Dear all,
Lots of news as usual in the field of critical materials: two articles addressing their recycling (Nature and Mining.com), a piece of opinion concerning rare earths mining in the US (The Denver Post), a report on data centers electric consumption in Ireland (Irish Times) and an analysis of US strengths for securing a critical materials supply chain (EPS News). Last but not least, a paper raising concerns on the impact of Climate change on water resources (Nature).
Further on the scientific front with a wide variety of innovations such as two processes for water purification at University of Tokyo and Rice University. A renewable biocement at NTU Singapore, new silicon nanowires for energy saving at Berkeley National Laboratory, a technology for metal recovery at KIST and finally a new and efficient approach for making electrodes in battery manufacturing at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
In the field of sustainability, we have chosen 5 initiatives: a team from Bar-Ilan University trying to reform coral reefs using 3D-printing, the Better Buildings Initiative trying to decarbonize America's built environment, a video from Deutsche Welle explaining how we can re-use rare minerals, an article from TechXplore on how to use flash heating to recycle automotive components into high-value graphene and finally a presentation of McGill's Sustainable Growth Hub.
Also 17 of our Start Up alumni were in the news this month : quite a few partnerships announced or progressing (Citrine Informatics - USA with Ubiquitous Energy, CompPair - Switzerland with Decathlon, ArianeGroup and Salomon, Graphene MG - Australia with Rio Tinto, Kebotix - USA with Valqua, Spin Ion Technologies - France with Quantum Design International, UBQ Materials - Israel with Polymertal and Mercedes-Benz), some funding rounds or grants (Radical Plastics - USA, Rein4ced - Netherlands), scale up announcements (Quantum Ventura - USA, Zeta Energy - USA), interesting press coverage (Bcomp - Switzerland, Demeta - France, Lixo - France, Nitricity - USA, polySpectra - USA, UbiQD - USA) and an award at JEC World 2022 (Blackleaf - France).
