Brydie Ragan, who has been just five days into her job as Exbiblio’s “hardware evangelist”, says that she was still learning about Exbiblio, its people, and its projects. Even so, she wasn’t bowled over, as she’s worked on startups before, including one of her own, and “there are always surprises”. She adds that it’s just part of “life’s great adventure.”

Engineer, Brendan McNichols, tells me: “In a sense, I’m not surprised because it’s a startup and we’ve been spending a lot of money on a piece of hardware that was ridiculously expensive to bring to market. Where the surprise comes in, is that just a week previous, things had been seeming to be going okay. We’ve been getting software stuff on track, and then we’ve been hiring , and usually that’s a sign that things are going well.”

Ian MacDuff, the engineer who has been co-ordinating the relationship with contractors Synapse, tells me that he has been discussing with Exbiblio’s management how to wrap-up the hardware project. He suggested that they should document the oPen’s architecture and explain how it works. However, he adds, “I’m not feeling hyper-motivated. I would like to be, but I’m pretty disappointed about the whole thing.”

(update) Lauren Summers tells me: “I was surprised at the announcement last week because it was very sudden, and am sad to break up from this team of people. I do hope Exbiblio can figure out a way to make it work. The growing idea of the (working) device over the past months, and seeing each new development, makes the idea of not using it soon feel like a loss.”

Adam Behringer will be writing shortly about his own impressions.

Speaking to a couple of others off-the-record, I get the impression that there is not a huge deal of surprise about the event itself – these things happen in startups – but the timing and suddenness was unexpected. There is some bafflement about why the management appeared not to know about potential problems – even to the extent that they were hiring recently.

Now that we’re using a metal extrusion for most of the main body, we also need to use some glue to stick plastic bits to it (such as the window you see the display through), since there just isn’t enough room in the tiny body for strong snap-fits. This makes recycling harder, for two reasons: first, because now the device is harder to disassemble into its component materials; and second, because now the component materials will have some gunk on them (adhesive residue) that cause problems in recycling the metal or plastic.

Don’t Be Too Strong

Fixing the first problem is fairly simple: you just use weak enough glue (or a small enough amount of strong glue) that whoever disassembles the device can just pop the parts out by hand, overwhelming the strength of the glue. This way, disassembly doesn’t take significantly longer than it would with snap-fit parts. If the glue is too strong, you have to pry things out with a tool, or (if the glue is stronger than the plastic itself) you have to release the glue somehow. Most glues can be released by dissolving them in nasty solvents like acetone, or burning them off in a furnace, but some glues dissolve in water, and other glues melt at low enough temperatures that your plastic parts won’t be affected. The advantage of dissolving or melting your adhesives is that then they can be removed from your parts, avoiding the problem of getting gunk in the recycling furnaces.

Recycling The Glue

Aluminum parts with glue-gunk on them are still recyclable, and only have a slightly lower value than clean aluminum, because the gunk will get burned off during the re-melting process; this requires the recycler to have special emission controls on their smelter in order to avoid air pollution, and can introduce some impurities in the metal. Many smelters in the US and Asia have these emission controls, but even those that do will pay a higher price for clean scrap. I talked with five different scrap brokers (companies who take your scrap and sell it to smelters; you can’t really go directly to the smelter yourself unless you’re a big company with huge amounts of scrap), and they said contradictory things. One said that having even a tiny amount of glue reduced the scrap value from 40¢ per pound to 15¢ per pound; another said it reduced the value from 70¢/lb. to 60¢/lb; two other brokers said that small amounts of glue didn’t really matter, and didn’t reduce the value at all.

Plastic parts with glue-gunk on them are a much worse proposition. All four places I talked to said that even a little glue, even if it’s easily removable, cuts your value in half (from 40¢/lb. to 20¢/lb., say), and bad glue or a lot of glue cuts your scrap value to almost zero (maybe 5¢/lb.) This isn’t because of emissions concerns like aluminum, it’s because the melted glue mixes in with the plastic and causes the plastic’s mechanical and molding properties to get whacked (glue molecules get in the way of polymer-chain bonding.). This is in the worst-case scenario. The best case scenario is that the recycler will clean off the glue (with water or heat or both) and then that scrap will be as good as other clean scrap; this takes time and processing, though, which is why your resale value gets cut in half. So how do you find a good water-soluble glue that can be easily removed? Well, turns out that’s easy.

Water Soluble Glue

Cyanoacrylate (a.k.a. “superglue”, “krazy glue”, and various other brand names) is water-soluble. A Loctite rep told me “If you superglue your eye shut, a warm compress will unglue it in a day or so”, so presumably a tub of boiling water would get it off in a few hours. (A plastic part, that is, not your eye. Ahem.) By the way, Loctite is a great company environmentally (for a glue/chemical company), they’re good to buy from. Cyanoacrylate is probably your best bet, because it’s strong, so you don’t have to use very much, and it sets rapidly, which is good in manufacturing.

Common Elmer’s glue (”white glue”) and some wood glues are water-soluble. White glue is not feasible for much manufacturing because it takes minutes or hours to set instead of seconds; it usually is not a very strong adhesive, and can also shrink when setting, causing parts to move or bend. But there are also higher-performance kinds that have stronger adhesion and faster setting times; many wood glues are stronger than the wood they glue (though they’re still not very useful for plastic or metal).

Regitex, a Japanese company, specifically formulates their glues to be eco-sensitive. They have a whole line of water-soluble latex glues for different applications (envelopes, food containers, medical tape, shoes, and general use; one kind is even cured by UV light instead of drying, which is very fast.)

Hide glue (yes, glue made from animal hide) is another water-soluble glue which can bond metal, plastic, glass, and cloth, although it’s mostly used for wood. Sometimes it requires a bit of vinegar in the water to help dissolve it, but vinegar is a mild chemical. Hide glue is archival (three-hundred-year-old violins are made with it), and it requires just a thin coating, which is nearly transparent, so it should not interfere with aesthetics. However, like Elmer’s glue, it may take an hour to set, and it shrinks when setting. You can get it in liquid form or do-it-yourself granular form.

There are various other specialty glues that are water soluble: AquaBond makes temporary high performance adhesives for semiconductor processing; Mosaic Mercantile makes it for mosaic tiling; Dongguan Jelly makes it for fabric; 3M even uses water soluble adhesive in some tape for masking printed circuit boards during soldering.

Heat-Reversible Glue

Heat-reversible glues, from what I found, would be fine for metal parts, but they don’t help with recycling plastic. They don’t disappear under heat, they just lose their stick; so on plastic they melt into the mix and gunk up the polymer. There may be ones that vaporize or drip off entirely before the plastic melts, but I didn’t find one on the market.

The trusty hot glue that you use for making models and crafts is heat-reversible. It softens at 75°C, where you can sort of pull things apart, and melts at 130°C, where it doesn’t hold anything in place anymore; this is a lot cooler than most plastics melt, so on a disassembly line, you might be able to place the devices in an oven that melted the glue until it dripped off or got sprayed off. But this would be much more hassle and energy use than dealing with water-soluble glues. And hot glue’s melting point is so low it would melt on a car dashboard in an Arizona summer.

Apparently the archery industry has a couple heat-reversible glues, as well: Ferr-L-Tite and Bohning PowerBond.

There are also higher-performance heat-reversible glues being investigated. Active Disassembly Research ltd. in the UK doesn’t sell glue retail, but they develop heat-reversible glues, latches, hooks, screws, springs, and other fasteners in an impressive variety. Check out their video gallery (no direct link); they’re one of the main companies making devices which actively disassemble themselves. In the lab, researchers at Sandia National Labs have made heat-reversible tape, and scientists at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have made a heat-reversible glue with nano-scale ferrite particles that, when exposed to an oscillating magnetic field, jitter around to heat up the glue without heating up much else. Neither of these are commercial products yet, but they hopefully will be within the next several years.

Conclusion

Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid adhesives in a product in order to ensure easy recyclability, but that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. There are no doubt situations where using a reversible glue actually makes disassembly faster and easier than snap-apart fastening would, without too much cleanup required for recycling. In our case it’s an obstacle, but we can work around it.

He feels passionately that the option scheme is central to Exbiblio’s values, and he hopes that it will be emulated by other companies and help redefine American capitalism.

“The historic model of options in early stage technology companies is the American lottery culture model,” he tells me. “The first 20 people to join the company win the lottery and end up making $5 million to $10 million to $20 million dollars each by sheer luck. And that is a terribly costly outcome both for society and the natural world.”

“To put those kinds of extreme resources in the hands of individuals to the complete neglect of competing interests like the natural environment and society is just not a model that works in the world. It doesn’t address our needs.”

Bearing the above in mind, Exbiblio has devised a share option scheme to provide motivation and opportunity to employees, while also taking into account competing interests.

Employees at Exbiblio who qualify for the scheme receive options in two forms. Half their options come as a traditional right to buy Exbiblio shares at a certain price. This part of the scheme is more or less like the majority of share option schemes, with unlimited upside for the employee if the company prospers.

However, the other half of the share option grant has a capped upside. Once the company is deemed to be worth $100 million in total, Exbiblio’s non-for-profit foundation, Compendia, will have a right to buy out this part of the employee’s grant. The employee will receive fair value for the shares at the time. If he or she holds holds half a percent of the company in this part of the scheme, then it will be bought out for $500,000. However, from that moment on, the shares will belong to Compendia.

For example, should Exbiblio ever be worth $1 billion, then the half a percent that Compendia has bought from that employee will be worth $5 million. This money will be spent by Compendia on environmental causes, thus achieving the aim of sharing a company’s success with the world.

Many people seem to think that companies only exist to make money.

Well, companies do need to make money – to reward those who trust us with their capital and also to enable us to invest for the future. No business can exist for long unless it makes money.

But making money really isn’t the purpose of business.

Our purpose is to supply the goods and services which people want to buy at a cost they can afford. If a business can’t meet the needs of its customers it will cease to trade.

Those needs, of course, are not expressed through a single transaction. Business is about meeting customer needs again and again over a long period of time and building a relationship which enables the business to respond as the needs change.

That means that to be a sustainable business you have to look at the challenges which are facing your customers.

You have to examine the things which threaten the sustainability of the relationship. And in a spirit of mutual advantage you have to examine what you can do, as a business, to remove those threats. To make the relationship sustainable. To ensure one transaction leads to another, and another.

That’s about relationships with individual customers and with the communities of which we are part.

Business is part of society. Business is affected by what is happening in society and business can and should be an active agent of change and progress. Meeting challenges and offering new and better choices.

I’ve often heard Exbiblio’s Martin King say similar things, but this quotation is from a speech by the CEO of the world’s third largest oil corporation, BP. The speech by Lord John Browne was entitled, “Sustainability – A Pracitcal Agenda.”

It’s always nice to know that you are in good company

Brydie’s career resume made quite an impression at Exbiblio. Her many achievements include developing the East Coast Sales channel for Aldus Corporation, where she managed strategic co-marketing relationships with Apple, IBM, and numerous computer dealers.

Later she helped set up the design and communications firm, Bridgemark, but as you see from this extract from her resume, her interests range far and wide and include Exbiblio’s passion for social responsibility. She is a true “Exbiblio” person.

During my years as co-owner of Bridgemark, I made a personal commitment to social responsibility. Two of my first steps included joining one of the first Community Supported Agriculture farms in America and living without a car in a small city that had no public transportation. In addition, I also became a mentor for Project Soar, a program for women on welfare who were starting entrepreneurial endeavors.

I also decided to heed Thomas Jefferson’s advice to practice “eternal vigilance.” I started by making a commitment to attend all of our city council and school board meetings for one year. After sitting through the first city council meeting (for over four hours), an elderly council member approached me and asked, “Oughtn’t ya be home with ya husband at night?” I will never forget his question, which I now see as the deciding moment that marked the beginning of my deeply-ingrained habit of civic involvement.

During my years as a citizen activist, I have become involved in many issues, including land use and planning, affordable housing, and education. I have attended countless public meetings, conducted research, and written and designed reports, press releases, fliers, and newsletters for many causes and citizen projects, suffering through my failures and delighting in my successes.

In addition to my volunteer work, I incorporated activism into Bridgemark’s business by designing, producing, and distributing a kit for refusing junk mail. I succeeded in selling thousands of kits nationwide with virtually no advertising because I was able to gain national publicity. Substantive articles about the kit appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and in many major city newspapers, prompting stores such as Urban Outfitters, the Boston Museum of Science, and Ben and Jerry’s company store to retail the product.

My effort to reduce junk mail also resulted in invitations to speak publicly about the effort. One of my most memorable speaking engagements was at Dartmouth College, where I enjoyed a meal with the Club of Rome author, Donella Meadows. Luckily, public speaking had been an integral part of all of my work as a professional, so I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity,and others like it, to generate interest in the issue as well as sales of my product.

It seems that praising the Asian way of doing business is back in fashion (it rather went out of fashion during the long years of Japanese deflation). I think the team at Exbiblio would be interested in this post about Apple, Buddhism, Design, and Corporate Culture.

This week’s episode of green design for Exbiblio is about metal. They recently decided to change plans about how the first release of the oPen will be made–instead of the whole body being recycled injection-molded plastic, most of the body will be an aluminum extrusion with holes machined into it for the screen and buttons, and there’ll just be plastic bits on the ends, much like an iPod Nano. The reasons for this had to do with schedule and design flexibility–we have a very tight schedule to make, and need to get to production as soon as possible, but still have not nailed down all of the design considerations. Using an extrusion with machined holes gives us a great deal of flexibility, as machining can be reprogrammed at any time to cut different holes, and extrusions are fast and easy to get into production–easier than injection-molding.

Using aluminum instead of plastic does increase the device’s environmental impact, in three ways: first, aluminum is more energy-intensive to produce than plastic; second, it’s more energy-intensive to manufacture with and requires harder tooling; third, having the case be made out of multiple different materials makes it harder to recycle because it needs to be more carefully disassembled and sorted. With a device this small, we need disassembly time to be extremely short, otherwise it won’t be worth anyone’s while to recycle it, because the amount of plastic and metal you get for the amount of time spent is small. I’ll talk more about design for disassembly in a later post.

Almost all consumer electronic devices which use extrusions are made out of aluminum. The ecological advantages of aluminum are that it’s a very common material (the most common metal in the Earth’s crust), it’s not toxic, and it’s very recyclable–according to the US Geological Survey, 44% of aluminum production in the US is recycled material (the industry calls it “secondary” production as opposed to “primary” production.) The disadvantage of aluminum is that extracting and refining it is enormously energy-intensive–so much so that it’s often called “solidified electricity”. The US EPA estimates that 2-3% of all electricity use in the US is for making aluminum, and New American Dream estimates that 16% of all electricity used in Oregon & Washington goes to aluminum smelting. (Also from that site: “every three months, Americans alone throw away enough aluminum [cans] to rebuild the entire US commercial air fleet.” So remember to recycle your cans.)

Exactly how energy-intensive is aluminum? An MIT study found “the production of 1 kg of aluminum requires on the order of 12 kg of input materials and 290 MJ of energy”. However, recycled aluminum only requires 5% as much energy to produce. This is why so much aluminum is recycled–it’s advantageous purely from a money point of view, even if you don’t care about the environment. Estimates vary on how much of the US’s total aluminum production is recycled, and it depends on the grade of aluminum you buy, but on average it’s at least 20%. Smelting tends to be a very large-scale operation, so everything gets mixed together in large batches–that unfortunately means it’s nearly impossible to source 100% recycled aluminum. (The upside is that everyone who buys aluminum of most grades gets some recycled content whether they care or not.)

Steel, on the other hand, is also extremely common (iron is the fourth most common material in the ground), and doesn’t require aluminum’s enormous energy budget–it uses less than 1/8 (almost 1/9) as much energy as aluminum to produce. And stainless steel has a great aesthetic, very classy without being pretentious. Steel is also recycled even more than aluminum: the USGS says that 71% of steel in America is recycled. (Surprisingly, they also say that the auto industry’s steel recycling rate is 102%, meaning that they’re recycling more steel from old cars than the steel they’re putting in new cars.) Unfortunately, however, steel cannot be extruded in the tiny dimensions of our device–I talked to about twenty companies throughout the country, and the thinnest wall they could extrude was usually the thickness of our entire device! Some places can do what’s called cold-rolling for thinner walls, but even then I couldn’t find a single company who felt they could make what we needed.

We also considered titanium briefly, but it has none of the advantages of aluminum and far worse disadvantages. It’s a rare metal; it’s not toxic itself, but its refinement requires toxic chemicals like chlorine and hydrochloric acid; and it uses over three times the amount of energy to produce as aluminum (twenty-six times that of steel). (See that same MIT study for details.) Titanium is also expensive, due to the difficulty and energy-intensity of processing it; it’s also very hard to work with: a European Commission study says that “80% of material from forged parts for the aerospace industry becom[e] turnings or other scrap. Titanium machines at between 10-20 times slower than aluminum and can account for 70-80% of the cost of the component.” So, no titanium for us. Best to leave it for high-performance engineering applications that require its impressive physical properties, or to the medical industry that likes its non-reactivity in the body.

Coatings

Bare aluminum gets smudgy and ugly when handled, and can get your hands a little smudgy too, so for aesthetics you should coat it with something. Paint is a poor choice, because all but a few special paints cause a great deal of pollution, as they require toxic solvents to set, and offgas volatile organic compounds while they’re new. (I hate to break it to you, but that “new car smell” isn’t very good for you.) Lacquering, plating, and buffing are also not so great. The two good choices are powder-coating and anodization.

Powder-coating is like paint, except there are no solvents. Instead, the pigment is a fine, usually non-toxic, dust that gets sprayed onto a product with a compressed-air sprayer (no CFC’s required). The powder sticks to the product is by static cling: the powder shooting out of the sprayer gets positively charged, and the product is hanging on a rack that’s negatively charged (meaning that the product has to be electrically conductive to powder coat it.) Then the powdered product is put in an oven to bake the powder into a hard coating; this does use some energy, but is still a much smaller impact than painting. The only problem with powder coating is that, like paint or lacquer, when you recycle the aluminum it’s coating, it burns off into toxic fumes, so a recycling plant needs to have special emissions-control equipment to do it cleanly. This means that powder-coated aluminum is less recyclable than bare aluminum (and painted or powder coated aluminum scrap is worth less money than bare aluminum.)

Anodization is a microns-thin layer of oxidation on the surface of the aluminum. It involves some nasty chemicals (depending on the color, these can include sulphuric acid, nitric acid, phosphoric acid, nickel acetate, and others; some use hexavalent chromium, but we will definitely avoid that), but small amounts of them (because the oxidation layer is so thin). The coating is non-toxic to the user, the concern is the waste and worker safety in manufacturing; any decent modern plant has emissions/effluent controls, but it would be better not to use toxins in the first place. The main advantage of anodization is that it does not hurt recyclability of the aluminum–it is such a thin coating (and even that coating is mostly aluminum itself) that anodized parts can be thrown right in with bare parts in recycling plants, and their value as scrap is just as high as bare aluminum.

In the end we decided to go for anodization. It was unclear which of the two choices was best (they both have advantages and disadvantages), and anodization looks much nicer.

Inc.com runs through some of the issues: High oil prices, global warming, the sense that chemicals cause real harm and the earth’s resources are indeed finite. It concludes:

These are not so much charitable causes to embrace as they are problems that entrepreneurs can solve. Wall Street and Silicon Valley certainly understand this: Venture capital firms invested $958 million in renewable energy companies in the first half of 2006 alone.

Exbiblio is committed to Green Design, but it hasn’t got a product that will ’save the planet’. Instead, it’s going down the charitable route with its Compendia Foundation. I am told that if Exbiblio fulfills its ambitions, there will be a significant amount of capital available for Compendia and the environment. It’s certainly a different approach to Green Business from that chosen by most of the Green 50 – but Exbiblio is never one to take the obvious or easy path, and I have to say that it is one of the things that motivates people at Exbiblio in their daily work on the oPen and its associated software.

As it has happens, there has been a big discussion raging on Slashdot along similar lines. If a US citizen wants to go and find a better place to live, should they move to the Netherlands? You will find a variety of views and perspectives on the Dutch immigration and taxation systems.

The thing that concerns me most about Exbiblio is time. It all seems so tight to me, that there doesn’t seem to be any margin for unpleasant surprises. And it’s already behind schedule. I would think that an ordinary business would be looking very actively for investors to buy it more time, and a strategic partners to help it get its product to the customers. Exbiblio doesn’t seem to be doing either of those things – at least, not in full gear. But then it isn’t an ordinary business.

I put my concerns to Martin, and he responds that he wants to hand a product to investors and partners, not just a “vision” with hypothetical sales projections. Exbiblio won’t have a product until early next year. So actively approaching partners is on hold.

There is a view that actually, it’s easier to sell a “vision” than a product – because a “vision” can be a sales pitch, and a product can be put to the test. Martin senses “dishonesty” in that approach.

He points out that investors aren’t just a cash cow, they are “real partners”, and as such, they deserve to have the full picture.

More importantly, I sense he wants an upper hand in the negotiations – and perhaps it’s not just about how much equity Exbiblio would give away for how much money. He wants very much to prove that Exbiblio’s way of doing things – its cherished “values” – make real business sense. If it has has already made a successful product that people really want, then the “Exbiblio way” will be more compelling.

So Exbiblio is not in full fund raising mode, though no doubt it would be happy to talk to potential investors, especially individuals who share its values. The plan is to have a product in hand early next year. Investors can try the product out for themselves, and decide if they find it compelling.

If Exbiblio is certain that it can find some “bridge funding” to keep working while it raises equity, then it can all work out yet… but the timing will keep us all on the edge of our seats.