The stories of the future Indian climate tech leaders
The Sustainability Mafia gathering 100 climate unicorns, recycling the un-recyclable and cooling without AC
Hola friends or should we say namaste? This time we got you a special issue dedicated to India. The world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases and probably the largest talent pool of our time. Not surprisingly, India is in the top 10 countries for climate tech investment, with the country's climate tech firms receiving $1 billion in venture capital funding between 2016 and 2021.
India, we are watching you! Lots of interesting things going on there!
Last week Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 climate summit that his country will reach net-zero by 2070.
The challenge for the world’s third-biggest emitter is figuring out how to finance the transition to net zero, which will require trillions of dollars of investment. India will increase its non-fossil fuel power capacity to 500 gigawatts by the end of the decade, he said, raising its goal from 450GW. Modi said half of India’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2030. …to deliver on the 2070 goal, the country still has to lay out a detailed plan for the 40 years in between.
Although the Prime Minister did not detail a plan for reaching net-zero emissions, India has already an army of climate driven entrepreneurs that are paving the way for that 2070 (or hopefully earlier) net-zero future. Here at Explorationists we have interviewed a small sample of this large community called Sustainability Mafia (SusMafia) to learn a bit more of what's going on in India and how entrepreneurs are unleashing innovation to implement climate action at scale.
Anirudh Gupta is the founder of the Sustainability Mafia, a community of entrepreneurs, industrialists and eco-builders bound together to work on climate change solutions and accelerate the large-scale adoption of sustainable practices. He is also one of the organizers of the next TEDx SusMafia: 100 Climate Unicorns, which will take place on November 13 and is gathering 100 potential Indian unicorns in the climate space. Aniruth is also the founder of Climes, a startup that offsets the carbon footprint of events and flights. In this special India series he’s featured along with Anish Malpany (Founder of Ashaya) and Madhusudhan Rao from Oorja.
The power of community and networks - Anirudh Gupta - The Sustainability Mafia
Anirudh defines himself as an idealist, a dreamer who wants to build a better, safer, wealthier planet for all of us. Anirudh was born in South India, moved to New Delhi, lived in a boarding school at the foothills of the Himalayas, moved to the US to study economics and political science at Berkeley, moved to Spain to work with Airbus and then went back to India.
It was when he returned to India that, led by curiosity, he tried to adopt sustainable practices like zero waste, water efficiency and solar systems at home. He managed to install solar panels at his place and he realized the power of sustainable solutions. Anirudh transformed his house into an off-grid solar powered place and that triggered a domino effect among his neighbors. Anirudh’s own sustainable curiosity allowed him to build a database of sustainable solutions providers across India.
A map of sustainable solutions across India
What once started as a Whatsapp group became the Sustainability Mafia (or SusMafia), a growing group of +65 startups pushing for climate friendly solutions to problems in India. The SusMafia gathers in the best video game style several important characters in the climate fight: the Mafiosos (sustainability entrepreneurs looking to multiply their impact through collaborations), Corporados (sustainability officers, or promoters/CEO of an Indian organisation looking to accelerate their company's climate & sustainability agenda) and finally the Soldatos (ecologically motivated people that want to be part of the SusMafia tribe). This formula is providing the SusMafia the opportunity to evolve into a marketplace where Mafiosos and Corporados bring their solutions, and in exchange the SusMafia brings them the demand (Soldatos).
The SusMafia is also organizing an annual TEDx event in India. The theme of the first TEDx SusMafia organized last year was Climate Discovery with the intention of enabling anyone to find out how to contribute to sustainability and thus figure out their own transition. This year, the call is to bring together hundred climate unicorns. In Anirudh’s words “It's our rallying call to action to build (competitive companies) well while you solve this crisis, because if you don't actually build a scalable company, your solution will never really be able to create the dent that it needs to...
…The 100 climate unicorns is designed to bring together babycorns, new companies that are just getting incubated climate, soonycorns, companies that are already on their way to become an unicorn and, existing unicorns that have already passed a billion dollar mark or, people and institutions that are bringing capital into climate unicorns, people who are scaling policy to enable the impact of climate unicorns or people bringing demand for the solutions provided by climate unicorns.
To Anirudh, those are the six pieces that are needed to create the right ecosystem for climate solutions startups to flourish, everything else is secondary.
Listen to the full conversation with Aniruth here:
Waste as a valuable resource in India - Anish Malpani - Babycorn: Ashaya
India has over 1.5 million waste pickers that live in very challenging conditions, generally they don’t have any contract, protective gear or health insurance. Their life expectancy can be as low as 39 years in contrast with the 69 years of the average Indian. They are generally of low caste, belong to minority groups, or are migrants. Waste picking tends to be a generational occupation, once you are a waste picker it is highly probable that your children will also end up being waste pickers.
About 81% of waste in India is left untreated and half of it ends up in landfills, that it’s literally a mountain of opportunities and a potential multi-billion dollar business. Some entrepreneurs like Anish Malpani from Ashaya have already realized this potential and are pushing to develop social impact startups that can improve both the quality of life of waste pickers and help with recycling.
Anish holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from University of Texas, he worked in Finance for 5 years in Texas and New York after which he decided to quit to pursue a more purposeful career. Anish took his own version of a MBA and he got way more for way less. For his hands-on “Custom MBA” Anish took off to Guatemala to focus on social entrepreneurship. In two years, Anish lived in three countries, worked closely with three organizations and over fifteen social entrepreneurs, learnt a new language, learnt how to code, earned board seats on two non-profits, built a deep, meaningful network with a plethora of people across borders. During that time he made great friendships while immersing himself in cultures inherently foreign, and most importantly, he learnt about the social impact space by living and working in the field. We could actually say that Anish went all-in and dived into it.
Since the beginning of his journey Anish had made it clear that he wanted to go back to India to develop a social impact startup. He came across the waste management space and really got attracted by waste pickers who live extremely poor lives, they not only own little money, but they also have a lower life expectancy.
81% of the waste in India is untreated and half of it ends up in a landfill. So I felt there's like a gold mine there or there's untapped value in this area
Anish: How could you increase the value of waste and use that to empower waste pickers? That's what got me to start Ashaya. In Ashaya we are trying to hit the waste problem from a multidimensional perspective, we were not focused on one thing. We're focused on the entire gamut of the waste problem, which is social, environmental, economical, and how to solve it at a decentralized inclusive cutting edge level.
In India, even 90% of PET bottles are recycled. To Anish, starting a PET recycling company wasn’t impactful enough because already 90% is taken care of. So he chose to focus on very hard to recycle plastics: metallicized multi-layered plastic (MLP) packaging, coloured plastic (PET) bottles and polycotton textile waste. Using LinkedIn, Anish managed to find the missing piece, he found a co-founder with a PhD in chemistry and the right tools to experiment and develop the recycling methods they needed. He described some of the challenges:
Only 14% of MLP plastic packaging is collected for recycling globally. 95% of plastic packaging material value is lost annually .Coloured plastic bottles (PET) are difficult to sort and contain toxic elements, making coloured PET less recyclable. This isn’t a large problem yet, but it might become a hard one soon. Whereas on Polycotton Textile Waste: 60% of clothing material is plastic and clothes are one of the largest producers of microplastics.
How does all that circle back to waste pickers? Well, the approach Ashaya is taking is starting small, scale it afterwards. They want to help a hundred waste pickers, going much deeper and getting them permanently out of this poverty so that they don't have to ever go back to waste picking, then they will scale the depth of the impact.
Anish: The idea is to extract as much margin as we can from the waste, because once you have margin, you can use it to impact in a way that would benefit the waste pickers. In the short term, we're going to ethically incorporate them into the supply chain, which means that we pay them a premium, we make sure we're not displacing them, trampling them, or doing any harm to them. That's the first step in the short run. In the long run, we want to work with them very closely, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Pune has this amazing organization called Swach Cooperative, which is basically a waste picker collective that organizes about 2,500 waste pickers. And they've been existing for 20 years. So we’ll make sure to work with them.
Going back to the technical side of things...
The downside (for the moment) for Ashaya is that they are very much at the lab scale. Ashaya is working right now at the scale of 10 grams to 100 grams, so it is a very small scale and they hope to go to one kilogram very soon. When you scale to bigger amounts, it's obviously more complex. Their idea is to throw everything in one single pot and then break the polymers of the plastics into their building blocks, then upcycle these constitute layers into a high quality material to produce a plastic filament for 3D printing and or other components that can be sold at a higher price than just raw plastic material.
We don't know if it's actually going to be viable. We want to go one step higher up the supply chain looking for vertical integration, and instead of selling the raw material, we sell a product like a filament; we are also thinking of something customized to your printed products, because the further up the supply chain, the more margin we'll be able to extract, but the more complex it gets.
Is it realistic in the short term?, too idealistic? How long is this research going to last?
Anish: We don't have 10 years of time. The way we look at it is that we have two benchmarks, two timeframes: There's a short timeframe and then a really, really long timeframe or our utopia, that we’re working towards within a 5, 10, 15, 20 year goal.
We believe in a decentralized solution where you have these material recycling recovery centers at the sub-district level, in all sub districts in India, processing all types of solid waste, not just plastic. There are many manufacturing units that generate revenue that can keep the recycling-repair center sustainable. Those would be supported by research cradles or R&D labs that innovate on really hard tech and then like a hub and spoke model, distribute that across. And, you know, we don't want to expect to do this ourselves, but working with the government, with other nonprofits and for-profits, so that's the utopia, that's what we're aiming for.
With regards to the short term, during the first two years of the gestation period, it’s extremely important that we anchor ourselves to our first benchmark on December 31st of this year which is getting the first (recycled) material in our hands.
We're also waiting on a customized machine that has taken three months to be built for us, which is going to come this month. It's a big extruder that we've ordered. So by December we think we’ll have a prototype of one or two materials. That's our first goal. Then next year we want to run two or three pilots, to prove that we can get the waste to produce the final product, and experiment with those, and find the product market fit. Are we selling filament? Are we selling front of products? At the end of next year, we want to have enough proof of concept to say ‘Hey, listen, we took this impossible shitty waste and made it into high quality
For now we've only gone to the one kilo scale, which is not very big, but it's hard. It's enough to get people to know, ‘okay, these guys have something’. Because 10 grams is too small and with a hundred kilograms it would be too expensive.
Then we’ll go to impact investors and say ‘we've figured this out from a tech perspective’. We think it could really work when you add the easy plastic and when you iterate and find easier ways to accomplish this it becomes even more interesting. So we're going to want to raise a big round that can hopefully help us build our first two material cradles. We also want to get synergies, so R&D labs can start working with these materials as fast as possible.
Looking forward to know more about Ashaya? Listen to the full interview here:
How to keep it cool and don’t contribute to GHG emissions? - Madhusudhan Rao - Soonicorn: Oorja
The sixth IPCC report titled ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ released on August, 2021 stated that heatwaves and humid heat stress will be more intense and frequent during the 21st century over India.
According to the IPCC report, the average temperature over India will rise by approximately 4.4 degrees Celsius relative to the recent past (1976–2005 average) between 2070 and 2099. This rise will increase the need for cooling in buildings which in most cases is achieved using air conditioners. the India Energy Outlook 2021 from the IEA expresses that India’s electricity demand is set to increase much more rapidly than its overall energy demand., the key contributor to this variability comes from rapid growth in ownership of air-conditioning units.
Madhusudhan Rao is the founder of Oorja, a company that provides energy efficiency, renewable cooling and heating solutions, mostly in the Indian market. He’s also a mechanical engineer by training and an entrepreneur for most of his working life.
Madhusudhan comes from a place in India, which has coal mines, too many power plants and industries. In his early days his main motivation was to help his hometown switch from coal mining to renewables, like solar, thermal. With time, that journey evolved over the years from just being focused on a solution for his hometown to addressing a larger problem: the gargantuan India’s cooling demand. This evolution took him about three to five years while understanding and devising solutions to the problem.
Extreme temperatures are not a big problem in India (yet), but in any projection whether it is by the International Energy Agency (IEA), or by the Indian government, India is going to be the largest consumer of energy for cooling in the next coming few decades, by 2050 or so it will surpass China and the US.” And that is mainly because India is below the Tropic of Cancer so cooling loads are higher than in high latitude countries.
An apartment of a 100sqm in Paris would need probably about two tons maximum of cooling system air conditioner. The same 100sqm area in India typically would require anywhere from five to six tons of cooling because we have more heat and the way we build buildings with concrete.
Oorja is staying away from refrigeration based technologies, which pollute and deteriorate the quality of the air. Air conditioning recycles the air in one room, while lowering its temperature. What Oorja does is that they allow the heat coming in through the building walls ceiling and even the floor, in some cases, and then flushes it out from the source itself so that it doesn't come in, therefore you don't need as much air conditioning. This is a technique used before there was air conditioning or electricity a few hundred years ago.
Our aim is to flush the heat out of the building
The method is called Structure Cooling. The idea is basically to make water at ambient temperature flow inside the walls of buildings. So as long as heat is being flushed out, the temperature of the building can be brought down to Indian winters average temperatures, where there is no need to use air conditioning at all. The water is channeled by a network of pipes and a pump to flush the heat out. So anybody anywhere can potentially implement this on their own.
Oorja has applied structure cooling mostly in commercial offices, warehouses in the pharma industry, as well as in the e-commerce industry. They have also implemented this technology in educational institutions and dormitories.
In India, most of the buildings are yet to be built, whereas in developed countries, most of the buildings are already built. This is an advantage point for Oorja, because if most of the buildings are yet to be built, then why not get them right at the beginning instead of launching a program four years down the line to retrofit these buildings.
Madhusudhan adds: What are the risks for India? That we do not have a plan to transition from these high energy cooling systems, we haven’t even changed our building code. We need compliance rules for buildings in terms of energy conservation. There are multiple players in this space that are growing the market in their own ways.
Additionally we’re navigating some tailwinds, green rating agencies are educating customers and giving them incentives to go for it, policy makers are creating these policies, plans and creating these regulations that buildings have to comply with. Even funding agencies from the UN or world bank are funding newer ideas. So all this makes me very optimistic. Things will grow now. At what rate will it go? That may vary a little bit and not everything that is thought of may be a 100% success, but we are generally in that direction and that's a good direction.
A quick note to all the engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs: We should start taking risks. It's not a time for smaller incremental steps of 15, 20% savings. We have to encourage and implement technologies that can reduce these energy consumption significantly by more than 50%. We take a systems approach. To come up with solutions and take risks so that we all can, cut down on this energy and carbon consumption that we are currently doing and provide good solutions to India.
We should start taking risks. It's not a time for smaller incremental steps of 15, 20% savings.
Listen to the complete interview with Madhusudhan here:
If you want to send us an idea or a tip, a #ClimateTech company that we should have a look at, or if you have any questions, please reach us at: davidcongeof@gmail.com or arraiz.p.daniel@gmail.com.
Some of the music we’ve been listening: