I’m back at Collision Conference for another day of finding startups doing good in the world. Let’s see what today brings.
Ensogo provides a system for teams to track and ensure they are meeting their ESG and sustainability goals. They do this by breaking down an abstract goal like better gender parity into concrete actions organizations can take.
Fenri focuses on ensuring clean water and proper wastewater treatment. They use a combination of sensors and cameras to monitor water systems in real time. This helps companies and governments better plan and react to changes in their water system. Their system can connect to government monitoring regulators too.
South Pole is a sustainability consulting firm to help other companies achieve their sustainable goals. They provide carbon offsets and insights into how companies can best reduce their carbon footprint.
Despite the smoke from the wildfires the bike racks were yet again full.
I’m at Collision conference today in Toronto looking for some cool new good things to share. I’ll update this post as I find stuff.
A record-breaking 30 percent of startups this year at Collision are women-founded.
The first company that’s a good one is Unwrapit. They want gift giving to be more about experiences tHan physical artifacts.
We believe that giving gifts and making a positive impact can be one and the same. That reaching out, saying thank you, and providing an engaging and branded experience can be seamless. That receiving corporate gifts from a client, your employer, or at an event, doesn’t have to feel corporate at all.
Smart Cocoon sets to optimize HVAC in your house be utilizing some tiny fans. They’ve created a smart fan system that boosts the airflow from your furnace to the whole house.
GoParity funds good projects by using the power of the crowd. Each project must be related to one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They tell me they have funded some solar projects in Portugal among others. Check it out!
Muuvment helps corporations engage their workers in making a meaningful impact on the planet. The system relies on self reporting from employees to see a company wide impact. By celebrating the good work everyone in the company keeping their employees engaged.
Homestozero are on a mission to get 10.5 homes in Canada to net zero as quickly as possible. They’re a service that helps homeowners understand the current state of their home and gives personalized advice on to get to gas zero.
Earthnet connects AI with experts to help craft projects from idea to impact around climate action projects. What’s more the site will help connect projects with potential finders.
Sponge Microgrids helps small renewable producers stay active and live. They use a suite of tools to help micro grid operators predict and control energy production. This may sound boring but is crucial to moving to a fully renewable energy grid.
Lastly, Collision needs more bike parking for all the eco conscious attendees.
A bacteria that eats plastic may sound too good to be true since we have so much plastic waste littering the planet. The rouble with plastic eating bacterias is that they aren’t efficient nor can they survive long outside the lab. So a research team turned to machine learning, or AI, to create a new enzyme that helps bacteria break down plastic. Of course, the best approach to eliminating plastic waste is not to use plastic in the first place.
Here’s the abstract:
Plastic waste poses an ecological challenge and enzymatic degradation offers one, potentially green and scalable, route for polyesters waste recycling. Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) accounts for 12% of global solid waste, and a circular carbon economy for PET is theoretically attainable through rapid enzymatic depolymerization followed by repolymerization or conversion/valorization into other products. Application of PET hydrolases, however, has been hampered by their lack of robustness to pH and temperature ranges, slow reaction rates and inability to directly use untreated postconsumer plastics11. Here, we use a structure-based, machine learning algorithm to engineer a robust and active PET hydrolase. Our mutant and scaffold combination (FAST-PETase: functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase) contains five mutations compared to wild-type PETase (N233K/R224Q/S121E from prediction and D186H/R280A from scaffold) and shows superior PET-hydrolytic activity relative to both wild-type and engineered alternatives12 between 30 and 50?°C and a range of pH levels. We demonstrate that untreated, postconsumer-PET from 51 different thermoformed products can all be almost completely degraded by FAST-PETase in 1?week. FAST-PETase can also depolymerize untreated, amorphous portions of a commercial water bottle and an entire thermally pretreated water bottle at 50?ºC. Finally, we demonstrate a closed-loop PET recycling process by using FAST-PETase and resynthesizing PET from the recovered monomers. Collectively, our results demonstrate a viable route for enzymatic plastic recycling at the industrial scale.
The FBI finally agrees with culture jammers. Online advertising has gotten so bad that the FBI now suggests everyone should make use of tracking blocking software, also known as ad blockers. During the last big consumerism celebration in December, the FBI noticed malicious actors paying for ads to solicit unaware consumers to spend money on their products (many times the products were fake or didn’t exist). The easiest way to defend oneself against these malicious online attacks is simply to use an ad blocker like ublock origin.
Ad blockers are also tracker blockers which gives you further protection from profilers. Stay safe online and block people from following you around the web.
Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with “minimum distinction” between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware.
One of the FBI’s recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.
As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands.
Fusion power has been just a decade away for decades, or at least that was the joke. Yesterday it became outdated because it was revealed that nuclear fusion was ignited, stabilized, and proven to work reliably. Fusion energy is carbon-free energy production which has the potential to revolutionize how we use electricity. Hopefully we will be able to replace major power plants with this carbon free fusion solution.
To be clear, there’s still a lot to do to get fusion energy connected to the grid. We still need to focus first and foremost on renewable energy sources.
“The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people,”LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budilsaid. “Crossing this threshold is the vision that has driven 60 years of dedicated pursuit—a continual process of learning, building, expanding knowledge and capability, and then finding ways to overcome the new challenges that emerged. These are the problems that the U.S. national laboratories were created to solve.”
