🌍 An eggcellent alternative #08

Giving EV batteries a second life and edible packaging

Hey there!

Welcome to the eighth edition of the 'tings with impact newsletter 🌍

This week we are looking at Betteries who are giving electric car batteries a second life, Perfeggt who have developed a plant based egg alternative, and Notpla who make edible and 100% biodegradable packaging from seaweed.

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🔋 Betteries - Giving batteries a second life

By the end of 2020 10 million electric cars were on the world's roads. New EV (electric vehicles) registrations jumped by more than 40% in 2020 despite global car sales slumping by 16% due to covid. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), if current policies around EVs remain the same, 7% of cars will be EVs by 2030 or up to 12% if governments accelerate efforts to reach climate goals. The transition from fossil to battery powered vehicles is fantastic, but we will need to adequately deal with the millions of batteries from EVs once they are no longer usable.

The useful life for EV batteries in most cases is around 10-years, which would result in a huge amount of hazardous waste with the rise of EVs. Thankfully, many regions prohibit mass disposal of batteries, leaving us with the options to recycle or reuse. Recycling lithium-ion batteries is quite complicated and a topic for a different time or format, but the 'spent' batteries can be up-cycled for other so-called 'second-life' applications. Second-life batteries could be 30-70% less expensive than new ones for activities less intensive than powering cars, like stationary energy-storage.

Berlin-based Betteries is one startup tackling this by dismantling and reassembling EV batteries to give them a second life as modular batteries called betterPacks. betterPacks weigh less than 35kg and can be stacked like legos in groups of 4 to provide 9 kWh of AC or DC current. Betteries have developed a suite of solutions on top of this. betterGen is a completely clean alternative to environmentally harmful fuel-based generators, betterLink can be used to turn betterPacks into swappable batteries to power electric rickshaws and boats, and betterStore can be set up as a cost effective stationary battery storage for micro-grids.

Applications in frontier environments or developing countries are particularly exciting. Imagine communities in Africa being able to skip directly to renewable energies, as they did by going directly to mobile banking, thanks to being able to establish affordable mini-grids to power their communities.

Image: a betterGen generator with 2 betterPacks. Source: Betteries

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🥚 Perfeggt - An eggcellent alternative

Bird eggs have been an important source of food for humans since prehistoric times and to this day are key parts of many cuisines and cultures. Chicken eggs, the most common form of egg, are some of the most widely consumed and inexpensive forms of protein. In 2019, global egg production exceeded 80 million metric tons, which is around 10 million metric tons more than beef and veal production. Granted, beef has more than 5.5 times the CO2e emissions per kg of consumed food compared to eggs, but the production and post-production activities of 80 million metric tons of eggs still result in 384 million metric tons of CO2e emissions. If eggs were a country it would replace Vietnam as the 23rd largest emitter of greenhouse gasses (CO2e) based on the most recent World Bank data.

We have talked about animal alternatives in 'tings #05, highlighting a BCG report that predicts that 22% of meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy eaten around the world will be made of alternative proteins by 2035. In that edition we also introduced Rügenwalder Mühle, an 1834-founded german sausage maker that in a matter of 6 years matched revenue generated from meat products with their veggie and vegan alternatives. Now, a few editions down the line we are seeing Rügenwalder Mühle pop up again, Bernd Becker who was the head of R&D there for 25 years has co-founded Perfeggt, a Berlin-based startup developing plant based egg alternatives, as their CPO alongside Tanja Bogumil (CEO) and Gary Lin.

Perfeggt have formulated a protein rich plant based liquid made out of field bean proteins that can be fried in a pan like traditional eggs to make omelettes or scrambled eggs, and according to their website it even looks like it behaves/cooks like conventional eggs. They announced a funding round of €2.5M at the end of November and are planning to launch their first egg alternative in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in early 2022, with other markets following later in the year. With an industry veteran that managed to help transform a traditional german sausage maker to one of the top veggie/vegan sausage alternatives in Germany, Perfeggt have a strong foundation to accelerate the development and spread of plant based egg alternatives.

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🥡 Notpla - Edible and biodegradable packaging

I'm sure many of you have seen videos of these little edible water bubbles going around on the internet, the first viral videos went around sometime in 2015, like this Business Insider video. The company behind these, Skipping Rock Labs, went on to raise almost one million euros through a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 to end the use of plastic bottles for good.

Image: Original picture from Skipping Rock Labs showing off their Ooho edible membranes

I'm sure that I don't have to tell anyone about the magnitude of the plastic pollution problem and importance of dealing with this. According to a UN report 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in the world's oceans every year, where they can remain for centuries!

Since those early viral videos and crowdfunding campaign Skipping Rock Labs has rebranded to Notpla, released additional products, and achieved some remarkable milestones.

Along their journey they've made cocktail pods with Glenlivet, provided pods filled with Lucozade for the London Marathon, produced Ketchup packets with Just Eat and Unilever, and developed a 100% biodegradable coating for takeaway boxes that will be launched across Europe in 2022 with Just Eat. I can't do justice to all that they have achieved, so I highly recommend reading their blog post about their journey so far, a great read.

Now, let's get to the magic that makes Notpla's products possible, or rather the magic ingredient... brown seaweed. Seaweeds are an incredibly renewable resource, they can grow 30 times faster than land-based plants in open water or land-based tank... so its safe to say we will not run out of space to grow seaweed. Unlike plastic based packaging, Notpla is able to biodegrade in a matter of 4-6 weeks even in home composting scenarios. The process of making edible water pods is not that complicated, it requires just a few ingredients and can be done at home, there are videos on youtube that show you how. Notpla has of course perfected the process and developed their own machinery that can eventually be leased to large food producers to integrate Notpla's 100% biodegradable packaging into their processes.

They have recently announced a further £10M in Series A funding to continue to commercialise their Ooho pods and Notpla technologies, and have already started working with non-food-based companies for toothpaste, toiletries and shampoo packaging.

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Thank you for making it to the end!

If you happened to enjoy reading this, why not send it around to a few friends so that more people can get an insight into what is being done to preserve the future of our planet 🌍

Until next time, much love,

Pascal