Welcome back to our weekly round-up!
In this edition we’ll share extracts from our chat with AirTree Ventures, and our articles reviewing hot climate-technicals.
AirTree Ventures
This week we sat down with the one and only Richard Lin from AirTree, a $585+ million venture capital firm focused on technology founders in Australia and New Zealand. In this edited conversation, Richard spoke about his perspective on climate-tech, and lessons from previous investments.
What stance does AirTree have on the climate-tech space?
“At AirTree, we are continually assessing which areas of climate-tech play more to our strengths and expertise. We are predominantly suited, but not limited, to software-based solutions. This means working with something where you can see software-type scalability and software-type ease-of-sale.”
What lessons have you taken away from your climate-tech investments in the likes of Brighte and Regrow?
“Products that have incentives beyond sustainability tend to do the best. In many cases, products should pass the "Mr. Burns test", which indicates it could be sold to even the biggest capitalist. This capitalist (Mr Burns) wants the product because it's the best, cheapest and/or most convenient, irrespective of sustainability.”
Climate-technicals
Spicing your life up through our reviews of climate-tech papers and innovations.
48 million km2 suitable for farming
If you were considering where to build your next seaweed farm, look no further. In this article, we join Froehlich et al, as they map out suitable areas and envisage how seaweed aquaculture might contribute towards carbon offsetting in the future.
As a consequence of their findings, the team suggest that seaweed farming is most appropriate on a regional level. In addition, farming could be used to offset global aquaculture emissions, which plays a relatively small role in global warming. Froehlich et al, estimate that 273- 474 km2 of seaweed farms would be needed to make the whole aquaculture industry carbon neutral. This area is between 14%- 25% of all space dedicated to cultured seaweed currently, a tiny fraction of the total 48 million km2 available.
Plastic pollution technophiles
"On the basis of extensive search and data compilation, our analysis reveals that information is dispersed across platforms and is not easily accessible."
Just as we started to complain about the difficulty of finding climate-tech research, this paper fell into our laps. In this article , we review a brilliant paper by Bellou et al. which analyses existing plastic pollution tech. Bellou et al. detail their repeatable methodology for identifying, analysing and evaluating cutting-edge plastic pollution solutions.
After extensive research, they come up with 177 answers to one of the planet's biggest problems. These solutions are considered effective, sustainable, and include innovative technologies and new methods to prevent, monitor and clean (PMC) our seas and oceans.
PIMped up uranium extraction
"And the award for tech most likely to appear in a James Bond movie goes to...Yang et al. " In this article we look at the paper "Bioinspired hierarchical porous membrane for efficient uranium extraction from seawater", which has developed a way to tap into the 4.5 billion tons of uranium found in our oceans.
The research team describe their novel membrane structure, which uses a modified polymer of intrinsic micro-porosity (PIM) arranged in a structure inspired by human blood vessel networks. This layered capillary system allows for rapid diffusion of uranium species and can extract as much uranium as 9.03 mg g−1 after four weeks in seawater.
Pretty neat hey?
Thanks again for joining us this week! Looking forward to seeing you soon.
Best,
Pete
Blue Tech Base