GreenTech

A slew of new funds indicate potential for dedicated pools for climate startups Annie Njanja 7 hours Venture capital activity around climate tech has been heating up in Africa despite the global VC funding cooldown. The continent’s climate tech startups secured over $860 million in equity funding, largely driven by clean energy technologies, representing 3.5x

There’s a long list of things corporations can do to lessen consumer electronics’ environmental impact. Making systems easier to repair is up there, along with encouraging device recycling and updating manufacturing and supply chain processes. Utilizing recycled material in the devices themselves is a big piece of this puzzle, as well — it’s good publicity

Opportunities abound as new rules push EVs to the forefront Tim De Chant 7 hours If there was any question as to whether the Biden administration is serious about the electrification of the U.S. economy, this week’s announcement of new automotive emissions regulations should put that to rest — along with any doubts investors have

But first it’ll have to prove its business model Tim De Chant 9 hours We’ve spent the last century and a half pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it’s clear that we’ll have to spend the coming decades removing a significant fraction of that. But then what do we do with it all? Some

When the financial markets go all wobbly, conservative investors turn to scarce resources that are unlikely to plummet in value, including things like silver, gold, palladium and platinum. Diamond Standard wants to add diamonds to that list and has created a blockchain-based system to create tokens that gives investors access to diamonds, much like how

Device42, a startup that helps companies understand and manage their hybrid infrastructure, can see a lot of information about each customer’s hardware and software usage. The company decided to use that ability to look at how each part of the system was contributing to carbon emissions. “Our focus as a platform is to discover IT

Nonprofit Arts Help is launching a $6 million fund to build the world’s first digital climate library to provide public access to the archives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC, which was formed in 1992, has more than 1.7 million paper documents related to the treaty, many of which

A few years ago, mattress company Casper’s co-founders Philip Krim and Jeff Chapin were banging their heads against the wall. Krim was in Long Island in New York while Chapin was in Wyoming. The weather in New York can be pretty different from that in Wyoming, but when bad storms roll through, they both suffer

Eager to secure all the lithium it needs to power a growing lineup of electric vehicles, General Motors said on Tuesday that it will lead a $50 million investment into lithium extraction and refining startup EnergyX. With the deal, the legacy automaker says it will help EnergyX scale its lithium-extraction tech. In exchange, GM will

The automotive industry’s transition to electric vehicles is ushering in a tidal wave of demand for batteries that’s upending national industrial policies, reshaping geopolitics, and sparking a surge of new factories that will pump out billions of cells. It may seem like the sector has exploded overnight, but founders, investors and multinationals have been laying

Disposable plastic and paper cups are an environmental mess. GaeaStar, a startup based in Berlin and San Francisco, thinks it can do better with just clay, water, salt and sand. After piloting disposable clay cups and bowls in Germany, GaeaStar says it is gearing up to introduce its products to the U.S. via a trial

A new state bill might move the needle for V2G charging Haje Jan Kamps 12 hours If you have solar panels on your roof, it makes sense to add batteries, too, so you have some degree of self-sufficiency should you lose power. In fact, it might be a good idea to have such a storage

For the last two years, climate tech was on a tear. To be fair, so were a lot of other sectors. But when a slowdown hit tech investing in the middle of last year, climate tech startups bucked the trend and kept racking up the deals. Now the party might be over, if preliminary data

Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes

Africa contributes less than 3% of the world’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions but the continent will be one of the most impacted by the adverse effects of climate change. Some explanations for Africa’s vulnerability include poor diffusion of technologies and information relevant to supporting adaptation, usually provided by clean or climate tech companies. Despite the

A warming world is going to need a lot of cold drinks. Problem is, today’s refrigeration tech is anything but climate friendly. The way we cool our food and drink has barely changed in a century and the technology is still reliant on environmentally harmful refrigerants. Now, a German startup thinks it can freeze those

The materials developer formerly known as ELeather has a new name and $18 million in fresh growth funding from some of the world’s fanciest brands. Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new investors include Coach parent Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.

Battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials is expanding a partnership with Volkswagen of America in its bid to collect more end-of-life batteries from consumer electronics and strip out the valuable materials so they can be used to make batteries for electric vehicles. Redwood has said its technology can recover more than 95% of the

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 will have a whole new look this fall with one aim in mind: bring together investors, founders and technologists who have specific industry interests — all under one roof at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Disrupt has always been big. But this year we’re folding TC Sessions, the standalone industry events

Steering humanity out of the climate crisis demands action in a very literal way. Boots on the ground, people rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty retrofitting existing infrastructure, such as poorly insulated houses, type stuff. The goal is to re-make our built environment to be energy efficient and drive down carbon emissions ASAP. So

Investors just pumped millions into Irrigreen, a startup vying to quench America’s thirsty lawns with “approximately 50% less water.” Seed investor Ulu led the $15 million funding round. Two tech investors that are focused on water conservation — Burnt Island and Echo River — also chipped in, among a handful of others. The San Francisco–based

It’s estimated that about a third of all food produced worldwide every year, which is approximately 1.3 billion tons, is estimated to be wasted. Aravita, a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup, thinks that supermarkets are the best place to start fixing this problem. Marco Perlman, co-founder and CEO, started the company with Aline Azevedo and Bruno

The U.S. Treasury Department’s guidance on battery sourcing requirements for the electric vehicle tax credits will result in fewer vehicles being eligible for full or partial credits, reports Reuters, citing an unnamed U.S. official. The proposed EV credit guidance as included in the Inflation Reduction Act says that in order for vehicles to qualify for

Pity Donald Trump. He spent four years in office tearing up trade agreements and ranting about rewriting old ones, all to little avail. Now, a key U.S. climate law is doing more to change the dynamics of international trade than any blustering and bullying ever did. The Inflation Reduction Act has been hailed as a

Google is introducing new extreme heat alerts in Search that are designed to surface information to help people stay safe during heat waves, the company announced on Tuesday. The new heat alerts will roll out in the coming months. Now, when people search for information on extreme heat, they will see information about when a

The oversubscribed round is yet another sign of fusion’s maturity Tim De Chant 7 hours One fusion startup is betting that a 70-year-old idea can help it leapfrog the competition, so much so that it’s planning to skip the experimental phase and hook its prototype reactor up to the grid. The decades-old concept, known as

The pet industry grew rapidly over the past three years as people, stuck at home during the pandemic, decided to add a furry friend to their families. Analysts say this industry, where spending was $118 billion in 2019, isn’t done with big growth and predict it will more than double by 2030 to $277 billion.

Concrete. Ubiquitous. A mainstay of the construction industry — over 10 billion cubic meters of concrete are used every year. And 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

The reports issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are usually grim affairs. But even by that standard, last week’s seemed particularly bleak. The upshot is that the world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and we’re on track to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius — the “safe” limit set by the Paris

T. Alexander Puutio Contributor T. Alexander Puutio is an adjunct professor at NYU Stern and he currently dedicates his research on the interplay between sustainability, technology and organizational management. All views expressed are his own. More posts by this contributor Breaking up Big Tech would be a mistake Equity crowdfunding is now legal, but don’t