Product Tank October - Ethical Product

ProductTank PDX autumn session is here! Join us for two great talks: Post-Growth Entrepreneurship and How we built a company to fix plastic recycling. As always, we will also have plenty of time to meet other product folks over drinks and tasty snacks!

Melanie Rieback will present Post-Growth Entrepreneurship. Companies are addicted to exponential growth. But is this good for our planet and our society? Our never-ending quest for growth is causing climate change, human rights violations, threats to biodiversity, and unprecedented waste. Melanie will make you question everything you know about entrepreneurship, provide practical tools for building something different and offer you a blue pill and a red pill. Can you go back to “business as usual” again?

Melanie will be joining us as part of a tour in the US for Post-Growth Entreprenurship. She is based in the Netherlands, and is co-founder of Radically Open Security and Post Growth startup incubator Nonprofit Ventures.

Johan Kers will speak on How we built a company to fix plastic recycling.
As a society we do a terrible job recycling plastic. In the US, our recycling rate is 9%, and it hasn't improved over the past decade. This is one of the major unsolved global sustainability issues. Birch Biosciences is a Portland cleantech company that is motivated to address our plastic recycling problem and develop technology that will reinvent how plastics are recycled. We are developing enzymes that act as "molecular scissors" to break down plastic polymers as part of an economical, sustainable, and circular plastic recycling process. I'll touch on our strategy to build the company in Portland, fund the company through grants and venture capital, develop an R&D platform, and move towards commercialization.

Johan Kers is the cofounder and CEO of Birch Biosciences. He was trained in microbiology (Cornell) and genetics (Stanford) and has spent the last 15 years developing novel biotechnologies at leading companies in the SF bay area, Boston, and Portland. He lives with his family in NE Portland.