Daily Archives: June 2, 2021

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Last month, Adlumin announced Alexander D Crepas as Director of Innovation and Technology. Crepas is based out of Chicago and will oversee technical channel enablement and help execute and manage product innovation.

Crepas brings over 25 years of dedicated information security experience and started his formal career in college as a Linux and Network Admin, helping build a regional internet service provider (ISP). After receiving his degree in Computer Science, Crepas worked for several Fortune 100 security teams developing their information security programs. His interest in cutting-edge security technologies led him to work for security startups focused on vulnerability management, intrusion detection and security information and event management.

"Adlumin has created a unique, patented and easy-to-use security analytics platform initially for the financial sector and is now used in many industries," said Crepas. "I am excited to be part of the Adlumin team and provide a technical bridge between our partners and the Adlumin platform."

While at the Internet Security Systems, one of the first groundbreaking security companies in the field, Crepas wrote the business case for their emergency response services and provided triage for break-ins and penetration testing services. Crepas has extensive worldwide travel experience, creating and delivering technical training curriculum and certification programs to over twenty countries.

"Alex is a positive and energetic leader and we are so delighted to welcome him to the Adlumin family," said Tim Evans, SVP of Adlumin. "With Alex's guidance, we look forward to continuously enhancing our product in this time of accelerated digital transformation and building on Adlumin's patented core banking algorithms."

Adlumin looks forward to expanding its team of innovators and is committed to creating the best security and compliance tool in the market. Crepas' passion for technological innovation will help propel the Adlumin platform and expand capabilities that will benefit partners, customers and the overall industry for years to come.

About Adlumin

Adlumin Inc. is a patented, advanced security and compliance automation platform built for corporate organizations that demand innovative cybersecurity solutions and easy-to-use, comprehensive reporting tools. The Adlumin team has a passion for technology and solving the most challenging problems through the targeted application of data science and compliance integration. Our mission is to "add luminosity" or visibility to every customer's network processes through real-time threat detection, analysis, and response to ensure sensitive data remains secure.

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Adlumin Appoints New Director of Innovation and Technology - Business Wire

USA TODAY Sports' Jeff Zillgitt breaks down how the Bucks have learned from their previous early exits in the NBA playoffs. USA TODAY

LeBron James missed 26 of the Los Angeles Lakers final 30 games dealing with an ankle injury.

What if there were a product that would have prevented the injury or made it less severe? Or what if there were a technology or therapy that would have allowed him to get back on the court sooner?

Thats what the league is seeking as it introduces NBA Launchpad, the leagues latest initiative to source, evaluate, and pilot emerging technologies that advance the NBAs top basketball priorities across all levels of the game.

In essence, the NBA wants your help to improve the game, and in its initial callout to entrepreneurs and companies, the league is seeking innovative products, technologies or other platforms that address four NBA priorities: innovating ankle injury prevention and recovery; elevating health and wellness in youth basketball; enhancing elite youth player performance; and advancing referee training and development.

Its always been our interest to be an innovative, tech-forward organization, to be exploring ways to improve the product, NBA executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics Evan Wasch told USA TODAY Sports. The reason were forming this new platform is essentially to allow us to take more control of that process."

Wasch described Launchpad as a cross between an incubator, crowd-source platform and 'techstars'program."

The NBA is accepting applications now through August and will announce finalists in each category in September. The league will have a selection day where finalists present to NBA stakeholders with the idea of selecting one winner in each track. Pilot programs will begin next season across various NBA properties.

Submissions are accepted at NBA Launchpad and via email: Launchpad@NBA.com.

While the NBA has worked with several tech companies, many of whom are already focused on sports, it wants to broaden the scope of its partners to include academics and entrepreneurs in adjacent fields such as healthcare and workplace improvement.

"We want tangible solutions to theseproblems," Wasch said. "We just dont care where it comes from. We dont care if it comes from a big company that has invested heavily in the space. We dont care if it comes from an entrepreneur, an academic anyone who has a tangible product or technology that can advance these priorities, were open to."

The NBA is introducing its Launchpad initiative to source, evaluate and pilot emerging technologies to improve the game,(Photo: Bob Donnan, USA TODAY Sports)

Ankle injuries are the No. 1 injury accounting for games missed by players, and 25% of players sustain an ankle injury during the season.

That is one of the most burdensome injuries that our players face, Wasch said. Its both impacting a lot of our players and the amount of games they play.

Someone might have an answer. Could be an innovative ankle brace that prevents ankle sprains. Could be predictive software that incorporates player movement and adjusts the way a player runs or jumps. Or a therapeutic product that helps a player return quicker.

All of these things would be within scope because ultimately, we want to prevent the injuries in the first place, make them less severe when they happen and speed up the return to play process when they do happen, Wasch said.

Health and wellness in grassroots basketball is a priority, Wasch said, because of injuries, minutes and games played, fatigue and burnout.

Were looking for technologies, platforms and software than can promote health and wellness among youth basketball players, he said.

Maybe thats a wellness app to track nutrition and activity. Maybe its injury preventionstrategies.

Players in the 15-18-year-old range who potentially could play in the NBA, G League and/or college basketball are also high on the leagues priority list. It wants to make sure those players have all the tools necessary to improve performance. The NBA has basketball academies in Australia, China, India, Africa and Latin America, works with USA Basketballs junior national teams and has teens at its G League Ignite team.

Wasch offered suggestions: virtual reality technology that improves cognitive processing, visual ability and skill development.

During the past few seasons, the NBA has expanded its officiating initiatives and created in-house software under NBA senior vice president and head of referee development and training Monty McCutchen.

The league wants to do more.

Most forward-thinking tech developers in the world arent really focused on officiating as a sexy area for them to invest them, Wasch said. If we can communicate to the marketplace, there is a market here, there is the opportunity to be affiliated with the NBA to shape the future of NBA officiating through training technologies, talent identification, we want to see it and we want to know how we can leverage that."

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NBA Launchpad initiative seeks to improve basketball through emerging technologies - USA TODAY

Boost Mobile Makes Fantasy Bet With DraftKings Partnership

Boost Mobile is partnering with DraftKings to offer its customers exclusive fantasy sports contests and sports betting promotions. The partnership is the first of its kind between a wireless carrier and sportsbook, and it will kick off with a $100,000 fantasy contest around the NBA Finals.

The contest, exclusive to Boost customers, will ask users to log into the DraftKings app and predict the amount of total points scored in the upcoming NBA Finals. Customers will also be able to visit Boost Mobile retail stores and pay cash to place bets with DraftKings, if theyre located in one of the 14 states where DraftKings currently offers sports betting.

Were trying to cut beyond voice, text and data and offer sports entertainment. We want to offer a differentiation of value to customers that an AT&T or Verizon are too corporate to do, says Stephen Stokols, EVP at Boost Mobile, whose parent company Dish Network partnered with DraftKings in March to add DraftKings betting and fantasy apps to Sling TV, the streaming service owned by Dish.

Stokols says that Boost Mobile plans to offer other promotions such as giving users who pay their phone bills on time a $5 credit to place a bet or join a fantasy contest on DraftKings. Boost Mobile customers will also receive DraftKings credits in exchange for left-over wireless data they didnt use. Outside of DraftKings, Boost plans to offer its own fantasy contests on the Boost Mobile app.

[Betting integration] is going to texting as well, Stokols says. You wont even have to open an app but you can get text messages that you reply to. Is LeBron James going to hit the next free throw? Reply Y to bet a buck, he envisions.

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Cristiano Ronaldo Signs Recovery Technology Deal With Therabody - SportTechie

BOISE, Idaho, June 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), announced today that it will hold its fiscal third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, at 2:30 p.m. Mountain time.

The call will be webcast live at http://investors.micron.com/. Webcast replays of presentations can be accessed from Microns Investor Relations website and will be available for approximately one year after the call.

About Micron Technology, Inc. We are an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products through our Micron and Crucial brands. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence and 5G applications that unleash opportunities from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), visit micron.com.

2021 Micron Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Information, products, and/or specifications are subject to change without notice. Micron, the Micron logo, and all other Micron trademarks are the property of Micron Technology, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Micron Media Relations ContactErica PompenMicron Technology, Inc.+1 (408) 834-1873epompen@micron.com

Micron Investor Relations ContactFarhan Ahmad Micron Technology, Inc. +1 (408) 834-1927farhanahmad@micron.com

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Micron Technology to Report Fiscal Third Quarter Results on June 30, 2021 - Yahoo Finance

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Harvard University has granted an exclusive license to biotechnology company Obatala Sciences to commercialize innovations that enable the study of human fat tissue in vitro. Harvard Office of Technology Development and Obatala, which manufactures stem cell and hydrogel products to enable next-generation therapeutics discovery, announced the agreement today.

Obatala Sciences operates in the organ-on-a-chip or microphysiological system industry, a fast-growing scientific field that enables pharmaceutical companies to better model human response to therapies, in comparison to traditional laboratory approaches. The licensed Harvard technology, an adipose-on-a-chip, provides a method of obtaining adult-size fat tissue cells for study in vitro and enables the testing of weight loss and cancer-targeting therapeutics without the need for testing in animals. The adipose chips can respond to starvation and simulated meals, and they demonstrate key hormonal activity that is a hallmark of adipose as a functional organ. This ground-breaking technology provides a more accurate and dynamic model of human tissue in its diseased state compared to traditional two-dimensional culture.

The adipose chips were developed by researchers led by Kit Parker, PhD, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Associate Faculty member of Harvards Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Parkers lab at Harvard SEAS developed and demonstrated novel methods of culturing human fat cells to model a diseased state in vitro. The findings were published, for example, in the journal Lab on a Chip (2020). The worldwide license agreement with Harvard enables Obatala to make the technology widely available for researchers use in drug discovery and R&D.

As a key part of its mission, Obatala promotes diversity in clinical research with the goal of speeding up the development of better therapies for diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cancer, which disproportionately affect minority populations. The company has rapidly grown to establish a robust pipeline of stem cells, unique human-derived hydrogels, and media products that combine to mimic tissue from patients of specific populations.

We are elated to be able to expand access to transformational research tools from Harvard that may help speed up the research and discovery of better treatments for patients who are traditionally excluded from clinical trials and those who need them the most, said Obatala Sciences CEO Trivia Frazier, PhD, MBA. The adipose chip technology provides us another crucial tool to promote diversity in research and improve outcomes for all patients. Organ-on-a-chip technology is revolutionary and may forever change the way we approach drug discovery on a global scale.

I am excited for the translation opportunity that the license to Obatala represents for these technologies developed in the Disease Biophysics Group at Harvard, Parker said. Trivia and I have talked for almost a year now and share a vision of how organs on chips can enable innovation in the pharma and biotech industries, and how the spin-off technologies represent new therapeutic opportunities in and of themselves. Im hopeful that my labs innovations in tissue engineering may lead to numerous impactful uses of synthetic adipose, including this effort to accelerate the development of better treatments for disease.

Frazier, a New Orleans native, said Obatala is the first life sciences firm based in New Orleans that is run by an African-American woman. To date, Obatala has received more than $2 million in federal funds to support the commercialization of its hydrogels and media products, and it has made history as the first minority female-owned firm to raise over $1 million in institutional funds to grow a biotechnology enterprise in Louisiana.

The license agreement with Harvard, Frazier said, will help Obatala expand its offerings of microphysiological systems that biomedical researchers can use to mimic various tissues throughout the human body. In consideration for the license, the university has received equity in the company and is eligible to receive royalties on resulting products. The license agreement also includes global access provisions, in keeping with Harvards longstanding commitment to promote equitable access to technologies of significant public health benefit in developing countries.

About Harvard Office of Technology Development

Harvards Office of Technology Development (OTD) promotes the public good by fostering innovation and translating new inventions made at Harvard University into useful products that are available and beneficial to society. Our integrated approach to technology development comprises sponsored research and corporate alliances, intellectual property management, and technology commercialization through venture creation and licensing. More than 70 startups have launched to commercialize Harvard technologies in the past 5 years, collectively raising more than $2.5 billion in financing. To further bridge the academic-industry development gap, Harvard OTD manages the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and the Physical Sciences & Engineering Accelerator. For more information, please visit https://otd.harvard.edu.

About Obatala Sciences

Founded in 2017 with the goal of advancing research in the fields of obesity, diabetes, and regenerative medicine, Obatala Sciences is a biotechnology company that offers research products and services to scientists in medical industries and academia. Obatala prides itself in making high-quality products that researchers use to discover better therapies for diseases that significantly impact the human population. Obatala is named for the West African deity tasked with sculpting the human body. Co-founded and run by an African-American female from New Orleans, Obatala Sciences is committed to creating more accurate models of human tissue, starting with their building blocks: the cells. For more information, please visit ObatalaSciences.com.

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Harvard Licenses Technology to Obatala Sciences to Advance Discovery in Obesity, Diabetes, and Cancer - Business Wire

Autonomous robotics company Starship Technologies has a new CEO. The company on Tuesday said Alastair Westgarth, the former CEO of Alphabets Loon, would be leading the company as it looks to expand its robotics delivery service.

Westgarth previously headed Loon, Alphabets experiment to deliver broadband via high-altitude balloons, from 2017. The project shut down for good at the beginning of this year. The company said in a farewell blog post that the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. Prior to working at Loon, Westgarth headed the wireless antennae company Quintel Solutions, was a vice president at telecommunications company Nortel and director of engineering at Bell Mobility.

He will be joining Starship Technologies at a time of rapid expansion. At the beginning of 2020, Starship only had a couple hundred autonomous bots operating in a few neighborhoods and college campuses. Last month the company said the number of deliveries since the start of the pandemic quadrupled, hitting a milestone 1.5 million commercial deliveries globally.

Autonomous delivery is changing logistics as we know it, impacting billions of people around the world, Westgarth said in a statement Tuesday. The team at Starship has been developing and perfecting the technology and its operations for years, since creating the robot delivery category in 2014 [] Im excited about this opportunity and looking forward to helping the company scale both on campuses and in neighborhoods, giving millions more people access to this market-leading, convenient, safe and environmentally friendly delivery service.

Starships previous CEO Lex Bayer quietly departed in December 2020, after nearly three years at the helm. Its co-founder Ahti Heinla, who acted as interim CEO, will now become Starships CTO.

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Former head of Alphabets Loon joins Starship Technologies as new CEO - TechCrunch

COLOGNE, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HRS, the leading corporate lodging platform, is leveraging its capabilities to support corporations, governments and health responders that face crisis situations arising from pandemics, natural disasters and other causes. With automation as its foundation, and supported by the companys globally-renowned Clean & Safe Protocol, HRS can quickly perform hotel procurement in any location and set up easy-to-use online booking access within hours of contract signing.

The random manner of COVID breakouts and new strains flaring up in different countries and cities demonstrates the need for fast, proven solutions to help people find safe hotels. Given the resource challenges many communities deal with in disaster situations, HRS Crisis Management Solution offers a superior option for urgent, high-volume lodging. The combination of new technology, on-the-ground hotel relationships, secure payment and unmatched speed to stand up localized solutions is ideal for the distinct emergency lodging needs of individuals, families, professionals and isolation scenarios.

Proven Technology with Rapid Deployment Already in Use on Multiple Continents

HRS end-to-end platform has been deployed with timely results in multiple locations:

Centralized Virtual Payment Solution Eliminates Expense Burden on Hotel Guests

Organizations can leverage HRS Touchless Payment functionality to streamline the financial component of the costs of extended hotel stays. Using proven virtual procedures and secure APIs with credit card providers and financial institutions, the process automates reconciliation and reimbursement processes while eliminating fraud opportunities. Hotels gain from timely payment and incremental occupancy, while guests dont need to worry about extensive costs that can accrue from lengthy stays at a hotel.

HRS Crisis Management Solution builds off the companys innovative Clean & Safe Protocol. Less than a year after its introduction in June 2020, the Protocol has been adopted by more than 65,000 hotels across 192 countries. These properties have elevated their hygiene standards in reaction to COVID-19, even for extended periods often required for emergency circumstances.

Organizations can learn more about this innovative solution at HRS website, or they can email a HRS Crisis Management team member at crisisresponse@hrs.com.

Its been gratifying to see our lodging expertise and technology help people impacted by the pandemic and other crisis situations, said HRS CEO Tobias Ragge. One outcome of the past 18 months is the irrefutable evidence of the role technology can play to expedite solutions that support communities and relief organizations at their time of need. Weve now refined our Crisis Management Solution to work on a global basis, and stand ready to assist corporations, governments, insurance entities and other parties navigating the lodging-related challenges driven by emergency circumstances.

About HRS

HRS is revolutionizing managed lodging programs for corporations, hotels and business travelers worldwide with its proprietary technology and expertise. The company is committed to facilitating safety, savings, security, satisfaction and sustainable hotel options for its global client roster. Leveraging its unique Lodging as a Service platform, HRS oversees the totality of corporate hotel programs for its clients, from initial procurement and rate assurance to booking, virtual payment and expense management. With more than 65,000 hotels joining HRS Clean & Safe Protocol in 2020, and the recently launched Green Stay Initiative, the company provides newly-prioritized information on key decision factors impacting post-pandemic travel. The companys data-driven solutions deliver savings and performance for corporations across all hotel categories, including transient, meetings and long-stay lodging scenarios all while digitizing processes on the hotel side for a better traveler experience. Founded in 1972, HRS today works with 35 percent of the global Fortune 500, as well as the worlds leading hotel chains, regional hospitality groups and independent hotels. More information at http://www.hrs.com/enterprise.

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HRS Crisis Management Solution Delivers Turnkey Technology and Safe Hotel Options for Corporations, First Responders and Governments - Business Wire

Ragpickers search for reusable items from a heap of garbage, at Sevapura dumping yard in Jaipur,Rajasthan, India, Wednesday, April 07, 2021.

NurPhoto | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Humans generate a remarkable amount of garbage: over 2 billion tonnes per year, according to the World Bank, or approximately 4.5 trillion pounds annually. And that figure is going to grow. Global garbage is expected to reach 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050.

Even if you could figure out where to put that much garbage, it's going to leak dangerous greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change. Solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the United States, according to the most recent data available from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2019, landfills released 15% of methane emissions, which is equivalent to emissions from more than 21.6 million passenger cars driven for one year.

Recycling is no panacea. And furthermore, there's a wide gap between what's possible to be recycled and what actually is recycled. Dry recyclables such as plastic, paper and cardboard, metal and glass are equal to 38% of municipal waste, according to data in the World Bank's What a Waste 2.0 report. Meanwhile, only 13.5% of those dry recyclables are actually recycled globally.

Technology companies are trying to tackle the garbage problem from multiple directions, improving recycling processes and creating new materials to make single-use products that are compostable.

The U.S. waste industry can use the help. Richer countries do a better job of recycling than poorer countries, but the United States isn't near the top of the list, recycling 34.6% of its garbage. While poor countries on average only recycle 3.7% and many don't recycle at all or don't have data, some of the best rates are in Europe and especially among some of the smallest territories, such as The Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which is No. 1 in the world, recycling 67% of its garbage.

"The basic principles of recycling are the collection, sorting, manual and or mechanical processing, and then delivery of the required quality of recycled materials to manufacturing industries," Ross Bartley, the trade and environment director at the Brussels, Belgium-headquartered Bureau ofInternationalRecycling, told CNBC. "Even in industrialized countries, manual sorting may be necessary and that can be complemented, and maybe replaced, by automated sorting systems using suitable technologies."

Automated sorting happens with magnets, flotation, wind sifters (to separate light and heavy materials), and cameras, among other techniques, according to Bartley, and such equipment can be bought off the shelf and integrated into recycling plants.

But key questions include how much the separation equipment costs, the all-in running costs per tonne of processed materials, and what is the added value to each of the separated streams of materials. In other words: "When is it profitable?" Bartley said.

Matanya Horowitz, the founder and CEO of AMP Robotics, which ranked No. 25 on this year's CNBC Disruptor 50 list, got his big recycling idea after visiting a materials recovery facility (MRF) the destination for residential and commercial recyclables and learned not only how demanding work conditions are, but how inefficient the process can be.

Horowitz was looking for applications of robotics technology that could be improved. He got his doctorate at California Institute of Technology and when he was there, he worked on several Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenges. "That helped me understand what was working well in robotics and what remained a challenge," he told CNBC.

It was clear to Horowitz that computer vision could improve the work of sorting garbage for recycling. In July 2014, Horowitz launched AMP Robotics and has raised $77.8 million and has almost 130 employees. In April 2020, AMP Robotics announced it had processed more than one billion recyclable objects in a year.

A primary challenge for AMP Robotics is that sorting garbage is endlessly complex. "Recycling is a tough business to be in," Horowitz says. "You can't control the materials you're processing, and there are all kinds of odd contaminants that people put in their recycling bins. The result is that you have to build exceptionally tough and high-performance pieces of equipment."

AMP Robotics uses robotics and artificial intelligence to sort recycling.

Photo courtesy AMP Robotics

He's aware of the historic insufficiencies of recycling. "These materials (plastics, metals, paper) all have true value. The problem is that the cost of sorting erodes away that value," Horowitz says. "If you reduce the cost of sorting, the margin you can extract on all those materials increases and you naturally find an incentive to capture that material. That's precisely what our technology does, and how we go about our mission of enabling a world without waste."

Horowitz is optimistic. "A quote I've always liked is, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,'" he said.

Consumer brands can help increase the success of the recycling supply chain, too, according to Steve Alexander, the president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, by designing packaging that can be recycled.

A label on a soda bottle that has a lot of adhesive or ink may not be consistent with other recyclable designs in the soda bottle category, and might in the fact contaminate that stream.

"Even though it's been separated as a soda bottle, or water bottle, it still could contaminate," Alexander tells CNBC. "It all comes down to design. The first thing we have to do is ensure the products we buy be compatible with recycling."

Brands are being pushed to be better and more transparent about their package recyclability by consumer demand. "It's on the goodwill right now of the consumer brand company," Alexander says, but there's interest in governmental regulation mandating consumer brand package design.

Troy Swope, the CEO of Footprint, a technology company focused on eliminating single-use plastics through development and manufacturing of compostable containers, says to focus on improving recycling for plastics is chasing the wrong solution.

"Just to be real clear: Recycling is a joke when it comes to plastic," Swope said. "It's one of the biggest lies we've ever been told."

Swope pointed to CarbonLite Holdings, a large plastic bottle recycler that filed for bankruptcy protection in March. "Without value, no matter what we do to infrastructure... if nobody wants it at the end, nature can't digest it, it doesn't mean anything. It has no value," he said.

Troy Swope, a co-founder and CEO of Footprint

Photo courtesy Footprint

Just to be real clear: Recycling is a joke when it comes to plastic.

Arizona-headquartered Footprint, which ranked No. 45 on this year's CNBC Disruptor 50 list, is focused on making compostable single-use products from cellulose, plant-based materials, such as a recycled cardboard box, wood fibers and agricultural waste. The goal is for all products to be biodegradable or compostable in 90 days or less.

And they're doing so at scale. "We're going to deliver close to a billion units this year, probably just under a billion units from three factories," Swope told CNBC.

Current Footprint customers include McDonalds, SweetGreen and Conagra Brands.

"Next year, we will sell billions of units," Swope said.

Footprint has three factories currently, one in Arizona, another in South Carolina and a third in Mexico. It is in the process of building a research center in the Netherlands and a manufacturing facility in Poland.

"I think recycling, and I say this as a recycling company, is not the answer to garbage," said Tom Szaky, CEO of recycling company Terracycle and zero-waste packaging company Loop, in a recent CNBC Evolve livestream event. "It's an answer to the symptom of garbage, maybe the best way to manage waste, but I think we have to go much deeper and enable an economy where garbage doesn't exist."

Indeed, that's a plug for Szaky's company, Loop, which has consumer brands partners collaborate to make "reusability, ideally, as disposability."

But it also gets at a nuance of the garbage problem which David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality Materials Management Program in Portland, Oregon, covered in a report questioning the environmental impact of recycling.

"In this country, most of the impacts of consumer goods and single-use items and packaging whether it be in toxics, climate change, water depletion, habitat disruption, or other impacts is not a result of disposal. Rather, it is a consequence of supply chains, manufacturing and production," Allaway tells CNBC. "And, as our research showed, items that are 'recyclable' and 'compostable' are not necessarily better for the environment or result in lower human health impacts than functionally equivalent items that are not 'recyclable' or 'compostable.'"

That is not to say that recyclability and composability are necessarily unhelpful.

Items with these popular attributes could be less impactful, and some of them are less impactful, but recyclability and composability are inconsistent predictors of environmental goodness, according to his work, which summarized roughly 17 years of international research on the topic.

For example, elemental mercury is very recyclable but a bad neurotoxin, and whale blubber is compostable but still not a raw material that is desirable.

"Simply knowing that an item is 'recyclable' or 'compostable' tells us surprisingly little about the actual impacts on human health and the environment, or the trade-offs between different materials," Allaway said.

There also are downstream effects of waste decomposition.

"Biodegradable is a great solution in countries that lack solid waste management infrastructure, but in this country, where most of our non-recovered waste goes to landfill, biodegradable means that the material will decompose and produce methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas," Allaway said.

He cautions that promoting these popular attributes such as "recyclable" and "compostable" is a common marketing strategy that plays to popular wisdom, "which is always popular, but not always wise."

What's most important, in his view, is that producers quantify the total environmental impact of a good with a life cycle assessment. Otherwise, Allaway says, society has no way of knowing whether any of these efforts are steering us in the direction of actual sustainability, or just "feel-good" shifts in pollution involving visible, obvious forms, such as plastic in the oceans.

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Trillions of pounds of trash: New technology tries to solve an old garbage problem - CNBC

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --The spread of inaccuracies on social media including political "fake news," and misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines has led to a plethora of problems in areas as disparate as politics and public health. To combat the spread of false and misleading information, MIT Sloan School Professor David Rand and his colleagues have been developing effective interventions that technology companies can use to combat misinformation online. A study just published in The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review by Rand and other researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Political Science Department and Media Lab, as well as the University of Regina, and Google's Jigsaw unit, introduces a suite of such interventions that prompt people to think about accuracy before sharing.

"Previous research had shown that most social media users are often fairly adept at spotting falsehoods when asked to judge accuracy," says Rand. "The problem was that this didn't always stop them from spreading misinformation because they would simply forget to think about accuracy when deciding what to share. So we set out to develop prompts that could slow the spread of false news by helping people stop and reflect on the accuracy of what they were seeing before they click 'share.'"

In April and May 2020, the team showed 9,070 social media users a set of 10 false and 10 true headlines about COVID-19 and measured how likely they were to share each one. The team tested a variety of approaches to help users remember to think about accuracy, and therefore be more discerning in their sharing. These approaches included (i) having the users rate the accuracy of a neutral (non-COVID) headline before they started the study (thereby making them more likely to think about accuracy when they continued on to decide what news they'd share), (ii) providing a very short set of digital literacy tips, and (iii) asking users how important it was to them to only share accurate news (almost everyone think it's very important). By shifting participants' attention to accuracy in these various ways, the study showed that it was possible to increase the link between a headline's perceived accuracy and the likelihood of it being shared that is, to get people to pay attention to accuracy when deciding what to share thereby reducing users' intentions to share false news.

This work isn't just consigned to the ivory tower. MIT is working with Jigsaw to see how these approaches can be applied in new ways. Accuracy prompts offer a fundamentally new approach to reduce the spread of misinformation online by getting out ahead of the problem. Instead of just playing catch-up with corrections and warnings, accuracy prompts can help people avoid unwittingly engaging with misinformation in the first place. "Most internet users want help navigating information quality, but ultimately want to decide for themselves what is true. This approach avoids the challenges of 'labeling' information true or false. It's inherently scalable. And in these initial studies, users found accuracy prompts helpful for navigating information quality, so we're providing people with tools that help accomplish pre-existing goals," according to Rocky Cole, one of the Jigsaw researchers on the team.

"From a practical perspective," says Rand, "This study provides platform designers with a menu of effective accuracy prompts to choose from and to cycle through when creating user experiences to increase the quality of information online. We are excited to see technology companies taking these ideas seriously and hope that on-platform testing and optimization will lead to the adoption of new features to fight online misinformation."

Rand and Cole co-authored the paper "Developing an accuracy-prompt toolkit to reduce COVID-19 misinformation online," which was published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, with MIT Ph.D. student Ziv Epstein, MIT Political Science professor Adam Berinsky, University of Regina Assistant Professor Gordon Pennycook,andGoogle Technical Research Manager Andrew Gully,.

About the MIT Sloan School of ManagementThe MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu.

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Patricia Favreau

Director of Media Relations

Associate Director of Media Relations

617-253-0576

617-253-3492

[emailprotected]

[emailprotected]

SOURCE MIT Sloan School of Management

http://www.mitsloan.mit.edu

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