 |
|
|
|||||
Inside the historic Book Depository at Michigan Central, now home to Newlabs innovation campus, Brittanie Dabney is quietly building a different kind of startup. Her company, EcoSphere Organics, doesnt make apps or mobility tech. It makes biodegradable coasters out of banana peels. Dabney and her team collect food scraps from local restaurants like Alchemy and Johnnys Speakeasycoffee grounds, citrus rinds, and eggshellsand process them into small-batch products like compostable packaging and plant-based leather alternatives. Using dehydration and fermentation, Dabney aims to create materials that are both functional and regenerative. I want the vision of our process and manufacturing to be sustainable, Dabney says. No harsh chemicals, not water-intensive. A coaster made from grapefruit peels at Ecosphere Organics in their NewLab workspace. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] EcoSphere is still in early development, operating with grant funding and limited access to production space. Once were able to get warehouse space, then well be able to take on more, she says. The company is part of a growing movement in Michigan to look beyond composting. With 745,000 tons of food waste landfilled in Michigan every year, theyre exploring alternatives: upcycling, food rescue, apps, and decentralized infrastructure that can transform waste into something more useful. EPA data identifies more than 10,000 food service establishments across Michigan generating significant amounts of food waste, with an estimated total of over 167,000 tons per day. These range from school cafeterias and restaurants to correctional facilities and healthcare institutions, each with unique waste patterns and constraints. The most frequently listed facility type is full-service restaurants, which account for more than 5,000 sites in the data set. Other common sources include cafeterias, limited-service restaurants, and food service contractors. Wayne County alone accounts for the most food waste, with more than 177,0000 pounds of average daily waste across facilities, followed by Genesee, Kent, Macomb, and Oakland counties. This diversity underscores the need for flexible, localized strategiestechnologies and programs that can intervene at grocery stores, restaurants, institutions, and beyond. The innovations emerging in Michigan represent promising steps, but broader adoption and investment will be necessary to meaningfully reduce food waste statewide. Flashfood app: Where retail tech meets waste reduction While startups like EcoSphere are experimenting with banana peels and coffee grounds, larger players are tackling food waste at the point of sale. In Michigan, one of the most visible interventions comes from Flashfood, a mobile app that lets shoppers buy groceries nearing their sell-by date at a discountand from Meijer, the first U.S. retailer to partner with the platform. Meijer was actually our first U.S. customer, says Esther Cohn, a spokesperson for Canada-based Flashfood. Michigan was a natural next step because we already had a strong user base and Meijers scale gave us a way to grow quickly. The model is straightforward: store staff scan soon-to-expire itemsmeat, dairy, produceinto the app, offering them at steep discounts. Customers place orders on their phones and pick them up from coolers near the store entrance. The goal is to keep food out of landfills and into shopping carts. From a grocers perspective, youre making money back on items you used to throw away, Cohn says. Youre reducing shrink and avoiding disposal costs. Shrink refers to inventory loss from damage and spoilage. As of late 2023, Meijer customers had diverted more than 10 million pounds of food waste from landfills using the app, according to the companys corporate impact report. The program began in 2021. Meijer also became the first U.S. retailer to accept SNAP/EBT payments through Flashfood, expanding access to lower-cost groceries. Flashfood users purchase items through the app and pick them up in the store. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] But the program requires infrastructure that many smaller grocers dont have: digital inventory systems, trained staff, and coordinated logistics. Even at Meijer, implementation takes planning. Were looking at multiple tools to address food waste, says Erik Petrovskis, Meijers director of environmental compliance and sustainability. That includes reducing waste at the source, diverting what we can, and making sure as little as possible ends up in a landfill. Volunteer-powered logistics: Food Rescue US in Michigan In a parking lot outside a Whole Foods store in Midtown Detroit, Janet Damian loads trays of bread, cut-up sweet potatoes, some pies, and pineapple into the back of her Ford Flex. This isnt a city-run program. Its one of more than 500 monthly rescues coordinated by Food Rescue US-Detroit, a tech-enabled nonprofit that redirects surplus food from stores and restaurants to food pantries, shelters, and fridges across Southeast Michigan. Elli Chivari, 22, and Jessica Awan, 19, bring carts with donated food from Food Rescue US to the WSU Food Pantry. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] We rescue any type of foodfresh, frozen, prepared, nonperishable, says Darraugh Collins, who runs the organizations Michigan operations. Sometimes its a whole carload. Sometimes its just a few bags. The model relies on a lightweight infrastructure: a mobile app, a flexible network of 80 to 100 active volunteers, and over 144 food donor partners, including Target, Whole Foods, Plum Market, and LinkedIn. In 2024, the Detroit program alone rescued about 700,000 pounds of food, delivering it to more than 147 recipient agenciesmany of them in the city, even though most food comes from outside its limits. One of those volunteers is Janet Damian, a retired medical administrator who lives in Dearborn and picks up food weekly from Whole Foods and other locations. Were reducing food waste by distributing it to people who need it, she says. Its satisfying because the need is realand the appreciation is real. Her favorite moment? Delivering 30 birthday cakes from Whole Foods to the Wayne State student pantry. Their eyes lit up, she says. It was like a party. It doesnt matter what you bring, theyre just happy someones thinking about them. That joy is familiar to Kenya Maxey, who oversees the Wayne State pantry, which also includes a thrift shop. Weve seen over 6,700 students in the last 12 weeks, she says. The numbers started climbing in January. Maxey said the donations from Food Rescue US make their limited budget stretch further, and offer students a moment of normalcy. They get to shop like theyre in a grocery store, she says. And that helps them feel like themselves. Despite its reach, the model has limits. Were at capacity with the volunteers we have, Collins says. We need more funding, more drivers and ideally some paid positions to help us coordinate. The need is only growing. This story was originally published by nonprofit news organizations Planet Detroit and Next City through the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship, as part of a series investigating how Michigans food waste system contributes to climate change through landfill methane emissions.
Category:
E-Commerce
2012. I walk out of a gastroenterologists office with a brochure titled Your Life With Ulcerative Colitis. What the brochure doesnt say: A month later, I will wake up on the day of a critical midyear design presentation feeling too nauseous to leave my apartment, and will have to spend several weeks at my parents house, where I will miss several more midterms. A year later, Ill stand at a boarding gate and feel too sick to take a five-hour flight and meet with potential graduate school advisers. Ill soon learn that, for me, these wont be one-offs. Instead, Ill live a life of constant flux, impossible to plan for. Desperate for some control as I push through academia, I turn to tech products. But technology cant help me. Digital tools excel at routines, but falter at exceptions. I can schedule weeks of meetings in a few clicks, but when Im unwell, Im copy-pasting the same cancellation message a dozen times. My personal-finance app keeps me on track, but only until an urgent-care bill throws things off. When my fitness tracker chastises me for not closing my rings during a particularly brutal flare-up, I shove it into my junk drawer. Technology is failing me when I need it the most. Happy paths 2016. I join Big Tech, working as a user researcher in early-stage and AI technology. Two things become immediately clear. First, my story is far from unique. Anecdotes from many hundreds of user interviews reflect lives riddled with chaos and disruption. Changeunplanned and plannedis the norm. Second, consumer products are largely designed for happy paths. A clear-cut problem is solved by a superhero technology, resulting in a favorable outcome that is tied off with a neat bow. For the sake of clarity, efficiency, and technical ease, the zigzag realities of lives are often sanitized into an idealized arc. We trot out these squeaky clean stories as hero use cases for a product ideafirst to convince ourselves, then our executives, and, finally, our users. Todays explosion of consumer-facing GenAI products are built with the same recipe. We get heartstring-tugging stories with just enough complexity to feel real, without any of the mess. A dad uses AI to prepare for a job interview while reminiscing on parenthood. A parent brings a childs imaginary creature to life in a custom picture book. Some brands try to incorporate more chaotic realities (a storm hits restaurant patio seating) only to portray absurd overdependence on AI (waiters leave their customers drenched because an AI agent doesnt reseat them indoors). If youre like me, these ads make you want to scream: Youre standing in the middle of the kitchen. How are your kids not interrupting your conversation with AI 27 times? But in contrast to the hero use case, taking kid snack breaks and asking AI to repeat itself over the noise of toddler screams are often cordoned off as edge cases in product development. The implication: These occurrences are rare. But they arent. Human journeys are not straight lines. They are dynamic, defined by change, interruptions, and curveballs. Some 60% of Americans reported experiencing an unexpected expense in the past year, though 42% dont have an emergency fund greater than $1,000. Households with two or more children have a viral infection in the household more than 50% of the time. And an estimated 28% of work time each year is lost to distractions. When technology isnt resilient to this reality, it breakssometimes catastrophically. Like when a Florida teen dies by suicide after his lengthy conversations with a Character.ai chatbot turn darkly romantic. When AI-powered cameras mounted on public buses mistakenly ticket thousands of legally parked vehicles in New York because they fail to recognize alternate side zones. Or when AI weather models fail to predict the worst storms because extreme weather data doesnt exist in the training data. These outcomes are extreme, but the pathways leading there are deeply ordinary, broken by nascent technology that isnt resilient to the gritty reality of human behavior. Sometimes, the catalyst stems from the tech itself, like security vulnerabilities. Other times, its agnostic of the technology, like mental health. But in all cases, the technology was not resilient to changes in context. AI’s broken promise Years ago, you could blame technology as the limiting factor. But AI should, ideally, thrive on this sort of complexityusing its superpowers of pattern recognition, synthesis, and triangulation of thousands of data points about users and their environment. GenAI has introduced a new frontier around deep reasoning and human interaction that should make the technology more tractable and transparent. AI is uniquely positioned to help people anticipate and recover from change, the kind that they may not have seen coming. Yet the Character.ai system didnt raise the alarm when a conversation overtly turned dangerous, much less recognize patterns that may suggest that it was headed that way. On issuing its 7,000th ticket in one day, the MTAs system didnt flag that this is an unusually large number of violations on a route. Its never easy to deal with the complex behavior of humans and societies. But when we keep designing to make already great lives 1% better, we are perpetuating a specific type of harmone that happens when the people designing the technology arent considering the real ways it might be used. As UX practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to start the conversation about how to change this. To move toward an AI UX rooted in resilience, well need to shepherd at least three main shifts in the way our products are designed. 1. Shift the user stories we tellwhich directly map to the problems we choose to solve. UX must choose to foreground the hard, complex story. We all have one: a multigenerational household with life-stage changes, moves across the country, divorce, job loss, a chronic illness. Right now, a key barrier to centering these stories is that they extend ideation cycles, which is uncomfortable in an increasingly launch-first-or-perish climate. As a result, cleaner stories, like the product narratives described earlier, win out. To break this cycle, UX can introduce complex user stories to product teams starting with ideation, through prototype and concept testingespecially ones that cut horizontally across product ecosystems. This requires creating a new canon: an accessible taxonomy of types of complexity, curveballs, and changes that we can easily pull from. Such a taxonomy might take the form of brainstorming prompts, user journey templates, or a card deck or visualization used in sprints. This cracking open will take time, but the more we tell these stories, the easier thy will roll off the tongue, and the more they can become normalized. 2. Shift how we leverage user data in AI-powered products. Today, user data collected by companieswhile wide-rangingisnt always curated or connected well. Most users, particularly younger generations, have resigned themselves to data collection and dont mind it, but also dont understand how the data is used or whether it benefits them. This is not an argument to collect more data. Rather, its a call to connect existing data for more meaningful, tangible user benefits, like helping navigate blind spots and complexity. Consider a simple example: Anns AI agent has access to a calendar app where she has blocked off time for a post-work run, a weather app that shows unexpected evening rain showers, and a maps app that she frequently uses to navigate to a yoga studio. This agent can now surface a timely suggestion: help Ann move meetings to shift the run to earlier in the day, or help her find a class at the yoga studio at that time. In reflecting how people really use their technology, this sort of cross-product dialogue and synthesis has the opportunity to leverage AI and user data to unlock resilience in the face of change. 3. Shift away from traditional definitions of seamlessness and magic moments toward ones that gracefully embrace failure, meaningful friction, and deep, explicit user feedback. AI advancements tend to tempt product teams to remove all friction and present users with auto-magical solutions to needs they werent even aware of, from hyper-personalized AI-driven ads to smart nudges on food and shopping apps. Common success metrics used today reflect the value we place on frictionless experiences: fewer clicks, greater session length, engagement with automation features, fewer user-submitted comments. This can cause a misleading overreliance on implicit behavioral signals that dont always reflect real intent. Take the example of an in-app pop-up: A user might spend a long time viewing it, even clicking on a linknot because they find it useful but because they cant find the exit. Even when users do provide explicit feedback, its often not in a form that can be interpreted meaningfully, leading to undesired outcomes. Think, for example, of how OpenAIs models grew sycophantic after a thumbs-up on a response was used as a signal to make the chatbot behave more in that direction. Instead, how might we offer users more ways to provide granular feedback that can shed light not only on the what but also the why? This can be meaningful friction that can empower users to have their unique human context be better understood while harnessing the beyond-human capabilities of AI. One could argue that this, in fact, is the more magical experience. Finally, the pursuit of seamless perfection risks underplaying the shortcomings of AI itselfmisunderstood accents, factual inaccuracies, biased imagery. These are a function of the technology, and are bound to happen. UX needs to treat these as predictable breaking points in the technology, build frameworks to classify them, and design intentionally with them as part of the user narrative. Of course, its far simpler to sketch these solutions than implement them, but if AI is to work well for real-world problems, we need to tackle real-world complexity head-on. UX is in a powerful position to shift these mindsets. As it has done for domains like accessibility and product inclusion, UX can redefine the problems and narratives that emerging technology is built for, and reshape the UX to accommodate product and user realities to support resilience. Are we brave enough to get into the messy weeds and do it?
Category:
E-Commerce
Mining isnt known for innovation. For more than a century, weve extracted copper using the same process: dig, crush, grind, leach, repeat. Meanwhile, demand has exploded, fueled by EVs, AI infrastructure, and the energy transition. That mismatch has created a bottleneck. Were using yesterdays tools to power tomorrows economy. The conductive highway Copper is the metal that moves energy. Literally, electrons dont travel from solar panels to batteriesor from your laptop charger to the cloudwithout it. Copper is the conductive highway that keeps the worlds electrons flowing. Its in every EV, every wind turbine, and every data center. Its also in short supply. Weve mined the easy stuff. Now were left with lower-quality ores, deeper deposits, and rising costsjust as demand hits historic highs. And when the global economy is built on electrons, copper is no longer just a commodity. Its a strategic resource, central to national security, electrification, and economic stability. Global copper demand is projected to reach 50 million metric tonnes annually by 2035double todays levels. According to BloombergNEF, the world needs over $2 trillion in mining investment by 2050 to meet electrification targets. Meanwhile, ore grades have declined more than 40% since 1990. Investors are watching this gap, and innovation must step in. Innovative microbes But something big is happening underground. And I mean that literallywhere the cool rocks are and things get interesting. As a scientist, I spent years working on astrobiology, cloud platforms, and energy systems. Ive seen how cross-disciplinary thinking can unlock entire industries. Today, I lead a team using engineered microbes to recover copper from ore that conventional mining leaves behind. It sounds unusual, and it is. But thats the point. Innovation in mining doesn’t come from fitting init comes from standing out. Mining is a deeply conservative industry, and for good reason. Even small changes carry massive financial and operational risks when your tools move millions of tons of earth. But thats also what makes this moment so powerful: When something new works, it really matters, especially when it can be plugged into existing infrastructure without requiring entirely new capital build-outs. Juice from a rock At Endolith, we recently completed testing with BHP, one of the worlds largest mining companies, through their Think & Act Differently (TAD) BioMetals innovation program. Our microbes were tested under simulated field conditions on a low-grade primary sulfide orea material so complex most operators consider it uneconomic to process. In one study, microbes shaped through adaptive laboratory evolution and guided by AI recovered up to 80% more copper from this material. Thats like squeezing juice from a rockand getting nearly twice as much. And this wasnt just a lab trick. These microbes work in real mining environments. They dont need clean rooms or perfect conditions. They need oxygen, acidity, and timeconditions already present in heap leach operations worldwide. We didnt reimagine the entire mine. We made the part most people had written off valuable again, making it cheaper, cleaner, and easier to operate. By using microbes that require no expensive reagents or intensive energy inputs, were cutting both capital expenditures and operating expenses, making recovery from low-grade ore economically viable again. Leapfrog technologies Heres why that matters. Ore grades are falling. Permitting timelines stretch for decades. Investors and regulators demand lower impact, higher performance, and real ESG outcomes. Mining companies know the status quo is unsustainable, but risk makes experimentation difficult. Most “sustainable mining” efforts rely on incremental gains: better water management, slightly lower emissions, and somewhat faster recovery. Important? Yes. Transformative? Not even close. We need leapfrog technologiesnew tools that unlock value, speed, and sustainability together. Biology is one of those tools, and right now, its underused. Biology belongs in the core toolkit of modern extraction. CRISPR for rocks Industrial biotechnology has already transformed medicine and agriculture, unlocking precision, efficiency, and resilience at scale. Its time for mining to catch up. Think of this as CRISPR for rocks. Instead of blasting ore with chemicals, we let microbes do the work. They break down rock, extract metals, and leave far less waste behind. With help from cloud-based systems, we can tune that process in real time, adjusting to changes in temperature, pH, or ore composition. Similar biological platforms could be applied to rare earths, lithium, and other minerals critical to the clean energy economy. The opportunity here is massivenot just for Endolith but for a new generation of industrial innovators focused on extraction rather than consumption. As governments prioritize mineral independence and ESG compliance, scalable bio-based solutions are becoming essential to securing the future of energy, technology, and defense. Scaling this kind of innovation takes more than strong results. It takes strong partnerships between startups and majors, scientists and operators, and regulators and entrepreneurs. We found that with BHP and the TAD team. They gave us a shot. We delivered. And now were working with others to bring this to production. But scaling also requires trust in the science, in the process, and in the promise of doing things differently. It means rethinking how we define innovation in mining and giving ourselves permission to imagine something beyond the current constraints. A systems problem People tend to talk about clean tech and hard tech as if theyre separate. EVs go in one box, mining goes in another. But thats a false split. There is no clean energy without minerals, no electrification without copper, and no scalable, sustainable supply without reimagining how we recover it. This is a systems problem, and it requires systems thinking. That reimagining wont come from status quo thinking. Itll come from radical collaborationand from being brave enough to try something different underground. Itll come from leaders willing to back bold science and turn pilot results into platform change. Heres the thing: I used to study how life evolved on Earth billions of years ago. The most extraordinary life forms Ive worked with? Theyre here on Earth today. Deep in the rocks, quietly solving problems we’ve struggled with for decades. So, if you want to power the future, start by listening to the ground and the weird, wonderful microbes doing the heavy lifting. In a world racing toward electrification, these tiny organisms just might be our biggest asset.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||