Did you know – 30-40% of annual food supply in US is wasted? Globally, the amount of food wasted is more than half the global annual production of cereal crops. Really, issues such as energy and food shortage are the most ridiculous global issues still troubling mankind, and we’re still far from a concrete solution. Thankfully, a new wave of green entrepreneurial setups and trends has shown promise in the recent times, and are a source of hope for the future. Let’s know more about them.
Startups That Are Making a Big Impact
Impossible Foods Inc.: This startup selects particular proteins and nutrients from vegetables and creates imitations of popular foods such as cheeseburgers, and meats. The complex molecular process mastered by this startup helps it create foods that taste like meat but don’t have animal origins! Impossible Foods’ motto is to provide a sustainable vegetarian produce to conscious consumers across US.
Fruitcycle: This startup collects unused apple produce from local farms and creates healthy snacks out of them.
Freight Farms: People at Freight Farms have created a cloud connected micro farm (a 40' x 8' x 9.5' container) with the best of hydroponic technology. Close to 4500 crops, including kale, basil, and lettuce, can be grown in this container. The progress of the crop can be monitored from anywhere. Plus, Freight Farms offers analytic support with monitoring for clients.
Spoiler Alert: It's a B2B app that helps enterprises manage food waste better than ever. You can easily connect with organizations that can quickly do something meaningful with leftover and overproduced foods and organic waste using this app.
LeftOverSwap: An app that helps you share leftover and uneaten food with people near you who need it.
Urban Vine Co: This startup has two core goals. First, to help inexperienced urban dwellers understand and cultivate food. Second, to connect urban farmers with cutting edge farm and cultivation technologies that help them maximize produce and minimize costs.
There are other startups, such as wiseRG, a hybrid tech company that leverages high tech bio systems to create sustainable solutions of urban organic content management, using food waste and leftovers. Then, there’s Booster, a Buenos Aires based startup empowers small farm owners to improve farm productivity by as much as 70% by providing them actionable information such as weather forecasts and updates, crop yield data, crop specific inputs, etc.
Green Trends For the Present and Future
The construction industry can contribute a lot to the cause of environmental compliance, by adopting means such as bio degradable paints, rammed earth bricks, environment friendly gabions and slabs, rammed earth bricks, etc.
The world is witnessing cost parity between solar energy sources and conventional sources of energy, such as coal and petroleum. In some regions, solar power prices are down by 50% as compared to 2008 highs. This has ushered a wave of increased solar power adoption along with startups helping consumers connect with affordable solar (as well as other renewable sources) power.
Smart grids use technologies such as sensors that shut off appliances when the grid faces a demand stress, and meters to help people use power more efficiently. Smart grid technologies’ adoption is on the rise, and will continue to be so, with proliferation and maturation of large scale wind and solar energy.
The global governance machinery has trudged along and not really done anything significant to combat the menace of food shortage, lack of electrification, environmentally hazardous construction practices. soil erosion, and deterioration of quality of agricultural lands, disconnect between farmers and markets, etc. These green entrepreneurial ventures and those following their footsteps are a new lease of hope and life for the ailing Earth.
