waste-to-value
(3)
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Andrew Jones
Andrew Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Carba, a Minneapolis-based carbon-removal startup that turns waste biomass into a durable, charcoal-like biocarbon and buries it to lock away CO2 for more than 1,000 years. A chemical engineer with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Jones invented Carba's patented low-energy pyrolysis and storage process and describes the work as 'reversing the coal mining process.' He previously founded and exited Activated Research Company, and has steered Carba from a 2021 lab idea to a working molten-salt reactor at a Burnsville landfill, a multi-year carbon-credit deal with Microsoft, and a goal of removing a gigaton of CO2 a year.
Julia Reichelstein
Julia Reichelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based carbon removal company that pumps carbon-rich organic waste up to 5,000 feet underground for permanent storage. A Stanford economist who built a fintech firm in Kenya and invested in climate tech at Piva Capital, she partnered with deep-well injection expert Omar Abou-Sayed to spin Vaulted out of Advantek Waste Management in 2023. The company won the $8M XPRIZE Carbon Removal in 2024 and has signed offtake deals with Microsoft, Google, and Frontier Climate.