Indiegogo campaign to stop illegal mining threatening the Amazon Rainforest
We were spammed yesterday with a Twitter question from @DavidRabanus asking if we could add the ability to detect mercury vapor to our app. If so, we could submit it, as an entry in this Indiegogo contest to reduce mercury pollution from illegal gold mining in the Amazon Rainforest (activist hashtag: #ImproveArtisanalMining). (Update: David Rabanus wrote to strongly imply the tweet wasn’t spam.) We’re suckers for a good cause, however, so we’ll answer the question. The question of using Internet of Things technology to allow citizen-science, crowdsourced monitoring of pollution from activities like fracking and mining have repeatedly come up, so it’s worth a blog entry (especially after we previously suggested using fracking to prevent earthquakes.)
It’s not clear whether they are looking for a technical, economic, or political solution. The project itself seems open ended — it could be a process, or it could be some sort of technology. Extra points if the technology is recyclable. (Not sure how a process can be recyclable. I think they mean to say environmentally-friendly, which would be more generally applicable to things like processes, but that is not mentioned as a criteria, although recyclability is. This suggests some of the judgement criteria have yet to be fully refined. As it is far from being funded asking for submissions seems more of a publicity stunt at this point, anyway.)
One of the background articles linked from the contest notes that solutions have tended to be “technical.” The problem ultimately is poverty, it seems. This kind of mining is illegal, but the countries in the region are unable to control their citizenry because threats of fines or imprisonment do not phase people who are otherwise starving to death. This suggests some sort of political process (e.g., food subsidies) might solve the problem. (Maybe our suggestions around the Social Progress Index might qualify as a political process to help address the problem in a big-data and predictive analytics way.) However, the contest judgement seems to involve delivering some of toxic slurry to the contest participants (despite processes being allowed), which suggests the contest’s bias lilts towards technical processes for handling toxic slurry, and not technologies or processes for better detecting illegal activity or otherwise helping to address the underlying social issues.
The easy fix (not recyclable, though) 🙂
“Vee could use nuk-u-lar veapons” to solve the problem — rendered in our best fake Peter Lorre, Mr. Chekov, or Dr. Strangelove accent. After years of being taboo, suggesting the use of nuclear weapons to solve relatively mundane human problems, or even bragging about the size of one’s non-conventional arsenal, has recently come back into vogue. During the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Russia helpfully suggested the U.S. use nuclear weapons to plug the oil leak, even offering to loan out some of its nuclear experts to help the US go nuke itself in the Gulf. Apparently, Russia’s own contingency planning had considered the use of these weapons to plug any oil leaks arising from its own deep drilling, and was anxious to test out its theories by detonating nuclear weapons in one of its geopolitical “partner’s” critical economic areas. So, with talk of nuclear weapons coming back into vogue, we’ll modestly propose simply nuking the Rainforrest. Turning the Amazon Rainforest into a “cloud of radioactive ash” (to borrow a newly popular figure of speech) isn’t the most environmentally-friendly suggestion (“nuk-u-lar veepons” weren’t very recyclable the last time we checked, and the Rainforest is needed for cleaning a lot of the Earth’s air) so we will probably lose Brownie points in the contest scoring criteria if we submit this as a contest entry. Admittedly, the cure might be worse the disease. However, this “process” should stop the illegal mining completely. In terms of shear effectiveness, it certainly beats the usual strategy parachuting in U.N. technical “experts” and nation builders to solve what is ultimately a political or humanitarian rather than a technical problem. Doesn’t it? Please contact us to learn where to remit our contest winnings for … “One Million Dollars” (to use the catchphrase of another movie villain popular with our blog readers).
Can crowdsourced sensors help save the Amazon Rainforest from illegal mining?
In general, if we took an open source Internet-of-Things citizen science platform like an Air Quality Egg (wikipedia link) and modified it to handle mercury vapor, it might be “environmental friendly” but not especially recyclable. (I imagine someone could find a supplier that could print the Arduino open source hardware designs on a biodegradable circuit board. However, since these devices will be exposed to the elements, it’s not clear if that’s a good idea.)
Although the contest seems to be looking for a technological “process”, it’s not clear if citizen crowdsourcing to detect mercury vapor (followed by, presumably, a police action) is what they had in mind. We don’t have enough background to know why IoT sensors would work better for detecting these kinds of small illegal mines than, say, aerial or satellite photos. If the rainforest foliage prevent traditional photography, might not sensors like infrared or some sort of radar be used to map human installations under brush? (Surely such technology exists even if it is not available for civilian use.) If aerial photography isn’t an option, couldn’t we send in wheeled drones or other vehicles to search for these mining huts? (Perhaps Google could offer a “Google Maps Street View” vehicle or backpack as a contest entry. Not only would we detect illegal mining, but we’d add the Amazon Rainforest imagery to Google Maps. Sounds like a win-win, and the technology already exists.)
It’s not completely clear, but it ultimately doesn’t sound like the contest authors are looking for a detection ability. Recall we noted earlier that these mines are already illegal, but the people don’t this aren’t dissuaded by criminal sanctions because they are already starving. The contest isn’t clear, but they are apparently looking a cheaper way of mining that doesn’t involve mercury. (It needs to be cheaper, or the miners will continue using mercury despite it being illegal.) This is presumably the reason why they will provide the contest entrants with some sort of toxic slurry to test their process or technology on. (They don’t make clear if this will require the contestants to travel to South America — perhaps the Amazon Rainforest — to be provided with their test toxic slurry.) Then again, we have visions of a shipment of mercury-laden slurry throwing exceptions with DHL (the presumable carrier of choice from South America) or customs for testing — at least an extra for shipping “hazardous material.” (Then again, many Compact Fluorescent Bulbs and other consumer products contain mercury, so perhaps it is not a problem if the slurry is sealed and properly packaged, or the amount of mercury is below some threshold. Another reason to switch to LED lighting.)
Inexpensive components to test for mercury vapor similar to the NO2, NO, CO, and VOC sensors already in something like the Air Quality Egg already exist. we’re not sure they will be a popular add-on, however. Mercury vapor is toxic and will drive you mad as a hatter if it’s in your home. (Hatters, or hat makers, used to use mercury as a reagent for making felt. The tendency of folks in this occupation to go insane is the origin of that figure of speech.) While we suppose it wouldn’t hurt to add this sensor to a comprehensive IoT device monitoring for toxic gasses, if there is an suspicion of mercury a cheap sensor should be the last thing used. There are high-quality industrial sensors to detect mercury vapor. This kind of application only makes sense where the economy of the applications means additional sensors can be placed in locations that would otherwise be economically impossible, to permit detection of mercury contamination where it was not previously suspected (to be followed up with more accurate testing by more expensive equipment). We suppose monitoring the Amazon Rainforest is one such application (a cheap sensor is perhaps better than no sensor). Citizen-science crowdsourcing to keep an eye on otherwise unmonitored sites of suspected pollution might be another. We doubt there’s a high priority to put cheap mercury vapor detectors in homes, as there are higher priority pollutants to monitor first.
Growing interest in IoT and citizen science monitors around potential pollution sites
That being said, there is growing interest on placing cheap citizen science monitoring devices around tracking and mining sites. Devices to monitor both air and water quality are needed. The Air Quality Egg seems ideally for the former, except that its radio protocol is designed for short-range home use. (However, you could purchase the Arudino-shield version, and connect that to a WiFi or serial interface, which would presumably permit longer-range networking via cellular, WiMax or even satellite technology.) A friend of ours has a company that is very interested in this kind of cheap remote monitoring of potentially polluted sites, so perhaps we’ll do another blog article on this in the future.
Our focus is on IoT predictive analytics and software
That being said, we’re an analytics and software company at this point. We focus on software and let other companies focus on the hardware devices that obtain this data. Our app is designed to demonstrate how this IoT data, once someone else makes it available, can be analyzed in simple or complex ways to allow a smart-home to make decisions. (And deciding how a smart home should automatically manage potentially dangerous and not-uncommon indoor air pollutants like PM2.5 requires non-trivial algorithms, such as we’ve developed in our IP portfolio.) If a hardware company thinks there’s demand for inexpensive IoT mercury vapor monitors, we say go for it; we’d be happy to lend our software expertise to analyze the resulting data. (Although we like the idea of sending in some Google Maps Street View backpackers into the Rainforest to photograph the miners. Heck, they just need Google Glass and they can wink at the illegal miners. Any comment, Google?) While we wait for the hardware devices, however, we’ll focus on other uses of predictive analytics.