zero-waste
(12)
The Machine That Turns a Handful of Almonds Into a Milk Habit
Almond Cow bet that people would rather make oat and almond milk on their counter than buy it in a carton. Roughly 300,000 households later, the bet is looking less strange.
Nature's Path Foods
Forty years ago a berry-farmer's son turned his father's one-line advice into a cereal company. Nature's Path is still family-run, still refuses to sell, and still puts organic breakfast on tables in more than 40 countries.
Simplifyber
Simplifyber is a North Carolina biomaterials company reinventing how soft goods are made. Its proprietary natural-fiber liquid, Fybron, is injected into 3D molds to form fabric directly, skipping the spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing steps of conventional textile production. Founded in 2021 by fashion veteran Maria Intscher-Owrang and Phil Cohen, the company targets fashion, footwear, bags, automotive and aviation interiors, and consumer packaging with a cellulose-based, largely biodegradable alternative to fossil-derived materials. It closed a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures in April 2025.
unspun
unspun is a San Francisco-based fashion-technology company that built Vega, the world's first 3D weaving system for apparel. Vega weaves garments directly from yarn in minutes, skipping cut-and-sew steps to enable on-demand, near-zero-waste, locally produced clothing. A certified B Corp founded in 2015, unspun sells custom-fit jeans direct to consumers while licensing its hardware and software to brands and retailers aiming to decarbonize their supply chains. Its stated mission is to reduce global human carbon emissions by 1%.
BrewBird
BrewBird is a San Carlos, California hardware and coffee company that reinvents office coffee. Its countertop machine brews specialty, whole-bean, pour-over-quality coffee in about 60 seconds using fully compostable pods filled with beans from local roasters like Sightglass, Verve and Equator. Each pod carries a QR code that tells the machine the exact water temperature and brew time for the beans inside. Founded in 2019 by CEO Mickey Du, BrewBird sells to offices and hospitality spaces - customers include Meta, LinkedIn and Salesforce - and has raised a $32M Series A led by investors including Sequoia Capital.
Public Goods
Public Goods is a New York-based, membership-driven direct-to-consumer brand that sells its own line of healthy, sustainable everyday essentials - personal care, household, cleaning, grocery, and supplements - at near-wholesale prices. Pitched by co-founder Morgan Hirsh as 'Amazon with a soul,' the company launched on Kickstarter in 2017, built a single house brand with minimalist design and clean ingredients, and ties purchases to reforestation and food-bank donations.
Sabai Design
Sabai Design is a New York-based direct-to-consumer furniture company making sustainable, non-toxic sofas that are actually affordable. Founded in 2019 by Phantila Phataraprasit and Caitlin Ellen, Sabai builds modular, repairable seating from recycled velvet, upcycled poly, recycled water bottles, hemp, and FSC-certified wood - manufactured in High Point, North Carolina. As a Certified B Corporation, Sabai pairs circular programs like 'Repair Don't Replace' and a first-of-its-kind US furniture buyback line (Sabai Revive) with a mission to keep couches out of landfills and make conscious living accessible to a generation that shops its values.
Ben Parry
Ben Parry is the CEO of Compost Crew, a Rockville, Maryland public benefit corporation turning food scraps into soil across the Washington, D.C. region. After more than a decade financing solar and wind projects on five continents, he bought a scrappy three-truck compost hauler in 2018 and grew it into one of the Mid-Atlantic's largest organics recyclers, with more than 20,000 customers, a 40-truck fleet, and a network of local Compost Outpost sites that close the loop between kitchen buckets and nearby farms.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Caroline Vanderlip
Caroline Vanderlip is the founder and CEO of Re:Dish, a Brooklyn-based reusable foodware company that swaps single-use containers for durable, USA-made ones, then collects, sterilizes, and redistributes up to 75,000 items a day from an automated industrial warewashing plant. After three decades launching businesses inside NBC, CNBC, AT&T, and her own publishing-tech ventures, she traded media for dishwashing in her sixties, betting that the most radical thing a company can do is wash its own plates and use them again.
RoadRunner
RoadRunner (RoadRunner Modern Waste + Recycling) is a Pittsburgh-based, technology-driven waste and recycling company that helps commercial and enterprise businesses cut costs, divert more material from landfills and report on their environmental impact. Founded in 2014 by Graham Rihn, it pairs a managed-services model with proprietary software and AI-powered smart cameras (via its 2022 acquisition of Compology) to meter, monitor and optimize waste streams. The company serves 14,000+ customers across all 50 states and has raised roughly $150M in venture funding.
Compost Crew
Compost Crew is a Rockville, Maryland-based organics recycling company that collects food scraps from homes, businesses, schools and local governments across the Greater Washington (DMV) area and turns them into nutrient-rich compost. Founded in 2011 and acquired by CEO Ben Parry in 2018, the company has grown from three trucks into a regional operation that has diverted tens of thousands of tons of food waste from landfills. Operating a network of distributed 'Compost Outposts' in partnership with local farms, Compost Crew aims to make food waste recycling a mainstream, everyday habit while rebuilding regional soil health.