Across the U.S., a growing number of new retailers are selling mostly in bulk to customers toting reusable containers.
I wrote this piece about zero-waste stores for Bloomberg Green on Aug. 18, 2022. See PDF here: Download ‘Zero-Waste’ Stores Are Helping Consumers Cut Back on Plastic - Bloomberg
This story appeared in the Feb. issue of Oregon Business Magazine.
In November of 2022, Thor Mikelic was working on social marketing and email campaigns for an upcoming promotion of Lora DiCarlo vibrators.
Co-owner of the Newburgh, New York-based sex-toy company SheVibe, Mikelic was excited about the collaboration. Mikelic’s buyer had even scheduled the promotion on SheVibe’s social apps. But by late November, there was no inventory left and the Lora DiCarlo website went offline.
“They just disappeared,” Mikelic says.
The sudden demise of Lora DiCarlo, the buzzy Oregon-based sex-tech startup founded by Lora Haddock, is still shrouded in mystery. Business colleagues like Mikelic think reckless spending may have had something to do with it; records obtained by Oregon Business paint a picture quite different from that of the progressive, feminist tech startup Lora DiCarlo touted in its marketing. The company has also faced criticisms of its product’s high price tag and a legal challenge to its claim of technological innovation. “Lora DiCarlo’s products were so overpriced and they were constantly raising money,” Mikelic says. “Something was wrong.”
One complaint, made by CEO Lora Haddock’s former assistant, alleges that on their first business trip together, Haddock “forgot her pajamas” and slept naked in the same room as the assistant, later asking her to touch a mosquito bite on Haddock’s bare bottom. Two complaints allege that both Haddock and her chief operating officer (and then-boyfriend), Doug Layman, made frequent inappropriate sexual comments to their employees — including details about their own sex life. All three former employees — all of whom are women — allege that throughout their employment, male employees were treated better than female employees.
“It was so anti-woman,” says one of these former employees. “Doug constantly was abusive toward women. It sets a tone that you can’t speak up — you are at risk of being attacked, too. The CEO would just sit and cower to whatever Doug says. She didn’t defend anyone or help out in the way a CEO would. She was in charge, but in reality Doug was in charge.”
‘A Gold Brick’
Founded in 2017 by Haddock (who at some point changed her name to Lora Haddock DiCarlo) and her then-romantic partner, Douglas Layman, the company stumbled upon the kind of PR in January 2019 that publicists only dream about. The company won an innovation award for the Osé — its signature toy — at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, only to be unceremoniously kicked out of the show for being “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane” and not in keeping with the show’s image. Their award was revoked.
Publicist Evie Smith Hatmaker, who had the company as a client at the time, remembers this moment fondly.
“I turned to Lora — she was really upset. And I was like, ‘A gold brick just landed on our laps,’” she recalls.
She was right. Haddock wrote an open letter on the Lora DiCarlo website accusing the Consumer Technology Association, which produces the trade show, of gender bias. She also penned an op-ed in The Washington Post. National outlets like The New York Times, Wired and TechCrunch wrote about how sexist and hypocritical it was to allow sex robots and VR porn for straight men into prior CES shows but not a vibrator focused on women’s pleasure. By May CES had offered an apology and restored the prize. When the company finally began taking presale orders for the Osé in late November of 2019, it brought in $1 million in the first five hours, Haddock told Wired. And that was before a prototype of the vibrator was even ready.
A Lora DiCarlo mechanical design engineer displayed a 3D rendering of the Osé on screen in 2019. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan
The company, which developed the Osé with Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, spun a narrative of itself as a sex-positive company with a femtech pioneer at the helm. The Osé was also touted as a novel kind of sex toy, with air-pulse technology that stimulates the clitoris the way a mouth might, producing a so-called “blended orgasm.” In November 2020 it scored a coup, bringing on actress and model Cara Delevingne as co-owner and creative adviser.
‘Morally Bankrupt’
But underneath the hype were serious problems, according to several sources interviewed for this article. Haddock, whose tale of self-invention was told differently in every article, never went to med school, even for a semester (as she claimed on the Lora DiCarlo website and in several interviews, according to a 2020 feature in Wired). In a 2020 article for Men’s Health, she’s quoted as saying she’d been in medical school when she had her “holy grail of orgasms” that inspired her to found the company; The New York Times claimed she had served in the Navy. In a 2019 profile in this magazine, we said she’d studied nursing at Portland State University. (Portland State has no record of her ever being enrolled.) The civil rights complaints filed with BOLI allege that Lora DiCarlo was a hostile work environment where women’s views were not valued and where women (at least certain women) were subjected to inappropriate sexual comments, sexual harassment, retaliation based on pregnancy, and racism.
Haddock’s longtime phone number was no longer in service and emails to her company email bounced back. Calls and emails to her lawyer, Scott Oborne at Jackson Lewis P.C., were not returned.
Complaints against the company filed with BOLI allege harassment by both Layman and Haddock, as well as a pattern of racist and gender-based discrimination.
In her civil rights complaint former director of sales and marketing Sarah Brown alleges that “male employees were treated better, more favorably, while female employees were treated as if they were poor at their jobs.” Sherry Tran, who worked in customer service and market research, says in her civil rights complaint that Layman would attack female employees during meetings but not male employees. She also says he would fire female employees with little provocation or warning. Tran, whose complaint is still under investigation, alleges that she was subjected to a hostile work environment based on her race. (She is from Vietnam and identifies as Asian.) Tran also alleges that Haddock and Layman would make inappropriate sexual comments that made her so uncomfortable she would need to walk away from her computer during virtual meetings.
But the most damning charges were from Haddock’s former executive assistant. (OB was not able to reach this complainant; she is named in the complaint, but we are withholding her name due to the nature of the allegations.) In her civil rights complaint, this woman alleged pervasive sexual harassment by Haddock as well as open discrimination against her pregnancy from Haddock and Layman. In her complaint, which was resolved in her favor, she alleges that on their first business trip together, Haddock not only “slept naked in the same room as me, claiming that she forgot her pajamas,” but also that Haddock asked her to touch her bare bottom. She also alleged that multiple times Haddock freely shared details about her sex life with Layman. The complaint says Haddock told employees that she and Layman were part of a sex club in Portland, where they would not engage in sex acts but “will go around and watch other people.” Haddock told the assistant that while she was away on trips, she sent a female friend to Layman “as a present,” and that she is the dominant and Layman is the submissive and “he is ‘her bitch.’” Haddock also told her assistant that she could call Layman “Daddy,” according to the complaint.
The former assistant says that she could not report this to the company’s human resources department because it was run by a friend of Haddock’s. She asked Haddock about policies regarding reporting confidential matters and, this woman states in her complaint, Haddock said that everything should come directly to her because “human resources discloses everything to her anyway.”
In her written response to this BOLI investigation, Haddock denied that she sexually harassed her assistant, slept naked in the same room or asked her assistant to touch her bottom, but said, “The nature of the business also requires discussions related to sex or [that] are sexual in nature.” This former assistant provided multiple witnesses, texts, and emails, and after a thorough yearlong investigation, a BOLI civil rights investigator determined there was substantial evidence of unlawful employment practices including sexual harassment, retaliation for reporting discrimination, and aiding and abetting sexual harassment and retaliation. In March of 2022, Scott Hunt, the complainant’s lawyer, asked BOLI to withdraw the case so he could resolve the matter via private action.
A number of former employees also allege that — though she was the public face of the company in most media coverage — Haddock was not really running the show at Lora DiCarlo. Instead, they say, Doug Layman was really running the company.
Depending on who you ask, Layman was either the chief operating officer or chief financial officer of Lora DiCarlo, but he was most certainly an investor. Smith Hatmaker says that she heard he had a successful exit from a previous startup and used some of his investor contacts to help get initial funding for Lora DiCarlo.
“He would go into meetings with her to talk to VCs,” Smith Hatmaker says. On the Oregon State University Foundation website, Layman is listed as having been the president and co-founder of Kadix Systems, “a management consulting firm focused on the federal government.” (Kadix sold to Dynamics Research Corps for $42 million in 2008.) In Lora DiCarlo’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which is filed under Uccellini LLC, Layman is listed as an executive officer for the company. (Records on file with the Oregon Secretary of State’s office show Uccellini LLC, of which Layman was the principal officer, formally dissolved in June 2021, but filed for an authorization to conduct business — with Haddock listed as president — the same day. They also say Portland attorney Mary Hull, who had been listed as a registered agent with the company, resigned from that role on Dec. 8, 2022.)
Layman also did not respond to emails requesting an interview for this story.
Another former employee, who asked not to be named because she fears litigation, said about Layman, “He is Lora DiCarlo — he founded it. Doug was, on paper, never more than an advisor, but in the day-to-day, he was in every meeting. He hired and fired.”
Asked if Layman was in fact running the company, Kim Porter, former director of engineering at Lora DiCarlo from February 2019 to February 2021, says, “Doug had more of a business background than Lora. But was he running the company? I don’t know who was running it…. Neither one of them knew how to get products to market.”
A Glassdoor review from November 2020 headlined “Awful, Toxic Company” seems to sum things up accurately, according to four former staffers interviewed for this story.
“The company that I thought would be the most woke, value-aligned company I could work for turned out to be more unethical and morally bankrupt than I could even fathom…. Executive leadership is manipulative and abusive. Their products aren’t innovative like they claim. It’s not truly a woman-owned, woman-run company as an older cis white male calls all the shots. Lora is merely the face of a shady company heading for failure. Run, don’t walk, away.”
Lora Haddock with a prototype of the Osé in 2019. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan
The Osé also got some negative reviews, with sex-toy tester Jess Joho telling a Wired podcaster that using the Osé was “a nightmare.” In that same podcast, journalist Lux Alptraum said the Osé was “excruciatingly painful” to use.
Critics have also pointed out that other companies like Womanizer and Satisfyer used air pulse technology, but that their products listed for far less than the Osé, which cost $290.
The Breakdown
Many former employees contacted for this story refused to speak on the record, citing a nondisclosure agreement they had signed with the company. Several that did speak to us asked that we not use their names or any identifying characteristics for fear of litigation.
One former employee agreed to answer questions via email but refused to answer any that might reveal their identity — like what their role was or how long they worked for the company. When asked why, they said, “The board members/majority shareholders of any leftover assets are known to be litigious.”
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call this source Pat. At first, Pat wrote in an email to Oregon Business the workplace at Lora DiCarlo was energetic, positive and inclusive. “Over time it became evident that there were some fractures between executives.”
In early spring of 2022, several staffers suspected that something strange was afoot when Haddock stopped attending meetings. “But we carried on with preparing for the holiday season since it wasn’t too unusual that she would disappear for weeks at a time,” Pat wrote. On Oct. 16, everyone — including HR and other C-level executives — got a text message from Haddock saying that everyone’s “termination was immediate,” according to Pat.
Pat says that they are still owed unpaid wages. BOLI reports that seven former Lora DiCarlo employees have made unpaid-wage claims.
“Our termination letters indicated that we would have COBRA options. However, we all later found our health insurance had not been paid, and we not only lost COBRA options but owed medical bills for the month of October as if we were uninsured,” Pat wrote, adding that through the collective work of all the laid-off employees, they were able to negotiate a deal with their insurance brokers. “We were on our own, but that wasn’t new.”
According to Pat, Layman left the company in October 2021, leaving a substantial amount of debt. Operational costs also suddenly swelled.
“We found that manufacturers and third-party logistics had been cutting us deals and giving us leeway due to the relationships that were built with the previous COO, logistics and operations teams,” Pat wrote via email. “These same parties, however, would decline meetings and refuse to continue to operate under similar agreements when the two women heading our company were requesting them.”
Even after cutting operational costs by 65% and running with a leaner budget, Pat says, the company was not able to handle the increase in shipping and logistics costs. “We needed a substantial influx of cash to move product to the states, pay off manufacturer debt and fund the launch of new product lines.”
The other woman heading the company, of course, was actress and model Cara Delevingne (with 42 million Instagram followers), whom Haddock brought onboard to be Lora DiCarlo’s new co-owner and creative adviser in November 2020, according to an article in Fast Company. Delevingne’s duties, according to the piece, included “raising brand recognition through content development and marketing strategies, as well as working with the in-house engineering team on product development.”
Delevingne’s entry was in theory, a master stroke. Pat says that the Cosmopolitan cover story on Delevingne’s sex toys that ran in July/August 2021 led to a spike in sales of Lora DiCarlo vibrators. Pat also says that Delevingne made a financial investment in the company in exchange for shares. (The company’s SEC filing shows that $2 million worth of shares were sold on Nov. 10, 2020, though it doesn’t divulge who they were sold to.)
The company also faced litigation from a German company called Novoluto, which makes the Womanizer. The two companies continued to file motions in the case through 2022, but on Nov. 15, Steven Lovett and Nathan Brunette at Stoel Rives filed a motion to withdraw as Uccellini’s legal counsel. They followed that with a December request to extend deadlines in the case, saying the reasons for the withdrawal could not be disclosed in the public record, but also that “counsel has not received the needed instructions from Defendant regarding positions it wishes to take on the substance of this case.” On Jan. 17, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai granted that motion and vacated all filing deadlines until the company finds new legal representation.
Sexual-wellness sales and marketing agency Gisele International terminated its partnership with Lora DiCarlo on Oct. 17, 2022. “After weeks of being silent on us, canceling meetings and not responding to high-priority emails, we were left with no other options,” a member of the Gisele team said via email. They never heard back from the Lora DiCarlo team. A spokesperson for Gisele said they informed their partners directly about the company’s disappearance. “We shared with them the owner’s email address to allow them to reach out to the brand directly. To our knowledge, they were left without any answer. This is really a shame, especially for retailers, distributors and partners who strongly believed in the brand’s potential, who fought for it and who made the brand more visible globally.”
At the end of the day, Lora DiCarlo probably went belly up for the same reason most startups do. But a toxic workplace culture, negative reviews about the Osé and a lawsuit certainly didn’t help.
“I think they just ran out of money,” says Porter, the former director of engineering. “Do you know the success rate of startups? It’s a very small percentage that succeed.”
In conservative parts of Oregon, one protest group is betting that a celebration of Black culture will capture more hearts than anger.
This story appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful on Jan. 20th.
In the summer of 2020, when protests against police brutality were taking place in Portland and Salem, Oregon, Julianne Jackson was there with the crowds on the streets, chanting for justice. But something nagged at her. Jackson, a Black woman with a loud voice and an infectious laugh, began to feel that she was not being accurately represented.
“There was a lot of hatred, a lot of vitriol and a lot of things I didn’t necessarily identify with,” she says. “And while I understand those feelings — I have them, too — it didn’t represent me as a Black woman. Black women throughout time have really been known for our ability to find joy in all kinds of situations, our ability to nurture, our ability to stand firm in the face of things that are really, really difficult.”
One night, she woke with an epiphany. She and her wife had met folks at Portland’s protests who were from the state’s rural areas. “They asked, ‘If we were to do something like this [a march], who would come and stand with me?’” Jackson decided that Oregon’s rural towns could be the perfect place to benefit from a different kind of racial justice march — one oriented around joy instead of anger.
The next day, with the help of her friend Emily Terry, Black Joy Oregon was born, a nonviolent organization that shows up in rural areas to demonstrate loving and joyful celebrations of Black culture. When they travel to rural towns they stand at busy intersections and hold up signs emblazoned with messages of love for the Black community — Black is beautiful, Black is revolutionary, Black lives uplift, and so on. “We smile and wave at folks, dance and just spread love and joy,” Jackson says. They also build connections with community leaders and provide access to resources and assistance for Black folks.
Since then, the group, composed of seven member-leaders and an informal “travel team” of around 14, has traveled to 170 towns across the state, from the Southern coastal hamlet of Coos Bay to Pendleton, where the famous wool blankets are made.
Many of these are places where virtually everyone is white. “I’ve met people who are like, ‘I’ve never seen a Black person in real life,’” Jackson says. “And if all you’ve seen is a Black person on Fox news, burning up Portland, what does that say to you?”
Jackson, who is biracial, has seen the white members of her family learn and grow. “I think that’s really where Black Joy comes from is this desire to help turn the lightbulb on for people to do better,” she says.
This lack of exposure can make even the simplest of positive interactions profoundly impactful. One of the most memorable experiences for Jackson was early in the pandemic, in August of 2020. She and a core group of Black Joy women were trying to find ways to help people escape the fast-moving Beachie Creek Fire. Jackson was scrolling through Facebook and heard about a couple who needed help evacuating their entire farm in Stayton, Oregon, a farming community 16 miles southeast of Salem.
“We found this one post and they needed help evacuating. They sent us their address. And when we pulled up to their farm it literally was like: Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump on a bald eagle, Trump with abs — I mean, it was crazy.”
Upon seeing the signs, she and her Black Joy compatriots exchanged nervous glances. Jackson was wearing a Black Lives Matter sweatshirt and had BLM stickers covering her car. Her friend wore a shirt that said “Humanize Being Black.”
“We were all looking at each other like, what the fuck? And we just got right to work. We were like, ‘Whaddya need?’”
The 60-something white man and his wife who owned the farm asked the women for help corralling the farm animals. Within no time, everyone was grabbing sheep, turkeys, ducks and other livestock. “We were catching chickens with nets. I mean, it was wild!” Jackson laughs. “And I’m not a farm girl by any means.” To prove her point, she flashes me her long, curved nails over our Zoom call. “Then there was a bull. This bull is scared, you know. We are trying to wrangle this bull into this little trailer. And it is not working at all. Luckily these amazing cowboys came out of nowhere and just lassoed it. It was phenomenal.”
They ended up getting all of the farmer’s animals to safety, even helping to drive some of them in their own vehicles down to a farm in Salem that was willing to take them temporarily. “When we had gotten everything completed, this dude kinda looked at us, and his eyes were welling up and he said, ‘This is what America needs. This is what works.’”
Not everyone agrees. Jackson says that she and the Black Joy Oregon crew have been criticized by other Black Lives Matter activists for helping people perceived to be antagonistic to the cause.
“That’s a really important concept to me,” Jackson says. “If you’re on fire, I’m not going to ask you if you voted for Trump first before I put you out. I’m going to put you out and we can talk about all of that later, if that’s what needs to happen. For me, it’s so imperative that we be human first.”
She goes on, “That couple, I bet you they were like, ‘Antifa just rolled up to our house,’” when they saw Jackson and her assembled group of women emerge from their cars. “They thought anybody on the left was there for doom and gloom and destruction. And you know, to be able to put a different face to that for them…I don’t know the end result. I hope we were able to enlighten them. I hope when people around them were like, ‘Antifa is starting fires in Portland,’ that they were like, ‘No, Antifa actually just moved our sheep!’”
Not all of their experiences have been positive. In Coos Bay, a local Black activist who had been receiving death threats invited them to town to host a nonviolent march. They were met by a large group of aggressive counter protesters, many of them armed. The group of white locals followed participants of the march, clearly trying to intimidate them. “Coos Bay was the only one where I thought we might actually die,” she says.
A few times, they’ve been in small towns where something they initially perceived as sinister turned out to be a warm welcome. A few towns away from Coos Bay, a white man pulled his truck over by the group of women, recalls Jackson, “He came in hot and we were hella worried. With tears in his eyes, he said, ‘My son is biracial, my grandson is biracial. We’ve never seen Black people here. Thank you for coming and thank you for standing up for my grandson.”
Something similar occurred in the coastal town of Otis (population: 3,450). “We were on the side of the road. This dude from the pizzeria comes out and he’s like, ‘I never thought I’d see anybody stand up for people who look like me.’ The lady came out and gave us Pronto Pups! We had a great time!” In the town of Sisters, a group of residents got together and bought the Black Joy volunteers dinner.
The nonprofit has been financed almost entirely by donations and one small grant from Willamette University. This winter, they’re taking a short break from travel. (All of the volunteer leaders have families and full-time jobs.) Jackson, who works in criminal justice reform, says they’re thinking of broadening the organization’s scope to include more advocacy work. But she also expects they will resume travel to remote parts of the state in the spring.
Cara Turnquist couldn’t go to the 2020 protests because she’d just had a double knee replacement. But Jackson was a friend of a friend of hers, and Turnquist was drawn to her approach. “I loved that she led with love,” says Turnquist, who is white. “I really believe that that is the way that we’re going to make change because I don’t see a lot of progress happening when people are called out. But I do see progress happening when people are called in. And so I wanted to put my efforts behind something that I believed in so much like that.”
The owner of Push Fitness, Turnquist realized that even if she couldn’t join a march, she could organize a fundraiser for Black Joy. She called it Squats for Social Justice. The first year, it took place on Zoom, and in 2021, in the parking lot of a gym. This past November they held it at Willamette University. Participants were pledged a certain amount of money per squat.
Member-leader Emily Terry, who is also biracial, says Black Joy has created this kind of supportive community. It started at the protests, which she attended by herself until she got to know Jackson and other women who were showing up. “We can talk about how we impact our community around us, but one of the best things is the community we have created for each other,” says Terry. “I know that it doesn’t matter what happens — they will be here when I need them. With any amount of bail money!”
From growing kelp forests to making packaging out of mushrooms, these companies are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from every angle.
I wrote this round-up for Inc.'s Carbon Neutral package, in the May/June 2022 issue.
Entrepreneurs coast to coast are coming up with innovative technologies showing not only that we can live without carbon-based energy, but also that we can thrive without it. From a Maine startup that's growing kelp forests (which can sequester gigatons of CO2 for centuries) to an electric vehicle company in Eugene, Oregon, that's making affordable electric cars with flair, these green tech startups show that our carbon-free future actually looks pretty cool. Wave energy? Batteries to store renewable energy that are more environmentally friendly than lithium? Biodegradable mushroom-based packaging? These aren't merely futuristic notions. They're happening now, and they've got the funding to prove it.
Tech: Builds right-size EVs for less than $20,000
Founder: Mark Frohnmayer
Home base: Eugene, Oregon
Not everyone needs--or wants--a Tesla. Arcimoto is on a mission to democratize electric vehicles. The startup, founded in 2007, makes a series of right-size EVs that are ideal for urban eco-drivers. The Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV), for example, is an open-air (yet covered) car with three wheels. Doors optional. It's ultra efficient and--unlike so many EVs--actually affordable. The company is growing, having just moved into a new 250,000-square-foot plant, a fivefold increase over its former digs. Next off the line will be a series of specialty vehicles, including the Rapid Responder, outfitted with sirens and lights for emergency services, and the Cameo, designed to create a smooth camera vehicle for the film and influencer industries.
Tech: Grows kelp to capture carbon
Founder: Marty Odlin
Home base: Portland, Maine
Like trees, kelp naturally fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere--only kelp does it exponentially faster than land-rooted trees and plants. So founder Marty Odlin decided to build a business selling carbon credits around this fact. Running Tide scientists amplify the process by growing the seaweed on wood buoys layered with ground-up seashells that sit on the ocean surface, allowing the plants to capture carbon via photosynthesis. The buoys themselves are made of carbon-rich wood, and when they get waterlogged over the course of several months they sink to the bottom of the ocean--carbon, kelp, and all--where they will sit for centuries. The potential is enormous: Some suggest kelp farms like these, if scaled in our oceans, could collectively sequester over 270 gigatons of carbon. Shopify, Stripe, which just launched a new $925 million carbon removal initiative, and Frontier (along with Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey) were early purchasers of Running Tide's carbon credits. Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital is also an investor. The first deployment of algae is happening in late summer 2022, off the coast of Iceland.
Tech: Uses hydropower to store renewable energy
CEO: Paul Jacob
Home base: Boston
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are critical to our carbon-free future, but since it's not always windy and/or sunny, they require storage mechanisms to green the grid. When it opens in 2026, the Swan Lake energy storage project, based in Klamath County, Oregon, will be the first pumped storage hydropower project built in the U.S. in 30 years. The system uses excess renewable electricity from the grid to pump water to an elevated reservoir, where it sits as stored energy until it's needed. During peak demand, the water is released, spinning turbines that generate electricity. Swan Lake, which is being built by Boston-based Rye Development, will generate 400 megawatts of clean electricity, vastly increasing the storage capacity for the grid's wind and solar electricity.
Tech: Builds a better battery
Founders: Julia Song and Craig Evans
Home base: Wilsonville, Oregon
These husband-and-wife founders started in their garage in 2011, cooking up so-called "flow" batteries, which store more energy and cost less per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion cells. That's because they're made of environmentally benign materials: iron, salt, and water. A bonus: Iron batteries have a longer lifespan than lithium batteries--they can operate for 25 years or more with daily use versus lithium ion's 8 to 10 years. This kind of long-duration battery storage, which has been installed at San Diego Gas & Electric and other locations, will be crucial to reliably power a grid that relies on intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar.
Tech: Tunes buoys to the waves to generate power
Founders: Alex Hagmuller and Max Ginsburg
Home base: West Linn, Oregon
Solar and wind energy will be essential for a carbon-neutral future, but the amount of time they produce energy is low. Solar produces energy just 25 percent of the time and wind produces energy 35 percent of the time. Wave energy, by contrast, has the potential to produce energy 60 percent of the time, and AquaHarmonics' founders believe they can increase that capacity to at least 80 percent. They will do this by using many smaller devices rather than a single large device as most other wave energy startups have done. Not only are small devices cheaper and easier to deploy, they can also generate more consistent power because they move out of phase with one another. For a variety of reasons, they can also survive storm conditions better than most bigger devices can, and continue to generate similar amounts of power. AquaHarmonics is designing cylindrical buoys with a mooring line that reels in and out with the waves. Depending on where they're deployed, the average capacity is 300 to 600 kilowatts, about the same as a big wind turbine. In 2017, the startup won the $1.5 million Wave Energy Prize and has since received $4.4 million in grants from the Department of Energy. It will soon deploy a device in Hawaii at a Navy Wave energy test site to demonstrate that the technology works. Grid-connected testing should follow in 2023.
Tech: Makes biodegradable packaging from mushrooms
Founders: Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre
Home base: Green Island, New York
Tech: Makes faux milk that's nearly identical to the stuff from cows
Founders: Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi
Home base: Berkeley, California
Methane is 28 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2, and a single dairy cow generates about 220 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year. The founders of Perfect Day engineered a way around the climate-warming impacts of the 10 million-cow strong dairy industry in the lab. By introducing the genetic code for whey protein into a fungus, Trichoderma reesei, they get a whey protein that is molecularly identical to the whey protein in cow's milk. As such, it mimics the creamy mouthfeel of dairy, making it a viable substitute. The protein is already used in a handful of popular ice-cream brands including Midwest ice cream manufacturer Graeter's and the Keto-friendly line Nick's. The company also partners with General Mills on a cream cheese and Betterland and Starbucks on an alt milk that the coffee giant is still trying to name.