Name: Turning greenhouse gas into plastic and providing affordable dental care landed these two companies on Fortune's Impact 20
Uploaded: 2023-12-11
Duration: 5 min 11 s
Description: The Fortune Impact 20 is a list of relatively small companies that have built their business models around world-changing ideas, using the profit motive to solve social and environmental problems.

The Fortune Impact 20 is a list of relatively small companies that have built their business models around world-changing ideas, using the profit motive to solve social and environmental problems.

Turning greenhouse gas into plastic and providing affordable dental care landed these two companies on Fortune's Impact 20

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These 20 startups are focused on making the world a better place

There is an access to care problem around the country amongst our pediatric population in underserved communities. We want to give every family everyone regardless of where they came from. What background, what insurance type, the key to access high end dental care. What we have in air carbon is a really unique and high efficiency solution to help companies decarbonize their materials and their supply chains. I'm really proud of the fact that we are in society today. You know, if you go into a shake shack, you can use a straw that is made from greenhouse gas. The impact 20 is a list of 20 start ups, usually venture capital backed and or private equity backed that are pursuing business models. They're going to have a positive impact on people and the planet. Some of them are working in sort of safe tech and tech for good. Coming up with apps or programs or A I that can solve a social problem. Some of them are in education, some are working on the climate change issue. They're trying to figure out ways to help other businesses or help consumers reduce their carbon footprint. What new light does is it turns greenhouse gas into a material called air carbon that we're using to help companies decarbonize by taking greenhouse gas and putting it into people's supply chain as a replacement for plastic. Some of our partners include Shake Shack and Sony and Disney. We've got a partnership with Sumitomo in the automotive space. We've got a partnership with Nike in the fashion space. We've delivered over 100 million units into the market. And so we're really just getting started. But we're also now finally at a, you know, full commercial scale. So the way the process works is it's very similar to what happens in the ocean. Every day. We feed greenhouse gas to micro organisms in a saltwater solution. And those microorganisms consume the gas and use it to grow and make a material inside their cells. Called Ph B. We call air carbon, push those cells through a high pressure filter that effectively separates the air carbon from the rest of the micro organism biomass that turns into a fine white powder and then we melt that fine white powder into pellets. Once we have the pellets, we can use them in pretty much any plastic processing equipment out in the market. Today. The start up space is where you find often sort of the freshest ideas on the most experimental novel approaches to solving social problems. Our change the world list which runs at a different time of year, focuses a little bit more on bigger companies that have already figured out how to make change in a big way. The way we see it is that the companies on the impact 20 may be coming up with the ideas that are going to be big, you know, 10 or 15 years down the line. So we're trying to introduce readers to them while they're new and young. We are a large group, multidisciplinary dental practice and Ds O we have 44 locations uh throughout three states, Texas, Arizona and Colorado. You could be in like major metropolitan city like Houston. And you might say, well, there's a dentist on every corner here, right? But as you get into the nuance of the different insurance types and what's accepted amongst the different practices where the specialists are. If you need specific surgery for your child or relative, you may not be able to get in and see a doctor within 36, nine month period. And so where do these patients go? We have an access to care problem around the country. Our goal is to go in and to try to solve that as much as we can, you can get all the services under one roof. So today we have pediatric dentistry, oral surgery, general anesthesia services, endodontics, even prosthodontics all built in to the service model. I think working in an environment where you can utilize the group practice model, I can utilize supplies I can buy at higher purchasing amounts I can share the space. So a typical chair that may not be occupied maybe on one morning, I can now bring in another service. Team members are cross trained across the different specialty lines. People drive miles away to come see us just to maintain the affordability. It's something we think about every day because that's what drives the mission and we have to be really smart to make sure that stays at the forefront. There are tons of companies out there that are striving to have a positive social and environmental impact. We really wanted to focus with the Fortune Impact 20 on the best of the best. The most exciting thing about the impact 20 is getting to see imagination and creativity at work in these relatively new companies very often. They're attacking a very familiar problem in a very fresh and novel way and to see the potential on that, to see where it's already getting traction and to imagine what it could be one year or five years or 10 years down the road, that's really thrilling.