- As the national director of the Right to Repair campaign, Nathan Proctor seeks to give consumers better options for fixing their busted tech, rather than simply throwing it all in a landfill.
- Combining sensors and analytics, Tara Pham’s startup, Numina, can tell cities exactly who uses their streets and how — providing granular data for pedestrian-friendly planning.
- Chemist Tony Bova is cooking up a way to use waste products from the paper industry to make a new kind of bioplastic that degrades after use.
- At Sunrun, engineer Audrey Lee worked on figuring out how to remap the grid to create a virtual power plant of networked car batteries, home solar panels, and other distributed sources.
- Stephanie Benedetto’s blockchain-enabled startup, Queen of Raw, matches fabric buyers and sellers to redirect some $120 billion worth of excess textiles — generated by the apparel industry every year — away from landfills and toward reuse.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Meet 5 tech innovators figuring out how to fix the future on May 8, 2020.