Spotted: The takeaway food delivery market is expected to continue its steady growth following the explosion of interest during the pandemic. The growth in recycling facilities, however, is not keeping pace, which is bad news for the environment. Countries across the globe are producing millions of metric tonnes of single-use plastic waste each every year.
Even the cardboard and paper containers that are becoming more common are not truly sustainable. Most contain a plastic coating to prevent leaks, something that Singapore-based startup Alterpacks wanted to change. After analysing the most common types of agricultural and food waste around the world, the company chose spent grain for its new line of compostable food containers.
Malt and barley grain waste created by the beer brewing process provide the majority of Alterpacks’ raw material. And rather than relying on a coating, the creators of Alterpacks chose to make the whole container leakproof, microwaveable, washable, and home-compostable.
Currently, the packaging is available as stackable containers with a cover, a bento box, and a set of cutlery. Having recently raised $1 million (around €922,000) in pre-seed funding, the company plans to begin commercial production and distribution of the packaging throughout Asia, Australia, and Europe.
Reusable food and drink container options have proliferated in recent years, providing consumers with feel-good ways to enjoy the ease of takeaway and on-the-go coffees without the environmental footprint. Two recent examples Springwise has spotted are reusable takeaway containers for restaurants, and a vegetable oil-based reusable coffee cup.
Spotted: Various studies have estimated that around 20 to 50 per cent of industrial energy consumption is discharged as waste heat – and up to 30 per cent of this could be harnessed and utilised. Looking to make use of the heat emitted by traditional engines, Israel-based startup Luminescent has built a system that produces zero-emission electricity.
A small, isothermal engine upcycles waste heat and is designed to fit alongside conventional large engines and generators in order to send electricity back to the grid. If needed, the Luminescent device stores between 8 and 20 hours of renewable energy.
The new device uses a heat transfer liquid to gather and move the heat emitted from another engine into the upcycling system. The liquid is then mixed with either air or gas and put under pressure, which causes the material to expand – this expansion converts the liquid into kinetic energy that powers a generator. The generator can then run other devices and systems, store power, or send electricity back to the grid.
Currently working at around 70 per cent efficiency, the system could become available commercially in the next two to three years. Luminescent plans to use the $7 million (around €6.5 million) it raised recently in a round of seed funding to bring the engine to market.
From the excess heat of public transport systems heating homes to car parks heating the buildings above, Springwise has spotted many ways innovators are making use of previously wasted emissions and resources.
Spotted: According to a report by the WWF, more than 15 per cent of usable food is lost before it ever leaves the farm, with the majority of this waste occurring in middle and high income regions. Some of this waste occurs when food is left on the field due to order cancellations, imperfections in food appearance, or a surplus. This represents a tremendous waste of resources. Mexican startup Perfekto is hoping to improve the situation with its delivery boxes.
Launched in 2021, Perfekto works with more than 70 producers to ‘rescue’ food that cannot be sold to suppliers. Subscribers choose from different types and sizes of box, or can request a ‘surprise’ box. These boxes can also be personalised with different types of produce and are then delivered using proprietary software that automates routing and logistics. All of the fruit and vegetables arrive with minimal packaging, and what packaging there is, is returnable to Perfekto for recycling and/or reuse.
Since its origins, the business has grown to more than 3,000 active monthly subscribers. However, the company envisions even bigger things in the future, with hopes of expanding into food other than fruits and vegetables, including those foods that are less likely to sell because of dented packaging. Perfekto recently announced that it has raised $1.1 million (approximately €1.07 million) in pre-seed funding to expand its food rescue programme across Mexico City, improve operations and technology, and expand its catalogue of products.
Perfekto is one of a number of companies that are working to save food from ending up in landfills. Springwise has also spotted a platform that helps hospitality companies manage their inventories to reduce waste, and AI that checks the ripeness of produce.
Spotted: Every year, around 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted, including approximately 40 per cent of all food at retail or consumer level in industrialised countries. This constitutes a huge amount of wasted resources and acts as a substantial contribution to global warming. To help reduce this mountain of food waste, startup No Spoilers has developed an innovative inventory control solution aimed at hospitality businesses.
The company’s multi-platform application provides tools that allow businesses to conduct fast and precise inventory control. The system centres around a Bluetooth-enabled scale that can be used with a mobile phone. Inventory control data is automatically uploaded to the cloud so it can be analysed on a computer or mobile device and using the data, managers can then easily schedule tasks for employees and control the company’s workflow on the platform.
The system is also packed with helpful features such as the ability to quickly identify products using a built-in barcode reader or measure partial inventory using No Spoilers’ Smart Scale – giving managers an accurate idea of exactly how much food and drink they have left. The software also offers inventory management features including inventory control, inventory optimisation, purchasing, pricing management, mobile access, and analytics and reporting.
Businesses can alter No Spoilers’ system to set the optimum periodic automatic replenishment (PAR) levels and automatically generate inventory orders, control suppliers with incoming inventory control, gather and analyse business data for informed decision-making, and identify and report losses due to wastage.
Reducing food waste not only helps save resources, but it also helps hospitality companies save money. Some other innovations helping reduce food waste include AI that can check the freshness of fruit and a startup that uses computer vision to help commercial kitchens manage food waste.
Spotted: Insulation is important. In the UK, it’s estimated that 80 per cent of all the houses that will be in use in the year 2050, have already been built – but just 20 per cent will have been built to net zero standard. This means that 26 million UK homes will need to be retrofitted with improved insulation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the situation is similar in other countries. In Switzerland, for instance, more than 1 million houses have no or insufficient insulation.
One of the key challenges when it comes to insulating homes is the trade-off builders need to make when choosing insulating material. Today, those installing insulation must compromise on either environmental impact, cost, or flammability. Now, however, Swiss startup FenX AG claims to have found a way to avoid this compromise.
The startup’s solution is to create insulating foams from abundant mineral waste. Sourcing materials locally from a wide range of industrial waste streams and low-value natural resources, FenX uses its unique foaming technology to create insulating panels, bricks, and customised 3D-printed parts.
The composition of materials used as feedstock for this process meets all the necessary safety requirements for use in the building industry, and the finished foams are recyclable, non-flammable, 3D-printable, and high-performance. What is more, the manufacturing process for the materials results in very low carbon dioxide emissions.
In addition to its core insulation offering, FenX has partnered with ETH Zurich on a project that explores how foam 3D-printing can be used in conjunction with concrete casting to reduce concrete waste.
Springwise has spotted other recent innovations that reduce the environmental impact of buildings. These include building walls that can store carbon, a wood-based cooling foam that improves energy efficiency, and a startup that converts existing buildings to net zero using an innovative process.
Spotted: According to the IEA, the number of electric cars on the world’s roads by the end of 2021 was about 16.5 million, triple the amount in 2018. While this may seem like great news for the environment, it is not all positive. That is because the current recycling rate for electric vehicle (EV) batteries is extremely low, with some estimates putting it at just five per cent. For electric mobility to represent a truly sustainable solution, this needs to change, and Stockholm-based Cling Systems is one of the organisations working on a solution.
Currently, when EV batteries reach the end of their life, they often end up in a fragmented system of car dismantlers, workshops, and wreckers. But connecting these to the businesses who want to use or recycle old batteries is difficult. In fact, according to Cling, logistics can account for almost 50 per cent of recycling costs. In response, the startup has developed an intelligent collection and trading platform that connects vehicle manufacturers and buyers of end-of-life batteries to vehicle scrap yards and dismantlers.
Cling’s platform aims to solve the logistics issues that prevent end-of-life batteries from being reused. It does this by aggregating data to allow recyclers and dismantlers to connect with buyers of end-of-life batteries. Through efficient matching of supply and demand, Cling enables the development of a circular battery recycling system while also maintaining a competitive market for the batteries.
While Cling’s marketplace is initially aimed at the Nordic region and Europe, the company hopes to expand to other areas. According to the company, “Our presence in the industry has already generated some exciting early conversations from key players. We have potential customers and partners from both Europe, North America, and Asia. Our vision is to make the electrical transformation truly sustainable.”
As battery technology becomes more vital to a sustainable future, we are also seeing a big uptick in innovations designed to deal with battery waste. Some of those we have recently covered include a riverboat powered by old EV batteries and repurposed EV batteries being used for energy storage.
Spotted: Bananas going to waste on the kitchen counter is an all-too-frequent occurrence. On an industrial scale, that waste is even greater, with up to 30 per cent of the annual banana crop deemed unsuitable for sale and therefore discarded. UK company LyteGro sees opportunity within those piles of unsaleable fruit. By adding water to the bananas and then mixing, heating, and filtering the mash, the company produces Baclyte, a microbial growth enhancer.
Highly potent, the mixture enables rapid microbe growth for a huge range of industrial applications. With everything from biofuels, brewing, and distilling to dairy food and pharmaceutical production reliant on microbes, Baclyte has the potential to be a highly valuable addition to food and commercial manufacturing processes. By speeding up microbial growth, production of the final product occurs faster and yield is increased.
Key to both the use and production of the growth enhancer is its scalability and circularity. LyteGro plans to expand its volume of production by working with local communities and governments to build and locate waste banana processing plants near growers. Cutting down on transportation costs reduces emissions, and as microbreweries and distilleries continue pushing the growth in circular economies, putting local waste products to use further can further bolster their green credentials.
So much food waste still occurs that Springwise has spotted a wide range of innovations making use of leftover produce. In Spain, a student has turned ugly fruit that would otherwise have been wasted into a line of sustainable cosmetics, and an Italian startup uses orange peels to 3D print a compostable lamp.
Swedish designer Louise Hederström has worked with furniture brand Swedese to use leftover wood and plywood from a Cobe-designed building to create furniture for its public spaces.
Hederström‘s project Rephrased Matter, which was on show as part of the annual design festival Southern Sweden Design Days, saw the designer work together with Swedese to create a collection of furniture for the atrium, restaurant and meeting rooms in developer Skanska‘s Hyllie Terrass building.
Above: Louise Hederström’s designs were on show at Southern Sweden Design Days. Top image: a prototype of her stool for Skanska. Photo is courtesy of Hederström
The furniture will be made from materials such as plywood and wooden beams that were used during the construction of the building, which was designed by Danish studio Cobe, and would otherwise have been burned.
Hederström, who approached Skanska together with Linus Davidsson, sales representative at Swedese, said they will instead use the waste material from the building site for both “big and small projects.”
Waste materials and leftover materials were used to construct the furniture. Photo is courtesy of Louise Hederström
The first item is set of stools and a table that will be used in the building’s atrium. They were made from wooden latches and plywood used on the site to cover elevator shafts and as temporary staircase banisters.
“We don’t really know yet, but that’s also the part of the process – we see something, we save it and we and the latches was really something that was easy to see that this is possible to work with,” Hederström told Dezeen.
Hederström worked together with furniture company Swedese
The time-consuming process of designing furniture from scrap materials requires a lot more preparation than working with virgin wood does.
“You have to have time to collect the material, you have to store it and dry it,” Hederström explained. “It’s a longer process, and we’re learning by doing.”
For the stools Hederström combined waste wood with leftover materials from Swedese, as the padding and fabric material needed was not available from the building site itself.
Instead, the stools have a filling made from leftover sheepskin from Swedese’s production, covered by leather seats that are made from leather with minor imperfections that meant the company was unable to use them for other furniture.
A steel ring used in Swedese’s furniture production and made from 80 per cent recycled metal holds the stool’s wooden legs together.
A table made from wood matches the stools
The current collection also includes a table made from the same wood and plywood pieces, and Hederström also plans to use the wooden latches to create a long sofa that will sit in the central atrium.
For her, having to use already-cut wood and other materials in existing conditions was a welcome challenge, rather than a disadvantage.
“I like the challenge that you have a material to have to work with,” she said.
“So with the stool, I wanted to change the dimensions of course, but I wanted you to still feel the connection to the material and understand its construction, how it holds together.”
Hederström will also use wood from elm trees that have had to be felled because of Dutch Elm disease, while leftover materials from Swedish furniture and design companies will be used to create accessories for the interior of the building.
Other leftover materials will be used to create accessories
Hederström hopes that the initiative, which Skanska said it hopes to also expand to other buildings, will become more commonly used when constructing new buildings.
“I hoped that it would open their eyes, but also, I think that when they count and see ‘we have 1,000 metres of wood that we just throw away’ they can also say ‘let’s save it for next building’,” Hederström said.
“They can rethink their way of planning. And I think it was an eye-opener, that they realise that this is something that we could use. Especially when the world is a bit upside down, we have to take better care of material resources.”
Hyllie Terrass, the building that the furniture will be used in, was designed by Cobe for Skanska and is part of a pilot program for NollC02 buildings, which Skanska says will have net-zero emissions over their entire life cycle. It will be ready for occupation in spring 2023.
Hederström has previously made a concrete bench and traffic barrier using waste, while Swedese recently worked with graduate Mika Lindblad on a furniture collection designed without upholstery.
The photography is by Daniel Engvall unless otherwise stated.
Southern Sweden Design Days took place from 19 to 22 May 2022 in Malmö, Sweden. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
Australian start-up Hoopsy has created a recyclable pregnancy test that is 99 per cent made out of paper, aiming to stop millions of single-use plastic versions ending up in landfill each year.
The Hoopsy “eco pregnancy test” is made almost entirely out of paper, with cardboard packaging that can be recycled in domestic bins. Only the pouch the test comes in is made of soft plastic and needs to be recycled through supermarket collection.
The company aims for its products to replace plastic home pregnancy tests, 12.5 million of which it says are completed each year in the UK before being thrown in the bin.
The Hoopsy test is 99 per cent made out of paper
Entrepreneur Lara Solomon founded Hoopsy after going through IVF and embryo donation procedures that made her realise just how many times people who are trying to conceive test themselves.
She said she used “countless” pregnancy tests in the 14-day period following her embryo transfer. She then went on to develop the product, naming it after the Dutch word for “hope”.
“I feel that when you do a pregnancy test there is a lot of hope – a ‘hope I am’ or a ‘hope I’m not’!” Solomon told Dezeen. “Plus, it also has connotations with jumping through hoops in life, which is sometimes what trying for a baby feels like.”
Only the pouch the test comes in is made of plastic
“On top of this, there’s hope for the future that this product can help reduce plastic waste,” she continued.
Hoopsy has been approved for sale by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency following clinical trials that showed it was over 99 per cent accurate from the day of a person’s expected period.
Like most home pregnancy tests, it works by measuring levels of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG, commonly known as the pregnancy hormone) in the urine.
The test is taken midstream, which Solomon said most users prefer to strip tests that require prior collection of the urine in a container. To use it, a person holds the end of the test with the Hoopsy logo while placing the other end in their urine stream for three to five seconds.
The test has been approved for sale in the UK
They then place the test on a flat surface and wait five to 10 minutes to read the result. Afterwards, the paper test can be cut in half so the part that’s been urinated on can be put in the bin while the clean portion goes in paper recycling.
Hoopy was developed entirely in-house by Solomon and the manufacturer, but she hopes to work with an external design team for the second iteration of the product, which she aims to make from 100 per cent paper.
The test is taken midstream and is more than 99 per cent accurate
“I’d love to see all plastic tests phased out eventually,” said Solomon. “I think that the pregnant/not pregnant digital screen version instead of two lines is not necessary.”
“The ‘number of weeks’ tests are more tricky to replicate in a non-plastic way, but I am confident we could look at a non-digital version as a way to stop that waste.”
Another single-use plastic testing product that has recently been given a recyclable reimagining is the Covid 19-test. Design agency Morrama came up with a concept design made from moulded paper pulp and NatureFlex film.
Spotted: According to one report, as much as half a pound of food is wasted for every restaurant meal, including from kitchen waste and what’s left on customers’ plates. While some of this can’t be helped (peels, rinds, food that has gone off), there is a lot of scope for improvement. That is the goal of Dutch startup Orbisk, which has developed a computer vision-based system that helps food service operators identify and cut down on waste.
Orbisk’s system includes a smart camera connected to a scale, which is installed near a facility’s waste bin. Staff hold food destined for the bin under the camera before throwing it away. The system identifies the exact foods and how much is being thrown away. The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm then delivers data that helps the restaurant monitor exactly what and how much is being thrown away, and why.
The system works for both pre- and post-preparation foods and the results help operators manage their kitchens and supply chains to minimise waste. For example, if a lot of a particular raw ingredient is going off before it can be cooked, the kitchen knows it needs to order less of that ingredient. Or, if leftovers of a particular dish are being thrown away frequently, this may mean the portion sizes of that dish are too large.
The company describes its goal as “a mission to make the world’s food system more sustainable. We do this by using progressive and innovative technology to tackle one of today’s biggest challenges: food waste. Our solution provides hospitality organizations with a complete insight into their food waste and helps them cut their waste in half.”
Orbisk is not the only company developing solutions to reduce food waste. Winnow, in the UK, makes a similar AI-powered system aimed at driving operational improvements and cutting waste. Other innovative ways of tackling food waste highlighted here at Springwise include making fabric out of food waste and a countertop system for turning home food waste into compost.
