How Tech is securing a more sustainable tomorrow for Singapore

As an island nation, we are especially susceptible to the ill effects of climate change – we are, after all, surrounded by seawater and have no hinterland to retreat to when sea levels rise.

To tackle this grave existential challenge, Singapore’s Green Plan 2030 charts the nation’s path for sustainable development. This ambitious vision calls for both public and private sectors to play their part in providing solutions that enable Singapore to continue thriving while reducing its carbon footprint.

And as expected, tech has been enabling different organisations to make a big impact in promoting sustainability. Let’s look at some of these inspiring examples!

Boosting food security with AI

One of the Green Plan 2030’s goals is to locally produce 30 per cent of Singapore’s food needs within this decade, and AI is taking on a significant role in making this a reality by boosting our fish farms’ productivity.

These fish farms need a huge quantity of larvae feed – made up of a large type of plankton known as rotifers – and this supply needs to be reliable as fish larvae need to be fed every few hours.

To ensure the supply of larvae feed, staff at the Singapore Food Agency were spending about 40 minutes daily examining rotifer samples to look out for contaminants and assess the health of the rotifers.

For better productivity and efficiency, GovTech’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAID) team developed and trained an object detection model to differentiate healthy rotifers from ailing ones.

Once the AI model was accurate enough, the team also developed a mobile app. Now, all it takes is a smartphone to snap pictures of the rotifers, which are then uploaded to the app for evaluation, turning a 40-minute laborious task into a one-minute breeze. Watch the video in this article to find out more!

A roof, with a farm, over our heads

Singapore’s first and only commercial rooftop farm produces some 65,000 packets of vegetables each month.

To achieve this, ComCrop uses greenhouses that combine natural sunlight with supplementary LED daylight when needed. An onsite weather station monitors weather conditions, adjusting the artificial lighting accordingly to ensure consistent yields.

The crops – consisting of chye sim, bok choy, basil, and others – are grown through hydroponics, which enables water recycling and more targeted nutrient delivery. As the greenhouses keep pesky bugs out, there is also no need for herbicides and pesticides. The variety of veggies can be bought at RedMart and NTUC Finest.

ComCrop, which is a recipient of the Singapore Food Agency 30×30 Express grant, aims to produce about 200 tonnes of vegetables every year.

Utensils that come from plants

Despite widespread knowledge of the harm that single use plastic is doing to our environment, we can’t quit using them because they are just so convenient.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them. Tria Foodware produces single use tableware that work just like plastic but are actually made out of plant based sources.

The company’s Bio24 digestor is then able to use natural enzymes that are free of chemicals to turn the used tableware, along with food waste, into compost in just 24 hours. This compost is packed and shipped to farms for use as fertiliser. The entire process is billed as the world’s first closed-loop system for single-use foodware and food waste.

To recognise its efforts, Tria was named one of the winners of the Sustainability Innovation Challenge 2022, organised by Enterprise Singapore.

Harnessing renewable energy

Did you know that Singapore’s reservoirs are not just sources of water but also electricity?

No, we don’t have any hydroelectric dams. But we do have a large scale floating solar farm at Tengah Reservoir.

Launched in 2021, its 10 islands of solar panels, about the size of 45 football fields, consists of 122,000 panels that can produce enough electricity to power 16,000 HDB four-room flats for a year.

Land scarce Singapore is also hoping to establish two more floating solar farms at Lower Selatar and Pandan reservoirs.

Effective water resource management with data science

Of course, the primary purpose of reservoirs is to serve as one of the four national taps of Singapore: namely water from local catchments or reservoirs, imported water, high-grade reclaimed used water called NEWater and desalinated water from the oceans.

But having water is not enough; water resources must be optimally allocated to satisfy demand islandwide. And climate change means it’s all the more crucial to ensure resource sustainability. To tackle this perennial challenge, a team of PUB engineers and GovTech data scientists came together to build a data science model that can handle this complex issue.

The model takes into account operational factors such as the capacity of treatment plants and storage tanks, as well as size of the water pipes. Other data such as weather forecasts are also fed into the model. It is then able to make recommendations and automate a large part of the planning process and increase the optimality of derived solutions.

After the model was implemented, planning time was from two hours to as low as fifteen minutes.

Doing our part

While Singapore’s efforts alone may not be enough to mitigate global warming, it is nonetheless important that we do our part in developing the tech and infrastructure to drive positive change.

If we can show that big cities can leverage technology to develop prosperously in a sustainable fashion, this would serve as a powerful proof of concept to other places in the world.

Hopefully, humanity can then act as one to meet the threat of climate change, an issue that respects no national borders.