5 climate tech innovations to cheer up your week
Hello everyone 👋
Here are 5 innovations in less-than-3-minute videos that you have missed this week!
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1. She found a way to stop paying for the water to grow crops. Steal her idea
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The math on rainwater harvesting is more serious than most people realize.
The basic equation: 1 millimeter of rain on 1 square meter of roof equals 1 liter of collected water. That's not an approximation — it's the geometric definition of a millimeter of precipitation depth.
A typical 100 square meter roof in a region receiving 800 millimeters of annual rainfall delivers a theoretical maximum of 80,000 liters per year. After realistic losses for evaporation, first-flush diversion, and system inefficiency, you keep 60 to 75 percent of that. Metal roofs perform best at 90 to 95 percent runoff. Concrete tile drops to 60 to 90. Thatched roofs are around 20.
For a household, that captured volume is enough to cover roughly 40 to 50 percent of total water demand if used for non-potable applications — toilet flushing, laundry, irrigation. Payback periods on residential systems typically run 3 to 8 years depending on local water tariffs and system size.
The honest stress-tests:
Rainfall is seasonal. Most regions have rainfall peaks that don't align with water demand peaks, which is why storage sizing — not collection — is the actual engineering problem. Tanks need to bridge dry months.
Regulations are inconsistent. Rainwater harvesting is incentivized in some jurisdictions and restricted in others, often for water rights reasons that have nothing to do with technical feasibility.
And rainwater isn't drinkable without treatment. UV sterilization or filtration is required for potable use.
What this is, structurally: a residential-scale water storage system that competes economically with municipal supply in most regions with reasonable rainfall. Not a survivalist gimmick — a serious infrastructure choice for buildings designed today.
The cheapest version is a barrel under a downspout. The most efficient is an underground cistern with first-flush diversion and gravity-fed distribution. The decision is about scale, not technology.
📹 Credit: plantsandgardeningideas
2. French TELEVISION GAVE THE BEST EXPLANATION during live TV of how we will use QUANTUM in the future
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France is winning a tech race the US dominates everywhere else.
A classical computer solves a maze by trying one path at a time. A quantum computer explores all paths at once — not by being faster, but by exploiting superposition, where a bit holds multiple states until measured. That's the mechanism.
Here's why France matters in this race.
Most countries made one bet on hardware. The US chose superconducting qubits — IBM, Google. France funded five different architectures in parallel through its €500 million PROQCIMA program.
Pasqal uses neutral atoms held by lasers — just announced going public at a $2 billion valuation. Quandela uses photons, operating at room temperature with no cryogenic cooling — their 12-qubit system Lucy was delivered to France's CEA national supercomputing facility in October 2025. Alice & Bob built cat qubits, designed to suppress errors at the hardware level — claiming 100 logical qubits from just 1,500 physical, an unusually efficient ratio. Quobly is in production at STMicroelectronics. C12 is doing carbon nanotubes.
The program is structured as a competition. After four years, only three survive. After eight, only two.
The honest framing: quantum isn't delivering yet. Fault-tolerant systems are a 2030 target. What's being built now is industrial positioning — whoever owns the quantum infrastructure of the next decade owns the simulation capacity that will shape semiconductor design, cryptography, drug discovery, and eventually energy materials.
France is positioning to be in that conversation. Not as a buyer.
📹 Credit: TF1 / Journal de 20h, infographics by Vincent Brossard
3. This bioplastic actually composts. Cosmetics brands are buying it.
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Most “biodegradable plastics” don’t biodegrade. They fragment. They need industrial composting facilities at 60°C. Throw them in soil and they sit there.
Vivomer is different — and the difference matters mechanically.
It’s a polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA. Same family of compounds bacteria have been producing for billions of years as energy storage. Shellworks ferments microbes on second-generation feedstocks like used cooking oil, lets the bacteria produce the polymer inside their cells, then extracts and processes it into a workable material.
The performance claims: dishwasher-safe, shower-safe, stable on retail shelves for over three years, FDA and EU food-contact certified. They’ve run stability tests across 400 formulations.
The end-of-life claim is what makes it interesting: home-compostable. Marine-degradable. No microplastic residue. The material returns to elemental compounds because it was never synthetic to begin with — it’s just a biological molecule that bacteria recognize as food.
The honest stress-tests:
Cost is still the bottleneck. PHA fermentation is more expensive than petrochemical synthesis, and Shellworks just raised $15 million Series A specifically to scale production. They’re operating at around 5 million units annually — versus the trillions of plastic units produced globally each year.
Use cases are limited. Vivomer is currently opaque, which rules out clear bottle applications. It’s being adopted in cosmetics and personal care — Wild deodorant at Tesco and Target, Phil’s at Whole Foods — not in the high-volume food packaging that drives most plastic pollution.
And “compatible with existing manufacturing” is the strongest claim with the weakest public evidence. PHA processing has different temperature and handling requirements than PET. How seamlessly it integrates into existing factories at scale is still being proven.
The thesis is right: longevity is the actual problem with plastic, not plastic itself. A material that performs like plastic in use and disappears completely afterward is the right design target.
📹 Credit: Abhishek Agrawal
4. They've pulled 1,260,000 kilograms of plastic from rivers. Help them do 1 million more.
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Quick note on something I rarely do here.
I met one of the Sungai Watch founders. The work is real, and the model is sharper than most.
What they're doing, mechanically: low-tech floating barriers installed across rivers in Bali and East Java, designed to intercept plastic before it reaches the ocean. Fish pass through. The barriers withstand rainy-season floods that raise water levels by 3 meters or more. Each one costs a fraction of open-ocean cleanup infrastructure.
The numbers from their 2025 report:
— Over 300 barriers operating across Bali and Java
— 1.26 million kilograms of waste recovered from rivers in 2025 alone
— A 17.6% year-over-year increase, with East Java jumping 53.8%
— 77-fold growth in barrier-captured waste since 2020
Why the model works: it's not just cleanup. It's three layers stacked. Barriers intercept the flow. Community programs reduce what enters rivers in the first place. Advocacy work pushes local governments toward decentralized waste management — the structural fix.
They're running 1,200 km from Bali to Java to raise $1 million. At their current cost-per-kilogram of waste recovered, that funding has a defensible return.
If you're looking for an environmental project where the unit economics actually hold up, this is one of them.
Run for Rivers — https://runforrivers.sungaiwatch.com/
📹 Credit: Sungai Watch / Make A Change World
Disclosure: I'm not affiliated. I'm posting this because I met the team and the work checks out.
5. He turned cow manure into clean fuel. It works.
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Manure briquettes look like something you'd throw away. That's exactly the point.
The process is straightforward: animal dung mixed with agricultural waste — straw, dry grass, crop residues — compressed into blocks, then sun-dried. Biomass briquettes burn longer, make transportation easier, and compared to fossil fuels produce low net greenhouse gas emissions because the carbon they release was already part of the biological cycle.
The combustion performance is what surprises most people. Biomass briquettes show higher calorific value and significantly lower CO₂ and SOₓ emissions compared to kerosene, while also reducing particulate matter relative to firewood.
Briquettes have lower ash content than coal — 2 to 10% versus 20 to 40% — and combust more efficiently.
The market context matters too. In Cameroon, fuelwood represents 72% of total energy consumption, driving deforestation and desertification. Briquettes made from farm waste don't require cutting a single tree. In the African Great Lakes region, NGOs have been scaling briquette entrepreneurship across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania — creating local manufacturing jobs from a waste stream that previously had no value.
The business model is simple: the raw material is free, the production is low-tech, and the demand is structural. Cooking fuel isn't a luxury — it's a daily necessity for billions of people with no grid access.
Waste into fuel. Farm residue into energy independence. The chemistry was always there.
📹 Credit: unknown
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🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good
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