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Revolutionising recycling with AI-enabled robots
CategoriesSustainable News

Revolutionising recycling with AI-enabled robots

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Even in areas that have established comprehensive recycling systems, very often huge amounts of recyclables don’t actually end up getting recycled. In the UK, recycling rates have ‘plateaued’ at around 43 per cent in recent years, while in the US, almost 70 per cent of municipal waste doesn’t get recycled or composted.

Enter Glacier, which has developed an AI-enabled sorting robot to help materials recycling facilities more efficiently separate individual recyclables. The robots can accurately identify more than 30 different types of recyclables as they move along conveyor belts. In addition, the robots collect real-time data on the volume of recyclables, contamination rates, and other details.

The robot takes up about the space as a human, can achieve cost payback in as little as six months, and can be installed with no downtime or heavy machinery. The company’s co-founder, Areeb Malik, told Springwise that “existing sortation solutions were too expensive, difficult to install, and expensive to maintain and repair.” Glacier’s robot, in contrast, is “purpose-built to solve these exact pain points.”

Glacier, which is led by a female CEO, earlier completed a $4.5 million (around €4.1 million) seed round led by venture firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). More recently, the company has received an additional $7.7 million (around €7 million) in funding from NEA and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, with additional participation from other investors. Malik explained that the technology is already live in about a dozen facilities across the US and the company expects significant growth going forward.

There is increasing urgency in finding solutions to the world’s growing waste problem. Springwise has recently spotted the use of plastic waste as a bitumen replacement and AI technology that combats food waste.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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Revolutionising roads with upcycled plastic waste
CategoriesSustainable News

Revolutionising roads with upcycled plastic waste

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: While we like to think that any waste placed in a recycling bin is recycled into new products, the reality is that in some places, the refuse is either incinerated or exported to landfills elsewhere. This was the situation faced by Singaporean Oh Chu Xian. In response, Oh and her sister founded Magorium, a deep tech firm that develops sustainable solutions for plastic waste.

Oh’s family had been in the road construction and asphalt manufacturing business for almost five decades, so this was a logical place for Magorium to start. The company’s product, NEWBitumen, is a replacement for bitumen, the liquid binder used to hold asphalt together. Where traditional bitumen is produced using crude oil, NEWBitumen is made from plastic waste that would have otherwise been considered non-recyclable and destined for the landfill.

Contaminated plastic waste is put through a multi-step process, which breaks down the long chains of polymers in the plastic, and then reformulates the materials to create a substance with similar characteristics to bitumen. By-products, such as synthetic gas, are captured, cleaned, and used as a heating source to power the process. Organic contaminants are converted to biochar and used as filler.

At the 2023 CapitaLand Sustainability X Challenge, Magorium won the Emerging Startup Award and received S$150,000 (around €103,000) as a result. In future, the startup hopes to take NEWBitumen beyond Singapore and help stimulate circular economies in other countries around the world.

Coping with plastic waste is the goal of a growing number of innovations spotted by Springwise. These include the recycling of plastic waste into chemicals and rentable packaging made from recycled plastic.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

Reference

Meet the women revolutionising sustainable fashion
CategoriesSustainable News

Meet the women revolutionising sustainable fashion

By Zarkon Group,

1. Turning pineapple waste into natural textiles

Dr Carmen Hijosa, the Founder and Chief Creative & Innovation Officer of Ananas Anam was inspired to create a natural, sustainable leather alternative after witnessing first-hand the environmental impact of mass leather production and chemical tanning while working as a consultant for the leathergoods industry. Realising that PVC would not be a viable alternative, she embarked on a journey involving years of research and development, including a PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, where Ananas Anam was developed.

Her company creates natural textiles using the fibres from discarded pineapple leaves. The phenomenal growth in popularity of pineapples means that 25 million tonnes of waste a year is created from the plant’s leaves. For the full story, watch the film above.

Photo source: Aciae  

2. Turning ocean plastic into clothing

In Australia, fashion brand Aciae works to the Circle to Zero principle, striving to eliminate waste from every step of its production processes and contributing to the overall reduction of global plastic pollution.

The company’s name is Latin for thread and refers to its practice of turning single-use plastic waste into the thread that’s used to create its machine-washable, waterproof, recyclable shoes. Gathered plastics are cleaned, shredded, and then melted down for extrusion. The extruded fibres are then spun into thread, completing the transformation of trash into fabric.  

Founder Tina Li says: “The brand embodies the spirit of women shaping the sustainable development narrative, ensuring we all play a part in the story.”

Aciae.com.au

Photo source: Recovo

3. A marketplace that connects fashion brands to deadstock

‘Deadstock’ is a term that refers to the surplus fabric that is generated by fashion houses and normally destined for landfill or the incinerator.

Circular startup Recovo, led by CEO and co-founder Monica Rodriguez, matches buyers of deadstock fabric with those who have it to sell via an easy-to-use online platform. The company has created a curated catalogue of unused natural and synthetic fabrics, yarns, and other production materials, and does all the heavy lifting for sellers. Buyers can browse this catalogue and request samples at the touch of a button.  

Since the company was founded in 2021, it has grown rapidly and now operates in 16 countries in the European Union. To date, it has saved the equivalent of 98,000 kilogrammes of CO2 and 22 million litres of water.

Recovo.co

Photo source: © PDPics from pixabay via Canva.com

4. Turning discarded clothes into new materials

Re-Fresh Global, a Berlin based startup co founded in 2021 by Viktoria Kanar and Revital Nadiv, is turning discarded clothing into new raw materials. These materials can be used to create products like cosmetics, cars, packaging, pharmaceuticals, fibres, and furniture. 

First, the company uses its automated technology to sort and separate textile waste, depending on its material composition and colour. Then, Re-fresh’s patented biotechnology transforms shredded textile fibres into industrial quantities of new and highly versatile resources.  

This process creates three new, raw material types: nanocellulose, ethanol, and sanitised textile pulp. The nanocellulose is strong and highly versatile, meaning it can be used in items including packaging, paper, and pharmaceuticals. The pure bioethanol (alcohol) has various useful applications across the beauty, sanitation, and biofuel industries. And finally, the textile pulp, made from recycled natural and synthetic fibres, can be used in the production of new fibres, whether that be for car upholstery or sound-absorbing workplace interiors.

Re-fresh.global

Written By: Angela Everitt

Reference

Revolutionising the poultry industry with carbon-neutral eggs
CategoriesSustainable News

Revolutionising the poultry industry with carbon-neutral eggs

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Although not as polluting as cattle or pigs, poultry rearing still contributes around 790 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents each year. The equates to around eight per cent of all agriculture emissions. Much of this comes from feed, heating and lighting, and manure. But now, Dutch egg farm Kipster is pioneering a carbon-neutral approach that could be the future of poultry farming – and the company is bringing it to the US.

Kipster has partnered with Kroger groceries and MPS Egg Farms to bring its sustainable egg farming stateside. Kipster’s techniques begin with reducing greenhouse gas emissions internally as much as possible, and offsetting any remaining emissions with external carbon reduction projects. Internal measures include turning surplus food into chicken feed, rather than growing feed on land that could be used for human food production.

The ‘upcycled’ chicken feed uses by-products from crop and food processing, such as oat hulls and faulty pasta. The upcycled feed has a carbon footprint of around half that of conventional feed. Kipster’s farms are all specially designed to allow the birds to carry out their natural behaviours, reducing the need for trimming beaks and administering antibiotics. Kipster is also the first farm to remove dust, odour, ammonia, and other undesirable particles from the barn air, as well as recovering the heat using a heat pump.

Denise Osterhues, Kroger’s senior director of sustainability and social impact explains: “Choosing Kipster cage-free eggs is an easy way for our customers to help create a more sustainable food system.”

As people become more aware of the emissions cost of rearing animals, many are turning to alternatives – and innovators are keeping up with the demand. Springwise has recently spotted many types of sustainable foods, including cultivated pork made using microalgae, and a sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

Reference

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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