Recap: Existential Threats
By: Street Beat
Tags: Climate Change, Sustainability, Urban Planning

This event featured four talks with entrepreneurs tackling climate change.

Speaker 1: Tom Szaky, Founder & CEO, Terracycle & Loop

Prompt: Why did you focus on this issue? How did you start Terracycle?

I was always interested in being an entrepreneur. I wanted to start a business that was focused on helping society and the planet first, on profit second. A business interacts with so many stakeholders — consumers, vendors, the environment, employees, and more — it’s not all about profit to shareholders.

I think garbage is an interesting area. Everything around us is disposable. Waste is also the least innovative industry in the world. It is blue ocean territory that’s kept me busy for two decades and will continue to do so.

We have a waste problem. 99% of what we buy has an end of life within a year of when we bought it. We are putting too much strain on the environment. We currently operate on a linear system: take, make, waste. I believe it is important to move toward a circular economy.

Virtually everything can be recycled. The reason we choose to recycle what we do is because we can profit off that kind of recycling. A dirty diaper is recyclable, but it is expensive to recycle. If we show recycling diapers drives some benefit, we can start having conversations and start to really challenge single use systems.

What can we recycle that may surprise people?

Diapers can be collected, sterilized, shredded, and separated. Almost everything can be reconstituted.

Plastic gloves can be collected, frozen, and transformed into a powder that can be integrated into new plastic gloves.

Cigarette butts (which are mostly littered) can be collected, shredded, and separated. The filter is actually made from plastic.

I can rattle off 100 more waste streams, but it simply costs more to collect or recycle than these materials are worth. It does not make economic sense to recycle these at the moment.

What are examples of closed-loop recycling?

In recycling, it’s rare to find examples of a complete closed loop. Usually, when we recycle something, it downgrades to some degree. For example, when you recycle fresh white printer paper, it will likely become newspaper. After that, it may become toilet paper. Then that’s the end point. At some point it can no longer create high quality paper. It is a down cycle. It always downgrades one step. So far, the only product that doesn’t downgrade is a municipally sourced soda bottle. The reason is systemic. We design our products with a ‘virgin’ mentality. For example, our shampoo bottles are designed based on the idea that they’ll be created with brand new plastic material. The dynamics of the bottle are different if we use recycled material. We need a systemic shift as product designers, to design products that embrace all sorts of waste. Better yet, we need product designers who embrace reusable packaging.

At Loop, we challenge single use packaging. We believe we dishonor material by using it for such a short time. The solution to that is reuse. There are some examples of reuse today (ie: a propane tank and a beer keg).

What do consumers want?

Consumers want 1) features and benefits 2) right value and price 3) convenience. Value comes from scale. Our approach has been to work with the biggest companies to get scale. Convenience is our biggest issue. How do we make reuse feel like disposable? How do we create the disposable experience with reusable?

What does Loop do?

Loop is a platform for reuse. We work with consumer product companies and have commercialized 500+ products — from ice cream to laundry detergent — in reusable package forms. We are in 6 countries, at 15 leading retailers, and incorporate our offerings into physical and digital stores. Here’s how it works: in the UK at a leading supermarket, Tesco, there is a Loop section. In this section, you can find your products (ie: Heinz ketchup) in reusable containers. You pay a small fee for the container. Once you are finished, you drop the container back at the Tesco, or at any other place that partners with Loop (ie: a coffeeshop).

We are professional reuse. Are you ever concerned about the tools your dentist uses? You are fully trusting that those tools were professionally cleaned by the dentist’s office … that is the benefit of professional reuse. That’s where we are trying to get. Our standards are high. We partner with EcoLab. Our cleaning facility is a proper environment, like a pharmaceutical facility.

How has COVID impacted you?

We actually were able to launch in the UK during COVID-19. But during this time, there’s been an increase in disposable goods, deliveries, and packages. We need to fundamentally think about how to make the system more circular and how organizations can be more responsible for deliveries/packages. There is no single answer to the environmental crisis. It’s complicated and not linear. In fact, the best product to buy is no product. No matter what you buy, there’s an impact on the planet. We have to reflect about the volume that we buy. Yes, we need better and more conscious products, but thats not the entire solution. Our most important role as consumers is buying less stuff.

Speaker 2: Dr. Pasi Vainikka, Co-Founder & Ceo, Solar Foods

Prompt: Why is agriculture no longer sustainable?

Some examples: 70% of fresh water on the planet is used for irrigation and agriculture, pesticides and fertilizer cause harm to diversity of life, forests are cut down for agricultural land, and the production of beef consumes a lot of environmental resources (and is inefficient). We need to change something fundamental in our food system.

Prompt: Why is solar foods different than plant-based competitors?

In 2030, all these technologies will build on and complement each other. The consumer can still have meat, but how it is created may completely change.

At Solar Foods, we are creating a whole new category of food. We produced a new primary ingredient that has the nutritional value of plant based material (65% protein). The ingredient actually vanishes within the product. Technology allows us to grow and harvest it. We are growing single cells through fermentation. It is very natural, but not traditional. You may compare it to wine-making. It’s a proprietary organism — a naturally occurring microbe created with hydrogen and CO2. It was built out of early space research in the 1960s.

Prompt: Whats next? How does it get to market and scale?

Once our demo is complete, we will setup a factory/micro-brewery and begin scaling production. We’ll focus on this for the next 2–3 years. We see ourselves not as optimists or pessimists, but possibilists.

This new technology opens a new door of opportunities, that may lead to more doors. It was a different world in this industry five years ago. Technology develops so fast and a lot can happen by 2030.

Speaker 3: Carla Niederhofer, Program Manager, Malta Inc.

Globally, electricity counts for 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In some parts of the world, it’s as high as 40%.

Also, the vast majority of electricity in the past 50 years has come from fossil fuels (75% in 1970). It’s improved in 2019, but it is still around 65%.

Renewable energy is the least expensive and least harmful form of generation right now. Renewable sources include hydropower, solar, and wind. But there are challenges and gaps with renewables. Solar can be intermittent and the wind is not always blowing the way we want it to, especially when a blizzard hits. As more industrial sectors are starting to electrify (ie: transportation), the electrical grid is getting pushed into territory it is not equipped for.

Long range gridscale affordable energy storage is the solution. Energy storage is not new, but additional technologies are needed for scale. This is where Malta comes in. We have a system for storing excess energy and using it to fill the gaps on the grid when needed.

We take excess energy from the grid, convert it into thermal energy, store it in large tanks of molten salt until it is needed, then convert the heat energy back to electrical energy and put it back into the grid.

Google incubated Malta for 2 years, then it was spun out as an independent company in 2018. Since then, we’ve been working to commercialize this technology, which is essential for the proliferation of renewables.

Speaker 4: Tom Schuler, President & CEO, Solidia Technologies

Concrete is the second most used material on the planet, after water. Cement (which holds concrete together) emits about a ton of CO2 for every ton of concrete. That makes cement responsible for 8% of all CO2 emissions and makes it the second largest emitter of CO2. The industry knows it is a problem and has been working to solve it, but they need help from startups like us. My company created a new form of cement (the main component of concrete) that captures CO2 instead of emitting it.

Cement is one of the most ubiquitous raw materials around the world. It’s not going anywhere. Most cement is made from limestone and silica, then is heated in a kiln. At Solidia, we use the same ingredients, but we change the recipe and the process. We use less limestone and 30% less energy, and we are able to produce more cement and emit less CO2.

With our cement, we are able to speed up the process of producing concrete as well. We can create more durable concrete in 24 hours, compared to the usual 28 days. We use the same mixer and same ingredients, but since our cement reacts to CO2 instead of water, we are able to drastically decrease the production time.

We are a few years away from being carbon negative in the production process, but this market can make a huge impact.