Now in its sixth year, Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards recognize
companies and organizations addressing the world’s most complex problems through
technology, science, design, finance, education and philanthropy. A panel of
Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool
of nearly 3,000 entries from across the globe and fields such as
transportation, education, food, politics, technology, health, social justice
and more.
Of the 39 winners for 2022, here are some of our favorites.
Food
-
A system that tracks the freshness of your groceries
– It’s well-documented that in the US alone, we annually waste 30-40
percent of our food supply — or 133
billion pounds of food. To prevent your groceries from turning into trash,
a group of students at UC Berkeley designed a
system
that tracks the food you buy based on your grocery receipts and alerts you
when your perishables are close to expiring via ambient, glowing tiles you
can stick right on your fridge or kitchen wall. EIDOS
comes with an accompanying app that also shares recipe suggestions for your
soon-to-spoil ingredients. Restaurants and grocery stores often have
programs to compost or donate their unused
food,
and brands
are working to educate consumers to prevent home food waste; but being
reminded about soon-to-spoil food could be a game-changer for many home
cooks. While still just a student project, its potential for impact is
undeniable.
-
Animal-free whey
protein
– A host of food-tech startups are now taking their turn creating
animal-free food and beverage
offerings.
But Berkeley-based Perfect Day was the first to
use precision fermentation to make dairy protein identical to the protein
cows make, without animals — a key step to helping products such as vegan
cheeses melt correctly and have a characteristically cheesy texture. The
startup makes animal-free ingredients for other food companies and a line of
its own products, from ice
cream
to cream cheese to protein powder. By programming microbes with the DNA to
produce dairy protein instead of raising cows on a farm, the environmental
footprint of the ingredient shrinks: In a lifecycle assessment last year,
the company calculated that its animal-free whey protein reduced energy
consumption by up to 60 percent, cut emissions by as much as 97 percent, and
reduced water use by up to 99 percent compared to whey from dairy.
-
Impossible
Pork
– While a number of the aforementioned food-tech startups have slashing the
environmental impacts of beef and dairy production well in hand (and
Impossible Foods
has also contributed to that
effort),
pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world — so, if a plant-based pork
can begin to replace the pig-based version (as Impossible Pork has proven
it
can),
think of the continued impacts.
Buildings, construction, energy & utilities
-
A light powered by
seawater
— Colombian renewables startup
Edina enlisted creative agency
Wunderman Thompson and the Waayu people indigenous to northern
Colombia to help design the WaterLight – a sustainable lighting solution for
the estimated 759 million people in communities around the world (many of
them coastal) without reliable access to electricity. Inside the portable
device, saltwater sparks an ionization reaction — producing enough
electrical energy to generate light and charge phones and radios. Just half
a liter of saltwater can produce 45 days of electricity.
-
Lay’s Factory Home Heating
– when Belgian real-estate developer Ion was looking for sustainable
heating alternatives for a new residential area in the city of Veurne,
PepsiCo suggested a
collaboration between the community and its nearby Lay’s potato chip
plant. The vapor from cooking up to 20 tons of potatoes per hour could heat
a water circuit, replacing natural gas with a more environmentally efficient
process while simultaneously providing PepsiCo with a valuable carbon
offset. The project — whose technology is replicable — aims to deliver
heating in radiators and tap water to its first homes sometime in the first
half of 2022, topping out at 500 households upon the project’s completion in
the next 10 years.
-
Ford’s F-150 Lightning,
an electric version of the best-selling vehicle in the US, can not only haul
heavy loads just like the classic pick-up — it can also accelerate faster
than a gas truck, and can power construction equipment and even your home.
-
GAF Energy’s solar shingles
— The new solar shingles from GAF Energy — a spin-off of
GAF,
the world’s largest roofing company — can be nailed directly to the roof
like ordinary shingles. Since the roofing industry is 20 times larger than
the solar industry, the company hopes the shingles can speed up the switch
to renewables through its vast network of roofers.
-
BlocPower
uses software to model almost every building in the country, with details on
their energy use. Then, it can create a custom plan to decarbonize each one.
-
ClimateScout — While prospective home buyers can now assess their potential purchases for
climate risks, thanks to Redfin’s ClimateCheck
feature,
figuring out how to design climate-resilient homes from the start also
involves understanding the local climate: A building in Maine uses
different strategies than one in Arizona. An open-source tool called
ClimateScout helps architects
quickly identify potential features to include in a design, from green roofs
to thermal storage walls designed to capture heat from sunlight.
Materials & chemicals
-
3D-printed wood, made from sawdust waste — In the US alone, nearly 100 million tons of sawdust is generated each
year, equivalent to 30-40 million trees. Much of that sawdust is either
incinerated or sent to landfills. Massachusetts-based startup
Forust’s six-foot-long 3D printer churns out wood
products that look indistinguishable from cut wood, built layer by layer
from sawdust that otherwise would have been wasted — and it’s able to
recreate the wood grain of any species. Since sawdust is widely available
everywhere, the printers could be used anywhere and help eliminate existing
supply chain challenges for wood.
-
'Wood' made from rice
waste — speaking of wood alternatives … In a typical lumber mill, logs are cut
down into pieces of lumber, then sawed and planed into smooth boards for use
as flooring or cabinetry. But at Mississippi’s Modern Mill, workers
don’t fell trees to make their boards. Instead of logs, Modern Mill uses
rice hulls, a waste product from food production, to make what the company
calls Acre — an upcycled, tree-free
building material.
-
Nature's answer to toxic industrial
cleaners — A startling fact: Industrial chemicals, including known carcinogens, now
show up everywhere from the deep ocean to breast
milk.
Sudoc — a startup that spun out of research by
Carnegie Mellon chemists — is working to create safe chemicals for heavy
cleaning that outperform their conventional, toxic counterparts. The
technology is based on
biomimicry,
taking inspiration from an enzyme in the liver that “supercharges hydrogen
peroxide to essentially tackle micro-pollutants.” The company’s first
product tackles mold remediation, which they claim uses one-eighth the
amount of chemicals but outperforms conventional products.
Electronics
-
IBM says its new, 2-nanometer
chip
will likely raise performance across all the gadgets that use it —
including cellphones, tablets, Xboxes, etc — while also making them smaller
and allowing for impressive new features. The company forecasts an average
45 percent increase in product performance — which could allow us to charge
cellphones once every four days rather than daily — while making electronics
cheaper, because smaller means less expensive to produce. Another benefit of
the 2-nm chip is a potential 75 percent reduction in energy consumption,
according to IBM, because powering a smaller device requires less energy.
IBM predicts that, if every data center in the world switched to the 2nm
chips, while maintaining the same capacities, the energy savings could power
more than 43 million homes for a year.
A seat at the table
-
The world's first net-zero pension
plan
— Companies in the UK that offer workplace pension plans to employees
are now required to auto-enroll
employees;
workers previously had to opt in. Whereas an average pension in the UK (and
likely in many other countries) finances 23 tonnes of carbon
emissions annually, about
equivalent to running nine family cars per year. Cushon now offers what
it claims is the world’s first net-zero
pension — comprising a fund
whose portfolio of businesses emit the least carbon. Because companies
across industries are in the middle of transitioning to meet the UK’s net
zero-by-2050
goals,
Cushon knows sustainable investing alone won’t get us to net zero; so, after
limiting emissions as much as possible with its sustainably designed pension
portfolio, the company pays to offset the outstanding carbon.
-
Involving the community in the redevelopment process
— Public housing complexes across the US are collectively staring down a
more than $70 billion backlog in repairs, a staggering figure that
jurisdictions simply don’t have the funds to pay. Cast in point: the New
York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which in recent years became the
target of a federal
probe
over its failure to provide tenants with “decent, safe, and sanitary”
housing. If/when the necessary repairs are ever undertaken, residents tend
to be ignored during the redevelopment process. But Manhattan’s Chelsea
Working Group, a first for the NYCHA (and likely a pioneering initiative in most cities), let residents shape a redevelopment
plan that would best reflect the community’s needs — the only time in
NYCHA’s history that
public housing residents were materially involved in construction plans for
their homes.
See the rest of Fast Company's 2022 World-Changing Ideas
here.
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published May 4, 2022 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST