In July’s ReFi Singapore meetup, we gathered to shoot the breeze about repurposed spent grains. This sector has gained popularity in recent years, with several companies in Singapore already using spent grains in various products.

The sector falls within the “Waste-to-X” category of circular economy businesses, which basically treats waste as a resource, rather than a problem to be disposed of.

Leveraging her background in pharmaceuticals and MedTech, Florence Leong co-founded KosmodeHealth with the aim of reusing spent grains into health food. She’s now looking for partners and investors to commercialize the intellectual property that she’s accumulated over the years.

Because I know absolutely nothing about this, Henry Soediarko, who runs the Climate Impact Asia Fund at First Estate Capital Management, kindly agreed to step in to offer some insights based on his experience investing in climate startups and FoodTech.

Is Waste-to-X an emerging business and investment opportunity? Yes, was the answer. But there are regulatory obstacles preventing it from taking off.

Hat tip to Varden (co-founder of Moonbeam) for lending his phone to record the chat, which includes the happy sounds of beer cans being opened.

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Professor Ben Horton, Director at the Earth Observatory of Singapore and Professor at the NTU Asian School of the Environment, weighs in on Neal Stephenson's climate change epic Termination Shock.

Basically, Pina2bo is a terrible idea and if you had shitloads of money, you should be donating it to a think tank to decide what to do with it.

This podcast features Horton, his dog Atlas, the occasional hay fever-induced sneeze, and my two parrots in the background.

Read the podcast highlights on Medium here.

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In our conversation, former head of water strategy at Bayer and co-founder of Ixo, Hannah Oh, chats about how Ixo's "internet of impacts" Web3 infrastructure is being used to harness carbon financing to improve the lives of rural communities via... clean cookstoves.

Founded in 2017, Ixo is an impact-focused blockchain company that has been building its technology stack via grant funding.

But it's now focusing on commercial use cases via it's new base in Singapore. Alongside it's work in Web3, Ixo also deploys its digital measurement, reporting, and verification (dMRV) infrastructure for companies to track their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments, or to track the progress of their decarbonisation strategy.

Read the highlights from our conversation on Medium here.

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