If you’ve ever shopped for an avocado, you would know how hard it is to find the right one. One which is perfectly ripe.

One that you can scoop and eat the next day.

If you’ve faced this, you’re not alone!

Even the farmers and distributors often don’t know how ripe avocados are.

And as a result, tons of avocados end up in the trash!

To solve this problem, food tech startup OneThird has built a scanner that can tell how ripe the avocado is. 🥑

To do so, it looks at the spectral fingerprints of the avocado and compares them to their past data in the database.

The technology can be adapted for other produce as well. The startup takes its name from 1/3rd of the food that is wasted on our planet

Have a look at their quick demo-

Moving onto this week’s content. So today, we have👇🏽

• A startup that’s transforming waste, one portable toilet at a time

• Another startup that’s tackling the hidden emissions behind cloud computing

• Some good news

• Stat of the week

💩 Transforming waste, one portable toilet at a time

The beginning…On their numerous mountaineering expeditions around the world, the team at Wasted got exposed to the human waste crisis. They saw how untreated human waste flowed from the pits to the natural environment. They also realized that our waste carries nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium(NPK) that we also need to grow food. But we cannot use them because we pee and poop at the same time (only land animals to do so), making it difficult to separate and use these nutrients.

Web3 for sanitization…Wasted has decided to build a decentralized sanitation infrastructure that ensures that these nutrients(NPK) are not lost. And they are starting this by transforming the portable sanitization industry aka porta potties. Their reimagined porta potties contain bamboo toilet paper, waste diversion technology, and ventilation for airflow.

• Their technology separates the solid and liquid waste streams at the drop point. This preserves the nutrients and makes them usable.

• They are then taken to a processing center, where nutrients are recovered and they are converted into fertilizers.

• This reduces GHG emissions and also, reduces the dependency of farmers on imported, synthetic chemical inputs.

Let’s test this first…Wasted is treating porta potties as their Minimum Viable Product(MVP). This would help them build relationships with contractors and developers that construct fixed toilets and gain trust for their decentralized wastewater treatment technology. Once proven, they would build millions of decentralized processing hubs and use electric vehicles to move waste between different points.

💻 Helping businesses reduce their cloud emissions

Out of sight, out of mind…The Zoom calls you attend, the Netflix content you watch and the files you store in GDrive, are creating data. Thanks to cloud-based technologies, you don’t have to worry about storing this data. The same goes for businesses. They are moving data-intensive jobs away from on-site servers to cloud-based ones like Amazon(AWS), Microsoft(Azure) and Google (Cloud). These companies store this data in data centers around the world. Energy is required to run and maintain them. Since there is energy involved, there are GHG emissions.

And these emissions are set to grow… By 2025, 49% of the world’s stored data will be in the public cloud. But no one is, unfortunately, talking about these emissions. Businesses are not worried because it doesn’t come under their direct emissions and cloud computing companies have not been very transparent about them. Greenpixie is on a mission to prevent millions of tonnes of CO2 from being emitted by helping businesses monitor their carbon emissions within cloud computing.

• Their product pulls usage data from major cloud providers and calculates estimated energy and GHG emissions.

• These are expressed in terms of CO2 equivalent.

• Apart from measuring and reporting, it also provides ways for companies to reduce their digital carbon.

Not only that… it also helps companies save costs. It’s estimated that on average, a business wastes between 30-40% of its cloud resources. The solution works with AWS right now and would soon be compatible with Azure and Google Cloud.

😹 Some Good News

🚆 On Track- Oslo to have fully electric public transportation by the end of 2023

🛑 The End- Danske Bank quits new fossil fuel financing

🌳 Hope- Lab-grown alternatives aim to cut palm oil dependence

✈️ Countries with the highest CO2 emission from aviation

🔦Can I help you?

If you’re a brand that has planet Earth as a stakeholder, here are a few ways in which I can help you-

1. Shine a spotlight on your brand in the newsletter and in a LinkedIn post (I post there every day). It’s completely FREE!

2. Write newsletters, blogs and articles for your brand

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Thanks for reading today’s edition. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to write to me by replying to this email.

Have a great weekend and see you next week😊