It may be onerous to be optimistic about the way forward for Earth’s local weather. Oceans are rising, autumn is unseasonably heat, and wildfires are raging. However some corporations are taking lemons and turning them into lemonade—regardless of how unattainable it might appear.
At Fortune’s World Discussion board on Tuesday in New York Metropolis, Jennifer Holmgren, chairman and CEO of biorecycling firm LanzaTech, mentioned how her enterprise is creating merchandise out of air pollution. For instance, the corporate takes the carbon dioxide omitted from China’s business crops and pumps it right into a bioreactor to create ethanol. It then converts that natural compound right into a monomer that later turns into polyester, which might then be used to make issues like jackets and different garments.
However a lot of these superior expertise are so forward-thinking that Holmgren says she regularly encounters naysayers.
“Whenever you have a new technology, it’s almost like you’re going to the ‘Ministry of No.’ Everything is no, there’s always a reason why it doesn’t work, why it can’t scale, why people won’t want it, or why it’s not perfect,” Holmgren says. “The perfect being the enemy of the good is really the biggest thing we deal with.”
Many individuals don’t consider it’s potential to take air pollution and create wearable merchandise out of it—even when the CEO holds up the pollution-saving woven jacket onstage at an occasion, which she did at Fortune’s World Discussion board. Holmgren says it’s tough for her to make and win arguments about pollution-converting expertise as a result of individuals will at all times be skeptical. Finally, she says she wants assist from like-minded people who see the promise of expertise like LanzaTech.
“I need the allies. I need the people that we lean in to help us be successful,” she says. “The success comes from allies. It comes from people like all of you sitting in this room, who when people say, ‘Well, the LanzaTech technology can’t scale,’ you’re the one that comes in and says, ‘Well, but if it does scale, it will reduce emissions.”
Jim Fitterling, the chairman and CEO of Dow, chimed in on the dialog onstage. As a serious firm that companions with smaller companies like LanzaTech, Dow is deeply invested in alternate options to air pollution and local weather change.
“To some extent, people believe what they want to believe until they’ve seen something different, until they’ve seen a future, or they’ve seen an opportunity that they can’t imagine,” Fitterling says.
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