The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes for a sobering read: the world is not on track to limit global temperature increases to 1.5C. Secretary General of the UN António Guterres called it “a litany of broken climate promises”.
But is there room for optimism? Green tech start-ups, particularly in the UK, are tackling all sorts of issues, from helping people change their lifestyles to coming up with novel ways to capture carbon. In many ways, the private sector is taking the lead where governments are stalling.
Where to start?
According to the IPCC report, behavioural change has the potential to reduce global emissions by 40 to 70 per cent by 2050. Public awareness of the climate crisis is at an all-time high, but despite this many people are unsure where to start when it comes to changing their own lifestyles in support of the transition to a low carbon future.
This is where start-ups like Treepoints come in. The app offers customers a subscription service that allows them to calculate their carbon emissions and offset them with various projects, such as tree planting and recycling initiatives. So far, the company has raised £150,000 in a pre-seed round and won the support of Olympian brothers Alistair and Jonny Brownlee.
Gary Styles founded Zellar in September 2021 to do the same thing for businesses. The platform is designed to help the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses calculate their carbon footprints, come up with personalised action plans and suggest methods to cut costs through green initiatives and tech. So passionate is Gary about the project, that he put in £2 million of his own money towards developing the digital platform.
As more businesses look to measure their Scope 3 emissions – greenhouse gases produced by supply chains – demand for start-ups like Manchester’s Sourceful will soar. Sourceful helps businesses identify and slash the hidden carbon footprint in their packaging and supply chains. In March, it secured £15 million in a Series A funding round led by Index Ventures, the backers of Deliveroo and Just Eat.
Capturing carbon emissions
While some start-ups focus on how to measure carbon emissions – whether from individuals or businesses – others concentrate on how to capture them. For the first time, the IPCC highlighted the importance of carbon dioxide removal technologies in its report, arguing that they are essential to achieving net zero by 2050.
This not a green light to abandon efforts to reduce global carbon emissions, but it is an acknowledgment that technology is needed as part of the solution to the climate crisis. Nature’s carbon capturing method – trees – can only soak up 7.6 gigatons of CO2 each year. That is seven times less than global carbon emissions.
Carbon Clean Solutions, a London-based start-up, has gone from strength to strength in recent years and is now one of the leading industrial carbon capture companies. It builds small modular units for smokestacks and claims it can capture as much as 97 per cent of the CO2 from steel and cement factories, and power stations.
British start-up Deep Branch Biotechnology has found another way to deal with CO2: it has developed a process to convert it into protein for animal feeds using microbes. Last year, Deep Branch raised £6.8 million in a Series A investment round and in June of this year it secured £4.8 million from the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The company plans to launch its first commercial production unit in 2027. It anticipates it will be able to produce 600,000 tonnes of Proton, its single-cell protein, by 2030, using over one million tonnes of CO2 every year.
Companies like Carbon Clean Solutions and Deep Branch are undoubtedly making inroads, but carbon capture and storage technology has a long way to go. At the moment, only 40 megatons of CO2 is captured and stored globally every year. The International Energy Agency says that figure must rise to 1.7 gigatons by 2030 to achieve a net zero economy by 2050.
The small steps
Not all the UK’s eco-preneurs are tackling global issues like carbon capture. Some are starting closer to home, like mum Charlotte Morley, who was horrified by how much waste her children’s clothes produced. She set up The Little Loop and earlier this year pitched her idea for a kids wear subscription service to the ‘Dragon’s Den’. The ‘Dragons’ were impressed and two of them agreed to invest in the company, offering £140,000 for a 12.5 per cent stake each.
The clothing rental market is taking off in the UK, for adults and children alike. At the end of last year, HURR, which rents clothing, bags and accessories, raised £4 million in a seed funding round led by Octopus Ventures. Its website even has a calculator to show customers exactly how many trees they have saved or how many miles in a car they have avoided by using its service.
The UN has estimated that the fashion industry is responsible for about 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the planet’s third largest polluter. Eco-preneurs like Charlotte Morley may start small, but their innovative solutions are the ones that have the potential to pave the way for a greener and more sustainable future.
