The NatureBacked Podcast

Barcelona-based TAPP Water seeks to change consumers’ habits and fights against billions of dollars spent on marketing bottled water through its filter systems for tap water, said Magnus Jern, founder and Chief Executive of TAPP Water.The consumption of plastic water bottles has increased over the last few years, when knowledge of the health problems of bottled water and knowledge of plastic waste has increased. “Bottled water consumption has continued to increase, which is crazy. It’s crazy, like with all the media we’re getting, with everything we’re getting told about how bad plastic pollution is and how bad it is. People just buy more," Jern said.Learn more about: how to change consumers' behavior why do people like to carry tons of water to the fifth floor how much does the average consumer spend on bottled water how space technology cleans water breakthroughs in expanding tap filters offering “In a nutshell, bottled water is really bad for the planet and just completely unnecessary,” Jern said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

U.S.-based green investment platform Raise Green is looking to drive more capital into climate solutions, boosting entrepreneurship in the sector, said founder and CEO Franz Hochstrasser.“We take a grassroots approach to climate action -- we want more people involved in investing and innovating in this space,” Hochstrasser said.Millennials’ interest in sustainable investment has continued to increase in the United States despite COVID and reached 99% in a recent Morgan Stanley survey.“They want real, sustainable investment options that aren’t some greenwash version of the same public equities that their parents had traded. That makes me hopeful: there’s capital going into the hands of younger generations that want to put that capital to work to create an inclusive and accelerated clean energy transition,” Hochstrasser said.Learn more about: the largest wealth transfer in the United States Impacts of the new U.S. legislation younger investors interested in green investing the upcoming launch of Raise Green crowdfunding Raise Green’s growth plans to 2025 The equity crowdfunding platform will launch this week its own crowdfunding campaign to tap into the growing demand.“There are more than 10,000 cities and towns across the US, and every one of them needs 10 or 20, or 100 distributed energy resources installed between now and the next seven years to get to 100% clean energy by 2035,” Hochstrasser said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Advertisers in this episode:Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teaming up with other investors to push for a change towards greener and healthier products from global firms is gaining traction, and industry behemoths like Unilever and Nestle are listening, said Alejandro Jimenez, head of investments at Estonian green investment platform Grünfin.“Part of our goal is to make you feel you have the power; this is democratized. You have accessibility, and your money is doing something good and helping make this change. So more of these coalitions are indeed popping up," Jimenez said.Learn more about: how investors push change in behemoths like Unilever, Nestle benefits of investing through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) why Grünfin focuses on Paris Agreement  “In the New World, activism needs to think about a lot more broadly than just shareholders and think about consumers, employees, the supply chain, what governments are saying, and all that kind of stuff,” Jimenez said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Advertisers in this episode:Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mushrooms will open a new nature-backed market for turning construction waste into new raw materials, said Joanne Rodriguez, founder of MycoCycle.“There is no waste in nature - that’s a manmade construct. And so, looking for solutions in nature to solve these problems is critical to how we battle this climate change,” Rodriguez said.Learn more about: Where mushrooms and cannabis meet The opportunities of biomimicry The beginning of the mycelium rush In the United States alone, 660 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste is added to landfills annually. That’s twice the amount of municipal solid waste, she said.“I see us as the only ones doing this with the nature-backed solution. We are seeing others work in recycling construction and demolition debris or hard-to-recycle industrial waste streams. That’s usually coming through chemical recycling,” Rodriguez said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Making potatoes and other crops more resistant to climate change and growing them faster using gene-editing techniques is the challenge ClimateCrop is looking to solve over coming years, said Yehuda Borenstein, founder of ClimateCrop.“We have an opportunity to upgrade plants and give them more resilience without a lot of investment in capex which is quite rare when you fight climate. Usually, you fight climate with capex,” Borenstein said.For many listeners, this surely raises ethical concerns, but Borenstein said the company works outside the GMO sphere. “We are only cutting a certain area in the DNA. So we don’t introduce any foreign DNA,” Borenstein said.Learn more about: How to tweak photosynthesis  Which crops ClimateCrop can fix?  Which are the first in line?  In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we are talking with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A trip to a refugee camp in Bangladesh led to a documentary and sowed the seeds for a material startup, which promises to cut plastics production costs and emissions using cellulose, said Alex Blum, founder of Applied Bioplastics.“What we’ve done by mixing cellulose with regular plastic in a way that is inexpensive to accomplish is that we’ve created a replacement for durable plastics that cost less than the original plastic while cutting the carbon footprint in half,” Blum said.Learn more about: Details of one of the weirdest founding stories Why is the adoption of bioplastics limited so far? How to scale material innovation globally fast  Should you be proud when you staff $3 a day? Applied Bioplastics team of 20 has so far raised $1.2 million and seeks to raise a further $1.24 million. You can check their campaign on Raise Green platform through this LINK.Blum’s “Blossoms From Ash” documentary about the Rohingya genocide won several awards and is available on Amazon.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

United Nations’ biodiversity summit COP15 finished with a historic deal earlier this week in Montreal. At NatureBacked, we discussed the essence of the agreement and how protecting biodiversity will become common.Nations agreed to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 and to protect vital ecosystems such as rainforests and wetlands and the rights of indigenous peoples. The Montreal Summit was seen as a last chance for nature’s biodiversity.“We have this global agreement that this is the thing - biodiversity needs to be protected. And action needs to be taken on this,” Merit Valdsalu, chief executive and co-founder of Estonian greentech startup Single.Earth, said in the podcast.“As a startup founder, it is now, I think, the craziest time where we can say that the United Nations just validated our utopian startup idea,” she said.Single.Earth is building a nature-backed currency of the future, minted from nature’s work in keeping our planet livable.The Montreal agreement can change the world for the better, said Katherine von Stackelberg, a scientist working at Harvard and Single.Earth.“Everyone agrees we want to be nature positive. Make disclosures mandatory piece; everyone’s moving in the right direction. But again, the devil is in the details,” said von Stackelberg.“There’s still this idea: we’re going to get nature into the economic system instead of thinking, how can we make the economic system more like nature? Because that’s not that difficult. If you’re going to be successful, you have to commit to something like a nature-backed currency. Nature is the only asset that has any value fundamentally and from which all else comes.”Von Stackelberg and Valdsalu said Single.Earth has the solution ready for turning the UN’s biodiversity targets into tangible actions.“The crazy utopian idea that we had - we have this, it’s working, we are creating a new currency based on nature; we have the first tokens dispersed, many tokens minted, it’s there, it can be used. It’s no longer about whether we are going to become nature-positive or net zero by 2030. We can do that today,” Valdsalu said.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are numerous opportunities for a revolution in the coffee industry, said guests at Naturebacked’s holiday-season coffee episode.We talked first with Josh Ziegelbaum from Miami-based private equity firm and asset manager Legacy Group, the key investor behind Green Coffee Company, the largest coffee producer in Colombia, which it built from the ground up starting in 2017.The Green Coffee Company is raising $100 million to expand its offering into roasting and distilling spirits from coffee waste.Learn more about: How to build a coffee unicorn in 10 years The opportunity to use the coffee industry leftovers How to change the industry’s social, and environmental standards Innovator’s dilemma in an old industry Later, we talked with Miroslav Kovac from Coffee Cloud in Croatia. He has turned the startup, which was born as a hardware company, into a data analytics firm for the coffee industry to reduce waste and slack from the process.“It’s not easy to go to the coffee virtually. In some countries, it’s not always takeaway coffee. Coffee is a social situation. Let’s say in the Balkans, where people are sitting and having coffee, it’s some kind of state of mind to sit and join the coffee for one or two hours and talk about everything,” Kovac said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Advertisers in this episode:Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pressure from consumers will likely be the key driver pushing climate tech towards the mainstream over the coming years, said James Vincent, co-founder of brand advisory and investment firm FNDR.“We’re a few years off from that because we haven’t done the homework yet. We haven’t shock-absorbed the need for culture to absorb the new metrics of what’s important in the world,” Vincent said.James Vincent worked as a brand agency executive with Steve Jobs for 11 years through the launches of iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, before launching FNDR in 2017.Learn more about: Essentials of starting your brand development Why do electric airplanes need fuel engines? Why a typical AirBNB review is so positive Why the iPhone is called iPhone At Slush 2022, FNDR launched its first investment fund, but Vincent stressed the company was not a VC firm.“We take founders through our processes to pull the genius out of the founder. So we think the founders often almost always have the genius somewhere, they’re just not quite saying it right, or they’re not segmenting it or sequencing it correctly,” Vincent said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Surging growth in distributed energy production, driven by innovations in solar and battery technologies, is helping the energy sector to cope with climate change, said Tim Hade, COO and co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions.“We’re getting to the point right now where distributed energy is starting to displace coal and gas - that’s going to be sort of a choppy road over the next decade or two,” Hade said. “Our current energy infrastructure has way too many single points of failure. We need to figure out a way to make it more reliable and more resilient in the face of ever-changing climate catastrophes,” Hade said.“On-site solar generation and batteries can provide 80% of the facility’s power need today. And then figuring out the other 20% is where we spend a lot of engineering R&D time, trying to figure out how to get a zero or low-carbon solution.”Learn more about: Innovations unleashing distributed energy production Challenges of hydrogen distribution The continuing surge in distributed energy production in the U.S. Fast-evolving battery technologies “When you look at the ramp rate when it comes to battery technology, we’re accomplishing a lot of things in months that people thought would take decades,” Hade said.“We’re experimenting with all sorts of cool technologies in that space, different battery chemistries, and longer-duration storage, as well as alternative sustainable fuels like green hydrogen, is an example."In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices