From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers
A story of climate change and gender equity
Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽
From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers
Quiz Time!
Startup of the Week: Blade-Made
5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered
3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week
From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers
India produces 30 million tonnes of salt each year. 80% of it comes from the salt flats in the western state of Gujarat. The industry informally employs women to run this.
There are around 40000 women salt farmers, who use highly polluting diesel generators to pump brine to the surface from underground reservoirs.
Now diesel is expensive and polluting. In the 8 months of the year when they harvest salt, each woman uses approximately 1300 litres of diesel. This costs them 60% of their salaries, too.
A project led by Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has replaced 7000 of these diesel generators with solar panels. SEWA is India’s largest union of poor women working in the informal sector.
These women not only use this solar power, but under a cooperative, they maintain it and even sell the extra power generated in the off-season (4 months) back to the grid.
The result:
Their incomes have gone up by 600%.
It saves 18900 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.
⌛ Time for the quiz of the week
Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉
✨ Startup of the Week: Blade-Made
Wind energy generation is on the rise. And that’s good news since we are moving to cleaner energy. But it’s also causing another stream of problems.
2 years ago, I actually wrote an article on that: Can Wind Turbines be Recycled?
Now, wind turbine blades don’t last forever. They have to be replaced every 20-25 years. These blades are made of glass/carbon fiber reinforced plastics (GRP). And we haven’t really figured out how to recycle them.
So instead of tossing them in landfills, Blade-Made is reusing them.
It’s converting them into outdoor furniture, facades, playgrounds, shelters, and street signs
A viable solution that gives these blades a new life until we find viable recycling methods.
✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered
🇦🇺 Sea Forest: Makes a livestock feed additive using seaweed to slash livestock’s methane emissions.
🇫🇷 nextProtein: Insect-based protein for animal feed stocks.
🇪🇸 Voltrac: Automated electric tractor, built for hard work and harsher conditions.
🇿🇦 Plentify: Optimises home energy and load management.
🇩🇰 Nordic Salt Cycle: Recovers critical & strategic minerals with a low-cost, flexible & scalable molten salt process.
😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week
⛏️ No more digging…Contrary to its neighboring country, Brazil, Colombia has decided not to approve any new oil or large-scale mining projects in its Amazon biome, which covers 42% of the nation’s land. There were a total of 43 oil blocks and 286 mining requests.
🤝🏽 Sustainable promises…Seychelles’ president-elect, Patrick Herminie, who came to power in the Indian Ocean nation on 26 October, has halted the construction of a controversial Qatari-funded luxury resort on an environmentally sensitive island.
🌞 Roof them up… Starting in November 2025, a national law in South Korea requires all parking lots with more than 80 spaces to install solar canopies and carports. The law applies to new as well as existing parking lots.
Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)