Neha Jain, Chief Seaweed Officer & Founder of India’s Zerocircle has 14 years of experience scaling up tech enabled businesses. Her transition to algae entrepreneurship began with her work as a tech consultant for a sustainability firm where she started looking for a brand-new building block for the world. The cats she rescued helped her find seaweed.
According to Neha, “One year into my attempt at a low carbon footprint lifestyle, I realized that emissions occurring at an industrial scale cannot be significantly reduced by individual choices. And what choices do we really have? Even a single blade of the hardiest grass uses fresh water, a fast depleting, finite resource. How could my attempt rewire something as fundamental as that?”
Instead of shunning industry, the answer, she decided, was to find an alternative building block that future industries could switch to. “Ironically, the answer lies in the industry’s greatest dump yard — the ocean. The many varieties of seaweed that grow in the ocean contain vast reserves of nutrients that can be used to mitigate food scarcity, birth sustainable packaging, reverse climate change and do so much more.”
With Zerocircle, she intends to use seaweed “to create bio-alternatives to products that we use in our daily lives and enable organizations to create solutions that are perfectly circular and leave nothing behind — and make a zero-waste lifestyle as easy as instant noodles.”
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