This Toronto 28-year-old received a chunk of Amazon’s $2B fund for her tech company
Amazon invested a portion of a $2-billion local weather fund earlier this month in an organization created by a 28-year-old Toronto scientist who turns meals scraps into different plastics.
Luna Yu, CEO and founding father of Genecis, says she dove into the bioplastics world at 22-years-old. At the time, her finances was dismal and method was scrappy – however artistic, as she put it.
“We went out to Canadian Tire and bought a couple of rice cookers, and then we actually retrofitted the rice cookers and made them into bioreactors ourselves,” Yu informed CTV News Toronto.
The makeshift gadget she created as a contemporary University of Toronto graduate emulated the goal of her company-to-be, Genecis.
“It’s super simple. It’s almost like brewing beer, right? All you have to do is to actually feed food waste as a sort of energy source or food to bacteria,” Yu defined.
That micro organism consumes sugars and fatty acids from the natural waste. As it metabolizes, the micro organism converts meals scraps right into a biodegradable referred to as Polyhydroxyalkanoate, or less complicated, PHA.
A reactor rising PHA is photographed on the Genecis lab (Supplied). From there, PHA is extracted, purified and compounded into pellets, that are injected into molding machines to make a substitute for single-use plastics, like meals and medical packaging.
“One product that we sort of experimented with launching ourselves last year is in a textile market,” Yu stated. Instead of constructing polyester shirts out of conventional artificial plastics, Yu makes use of PHA as a alternative.
With a piece of Amazon’s $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund secured, Yu is aiming to combine her sustainable, biodegradable different to plastic into Amazon’s provide chain.
Genecis workers working on the workplace lab (Supplied). She couldn’t disclose the amount of cash obtained. An Amazon spokesperson informed CTV News Toronto the funding in Genecis got here from the fund’s $50 million Female Founder Initiative, however may solely affirm these investments vary from a whole bunch of 1000’s to thousands and thousands of {dollars}.
“That’s going to be able to help us altogether amplify our overall impact, right? Because our goal in the next 10 years is to essentially make PHAs as ubiquitous as possible,” Yu stated.
