Spotted: Inversa, a sustainable Florida-based fashion brand, has announced a new type of sustainable leather with a unique selling point. The exotic leather is made from lionfish, a species that is highly invasive. Native to the tropical waters of the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, lionfish were first detected in US waters in the 1980s, potentially as a result of aquarium releases. The increasing presence of the highly predatory fish in Florida’s Atlantic waters is believed to be having a significant impact on the health of coral reefs and the ecosystems they support.
The idea of using the fish for leather was inspired by indigenous practices, and the goal of the initiative is to reduce the pressure on marine ecosystems while also providing an alternative to cow leather – a material criticised by many on ethical and environmental grounds.
Inversa’s leather is extremely versatile and flexible. It can be used in a variety of applications, from fashion to furniture. The company is partnering with a number of brands, including Italian footwear brand P448 and Teton Leather, who will produce accessories using the lionfish leather.
In addition to helping the environment by removing a damaging invader, Inversa’s innovative tanning process for the leather has a very small footprint using just 200 millilitres of water per skin.
The startup was recently a finalist for the Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge grant by the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA).
Springwise has spotted numerous sustainable leather innovations including the world’s first cell cultivated leather, leather made from grape skins, and plastic-free leather made from hemp.
Spotted: Writing assistants have become a ubiquitous part of office life. Anyone who has worked with Microsoft Word will be familiar with the red and blue squiggly lines that indicate spelling and grammar mistakes. And sophisticated plug-ins like Grammarly—now the tenth most valuable US startup—provide more in-depth feedback on writing style and grammar. But what if the user experience of a spellchecker was leveraged to make people write more inclusively? This is the idea behind Witty Works, a Swiss startup that is using AI to uncover unconscious bias in corporate writing.
Why is inclusive writing important? Exclusionary and stereotypical language remains deeply embedded in professional vocabulary despite research demonstrating its harmful effects. A recent article published in the Harvard Business Review provides a good run-down of studies examining the impact of exclusionary language – from misused descriptors with negative connotations to terms in job postings that deter more women than men.
Witty Works, which was founded in 2018, is one of several AI tools that aim to tackle this issue. The company’s free plugin analyses text as it is written, highlighting stereotypical or exclusionary terms and offering an alternative. Crucially, Witty Works does not simply help time-poor writers produce more inclusive copy without pausing for reflection. Instead, it is designed to be an educational tool, providing a brief explanation of why a term has been highlighted. The company believes it is vital that employees recognise bias in their daily workflow, referring to their tool as ‘unconscious bias training on the go’.
The company operates a ‘freemium’ model, with the basic plugin available without charge. Users can then pay to upgrade to two more sophisticated packages known as Witty Teams and Witty Enterprise. These offer additional features that provide further training and help organisations manage inclusive writing across whole teams and organisations.
Inclusivity in the workplace is an important area of innovation and Springwise has recently spotted software that automatically analyses the diversity of media content, an artificial intelligence platform that helps companies improve diversity, and a tool for measuring workplace diversity and inclusion.
Spotted: Between 1991 and 2005 the European Union banned the use of all six types of asbestos in a series of directives. Today, we know that this building material, which was commonly used for flooring, roofing, and insulation, is deadly. In fact, the World Health Organization has estimated that asbestos causes 107,000 deaths worldwide each year due to lung cancer, pleural cancer, and asbestosis.
One of the key challenges facing those working to remove the material is identifying where it has been used. In particular, the most common way of finding rooftops made of asbestos remains visual identification by a human expert – a method that is inefficient and costly given the scale of the problem. In response, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) have partnered with startup DetectA to develop an AI-powered system that can automatically detect asbestos rooftops using publicly available aerial images.
The project takes advantage of UOC’s depth of expertise in image analysis, computer vision, and machine learning. Researchers fed an algorithm a series of aerial images of rooftops – some with asbestos, some without. Through machine learning, this algorithm was ‘trained’ to make predictions about visual data it had not previously seen. The algorithm’s ability to identify the tell-tale characteristics of asbestos roofs improves as it is fed more images. In the words of lead researcher Javier Borge Holthoefer, “The more you train it, the better it gets.”
One of the main technical challenges when it comes to using artificial intelligence (AI) for asbestos detection is the vast amount of data that is needed to train the algorithm. This is where the use of public imagery can make a decisive difference. Similar attempts at automated asbestos detection have obtained sophisticated high-resolution aerial imagery at great expense. By contrast, the UOC-DetectA team used free images from the database of the Cartographic Institute of Catalonia. This approach has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of the technology.
The researchers will now conduct further testing using images of municipalities the AI has never seen. The team hopes to obtain proof of concept of the technology by late summer.
Other machine learning and computer vision innovations recently spotted by Springwise include a real-time monitoring network for natural disasters, a startup that provides medical data for testing AI healthcare solutions, and computer vision used for fashion cataloguing.
Spotted: Modular housebuilder TopHat, which claims to be the UK’s first zero-embodied-carbon home builder, recently announced that it will be opening a hi-tech home building facility in Corby, Northampton next year. The new factory will be 650,000 square feet in size and will incorporate the latest in robotic technology.
TopHat was founded in 2016 and began production in early 2018 at its manufacturing facility in South Derbyshire. The company builds modular, zero-carbon homes with a sustainable core. The company claims their homes have less than one-twenty-seventh the embodied carbon of a traditionally built home. To achieve this, the company uses low-carbon materials, such as timber, while reducing waste and travel at every stage.
One way that TopHat achieves its low-carbon usage is through the streamlined logistics and lean manufacturing techniques that are made possible by building modular homes in a factory using robotics. The company is also able to tailor solutions to clients, acting as either a supplier, contractor, or developer. The first residential site to use TopHat’s product was the historic Kitchener Barracks in Chatham, Kent, which opened in 2019. The company has also seen a £75 million (around €89 million) capital investment from Goldman Sachs, which has helped to finance the new factory.
There is no end of creative proposals for developing housing that is both more affordable and more sustainable. Springwise has often covered innovations in this space. Some of the most recent have included carbon-neutral tiny homes, all-timber buildings and the use of tech to maximise efficiency and sustainability.
Spotted: For June’s Indigenous History Month, Cheekbone Beauty launched a social-driven ‘#GlossedOver’ campaign with the help of agency Sid Lee. Cheekbone Beauty is a Canadian, Indigenous-owned beauty brand that makes vegan and sustainable cosmetics. The campaign recognised the struggles First Nations and Indigenous communities have faced for access to clean drinking water – a hot-button issue in the last three Canadian federal elections.
As part of the campaign, Cheekbone Beauty is releasing a line of lip gloss made using water from Indigenous communities in Canada. The twist? The lipgloss cannot actually be sold because the water is so contaminated.
With names like ‘Lucious Lead’ and ‘E.Coli Kiss’, the Cheekbone Beauty lip glosses are sure to get people talking—and thinking—about why anyone should have to put contaminated water to their lips.
Cheekbone’s mission is to make ‘a difference in the lives of Indigenous youth through donations addressing the educational funding gap, and to create a space in the beauty industry where Indigenous youth feel represented and seen’. To date, the brand has donated over CAD$150,000 (around €110,000) to a variety of non-profit organisations across North America.
Innovations spotted by Springwise that tackle contaminated water include a mobile filtration system that provides affordable clean water, a green technology to treat industrial wastewater, and kombucha used to remove e-coli from water.
Spotted: Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) look set to play a crucial role in the future of energy as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. Found in everything from electric vehicles to smartphones and computers, these batteries have several downsides when it comes to environmental impact. Lithium mining is an extremely water-intensive process that involves the use of toxic chemicals. In fact, producing each tonne of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water. And exacerbating this problem is the fact that several of the leading lithium-producing regions, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile, are among the world’s driest.
Innovators are rising to the challenge in several ways. Some are exploring alternative ways of extracting lithium, while others are developing batteries that avoid using lithium (and other minerals with a high environmental impact) altogether. But given the current prevalence of LIBs, and the early stage of alternative technologies, one of the biggest things we can do to mitigate their impact is to invest in effective recycling technologies.
Canadian company Li-Cycle has developed a two-step recycling process that enables the recovery of critical materials, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
The first step of the process involves breaking down the end-of-life batteries into their component parts. The second step consists of refining the materials into different product streams which can then be used for new batteries.
Unlike other battery recycling processes, which require high temperatures, Li-Cycle’s patented approach relies on chemistry, using unique ‘hydrometallurgical’ technology that is more environmentally friendly. Moreover, traditional approaches to battery recycling typically result in the loss of up to half of the useful recycled material in comparison to Li-Cycle’s 95 per cent recovery rate. The Li-Cycle system can handle batteries of various sizes used for different applications.
The company has recently announced that it plans to expand its operations into Europe. The company will open spoke facilities in Norway and Germany in the first half of 2023, with an aim to recycle 65,000 tonnes of batteries annually by the end of that year. This expansion will help Li-Cycle to meet the growing demand for its services as the world moves toward a more sustainable future.
Other innovations spotted by Sporingwise that re-use end-of-life batteries include e-rickshaws that give a second life to electric vehicle batteries, a startup re-purposing used electric vehicle batteries into home energy storage systems, and technology that yields pure graphite from used lithium-ion batteries.
Reflecting our global Springwise readership, we explore the innovation landscape and freshest thinking from a new country each week. To celebrate Canada day last week, we are celebrating three exciting Canadian innovations…
Climate targets: cut emissions by at least 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, net zero by 2050
Sustainability issues
Oil sands extraction– The Alberta oil sands are the world’s third largest proven oil reserve, and Canada is the largest exporter of oil to the US. Oil sand extraction causes heavy metal pollution and emissions of nitrogen and sulphur oxides, and is a particularly energy and water intensive method of producing oil.
Road salt pollution – Canada uses around 5 million tonnes of road salt each year to tackle the country’s treacherously icy driving conditions. This heavy-use of salt has a negative environmental impact, most obviously on vegetaion lining the sides of major roads, but also on aquatic life.
Air pollution – As in many other countries, air pollution is one of the biggest environmental factors impacting human health in Canada. Poor air quality is linked to 15,300 premature deaths per year in the country, as well as environmental impacts including acid rain and reduced plant growth.
COMFORTABLE OFFICE CLOTHING MADE FROM USED FISHING NETS
One effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that many of those working from home got used to spending the working day clothed in loungewear – or even pyjamas. Many of those returning to the office have found themselves thinking wistfully back to a time of wearing comfortable clothes. This is the thinking behind Lezé the Label, an entire brand created around loungewear that is comfortable enough to be worn at home and chic enough for the office or an outing. And the twist? The clothing is made using sustainable materials such as recycled fishing nets, sustainably sourced beech trees, and coffee waste. Read more.
INDIGENOUS-OWNED BEAUTY BRAND MAKES TOXIC LIP GLOSS TO HIGHLIGHT CLEAN WATER CRISIS
For June’s Indigenous History Month, Cheekbone Beauty launched a social-driven ‘#GlossedOver’ campaign with the help of agency Sid Lee. As part of the campaign, Cheekbone Beauty is releasing a line of lip gloss made using water from Indigenous communities in Canada. The twist? The lipgloss cannot actually be sold because the water is so contaminated. Read more.
MITIGATING THE IMPACT OF LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES IN THE ENERGY TRANSITION
Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) look set to play a crucial role in the future of energy as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. Found in everything from electric vehicles to smartphones and computers, these batteries have several downsides when it comes to environmental impact. One of the biggest things we can do to mitigate their impact is to invest in effective recycling technologies. Canadian company Li-Cycle has developed a two-step battery recycling process that recovers 95 per cent of critical materials, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Read more.
Words: Matthew Hempstead
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Spotted: There is an estimated 75 to 119 million tonnes of plastic waste in our oceans today. And while most endeavours to tackle ocean waste have focused on addressing litter floating on the surface, the majority of it is found on the ocean floor.
The underwater environment poses a unique challenge. Traditional methods of cleaning up the ocean floor are both dangerous and expensive, involving human divers who are put at risk every time they descend into the depths. In response, researchers from the EU-funded SeaClear project are developing an AI-based solution for cleaning up the ocean floor without putting human life in danger.
The SeaClear system uses a combination of robotics and machine learning to efficiently locate and remove marine debris. A boat, a drone, two underwater robots, and a collection basket make up the system. The boat functions like a sort of mothership, acting as a communication hub and power source for the robots.
How does it work? The boat marks any large debris encountered on the ocean floor using a type of sonar called a multibeam echosounder. The drones also use sonar to identify large pockets of debris from the air. The underwater robots are then deployed to collect the debris and deposit it in the basket. The whole process is automated, making it much more efficient and effective than traditional methods of marine litter collection.
SeaClear project partner Subsea Tech in France developed the innovative system, which is now being tested in real-world conditions. This new solution has the potential to revolutionise the way we deal with ocean pollution and help to keep our seas clean for future generations.
Other innovations spotted by Springwise that clean up marine litter include okra used to clean up microplastics, a fleet of giant floating barriers tackling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and a beer company hosting a tournament to fish plastic out of the ocean.
Spotted: While climate change is undoubtedly leading to more extreme weather events, it can be difficult to understand how climate change is impacting on local weather. After all, how are we to determine if an unseasonably warm day is due to global warming or is simply normal variation in temperature? Climate Central is attempting to answer this question with the Climate Shift Index (CSI), a free tool that reveals the level of influence of carbon emissions on daily high and low temperatures.
Climate Central, is a non-profit organisation and an independent group of scientists who research and report the facts about the changing climate and how it affects people’s lives. Climate Central uses science and big data to generate local information that makes climate change personal and helps show what can be done about it.
The CSI indicates how much more likely or frequent high temperatures and overnight lows have become in a given location. The index uses observation and model-based calculations, along with a clear and easy-to-follow colour-coded map covering the entire continental US, and a simple numeric scale. For example, a CSI level of 3 means the day’s temperatures were made at least three times more likely than they would have been without climate change.
Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central CEO and chief scientist points out that, “Climate change is invisible to most people, but it already affects our daily lives. When it’s too hot to safely work outside, play sports, or walk down a city street, the Climate Shift Index will reveal its fingerprint. When crops wilt, when tornadoes or fires erupt in unseasonal heat, the Climate Shift Index can put those events in context.”
Awareness of the impact of climate change is often seen as a first, and important, step to effecting change. This is why we are seeing a growing number of innovations aimed at measuring local effects of climate change, to help individuals and professionals better counter them. These range from data management platforms aimed at forestry professionals to a ‘heat map’ of climate injustice.
Infrastructure encompasses all the connections that hold the global economy together. Traditionally, these connections have come in the form of buildings, roads, and power supplies. But with the advent of the internet age, cables, wires, data centres, and satellites are increasingly integral to the economy’s nervous system. While many in the developed world take this infrastructure for granted, people in developing countries often lack both physical and digital connections.
Industry sits together with infrastructure as the bedrock of the economy. Today, 23 per cent of the world’s workforce is employed in industry according to the latest figures from the International Labour Organization. And industry has been key to the historic success of the developed world. Sustainable industrialisation is therefore an important priority for those in developing countries.
Global manufaturing took a hit as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent recovery has been uneven, with less developed countries showing signs of stagnation. At the same time, as the climate crisis becomes ever more urgent, it is important that the economic benefits of industry and infrastructure do not come at an environmental cost that is too high for the world to bear.
Investment in innovation is essential for industrialisation to be sustainable and broad-based in the future – especially in areas of industry that are currently difficult to decarbonise.
Electrification
Target 9.4 within SDG 9 calls for industrial processes and infrastructure to be upgraded or retrofitted for improved environmental sustainability. One of the challenges when it comes to de-carbonising industry is the need for extremely high temperatures for key processes. At present these temperatures can only be attained economically by burning fossil fuels. Electrification of industrial heating processes is an important goal – especially as most net-zero scenarios envisage electricity generation transitioning almost entirely to renewables.
Finnish engineering company Colbrook has developed ‘Roto Dynamic Heater’ (RDH) technology that uses electricity generated from renewable sources to reach process temperatures of 1700 degrees Celsius – hot enough to replace fossil fuels in a number of processes previously considered unsuitable for electrification. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabian mining company Ma’aden is planning to replace fossil fuels with solar ‘greenhouses’ to generate the steam needed for aluminium production.
Hi-tech manufacturing
In addition to electrification, hi-tech innovations can also lead to improved efficiency and sustainability. Approximately 45 per cent of electricity generated on earth is consumed by industrial electric motors. Current designs are energy-intensive with metal-to-metal contact between rotating and stationary parts acting as a major source of inefficiency. Finnish startup SpinDrive combats this inefficiency with active magnetic bearings (AMB) technology that levitates the rotating parts of a motor using electromagnetic forces.
Elsewhere, a new manufacturing process that combines elements of traditional casting with 3D printing produces complex metal parts that are lighter and up to 80 per cent cheaper than the current industry standard. Affordable, lighter components could lead to improved fuel efficiency in the automotive and aerospace sectors.
Transport infrastructure
Roads, railways, ports, and airports are crucial for both the movement of goods and ideas. But millions of people around the world live more than 2 kilometres from the nearest all-season road. Extending transport links in a sustainable way is therefore essential for economic development. German startup Ecopals has developed an asphalt additive made from non-recylable plastic. The enhanced asphalt improves road longevity and reduces the need for virgin materials and petroleum-based products such as bitumen.
Clean, accessible public transport is particularly important in less developed countries where many do not have the means to own a private vehicle. In Kenya, the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority has recently announced that its new Bus Rapid Transit network will be exclusively operated by green vehicles.
Communications and connectivity
In today’s world, internet connectivity is as important as more traditional forms of infrastructure. Yet, to this day, over a third of the world’s population has never been online. Innovators are working to bring connectivity to even the most remote regions.
Satellite technology is coming on leaps and bounds with companies taking different approaches. Mangata is using a combination of ground-based hubs and high orbiting satellites to make the cloud accessible anywhere. Another company, Astranis, is using small satellites placed in geosynchronous orbit to provide faster broadband speeds. The company’s satellites are much smaller than other geosynchronous satellites on the market and are consequently much cheaper and faster to manufacture.
Even where the internet isn’t available at all, innovators are looking to provide connectivity. Bridgefy has developed technology that enables messaging and app access without data or Wi-Fi.
Re-purposing old infrastructure
As the world transitions to a new energy system, much of the infrastructure that powers today’s world will no longer be used. However, innovators are considering a number of ways in which existing fossil fuel infrastructure can be re-purposed to support a cleaner, more sustainable world in the future.
For example, the UK is exploring how coal mines could be used to provide geothermal energy. And sustainable aviation fuel has been successfully piped to New York’s LaGuardia airport using existing petroleum pipelines.
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