KMX’s technology facilitates a separation and recovery of pure water, lithium and other rare earth minerals a from industrial brine and waste-streams at low temperature and pressure. By using its proprietary membrane distillation technology for mineral recovery and water separation, KMX's technology targets water scarcity and contamination and offers a new method of promoting clean water and wastewater treatment. In addition, separation of Lithium, which is a critical element for batteries used in electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies, as well as other rare earth minerals, through brine and waste is a far more sustainable approach than traditional lithium extraction methods which are energy-intensive and have negative community and environmental impacts.
- circular economy
- critical minerals
- industrial waste
- renewables
- water
Ecosia is a search engine that uses its profits to plant trees around the world. It functions similarly to other search engines, using Microsoft's Bing as a foundation, but distinguishes itself by allocating a significant portion of its ad revenue towards reforestation efforts. Users can support environmental initiatives simply by conducting web searches through Ecosia's platform.
- internet
- reforestation
- search
The Buy Nothing Project is a global network of hyper-local gift economies, founded in 2013. It uses a digital platform and mobile app to enable people to give away for free unwanted items and skills within local communities, fostering connections, circulating value, and reducing waste. The network transacts around 2.5 million gifts per month over 230,000 communities, 10 million neighbors with 13,000 volunteers.
- circular economy
- community
- localization
- mutual aid
The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit environmental engineering organization dedicated to developing and implementing technologies to extract plastic pollution from the oceans and rivers. For over ten years, The Ocean Cleanup has been researching, extracting, and monitoring plastic pollution in oceans and rivers globally – with millions of kilograms removed to date. Its technologies supporting ocean cleanup act as large-scale floating barriers, designed to concentrate plastic debris within a specific area for collection. They utilize ocean currents and wind to move through the water, gathering plastic along their path. The systems are also equipped with solar panels and wind turbines to power their operations. It also deploys floating barriers in rivers to intercenpt and prevent plastic from entering the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup also closely monitors and analyzes impacts, provides a dashboard and data insights, and is engaged in research on improving envrionmental impact analyses. The Ocean Cleanup aims to tackle plastic pollution in order to protect and restore marine and riverine environments and the wildlife they contain – as well as benefit the human communities living alongside these areas, and reliant on these ecosystems for their livelihoods.
- bioremediation
- conservation
- data
- nature tech
- oceans
- rivers
Matriark Foods is a social impact business that upcycles farm surplus and fresh-cut remnants into healthy, low sodium vegetable products for schools, hospitals, food banks and other foodservices. Matriark works with farmers and aggregators to make use of the vegetables that would otherwise go to waste, to instead provide nutritious food for people and reduce the environmental harms of food waste. They are using technology to manage their supply chains, inventory, sustainability tracking, and data analysis to underpin auditability of Upcycle Certified products.
- certifications
- circular economy
- food waste
- foodtech
- supply chain traceability
Earth Species Project is a non-profit research lab and impact organization focused on using artificial intelligence to advance our understanding of animal communication, and ultimately to decode non-human languages. The organization is founded on the belief that understanding non-human languages will transform how we perceive the world and our relationship with the rest of nature. Their work involves developing machine learning models to interpret animal sounds and movements. While "decoding" communications are a long-term objective, the ESP supports other organizations along the way by supplementing animal and ecological research; supporting existing conservation efforts; and contributing to the fields of ethology, bioacoustics, and machine learning by making their research public.
- animals
- artificial intelligence
- bioacoustics
- conservation
- ethology
Socialbnb is an online platform that allows people to book accommodations that support social and environmental projects around the world, and connect travelers with local communities in ways that directly support local economies and causes. Each overnight "Impact Stay" supports a social or ecological project and travelers can also book "Impact Trips," which are multi-day trips that combine socialbnb accommodations with activities. Socialbnb currently has 6 different types of projects: Nature conservation, animal welfare, education, health, equality or sports.
- digital platforms
- marketplaces
- rentals
- sharing economy
- travel
Regrow Ag's Agriculture Resilience Platform is a software program that helps stakeholders across the agricultural supply chain measure and improve their environmental impact and identify areas where adopting regenerative practices would be most beneficial. They use a combination of agronomic insights, satellite imagery, and scientifically validated crop and soil models to monitor and verify the implementation of these practices, enable auditability and transparency in value chains. Regrow serves more than 100 organizations who have collectively invested more than $19M to help farmers adopt regenerative practices. These actions will abate more than 600k tonnes of CO2e, equivalent to the carbon sequestered by 713k acres of U.S. forests in one year. The platform also aggregates agricultural systems data worldwide to garner new insights about resilient farming and expand practice adoption, and to support stakeholders like governments and academic institutions to inform agricultural policy, advance academic research, and implement innovative farm projects that expand the adoption of resilient practices.
- agricultural tech
- agtech
- artificial intelligence
- bioremediation
- conservation agriculture
- data
- satellites
Plastic Bank is a for-profit social enterprise whose model is designed to reduce plastic pollution and alleviate poverty in developing countries. It does this by establishing plastic collection centers where communities exchange plastic waste as currency for income and life-improving benefits such as income, zero-interest loans, education, or other social benefits. Exchanges are recorded through their proprietary blockchain-secured platform, enabling traceable collection, secured income, and verified reporting. The collected material is processed into Social Plastic® feedstock for reuse in products and packaging. The company re-invests the majority of its profits into collection benefits, development and maintenance of recycling infrastructure, and technology development for material traceability for a greater social, environmental, and economic impact.
- blockchain
- community
- credits
- digital platforms
- digital wallets
- fintech
- plastics
- pollution
The Indigenous Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Working Group is a program focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and Indigenous knowledge systems. The project’s interdisciplinary team of experts includes 37 co-investigators and collaborators who come from eight universities and 12 Indigenous community-based organizations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Most of the team members are Indigenous. They are motivated to expand the definition of intelligence by collaborating with Indigenous communities to integrate their knowledge systems with the AI research and development ecosystem to develop more integrated and practical approaches to building the next generation of A.I. systems.
- artificial intelligence
- indigenous peoples
- traditional ecological knowledge
Relier is a company tackling plastic waste in the produce industry through the upcycling of grapevine shoots. Relier's unique approach transforms discarded grapevine shoots into a sustainable biomaterial for packaging. This innovative material offers several benefits, including delaying fruit ripening, inhibiting microbial growth, and protecting produce during transport. Relier uses AI to analyze different recipe mixtures and percentages to obtain thermal, mechanical, and rheological behavioral to model the behavior of the clamshell, resulting in thousands of possibilities depending on the “how much” and “how” the components are mixed. Relier's biomaterial aims to be a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional plastic clamshell containers.
- agricultural tech
- artificial intelligence
- bioplastics
- bioremediation
- composting recycling
- data
- reduced food waste
ISeeChange empowers communities to tackle climate change impacts by integrating public input into infrastructure design and response management. Headquartered on America's Gulf Coast, ISeeChange prioritizes community, connection, integrity, equity, and insight, driving citizen science-based solutions. Residents contribute real-time observations of climate events like flooding and heat waves, which ISeeChange transforms into actionable insights using AI and sensor data. These insights enable cities, engineers, and utilities to prioritize infrastructure investments and design resilient solutions.
- artificial intelligence
- citizen science
- cloud
- data
- digital platforms
- edge computing
- marketplaces
- nature tech
