What Are Strive's Sustainability Practices, and Why?
How Does Strive Support Sustainable Agriculture?
How Does Strive Go Beyond What Anyone Else is Doing?
What Are Strive's Sustainability Practices, and Why? How Does Strive Support Sustainable Agriculture? How Does Strive Go Beyond What Anyone Else is Doing?
What is Sustainable Agriculture and Why Does it Matter?
The purpose of practicing and supporting sustainable agriculture is to help preserve the environment while expanding the capacity of earth’s natural resources to support all life, and to improve quality of life for all living things.
Embracing and practicing sustainable agriculture supports society’s food and textile current needs without degrading and diminishing Earth’s natural resources needed to support future generations.
While preserving Earth’s natural resources, practicing sustainable agriculture benefits the environment by:
- Helping maintain soil quality
- Reducing erosion
- Preserving water quality and capacity
Utilizing the practices of sustainable agriculture is one of the foundational measures needed to help preserve our planet so we can maintain the natural resources we have left.
What Are Strive Superfoods Sustainability Practices?
By only using USDA-certified organic ingredients, Strive Superfoods directly supports sustainable agriculture practices.
When Strive Superfoods provides a display rack to one of its customers, we build those racks from repurposed wooden pallets. We build each rack from wooden pallet slats we have received ingredient shipments from one of our suppliers.
Strive Superfoods uses dehydrated and powdered products to increase the density of the ingredient and reduce the carbon footprint associated with shipping that ingredient and final product to customers.
Strive Superfoods uses resealable and reusable packaging. Just rinse and clean one of our product bags after it’s been emptied and use the bag to seal and carry foods to work, on a picnic or for other purposes.
Strive Superfoods uses good recycling and goes beyond, as described below.
Striving with a Vision for the Sustainable Future:
EcoStrive's Sustainable Foods & Energy System
From 2011 through 2017, Strive Superfoods Founder, Alex Sellers, designed, submitted patents on, built and tested a pilot waste to energy system. This pilot system was designed based on the principals of biomimicry and cost over $2M to research, build and test from 2011 through 2017.
The system was carbon negative because photobioreactors were built to capture emissions from the waste to energy system, the process to convert carbon-based waste such as plastics and wood waste into transportation fuels such as diesel. Independent 3rd Party laboratory analysis on the fuel products yielded from the waste plastic feedstock confirmed the efficacy of the system and processes. Due to lack of funding for next generation modification to system and scaling for development, the system has been disassembled and kept in storage since 2018.
Strive Superfoods seeks to reassemble the system with modifications at a location in North Georgia. The primary purpose of the system will be to convert plastics that Strive Foods and Superfoods receive as part of ingredient shipping, as well as receive from other sources, including participating Strive Superfoods clients that supply any of their waste plastics, into:
- a synthetic crude that is refined into diesel that fuels Strive Superfoods vehicles
- the lighter cut of the synthetic crude that is a naphtha to be upgraded into recycled plastics suitable to be utilized in outdoor adventure industry products like kayaking and ski boots
- increase scrubbing and cleaning of the emissions from the carbon conversion system to support growth of a pharmaceutical grade chlorella strain of algae in the algal photobioreactors. The photobioreactors converting emissions into algal biomass make the system carbon negative.
Strive Superfoods is only able to achieve this objective through capital support of its affiliate entity, EcoStrive Energy. Efforts are ongoing to facility this funding. Beyond repurposing and redeployment of the system in North Georgia, there are broader and larger goals to deploy the system in other areas of the world where plastic waste accumulation and lack of access to natural resources for fuels is a challenge, such as islands and island nations. By converting the emissions from the system into an edible superfood, such as chlorella or spirulina, the system is helping to solve multiple problems:
- directly converting plastic waste that is polluting our oceans and terrestrial environments into transportation fuels as well as back into plastics via carbon-negative processes aids in removing waste from our environment and provides energy for transportation without further exploiting fossil fuel reserves that put our environment at risk and contribute to climate change
- by utilizing algal photobioreactors to capture and convert emissions from the systems into edible algae, such as chlorella and spirulina, we provide nutrition for people via a process that does not add more carbon into the terrestrial carbon cycle
As far-fetched as this may sound, it has already been done and tested by us. Contact EcoStrive Energy for more information.
The EcoStrive Energy System and Its Yields
EcoStrive’s Integrated Closed-loop EcoTech (“ICE”) System is designed to convert discarded and recyclable plastic waste into: food products, fuel products, and fungible plastic product bases via carbon-negative processes.
The Renewable ICE Pilot system was designed, constructed, and tested in Smyrna, GA. Multiple batch tests were run through the continuous flow reactor using various feedstock blends of biomass and plastics.
EcoStrive Energy’s Renewable ICE system was designed to be an automated and continuous flow process. This modular system fits within intermodal cargo containers and can be deployed anywhere.
The Renewable ICE photobioreactors converted the CO2 emissions and other nutrients from the ICE reactor into algal biomass. that was harvested and then utilized as feedstock for the pilot system.
The Renewable ICE system successfully converted the waste feedstock blends into a synthetic crude oil that could be distilled into various cuts, such as diesel and naphthas as the predominant product cuts yielded.