To safeguard against meat supply shortages during pandemics or other catastrophes, this study analyzed the potential to provide the average household’s entire protein consumption using either soybean production or distributed meat production at the household level in the U.S. with: 1) pasture-fed rabbits, 2) pellet and hay-fed rabbits, or 3) pellet-fed chickens. Only using the average backyard resources, soybean cultivation can provide 80%-160% of household protein and 0%-50% of a household’s protein needs can be provided by pasture-fed rabbits using only the yard grass as feed. If external supplementation of feed is available, raising 52 chickens while also harvesting the concomitant eggs or alternately 107 grain-fed rabbits can meet 100% of an average household’s protein requirements. These results show that resilience to future pandemics and challenges associated with growing meat demands can be incrementally addressed through backyard distributed protein production. Backyard production of chicken meat, eggs, and rabbit meat reduces environmental costs of protein due to savings in production, transportation, and refrigeration of meat products and even more so with soybeans. Generally, distributed production of protein was found to be economically competitive with centralized production of meat if distributed labor costs were ignored.

In the event of an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario there is a time window that occurs between when food stores would likely run out for many countries (~6 months or less) and ~1 year when resilient foods are scaled up. A promising temporary resilient food is leaf protein concentrate (LPC). Although it is possible to extract LPC from tree biomass (e.g. leaves and needles), neither the yields nor the toxicity of the protein concentrates for humans from the most common tree species has been widely investigated. To help fill this knowledge gap, this study uses high-resolution mass spectrometry and an open source toolchain for non-targeted screening of toxins on five common North American coniferous species: Western Cedar, Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Western Hemlock, and Lodgepole Pine. The yields for LPC extraction from the conifers ranged from 1% to 7.5%. The toxicity screenings confirm that these trees may contain toxins that can be consumed in small amounts and additional studies including measuring the quantity of each toxin are needed. The results indicate that LPC is a promising candidate to be used as resilient food, but future work is needed before LPCs from conifers can be used as a wide-scale human food.

In many developing countries, plastic waste management is left to citizens. This usually results in hazardous landfilling or open-air burning, leading to emissions that are harmful to human health and the environment. An easy, profitable, and clean method of processing and transforming the waste into value is required. In this context, this study provides an open-source methodology to transform low-density polyethylene drinking water sachets, into pavement blocks by using a streamlined do-it-yourself approach that requires only modest capital. Two different materials, sand, and ashes are evaluated as additives in plastic composites and the mechanical strength of the resulting blocks are tested for different proportion mix of plastic, sand, and ash. The best composite had an elastic modulus of 169MPa, a compressive strength of 29MPa, and a water absorptivity of 2.2%. The composite pavers can be sold at 100% profit while employing workers at 1.5X the minimum wage. In the West African region, this technology has the potential to produce 19 million pavement tiles from 28,000 tons of plastic water sachets annually in Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia. This can contribute to waste management in the region while generating a gross revenue of 2.85 billion XOF (4.33 million USD).

Abstract: In order to accelerate deployment of distributed recycling by providing low-cost feed stocks of granulated post-consumer waste plastic, this study analyzes an open source waste plastic granulator system. It is designed, built and tested for its ability to convert post-consumer waste, 3-D printed products and waste into polymer feedstock for recyclebots of fused particle/granule printers. The technical specifications of the device are quantified in terms of power consumption (380 to 404W for PET and PLA, respectively) and particle size distribution. The open source device can be fabricated for less than USD$2000 in materials. The experimentally-measured power use is only a minor contribution to the overall embodied energy of distributed recycling of waste plastic. The resultant plastic particle size distributions were found to be appropriate for use in both recyclebots and direct material extrusion 3-D printers. Simple retrofits are shown to reduce sound levels during operation by 4dB-5dB for the vacuum. These results indicate that the open source waste plastic granulator is an appropriate technology for community, library, makespace, fab lab or small business-based distributed recycling.