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Technology for monitoring cooling systems - Springwise
CategoriesSustainable News

Technology for monitoring cooling systems – Springwise

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Cooling, including refrigeration and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, is essential for human health and food safety. It is also estimated to account for up to 10 per cent of global CO2 emissions. However, in industries such as food production and delivery, it is impossible to turn down the thermostat as products need to be kept at constant temperatures to avoid spoilage. But now there is a product that can help users save energy and reduce waste.

The Therma Cooling Intelligence Platform is a wireless system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and optimise refrigeration and HVAC systems. It offers 24/7 temperature and humidity tracking, alerts users to faulty equipment, reduces energy consumption, and moves electricity usage to off-peak hours. Energy data is sent directly to a user-friendly dashboard, allowing operators to track energy bill savings and energy consumption, while empowering them to adjust usage as required.

As Therma founder and CEO, Manik Suri, points out: “The massive growth of refrigeration and air conditioning globally will greatly accelerate climate change unless we revolutionise cooling technologies.”

Therma’s system has already been deployed with more than a thousand customers across restaurants, hospitality, education, and food manufacturing, and the company recently completed a $19 million (around €17.9 million) funding round led by Zero Infinity Partners.

Therma° is not the only company working to reduce energy consumption. Springwise has spotted other innovations in this space, including solar powered refrigerated trucks, and an off-grid solar refrigerator.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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A glass brick that collects solar energy
CategoriesSustainable News

A glass brick that collects solar energy

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: In the UK, Solar PV capacity reached 12 gigawatts of energy in 2021. Yet, the MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme) estimates that only around 900,000 of the 24 million homes in the country currently rely on solar power. There is much room for improvement, and one of the easiest ways to incorporate renewable energy generation into a home or building is by embedding the technology into construction materials.  

Professor Tapas Mallick and Dr. Hasan Baig, two University of Exeter researchers, have created Build Solar in order to do just that. Built with patent-pending technology, the Solar Squared glass brick is a direct replacement for traditional glass building materials. Solar Squared bricks let light through, just like current glass building materials do. The difference is that Build Solar’s new blocks generate sustainable energy as well. The bricks are available in several patterns and colours, in addition to the typical clear glass.  

Usable in a variety of structures, including commercial spaces, public transport hubs, and housing, the Solar Squared blocks improve a building’s thermal insulation efficiency while providing daylight and renewable energy. The company’s goal is to contribute to carbon-neutral construction and building management and is currently seeking sites in which to test and showcase the technology. 

Springwise has spotted other innovations seeking to make renewable energy more accessible, including nailable and wearable solar panels.

Written By: Keely Khoury

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Make-up wipes that dissolve in water
CategoriesSustainable News

Make-up wipes that dissolve in water

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Though wipes are quick and convenient for taking off your make-up, they are an extremely wasteful product, with 11 billion thrown away every year. And each of these wipes take 100 years to biodegrade. To tackle this, Conserving Beauty has created InstaMelt, a make-up wipe made with patented fabric technology that dissolves in water after use, leaving no microplastics or waste. And, they’re vegan.

Conserving Beauty’s fabric has coveted Fine to Flush Certification by Water UK and will not block sewer pipes like other disposable wipes. The company recommends dissolving where many might already have a water footprint, like in the shower, kitchen sink, or toilet. The wipes are also packed into home-compostable packaging, including sachets and cartons. If the wipes are accidentally thrown away, they will biodegrade within 14 days in landfill with no adverse impact on our environment or wildlife. 

InstaMelt delivers the benefits of an oil cleanser through its make-up wipe. It contains eight oils – including olive-based squalane, hemp seed, sunflower seed, and jojoba oil – to dissolve make-up while gently exfoliating the skin. The wipes are made ethically in Australia using traceable ingredients from the company’s global supply chain. 

Conserving Beauty is committed to creating beauty products that help our skin and save water, carbon, and waste at the same time. The company is the first beauty member of The Water Footprint Network, which allows it to research and sustainably manage its water footprint.  

More and more companies are preventing products from ending in landfills. For example, Springwise has spotted baby shoes that dissolve in water at the end of their usable life, and a sustainable medicine packaging system.

Written By: Anam Alam

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Feeding fish with plastic-eating insects 
CategoriesSustainable News

Feeding fish with plastic-eating insects 

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Seafood is one of the most highly traded commodities in the global food system, and in 2018, for the first time in history, global farmed fish production surpassed that of beef production. And experts expect demand for aquatic foods to double by 2050. How to sustainably farm fish to meet such high levels of global demand is a pressing concern for the aquaculture industry.  

Part of that concern lies in finding the best solution to the challenge of what to feed farmed fish. Many growers seek circular solutions that minimise waste at all stages of the production process, including Glasgow-based researchers who recently discovered a surprising option for fishmeal. The team found that waxworms fed on plastic appeared more digestible to salmon than those fed on a regular diet. 

Set up by Dr. Martin Llewellyn at the University of Glasgow, SalmoSim is an in-vitro Atlantic Salmon gut simulator that helps those in the aquaculture industry test out new medicines or feedstock for farmed fish. The team provides tailored experiments that analyse the absorption of sugars, volatile fatty acids, amino acids, and more throughout a salmon’s digestive process, and it was in one of these experiments that plastic-fed waxworms were found to be a highly digestible feed.  

By reducing demand for marine-grown fish meal, plastic-fed waxworms could provide a dual purpose – reducing plastic waste while feeding the high volumes of fish demanded by a growing global market. The research team’s next steps include assessing the healthfulness of the salmon fed on the waxworms for human consumption.  

Springwise has spotted other innovations improving the sustainability of the aquaculture industry, including tiles made from fish scales and a cellular growth technology used to make cultivated seafood.

Written By: Keely Khoury

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Upcycling food waste into dried fruit snacks
CategoriesSustainable News

Upcycling food waste into dried fruit snacks

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Faced with the knowledge that California throws away more peaches than the entire state of Georgia produces in a year, The Ugly Company founder Ben Moore wanted to help put a stop to such waste. Rather than discarding fruits that are too misshapen to be sold to supermarkets, The Ugly Company upcycles them into healthy dried fruit snacks.  

Run by a team with close ties to the farming industry, the startup sources most of its product locally from the San Joaquin Valley in California. Cherries, peaches, apricots, kiwis, and nectarines are dried and packaged for sale in individual snack packs. It takes eight pounds of fresh fruit to create one pound of dried fruit, so each pack of Ugly fruit represents two and a half pounds of fruit rescued from waste.  

As well as preventing food waste, the company adds value to the local farming economy. Farmers no longer have to pay for the collection and dumping of their unused fruit. Instead, The Ugly Company pays growers for crops that are good to eat but deemed ‘too ugly’ for general wholesale, whether that be because they are too small, or have an odd colour or shape. 

Buyers can find the fruit in several grocery chains, including Krogers’s, Hy-Vee, and Whole Foods, as well as online and via subscription boxes. Thanks to a recent Series A funding round that raised $9 million (about €8.4 million), the company plans to expand its processing capacity and keep up with growing national demand.  

Other ways in which Springwise has spotted innovations reducing food waste include turning broccoli stems into alternative proteins, and using AI-powered scanners to track the freshness of produce.

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference

Hoover Building by Interrobang
CategoriesSustainable News

Smith Mordak named CEO of UKGBC at “critical period” for sector

By Zarkon Group,

The UK Green Building Council has announced that architect and Dezeen columnist Smith Mordak will become the charity’s chief executive officer.

Mordak will be leaving their current role as the director of sustainability and physics at British engineering firm Buro Happold to take up the full-time advocacy role and help the UK’s built environment sector to halve its emissions by 2030.

“We look forward to their leadership of the team in this critical period for taking urgent and effective action to limit and reverse environmental degradation,” said Sunand Prasad, the chair of UKGBC’s board of trustees.

“Smith combines a deep, science-based and systemic understanding of the climate emergency with a clear-sighted, principled and pragmatic approach for what needs to be done in response.”

“Our actions over the next few years will have an outsized impact”

Mordak is a multi-award-winning architect and engineer, having co-founded London firms Interrobang and Studio Weave before going on to work at Buro Happold.

Alongside this, Mordak has a long-standing history in driving industry action on climate change, as a board member of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, a former design advocate for London mayor Sadiq Khan and a steering committee member at climate action group Architects Declare.

Hoover Building by Interrobang
Smith Mordak (top) is an architect and engineer known for award-winning projects such as the residential conversion of London’s Hoover Building (above)

As a nationally elected councillor at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), they also edited the landmark Built for the Environment report that was published by RIBA and Architects Declare ahead of COP27.

“We live in existentially challenging times,” Mordak said. “Our actions over the next few years will have an outsized impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and on many generations to come.”

“I’m honoured that I’ll be playing my part in this crucial period as part of this powerful change-making coalition.”

UKGBC also names new deputy chief executive

Mordak will be taking over the role from Julie Hirigoyen in June, who last year announced her decision to step down after more than eight years at the helm.

“My decision to stand down was a challenging one,” Hirigoyen said at the time. “But I believe that fresh direction will allow for an infusion of new creative ideas at a pivotal moment in time, ahead of the step-change required to 2030.”

UKGBC set out a new strategy for 2025 just last May, in recognition of the fact that more ambitious short-term targets need to be set to help the industry halve its emissions by 2030 and stabilise global warming around the crucial 1.5-degree threshold.

The charity is also promoting Simon McWhirter, its current director of communications, policy and places, to deputy chief executive to strengthen his role ahead of the UK’s next general election.

In his new role, McWhirter will have a “laser focus across international, national and local policy work”, UKGBC said.

Previously, Mordak has reported on two different Conferences of the Parties for Dezeen – both COP26 and COP27 – as well as penning opinion pieces on everything from strategies for passively cooling buildings to the green jobs transition.



Reference

Extracting umami flavour from plant-based by-products
CategoriesSustainable News

Extracting umami flavour from plant-based by-products

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: It is no secret that a vegan diet is better for the planet. In fact, if the world went vegan tomorrow, greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by up to two-thirds. People are often put off by a vegan diet, though, for its lack of umami: one of the core tastes that usually corresponds with meaty flavours. This is why the Finnish food technology startup The Nordic Umami Company has developed sustainable umami flavours from circular ingredients, hoping to speed the transition to a fully sustainable food system.  

To generate momentum towards delicious, upcycled food, the Nordic Umami Company has uncovered a ground-breaking way to extract umami flavour from plant-based products that would otherwise be wasted. The company now hopes to scale its fermentation-based technology into an industrial-sized pilot plant while expanding its impact with new creations.  The company’s umami products include bouillons, sauces, and salts.

The startup’s CIO and co-founder Reetta Kivelä explains that “we found the original idea for natural umami through a real-life problem. We realised that the options for bringing umami to plant foods were limited. All alternatives had health, naturality, or sustainability challenges. However, vegan food must also have the fifth basic flavour, umami.” 

In December 2022, the young company raised €1.8 million in a seed funding round led by the Nordic Food Tech VC.  

Springwise has previously spotted other innovations that aim to widen vegan choices, including a gut-friendly vegan cereal startup and a startup that hopes to put upcycled fish alternatives on the menu by 2023. 

Written By: Georgia King

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Controlling harmful insects with gene technology 
CategoriesSustainable News

Controlling harmful insects with gene technology 

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Although insects are crucial to the global ecosystem, some threaten humanity by ruining crops, spreading disease, and invading local ecosystems. To fight back, people have leaned on toxic pesticides, but at the detriment of other wildlife and human health. Thankfully, Italian startup Biocentis has found another solution that eludes these harmful side effects using CRISPR-based gene editing. 

The company’s proposed alternative builds on research from Imperial College London and uses the sterile insect technique (SIT) – where a target species of insects is sterilised to decrease the amount of successful mating in the wild. Biocentis plans on improving this approach by using the advanced gene-editing technology CRISPR to progressively reduce egg production and locally control insect species.  

Professor Andrea Crisanti in Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences, a co-founder of Biocentis, explains that “our solutions will alleviate the burden imposed by vector-borne diseases, improve agriculture productivity, and reduce the damage from the use of traditional pesticides, addressing the agenda of a future green economy – a sustainable model that combines reduced environmental impact with significant improvements in the health and livelihoods of communities around the world.” 

Biocentis is currently active in Italy, the UK, and the USA and has recently received seed funding from Neurone to further round and develop the company and its employees.  

Springwise has previously spotted other innovations that hope to minimise our reliance on harmful pesticides, including a natural pesticide and a drone that detects infectious diseases in bugs.

Written By: Georgia King

Reference

New net-zero glass reduces heating costs
CategoriesSustainable News

New net-zero glass reduces heating costs

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The energy crisis is impacting everyone, and the situation has only gotten worse with the invasion of Ukraine. What has become apparent over the years is that as energy prices have risen, inefficient designs and techniques have played an increasingly big part in contributing to the financial costs of living and working in older buildings. For instance, a building with inefficient windows will lose around two-thirds of its heat through the glass.  

Now, a patent-pending innovation by LuxWall called Net Zero Glass reduces building carbon emissions and energy consumption by up to 45 per cent. The windows consist of two vacuum-insulated coated glass (VIG) panes that are installed from inside the building, making it much quicker and easier to retrofit as tenants experience minimal disruption.  

The panes act like a thermos bottle, reducing the transfer of heat and cool air via convection, conduction, and radiation. Heat from the sun’s rays is reflected, and HVAC conditions inside the structure are blocked from leaving the space.  

The company recently closed a Series A funding round that raised $33 million (around €30.8 million). The funds will be used to scale production at the business’s first purpose-built commercial factory. If the glass technology is used widely throughout the world, the company could support an annual global carbon emission reduction of more than half a gigatonne.  

Springwise has spotted window technology providing a range of new services, from Wi-Fi alternatives to nature scenes for rooms without access to natural light or green views.  

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference

Computer vision, automation, and machine learning boost insect farming
CategoriesSustainable News

Computer vision, automation, and machine learning boost insect farming

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Experts are becoming increasingly concerned about how the world’s growing population will be fed in an equitable and sustainable way. One solution is edible insects – both for human consumption, and as pet food in order to help free up land and resources. Insects require far less space and fewer resources to farm than other proteins like beef or chicken, but producing them en masse has proved challenging so far. Tech company Entocycle is using innovative technology to help. 

The London-based startup uses smart technology to help insect farms work efficiently and sustainably (and manage billions of insects at any one time). Its technology aims to help farms improve accuracy, efficiency, and enable less need for manual involvement, such as by measuring populations in a farm to automate food requirements and controlling the temperature to optimise insect health.

The company focuses on black soldier fly farms, an insect that grows very rapidly – and can survive on food waste. They contain all the nutrients humans need for good health, including more zinc and iron than lean meat, and more calcium than milk.  

Entocycle recently raised $5 million (around €4.7 million) in a recent Series A funding round, which the startup will use to expand the commercial roll-out of its products and services. 

Entocycle is not alone in developing technology to help make insect-growing a viable and sustainable operation. Springwise has also spotted vertical mealworm farms that produce plant and animal feed, and AI-powered insect microfarms.

Written By: Jessica Bradley

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