critical mineral

Notpla is eliminating waste by creating seaweed and plant-based alternatives to plastic packaging. Their solutions include a seaweed-based coating for takeaway packaging that has replaced 20 million plastic-lined containers. Notpla is also known for its edible liquid bubbles – 'Ooho'.

Apeel is a company that has come up with an innovative way to... See more

I guess the question really comes down to: is the pilot designed in such a way that you can scale it? Or rather, that it’s designed in such a way that the scaling is taken into account... To meaningfully scale circular business models, you need to redesign internal operations and customer experience for scale from the outset, and this will require... See more

Societally, and in business, we’ve become more comfortable with the notion of ‘failure’ in recent decades. Yet this hasn’t always been applied to circular economy innovation. Advocates may want to avoid highlighting the times when implementation didn’t play out as predicted, but in reality, all practitioners face a messy, incremental journey... See more

When sand is unearthed and shifted, its legal and economic status shifts too. Extracted as a cheap resource in one place, it is converted back into land and becomes naturalized as ground and territory in another. Milica Topalović has described this conversion as “alchemy.” Sand’s origin is not what matters, but rather its uptake: sovereignty over... See more

And, as a so-called “common pool resource,” sand is considered “free,” and therefore cheap to extract.

For instance, in 2018, a start-up named Finite gained attention for developing a biodegradable construction material based on desert sand. Meanwhile, the Singaporean government is experimenting with a construction material made from processed waste, called NEWSand. Nonetheless, the large-scale application of these alternative materials remains... See more

Not all sand is suitable for construction; only marine and river sand, with their angular grains formed by water movement, provide the necessary adhesion and stability for building mass and landfill. In contrast, desert sand is primarily shaped by wind, which leads to rounded grains with a hardened core, making it unsuitable for construction. This... See more

After water, sand is the second most used material in the world. Each year, approximately 40-50 billion metric tons of sand are consumed worldwide