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How this European company is reducing food waste in Houston and Texas

sustainable impact

This innovative European company has already saved nearly 30,000 meals from being wasted in Houston. Photo via toogoodtogo.com

Since expanding into Houston just over two months ago, an app that combats food waste has saved over 28,000 meals.

By partnering with locally owned vendors like the Village Bakery, as well as larger chains like Tiff’s Treats, Too Good To Go offers Houstonians a variety of discounted goodies. Users can browse a range of stores and sign up for a “surprise bag,” an assemblage of surplus food that typically costs $5.

The free mobile app now connects savvy shoppers to 130 Houston area stores, allowing them to enjoy food that would otherwise be thrown away. Based in Denmark, Too Good To Go previously launched in Texas in Austin in 2021, before its statewide expansion into Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio in July.

"We are excited to expand our app across Texas to partner with the dynamic food scene and culture," says Chris MacAulay, Too Good To Go US Country Director, in a press release. "In partnership with the incredible local food businesses across Texas, we want to make reducing food waste accessible to all. Together, with the great restaurant community and residents in Texas, we know we will have an immediate impact."

Sarah Soteroff, senior PR manager of Too Good To Go’s North American branch, shared the European based corporation’s scaling up of operations in Texas is part of their plan to move across the United States, going into more cities where food waste persists.

“Our goal is to reduce food waste everywhere that it occurs. So in the long term, we want to eliminate food waste globally,” Soteroff says.

The move into U.S. cities has been gradual, as Soteroff said Too Good To Go works to get an initial network of 50 businesses signed up for the app before officially launching. Beyond getting vendors to list their surplus stock on the app, Too Good To Go representatives aid in marketing and educating the stores on how to use the app.

“We want to make sure that we are setting those businesses up for success and ensuring that consumers know about it through PR, through the stories we share. That businesses do feel as though there’s a value to them for being on the app,” Soteroff explains.

Though the surprise bags are typically priced at about one-third their retail values, vendors can still bring in business through these mystery deals. Roughly 8,500 unique users in Houston have made purchases through the app since it debuted, preventing over 28,000 meals from ending up in landfills.

“For us to ensure that we are able to reduce food waste, we do have to be going into markets like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin–in those larger cities where there’s a larger concentration of stores,” Soteroff shares.

According to the Too Good To Go website, every surprise bag purchased prevents the “CO2e emission of charging one smartphone fully 422 times,” and in 2022 the company averted nearly 200,000 tons of CO2e emissions through its community partnerships.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

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Houston researchers harness dialysis for new wastewater treatment process

waste not

By employing medical field technology dialysis, researchers at Rice University and the Guangdong University of Technology in China uncovered a new way to treat high-salinity organic wastewater.

In the medical field, dialysis uses a machine called a dialyzer to filter waste and excess fluid from the blood. In a study published in Nature Water, Rice’s team found that mimicking dialysis can separate salts from organic substances with minimal dilution of the wastewater, addressing some of the limitations of previous methods.

The researchers say this has the potential to lower costs, recover valuable resources across a range of industrial sectors and reduce environmental impacts.

“Traditional methods often demand a lot of energy and require repeated dilutions,” Yuanmiaoliang “Selina” Chen, a co-first author and postdoctoral associate in Elimelech’s lab at Rice, said in a news release. “Dialysis eliminates many of these pain points, reducing water consumption and operational overheads.”

Various industries generate high-salinity organic wastewater, including petrochemical, pharmaceutical and textile manufacturing. The wastewater’s high salt and organic content can present challenges for existing treatment processes. Biological and advanced oxidation treatments become less effective with higher salinity levels. Thermal methods are considered “energy intensive” and susceptible to corrosion.

Ultimately, the researchers found that dialysis effectively removed salt from water without requiring large amounts of fresh water. This process allows salts to move into the dialysate stream while keeping most organic compounds in the original solution. Because dialysis relies on diffusion instead of pressure, salts and organics cross the membrane at different speeds, making the separation method more efficient.

“Dialysis was astonishingly effective in separating the salts from the organics in our trials,” Menachem Elimelech, a corresponding author on the study and professor of civil and environmental engineering and chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “It’s an exciting discovery with the potential to redefine how we handle some of our most intractable wastewater challenges.”

Virtual power plant from Houston-area company debuts at CES

Powering Up

Brookshire, Texas-based decentralized energy solution company AISPEX Inc. debuted its virtual power plant (VPP) platform, known as EnerVision, earlier this month at CES in Las Vegas.

EnerVision offers energy efficiency, savings and performance for residential, commercial and industrial users by combining state-of-the-art hardware with an AI-powered cloud platform. The VPP technology enables users to sell excess energy back to the grid during demand peaks.

AISPEX, or Advanced Integrated Systems for Power Exchange, has evolved from an EV charging solutions company into an energy systems innovator since it was founded in 2018. It focuses on integrating solar energy and decentralized systems to overcome grid limitations, reduce upgrade costs and accelerate electrification.

Regarding grid issues, the company hopes by leveraging decentralized solar power and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), EnerVision can help bring energy generation closer to consumption, which can ease grid strain and enhance stability. EnerVision plans to do this by addressing “aging infrastructure, grid congestion, increasing electrification and the need for resilience against extreme weather and cyber threats,” according to the company.

One of the company's latest VPP products is SuperHub, which is an all-in-one charging station designed to combine components like solar panels, energy storage systems, fast EV chargers, mobile EV chargers and LCD display screens, into a unified, efficient solution.

“It supports clean energy generation and storage but also ensures seamless charging for electric vehicles while providing opportunities for communication or advertising through its built-in displays,” says Vivian Nie, a representative from AISPEX.

Also at CES, AISPEX displayed its REP Services, which offer flexible pricing, peak load management, and renewable energy options for end-to-end solutions, and its Integrated Systems, which combine solar power, battery storage, EV charging and LCD displays.

“We had the opportunity to meet new partners, reconnect with so many old friends, and dive into discussions about the future of e-mobility and energy solutions,” CEO Paul Nie said on LinkedIn.

In 2024, AISPEX installed its DC Fast chargers at two California Volkswagen locations.

Houston-based energy transition leader talks new role, shares future predictions

new hire

For some companies, all that’s needed to make a seismic shift toward innovation is to hire the right person to steer the organization in a transcendent direction.

Arcadis, a sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions company, is channeling this concept by hiring Masjood Jafri as its new National Energy Transition Strategic Advisor and Business Development Lead. In the role, Jafri will help lead and develop the company’s energy transition business growth and strategy for its interests in the United States alongside Matthew Yonkin, National Energy Transition Solution Leader, based in New York.

“I have a fairly diverse background, with about a decade in the energy industry with an oil and gas, power and petrochemicals background,” says Jafri, who moved to Houston from the U.K. back in 2012. “But prior to that, I had about a decade in the infrastructure world, looking into the transportation market, and the manufacturing sector, as well as working as a lender's advisor in the capital market. So, in this very transformative period, you need to connect all the dots.”

With just over six months in his new role, Jafri leverages his 20 years of experience in leading the successful delivery of capital programs and projects as the strategic advisor to Arcadis’ own capital projects.

“Arcadis is on a journey to be the sustainability partner or sustainable transformation partner for our clients,” Jafri says. “And the path to sustainability goes through energy transition. Arcadis has been investing quite heavily in that space for us to be a leading consulting services provider for energy companies.

Jafri’s hire comes as Arcadis moves its business operations in Houston to a new centralized office in the Galleria area. According to Jafri, this will bring the company’s expertise under one roof. With Houston being the energy capital of the world, Jafri says Arcadis is positioned to lead and deliver results for the energy demand in the United States and globally.

“Houston is the Silicon Valley of energy,” Jafri says. “The challenge is to continue to drive with that force. … We have the talent in the city, we have the right mindset—very entrepreneurial, and obviously a lot of capital commitment to make these changes.

“And it is not just coming from the private sector, it is also coming from the public sector. So, I think the stars are aligning in the context of what is needed for us to have a planet-positive future and Houston being suitably positioned to deliver to that,” he adds.

And while keeping up with the demand for energy and moving towards clean energy are equally important challenges, Jafri is more focused on addressing the latter.

“Clean energy is certainly a bigger challenge because it requires a very broad area of energy sources to come together and to make it cleaner,” Jafri says. “Technologically, some of those things are not ready yet, at least to be scalable in a commercial and profitable way. So that's the challenge. I think it is a clean energy challenge, but obviously, the demand side makes it a bit more complicated.”

Texans, and more specifically Houstonians, have seen firsthand the complications of demand and the pitfalls of energy security and resilience. Addressing these issues, along with many other sustainability challenges, will also be part of Jafri’s core mission at Arcadis.

“As we saw in severe climate conditions, the grid is vulnerable and so are the people connected to the grid,” Jafri says. “The better we can make the grid more resilient and more adaptive to these changes, the more satisfactory conditions will be on the ground for people who are affected.”

Jafri asserts that the industry is already considering numerous options, including all colors of hydrogen, solar, wind and geothermal, in addition to fossil-based energy (natural gas). These measures are already in progress, but consumers are concerned with climate change and, of course, the impact on their electricity bills. Still, states like California, Washington and Texas are making progress.

“I would say by the year 2030 you would start to see a pretty significant movement in the right direction,” Jafri says. “If you look from a federal policy perspective, we want to produce 100 percent of the electricity clean by 2035. That is an expected goal, but it’s all happening.”

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