Around the world, the cost of wasted food is set to total $540 billion this year. It’s an issue top of mind for Matt Rogers, CEO of Mill, a startup seeking to turn food scraps into something useful. What began as an at-home food recycling system is now tackling the commercial sector. This year Mill launched a commercial-scale system that processes food waste on-site, while using AI to provide kitchens better insight into what they are throwing away. This allows them to adjust what and how much they buy and produce. Beginning in 2027, Whole Foods plans to start implementing the technology to turn its in-store fruit and vegetable waste into chicken feed. Mill also announced a new partnership with Compass Group to roll out its services across corporate dining facilities, hospitals, universities, and stadiums starting next year.
What is a climate solution (other than your own) that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?
Carbon dioxide removal.
About 14 years ago, I started investing heavily in climate. One of my early focuses was finding ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As I thought about what the world might look like in 15 years (energy diversification, reduction in fossil fuel emissions) I saw a chance to help build a new field before there was a clear market for it. That’s the type of bet we need to take to make carbon removal happen at scale.
The key to success: taking a broad ecosystem approach to invest in both the people building solutions and the public, private, and academic infrastructure in play around them.
This involved footing the bill for early and seminal National Academy of Sciences research that helped make the case for carbon removal. It also involved funding nonprofits that built support for the idea of carbon dioxide removal and helped advance policy discussions in Washington. That research later informed non-profit and subject matter expert recommendations that Congress folded into major legislation through the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a full-circle moment: research we funded converted to U.S. policy years later.
Today, billions of dollars in federal funding are available, and dozens of companies are working on carbon removal.
There’s more to do: Carbon removal still needs more support and engineering talent, but the progress shows what’s possible when you invest in a solution early and bring the ecosystem along for the ride.
What gives you hope about the future of the planet/climate movement?
People are catching on to what we learned 15 years ago building Nest. Building a great product isn’t enough. You also have to change entire systems around the product.
In other words, world-class technology must be easy to use, affordable, and efficient to make a significant difference. Anything less adds complexity, cost, and roadblocks to progress.
At Nest, the goal was building a smarter thermostat and helping people use less energy at home. To do that, we ventured beyond the R&D lab to work with groups like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). In addition to complementing programs already in place, like Energy Star, we needed to show that our technology could save as much, if not more, energy than traditional programmable thermostats.
We also worked directly with utilities to offer rebates that made Nest more affordable for everyone. Those partnerships helped more people adopt the technology and made it easier for homes to use energy more efficiently. Without that utility-level work, Nest elevated from cool gadget to a useful, accessible product that could make a real difference.
There’s a lot to be optimistic about despite the (p)doom of it all. We have a lot of promising technology and, as a climate solutions builder community, we’re getting better at understanding that technology is only part of the answer. We also need the right policies, incentives, and partnerships to help it reach more people. When we bring all those pieces together and make them better, faster, cheaper, we can turn engineering brilliance into practical real world change.
Do you think AI will help or worsen the climate crisis? How?
I believe there’s a positive role for AI to play in helping to solve the climate crisis.
But we need to use AI as one element of any solution, not rely on it to solve something autonomously or ship it if the outcome during testing could set efforts back or stall them.
I believe in AI as a means to an end across industries, contexts, and use cases. There’s a ton of potential for AI to positively impact real world, full-scale issues people deal with on a daily basis. In the climate context, AI can support better infrastructure, fortify municipal and industrial systems, and pair with science and engineering to develop high-grade critical materials.
Concerns about AI’s footprint and negative impact should be taken seriously. Technology needs to be a net positive for people and the planet. The increase in fossil fuel usage as a result of AI means we have an even greater responsibility to use this tool to solve real problems at the infrastructure, app, and user levels.
Instead of running from that, I think we should work together as a global community of builders and AI researchers to determine which models, approaches, and tools should be applied to climate solutions specifically. We should look at weather patterns and anything climate-related that generates huge amounts of data as potential testing ground for AI solutions. Among other critical steps, we need to lean further into grid modernization and electrification. AI could help with that at scale.
In my view, figuring out if AI will help or worsen the crisis is a classic case of weighing pros and cons. If an AI solution helps rocks recapture carbon or an electric grid manage compute distribution at scale, it’s worth exploring. If it adds emissions to the picture or serves as a wrapper for a digital task that adds pressure to a grid, it’s a quick no.
