Show notes
Larry Ketchersid, CEO of Media Sourcery discusses their partnership with Everpoint Services to improve the recycling process for blades and solar panels, proving the circular economy. Their method uses innovative blockchain technology to create verifiable proof of proper recycling. By implementing this tracking method, asset owners can be certain their blades have been properly disposed of.
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The recycling crisis for wind turbine blades and solar panels demands better solutions as these materials pile up without proper processing and documentation.
This week we speak with Larry Ketchersid, CEO of Media Sorcery, who's partnered with Everpoint Services to tackle renewable waste recycling. Their innovative blockchain technology creates verifiable proof that your decommissioned assets actually reach proper recycling facilities, not abandoned in fields or landfills.
Stay tuned.
Allen Hall: Alright, Larry, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
So we met yesterday with Everpoint Services who is doing a quite a bit of business at the minute doing solar panel recycling and wind turbine blade recycling.
Correct. And we've talked about it on the podcast more recently about the efforts. To make sure that what leaves the facility is actually [00:01:00] recycled. There is a industry problem where blades leave a site and they get stacked up in some farm somewhere or some disposal site and never get chewed up or ground up and, and recycled properly.
And it's a black eye on the industry, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. You get, uh, I mean, we. The wind industry has detractors. We already know this. Right? And then when you have something that's like that, especially wind turbine blades, 'cause they're big, uh, and it's very visible, the problem then exacerbates itself. Right? I mean it, like you said, black eye on the industry.
But even with that happening, we still haven't gotten all the way to solving that problem that's, that's existing there. But you guys are working on it.
Larry Ketchersid: We are. We are. We, we have a solution that we cut our teeth on with, uh, tracking things like COVID-19 test kits. Okay. Right. So we, we started proof of authenticity when, uh, we were in the healthcare business.
And during Covid we had a partner that became an importer of, uh, COVID kits from Korea. And what [00:02:00] people didn't realize is if you leave the Covid kits out of the freezer, the efficacy goes down. So we had a automated workflow system that we turned into a proof of authenticity for. Tracking Covid kits from the manufacturer.
So we put little, I mean this was four or five years ago during the pandemic, we had these chemical barcodes that were temperature sensitive, and we put 'em on the, on the covid kits. So, and, and you had to scan 'em. So they weren't really interactive sensors, but from point A to point B, you could scan 'em.
Did the, the temperature go above a certain amount for a certain period of time, which made 'em bad, yes or no? And then we just track 'em all the way through. So it, it's very. Similar to what we're trying to do with tracking, recycling. I mean, we use this solution to track, uh, all sorts of things, but recycling is a really obvious use case for it.
So what we try to do is we, we, we take an asset. So an asset can be a solar panel, it can be a pallet of solar panels, it can [00:03:00] be a blade, it can be a tractor trailer, full of blades, whatever the customer wants. And we take as much of the evidence about an event and the life of that asset, whether it's.
Demolition for at the first part, transport for the second part, and then grinding or recycling for the third part, and then whatever comes after that. And, and we, we take all that evidence, uh, put it on decentralized public ledger storage so that it's there, um, maybe not forever in some cases, but it can be forever in, in whichever cases we want.
We hash all that information. We put it on the blockchain so it's there forever. For each one of those events, and then at the end we take that proof of authenticity and we turn it into an NFT. If we think there's value in it, because an NFT is a, a blockchain construct for a non fungible token, so we can, we can save that as an NFT along with all the metadata.
So if there's value in that later, [00:04:00] we'll come back to it and we'll have that NFT as a tradable entity. And when I say value at later, I'm talking about potential greenhouse gas emission savings for, for the way that we're doing proof of recycling.
Allen Hall: Okay. That was a lot. I'm sorry. I wanna unwind that a little bit.
Yep. So let's work on the process first and I'll, we'll figure out the NFT part here in a second. So the process is on a wind turbine, we take down the blades or take down, typically take them to the cell down and a bunch of other things. Yep. They're sitting on the ground. You come in and you start tagging each one of these with an RFID, or is it something a little more complicated than that?
Larry Ketchersid: So we have four or five different trackers that we use depending on what we're tracking. So for wind turbine blades, we can use one of two. We've got an industrial tracker. Uh, that does three different kinds of, uh, of back haul, we call it. So it can do GPS, it can do something called [00:05:00] Lower wan, which is long range wide area network.
Yep. Uh, it can use wifi if it sees wifi stations and, and that one is industrial, we, we screw it in to the fiberglass blades on, on a truck. That's, that's the first way that we did it. When we did, uh, Candace Wood and I from Everpoint services did one of these. 2002. 2022. Um, what we have now are sticker trackers that have 3M adhesive on the back.
Uh, they're, they're very, very thin. Um, I think, did I show you one yesterday? I think I showed you one yesterday. I saw one.
Allen Hall: Yes.
Larry Ketchersid: And, and we just, we can slap that on there. And we, we like using that method because when that goes through the grinder. We know it's, we know it's dead and it's, it's inexpensive enough that it, it's cost effective to put it on each piece of a wind turbine blade.
It's not cost effective enough to put it on every solar panel, but you can put it once they bound the solar panels together on a pallet, we, we stick it in between the top one and the middle [00:06:00] one so that the signal can still get out and when, when that one gets ground up. We've already associated every serial number for the pallet of solar panels to that serial number on that sticker tracker.
So we know once one of them's ground up, we assume the whole pallet's ground up.
Joel Saxum: That was the question I was gonna ask was, and you kind of touched on it, was around the cost. Yep. Right. So all of those things say Everpoint is gonna do a service for someone. Is that built into the bid? Like the tracking It is.
Okay. Okay. That makes sense.
Larry Ketchersid: It is. And you know, uh, the reason we work where Everpoint for a variety of reasons. One, full disclosure, my company invested in Everpoint, uh, way back in the day. Okay. 'cause we believed in what they were doing. And the reason we believe in what they're doing is they, they want to make sure that the, the stuff that they're taking down, the demolition work that they're doing is going somewhere.
Right. Right. And, and they, you know, previously they would contract with people and they, you know what you don't know, you know, what people are doing with it. You guys mentioned it at the beginning of the podcast. There's, [00:07:00] there's, there's a lot of, uh, dump. Where, where stuff gets put and you know, it's, it's just not, it's not the full circular economy that we're trying to promote in our company and that Everpoint services are trying to promote as well.
Allen Hall: So now you have basically an air tag on each of the blades or a pallet of solar panels. Correct. It may be the simple way to think about it. Yep. And similar to air tags, you can actually watch as the truck pulls the blade along or the blade sections along. To where if ever it's Everpoint's gonna take it to be ground up or whatever happens to it on the recycling side.
So not only do you identify it at this farm where it's been pulled down from, now you're constantly tracking this piece of blade or these sections of blade or this whole thing to its end of life. I, I think that's where a lot of operators are concerned about is like when it leaves my site, it kind of, I can't track it.
I don't know where [00:08:00] it's going anymore. Right, right. And I'm not sure, as some OEMs have pointed out, I'm not sure where it ends up at. 'cause I have no way of following. So unless I physically follow this thing. I don't know. So as an operator working with Everpoint, I can actually see that the blaze that are leaving my site or the solar panels that are leaving my site, I can actually see where they're going live, so to speak.
Larry Ketchersid: That's correct. That's correct. And we, you know. Cool. We, we put it on a dashboard. Um, they can share it with whoever they want to, so you can see them going. Um, we had 460 pallets from this last job that we did, so the map gets a little busy, so you kind of have to separate it out, but it's, it, it shows, it shows 'em going everywhere and, you know, occasionally.
It's not perfect. Um, sticker tracker wouldn't put on. Right. One fell off. We had to make some assumptions, but,