Season 2

To solve the challenge of increasing plastic waste in oceans, we need to go to the source and find alternative materials to the plastics, said John Felts, CEO and co-founder of California-headquartered materials startup Cruz Foam. "It’s nearly impossible to play catch up on an increasingly flowing f...

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 ...

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 ...

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 go...

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 t...

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 resi...

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 th...

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 su...

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 c...

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...

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 starti...

Industries have too often left the control over the end of the product lifecycle to individuals at a time when it could open many opportunities for the reuse of materials, said Joe Macleod, founder of andend, the world’s first customer-ending business. “There’s a massive gap at the end of the consum...

Climate investing and the climate, in general, is the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had, said Matt Ward from early-stage climate investment syndicate 4WARD.VC. “Either we pull it off and succeed or pretty much we all effing die and go to war, and the world goes to absolute s-h-i-t. So what would yo...

A universal basic dividend that would distribute some of the profits generated by corporates in industrialized countries to the citizens in low-income countries would be a step forward in the current troubled situation, said Anders Wijkman, Honorary President of the global think tank Club of Rome. “...

Action and information sharing are keys for fighting climate anxiety, said Itamar Weizman, the head of climate investments at Israeli investment firm Firstime who suffers from self-diagnosed climate anxiety. He said the five stages of climate anxiety are similar to the five stages of grief. "A lot o...

Industrial agriculture, one of the most significant contributors to climate change, is facing a revolution that will move meat production to factories from farms, said Daan Luining, a co-founder and CTO at cultivated meat startup Meatable. The 2018-founded Dutch startup Meatable - one of the frontru...

Rules of capitalism need changing to move the needle in the fight against climate change, said Yoann Berno, a partner at the Nordic investment firm Climentum. “Unfortunately, our leaders, political leaders, are too short-sighted. They’re just responding to this crisis as they responded to COVID. As ...

Oslo-headquartered Norselab looks for startups transforming resource-intensive industries like food, transport, and construction, said Maria de Perlinghi, a partner at the Norwegian impact investment firm. “We believe that the next frontier or the code that we have to crack now is in the major globa...

Climate tech is booming thanks to troubles in the European energy sector. Still, the proportion of investments in climate tech has to grow from very low levels, said Sebastian Heitmann, co-founder, and partner at Extantia Capital. “The goal is to significantly increase this over the coming years,” H...

Making great cheese is the holy grail of plant-based milk products. This company is certain it has found the solution. "The product is identical to what the cow is producing," Sheriff Will Van den Tweel said in an interview on the sidelines of the Startup Day Festival in Tartu, Estonia. Those Vegan ...