environment

ULUU wants to solve the plastic crisis with seaweed • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Australia, Climate, environment, green tech, plastic alternative, plastics, ULUUNo Comments

ULUU believes the solution to the plastic crisis lies in the world’s oceans. The Australian startup uses seaweed to create a plastic alternative and is planning to launch its first products in the next 12 to 24 months. Today ULUU announced it has raised $8 million AUD (about $5.3 million USD) led by Main Sequence (the deep-tech fund launched by Australia’s national science agency) with participation from Albert Impact Ventures, Mistletoe and Possible Ventures. Other investors through Main Sequence’s social impact community Voice Capital included Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republi, Nathan McLay, Australian independent music company Future Classic, restauranteur Neil Perry AM, model and philanthropist Karlie Kloss and Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker. ULUU’s compostable polymer, called polhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), is made through a fermentation process that is similar to brewing beer, and enables the company to keep its production process clean. It is made out of seaweed sugars, sea water and salt water microbes and has a durability similar to plastic, but is biodegradable and compostable. ULUU founders Dr. Julia Reisser and Michael Kingsbury Dr. Julia Reisser, who founded ULUU along with Michael Kingsbury, told ZebethMedia that she has a long history with plastics. During her PhD studies, she mapped microplastic pollution within Australian waters and got the idea for ULUU in 2019 while working at Australian businessman Andrew Forrest’s philanthropic organization Minderoo Foundation, analyzing how startups are dealing with plastic pollution. Dr. Reisser researched how startups are created without fossil fuels, but found that alternatives derived from sugar cane or corn (which PHAs can also be created from) have environmental challenges. Kingsbury also worked at Minderoo, where he was introduced to Dr. Reisser while she was looking for someone with a commercial background to help develop ULUU. The startup was launched in 2020 and raised $1.8 million the next year. The latest funding will be used on product development and engineering R&D to scale the production of PHAs. ULUU currently plans to get its pilot plant facility operational in the next 12 months, and start to scale and test products. It can be used in many industries, including fashion, furniture and packaging. ULUU plans to cement partnerships with major consumer brands, and it will pick one or two to work on a pilot project. ULUU will work toward establishing commercial relationships in the fashion sector, with the goal of helping brands develop products that are made with ULUU and are both carbon negative and marine biodegradable. Its investment from industry figures like Kloss and Parker will help them make important connections in the fashion and beauty industry, Kingsbury said. “We’re exploring potential opportunities in sustainable fashion, changing the space one step at a time,” said Kingsbury. “It’s no longer cool to have only the best design and cut when it comes to the clothes we wear—people are starting to care about the materials behind them.” Even though 60% of fibers used in clothes are synthetic, derived from fossil fuels and cause microplastic pollution, Kingsbury noted that many brands are starting to look at more environmentally-friendly alternatives. These include Patagonia, which plans to use only renewable or recycled materials in their products by 2025.

Makersite lands $18M to help companies manage product supply chains • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Climate, environment, funding, Makersite, Planet A Ventures, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, supply chain, sustainabilityNo Comments

In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his ten-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized their influence on product design choices. “For example, analyzing a car’s life cycle assessment can easily take an automotive company an entire year,” D’Souza told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Speed matters, otherwise the analysis just becomes a meaningless report.” That frustration was the genesis of his startup, Makersite, which aims to produce near-instant impact assessments in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk to inform corporate-level decisions. Makersite, D’Souza says, is an attempt to bridge the gap between experts who know what “good” looks like from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision makers with control over the product supply chain. With over 30 customers including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas and a balance sheet showing profitable operations over the last few years, Makersite is beginning to attract investor attention, this week securing $18 million in a Series A round with participation from Planet A Ventures. D’Souza says the tranche — Makersite’s first besides “a few convertible notes”; the company was bootstrapped until now — will be put toward work with integrators and resellers and expanding the size of Makersite’s team. “There are many companies out there that specialize in solving cost, compliance, risk or sustainability challenges. The problem is they each sit in siloes and the data they use is specialized to the people who work in those fields,” D’Souza said. “That’s what makes our solution different. We’re unique in the space as we’re the first to solve the challenge of bringing multi-criteria decision analysis to non-experts.” Using AI, Makersite maps a company’s product data against a material and supply chain database, generating automated reports. The idea is to help companies meet their sustainability goals while minimizing costs and keeping compliance at the forefront. The aforementioned database — which D’Souza says is among the largest of its kind — allows Makersite to identify contextual relationships to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not just what a product is made out of, but how every component or ingredient is manufactured — all the way from the mining resources to the factory floor. “[Makersite] enables a customer to drop in a bill of material for, say, a wind turbine, tell the AI that it’s a wind turbine, answer a few questions (e.g., about power output), and the system will automatically build a ‘cradle-to-grave’ model of that turbine that’s localized to where it’s made and where it’ll be erected,” D’Souza explained. “That allows you to optimize designs of specific elements of the turbine — like the tower and nacelle — to locally available resources and infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs across the lifecycle and criteria, like cost, risks and regulations.” As Makersite grows its headcount from around 40 employees to over 100 over the next 12 months, D’Souza says that the focus will be on building out the company’s sales and marketing teams to grow business particularly in the U.S. and Europe. On the integration side, Makersite’s investing capital in connectors to software like Autodesk to deliver cost and environmental insights within computer-assisted design platforms. “There is a paradigm shift towards sustainable products which are driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investments,” D’Souza said. “For that, Makersite enables procurement and product design professionals to make day-to-day decisions without the need for compliance, sustainability, cost or risk experts.”

Waste4Change is building a circular economy in Indonesia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Asia, circular economy, environment, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Startups, waste-management, Waste4ChangeNo Comments

Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025. Waste4Change is one of the companies that wants to help by increasing rates of recycling and enabling better waste management. The startup, which currently manages more than 8,000 tons of waste very year, announced today that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding, co-led by AC Ventures and PT Barito Mitra Investama. Other participants in the round include Basra Corporation, Paloma Capital, PT Delapan Satu Investa, Living Lab Ventures, SMDV and Urban Gateway Fund. Founded in 2014, Waste4Change has seen a CAGR of 55.1% since 2017, and is present in 21 Indonesian cities, where its services are currently used by about 100 B2B clients and more than 3,500 households. Waste4Change was created by founder and CEO Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano based on conversations between PT Greeneration Indonesia, an NGO, and waste management organization PT Bumi Lestari Bali (ecoBali) to form a company that reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. Junerosano is an environmental engineer by training and spent 16 years working in the solid waste sector. Junerosano says that a major opportunity is created by Indonesia’s low recycling rates (about 11% to 12%), which means there is a lot of valuable recyclable material that is being left behind. “Waste reduction is a top priority, followed by material optimization and recycling which supports the concept of a truly circular economy,” he told ZebethMedia. Waste4Change will use its new funding on expansion and increasing its waste management capacity up to 100 tons per day over the next 18 months, with the target of reaching more than 2,000 tons per day over the next five years. Waste4Change’s team Junerosano said Waste4Change differentiates from traditional waste management solutions by providing an end-to-end solution, with a focus on sustainability and zero waste. Part of its strategy includes more digital integration for monitoring and recording the process of waste management and automating its material recovery facilities. “We see digital integration as a valuable tool to build a sustainable waste management ecosystem,” he said. “The goal is always to create harmony between the environment, the economy and the people.” Waste4Change’s digital integration strategy this year and next include improving its waste journey report and monitoring, which its customers receive after their trash is processed. To use Waste4Change, customers can ask for a pick-up team to collect their pre-sorted trash or drop it off themselves. The company currently has 108 employees and 141 waste management operators, with plans to add 52 more people to its team and work with 300 informal waste collectors and SMEs. Informal waste collectors include scavengers, waste banks, waste stalls and waste aggregators. For recycling business partners, including informal waste collectors, Waste4Change is building a platform to help them sell and buy solid waste with the company. The goal is increase the traceability and accuracy of the waste management process. It is also working on a program called Send Your Waste, where consumers can send waste to Waste4Change’s pick-up points. An app tells them what kinds of waste to send, where the nearest pick-up point is and what kind of reward they can receive. Junerosano says informal waste collectors tend to be selective about the materials they collect, picking out PET bottles, glass and cardboard. But this means less desirable materials like PP plastic, multilayer packaging and styrofoam are often left behind, polluting the environment. To combat that, Waste4Change has started a service called Waste Credit, that gives incentives for picking up certain materials, and also makes it easy for waste collectors to build this businesses. “Considering the crucial role of the informal sector in improving Indonesia’s recycling rate, we aim to build a waste recycling platform that will keep the system sustainable,” he said. “We are more than happy to bring it to life with a joint venture or joint operation with other industry stakeholders, including those in the informal sector and local Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (3R) temporary waste storage sites.” In a statement, AC Ventures founding partner Pandu Sjahrir said, “Waste4Change is a pioneer providing an end-to-end waste management solution. Sustainability is the team’s main focus, with a demonstrated commitment to building a better future for Indonesia. The company is proving that it has reached product-market fit and has the potential to scale across the nation.”