Dr. Colin Averill is a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich’s Crowther Lab, where he and his team study the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts?

In this episode, we talk all about the economics of AMP’s robots, the trajectory Matanya took from being an academic roboticist to becoming a CEO, the role venture capital has played in the company, what mistakes along the way were made, whether he thinks robots will ever become sentient, and more.

In this interview with author Richard Munson, we discuss everything from how new tech can displace old jobs, why some environmentalists don’t seem that down with new tech that could benefit the environment, and what the future of food and ag may bring.

Footprint Co-founder and CEO Troy Swope leads world-class engineers, scientists, environmentalists and designers on a mission to create a healthier planet, with step one to provide sustainable alternatives to single-use plastics.

Katrina Spade is on a mission to offer a better way to deal with human corpses, and it involves a process called natural organic reduction. It’s essentially a fancy way of saying she’s invented a method of accelerated composting for your body. Rather than cremating your corpse, which involves substantial pollution, and rather than burial, which typically means sealing your body off from nature with concrete liners, hermetically sealed caskets, preservatives in your body, and more, Katrina wants to turn your body into healthy, rich soil, within just one month.

Radical Plastics is essentially asking the question: what if all that plastic lining our highways or floating in the ocean would actually biodegrade? That’s the promise of the technology that they’re pioneering. They’ve discovered a mineral concoction that when added during the manufacturing of conventional plastic—at even less than one percent—will eventually convert that plastic into food that microbes will recognize and eat.

Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink is Head of Product Impact at Google.org, where she leads initiatives that leverage emerging technologies and Google’s expertise to address global challenges. She is currently focused on how AI can be used for social impact through efforts like the $25M Google AI Impact Challenge.

Enter the Material Innovation Initiative, a relatively new nonprofit organization started by veterans of the animal welfare and animal-free food space. Their goal: to be the Good Food Institute of animal-free materials, helping to attract investment and entrepreneurial activity to build a new industry of animal-free fur, leather, silk, and more.

Mélanie Broyé-Engelkes is the CEO of Ananas Anam, makers of Piñatex. It’s a leather alternative that’s made from the leaves of the pineapple plant, which are typically considered an agricultural waste product. These upcycled leaves are converted into a functional and luxurious-feeling material that can be used for everything from shoes to handbags, and more.

Monica was born into the seafood industry, and for years has been running her family business, Van Cleve’s Seafood, from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. But as you’ll hear in this conversation, a series of events led her to start experimenting with plant-based seafood recipes. And while it’s no longer major news for conventional meat companies to develop plant-based lines since so many are admirably already now doing that, Monica announces in this episode something far more inspirational.

What if we could take a lot of trash and seed it with fungal cultures that would eat it and render it no longer toxic within just a few weeks rather than having to wait centuries? That’s exactly what Mycocycle is planning to do, and we’ve got their CEO, Joanne Rodriguez, on the show to talk about it.

David Breslauer is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Bolt Threads. He leads technology innovation at Bolt, creating and incubating biomaterials for improved consumer products. His obsession with biomaterials began with graduate research on silk during his Bioengineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

After successfully experimenting for months in their backyard with materials given to them by a refinery, Nick and Thomas went on to found their start-up, got accepted to the prestigious Techstars accelerator, won a quarter-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, have filed for provisional patents on their process, and have now raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors. In short, they’re ready to get to work.

One serial entrepreneur, Rich “Raz” Razgaitis, is trying to make plastic-free tap water cool again, and wants you to think of single-use plastic water bottles as if they were as socially unacceptable as cigarettes. And so far he’s raised $25 million in venture capital to wage his purified tap water crusade.

In many countries, walking down city streets vividly brings to life two serious problems: plastic pollution and poverty. While there are charities trying to address both of these concerns, serial entrepreneur David Katz in 2013 thought there was an opportunity to marry the two issues and build a profitable business out of it. The result: Plastic Bank.

Elizabeth Muller's company Deep Isolation has pioneered what she says is a safe method of storing nuclear waste deep underground—really deep. Elizabeth argues that such storage, which would still allow for the material to be recovered if desired, would keep ground dwelling earthlings like Homo sapiens and other living beings safe from our civilization’s nuclear waste for perhaps a million years, and she’s attracting venture capital from investors who’ve already pumped $14 million into her company.

Rodrigo Garcia Gonzales and Pierre Paslier began ordering ingredients off Amazon and Alibaba and tinkered away in their kitchen. With a rough prototype in hand, they decided they’d launch a Kickstarter to see if there was interest in a new company that would make alternative packaging from seaweed. The result: A million dollars poured in and Notpla became a reality.

Provenance Bio is now coming out of the shadows and is ready to start talking about its big plans to keep people wearing leather, but instead of it coming off the backs of cows, they’re leaving those cows out to pasture and making real leather, animal-free.

You know the story: there’s a bright college student who drops out of an Ivy League school to embark upon an entrepreneurial journey, founding his own company and building it into a major success along the way. No, we’re not talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates here. Instead, we’re talking about Tom Szaky, an immigrant whose family fled Hungary after the Chernobyl disaster, eventually sending him to Princeton, where he dropped out to launch his startup called TerraCycle. Their goal, as the company touts, is to make “recycling the unrecyclable not only feasible but desirable and profitable!”

There are few people who know more about climate change than Columbia University’s Graciela Chichilnisky. Not only did she propose and design the carbon credits trading system under the Kyoto Protocol, she also was a lead author of the 2007 report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby.