Spotted: According to Statista, more than 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste are generated every year. And as the world becomes increasingly digitised and reliant on technology, this is only set to increase. Often, this e-waste ends up in developing countries, where electronics are burned on a mass scale to reveal precious metals, releasing extremely harmful toxic gases.
But now, New Zealand company Mint Innovation has devised an eco-friendly multi-step process for breaking down e-waste. The technology uses low-cost and low-impact biorefineries that extract valuable metals from scrap circuit boards so they may be reused, reducing future need for mined materials.
First, electronic circuit boards are ground up. If metals can’t be retrieved using electrochemistry, Mint dissolves the precious metals using its proprietary green chemistry – chemistry that either reduces or completely eliminates the use or “generation of hazardous substances”.
The company then recovers metals from the solution with a bioabsorption process, whereby special microbes added to the solution absorb the metals. A centrifuge separates metals from the microbes and these extracted materials are then refined into pure metals, ready to be repurposed and resold as items like jewellery or new electronics.
Although Mint has been focused on recycling electronic devices and scrap circuit boards so far, the technology could also be used in the recycling of batteries and catalysts on a large scale.
Other e-waste innovations spotted by Springwise include clean e-waste recycling and mineral processing, the world’s first fully recyclable computer chip substrate, and a project where gamers can return their e-waste for Minecraft coins.
Spotted: As the world heats up, there is a rapidly increasing demand for more cooling technologies. However, nearly 20 per cent of the electricity used in buildings around the world is already going to air conditioners and fans, with cooling accounting for around 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. What is needed is more efficient cooling technologies, and this is exactly what US startup SkyCool hopes to deliver.
SkyCool grew out of research in the lab of Aaswath Raman at the University of Pennsylvania. The technology is based on infrared radiation and could improve the efficiency of cooling systems. All objects give off heat in the form of infrared radiation, and this heat is then trapped by the atmosphere. However, radiation given off in wavelengths of between 8 and 13 micrometres is able to escape into space. Raman and his team have developed a proprietary material that converts the infrared light leaving a surface into this wavelength range, allowing the heat to escape into space and cooling the object in the process.
The company’s technology can be applied in several ways. First, the company has developed a system of cooling panels, covered in SkyCool’s dual-mode film, that can improve any air conditioning or refrigeration system. The panels reflect sunlight and emit infrared radiation to the cold sky. Together these mechanisms keep the panels, and cooling fluid pumped through them, up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit below the ambient temperature with zero electrical input. As an add-on to an existing cooling system, SkyCool’s panels can improve efficiency by 10 to 40 per cent. And, in some situations, the panels can replace existing cooling systems altogether, in which case energy savings can reach up to 90 per cent.
The company’s optical film can also be used in other applications separate from the panels. For example, it can be applied to batteries, outdoor shade structures, metal roofs, or refrigerated vehicles, bringing the benefits of solar reflectivity and infrared radiation to these surfaces.
SkyCool has recently completed a $5 million Seed funding round, which will allow the company to move from the commercial-scale pilots to scaled deployments of its panel and film products. The company is focusing on deploying panels in commercial premises such as grocery stores, refrigerated warehouses, data centres, and similar buildings that require consistent cooling.
Cooling cities and other areas more efficiently is becoming a vital component to achieving net zero. Other innovations that are addressing this issue include insulation made from sheep wool and paint that passively cools buildings.
Spotted: As customers become increasingly aware and invested in health and wellness, demand for nutricosmetics – supplements and foods with beauty benefits – is projected to boom. Indeed, Straits Research estimates the global industry will be worth almost $16 million (around €14.5 million) by 2030.
Nourished, a UK company that creates personalised 3D-printed chewable vitamins, including chewable mouthwash alternatives made in collaboration with Colgate, is joining the growing nutricosmetics industry with new skincare supplements that were unveiled earlier this year.
The vitamins, called SkinStacks, were developed in partnership with skincare brand Neutrogena. Using a smartphone, customers scan their face, and the images are then analysed by Neutrogena’s AI-powered Skin360 software, which assesses more than 2,000 unique skin attributes. Users are then asked to consider what outcomes they’d like to see – more radiant skin or less fine lines, for example – and a recommended combination of nutrients is given. Nourished then 3D prints customised gummies that are based on these recommendations. This stands in contrast with other vitamin brands, who tend to use basic quizzes to guide the ingredients used in personalised supplements.
Because the vitamins are made-to-order, Nourished avoids wasteful overproduction that can leave excess products to expire on shop shelves. And crucially, SkinStacks and other Nourished products combine multiple science-backed ingredients in one supplement. Not only does this save customers unnecessary time and money that would be spent sourcing several different pills – it also cuts out the large volume of plastic packaging that is thrown away when customers buy multiple tubs of vitamin pills. Skinstacks and other Nourished products, in comparison, come in completely recyclable plastic-free packaging, including home-compostable wrappers.
There’s a plethora of innovators out there looking to make the beauty industry more sustainable. In the archive, Springwise has also spotted cosmetics made from unsold fruit and a plant-based beauty brand.
Every step of the food production process generates greenhouse gas emissions; but not many of us are aware of how much damage food waste does to the environment, causing up to 10 per cent of our global emissions.
One-third of the food we produce globally is never eaten, with the financial cost of this wastage estimated $2.6 trillion per year. The environmental impact may be even higher over the long-term. Food that ends up in landfill generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, while reducing food waste has the potential to draw 87 gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
In India, the issue of wasted food is particularly acute, largely due to the need to transport and store food at ambient temperatures because, unlike in developed countries, cold storage is not widely available. India is the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world behind China, but 40 per cent of its produce is lost before it even reaches consumers. This incurs significant costs for the Indian economy, contributes significantly to global emissions, and does nothing to improve the lives of the 14 per cent of people in the country who are undernourished.
The founders of GreenPod Labs, an agri-biotech company based in Chennai, south-east India, believe this is a preventable problem and have come up with a solution that can increase the shelf life of produce by up to 60 per cent. It produces sachets made of non-woven, gas-permeable membranes that are packed alongside the fresh produce during transportation and storage. The sachets contain 8-12 bioactive ingredients – specific to the particular crop – in powder form. These activate the built-in defence mechanisms in the fruits and vegetables, a bit like the way the human immune system responds to outside stresses. The process slows down the ripening rate and minimises microbial growth that contributes to rot.
GreenPod Labs has completed products for three crops, with two more in the pipeline. It hopes to scale its business to include Africa and other countries in Asia, a welcome solution in regions where food security is already an issue, and climate change increasingly disrupts supply chains.
Spotted: For many companies, more than 70 per cent of their carbon footprint is composed of scope 3 emissions – those that occur in an organisation’s wider value chain. But keeping tabs on these emissions is a hard task, as it can be difficult to trace materials through every stage of the supply chain.
One of the specific problems associated with the data gathering process, is the need to collect information from suppliers that might be sensitive. But now, Dutch startup Circularise is tackling this problem through its digital product passports.
Circularise’s technology generates a digital passport for each different raw material that goes into each component. Companies at the end of the supply chain then add their own information to create a new digital passport for the final product. This facilitates re-use and recycling by providing reliable information on a product’s composition and provenance.
All this information is recorded in an immutable format on a public blockchain. This provides superior levels of verification compared to other digital passport solutions, which use private blockchains.
What really separates Circularise from its competitors, is the startup’s focus on helping suppliers share sensitive information on topics such as environmental impact, material composition, or life cycle assessment data. It does this through its patent-pending Smart Questioning technology. This uses advanced cryptography techniques – called zero-knowledge proofs – that allow suppliers to prove their claims without the need to provide sensitive raw data.
Suppliers answer lists of questions at an agreed level of disclosure – from full disclosure to no disclosure of underlying data. The verifying company can then choose a question from the list, and the supplier provides the answer. If the question is set at the highest level of data privacy, the answer is provided alongside a cryptographic proof. Smart Questioning verifies this proof against the raw data without the data itself being revealed to the verifier.
In the archive, Springwise has spotted other innovations working to modernise the supply chain, including a platform that provides product transparency to customers and another that helps companies decarbonise.
Spotted: Agriculture is directly responsible for up to 12 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, with fertilisers alone accounting for around 5 per cent of total emissions. To reduce this, a partnership between EIT InnoEnergy, RIC Energy, MAIRE, Siemens Financial Services, InVivo, and Heineken has recently launched FertigHy, a green fertiliser provider.
The agricultural sector is responsible for over 10 per cent of the European Union’s (EU’s) total greenhouse gas emissions, and European farmers apply around 10 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilisers each year. This is why the European Commission has identified the fertiliser sector as critically important to reducing CO2 emissions.
FertigHy will build low-carbon fertiliser plants that will use green hydrogen to replace the natural gas-based feedstock used in traditional fertiliser plants. The green hydrogen itself will be produced using electrolysis powered by renewable or low-carbon electricity.
The initial plant, due to start construction in 2025, will produce more than one million metric tonnes of low-carbon fertilisers per year and will be based in Spain. FertigHy also plans to build and operate a number of large-scale low-carbon fertiliser projects in other European countries.
FertigHy is coming at a time of increasing awareness of the high CO2 and energy cost of fertiliser production. In the archive, Springwise has spotted other innovations aimed at improving sustainability in this space, including the use of biochar – produced from waste – to enrich the soil and capture CO2, and increasing support for regenerative agriculture.
Eleni Myrivili is the Global Chief Heat Officer for UN Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, which facilitates more socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities. It is currently active in more than 90 countries to promote transformative change through knowledge, policy advice, technical assistance and collaboration.
In addition to her role for the UN, Eleni is a senior adviser for resiliency and sustainability to the City of Athens. She was an elected official in Athens for a number of years, pioneering work on heat adaptation before becoming Chief Heat Officer for the city in 2021, a position championed by the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation.
We spoke to Eleni two weeks into the devastating heatwave affecting Greece and other countries around the world, and ahead of a weekend where temperatures in Athens could reach 45 C…
Interview
“It doesn’t seem to be ending and we are talking about 40 degrees, 41 degrees, 44 degrees…And I hate air conditioning, I don’t have it in my home – and I work from home.” Eleni is talking to us via video call from her home in Athens, and while the white walls and comfortable looking white sofa suggests a cool environment, her face tells a different story. “It’s just unbearable.”
In her TED talk from last year, she signs off by saying, “Cranking up the air conditioner is just not going to cut it.” Indeed, air conditioning and fans account for around 20 per cent of global electricity consumption, and contribute around 1.95 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.
“I’m working together with the Cool Coalition led by UNEP to put together a pledge on a national level that has to do with active cooling and how can we make sure we don’t end up with thousands of air conditioning units throwing our mitigation goals out of the window,” she says.
Eleni is a passionate advocate for the need to reintroduce green spaces, planting, and areas of surface water to our urban environments, which all promote passive cooling. “Landscape architecture I think will change the world,” she laughs. It’s a moment of light relief. The conversation is taking place while wildfires continue to devastate the countryside surrounding Athens and the heat indoors is clearly debilitating.
The strategy
To try and cope, the city is implementing strategy that Eleni put in place. “There are three different pillars with actions that have to do with awareness, preparedness, and redesigning the city.”
A big part of the awareness pillar centres around categorisation of heatwaves. “It is an important thing and an initiative that we have tried in a couple of cities, but it’s something that all cities should try to do,” she says.
The categories are not set by a central body, such as the World Meteorological Organisation, rather each city categorises its own heat. “What you do is gather data from decades prior to now – temperature and other parameters such as humidity, winds, and atmospheric pressure to create the typologies that usually form the air masses that sit on top of your cities. You then check mortality rate data and see which typologies make the mortality rate peak. It allows you to create an algorithm that is very specific to your city.
“So now we are doing five or six cities in Greece – they each have their own algorithm because they all have their own relationship between heat and health. I hope the formula we use will soon be open IP – The Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation is exploring how the IP can be opened up so that different universities can use it.”
The different categories from one to three offer an estimated number of excess deaths that would be likely due to the extreme heat. Human health can be affected by heat in a number of ways, both physical and mental. In the vulnerable, it can be fatal.
As part of the preparedness pillar, categorisation allows people who work with vulnerable groups: the elderly, the very young or the homeless, to share information with them that will keep them safer in the heat, to ensure that they are being checked on, or taken to cooling centres.
It’s ultimately the third pillar, redesign, that will have a longer-term impact on how people are able to live and work in cities in a world where temperatures continue to rise. But the challenge there is a financial one. Eleni is clearly frustrated: “The budgets countries have for cities is miniscule. The maximum amount a country can get from the climate change Adaptation Fund is around $20 million and how many cities does a single country have?”
She sighs “Who knows? Maybe these crazy heat waves, now that the whole northern hemisphere is under extraordinary heat conditions… Maybe this will create the momentum we need to have something move forward fast in terms of adaption funding?”
Let’s hope so. Funding will be on the agenda at the upcoming COP28 conference in Dubai (30 Nov to 12 Dec). We will be publishing more on how cities and societies are innovating to mitigate for and adapt to extreme heat, and the role Chief Heat Officers are playing, over the coming months in the run up to COP28.
Spotted: Quantum computing is an early-stage technology that offers far higher processing speeds than even the most advanced conventional supercomputers. This represents an extraordinary opportunity for business, with McKinsey forecasting that quantum computing could capture nearly $700 billion (around €642 billion) in value by 2035. However, today’s quantum computing hardware is still underdeveloped and largely confined to use by specialists in research labs.
The company has developed a software-as-a-service platform – called Singularity –that provides non-specialist employees with an intuitive interface that connects to quantum computers on the Cloud.
Today’s quantum computers are most advanced when it comes to problems that involve optimisation, and Singularity’s first use case is in financial services. Employees in the sector can use Singularity to maximise returns from their investment portfolios through a plugin added to a regular Excel spreadsheet.
Users input data, such as the expected returns and volatilities of different financial assets, and set parameters such as the total amount to be invested. This information is pre-processed by the software to determine the best algorithms and quantum computers to use. The data is then sent to the computing hardware and the results are returned to the user in an easy-to-understand format. In a matter of minutes, Singularity can identify the optimum allocation of assets in a portfolio, delivering higher returns than industry standard solvers for any given risk level.
The Singularity platform enables companies to gain some of the promised benefits of quantum computing immediately, even though quantum computing hardware remains in its infancy.
Quantum computing is only just starting to reveal its full potential. In the archive, Springwise has also spotted it being used for cybersecurity and to tackle the climate crisis.
1. Every part of society needs to be included in the transition
The original purpose of ChangeNOW was to showcase entrepreneurs trying to solve concrete issues. But this year the summit included a broad mix of people – from big brands to investors, activists, and artists. Lefebvre explains that this is because the team increasingly understands that the transition to a sustainable world needs to integrate every part of society. What we need, he argues, is complementary strategies because: “If you attack the system on just one side you can’t really change it.”
2. You can look at the issues differently
Lefebvre highlights that CEOs and policymakers at ChangeNOW are discovering frameworks and tools such as Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and MIT’s Climate Pathways. These are helping them to shift their mindset, and approach old issues with fresh eyes.
3. Connections are key
This year, ChangeNOW has brought together changemakers from all over the world. And while travelling such a long distance is a big commitment, the opportunity for stakeholders to connect is invaluable. For example, Lefebvre highlights how the director of The Great Green Wall, a project pursuing reforestation in the Sahel region of Africa, met the president of COP 15, Alain-Richard Donwahi, for the first time at ChangeNOW.
4. The agenda is broader than climate
ChangeNOW is moving beyond a conventional focus on climate alone, with Lefebvre highlighting that there are four main equations that we must solve together: the climate, biodiversity, resources, and inclusion. Solving these one by one would take many decades, and the planet doesn’t have time for that. We must therefore tackle them at the same time.
5. We need courage
As we make the transition to a more sustainable world, many people will need to show courage. Lefebvre points to the inspiration of one of ChangeNOW’s keynote speakers, Francisco Vera, who, at just nine years old, created a climate change education platform in Colombia. He did this despite the pressures that this brought on him.
To find out more about ChangeNOW and to watch replays of the talks at the 2023 summit click here.
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.
