Glacier

Still humming from London's energy! At the 100+ Accelerator Demo Day last week, Glacier won the audience-voted “Alumni Favorite”- a reminder that pragmatic climate tech resonates when it drives real outcomes on the ground. I was also honored to be representing the founder POV on a financing panel, alongside investors from Anthesis Group, Danone, Greycroft and UBS Optimus Foundation. Two ideas that particularly resonated in today's market: 🤑 The “Mr. Burns Test.” If a profits-at-all-costs owner took over tomorrow, would your business still do good for the world? Mission endures when your unit economics AND your impact point the same direction. 🤝 To corporate partners: Don’t be nice. Be kind. Nice is often vague and slow. Kind is honest and fast. Telling startups what's not working is just as important as celebrating what is, so we can focus our most precious resource: time. Beyond the stage, the best conversations were with leaders who want to see circularity measured in the real world, not just in slide decks and lab audits. Glacier's excited to expand our society's understanding of what happens to packaging post-consumption, and use those insights to help improve packaging design and recovery. Thank you to the 100+ team and all of its member companies (Colgate-Palmolive, The Coca-Cola Company, AB InBev, Unilever, Danone, Mondelēz International) innovating towards a brighter future. And if you’re exploring how real-world data can improve packaging recovery and circular design... let’s talk! Highlights from my photo roll, in no particular order: 🧀 Arriving at Demo Day (Westminster Abbey across the way = best location ever!) 🎤 Talking about the significance of The Simpsons to a room of founders, corporate partners, and investors 🏆Winning the award for "Best Alumnus" - this trophy, while shockingly hard to fit in my carry-on🧳, is deeply symbolic of so much progress we've made with the support of the 100+ ecosystem. Special shout-out to Adam Spunberg and Molun Zhang! ✌️BTS cheesing post-win with Cristina Bayona and Isabela Perea Cordoba

🎥 I’m thrilled to share that Glacier was featured in a new mini-documentary from TIME Studios - in collaboration with Project Management Institute and Good is the New Cool. I'm lucky to get to talk about Glacier all the time. What I especially love about this project is that it looks beyond the company - to the story that led me to this point. 🌎 Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/g6GxaMuJ That story starts long before Glacier. When I was growing up, nothing in our house went to waste. 👕 Old t-shirts became cleaning rags. 🍪 Empty cookie tins became sewing boxes. 🥫 Cans got dutifully rinsed, crushed, and taken to the beverage redemption center on weekends. I was taught to do those things out of economic necessity - not because anyone called it “sustainability.” But looking back, I realize it was both. That’s the same truth that drives Glacier. When Areeb and I started the company, it wasn’t because we loved AI and robots (though we do). It was because we saw a chance to improve a system where economics and the environment should be on the same side. Recycling isn’t just a sustainability issue; it’s an economic one. If the economics don’t work, the system doesn’t work. That’s why we’re building AI-powered robots and data tools that help recycling facilities run more efficiently and profitably - reducing waste, improving working conditions, and keeping valuable materials in circulation. The lesson I’ve carried from my childhood to now is simple: Waste is just misplaced value. At Glacier, we’re building the tools to find it - and use it - over and over again. ♻️

Earlier this month, we launched our AI sorting robot at Penn Waste, with Cox Enterprises as a partner and funder to help make the vision a reality. Cox has bold zero-waste goals; Penn Waste has world-class operators. Add Glacier's AI + robotics, and you get a living example of what happens when industries team up around a shared outcome. This is the pattern I’m most excited about: when MRFs, brands, and innovators collaborate, the system gets better. We’ve seen it already, from Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery x Colgate-Palmolive using our AI to trace toothpaste tubes in the recycling stream, to Penn Waste x Cox accelerating recovery on the front lines. At Glacier, our vision is to help recycling become even better - to make it the next frontier of advanced manufacturing. Item-level data. Provable ROI. Safer work environments. Less waste. If your team wants to co-build what comes next, my door is open! 🔧🤝♻️

I got to see Glacier's AI recycling robots in action at a waste facility in Pennsylvania last week alongside co-founder Rebecca Hu-Thrams. Really fun touring a MRF for the 1st time after years of reporting on recycling. 🎥 More videos like these to come. Follow my work on TikTok and Instagram @ The Sustainable Source 🗞️ Read my profile of Glacier for TIME Best Inventions 2025 here: https://lnkd.in/emCxd5ZP

When we installed Glacier's first robot, we didn’t have a customer hotline. We had a Sharpie and scrawled my cofounder Areeb's phone number on the machine (photo for evidence). Today, that robot was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. It's a little dizzying to contemplate how far "Glacier Tech Support" has come. That first install was me and Areeb, working 20 hours straight through a weekend to prove we could make recycling a little better. Today, our recycling technology supports nearly 1 in 10 Americans. In the time it took you to read this post, our fleet has already analyzed 37,000 recyclables and sorted nearly 1,000 items. I’m so proud of our team and partners, who have turned our sweat and stubborn optimism into something that’s making a meaningful dent. And I’m also reminded: we’re still just getting started. Onward! 🚀♻️