🥤 ClimateHack Vol 22: Plastic x Climate

Hey There,

Here's the breakdown of our audience survey from the other week:

💸 34% of you identify as an "investor in climate tech"💡 28% of you identify as an "founder in climate tech"🔨 17% of you identify as an "operator in climate tech"

21% of you identified as "none of the above" - of which, more than half noted they would like to be transition into a climate roll in future.

Feels like a good group to bring together IRL, question now is, in which city?

Digest x Climate

📈 What’s up? Research from Nature4Climate and Capital for Climate, released during COP27, predicts ‘nature tech’ to see an increase in investment of $6 billion by 2030.

📉 What’s down? At COP27, the US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called out monitoring, verifying, and quantifying carbon sequestration, and agtech VC investment, as “lacking”.

🧊 Researchers from The Ohio State University are using dust trapped in Tibetian glacier ice to document past climate changes in the Earth, and potentially help predict future changes.

📚 Good Read: Green Queen explains why climate grief is the next mental health crisis.

Carbon x Climate

💰 BeZero Carbon secured $50 million Series B funding for its voluntary carbon market scoring platform, which allows businesses or individuals to buy carbon credits to offset their emissions.

💻 Dutch blockchain startup Circularise raised €11 million Series A funding, in a round led by Brightlands Venture Partners, to address more landfill waste with its "digital product passports".

Food x Climate

🧫 Australian cultivated meat company Vow raised $49.2 million Series A funding, the largest round in the sector to date. Vow is set on launching its first product, Morsel, a cultivated umami quail product, into Singapore by the end of the year.

🐓 US-based cultivated meat maker UPSIDE Foods received approval from the FDA for its cultivated chicken, and now awaits approval from the USDA in order to serve its chicken products to consumers.

🥬 Freight Farms secured $17.5 million Series B3 funding to support the growth of its vertical, modular hydroponic container farms, which “empower anyone to grow food anywhere”.

🧬 Cradle came out of stealth to raise €5.5 million for its platform that uses synthetic biology to design environmentally friendly alternatives to 60% of everything humans consume, from food and clothing to materials and medicines.

🐄 Swedish startup Volta Greentech secured €2 million to build Volta Factory 02, its first large-scale algae factory where it will produce its seaweed supplement that helps reduce cow methane emissions by 80-90%.

🥚 Researchers at Princeton Engineering are using egg whites to create an aerogel that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration to cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater.

🌾 Vertical farming company Infarm announced that they have successfully produced wheat in an indoor farm, using no soil, chemical pesticides, and much less water compared to open field farming.

Materials x Climate

🧥 San Francisco-based BioFluff closed a $500,000 pre-seed funding round that will help bring its first plant-based fur products to market next year.

🇦🇺 Australian startup ULUU secured AUD 8 million in a round led by Main Sequence. It uses seaweed to create a sustainable alternative to plastic, and plans to launch its first products in the next 12 to 24 months.

🌎 Sustainable packaging company Impacked raised $2.5 million seed funding, in a round led by TenOneTen Ventures, to “source every primary package on the planet, for the planet,” using its platform to foster greater connectivity and collaboration between brands and suppliers in the packaging industry.

🇨🇭 A team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne has developed a prototype edible drone, made from rice cakes and gelatin, designed for rescue missions.

Energy x Climate

⏲ Impulse secured $20 million in a Series A funding round, led by Lux Capital, for its induction stoves that include a battery solution, reducing their use of energy from the grid.

🇺🇸 US President Joe Biden and Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a climate finance deal providing $20 billion to help Indonesia pivot away from coal power, marking the largest climate transaction in history.

⚡️ Cambridge GaN Devices, a spinout of the University of Cambridge, raised $19 million Series B funding for its gallium nitride transistors, which the company claims can make electronics greener by improving energy conversion efficiency.

🔋 Milan-based Sinergy Flow secured €1.8 million seed funding to accelerate commercialisation of its grid flow energy battery concept, which has enough energy density for 20 hours usage to help grid operators bring more renewable power into the mix.

🛢 The ‘world’s largest floating wind farm’, Hywind Tampen, produced its first power last weekend, confirmed Norwegian energy firm Equinor. It will be used to help power operations at oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

💨 Australia’s Fortescue Future Industries is partnering with Windlab to build a ‘super hub’ that produces green hydrogen using wind and solar, known as the North Queensland Super Hub.

♻️ Cambridge-based Levidian installed the first of its greenhouse gas-reducing LOOP devices, which break methane into hydrogen and carbon atoms, with the carbon then used to create graphene, in the UK, in partnership with Eco Group.

💬 We're working on a report / mapping about lithium batteries and battery recycling - comment here if we're missing any companies from our list.

Transport x Climate

🚗 E-mobility startup JUCR, based in Berlin, secured €32.2 million in seed and debt financing from Vector Venture Capital, 2bX and German Media Pool to support software and hardware engineering on its proprietary EV charging technology.

🚎 Kenya-based BasiGo raised $6.6 million equity funding to begin assembling electric buses in the country from next month, and expand its charging infrastructure network, with an initial focus on Nairobi.

🇬🇧 The UK government has awarded over £5 million to 24 winners of its Department for Transport’s First of a Kind 2022 competition, developing technology aimed at decarbonising and improving train travel, from self-charging trains to automatic flood detection on rail tracks.

🌱 Electric motorcycle manufacturer Tarform unveiled a new model made with plant-based, recyclable, and biodegradable materials, including flaxseed biofibres and bio-resin.

Funds x Climate

💸 Italian angel investor Stefano Bernardi raised a new fund, Unruly Capital, with €18 million after first close to invest in what he describes as “weird stuff”, mainly climate and deeptech - ths current profile includes everything from companies like Heart Aerospace, Pachama, Seaborg Technologies, Twelve and 50 others.

🇰🇷 South Korean social impact-focused VC Sopoong closed its sixth fund with $8 million to support emerging climate tech startups that will help the country’s big manufacturers reach carbon neutrality.

Conversations x Climate: Packaging x Climate 🔎

This week I reached out to Sonalie Figueiras, Founder of award winning media outlet Green Queen and co-founder of sustainable packaging sourcing company Source Green.

We've all heard (and likely seen) our big plastic problem, but truth is, not much has changed over the last 10 years.

Sonalie breaks down the faux from the facts, the greenwashing from the impact and shares more about what she's doing to drive lasting change in this space.

Q: We hear a lot about our big plastic problem - so what's the latest in the situation here?

Plastic is solid oil, a fact that we often forget. Producing plastic requires extracting crude oil, which is a toxic process that generates millions of greenhouse gas emissions.

Plastic is killing us, killing wildlife and damaging our natural environment. The United Nations has called out the plastic waste crisis as being on par with the climate crisis in terms of impact to the planet and humanity. We simply cannot solve the climate crisis without turning off the plastic tap.

Q: It feels like the plastic problem and reduction has been something we've been talking about for the last 10 years, so why is it different now?

From where we are sitting, plastic reduction has not been top of mind for very long. It’s true that in the past 5 years, single-use plastic has been called out as a problem, particularly in F&B, but the numbers around plastic packaging production and usage are staggering.

The vast majority of companies globally still very much rely on plastic in their supply chain. What brands have been talking about is recycling plastic and that's a huge problem. Plastic recycling doesn't work.

We've given this experiment over 50 years and decades later, global recycling rates are under 15% (with the true figure once you account for downcycling, loss and mismanagement around 2%).

In the US, a report showed a plastic recycling rate of 5% for 2021. Further, of the dozen or so types of plastic, only 2 or 3 can actually be recycled. There is no adequate infrastructure for the rest. Plastic recycling, more accurately be described as wish cycling, is wrongly and unethically promoted as a solution for a circular economy.

Q: What about biomaterials, what's the current state of affairs?

Biomaterials are full of greenwashing too. Many of the new alt-leathers and alt-materials have a poor end of life because they are mixed with plastic (for performance reasons). That means that they cannot degrade in the open air, or be composted, and they will end up polluting landfills just like a discarded plastic bottle or styrofoam. So while they are helping to reduce the total usage of plastic, they are only addressing a small part of the problem.

If you want to properly asses a material you need to look at the entire lifecycle and supply chain and ask the following questions:

1. Feedstock: Where does it come from? Is the feedstock competing with food crops? What is the land/energy/water required to produce the feedstock? How vulnerable is the feedstock to the effects of climate change? Is the feedstock renewable?

2. Material: Does the material contain any petrochemical-based additives? Any coatings/glues? Was anything added to the material to meet certain technical specs? What toxins are released during production of the material? Any toxic substances required to be added to the material?

3. End of life: What happens to the material once it has been used? Can it be reused? Can it break down? And if so, in what conditions (composting facility? Landfill? Open air?) and how long does it take? What toxins are released during the breakdown? If it can be recycled, what kind of recycling? Chemical? Or Mechanical?

4. Other questions: what does the waste infrastructure look like for this material? Are consumers aware of how to dispose of it?

As you can see, there are a lot of unknowns and it is far too easy to make grand claims about materials that consumers want to believe but materials are a complicated business and require a certain level of chemical, waste management and regulatory understanding to properly assess. It is not reasonable to expect consumers to have this level of knowledge. Unfortunately, this opacity means the space is rife for misleading marketing claims and greenwashing.

Q: What led you to start Source Green and what do you do?

At Source Green, we have developed the world's first plastic waste reduction software including the first impact calculator to calculate the true cost of plastic waste to human health, wildlife and the environment, from feedstock extraction to end of life.

Source Green's transparency tech helps brands quit plastic by:

1. Helping them calculate the true cost of the plastic in their supply chain

2. Helping them to create plastic reduction commitments.

3. Helping them source plastic-free alternatives/solutions

💡 A few scary stats:

• We currently produce over 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year globally. If we keep up the status quo, we are on track to produce 4 times more plastic packaging waste by 2050.

• We currently produce over 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year, and over 60% of all textiles are made from plastic fiber.

Most businesses are blind to the true cost of plastic and drowning in a sea of plastic greenwashing. But regulatory headwinds across the world mean that brands are facing a host of unmanaged business risks, namely:

• Disclosure Risk: ESG reporting requirements, truth in labeling laws, anti-greenwashing laws (e.g. UK Green Claims Code)

• Regulatory Risk: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws in France, US states like Oregon and Maine and most recently Thailand ; single-use plastic bans in China, India, EU, and most recently

• Reputational Risk: increased activist pressure and social media naming & shaming

• Market Risk: consumers want more conscious products and services with demand for plastic-free products up 90%.

This is not a problem that will go away. It will just get worse. By quantifying the issue and helping brands to visualize the true cost data, we are empowering them to fight the plastic waste crisis directly from their own supply chain.

Q: What's next and who should reach out?

Investors: We are currently raising our pre-seed to build out our software, so get in touch if you want to learn more about Source Green and get involved in the the future of plastic-free!

Brands: contact us to get an audit using our true cost of plastic tool and create a plastic reduction roadmap!

Debate x Climate: 

Controversial post of the week - how do we feel about Climate funds backed by LP's built on Oil & Gas?

Thanks for reading and wherever you are in the world (probably Helsinki), have a great weekend ahead.

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Curated by Nicola & Arman