Plant Chicago | Earth Angel | Bubbly Dynamics | Businesses Recycling Waste | Entrepreneurship

Plant Chicago: On the South Side of Chicago, a former meatpacking plant has figuratively been turned upside down on its unsustainable head. The Plant Chicago, created in 2011, is a model for alternative energy and sustainable food production. With global warming, droughts, and fires rampant, people are paying more attention to the climate footprint of meat. No more symbolically impactful of a site could have been chosen for a successful demonstration of a circular economy. Founder John Edel honed his chops in green business incubation around the corner from The Plant at the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center. Both are located where the stinky old stockyards once was, which is now the Stockyards Industrial Corridor. The Plant Chicago also was Chicago’s first vertical farm (possibly the first in the entire United States of America in fact). The 95,000 sq ft vertical farm has impressive systems for energy production and waste disposal. The original plan was to process 32 tons of food waste every day, including waste from factories next door. It also projected to ultimately integrate natural materials and gas emissions from brewing, office, hydroponics, and agriculture so that no waste would leave the property. The entire system comprises a “circular economy.” Today The Plant a hub for education, small business, and sustainability. It’s pretty complex, and the diagram on this page better explains it.
https://www.plantchicago.org/
https://chicagodetours.com/the-plant-chicago/


Earth Angel: In 2013, O'Brien started Brooklyn-based Earth Angel, a company that helps ensure that movie and television productions are green by offering waste-management and sustainable-sourcing services, as well as environmental impact reports. O'Brien claims that productions that use her services can save from $60,000 to $100,000 on waste reduction. Earth Angel has worked on the sets of commercials, televisions series, and 13 feature films--including movies like Black Panther, The Post, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Ghostbusters. After graduating from NYU's Tisch School of Arts in 2011, O'Brien started working in the film industry and was "appalled" by the waste epidemic on set. She thought there must be a better way. After researching how to deal with different waste elements, O'Brien convinced a producer to hire her as a "sustainability consultant" to oversee environmental efforts on set. "I spoke the language of production, so I knew how to translate the language of sustainability into the language of production," she says. | To help productions become more sustainable, Earth Angel recruits and trains an eco crew that implements zero-waste initiatives on the set, such as recycling and composting and educating the crew on sustainability policies. Earth Angel also has different partnerships--the company uses Nalgene for reusable water bottles and Emagispace for eco-friendly construction materials--that provide sustainable products on set. Lastly, the startup crunches the production's carbon footprint numbers into digestible reports. The key to making people care about sustainability, according to O'Brien, is making it easy for them to understand. "That's something that motivates people to want to change and we can create reduction goals from there," she says. To date, O'Brien says that Earth Angel has diverted 3,000 tons of waste from landfills, donated 90 tons of material to local charities, donated 55,000 meals to shelters and food banks, avoided over a million single-use plastic water bottles, and prevented 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by using recycled paper, limiting transportation emissions, and implementing "Meatless Monday" initiatives. The biggest incentive for productions to hire Earth Angel is the potential to save money, according to O'Brien. For instance, simply switching from plastic water bottles to reusable bottles can save productions $20,000 to $40,000. Plus, there's a marketing and PR advantage: Productions receive a NYC green film logo--a seal seen at the end of the credits--when they meet certain sustainability requirements. While movies are not mandated by the law to adopt sustainability practices, O'Brien says it's just a matter of time.
https://www.earthangelsets.com/
https://www.inc.com/michelle-cheng/30-under-30-2018-earth-angel.html

Bubbly Dynamics, the organization that nine years ago converted this former meatpacking facility into a hub for local food businesses, said that, once completed, this “mechanical stomach” would turn organic waste into compost, biogas and a nutrient-rich liquid in which to grow algae.
https://www.bubblydynamics.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/climate/circular-food-economy-sustainable.html