Alison Van Houten

Recent Articles

A New Way To Clean Steel

Making steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, is notoriously polluting. But Electra, a Boulder-based company looking to change that, opened its first pilot plant in 2024 and has already partnered with the largest U.S....

By Alison Van Houten

Helping Climate-Friendly Farmers

Although carbon dioxide takes center stage in greenhouse gas talk, nitrous oxide (N2O) is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture and third biggest overall. However, many companies have stalled out on curbing...

By Alison Van Houten

Keeping Buildings Cool

To test its anti-flammability technology, NanoTech Materials slathered an egg in its Wildfire Shield coating and set it ablaze. It remained raw. Meant for buildings, the product contains their Insulative Ceramic Particle (ICP), a powder...

By Alison Van Houten

Reducing IUD Pain

When it comes to women's pain? "Nobody cares," says Ikram Guerd, global marketing VP for medical device company Aspivix. It wasn't until this August that the CDC even officially urged ob-gyns to offer medication to...

By Alison Van Houten

Sustainable Luxury Leather

To make handbags that look like marbly prosciutto, TomTex actually uses chitosan from mushrooms and discarded shrimp shells. The materials are more than just aesthetically versatile. They're a 100% biobased and biodegradable alternative to the...

By Alison Van Houten

A No-Emissions Flight

ZeroAvia's ZA600 hydrogen-electric powertrain can propel a 19-seat aircraft without releasing any carbon. It's only emission: Water vapor. Inside is a fuel cell that converts green hydrogen into electricity. In 2024, the company earned approval...

By Alison Van Houten

3D-Printing Electrodes

Polluting, potentially explosive lithium-ion batteries hamstring the promise of electric cars that could be lighter and more environmentally friendly—not to mention phones, medical devices, and other consumer electronics that also rely on this liquid-electrolyte technology....

By Alison Van Houten

Ember Technologies

These days, Ember does far more than make mugs that keep coffee warm. It's applying its temperature-regulating technology—with over 150 patents—to everything from baby bottles to the Ember Cube, the world’s first self-refrigerated, sensor-enabled, cloud-connected...

By Alison Van Houten

ThyssenKrupp Nucera

"If you want to protect the climate, there is no way around green hydrogen," ThyssenKrupp Nucera CEO Werner Ponikwar says. His company specializes in building high-efficiency alkaline water electrolyzers to power steel mills and other...

By Alison Van Houten

Watershed

After raising an additional $100 million this February, Watershed became the most valuable climate-software company on the planet. The subscription-based digital dashboard helps corporations easily measure emissions to not only report but also, critically, to...

By Alison Van Houten

CoreWeave

Amid the chip shortage, CoreWeave's hoard of high-powered graphics processing units made it one of the largest GPU-specialized cloud-service providers. "If you’re using AI in any part of your life—whether it’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot—there’s...

By Alison Van Houten

Nubank

In an increasingly digitized economy, the 1.4 billion people who live on cash alone are left behind. "You are completely marginalized," says David Vélez, CEO of Brazil-based Nubank, the world’s most valuable digital bank. Unable...

By Alison Van Houten

The Good Charcoal Company

Charcoal often comes from South America under dubious environmental circumstances, but Good Charcoal Company’s products are sourced from overgrown Namibian acacia, which reduces biodiversity and groundwater recharge when left unchecked. By employing local ranchers to...

By Alison Van Houten

Transcripta Bio

Rare diseases affect some 400 million people worldwide, but no effective treatment exists for 95% of them. There's a sense among drugmakers, says Chris Moxham, CEO and chief scientific officer of Transcripta Bio, “that the...

By Alison Van Houten
More from TIME
More From TIME