GigaOM » waste management

Garbage in, data out: Enevo gets funding for its smart waste services

David Meyer — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:34:58 +0000

The internet of things — the scenario where everyday items are equipped with sensors and pumping out data — still feels largely theoretical. However, it’s bleeding into reality, often in rather prosaic ways. And you don’t get much more prosaic than garbage collection.

One interesting company dabbling in this field, Helsinki-based Enevo, just picked up €2 million ($2.6 million) in funding from Finnish Industry Investment and Lifeline Ventures. The money will be used to help Enevo push its cleantech services across Europe and into North America.

Enevo isn’t the only company working on smarter waste management, but rivals (such as BigBelly) are largely trying to sell more intelligent bins. Enevo, on the other hand, is a services firm that provides sensor units to waste management companies for free. The unit (pictured in the hands of CEO Fredrik Kekäläinen) measures variables such as volume and temperature within the bin, then sends the data back to Enevo via GPRS. The company then uses that data to dynamically optimize collection intervals and routes for its customers.

The intended result? Fewer overflowing bins and fewer pointless journeys to empty bins that are barely full. In the trillion-dollar industry that is waste management (according to Lifeline), that adds up to a pretty big deal. According to Kekäläinen, Enevo’s existing 10-or-so customers are already saving 30 percent on direct waste logistics costs.

Kekäläinen told me on Wednesday that Enevo has started mass production of its sensor units (using a Finnish manufacturer “to make sure it’s really high quality”) and is recruiting salespeople across Europe. The company has deals with municipalities across Scandinavia and is setting up a pilot project in Canada. It’s also in talks with the big bin manufacturers to try get the sensor units integrated into their products.

All in all, it’s a simple idea that can produce tangible results – cost savings for firms and greater efficiency and environment-friendliness for communities. As such, it’s a pretty good example of what we’re hoping to see come out of the much-hyped internet of things.

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An emerging source of clean power in India: city waste

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:49:52 +0000

An Indian company which plans to build a power plant that runs on city waste will aim for a $200 million IPO next month, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company is called Ramky Enviro Engineers, and it’s backed by the private equity arm of Standard Chartered.

India asks its carbon-intensive industries — like power generation and mining — to get 10 percent of their yearly energy quotient from clean sources. The regulations currently aren’t widely heeded, but the Executive Director of Ramky Enviro Engineers, Goutham Reddy, tells Bloomberg that he thinks that the government will soon get much more strict about environmental regulations.

The growing amount of waste in India can be a valuable resource. India has a population of 1.2 billion and an increasing amount of those people are living in cities. India’s cities now generate 55 million tons of solid waste and 38 billion liters of sewage per year, according to consulting firm Energy Alternatives India and cited by Bloomberg.

The waste per capita is also rising in India as GDP grows. The rapidly growing Indian middle class will soon want to consume similar amounts of power to the U.S. and Europe, and that will require a massive power infrastructure build out in the country. India plans to add 100 GW of power generation over the next several years, and that will be made up by mostly coal and clean power.

The Indian government is infamous for setting lofty goals and then coming up quite short of those numbers. “Aspirational goals” is what many call them. For example, the Indian government has a top-down plan to deliver 20 GW of solar across the country by 2020. We detailed some of the realities of the growing pains of the Indian solar market here.

If Ramky Enviro Engineers raises the funds it wants in an IPO, it will spend close to $100 million on a 48 MW waste to energy plant in Hyderabad. The company is already profitable off of its waste management business. U.S.-based Waste Management has also been interested in waste to power plants.

Waste to power plants are still rare in India. They are more common on European countries like Germany. Agnion Energy is a German startup that has developed a gasification process that can turn trash into energy.

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Waste Management bets on turning trash into sugars

Ucilia Wang — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:01:05 +0000

Waste Management has been a particularly active venture capital investor in the trash-to-energy space, and that focus has prompted it to invest in Renmatix, which turns biomass, such as agricultural wastes, into sugars for making fuels and other chemicals.

Renmatix increased its most recent round of investment from $50 million to $75 million and now counts the trash hauling giant as both an investor and a research and development partner, reported VentureWire Wednesday. Waste Management wants to use Renmatix’s technology to convert trash into sugars to replace petroleum for making plastics and other products.

Pennsylvania-based Renmatix announced the $50 million round in January this year and noted that German chemical giant BASF put $30 million into that round. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also is an investor.

Sugar is a key ingredient for biofuels and other chemical products. Its market potential has attracted more investors in recent years mainly because the government is spending billions of dollars to build a market for alternative fuels. Early on, many biofuel producers had to figure out their own processes for breaking down the tough cell walls of plants and other biomass to make cellulosic sugars and then converting the sugars into fuels.

In fact, there were hardly any companies that focused only on making only cellulosic sugars back in 2008, when an investment banker told me thenthat producing those sugars alone could be a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors. By the way, these sugars aren’t the same stuff that sweetens coffee or powder donuts.

Other companies in the cellulosic sugar market include Virdia, which announced a $20 million venture capital investment from Khosla Ventures and others earlier this year and a package of $75 million in loans and up to $155 million in tax breaks from Mississippi to build a processing plant there.

Renmatix’s technology uses “supercritical hydrolysis” to produce sugars, a process the company says is cheaper and faster than some of the other technologies. The company has been running a demonstration plant in Georgia.

For Waste Management, Renmatix becomes one of a now long list of companies that it backs (check out our post about Waste Management’s investment strategy) so that it could find new and profitable uses for the trash it collects.

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Waste-to-fuel startup Enerkem withdraws its IPO, too

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:42:18 +0000

Waste to fuel startup Enerkem has withdrawn its IPO plans citing — what else — poor market conditions. The move is the third greentech IPO hopeful to cancel public market plans this month, following moves by gas farming startup Luca Technologies, and solar thermal company BrightSource Energy.

As I pointed out when Luca withdrew its IPO filing, the hope that there was a greentech IPO revival brewing is now officially debunked. An investor in BrightSource, DBL Investor’s Nancy Pfund, lamented in an op-ed this week the sad state of a society and marketplace that won’t allow a solar thermal to go public at the valuation it wants, but in the same week can support a large secondary offering from Dunkin’ Donuts.

Solar inverter company Enphase Energy was the only greentech company that had intended to go public in recent weeks, and which actually did. On May 30 the startup sold nearly 9 million shares at $6 a piece, raising about $54 million. The company is currently trading at $6.86 per share, slightly above its debut price.

Enerkem is a Canadian company, founded in 2000, that develops technology that turns waste into biofuel. The company has won federal government backing — a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA — and also counts giant trash hauler Waste Management, oil refiner Valero, Rho Ventures, Braemer Energy Ventures and the Westly Group as investors.

Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Enerkem has inked non-binding agreements with Waste Management and Valero to sell its equipment, and those deals give Enerkem the option to co-own refineries with Waste Management and Valero.

Since 2008, Enerkem has been running a pilot plant in Sherbrooks, Canada, that can process 4.8 metric tons of feedstock a day, and its demonstration plant, in Westbury, Canada, was built to produce 1.3 million gallons of fuels per year. The company is now building a commercial refinery, located in Edmonton, Canada, that will be able to make 10 million gallons per year. It expects to get ready for producing methanol at the Edmonton facility in the first quarter of 2013; ethanol production should follow in the second half of 2013, says the company.

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Vimeo debuts Focus Forward, a film series about the big ideas in tech

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:00:08 +0000

There’s no time like the present to be using technology to make something really big. Of course, a lot of people and companies are already doing just that — but unfortunately, they don’t always get the kind of wide exposure they deserve. That may be partly because the media coverage of such big-picture, highly technical projects is not as accessible and absorbing as it could be.

So it’s awesome that video sharing site Vimeo has joined forces with General Electric and video publisher Cinelan to launch “Focus Forward” – a micro documentary series that aims to showcase big, world-changing technology innovations in a compelling way. The project’s website describes its mission thusly:

“In the span of three minutes, these films will encompass everything from medical advances to economically viable ‘green’-powered homes to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries, not to mention innovations in transportation and healthcare, gene therapy and waste management, or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires them.”

In all, it’s a very cool mission. The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.

But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $200,000 in cash prizes, including a $100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. This is what Focus Forward says it’s looking for:

“We’re looking for professionally produced, three-minute end-to-end stories about people or organizations whose innovative efforts in medicine, computer science, robotics, engineering, green energy, or other fields of applied technical knowledge have had a significant positive impact on humanity. Recent, cutting-edge inventions that are changing how we live today are of special interest.”

With how inexpensive digital SLR cameras with video capabilities have become in recent years, and the huge amount of innovative tech projects out there, there is a lot of opportunity to create awesome films that fall into the Focus Forward mold. It’ll be exciting to see what people come up with.

Here’s a video explaining what the Focus Forward Film Challenge is all about:

Focus Forward – Short Films, Big Ideas: Filmmaker Challenge from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

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Genomatica files for IPO for making green chemicals

Ucilia Wang — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:35:44 +0000

Green chemical developer Genomatica has filed for an IPO, planning to raise up to $100 million, according to a filing on Wednesday. The company engineers processes to create chemicals from renewable sources that can be turned into a variety of products, from clothing to auto parts.

The IPO filing isn’t surprising considering the company’s chief executive, Christophe Schilling, has talked about turning to the public market to raise more money and biofuel makers have flocked to the public markets in the first half of 2011. The funding will likely go toward helping Genomatica reach commercialization of its technology.

According to the S-1 filing (often the first look at a company’s financials), Genomatica hasn’t generated revenues from the sale of its chemicals. Instead, revenues have largely come from payments from joint development agreements, software licensing to research institutions and government grants, the company said. The company also hasn’t made a profit and recorded $14 million in net losses on $726,000 in revenues for 2010.

IPO market open?

Genomatica is planning to go public at a time when the economy still feels shaky. The stock market has swung widely in recent weeks, and the green IPO market even seemed to have slammed shut for a while. Investors have been hoping 2011 would be a strong year for cleantech exits — in particular, IPOs. Companies that received funding more than five to seven years ago are maturing, and the venture capitalists that invested in them are eager to get returns out.

The IPO window appeared wide open in the first half of 2011. Biofuel maker Gevo started trading in February; Zipcar started trading in April, algae maker Solzayme started trading in May; and biofuel company KiOR started trading in June.

In addition, companies that have filed papers for IPOs (but not yet traded) include solar equipment developer Enphase Energy, smart grid tech company Silver Spring Networks, biodiesel producer Renewable Energy Group, and solar power plant developer BrightSource Energy. VentureWire reported that electric car company Fisker Automotive had also hired bankers to investigate the IPO process.

Greener chemicals

Genomatica engineers organisms that can turn sugar or synthesis gas into a variety of products, from chemicals for plastic to transportation fuels. The sugar or syngas can come from renewable sources such as plants and wood chips rather than crude oil or natural gas. Syngas also can be produced using trash, which accounts for why Waste Management decided to invest in Genomatica and a host of other startups.

Genomatic’s first product is 1,4-butanediol, or BDO, which is made from using sugar-eating E. coli. BDO can be used for making spandex, running shoes and plastic auto parts. The company began pilot production in Michigan last summer. Earlier this year, the company said it was able to demonstrate a larger-scale production of BDO in Illinois. The second product will be butadiene for making tires and latex products, the company said.

The San Diego company has raised $84.2 million in private equity since its inception in 1998, including a $45 million round announced in March of this year that came from investors including Waste Management, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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OPX Biotechnologies raising $45M for next-gen biofuels

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:15:37 +0000

Are the recent biofuel IPOs paving a path for newer biofuel firms to getting funding? Well, four-year-old OPX Biotechnologies, which uses genomics to make biofuel production more efficient and economic, is in the process of raising a $45 million round of equity, and has closed on $37 million of that funding, according to a filing.

The company made news recently by announcing a partnership with chemical giant Dow Chemical to turn sugar into a bio acrylic acid — the petroleum-based version of acrylic acid is used in plastics, paint products and diapers. When I interviewed the company a couple years ago, they explained the company’s innovation as a speedy full genome search and gene modification technology platform that is 1,000 to 5,000 times faster than conventional methods.

In conjunction with the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, which gives small grants to high-risk early-stage companies, OPX is also working on engineering a microorganism that makes biodiesel from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The DOE gave OPX $6 million for this research. Previous investors in OPX include Mohr Davidow Ventures.

A few other next-gen biofuel companies have been funded in recent months including CoolPlanetBiofuels, which attracted investment from Google and a consortium including GE, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips. Another one is Enerkem, which gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Enerkem gained funds from oil refiner Valero and trash king Waste Management.

While using bio feedstocks — like sugar, waste, energy crops — to power vehicles in large numbers is a long way off, so-called biofuel companies are now finding some success selling biochemicals. In addition to OPX and its bio acrylic acid, companies like Solzayme and Amyris are tackling bio chemicals first, before turning to fuel.

These smaller, but seemingly abundant, specialty chemical, cosmetic, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical markets are giving companies some of their first revenues and commercialization agreements. As a result, biofuel companies are some of the only ones that have waded into the public market in the greentech field, and companies that have gone public in recent months include KiOR, Gevo, Amyris and Solzayme.

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Waste Management Bets on German Trash Tech With Agnion

Ucilia Wang — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:11:12 +0000

We like trash technology — tech that can turn trash into something useful — and clearly, garbage giant Waste Management does, too. The serial corporate investor just added another one to its portfolio: Agnion Energy out of Germany.

Waste Management says it has made a “strategic investment” in Agnion, a bit of jargon that means Waste Management thinks one day it could use Agnion’s biomass-to-synthesis gas process to find a second life for the trash it collects. The Houston company isn’t divulging the size of the investment.

What does Agnion have to offer? It has invented its own gasification technology using something called the heatpipe-reformer design. A heatpipe is a bit of equipment that apparently can transfer heat efficiently into the gasification chamber to eviscerate biomass in a high temperature and turn it into syngas. Syngas, rich in hydrogen and carbon monoxide, can run combined heat and power generation equipment, or can be further processed to become a natural gas substitute or a liquid transportation fuel.

Syngas is quite popular among biofuel and chemical producers. Genomatica, which also counts Waste Management as an investor, is developing organisms that will consume syngas instead of sugar – sugar is the more expensive feedstock Genomatica currently uses – and turn the syngas into chemicals. Fulcrum BioEnergy has signed a 15-year deal to buy trash from Waste Management and use it for producing syngas and then fuel.

Agnion’s technology can produce syngas at a smaller scale that is suitable for locations such as universities, factories, hotels and hospitals, the company said. Founded in 2007, the company is currently building its first commercial gasification plant in Grassau, Germany. Agnion announced the plant construction last December, and Germany’s Ministry of the Environment is kicking in €850,000 ($1.21 million USD) to help fund the project. The startup also has received undisclosed investments from Kleiner Perkins, Munich Venture Partners and Wellington Partners.

Waste Management has been a keen investor in companies that can make use of garbage for a variety of products. Its portfolio include Enerkem, S4 Energy Solutions, Terrabon and Agilyx (here is our list of more Waste Management’s cleantech investments).

Agilyx is another more recent investment. The company, which turns plastic that would otherwise head for the landfill into synthetic crude oil, said in March it had raised $22 million from Waste Management and investors such as Kleiner Perkins and Total (the French oil and gas giant).

Photo courtesy of Nancy Qian via Flickr

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Startup Turns Plastic-to-Crude Oil, Gets VC Cash

Jeff St. John — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:00:21 +0000

Here’s the latest of Waste Management’s investments into turning its trash into treasure. The trash king said Thursday it had joined in a $22 million investment in startup Agilyx, which has developed technology that can turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill, into a synthetic crude oil.

The Series B investment was led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by new investor, French oil giant Total, as well as previous investors Chrysalix Energy, Saffron Hill Ventures and Reference Capita. Agylix says it’s ready to scale up its patented technology, which has already churned out about 120,000 gallons of a crude oil-like substance from about 1 million pounds of shredded plastic at a Portland, Ore. pilot plant.

A 1,000-pound bag can yield about a gallon of the crude oil substitute, and Agylix says its system can process about 10 tons of plastic into about 2,400 gallons, or 60 barrels, per day. It uses an “anaerobic thermal reclamation process” — that is, heat in the absence of oxygen — to turn the plastic into a gas, which is then condensed into the crude oil product

That product, in turn, can be fed into existing refineries for conversion into a variety of fuels and products, the company says. That’s different from most biofuel startups, which seek to make liquids as close to fuel-ready as possible, though Texas startup KiOR is also working on creating bio-crude from plant waste like wood chips and straw.

Waste Management has been making a ton of green investments, with interests ranging from organic soil and compost makers to solar-powered trash compactors. But trash-to-energy and trash-to-chemicals technologies have been its primary focus, with investments in waste-to-ethanol startup Enerkem, and fermentation-based biofuel startup Terrabon,

In February, Waste Management announced a partnership with Genomatica, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup with a platform to create genetically modified organisms to turn biogas into a variety of industrial chemicals. That’s a smaller market than the holy grail of fuel production, but it can be easier to tackle for startups, if they can produce replacements for the often fossil fuel-derived chemicals at a high enough quality and low enough price.

Notably, Agilyx says it turns shredded plastic into a gas before condensing it into crude oil. It’s not clear, however, whether the startup’s gas is the same as the syngas that Genomatica CTO Mark Burk works with. I wonder if Genomatica can help Agylix build new bugs to make different chemicals out of its product, via the help of their common big corporate brothers?

Image courtesy of World Resource Institute via Creative Commons license.

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Al Gore’s New Passion: Organic Waste Recycling

Ucilia Wang — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:53:26 +0000

Recycling is a tried-and-true form of energy efficiency, so it’s no surprise that greentech investors such as Al Gore would find the concept appealing. That interest has translated into a $51.7 million round for Harvest Power, to enable the company to build facilities that turn organic waste into fertilizer and energy.

Waltham, Mass.-based Harvest Power builds and operates plants that use composting and anaerobic digestion technology to breakdown food scraps and yard clippings. The technologies not only produce fertilizers, but also biogas that can be used to produce electricity or be processed into compressed natural gas for transportation fuel. The company started in 2008 and is already operating five plants in North America, including a yard waste composting center for Waste Management in Pennsylvania.

Generation Investment Management, co-founded by Al Gore, who visited one of Harvest Power’s plants last October, led the $51.7 million B round. Other investors include DAG Ventures, Keating Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Waste Management. To date, Harvest Power has raised $77.5 million in equity, $38 million in debt and $11 million government grants, the company said.

Harvest Power plans to use the new funding to build more composting and anaerobic digestion facilities in North America and add recycling technologies, such as a high-temperature process to create synthesis gas, to its offerings. Syngas can be used to produce electricity, transportation fuels and other chemical products. Producing syngas would complement efforts by trash king Waste Management to profit from its municipal wastes collections.

In fact, Waste Management recently put more money into a California company called Genomatica that plans to turn syngas into a compound for making spandex, running shoes and auto parts. Waste Management, which has invested aggressively in companies that turn trash into products, also signed a research and development deal with Genomatica.

Harvest Power is building an anaerobic digestion facility — the Fraser Richmond Soil & Fibre — near Vancouver, Canada, where it already operates a composting center. The company plans to complete the project’s first phase, which will be able to take on 30,000 tons of organic waste per year, by 2011.

Harvest is developing its own technology but also makes use of others’ know-how. The company recently teamed up with Germany’s GICON Bioenergie to engineer and build processing plants using GICON’s anaerobic digestion technology.

Photo courtesy of Harvest Power

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