🌍 Carbon negative plastic #04
Saving bees with data, simplifying carbon tracking, and 100% sustainable fuel
Hi!
Welcome to the fourth edition of the 'tings with impact newsletter 🌍
I know it's a day late, but sometimes life happens and you miss deadlines. Better late than never.
This week we are looking at BeeHero who are saving bees with smart sensors, Made of Air who have developed a technique to create carbon-negative plastics, and Climatiq who made tracking emissions as easy as using google analytics.
As a little 'ting we'll look at the recent announcement on how Formula 1 are creating the next generation of 100% sustainable fuels.
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🐝 BeeHero - Saving bees with data
Save the bees! That's a phrase we've heard a lot, and rightly so, as they are a key part of a healthy ecosystem, but who of us have given their role a real thought? Over one third of the food we eat relies on bees, they pollinate crops, increase yields, and of course produce delicious honey. Grocery stores are filled with an abundance of foods like almonds, apples, berries, and cucumbers thanks to the hard work of bees. Bees don't just go around as a public service from farm to farm to make sure that we have enough food. Farmers have to spend millions each year purchasing or renting hives to pollinate their crops.
As you can imagine the process of driving out to fields, placing the hives, and checking on them is a slow and manual process. In the time between checking on the different hives at a farm many issues could have come up that severely impacted bee health and population. In a TechCrunch article the founder of BeeHero, Omer Davidi, mentions "The way pollination is handled today is challenging...There’s a shortage of hives; you get a box, you don’t know what’s inside, you just hope for the best.". These issues stemming from a purely analog practice is what BeeHero are addressing with their SmartHive sensor technology.
Each of BeeHero's hives is fitted with 9 distinct SmartHive sensors that are able to monitor 30 different colony health metrics in real time. Bees are monitored year-round, allowing farmers and beekeepers to detect the strength of hives and when they are at risk. So, instead of losing an entire colony due to mites invading the hive in the time between visits, beekeepers and farmers are able to detect this invasion in real time and reduce mortality. BeeHero's technology is not only good for bee health, but with all that data they are also able to optimise hive placement to maximise crop yield. Despite launching during the pandemic, BeeHero have already grown to be the 4th largest pollination provider in the US and raise a fresh $15M last week to scale precision beekeeping.
🪣 Made of Air - Carbon negative plastic
If you look around you right now you will see plastic everywhere, the keyboard I'm typing on has plastic components, the headphones I'm wearing and chair I'm sitting on too... it is everywhere.
Nearly every piece of plastic starts of as fossil fuel, with greenhouse gases being emitted at every step of production. If the trend of plastic production and consumption continues to grow at current rates, the emissions could reach 1.34 gigatonnes of CO2 per year by 2030, which is equivalent to the emissions released by around 300 500-megawatt coal power plants. The use of plastic in today's world is almost unavoidable, it is a magical material that has made so many things possible and affordable but the environmental impact cannot be ignored.
Enter the world of bioplastics, plastic that is made from renewable biomass such as vegetable oils, corn starch, or sawdust, thus reducing the need for fossil fuels. Of the 368 million tonnes of plastic produced in 2019 only around 1% was bioplastic, so the industry still has a long way to go.
A startup that is trying to help accelerate this shift is the Berlin-based Made of Air, that have developed a process to create carbon negative thermoplastics. They use low value biomass such as sawdust and wood chips from the forestry industry and turn this into into high value thermoplastics. The material, called Made of Air, is 90 percent carbon that stores two tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of plastic produced. They achieve this by taking the wood waste and turning it into biochar through a process called pyrolysis, which according to my googling is the thermal decomposition of materials at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. The result is a compound that permanently locks carbon in a stable form. Made of Air then use this biochar to create materials that replace polluting materials like fossil plastic and aluminium.
They have already partnered H&M to create sunglasses made from Made of Air and Audi to create a carbon negative facade of their new flagship store in Munich. Made of Air's thermoplastic has significant potential to replace plastics and other polluting materials in construction, consumer goods and the automotive world.
Audi's new flagship store in Munich with Made of Air panels. Source: Audi AG
🔍 Climatiq - Helping companies get past the blah, blah, blah
Greta Thunberg recently called out global leaders on their empty promises, among the things she said she specifically called out "net-zero by 2050... blah, blah, blah". There have been many instances where political leaders or companies have pledged to become net-zero by 2050, or even earlier in some cases, these are quite ambitious pledges given that surveys show that 95% of companies don't even have the capability to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. So, how should they be able to reach net-zero if they can't adequately measure the direct and indirect impact of their operations.
Emissions are split into three distinct groups based on the GHG protocol, the most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard. Scope 1 emissions result from a company's direct operations, scope 2 are indirect emissions as a result of purchased electricity, steam, heating or cooling, and scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of the company (both up- and down-stream). As you can see, these standards get quite complex and its understandable that a company can struggle to calculate their emissions accurately. We don't all need to be climate scientists to calculate the impact of a company but we do need the necessary data to do so.
This is where Climatiq comes in, they are helping companies get past the "blah, blah, blah" and actually reach their net-zero pledges by making measuring a company's carbon footprint as easy as installing google analytics on your website according to founder Hessam Lavi. What's even more remarkable is that this is all offered through an open-source API (this means free). An API or application programming interface is a software intermediary that allows different applications to talk to each other. So, a developer from Company X could integrate Climatiq's API to access the thousands of up-to-date and verified emission data points from Climatiq. This allows companies to calculate their own emissions or even add fully trusted emissions data to their own product/service.
You might be wondering, how the hell does Climatiq make money then??? There are quite a few technology companies who follow a similar business model, open-core. This is where a company offers its core product for free as open-source while certain enterprise features that make it easier and better to use for large companies comes at a cost.
Solving the issue of getting accurate emissions data positions Climatiq as a key enabler to help companies reach net-zero and shift towards a green economy... moving past blah, blah, blah pledges.
🌍 A little 'ting - 100% sustainable fuel
Formula 1 doesn't sound like the most environmentally friendly sport. Flying around the globe racing the fastest cars in the world... yeah... probably not the best sport for the planet, but they are developing some pretty impressive technology.
Formula 1 cars have the most advanced and efficient hybrid systems ever created. These hybrid systems have a thermal efficiency of over 50%, meaning that 50% of the fuel consumed is used to power the car while 50% is lost as heat. Normal road cars have somewhere around 20-35% thermal efficiency, meaning that a whopping 65-80% of the gasoline consumed is lost as heat.
By 2030 it is expected that 1.8bn cars will be on the road with only 8% of those being pure battery electric vehicles. So, something needs to be done to make the gas guzzling cars more environmentally friendly. This is what Formula 1 is trying to address with their recent announcement that they are developing 100% sustainable fuel that will preform the same as fossil based fuels while contributing 65% less greenhouse gas emissions. This fuel is also set to be a 'drop-in' fuel, meaning no modifications to existing cars need to be made.
The first challenge will be to run Formula 1 purely on sustainable fuel, as of 2022 f1 cars are mandated to run E10 fuel (90% fossil, 10% sustainable). Then, the big challenge will be to scale this to the mass amounts of road cars. A good first step at least.
Thank you for making it to the end!
Since I'm lucky enough to already be sending you the first iterations of this bi-weekly newsletter I am more than happy to get some feedback on how to improve, just respond to this email 🤗
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Until next time, much love,
Pascal