivers--a study of the Han River showed a particularly frightening increase in algae, with 56 specimens per milliliter in 2012 growing to 13,357 specimens per milliliter this year. This contaminates the water and causes massive fish kills, since the algae use all the water's dissolved oxygen. The fish literally drown.

Ahn noticed that wasted shells from oysters and other edible shellfish were valuable sources of calcium carbonate--even oyster waste, easily collected from Korean oyster farms, contains 7% calcite. Here's where I become foggy on the details. Maybe I can do some Googling, or maybe I'm just not very good at chemistry, but I didn't understand the process of using shells to purify water. Either way, it was a great use of otherwise useless material.

That was a main theme during the presentation: reusing waste. Fly ash from coal plants can be used to fill in abandoned mines and potholes. Hydrogen can be harvested in the process of purifying human urine. Other mineral byproducts from coal plants are used to lower the temperature of cement production by around 100 degrees Celsius. Even though a few of the projects were only marginally related to climate change, they all theoretically save energy, and they're all very interesting.

I'm going to apologize again for my very limited understanding of this presentation. Unfortunately, that's all I did on Day 3, since I was a minute too late for the other meeting I wanted to observe, and I got locked out.

Here's a picture of a wind-powered generator shaped like a tree.

There are two of these outside the conference.