SF Bay Climate Tech: April 10 - April 17
Lowercarbon happy hour, regenerative ag, climate as praxis, why recycling won't save us, and more events this week
Hi friends,
It’s another busy week for climate in SF! Here are the events this week:
San Francisco
♻️ Lowercarbon Capital x Alante Capital Happy Hour: Tue, Apr 11
🏗 Climate as Praxis: Sat, Apr 15
🥳 Earth Day Pre-Party: Sat, Apr 15
🌱 Nature X Carbon Bay Area Monthly Meetup: Mon, Apr 17
East Bay
🌾 Regenerative Agriculture Salon: Tue, Apr 11
👩🔬 Careers in Sustainability - Speaker Panel and Case Workshop: Mon, Apr 17
South Bay / Peninsula
🐙 Changing Planet: Rob Verchick: Wed, Apr 12
0️⃣ Net-Zero is Not Enough: Innovative Solutions to Cool the Planet: Wed, Apr 12
🌅 The Climate Crisis: Causes, Solutions, & What You Can Do: Thu, Apr 13
🌱 Cleantech Open Bay Area Meetup: Thu, Apr 13
🍸 The Climate Not Too Late Show: Thu, Apr 13
☀️ Sustainable Art Gala: Fri, Apr 14
⚡️ E-Bikes and EVs in the Park: Sat, Apr 15
And there’s tons more next week for San Francisco Climate Week! We’ve listed a lot below, but click through for their full list.
Cheers,
Alec and Sonam
Hot Take: Recycling Won’t Save Us
One of the thorniest challenges in transitioning to a circular economy is that of plastics. Composed of raw materials like natural gas and oil, plastics are ubiquitous in our world, from the clothes we wear to the packaging of our foods and the electronics that power our lives. Many of us have a gut understanding that plastics are bad for the planet. And many of us muffle that nagging suspicion with the hope that recycling plastic can solve the problem. Plastic waste doesn't seem all that bad if it can spawn new products via recycling.
If you’ve ever found yourself guilty of wishcycling - placing something in the recycling bin and hoping it will be recycled, whether or not there is evidence to confirm so - you’re not alone. Most of us have consumed a feast of pro-recycling messaging from an early age, with governments, corporations, and environmentalists feeding our belief in the efficacy of recycling. But it was the nation’s largest oil and gas companies who set the table.
As early as the 1970s, the oil and gas industry had serious doubts that recycling could ever be made economically viable. Yet it spent millions of dollars telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told an NPR investigator, “selling recycling sold plastic” - even if it wasn’t true.
At the heart of the problem is the cost of picking up used plastic, sorting it out, and melting it down. Plastic also degrades with each turnover, meaning that it can’t be reused more than once or twice. New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap – in fact, it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh. A slew of commercials promoting the benefits of recycling long kept the public from knowing about these challenges.
The veil lifted considerably in 2018 when China launched Operation National Sword, a sweeping set of restrictions on imports of most waste materials from abroad. Over the preceding 20 years, China had purchased millions of tons of scrap metal, paper, and plastic from wealthy nations for recycling, granting those countries an easy and cheap option for managing their waste materials. Without China as a viable destination for waste, enormous amounts of it piled up in the U.S., where governments had under-invested in recycling infrastructure. Consumers began to see that recycling was not nearly as reliable or eco-friendly as they’d hoped.
Today, only 9% of the world’s plastic is recycled globally, while millions of metric tons of plastic waste end up burned, buried, or bound for our oceans. So what hope do we have to turn the tide on the plastics crisis? Recycling is part of the answer, to be sure, for those products where reusable alternatives and packaging are not yet at scale or are not appropriate for a given use case. But to imagine a future truly free of waste, the solution must also include alternatives like bio-based plastics, biopolymers, and compostable materials.
These are the channels, but who are the innovators charting a path toward this waste-free future? A few companies homegrown in California to keep an eye on include:
Mango Materials: This company is tackling the textile space, specifically conventional polyester, a petroleum-based material that accounts for over 50% of global fiber production. Its technology uses landfill and wastewater methane gas to produce polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) powder, a valuable biopolymer that is converted into a range of products such as cosmetic packaging and polyester replacement for textiles. In fashion and beyond, Mango Materials is a leader in the bio-industrial revolution.
Cruz Foam: Born from a mission to make a petroleum-free material to replace plastic foam in surfboards, Cruz Foam’s product has achieved impacts far beyond the breakwaters. It creates protective packaging foam from chitosan, which is created by treating the shells of shrimp and other crustaceans with an alkaline substance. The company’s regenerative materials can be used to protect everything from appliances to electronics to homeware.
Sway: Seaweed is a rising star in the climate tech world and Sway knows it well. The company makes seaweed-based, home-compostable, and carbon-negative thin film packaging, with applications that span apparel, cosmetics, premium luxury items, footwear, and more. By making home-compostable replacements for plastic packaging, Sway touches key pillars of the circular economy: designing out waste, keeping materials in use, and regenerating natural systems.
As these companies and their peers demonstrate, material innovation is fast evolving, helping to spur the transition to a circular economy. But that transition demands more than proper sortation in our waste bins. It requires a total restitching of the materials that form the fabric of our lives. With the right combination of innovation, investment, and enabling environments, those materials can one day reincarnate as carbon sequestering, nutrient-rich soil to replenish our lands rather than pollute them.
Community Shoutouts
Events This Week
🌾 Regenerative Agriculture Salon: Tue, Apr 11
♻️ Lowercarbon Capital x Alante Capital Happy Hour: Tue, Apr 11
🐙 Changing Planet: Rob Verchick: Wed, Apr 12
0️⃣ Net-Zero is Not Enough: Innovative Solutions to Cool the Planet: Wed, Apr 12
🌅 The Climate Crisis: Causes, Solutions, & What You Can Do: Thu, Apr 13
🌱 Cleantech Open Bay Area Meetup: Thu, Apr 13
🍸 The Climate Not Too Late Show: Thu, Apr 13
☀️ Sustainable Art Gala: Fri, Apr 14
⚡️ E-Bikes and EVs in the Park: Sat, Apr 15
🏗 Climate as Praxis: Sat, Apr 15
🥳 Earth Day Pre-Party: Sat, Apr 15
🌱 Nature X Carbon Bay Area Monthly Meetup: Mon, Apr 17
👩🔬 Careers in Sustainability - Speaker Panel and Case Workshop: Mon, Apr 17
Read on for more details about this week’s happenings and upcoming events this month
Events This Month
🍷 How a Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink: Tue, Apr 25
🌳 Course Correcting Carbon: Tue, Apr 18
🌵 Xeriscaping Workshop with SFO Landscaping: Wed, Apr 19
🍻 Otherlab Happy Hour for SFClimate Week: Wed, Apr 19
🚙 Transportation and Climate Tech Happy Hour: Wed, Apr 19
🌱 Work On Climate Wednesday: Wed, Apr 19
📈 Grants, RFPs, Venture, Debt - What's Right for My Company?: Thu, Apr 20
✨ SPARK Innovation Competition Opening Reception: Thu, Apr 20
🌳 Imagine5: Power of Many Mixer: Thu, Apr 20
✊ March & Rally for Climate Justice: Fri, Apr 21
🗼 Mount Sutro Nature Walks: Water History with Joel Pomerantz: Sat, Apr 22
🌎 Earth Day SF 2023: Sat, Apr 22
🌎 Earth Day Festival - Downtown Berkeley: Sat, Apr 22
🔌 Electrification Fair: Sat, Apr 22
⛵️ Earth Day Sail: Sat, Apr 22
🌊 Waves and Beaches Book Presentation & Signing: Sat, Apr 22
📽 The Wild and Scenic Film Festival on Tour: Sat, Apr 22
🧑🌾 Digital Farming and AgTech Ecosystem: Mon, Apr 24
🛢 Amy Westervelt on Drilling, Denial, and Disinformation: Tue, Apr 25
🔌 Building Electrification and Decarbonization: Thu, Apr 27
🎬 Earth Day - Free 2023 Wild and Scenic Film Festival: Sat, Apr 22
🌿 SFHub : INSEAD Business Sustainability Series Part I: Wed, Apr 26
📖 Social Forestry by Tomi Hazel Vaarde: Wed, Apr 26
🎭 Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival on Climate & Justice: Fri, Apr 28
🚗 EV Ride and Drive: Electrify your Ride: Sat, Apr 29
🧺 YPE Family Picnic: Sat, Apr 29
Events This Week
🌾 Regenerative Agriculture Salon
When: Tue, Apr 11th from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Where: Wells Fargo C420, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, 2220 Piedmont Ave Berkeley, CA 94720
An evening of dialogue and connection for students, alums, and industry leaders passionate about rethinking food systems from soil to plate. The event will bring students, community members, regenerative agriculture practitioners, investors, and more together to discuss and identify regenerative pathways for producing, processing, and packaging animal protein and inspire community building across the Bay Area.
♻️ Lowercarbon Capital x Alante Capital Happy Hour
When: Tue, Apr 11th from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Where: Novela, 662 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94105.
Join Lowercarbon Capital and Alante Capital in SF for drinks and conversation on climate tech, circularity and material innovation
🐙 Changing Planet: Rob Verchick
When: Wed, Apr 12th from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: Kepler's Books, 1010 El Camino Real #100 Menlo Park, CA 94025
Loyola University's Rob Verchick is a leading climate law scholar who designed and implemented climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration. In this event, he will share his hard-earned wisdom on how to build resilience to climate change and answer questions on these urgent issues.
0️⃣ Net-Zero is Not Enough: Innovative Solutions to Cool the Planet
When: Wed, Apr 12th from 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Where: Calabazas Branch Library, 1230 South Blaney Avenue San Jose, CA 95129
Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) is a method suggested by John Latham some 25 years ago to mitigate the effects of climate change. The technique aims to increase the reflectivity (albedo) of certain kinds of maritime clouds, such that more of the incoming sunlight is reflected, thereby cooling the earth. The technique involves injecting tiny, nanometer sized droplets of sea water into the air to brighten certain natural clouds. Sea-going vessels could be equipped with the necessary equipment to accomplish the task
🌱 Cleantech Open Bay Area Meetup
When: Thu, Apr 13th from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Where: JP Morgan Chase, 3223 Hanover Street Palo Alto, CA 94304.
Interested in cleantech startups and entrepreneurship? Want to chat about the latest and greatest in the cleantech commercialization support ecosystem in California, and beyond? Us too! Join Cleantech Open West for a session of networking with like-minded folks! Whether you're into growing your own startup, learning about evolving cleantech markets or environmental public policy, or just meeting new people, there's something here for you!
🌅 The Climate Crisis: The Causes, The Solutions, and What You Can Do
When: Thu, Apr 13th from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Where: San José State University, Mod F Conference Room, 1 Washington Sq, San Jose, CA 95192
The Climate Crisis is already affecting ecosystems and communities across the globe, but it is not too late to take action. The climate reality presentation will show you how! The presentation is non-partisan, from the perspective of science. The presentation is broken into three parts – Must We Change, Can We Change and Will We Change. In Must We Change, we talk about the crisis itself, how it happened and what effect it is having on the planet. In Can We Change, we talk about the technologies that currently exist to deal with the problem. In Will We Change, we talk about what is being done now, across the planet, as well as what you can do by yourself and with others in your community.
🍸 The Climate Not Too Late Show
When: Thu, Apr 13th from 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Where: SHACK15, 1 Ferry Building #Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94111
A networking event organized by Climate Tech Cocktails, where the latest developments in climate tech, including initiatives like making honey without bees and coffee without beans, will be discussed along with a performance by comedian Paul Robertson.
☀️ Sustainable Art Gala
When: Fri, Apr 14th from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM
Where: Student Union Ballroom, One Washington Square San Jose, CA 95192
Come celebrate the Spring 2023 issue themed SolarPunk: Greener Pastures. The basic idea of SolarPunk is that it's a version of the future where we use technology to live more in harmony with plants and nature.
⚡️ E-Bikes and EVs in the Park
When: Sat, Apr 15th from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Where: Mitchell Park - next to pickleball courts, 3700 Middlefield Road Palo Alto, CA 94303
Test ride an e-bike, enter to win a FREE e-bike, and meet your future EV at this yearly e-bike test ride and expo event. Rad Power Bikes will provide numerous models for test riding, including city/commuter bikes, cargo/utility bikes, folding bikes, and off-road bikes.
🥳 Earth Day Pre-Party
When: Sat, Apr 15th from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Where: Speakeasy Ales & Lagers, 1195 Evans Avenue San Francisco, CA 94124
Get your tickets for the Earth Day SF Pre-Party happening on SATURDAY, April 15, 12 - 5 pm, at Speakeasy Ales & Lagers, 1195 Evans Ave. Join us for a day of vegan food, fun, and beer ssupporting local businesses, SFVS, and Earth Day SF. Please invite your veg-curious friends and family!
🏗 Climate as Praxis
When: Sat, Apr 15th from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Where: California College of the Arts, 450 Irwin Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
This event, which marks the launch of the M. Arthur Gensler Jr. Center for Design Excellence in the Architecture Division at California College of the Arts, brings together four eminent practitioners whose work straddles the academic and professional realms and who are advancing new ways for designers to directly address the social and environmental effects of climate change. All four are actively engaged in creating buildings, landscapes, and communities that can support a more just and resilient future
👩🔬 Careers in Sustainability - Speaker Panel and Case Workshop
When: Mon, Apr 17th from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Where: Dwinelle Hall, South Drive Berkeley, CA 94720
Want to be a successful applicant for environmental consulting internships and jobs? Interested in learning more about the differences in projects, clients, and expected skills between analytical- and strategy-based consulting firms?
🌱 Nature X Carbon Bay Area Monthly Meetup
When: Mon, Apr 17th from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Where: SF Commons, 550 Laguna St, San Francisco, CA 94102
The gathering is for people interested in or working at the intersection of nature and climate. Our intention is to host a space where we can meet each other, decompress, have important conversations, enjoy each other's company, and align our efforts for the collective good. This event is a potluck. Please bring food to share with our community. Vegan preferred.
Join the Fun!
Submit Events
We know all of you are cooking up great events across that highlight the latest and greatest in our collective effort to save our city - and our planet! 🌍 We would love to spread the word. Please share any event details and we'll add them to the list!
Climate Tech Cities
We are expanding! We started as an 8-person dinner and now have over 4,000 members in our community. We’ve had people across the world reach out to us to start their own chapters - so we’re launching a new Climate Tech Cities organization this year! If you have friends who are interested in becoming chapter leads, please share the word. Here’s to a global network of local communities making a positive impact!