Welcome back, climate technology readers! Just like last week, we have a full slate once again, from food waste to sewage and more. let’s dive in
Image Credits: mill industries
After selling Nest to Google for $3.2bn, Matt Rogers is no stranger to scaling quickly. But unlike last time, Rogers isn’t interested in selling that fast. “These are the next 20 years of my life. This is not like building the company in four or five years and selling it to Google. This is a big, long journey,” he told TechCrunch.
Rogers is on a quest to end food waste, which accounts for 6-8% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and his tool to achieve this is the humble kitchen trash can. Mill Industries’ container is sleek and tech-enabled, dehydrating and grinding food until it resembles dried coffee beans. Then, when it’s full, he automatically requests a box to send the dry food scraps to one of the Mill facilities, where it’s turned into chicken feed. How does it get there? That part was the one that surprised Rogers the most.
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Image Credits: Guillermo Legaria Schweizer/Getty Images
Industrial facilities, from semiconductor plants to automobile factories, use staggering amounts of water. What comes out the other end can be difficult to treat and even more difficult to reuse. That’s why Membrion has developed a ceramic membrane that can filter heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and lithium. The startup has $7 million in a Series B round that it expects to generate another $3 million.
Image Credits: british volt (Opens in a new window)
Britishvolt was always a long shot, but the battery manufacturing start-up seems to have missed its point entirely. This week, it announced it would file for bankruptcy, having made little progress on its planned $4.7 billion gigafactory.
The company’s downfall echoes what happened here in the US a little over a decade ago when A123 Systems stumbled and went bankrupt. But the British version of the story may not have a happy ending. With A123, the US had time to cover. With global battery supply chains solidifying, the UK’s domestic battery industry may never catch up.
Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Space programs pride themselves on developing breakthrough technologies that end up proving their worth here on Earth. Apollo helped catapult computing, and the space shuttle did wonders for avionics and materials science. Now it’s the turn of the Perseverance Mars rover.
The MOXIE experiment was built to show that carbon dioxide can be converted to oxygen on Mars. Chris Graves, who worked on the instrument, thought it could help use carbon dioxide on Earth, so he started Noon Energy. The company’s carbon-oxygen battery promises to store electricity for long periods of time at fairly low cost. The startup announced a $28 million Series A this week.
Image Credits: fake images
Heat pumps and home energy upgrades have received a lot of attention as a result of the incentives contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. That makes it a good time to be Sealed. The company predicts how much energy an upgrade will save and converts initial installation costs, billing homeowners based on the savings.
For a company so reliant on data, Sealed’s acquisition of Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense makes sense. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Sealed plans to offer, but not require, InfiSense sensors to customers to monitor both energy usage and indoor air quality.
