#sustaiAn Ecopreneur represents a new era of entrepreneur, whose focus is on creating & selling environmentally-friendly products & services.

One of the greatest challenges facing businesses today is to find ways to reduce their climate impact, reduce harmful emission & pollutants, become more sustainable & yet still remain financially viable.

Millions of companies across the globe have taken up the climate action torch & are reducing emissions & waste & finding ways to be more sustainable & reduce their impact on dwindling biodiversity.

However, there are a new breed of entrepreneurs who are generating new business models which are sustainable & make a positive impact from their inception, whilst also making a profit.

These climate conscious entrepreneurs are known as Ecopreneurs.

Choose Packaging (CHOOSE Water Limited)

James Longcroft, Founder & Managing Director of CHOOSE, began the company as a profitable business venture. Although he began his business selling water in single use plastic bottles, he quickly evolved to a business committed to removing plastics from the economy and out of the eco-system.

Edinburgh based company CHOOSE are now striving to minimise plastic pollution, with their innovative, plastic free, fully biodegradable bottle made entirely from naturally occurring, sustainable & non-toxic materials.

“We created our bottle to minimise plastic pollution and begin the journey towards zero impact living. The products we offer utilise our patented paper bottle technology – a paper casing lined with a plant-based waterproof PET free liner. All the materials used to make our bottles are 100% natural, sustainable and vegan-friendly which will take less than a year, instead of a few centuries to degrade.” (1)

Recently, HP have recently acquired CHOOSE packaging with the vision to disrupt the $10 billion fiber-based sustainable packaging market.

Freight Farms

Freight Farms was started in 2010 by Ecopreneurs Brad McNamara & Jon Friedman with a brand of rooftop greenhouses. They quickly saw a gap in the food production sector & realised that to meet their goals they would need to invest in a modular & scalable solution.

Shipping containers being readily available, offered a readily available & affordable option for Brad & Jon to build their new technology inside & in doing so, could enable farms to exist in areas traditional farming could not support with traditional agriculture.

Freight Farms have emerged as one of the first leading Ag Tech companies & by 2019 they had launched ‘Greenery’, the first hydroponics farm built inside a shipping container.

With the need for sustainable food for an ever-growing planetary population, the ‘Greenery S’ hydroponics container farm, can offer farming solutions on so very many levels. Not only can the ‘Greenery S’ be installed where space is of a premium, but it can also be stacked to optimise productivity. (2)

The options for countries affected by climate change weather extremes, which are perpetually disrupting biodiversity & impacting on the land means that the ‘Greenery S’ can also be installed in arid deserts & where extreme weather is destroying crops.

Optim Energy

Jeremiah Thoronka is the Ecopreneur responsible for start-up Optim Energy, an energy solution based on the kinetic movement of human movement.

Having been brought up in poverty Sierra Leone with only his mother to support him, the family would rely on charcoal & firewood for heating, cooking & lighting. In Sierra Leone, at least 89% of the population is without electricity or gas.

At aged 10 years old, Jeremiah having won a scholarship to attend one of the best school in the region, realised all too quickly how being at school & having access to energy & electricity transformed his learning experience. However, at the end of each day travelling back into the slum, he began to realise the effects of energy poverty.

While studying at University, Jeremiah grew more concerned about the impact of energy poverty on his community. This led him at just 17 to create a start-up, Optim Energy.  Jeremiah developed a piezoelectric device that harnesses energy from heat, movement & pressure – all which occur naturally in the environment. (3)

When the device is placed under a road, in an area with a lot of traffic and passers-by, it absorbs the vibrations they create and uses them to generate an electric current. As nothing is being burned, no emissions are released in the process. (3)

“The Sun is not always shining, water is drying up, fossil fuels are not always going to be used, but people are always moving,” says Thoronka. (3)

When Optim energy was first installed in Jeremiah’s local area of Kuntolah using two of his devices, Optim Energy was able to provide power free of charge to 150 households (1500 people) & 15 schools (9000 students)

1. https://www.choosepackaging.co.uk/about-us
2. https://www.freightfarms.com/
3. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210713-how-pedestrians-are-lighting-homes-in-sierra-leone

Written & cited by Katy-Jane Mason for & on behalf of Virtually Smart Ltd