Hello Alice, Sarah and Connor here!
What's in store this week?
- Vertical farming: the competitors, compared
- Pea milk and peaky prices — Vly Milk raises €6.1m
- How to choose carbon offsets
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\Top Five News Stories
📱 Refurbished gadgets. Back Market, a Paris-based online marketplace for refurbished products, has raised €276m in a Series D round. Chris O’Brien reports.
🌱 From COO to CSO. Oxford-based sustainable laundry startup Oxwash has appointed Tom de Wilton as chief sustainability officer. He was originally the company’s chief operating officer. What does a sustainability C-suite actually do? We covered it here.
🏠 Green homes. Tado°, a Munich-based startup which uses SaaS and IoT to create home climate management products for things like heating and air conditioning, raised €38m from real estate company Noventic.
❌ No more oil and gas. In its latest net zero report, the International Energy Agency says that energy groups must stop new oil and gas projects to reach net zero by 2050. The FT reports.
⚠️ Managing climate risk. Cervest, a London-based startup which uses AI to help businesses and governments make better decisions surrounding climate risks like flooding and fires, has raised a $30m Series A round led by Draper Esprit.
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\For Members Sustainability
Vertical farming startups, compared
Eight years ago, vertical farming startups were hard to come by. Now, dozens of them have popped up — and the market is projected to grow to $12.8bn by 2026.
These companies are on a mission to create a more sustainable, less land-guzzling and less seasonally-dependent food chain by growing crops on stacked trays indoors.
This could prove to be what the world needs soon, as billions more of us are expected to live in urban areas by 2050.
So which startups are in the running? Which markets — in and out of Europe — are they trying to win? And who's got the most money in the bank?
Connor Bilboe dives into the details.
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\A message from our sponsor ChangeNOW
From Marie Ekeland to Lubomila Jordanova, ChangeNOW’s online summit brings the opportunity to connect with sustainability innovators, CEOs, investors, policymakers and leaders.
Sign up to the event here.
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\News
Plant milk startup Vly Milk raises €6.1m
From oat to coconut, almond to hazelnut, an overwhelming variety of plant milks are now ubiquitous on grocery store shelves and in restaurants.
Now, Berlin-based startup Vly is bringing pea milk into the fray — and just raised €6.1m, after launching in Germany, Austria and Switzerland last year.
But at €2.50 a litre on average, plant milk is three times higher than cow's milk. Vly's cofounder Nicholas Hartmann is convinced that the price will come down though.
Freya Pratty finds out why.
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\Chart of the Week
Bad beef
A study from the journal Science found that per gram of protein, the impact of beef production is 113 times more harmful to the climate than peas. A handful of other meats pack a carbon punch as well.
There's an increasing push for more sustainable substitutes. In Europe, funding for alternative proteins increased by 178% from 2019 to 2020 (from €203m to €566m). One startup is even making alternative proteins out of air.
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\Reads and Resources
🥛 Milk wars. The plant-based milk market ($17bn) is worth a smidgen of the traditional dairy market ($650bn). But that's not stopping the old guard from feeling threatened. Here's a good read from the FT asking whether this is a fad — or a major structural change in the market.
♻️ How to talk trash with your neighbours. Grist explains how eco-conscious city dwellers can deal with neighbours who don’t recycle (without pissing them off).
🌍 Climate innovation. Plug and Play is hosting an online event next week on how corporate-startup collaborations can contribute to opportunities related to climate change.
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\How To
Choose carbon offsets
You’ve measured your carbon footprint, you have a plan to reduce it as much as possible, and now you want to offset the remainder. But how can you tell which offsetting projects are actually any good? Marco Magini, head of projects at carbon consultancy South Pole, has some tips.
Don’t just follow the trends. Tree planting and nature-based offsetting solutions are the “flavour of the month”, Magini says, partly because of how easy they are for startups to communicate to customers. “It’s true that trees will play a significant role in the fight against global warming,” he says. “But personally I think there are a lot of things [going] unseen. There was a piece in the Economist making the case for methane — and that made me so happy. [Methane-reducing projects] are a bit less intuitive and harder to communicate, but they are effective.”
Do your due diligence. There are a number of third-parties out there that vet carbon offsetting projects to make sure they do as they say. Magini says ICROA-approved projects are, in his view, the gold standard. “The ICROA ones are rigorously verified, where every emission reduction has its own unique serial number.” Carbon credits also come with vintages, referring to the year the emission reduction took place. Magini also says it’s important to invest in projects that are still active. “Projects that have ‘legacy’ credits are valid, but buying from a project that is live and generating emissions reductions today is more impactful.”
Price isn’t everything. Cheap is often seen as sketchy in the carbon offsetting world, but Magini says your offsetting provider should provide full transparency on why a project costs what it does. Price can sometimes come down to the efficiency of a project; carbon capture, for example, is expensive because it is currently not so efficient. “I don’t think price is the only factor that defines the impact of a project,” Magini adds. “You might also want to look at the different SDGs and quantify the impact this project has on the livelihood of the people involved. It’s a matrix of a lot of factors.”
Keep checking in. Your offsetting provider should also provide regular updates on the projects you have invested in. “These projects are very much alive, and things might change. If anything goes wrong — like there’s a fire, say — it’s our job to call the client and make them understand what’s going on,” Magini says. “These projects are not something that you buy credits for and walk away from.”
— Sarah
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\The Green Glossary
Carbon offset 'vintages'
Like wine? Sort of. The ‘vintage’ of a carbon offset refers to the year that the emission reduction took place. Every year carbon offset projects will go through an evaluation process to verify just how much carbon has been reduced, and that’s when its vintage will be determined.
So the older the better, right? Unlike wine, it’s often recommended that carbon offsets are purchased within two years of their vintage, because that normally means they're better quality and have a more direct link to carbon being removed from the atmosphere today.
What happens to those old credits? They normally end up getting heavily discounted, to try and make them more appealing to purchase. According to Bloomberg, old offsets can be up to 24% cheaper.
Where can I read more? The Conversation has an explainer on the problem of old carbon credits. YaleEnvironment360 argues that the system of ‘legacy’ credits should be scrapped.
Seen a sustainability term that's totally confused you — or want to have a go at explaining some often-misused jargon yourself? Let Sarah know.
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