HeatTransformers turns up the dial on heat pumps with new funding

In the Netherlands, central heating boilers will be banned by 2026 and its government has incentivized the installation of heat pumps. Meanwhile, the U.K. government estimates that heating buildings accounts for 25% of the U.K.’s greenhouse gas emissions. It passed the Energy Security Bill, and is aiming to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028. All of this opens up opportunities for companies advising on, fitting and maintaining heat pumps, which is what Netherlands-based HeatTransformers, does. It just a raised €15 million Series A to go heavy on the (proverbial) gas.

“Heat pumps have an unbeatable CO₂ reduction ratio per invested dollars for households,” says Stijn Otten, co-founder and director of HeatTransformers, “This ratio is much higher than with solar for instance. This was already the case back in 2018 when we started, but even more today.”

While heat pumps might not be new technology, the tech isn’t evenly distributed. More than 60% of homes in Norway are heated using heat pumps, for example, while the U.S. sees fewer than 6% so equipped. HeatTransformers seeks to address the traditional challenges of heat pump adoption by connecting heat pump producers and installation specialists with consumers. The HeatTransformers platform takes consumers through the process from the beginning, when they might only be thinking about the benefits of a heat pump, through installation and beyond, with maintenance, online monitoring and the optimization of heat pumps.

This is a model that has attracted global energy companies, heat pump producers and installers as committed partners, including Engie, Bosch, BDR Thermea Group and dozens of local and national installers. Its €15 million Series A funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners (“EIP”), a global investment firm supporting the transition to a sustainable future, with participation from existing investors Fair Capital Partners and InnovationQuarter.

Interestingly, HeatTransformers told TechCrunch that it could have done without the investment but felt that it needed to scale faster in order to address the general state of the global energy market: war in Ukraine, energy poverty and carbon emissions’ climate impact.

“In this process we were looking for truly professional investors who could help us scaling up across multiple markets,” says Otten. “But at the same time, we also wanted investors who share the same impact fundamentals we have. This is what we found in Energy Impact Partners — a leading investment firm in this space with experience scaling companies like us across multiple markets.”

With heat pump sales having risen by almost 38% across Europe last year, which replaced roughly 4 billion cubic meters of natural gas and avoided 8 million tons of CO₂ emissions, HeatTransformers has recognized that right now is the time to be expanding, to meet the growing need for heat pumps not just in the Netherlands, but across Europe.

“This investment will cement our market-leading position in the Netherlands, it will enable us to grow into other markets like Germany and the U.K.,” says Otten. “Fundamentally, it will help us grow and increase our impact.”

For Otten himself, the excitement lies in growing his company and, further into the future, having a lasting impact on global residential heating, as well as climate change.

“I am specifically looking forward to building the teams, further developing the tech-platform and building our partnerships with suppliers, energy companies and installation companies across Europe,” says Otten. “In 10 years’ time, heat pumps will be the common way of heating your home across the entire globe. HeatTransformers will have played a pivotal role in speeding up this transition and [will still be] playing a role in the installation of heat pumps and optimizing the energy systems of households across multiple countries.”

HeatTransformers turns up the dial on heat pumps with new funding by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Sepura Home raises $3.7 million to make your kitchen sink a composter

Here’s a clever new bit of kitchen tech. Victoria, BC firm Sepura recently introduced its eponymous home appliance, which sits under a sink in place of a garbage disposal. There’s an included Bluetooth button, which can be stuck anywhere near the sink. The system itself sits underneath the sink and is designed to hook directly into the drainage.

When enough foodstuffs have accrued beneath the drain, tap the button, and it will initiate a process that effectively shoves the waste products into the appliance. In an introductory video, co-founder and CEO Victor Nicolov is quick to note that the system doesn’t actually grind the food waste, unlike a traditional garbage disposal. “We found it was better to keep things [intact]. We found it was better for our planet to avoid crushing things into our drains.”

The system also has a safeguard to stop water from entering the receptacle, allowing it to drain out of the pipe first. It will also stop if it detects something like a utensil, which you don’t want in the composting bucket.

Today, the firm announced the close of a $3.7 million seed round designed to accelerate production and delivery of its product, which will run $700 when it starts shipping in July. The round was led, appropriately, by sink-maker Blanco.

“Sepura represents a significant step forward in sustainable living. With its advanced technology and user-friendly design, Sepura offers a simple and effective way to minimize waste and promote a cleaner, healthier environment,” Nicolov says in a release. “We are excited to bring consumers the sustainable solution they are seeking and work to improve how food waste impacts the environment moving forward.”

The company claims that its system can “effectively separate 99.9% of solid waste that goes down the drain.”

Sepura Home raises $3.7 million to make your kitchen sink a composter by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

When life gives you carbon, make Carbonaide

Concrete is ubiquitous. A mainstay of the construction industry, over 10 billion cubic meters of concrete is used every year. It’s also responsible for up to 8% of CO₂ emissions: one ton of ordinary Portland cement creates somewhere between 800 and 900 kilograms of CO₂ emissions. Finnish startup Carbonaide has just raised €1.8 million (~$1.9 million at today’s exchange rate) in seed funding to knock down concrete’s carbon emissions, but not the construction industry.

“Our goal at Carbonaide is to create a more sustainable future with cutting-edge tech that doesn’t just reduce the carbon emissions of construction materials like concrete, but that traps more CO₂ than they emit throughout their lifetime,” explains Tapio Vehmas, Carbonaide’s CEO. “It is very natural that the constructed environment becomes a CO₂ sink, as it is the largest volume of man-made material.”

Carbonaide’s process binds carbon dioxide into precast concrete using an automated system at atmospheric pressure. By reducing the quantity of required cement content and mineralizing CO₂ into the concrete itself, Carbonaide believes it can halve the carbon dioxide emissions of traditional Portland cement concrete. If it can introduce industrial waste products, for example, industry slag, green liquor dregs, and bio-ash into the process, it has the potential to produce concrete with a negative carbon footprint.

The next step for Carbonaide is to scale the technology into a production line at its factory in Hollola, Finland, which is where this seed funding round comes in.

“The goal for this funding round is to scale the technology into an industrial-scale pilot factory. With the funding, we can implement the technology into a precast concrete production line that allows carbon curing as a part of the industrial process,” says Vehmas. “When we have done that, we will know exactly the cost structure and needed parameters for effective curing,” because it does need to add up.

“Can we develop technical solutions that also make sense commercially? Low-carbon products have to have a lower price than normal products. Otherwise, we can’t be sure that our technology will prevail,” says Vehmas.

Carbonaide has calculated that a fully operational chain could mineralize up to five tons of CO₂ per day and increase production by 100-fold of its carbon-negative concrete products, but it’s not just about making this type of concrete industrially scalable. Carbonaide also needs to bring the naturally conservative construction industry with it.

“The technology must fit in perfectly, otherwise, it won’t make a change,” says Vehmas. “The industry is very conservative, but there is a good reason for that. We build structures that are meant to last, and by being conservative, we can ensure that they will remain in the future.”

It’s easy to say that if something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed, but Vehmas recognizes how the carbon footprint of concrete is breaking the Earth, and it does need to be fixed: “I want to see how a low-carbon industry can become a reality in highly conservative markets. If we can make this happen, maybe our generation will have some hope to pay our carbon debt for future generations.”

Importantly, Vehmas has experience in the construction industry that he can bring on this quest, and he believes that the investment that Carbonaide has raised validates both its necessity and viability.

“I also have 20+ years of experience working with concrete, meaning I have dealt with industry my whole adulthood. I basically live and breathe concrete. That helps a lot when introducing new technology into a highly conservative industry,” says Vehmas. “This investment is a sign of good progress for us because we’ve received the support and backing of players in the industry already.”

Backing for Carbonaide comes from Lakan Betoni and Vantaa Energy, which led the seed funding. The round was completed with public loans and in-kind contributions from Business Finland and other Finnish concrete companies and strategic investors.

The concrete and energy companies supporting Carbonaide are doing so in more ways than just financially. They are also able to provide CO₂ for Carbonaide’s processes, because believe it or not, while too much carbon dioxide is fizzing its way into the atmosphere, the captive kind that we need for everything from concrete to soda is in short supply.

If Carbonaide’s pilot factory goes to plan, Vehmas hopes that it can have a planet-saving impact on the construction industry.

“After the piloting, our goal is to commercialize the technology. We want to make this process easy to implement by packing the technology into a modular unit that is easy to install and enables easy implementation of the technology on-site,” says Vehmas. “If everything goes as I dream, our technology will start a process where the constructed environment becomes a carbon sink in the future, not a source of massive emissions.”

When life gives you carbon, make Carbonaide by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Foiled again: Candela raises another $20M to set course for the future of ferries

Swedish company Candela this summer will launch its 30-passenger commercial hydrofoil shuttle, the P-12, the vessel it believes will change the course of motorized water transport. Following its C-7 and C-8 leisure cruisers, Candela has already been making waves with its drive to transition to fossil-free waterways.

“We are now heavy into the process of finalizing the development and putting this ferry into production, which we think is going to be kind of a game changer in public transportation,” said Gustav Hasselskog, Candela’s founder and CEO.

The company raised SEK 210 million (around $20 million) in a round co-led by EQT Ventures and investor duo Joel Eklund (Fosielund Holding AB) and Svante Nilo Bengtsson (Marknadspotential AB), with participation from Ocean Zero LLC and others. This follows its $24 million round from last year.

The P-12 is an electric-powered hydrofoil that effectively flies over the surface of the water on computer-guided underwater wings. It has a range of up to 60 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 27 knots. Being electrically powered makes the P-12 cleaner and greener than traditional diesel-fueled craft, which also makes it cheaper to operate. Candela estimates that the P-12 uses 80% less energy than a traditional vessel.

“It’s a very good thing for the environment. In total, the shipping industry is around 3% of total carbon emissions,” says Hasselskog. However, as well as the benefits of being electric-powered, the P-12 is designed to be low maintenance and with lower service costs.

“We use a low maintenance type of dry drain. We have developed this pod motor, which doesn’t have any gears, any oil or anything; it’s just motors underneath the water,” explains Hasselskog.

If the decision to make a passenger vessel with a maximum capacity of 30 people seems a little unusual, it’s because it is designed for coastal, archipelago or lake-based transport, and how people actually use water transport in these geographies.

“It looks the same in Oslo, in Stockholm, in New York and everywhere: most of these boats are typically 300 passengers. But when you study optimal boat size, especially in Stockholm, Istanbul and in San Francisco, it’s concluded that it’s not the optimal boat size. Seat utilization is typically super low. In Stockholm, it’s 5% over the year,” says Hasselskog. “When you have only 30 passengers, you don’t need more than one staff member on board; otherwise, you need three staff members. If you put that all together, you get a very good cost equation, and that’s why we went with this format. Operators save typically around 40% compared to traditional, large, diesel setups.”

Smaller craft can also be deployed more flexibly, for example, by operating on an on-demand basis rather than on a fixed timetable, and can travel to more remote locations. The company says this format has huge cost-efficiency benefits for operators. 

Candela is looking to build on this flexible approach to transport and is currently developing its own software to enable real-time fleet routing.

“The first one we’re going to put in water is for the city of Stockholm,” says Hasselskog. “It’s going to run from a suburb outside of town into the center. If you travel that route today by bus and subway, or by the current boat, it takes 50 minutes. We can do that in 25 minutes, the reason being we don’t create any wake so we have permission to go faster. If we can save commuters’ journey time, that makes a huge difference.”

For Candela and Hasselskog, the future looks like large fleets of small craft that can travel more quickly to more remote locations with greater flexibility. It might be starting in Stockholm, but it estimates that the market is €15 billion in size, and the format has global appeal.

”The next step for us here is to… take a place like Stockholm, where there are, say, 35 big ferries today. We will replace them with 120 of ours,” says Hasselskog. And from there: “It’s a global business that we envision and so far, we are in dialogue with hundreds of customers. They are spread from Hong Kong to Sydney. There are a lot in the Gulf region, in Europe, and we have dialogues in Mexico, Belize, San Francisco, New York.”

The company is taking a big bet that bigger isn’t always better, in the hope that smaller can mean faster, greener and more serviceable.

Foiled again: Candela raises another $20M to set course for the future of ferries by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Aether wants to shift you from blood diamonds to gems pulled from thin air

Diamonds: carbon, transparent, expensive, symbolic of love and commitment — and many of them come dripping with human rights abuses. They also come with a heavy environmental burden, even the lab-grown ones. So what if diamonds could be done differently, with proper traceability and sustainability? That’s exactly where Aether, a diamond-growing company based in New York, is trying to change the narrative around diamonds.

“The only thing transparent in this industry are the stones,” says Ryan Shearman, CEO of Aether Diamonds in an interview with TechCrunch. “There is no supply chain on planet Earth that’s fully traceable with respect to mined diamonds. And the same goes for a lab-grown diamond; it’s better when you’re talking about a lab-grown diamond, but it’s still nowhere near fully traceable.”

Although people are more aware of the human impact of diamond mining, and terms such as “blood diamond” or “conflict diamond” are well recognized, the environmental impact of diamond mining is enormous and perhaps a little less well-known.

“Diamonds are particularly bad in terms of the ratio of earth that needs to be moved, compared to the actual product that makes it to market. For one carat worth of diamond, you have to move about as much earth that it takes to fill up the average American living room,” says Shearman. Of course, it isn’t just the scarification of the landscape, but the vast quantities of energy required to excavate and relocate that earth, the particulates released into the atmosphere in the process, the toxic waste it generates and the residues collected in tailing ponds or that run off into waterways. Then there are accidents associated with the mines themselves, or their aftermath.

If we have to have diamonds, there must be a better way — and that’s where Aether steps in. Aether’s direct air capture process builds on a CO₂ to methane conversion reaction discovered by French chemist Paul Sabatier, but one that required enormous refinement to ensure that it was energy efficient.

Aether’s diamond-growing process takes carbon dioxide from the air, which it then synthesizes into the hydrocarbon material required to grow diamonds. This hydrocarbon feedstock, or Atmospheric Methane, as the company calls it, is injected into a chemical vapor deposition reactor, where the diamond grows, one atom layer at a time. The fully grown diamonds don’t emerge from the chamber ready to be set into engagement rings or pairs of earrings. They are still rough, requiring to be cut, polished and finished. But, they have been extracted from the air, are fully traceable, and are carbon neutral.

“We can tell you where every carbon atom in your diamond came from, and we can trace the path of that carbon atom all the way through to final sale,” says Shearman.

But carbon neutral? Isn’t that a bit of a stretch for a process that requires so much energy, even when you are extracting carbon from the atmosphere to produce the diamond itself?

“From a sequestration standpoint, we would have to make a lot of diamonds to drive a huge impact. Where we have our biggest impact with diamonds is avoidance, we get to avoid all of the really terrible things that are happening with these other dirtier lab-grown diamonds and mined diamonds,” says Shearman, acknowledging that even lab-grown diamonds are an energy-hungry resource and can be terrible for the environment if that energy comes from, say, coal-fired power stations. Aether, though, claims that its production is entirely solar-energy run.

“We rely on solar, we invest in new solar development,” Shearman said. “Our manufacturing process nets out so that it’s carbon neutral, up to the point of producing the actual gemstone, not including the carbon that goes into gemstones. Any carbon that goes into the stone then takes us kind of over that threshold into carbon negative territory.” And Aether’s focus on carbon neutrality has further benefits than just its own diamond production business, too: “We are helping promote the expansion of renewables here in the States, especially in areas of the country that are currently underserved.”

Shearman says that the mythology around diamonds, around a glittering stone forged in the heat of the belly of the earth, is a romantic narrative that’s hard to overcome with a stone grown in a lab. But he senses that there’s a new story-telling opportunity here. First, it builds on the environmental and human costs that a lab-grown diamond obviates, and second, it encourages potential customers to think about a lab-grown diamond as a bit like vintage wine.

“The journey that the carbon has taken is really important for us and leans in on provenance. There’s never been a Paris diamond; there’s never been a New York City diamond, or diamond from May, or diamond from September.” Now, there can be.

For Shearman, the technology Aether is platforming is about a lot more than diamonds, though.

“We’re a carbon technology company. And we specialize in making ultra-high purity methane in a really efficient way, which will enable us in the future to get into other markets, where solid carbon products are vital,” says Shearman. Think of products such as tires and graphite for batteries, which can be produced in far more environmentally friendly conditions.

“If we can actually take that carbon from the air here in the United States and have a domestic supply, we think that can play a really interesting role in the future of that supply chain as it continues to mature.”

Now, if you were purely in it all for the environmental reasons, perhaps you could propose to a loved one with a sliver of a river-rock you found on your third date, but at least this helps move the narrative onward a bit, showing there are other alternatives than what we’ve been doing for a few hundred years.

Aether wants to shift you from blood diamonds to gems pulled from thin air by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

SepPure’s nanofilters massively reduce energy cost of industrial separation processes

As pressure grows on companies to reduce reliance on gas and oil, established processes even at industrial scales are being questioned, offering an opportunity for tech to step in. SepPure is looking to replace the complex gas-based distillation of oils with a membrane engineered at the nanometer scale, and its approach has attracted $12 million in a new funding round.

Oils of all kinds must be extracted and purified from their source, which might be a seed, fiber, or some other organic material. Of course, you can crush an olive and get a lot of the oil out of it, but nowhere near all of it; to do that, the pulp is immersed in a massive amount of solvent, like acetone or hexane, which pulls out the remaining oil. The resulting mixture is then heated, usually via natural gas or oil, and the solvent and oil separate.

This fuel-intensive process has persisted for decades, partly because the high temperatures required preclude the use of solar or wind as the heat source.

A potential alternative appeared in the water-purification space many years ago, which for a long time also used a distillation process to separate H2O from contaminants. Membranes can be engineered to allow through certain substances while others are blocked, letting, for instance, water molecules but not large organic ones. This approach has been taking over the water industry, because it’s cheaper, simpler, and uses less energy (look for “reverse osmosis” on the label).

SepPure founder and CEO Mohammad Farahani explained that the pressures of climate change and gas prices (not to mention cost savings) have caused others to look at membranes as a possibility. DiviGas, for example, created a membrane that separates hydrogen from carbon dioxide, and Membrion made one to remove heavy metals from water. But water isn’t a particularly harsh substance, unlike many chemical precursors to useful oils and other molecules.

“It took a long time to get a good solution for water, and basically every company making membranes focused on water,” said Farahani. “Maybe only 10 years ago, people started to research chemical-resistant membranes. We think we’re at the same place as when water membranes were introduced 40 years ago — basically it’ll start to be implemented everywhere.”

SepPure makes what’s called a hollow-fiber nanofilter, which is exactly what it sounds like: a hollow polymer fiber with a surface engineered at the nanometer scale to allow only certain molecules through. Pack a bunch of them together and stick them in a tube, and push liquid through the tube to filter it. Though the membrane doesn’t separate 100% of the two substances, it vastly reduces the scale of the distillation step. The concept isn’t new, and in fact is used across the membrane industry, but where SepPure diverges is in its durability and compactness.

“Strong solvents can easily dissolve polymers — you have to make polymeric membranes using solvents, but then they need to withstand solvents. That’s a challenging thing and a lot of research was done to get there,” said Farahani. “The beauty of what we’ve done is creating fibers to withstand harsh chemicals, high temperature, and high pressure.”

Water and gas aren’t so demanding in those categories, so they’ve received the bulk of the attention, but now a version exists that can split off oils from solvents, or other valuable molecules from a similarly difficult mixture. That has applications in any industry that still uses distillation due to the fragility of old membrane processes — and there are a lot. Separation processes make up a meaningful proportion of global energy use and emissions.

SepPure has a competitor in Germany’s Evonik, which creates a similar product. But Farahani said that while this earlier version of the technique is fine for high-margin products like in the pharmaceutical industry, it’s too slow and bulky to use in high-volume, low-margin processes like food oil production.

Filters tend to come in a standard size: a pipe 4 inches in diameter and 40 inches in length. SepPure claims it can put five times as much membrane in that space, improving efficiency and reducing cost: push five times as much stuff through the same number of pipes, or filter the same amount in far less space. And that’s without reckoning for increased pressure and other combinatorial factors.

Overall, through these gains and the reduction of fuel-based heating, Farahani estimates they could reduce the cost of producing (for example) 100,000 tons of oil in a year from around $7.5 million to about $2.5 million. And apparently the filter fibers, once exhausted after a couple years of use, can be reused to create flame-retardant fabrics.

The $12 million Series A round was led by SOSV, with participation from Anji Microelectronics, Real Tech Fund, Seeds Capital, EPS Ventures, and others. The company previously raised $2.5 million in 2019.

The money will be used to complete construction of its first filter production facility, in Singapore.

“As soon as we begin implementing our technology solutions at customer sites, we will quickly reach maximum capacity. In anticipation of growing demand for our modules, our team is already working on expansion plans,” said Farahani.

SepPure’s nanofilters massively reduce energy cost of industrial separation processes by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Battery recycling startup Cylib recharges its coffers to go faster

In 2024, a number of new EU regulations are expected to come into force, which will tighten the obligation of electric vehicle manufacturers and resellers to recycle batteries at the end of their natural lifespan. German battery recycling startup Cylib leapt at the opportunity, raising a total of €11.6 million ($12.6 million) to build a recycling factory.

“For too long, battery recycling hasn’t been efficient enough for companies to take advantage of,” said co-founder and COO at Cylib, Gideon Schwich. “We need to create awareness with different stakeholders to ensure that battery recycling is given the attention it deserves to enable a circular economy in battery usage.”

The company says that over the next six to 12 months, it will be working to recycle the first batteries provided by its pilot partners — demonstrating that the company’s process is scalable, alongside the challenge of building out the supply chains and customer base.

“The goal of this fundraising was to accelerate the industrialization of our sustainable recycling process, which has been developed over years of research. We now want to scale the process to reach industrial levels, with plans to establish a cutting-edge recycling facility so it can serve more customers across Europe,” says co-founder and CEO at Cylib, Lilian Schwich in an interview with TechCrunch.

The lead investor of this round is World Fund, while previous investors include Vsquared Ventures and Speedinvest. For this round, 10x Founders also joined. The current round is an €8 million extension, taking the total amount raised for the company’s seed round to €11.6 million.

“World Fund provides a strong climate capability, deep tech knowledge and operational expertise with an extensive network. That is why we are also very excited that Dr. Mark Windeknecht is joining as an observer to the board,” says Schwich. “World Fund only invests in startup technologies that can save at least 100 megatonnes of CO2e annually by 2040. World Fund is also joined by 10x Founders, which brings a wealth of knowledge on the path of a founder and will help to build the company even stronger.”

The company is aiming to create the most efficient and sustainable recycling process for lithium batteries — like the ones used in electric vehicles. The company has created a process that means it can take end-of-life batteries, recover the resources and output new raw materials. The idea is to close the loop and ensure the mobility sector can run on electrified, regenerative energy. The company says it has a 90% recycling efficiency.

“By doing so, we can also make it possible to trace back all resources and ensure supply chain transparency, drastically lowering the environmental footprint of batteries and driving the decarbonization of mobility and transport forward,” says Lilian Schwich, pointing out that this reduces the need to mine additional lithium. “This will enable true green and circular mobility.”

Battery recycling startup Cylib recharges its coffers to go faster by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Recycleye grabs $17M, calling plastic crisis a ‘tremendous business opportunity’

Highlighting the plastic industry’s infamous track record on recycling, London-based Recycleye says it raised $17 million in new funding led by “deep tech” investor DCVC.

The startup claims its recycling-picking robots can identify materials “at an unrivaled 60 frames per second” and sort them more accurately than humans can. Ultimately, the startup says its tech cuts the “cost of sorting materials.” TechCrunch has reached out to the company for information on its projected cost savings.

Based in Palo Alto, DCVC says its mission is to “multiply the benefits of capitalism for everyone while reducing its costs.” Climate tech is one of its focuses, and one lens through which we can see capitalism’s environmental toll. In the case of plastics, the oil industry has long preached the virtues of plastic recycling, while doubting its economic viability, in order to sell more virgin plastic.

Every stage of plastic production disrupts the climate and natural world, from “the extraction and transport of the fossil fuels that are the primary feedstocks for plastic, to refining and manufacturing, to waste management, to the plastic that enters the environment,” the Center for International Environmental Law wrote in 2019.

Plastic pollution — a major climate change driver — is rising, too. That is due in part to shortfalls in “waste management and recycling,” OECD, an intergovernmental body, said last year. The group concluded that someone needs to “create a separate and well-functioning market for recycled plastics.”

The trouble is: Sorting, melting and ultimately reusing most plastic — which you can only recycle a couple of times — is way costlier than buying virgin plastic. Much of the time, we simply don’t do it. Most plastic (about 91%, per OECD) is not recycled and single-use plastic production is at an all-time high.

By focusing on speeding up scanning, identifying and sorting used materials, Recycleye is one among many companies that are attempting to fix part of this broken system with AI. Citing OECD’s report, Recycleye said, “Changing this wasteful and environmentally damaging dynamic, seen across a range of materials, presents a tremendous business opportunity.”

Recycleye says its machine learning and scanning tech “is twice as fast as the industry standard and means that each item is seen on average 30 times as it passes along the conveyor belt, with double the chance of being accurately identified before picking.” We’ve reached out to the company for more context on these figures.

Several other investors chipped in on Recycleye’s new Series A funding round, including London-based early-stage investor Playfair Capital.

Recycleye grabs $17M, calling plastic crisis a ‘tremendous business opportunity’ by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

Startups, here’s how you can make hardware without ruining the planet

Nobody starts a hardware company with the express goal of destroying as much of the planet as they possibly can. Walking around the startup hall at CES, however, I noticed that — with a few notable exceptions — there was painfully little attention given to material choice, repairability, ease of disassembly and considerations around the end of usable life.

It’s embarrassing, really — but as someone who used to run a hardware startup, I know it can be hard to prioritize when you have limited time and resources. However, if you can’t make planet-friendly choices as the founder of a startup, when the buck literally stops with you, when can you?

In an effort to figure out how you can create greener hardware, we spoke with Lauryn Menard, a professor at the California College of the Arts, where she teaches the future of biodesign. She’s also an adviser to Women in Design SF and the co-founder and creative director at PROWL Studio, an Oakland, California-based design and material futures consultancy focusing on sustainable solutions.

“As a startup, you have choices. The thing is, it’s such a capitalistic society we live in, and a lot of decisions are made based on time and money,” Menard explained. The startups want to think about sustainability, but they are moving at breakneck speed and trying to get a product to market as soon as possible. “The startups need to hit their target price point and all that good stuff.”

But there are some big things moving out there in the market. Consumer demands are shifting, and climate pledges, circularity strategies and environmental questions are all bubbling to the surface. It’s hard to say whether enough customers are making purchasing decisions based on a company’s green credentials to move the needle meaningfully, but product development cycles can take years, and who knows what the landscape looks like by the time your product makes it to market? To some companies, it might make sense to take the risk, but other founders are starting to think differently about how products are made.

“If a startup is being run by solely engineers, that can be problematic: Engineers tend to be worried [about] making sure they’re getting to the finish line. They put all of their energy into making something function and are probably leaning toward materials, ways of making and manufacturing processes that they’re already familiar with,” Menard explained. “What we’ve seen [be] really helpful is working with a design studio that specializes in more sustainable ways of thinking and healthier materials. Or partnering with someone like a materials library, so they’ve already started thinking about the functionality of the materials by the time they are making a prototype. Just in the same way that it takes a really long time to get an MVP product that works and looks the way you want, it sometimes takes a long time to put a new material into an existing manufacturing process.”

Thinking sustainability

One of the big challenges we have with creating more sustainable products is that we are often replacing plastics with something else. The problem is that plastics are deeply embedded in workflows already. Product designers love how predictable, easy to design and repeatable plastic is.

There also isn’t an obvious one-for-one replacement for plastic; depending on the use case and material properties you need, you may have to replace it with wool, paper, wood, plant pulp, carbon fiber, seaweed, hemp, mycelium, lab-grown leather or any number of other materials that are available.

Here’s what founders and product designers can do to think about sustainability and product development in a more conscious way.

Startups, here’s how you can make hardware without ruining the planet by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

CAMM: The Future of Laptop Memory Has Arrived

There's a real possibility that SODIMM memory sticks could be replaced by a new type of removable memory called CAMM. According to PC World, "Memory overseer JEDEC will formally adopt the 'CAMM Common Spec' as the next RAM module standard for laptops." From the report: JEDEC, the memory group that homologates RAM standards, is in the process of hammering out the new spec to replace the basic SO-DIMMs that have been in use for 25 years, according to JEDEC committee member, and Dell Senior Distinguished Engineer Tom Schnell. Schnell actually created the original CAMM -- or Compression Attached Memory Module -- design for Dell last year. JEDEC's CAMM standard will be based on that CAMM design but is likely to be somewhat different as companies hammer it out. "We have unanimous approval of the 0.5 spec," Schnell told PCWorld. Schnell said JEDEC is targeting the second half of the 2023 to finalize the 1.0 spec, with CAMM-based systems out by next year. Who are the companies that voted for it? Schnell can't say, as that's up to each member to reveal, but group covers the range of suppliers, from SoC, to connectors, to OEMs, and all unanimously voted to adopt the CAMM Common Spec, with no dissenters. There are currently 332 companies listed in JEDEC, from Apple to ZTE, each involved in different aspects of memory in different industries. For those who haven't followed it, Dell introduced its CAMM design in April 2022 with the aim of replacing the decades old SO-DIMM design that has been used in most gaming and workstation laptops up to now. CAMM's main appeal is that it enables higher memory density while also scaling to ever higher clock speeds. Some of the motivation for expediency likely comes from the fast-approaching "brick wall" facing laptops when SO-DIMMs hit at DDR5/6400. Schnell said the CAMM spec is far from finalized, but the first JEDEC CAMM modules should take over right where SO-DIMM ends at 6400. [...] With CAMM being hammered out now, Schnell did lay out some possible paths for CAMM as it replaces SO-DIMM. DDR6 is an obvious road, he said, but CAMM even enables the possibility of LPDDR6 on a replaceable module. LPDDR, or low-power DDR RAM, has long been preferred for smaller and thinner laptops as well as phones for power savings. It's also long been implemented only as soldered-on. Schnell foresees a version of CAMM enabling the performance and power benefits of LPDDR, but in a replaceable and upgradeable module. With JEDEC adopting CAMM now, that future gets closer.

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