Innovate for a Green Future – Upcycle plastics

Solgaard and BioCellection

Unlike other kinds of waste, not all plastics can be recycled and often stick around in landfills or wind up in the ocean. This week in celebration of World IP Day “Innovate for a Green Future,” IPO Education Foundation is featuring two companies that are working to upcycle plastics and minimize waste: Solgaard and BioCellection.

Adrian Solgaard’s New York based company is a design driven, sustainable luxury brand of luggage, bags and accessories. What started as an attempt to make the perfect backpack turned into much more. Now, Solgaard’s mission is to reduce plastic in the ocean by half by 2025. For every item sold, five pounds of plastic is being pulled from the ocean. They have partnered with a company to work towards achieving their mission and pulled 75,000 lbs of plastic from the ocean in 2019. To learn more about what this organization is doing to innovate for a green future, please visit: https://solgaard.co/

Meanwhile on the west coast, Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao who met in their high school recycling club have cofounded BioCellection where they are using a chemical innovation that turns unrecyclable plastics into valuable performance materials. They were previously studying biodegradation and decided to pivot when this proved to be too slow to combat the process on a large scale. Learn more about BioCellection on their website, and stay tuned, Miranda and Jeanny will be featured on season three of the Stroke of Genius podcast coming in May!

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