In the hyped up world of “move fast and break things” startups, an ethical approach to building products and companies can often come as a breath of fresh air. That’s why it’s great to see the docket on the upcoming Product Tank features a couple of speakers on exactly this sort of thing.
Melanie Rieback will present Post-Growth Entrepreneurship. Companies are addicted to exponential growth. But is this good for our planet and our society? Our never-ending quest for growth is causing climate change, human rights violations, threats to biodiversity, and unprecedented waste. Melanie will make you question everything you know about entrepreneurship, provide practical tools for building something different and offer you a blue pill and a red pill. Can you go back to “business as usual” again?
Johan Kers will speak on How we built a company to fix plastic recycling. As a society we do a terrible job recycling plastic. In the US, our recycling rate is 9%, and it hasn’t improved over the past decade. This is one of the major unsolved global sustainability issues. Birch Biosciences is a Portland cleantech company that is motivated to address our plastic recycling problem and develop technology that will reinvent how plastics are recycled. We are developing enzymes that act as “molecular scissors” to break down plastic polymers as part of an economical, sustainable, and circular plastic recycling process. I’ll touch on our strategy to build the company in Portland, fund the company through grants and venture capital, develop an R&D platform, and move towards commercialization.
The next event takes place Thursday, October 17, 2024, at 6:00PM. It will be hosted at Kiln.
For more information or to RSVP, visit “Product Tank October – Ethical Product.”
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