Dear all
Another heavy « double month » issue covering the period in which we thankfully had our 6th edition of World Materials Forum with many of you present and some great speakers connecting during their night from Australia, California and Japan…
Especially this time, we would like to highlight the news from « our » start ups as we nominated 60 start ups world wide during the 4 editions of our WMF Start Up Challenge and we had 15 out of 60 displaying great news over these past 2 months varying from new product launch (Citrine Informatics - USA), key customer trials (B Comp - Switzerland, Cycladex - USA), venture program (Brimstone Energy - USA), fund raising (Carbios - France, Radical Plastics - USA), grant allocation (Nelumbo - USA), awards (Cypris Materials - USA, Keey Aerogel - France, Safi Organics - Kenya), press coverage (Spin Ion - France, UbiQd - USA, Woodoo - France), go public transaction (GrapheneMG - Australia) or company sale (Vaporsens - USA).
Lots of news as well and as usual in the field of critical materials: the conclusions of WMF Opening session of course as well as news on the battery side (new European capacities or Tesla next generation) and perspectives on rare earth (Flooding in China or Funding/Listing for MP Materials in the US), lithium (now recognized as critical by EU), copper (Goldman Sachs survey), or even ore (progress on Nimba).
Further on the scientific front with a variety of innovations in order to purify water with sunlight (Monsah University), extract rare earth from acid mining drainage (Penn State), make fuel cells cheaper and longer lasting (University of Copenhagen), increase electrical capacity of copper wires (Oak Ridge National Lab), or even develop some new electronics so called plasmonics (Tohoku University).
On the sustainability front, we picked 3 examples: Amazon investing in battery recycling, Collaboration of 9 nations (Canada, China, Chile, Finland, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) to develop Zero emissions EV production/infrastructure and University of Toronto’s survey conclusions on changing vehicle ownership/usage patterns and big cities designs on top of supporting conversion to EVs.
Finally please note the dates of WMF 2021: June 15-17 - as always in Nancy