Plastic-free groceries and reengineering the supply chain with Zero ❌🗑️
Plus what's the environmental impact of your streaming addiction?
Greetings all,
This week, I had the pleasure to speak with Zuleyka Strasner, founder and CEO of Zero. If you visit Zero’s website, you’ll quickly realize the company is a low-waste food and homeware delivery service; but, the company is much more than that. On top of minimizing packaging waste, Zero is re-architecting the supply chain to optimize accessibility, improved food quality, and reductions in food waste. We talk about this and much more below.
I also answer the question you’re too afraid to ask—what is the environmental toll of your streaming addiction? I suspect you’ll be satisfied with my findings, but beware, my piece is really data centers 101.
Thanks for reading!
Plastic-free groceries and reengineering the supply chain with Zero founder Zuleyka Strasner ❌🗑️
What is Zero?
Zero is the first-ever plastic-free, online grocery store. Our mission is to enable as many Americans as possible to shop 90% plastic-free or more in a given week, should they choose to do so.
Why did you start this business?
Two things happened at the same time. I was working in venture capital as a chief of staff and seeing a lot of companies. I was fortunate to learn about a variety of businesses, meet founders, and understand the ecosystem of Silicon Valley. In many ways, it was my boot camp. At the same time, I became interested in the question of being and living plastic-free. To my admission, I was not an environmentalist. I certainly wasn't ignorant of the environment, but it wasn't front and center to my work. Before VC, I had come from politics. But even in politics, my focus areas were foreign and educational policy, and never environmental policy. Even my husband would get on me about my plastic use. I loved plastic wrap. It was my thing.
My husband and I went on a honeymoon to a beautiful island in the Caribbean called the Corn Islands. But it was littered in plastic. Seeing all the plastic just woke me up. I'm a very curious person. I spent my days swimming and enjoying the island, but I also spent a lot of time fishing out this plastic and wondering how 1,000 people living on this small Caribbean island could produce so much waste. Of course, they weren't. Most of it was washing up on their shores. I then started to look into the zero-waste movement. I had seen it on social media and wondered what would happen if I tried to live this zero-waste life? I adopted the plastic-free lifestyle when I came back to San Francisco for a year and a half, and it was hellish. Some parts were great and easier than I thought. But for the most part, it was hard, and the most challenging piece was getting your food.
Those two worlds collided for me—the plastic free-world and my background in VC. But I genuinely didn't set out to start a venture-scaling business.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the packaging waste issue. Can you talk about why the everyday consumer should care about this problem?
There are many pieces to this. The initial obvious one is that plastic doesn't look very nice. It's not cool to walk around and see it lying around everywhere. We also have a huge landfill problem globally and in the US. But there are many other reasons that only surface once you start digging into the detrimental impact of plastics and BPA. Plastic shows up in the fish you eat. It shows up as microfibers and can easily be in your food and food systems. It’s also implicated in the rise of cancer. New research is coming out about the links of plastic and petroleum to all of these areas. Even deeper, many communities up and down this country are being impacted by changes in the environment, whether it's massive flooding in the Gulf or wildfires in California. Those events are tied back to the environment and a combination of what is happening to the planet right now. People of all types—rich, poor, black, and white—are being affected by changes in the environment, and it truly is the movement of our time to fix this.
Besides packaging waste, what other problems are you trying to solve with Zero?
Zero is solving both food and packaging waste issues. Our company mission is tied around the reduction of waste and changing consumer behavior and habits. But the other big piece is accessibility. The waste in the production and transportation of food is also a driver of accessibility because it contributes to increases in the cost of the food itself. If you get more efficient and effective in the supply chain, not only do you solve the packaging and food waste pieces, but you can offer products at much better price points because you're not hand over fist losing revenue. Zero’s goal is to enable as many Americans as possible to access good quality products and get them at better price points.
How are we able to do this? Zero is a technology company. We didn't enter into this to just be a new grocer. We entered into this to use technology to really impact how grocery works and how grocery functions in this country as a whole. It's the technology that we're building today that enables us to reduce waste. There are new products and facets of Zero that we're launching very soon to drive down costs and reduce waste further. But if you have a big waste problem in the supply chain, the only way to solve that is through technology that can tell you when and how that waste is produced. If you can predict what's happening with much more accuracy and farm with more accuracy, you can reduce that waste.
Do you see Zero ever offering the infrastructure to enable legacy grocers to join the low-waste movement?
We are re-architecting the supply chain through our technology. Zero is quickly becoming the largest sustainability platform in the US, where consumers can get everything that is clean and green. That's not just the food you eat, but it's also household items. Today, we have 950 SKUs. Just in that 950, we already cover homeware, personal and body products, as well as a considerable amount of food. Our food is fresh—it's produce, dry food, meat, deli cheese, vegan products, and much more. Now, how is that technology-enabled? It's that the technology touches every facet of the supply chain. This is why we’re so different than retailers and grocers. We care about the full product lifecycle—from how and where it’s produced and packed all the way to distribution to the end-user. The technology stitches all of those pieces together for the first time. Many partners can plug into this supply chain. The only reason that the platform is successful is that we have partners in all parts of the supply chain plugging in and adopting green practices. We understood early on that for this to work, and for us to make the whole industry green, we had to build the supply chain we wanted to see.
How do you see Zero in relation to farmers markets, CSAs, and food co-ops?
I love farmers markets and CSAs. Fortunately, they are not going anywhere, although they have struggled through this period. I'm a believer in the online experience. Unless you're looking for a day out or a fun experience, I don't believe that it's necessary to go week in, week out to a farmers market or a store. I believe in the value of absolutely everything in my life appearing at my door, particularly my groceries and homewares. But Zero really is complementary. The things that you're describing are very, very different businesses and very, very different models. They're not scalable. An individual farmers market or CSA cannot scale in the way Zero can. It turns out that we are hugely complementary, particularly from COVID-19 and beyond, and can use our technology to generate more revenue for their products. It's the technology that scales, and therefore it's the technology that either works with or works against existing systems. We focus on getting the best quality produce from local farms to our end users. If you're going to drive down the costs, make good quality farm produce available to as many Americans as possible, and reduce waste, you need a national, scalable company.
What’s a climate-related topic you’re interested in right now?
Right now, I’m excited about horticulture, topsoil erosion, and farming practices. I also encourage people to read and learn about how the food industry works overall.
What’s your climate hot take?
For me, the advancement of humanity is the ability to exist on our planet with little or no impact on the planet itself. I believe if we were to discover a life-form that was more advanced than us (or they discover us), one thing we would probably notice is that they live in a way that has very little influence on their planet. We are not there. Everything we do destroys everything around us.
Zero is currently servicing the Bay Area if you want to shop plastic-free products today!
Are streaming products bad for the environment? 🧊
With winter approaching and COVID-19 resurging, many of us will be spending more time indoors over the next few months. For some of us (read: all of us), that means more screen time and content streaming. Though Netflix, Zoom, Peloton, and Spotify all serve different purposes, the high-level technology underpinning the delivery of these software-based services is fairly similar. The companies you know and love leverage various types of data centers to power their products. Data centers consume roughly 1-2% of all global energy each year, and many have expressed concern that that figure is 1. growing and 2. represents a significant source of carbon emissions. So is our collective dependence on streaming products directly contributing to climate change? Let’s find out 👇
How streaming products work
Let’s use Netflix as an example. Netflix utilizes two types of servers: a content delivery network (CDN) and a third-party cloud provider. A content delivery network is a distributed array of data centers that deliver content to local users. Netflix built out its own CDN, called OpenConnect, to eschew dependency on a third-party provider. When you fire up Emily in Paris, the video stream is transmitted from OpenConnect servers to your device. The balance of Netflix’s product uses Amazon Web Services, a third-party cloud provider, to essentially do everything that isn’t video streaming. When you enter the Netflix URL into your browser, that sends a request to Netflix’s AWS server to display the webpage. The web page and its contents, including the design and customized recommendations for you, are based on software and data that lives on AWS servers. To tie this back to individuals and carbon emissions, each time you open Netflix and play a show, you ask OpenConnect and AWS to send you information that comes at the cost of energy.
Can clouds be green?
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure make up nearly two-thirds of the cloud provider market. You might not realize it, but you are interacting with some combination of these companies all the time. AWS powers Netflix, Peloton, and Hulu. Google Cloud powers iCloud, Paypal, and Twitter. Azure powers LinkedIn. Given their market share, the sustainability of these three companies is a decent proxy for the industry.
There are essentially two ways data centers can reduce emissions: 1. use less energy and 2. use low carbon sources of electricity. Our dependency on data centers is only increasing. Thus, using less energy really means improving the efficiency of infrastructure and servers. We will talk more about this in a moment. The bigger concern for data centers is how they’re powered.
Of the three big cloud providers, Google is the sustainability leader, followed closely by Microsoft, and AWS lags far behind.
Google Cloud has been carbon-neutral since 2007. In reality, it still depends heavily on fossil fuels but purchases renewable energy credits (RECs) to offset its footprint. This is okay, but RECs aren’t a perfect solution. Fortunately, Google recently pledged to power its cloud business with 100% clean energy by 2030.
Microsoft Azure committed to achieving 100% renewable energy by 2025, and they’ve been carbon-neutral via RECs since 2014. The company is also actively researching novel energy efficiency technologies, like its Project Natick, which I discuss below. The only blemish on Azure is that it continues to tout advanced capabilities for fossil fuel companies.
Amazon Web Services achieved 50% renewable energy usage in 2018. The company as a whole has done a horrible job centering the environment in its products, though it recently made a series of announcements around sustainability. Amazon also continues to position itself as a leading cloud provider for oil & gas companies. I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll follow through on some of their recent announcements, but the lack of specificity and transparency is concerning.
Koomey’s Law and data center efficiency
I put data center efficiency on the back-burner because it’s actually an area these companies have invested heavily in and seen incredible improvements. You may have heard of Moore’s Law, but I bet Koomey’s Law is a new concept for you. Koomey’s Law states that the energy efficiency of computers doubles every 1.6 years. Despite internet traffic ballooning over the last several years, the total energy required to power the increasing compute demands has actually remained roughly constant (see the graph on the left below).
To uphold Koomey’s law, the academic community, semiconductor companies, and data centers are continuing to find ways to improve energy efficiency at various points in the value chain. One area I’m particularly interested in is cooling. You’ve probably experienced your personal laptop overheating at some point. That same problem is a massive concern for data centers too, and they spend a considerable amount of money to prevent damage from overheating. There’s plenty of interesting work being done in the space, but two initiatives that stand out to me are Project Natick and Submer. Project Natick is a research project led by Microsoft to assess the viability of underwater data centers. While this project is ongoing, the initial results are promising, partly due to the natural cooling effects that the ocean provides. Submer is another fascinating company that bathes servers in goo to enhance efficiency and provide an alternative to air and liquid cooling.
The carbon footprint of your tech addiction is modest
In late 2019, there was a media blitz suggesting the underlying infrastructure powering streaming-based tech products contributes significantly to carbon emissions globally. These reports largely quoted research from a French think tank called the Shift Project. The International Energy Agency (IEA) put out a thorough rebuke of the Shift Project’s analysis. According to the IEA, the average carbon footprint from streaming a 30 minute Netflix show is equivalent to driving 200 meters in a standard car. The IEA estimate suggests the Shift Project’s figure is overstated by 25 to 53 times. It’s worth reiterating that the IEA’s figure is only an estimate. If you live in a coal-powered region, your footprint is likely higher. Similarly, if you power your house with solar, you likely have a smaller footprint. There are dozens of factors that contribute to this estimate. Still, no matter how you cut it, streaming products contribute much less damage than many other common habits (driving a gas-powered car, eating factory-farm-raised beef, etc.).
Though the carbon footprint from streaming products is modest, we still need to achieve near-zero emissions to save the planet. That means we need both the consumer-facing companies (Netflix) and infrastructure providers (AWS) to invest in decarbonizing their products.
What you can do
The takeaway from this analysis is that you can, in good conscience, use streaming products from an environmental perspective. It’s worth keeping in mind that each time you fire up Netflix or play Xbox, you are choosing to do something that emits carbon. At the same time, nearly everything you do has an associated carbon footprint. If you chose to go on a hike instead of watching two hours of Netflix, that hike might actually have a higher carbon footprint assuming it’s more than a half-mile drive and you travel via a gas-powered car. But, of course, be mindful of everything you do and gentle with yourself as you work to heal the planet. Lastly, if you work at any of the companies I’ve mentioned, push for your employer to clean up their carbon footprint (please and thank you 💚).
Sources: Carbon Brief, PC Mag, Techcrunch, Submer, Wired, Google, Azure, Amazon
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