SF Bay Climate Tech: February 27 - March 6, 2023
Electrify everything -- healthcare, buildings, and more!
Hi friends,
Start your Monday off right with the Sustainable Healthcare Workshop, diving into how Stanford’s Medical School can cut GHG emissions in half by 2030. Or head to the Napa County Library for a book talk with author Jake Bittle as he shares stories of The Great Displacement that comes with climate change. On Tuesday, join the Women in Cleantech and Sustainability group at Charm Industrial for an Open House & Happy Hour. On Wednesday, Building Electrification aficionados unite! Share your successes and struggles on electrifying your home and learn the tricks of the trade from others. Close out the week with Architectures of Extraction, a chat with famed artists and activists representing the environmental injustices of oil extraction and what to do about it. Enjoy the week!
Cheers,
Alec and Sonam
Hot Take: Talking Trash
You tear open the Amazon boxes, put the plastic packaging in the trash, and call it a day. My hunch is that you’re probably not thinking about where San Francisco’s 900,000 tons of trash comes from or goes every year.
I’ll do a much longer post about San Francisco’s Quest to Make Landfills Obsolete, as our friends at Politico so aptly describe, but today we’ll focus on the role governments can play in shifting how much trash is produced in the first place. And for this, we’ll head across the pond to Europe to learn a thing or two on how policy-makers can be market-makers when it comes to talking trash.
Last year, the EU proposed regulations that would require companies to make their packaging easier to reuse, recycle, or compost - complete with better materials, better design, and better labeling for consumers. All takeout food, drinks, and alcohol would need to be in reusable packaging by 2030, and say goodbye to half empty containers with tons of space fillers! This is on top of a complete ban on single-use plastics, cutlery, straws, and the like that went into effect in 2019. The aim: reduce packaging waste by 15% and especially curb plastic waste, which makes up 80% of all marine debris found near surface waters. The goal is to shift the onus on the producers of plastic rather than the consumers who are traditionally left with limited choices.
And all this is just the beginning. The EU is working in partnership with the UN High Ambition Coalition, a group of countries that includes the EU member states, the UK, Ghana, Senegal, Australia, Canada, and small island states such as Kiribati and Tonga that suffer the bulk of negative consequences of marine plastics washing up on their shores. Together, they hope to create a global set of rules for the redesign of packaging materials, and more importantly, strict controls on plastic production.
Each kilogram of plastic that comes on the market has already caused 3 kilograms of GHG emissions through its production process. This is a global business with thousands of nodes - and no clear standards on what can be degraded, composted, reused, or recycled. Every country has had its own set of piecemeal regulations, with Bangladesh being the first country in the world to ban plastic bags back in 2002 while France has banned plastic packaging for all produce. A comprehensive, global standard is what’s missing and that’s where the EU is stepping into a leadership void.
The goal for the EU is to utilize ‘green diplomacy’ to influence global environmental negotiations, and become both a policy leader and market leader. And a plethora of sustainable packaging startups are ready for the action! From Germany’s Circleback building deposit-return systems to the UK’s B2B startup Sourceful providing sourcing and supply chain platform to Estonia’s Woola that is creating compostable packaging made of sheep wool, there’s no shortage of creative ideas to make a dent in our global plastics ecosystem.
Want to close the loop? Learn more about circular economy startups and ecosystems from our friends at the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, check out the amazing work New York City’s Closed Loop Partners is doing to build and invest in circular systems, and stay tuned for our upcoming SF Bay Area Climate Tech visit to my favorite place to talk trash, the Recology Center in Dogpatch!
Community Shout Outs
🌎 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 to kick of 2023! 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!
♻️ Clean Tech Open
Applications are now open for the 2023 Cleantech Open (the world’s largest cleantech accelerator!). Get access to expert and specialized mentors, a full business development training program, and investor networking! Apply today at bit.ly/cto2023. The application period is open until 11:59 PM PST on April 16th.
Events This Week
🏥 Sustainable Healthcare Workshop: Mon, Feb 27
🌎 The Great Displacement with Jake Bittle: Mon, Feb 27
🍀 Charm Industrial Open House & HH with WCS: Tue, Feb 28
🔌 Building Electrification Happy Hour: Wed, Mar 1
⛏ Architectures of Extraction: A Just Transition Dialogue: Thu, Mar 2
Read on for more details about this week’s happenings and upcoming events this month
Upcoming Events
🌎 Project: Planet: Mon, Mar 6
⚡️ BERC Energy Summit 2023 - Making the Energy Transition Work: Wed, Mar 8
🌱 Climate, Business & Innovation Summit 2023: Wed, Mar 8
📣 Startup Bites - Cleantech Pitch Night: Wed, Mar 8
👖 Future of Fashion Conference: Thu, Mar 9
🥂 MCJ + Climate tech friends drinks and networking event: Thu, Mar 9
💧 Hydrocolonialism Symposium: Fri, Mar 10
🔌 Energy Innovation Forum: Low Carbon Innovation: Wed, Mar 15
🔥 1.5°C - Methane: The 100x Threat: Thu, Mar 16
🌳 Nature X Carbon Bay Area Monthly Meetup: Mon, Mar 20
🤵♂️ Regenerative Gala 2023: Sat, Apr 1
🥙 Urban Foodscape Tour: Innovators Nourishing the East Bay: Wed, Apr 5
🔁 Putting Contemporary Climate Migration in Context: Thu, Apr 6
Events This Week
🏥 Sustainable Healthcare Workshop
When: Mon, Feb 27th from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Where: Li Ka Shing Building, 291 Campus Drive, Palo Alto, CA 94305
The Stanford Medical Center has an ambitious goal: cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030. Achieving this demands committed and strategic collaboration among the hospitals, School of Medicine, and School of Sustainability. Acting as a “living lab” and building on strengths in research, education and community engagement, Stanford can lead the charge for health sector sustainability and climate action. Workshop participants will explore research targets, identify funding opportunities, and build teams around specific initiatives. In addition, the workshop will create mechanisms for effective partnership going forward.
🌎 The Great Displacement with Jake Bittle
When: Mon, Feb 27th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: Napa County Library, 580 Coombs St., Napa, CA 94559
Join us Monday, February 27, 2023 at 6:00pm at the Napa County Library for an evening with author Jake Bittle as we discuss his new book The Great Displacement. The untold story of climate migration — the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.
🍀 Charm Industrial Happy Hour with WCS
When: Tue, Feb 28th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: 2575 Marin St, San Francisco, CA 94124
Join Women in Cleantech and Sustainability at Charm Industrial’s HQ. Charm will be providing tours of their Minifactory including their mobile carbon removal machine and also host a happy hour for our group.
🔌 Building Electrification Happy Hour
When: Wed, Mar 1st from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Where: Southern Pacific Brewing, 620 Treat Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110
Hello friends! Have you ever tried to electrify and retrofit your home and faced challenges? Are you curious as to how we will switch from gas to electricity in the homes? When do you really need to upgrade your panel? Did you get really engrossed in the Twitter fight on gas vs. electric cookstoves? Then this is the Happy Hour for you! Home retrofits have been on our minds and we wanted to come together to exchange ideas. We welcome homeowners, solution providers, installers, experts and anyone curious about building and home electrification…. See you soon!
⛏ Architectures of Extraction: A Just Transition Dialogue
When: Thu, Mar 2nd from 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Where: California College of the Arts, 450 Irwin Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
Join us for a lecture and dialogue between Bz Zhang, Ratha Lai, and Shreya Shankar, who each bring stories of building and unbuilding, using tools of architecture and organizing in service of climate justice movements, particularly from the vantage point of the five refineries in the Bay Area as sites of extraction and resistance. While acts of settlement and extraction are necessarily sited and embodied violences (pipelines through ancestral sites, refineries along beaches, wells opposite windows, chemicals in lungs), the extents of their impacts transcend borders, creating transnational frontlines, connected through global struggles for land, air, and water sovereignty. Meanwhile, the scales, forms, and boundaries of these sites are often intentionally obscured and thus difficult to dismantle. Using Richmond and California as focal points in a planetary network of petrochemical urbanisms, this conversation aspires to unveil past and present representations of urban sites of extraction, the role of architecture's complicity, and possible futures — including possible future design practices — as informed by contemporary climate justice movements.
Join the Fun!
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Share Your Ideas
We're excited to grow the Climate Tech community in cities across the globe! What started as an 8-person mid-pandemic outdoor dinner has since morphed into a 4,000+ strong and ever-growing group of rockstars trying to change the world. We aim to be a community resource - built for and by our community. Share your thoughts!