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Transforming agriculture with carbon-neutral ammonia production
CategoriesSustainable News

Transforming agriculture with carbon-neutral ammonia production

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Today, producing ammonia accounts for around 1.3 per cent of CO2 emissions from the world’s energy system, because the catalytic process requires extremely high temperatures and pressures that are normally achieved using fossil fuels. The vast majority of ammonia is used to create nitrogen fertilisers, making it a vitally important compound in global food production. Hoping to make it easier for farmers to produce ammonia cleanly is Danish startup NitroVolt.

The company has created a patent-pending “Nitrolyzer” that allows a previously carbon-producing process to become entirely carbon neutral and fossil free, with the only necessary inputs being green energy, water, and air. Within the Nitrolyzer, lithium salt is reduced to lithium metal, which then reacts with nitrogen to form nitrides. Hydrogen (which is produced by hydrolysis) can then react with nitrides to form ammonia. To make the process even more sustainable, the lithium can be reused again and again in the continuous reaction process.

Crucially, the Nitrolyzer was created to tackle the logistical challenges that farmers may face in accessing ammonia. The technology is modular and can therefore be installed wherever ammonia is needed, say on a farm or in a greenhouse. This means that farmers and growers can tailor production depending on their needs, and eliminate the costs and emissions associated with transporting fertiliser.

Recently, NitroVolt raised €750,000 in a pre-seed funding, which will be used to expand the team and help to scale the technology.

Fertilisers play an essential role in growing healthy crops and boosting food security, but currently industrial production methods are highly unsustainable. Luckily innovators are searching for alternatives, including the use of dog waste and seed coatings that reduce the need for fertilisers in the first place.

Written By: Archie Cox

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Carmaker Nio unveils fashion made using waste from its own production
CategoriesSustainable News

Carmaker Nio unveils fashion made using waste from its own production

By Zarkon Group,

Chinese car manufacturer Nio has launched Blue Sky Lab, its own sustainable fashion brand, which has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award.

Blue Sky Lab creates garments and accessories using materials left over from the car manufacturing process including seat belts, airbags and other car-grade fabrics to demonstrate how waste can be “creatively repurposed”.

Blue Sky Lab collection by Nio Life
Nio has launched its own fashion brand

Nio claims the label is “the world’s first sustainable fashion brand launched by an automotive company and brought to mass production”.

Blue Sky Lab made its debut in 2021 at the Shanghai Auto Show and has since reused nearly 55,000 metres of waste fabric.

Male model carrying a white backpack by Blue Sky Lab
The pieces are made using leftover materials from car manufacturing

These car-grade surplus materials can help to create new high-performance products, according to the brand.

“Blue Sky Lab enjoys an innate advantage by adopting auto-grade materials in its fashion products as these materials outperform their consumer-grade counterparts to a large extent,” the brand said.

“We think more about improving our products rather than blindly catering to the external environment. For example, the recycled materials from the airbags are light and durable with high strength, a perfect fit for lightweight fashion items.”

Blue Sky Lab by Nio Life
Blue Sky Lab launched in 2021 at the Shanghai Auto Show

The materials are simply sterilised and repurposed into a variety of products in line with the brand’s minimal futuristic aesthetic.

“Regarding environmental protection, most visual communication tends to adopt nature and green elements,” the company said.

“However, rather than being confined by such a monotonous style, we have chosen to find inspirations from our DNA and business areas including innovative technologies, manufacturing and industrialization, and lifestyle in carrying out product design.”

“Blue Sky Lab has joined with global design talent including Nio’s designers, Japanese architect Shuhei Aoyama, French leather goods designer Vincent du SARTEL, Finnish designer Rolf Ekroth, NIO user designers and designers from Parsons School of Design, Li-Ning and Allbirds,” the brand added.

The brand told Dezeen it has mass-produced over a hundred different fashion items since its inception alongside tables, stools and lighting fixtures.

Blue Sky Lab has produced over 100 products using excess car manufacturing materials
Blue Sky Lab has also created furniture and lighting

The brand also partnered with an independent product testing and certification agency to calculate the carbon footprint of its bestselling products.

“Compared with their counterparts made of traditional raw materials, their footprint per unit is 18 to 58 per cent less,” the brand said.

Blue Sky Lab is a collection made from excess car materials
Blue Sky Lab has been shortlisted for a Dezeen Award

Blue Sky Lab has been shortlisted in the sustainable consumer design category of this year’s Dezeen Awards.

Here, the brand is competing against the world’s “first refillable” edge styler and soap-in-a-can brand Kankan.

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Could ‘biosolar leaves’ be the future of protein production?
CategoriesSustainable News

Could ‘biosolar leaves’ be the future of protein production?

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Agriculture and related land use represents around 17 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, global demand for protein is set to rise significantly by 2050, along with the growing population. Meeting this will require innovative approaches to efficiently scale protein production. One such approach is that developed by startup Arborea, which grows microalgae and phytoplankton on solar panel-like structures.

Arborea designed the panels to be placed on buildings, where they absorb CO2 and produce oxygen. The company claims that they do this at a rate equivalent to 100 trees from the surface area of just a single tree. At the same time, the organic biomass produced by the organisms can be harvested and used as additives for plant-based food products.

The company’s Biosolar Leaf technology mimics the function of a real leaf, using CO2 and sunlight as feedstock. But unlike real leaves, the system is able to self-regulate and indefinitely maintain ideal growth conditions with minimal energy inputs – and it doesn’t require fertile land or agricultural feedstocks.

Arborea was spun out of Imperial College London, with grant funding and support from Imperial’s SynbCITE, a synthetic biology and engineering biology industrial accelerator.

Improving food production while reducing carbon emissions is the subject of a number of recent innovations spotted by Springwise. These include an in-house mycelium production system for producing food additives and using acorns as a protein source.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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Electrifying cement production for kiln-free concrete
CategoriesSustainable News

Electrifying cement production for kiln-free concrete

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Cement is a vital component in construction, with an estimated 4 billion tonnes produced each year. Yet at the same time, cement production is also a huge contributor to global warming, generating 1.67 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2021. Clearly, getting the world to net zero is going to require reducing emissions from cement. One of the companies working to achieve this is Sublime Systems.

In conventional cement making, limestone is heated to 1400 degrees Celsius until it decomposes, releasing CO2 as a by-product. The fossil fuels used to power the kilns and the CO2 released through limestone decomposition are responsible for almost all of cement’s carbon emissions.

Sublime’s technology uses an electrochemical process, instead, to break down non-carbonate rocks and other raw materials (such as industrial wastes) that don’t release CO2 when decomposed. This can run at room temperature and be powered by renewable electricity, making Sublime’s process net zero while also reducing manufacturing costs and complexity. The resulting Sublime Cement can be used in place of ordinary Portland cement for any use.

The company recently announced the closing of a $40 million (around €38 million) series A funding round, led by climate-tech-focused fund Lowercarbon Capital, and with participation from Siam Cement Group, the largest cement producer in Southeast Asia.

Reducing emissions from cement manufacture is crucial to reaching net zero. Luckily, there is no shortage of innovators working on ways to help with this. Recent advances spotted in the Springwise archive include using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise concrete recipes and using fly ash to reduce cement emissions.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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AI spots defects in textile production
CategoriesSustainable News

AI spots defects in textile production

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The fashion industry has been in for a lot of criticism over its poor environmental record – and with good reason. Textile production makes up 10 per cent of global carbon emissions and produces more than 20 per cent of global wastewater. Luckily, awareness of these issues is leading to innovations that are driving change in the sector.

One of the companies working to make textiles greener is Smartex, which has developed a suite of software tools that make fabric production more efficient. Smartex’s Core platform uses cameras, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to make fabric production more efficient. The system identifies defects before they can create waste, aids in article management, and creates digital twins of textile rolls produced, among other features.

At the same time, the company’s more recently unveiled Loop platform provides suppliers with precise data down to each roll of fabric, enabling greater transparency across the supply chain. The result is much greater efficiency and communication between suppliers and brands – all of which reduce waste.

The increased interest in making fashion more sustainable means there is a big demand for this type of platform. Smartex completed a $24.7 million (around €23 million) series A funding round in 2022, building on a $2.9 million (around €2.7 million) seed round in 2019.

Smartex’s Taylor Bradley told Springwise that the company “will continue to tackle enormous, pervasive problems across the global textile industry by providing tailored AI, software and hardware solutions which will help the industry become modernised and digitised. Our goal is to provide essential tools for every Modern Textile Factory.”

The fashion industry has been working to improve its environmental track record with a wide number of innovations. In the archive, Springwise has also spotted 3D weaving to reduce textile waste and leather alternatives made from brewing waste.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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A modular system for boosting biogas production from waste
CategoriesSustainable News

A modular system for boosting biogas production from waste

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Organic waste makes up a huge proportion of all municipal waste, with around 17 per cent of global food production going to waste at the retail, restaurant, or household level. But what if that food wasn’t all wasted? What if some of it could be turned into renewable energy? That is the question being answered by New Zealand clean-tech startup Cetogenix. 

Cetogenix has designed a modular system for breaking down organic waste to generate renewable energy and other useful by-products, such as fertilisers and biodegradable plastics. The company’s technology uses a combination of chemical and microbial processes, which can be located at source and easily scaled. 

The flagship product, called CETO-Boost, is currently under development. When complete, it will allow a 40 per cent increase in the production of renewable natural gas from anaerobic digestion plants. It will also be capable of being retrofitted, and the company has identified more than 15,000 anaerobic digester plants that could benefit from this retrofitting. 

Cetogenix secured $4.5 million(around €4.1 million) in a 2022 seed funding round led by deep-tech investor Pacific Channel, with support from angel investors. The investment is being used to scale up the company’s technology and enable global deployment, with an initial focus on Europe and North America. 

This technology aims to tackle both organic waste and natural gas issues at the same time. In the archive, Springwise has spotted other methods for tackling these issues, including turning organic waste into bio-plastic and using methane pyrolysis to generate green hydrogen.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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Land-based production of tuna – Springwise
CategoriesSustainable News

Land-based production of tuna – Springwise

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s 2023 report on the status of the world’s stock of fish assessed the annual global tuna catch to be around 4.8 million metric tonnes. With many markets completely reliant on wild-caught tuna, aquaculture is scrambling to provide a reliable, scalable alternative to the many types of tuna that are consistently overfished. Germany’s Next Tuna is building one possible solution in the form of the world’s first land-based source of Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABT). The company’s goal is to transform the tuna fish food industry into a circular, sustainable economy. 

Using a recirculating aquasystem (RAS), the company’s floating farms are protected from heat increases in the water, algal blooms, predators, and pollution. Waste from the system is collected for use as fuel or in seaweed production, and the farm itself is largely solar-powered. Next Tuna plans to offer three products and services. Juvenile ABT will be grown for producers to use in their own commercial farms. The RAS will be available for sale for use with other species of fish, and the entire system will be available as a bespoke aquaculture-as-a-service offering. 

Next Tuna is currently constructing a commercial farm in Spain. Once finished, the farm should have a sufficient supply of eggs to be running at full levels of production based only on farmed tuna and no longer requiring the use of any wild-caught juveniles. The company is working with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to gain a sustainability certification for the farmed tuna.  

From using improved soils to a platform that optimises agriculture in hot climates, Springwise is spotting many other innovations working to make the world’s food production more resilient and sustainable.

Written By: Keely Khoury

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“The world ran out of pink” due to Barbie movie production
CategoriesInterior Design

“The world ran out of pink” due to Barbie movie production

By Zarkon Group,

The sets of Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie required such vast amounts of pink paint, they swallowed up one company’s entire global supply, according to production designer Sarah Greenwood.

Speaking to Architectural Digest, Gerwig revealed that the team constructed the movie’s fluorescent Barbie Land sets almost entirely from scratch at the Warner Bros Studios Leavesden – all the way down to the sky, which was hand-painted rather than CGI rendered.

Barbie Land in Barbie movie
Barbie Land sets were built from scratch in a movie lot

“We were literally creating the alternate universe of Barbie Land,” she told the magazine. “Everything needed to be tactile, because toys are, above all, things you touch.”

To recreate the almost monochromatic colour palette of Barbie’s Dreamhouses, the set design team had to source a bottomless supply of pink paint to cover everything from lampposts to road signs.

Barbie movie cast dancing in a pink town square
Almost everything from lamp posts to sidewalks is rendered in vibrant pink

In particular, the production used a highly saturated shade by US manufacturer Rosco to capture the hyperreality of Barbie Land.

“I wanted the pinks to be very bright, and everything to be almost too much,” Gerwig told Architectural Digest.

So much paint was needed, in fact, that Greenwood says the movie’s production caused a worldwide shortage of that particular hue.

“The world ran out of pink,” she joked.

Rosco later told the LA Times that the company’s supply chain had already been disrupted when the movie began production at the start of 2022, due to the lingering aftereffects of the coronavirus pandemic and the winter storm that shocked Texas the previous year.

“There was this shortage and then we gave them everything we could – I don’t know they can claim credit,” Rosco’s vice president of global marketing Lauren Proud told the LA Times, before conceding that “they did clean us out on paint”.

Margot Robbie in a pink car
Margot Robbie plays the movie’s main character

Since stills for the upcoming movie were first released a year ago, the all-pink hyper-feminine “Barbiecore” aesthetic has infiltrated the design world, with Google searches skyrocketing and the term accumulating more than 349 million views on TikTok.

Earlier this year, Barbie manufacturer Mattel collaborated with Pin-Up magazine to release a monograph on the architecture and interiors of Barbie’s Dreamhouse to mark its 60th anniversary.

“There have been so many books and entire PhDs on Barbie, but never really on her many houses and her furniture,” Pin-Up founder Felix Burrichter told Dezeen.

“So we thought it would be a good idea to make one and treat it as a serious subject, in the same way that Barbie has been treated as a serious subject over the years.”

The image is by Mattel.

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Improving the climate resilience of food production with better soils
CategoriesSustainable News

Improving the climate resilience of food production with better soils

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that about one-third of the world’s soils are already degraded. This threatens global agricultural production and food security. But one company is aiming to improve soil quality. 

Initially founded in 2020 by Azadeh Farajpour Javazmi with the support of the European Union (EU) parliament, the BetterSoil movement launches national and international projects to improve the quality of soils for improved climate resilience and sustainable food production. The company aims to promote sustainable agriculture both in practice and the political environment, by mobilising decision-makers at the level of the European Parliament. 

The initiative’s goal is to close the gap between theory and practice in terms of knowledge about soils and their quality in sustainable agriculture. BetterSoil connects science and research with the knowledge of farmers around the world to understand how to best improve soil fertility and build up soil humus – a nutrient-rich substance made from decomposed plant and animal matter.

Video source BetterSoil

Working closely with scientific advisors, BetterSoil develops tailored soil recipes for different regions, since each country has its own specific climate, crops, and needs. All soils are created with the BetterSoil science-derived principles in mind: appropriate soil management and agroforestry, and the use of compost and biochar. 

BetterSoil also offers education on sustainable development in order to raise public awareness, motivating people to rethink how they use resources and contribute to sustainable development. The company addresses individuals, companies, teams, and schools – it is also launching a BetterSoil Inhouse Academy. 

Healthy soil is integral to the world and its inhabitants, and improving and maintaining soil quality is vital for sustainable and reliable food production. Springwise has also spotted pre and probiotics that improve soil health and plant patches that monitor crop stress.

Written By: Anam Alam

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Three innovations revolutionising food production
CategoriesSustainable News

Three innovations revolutionising food production

By Zarkon Group,

When it comes to food, the world faces a two-pronged challenge. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, by 2050 we will need to produce 60 per cent more food to feed a world population of 9.3 billion. At the same time, food systems cause 25 to 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and this figure rises to around one-third when we include all agricultural products.

We therefore not only need to produce more food – we also need to build a more sustainable food supply chain. As a result, by 2043, we are likely to produce food in a very different way. To shed some light on the topic, we asked some of the world’s leading futurists a simple question: what will we eat in 2043?

“The biggest impact on what we eat will be the personalisation of our diets,” explains food futurist Tony Hunter. “As we continue to explore our genetics and microbiome, we’ll come to understand just how individual we are in our nutritional responses to food,” he adds.

Hunter also argues that, “By 2043, we’ll have a range of new protein and other food products unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.” However, Christophe Pelletier, founder of The Food Futurist, is more skeptical in his assessment. According to him, “The future of food comes down to three boring but important aspects: price, the ability of food businesses to control costs, and the level of management skills of the business leadership.” In his assessment, “alternative protein producers come quite short on all three counts.”

So, will we be tucking into a whole host of exotic new proteins for our Wednesday lunch in 2043? Only time will tell. In the meantime, discover three innovations that represent the cutting edge of food innovation today.

Photo source Marcus Harland-Dunaway/UCR

‘ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS’ COULD BE THE FUTURE OF FOOD

Through photosynthesis, plants convert water, carbon dioxide, and energy from sunlight into sugars that they use to grow biomass. This process has been the basis of the food chain for millions of years, yet it is surprisingly inefficient. In fact, only about one per cent of the energy found in sunlight actually ends up in the plant. Now, scientists at the University of California Riverside have found a way to improve on mother nature by bypassing biological photosynthesis entirely. Read more

Photo source MyForest Foods

WORLD’S LARGEST VERTICAL MYCELIUM FARM SCALES UP PRODUCTION OF ALTERNATIVE BACON

It only takes MyForest Foods 12 days to grow an entire crop of mycelium, with the harvesting taking only a single day. Such rapid growth is made possible by the simulated forest inside Swersey Silos, the company’s newly expanded growing facilities in New York. The vertical farm contains seven growing rooms with just under two acres of total farm space. Read more

Photo source Olga Kudriavtseva on Unsplash

UPCYCLING BARLEY BYPRODUCTS INTO HIGH-PROTEIN FLOUR

Seoul-based food upcycling startup RE:Harvest has created a new flour alternative made from upcycled barley from the production of beer and sikhye – a traditional sweet Korean beverage. The company says that its powder is not only more sustainable than traditional flour, but that it also has a higher protein content. The company is currently working on scaling up its production so that it can meet the demand from both domestic and international customers – as well as expanding their byproduct sourcing. Read more

Want to discover more about what the world will look like in 2043? Download our free Future 2043 report which draws on the insights of 20 of the world’s leading futurists. For more innovations, head to the Springwise Innovation Library.

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