Sustainability Starts at Home 

Getting Clean Water to One Billion People

In 2018, Seyi Fabode, ’10, knew he and his family had a glaring problem. After a flood in their city of Austin, Texas, overwhelmed the filtration system with silt and debris, they received Austin’s first-ever citywide boil-water advisory. His son developed a rash in reaction to the water—a common symptom during a health violation, during which local water companies typically warn residents to boil their drinking water or flush existing water. 

“I knew that a million Austinites had similar constraints on being able to drink the water,” he recalls. 

In the past, when local communities across the United States received similar advisories, they would often need to follow up with the water utility company to ask it to test the water and to right the issue. Then the water authorities would send someone to investigate the situation. It could take days—if not weeks—to resolve.

Some common reasons for boil-water advisories include a failure in the disinfection process or a natural disaster overwhelming the system. Water pumps running poorly can result in stagnation and worse quality water. “Old infrastructure is a big problem that leads to all sorts of contamination,” Fabode says.  

With a background in operations engineering for power systems—his first startup, Power2Switch, an online marketplace to help people choose electricity suppliers, was acquired in 2013—the serial entrepreneur decided it was something he needed to address. 

That revelation led to Varuna, which makes it easier to spot these violations before they impact thousands of households. Municipal water systems use Varuna’s hardware and tracking software to create real-time alerts and offer data on poor water quality. The company provides analytics along with recommendations on how to address issues quickly. It can also predict water system problems, which often happen during rain or flooding, he adds. 

“The people at these water systems are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, but they lack the tools and technology to do their work well considering the complexity of the system and climate change,” he says. With better information and resources, the company and utilities can come together to reduce water quality violations and make it easier for residents to feel confident about their water. 

Not only is this system more resilient, but it’s allowing utilities to become more sustainable. Wastewater treatment has a large carbon footprint—as does water transportation. It’s important to understand how to do this more efficiently, he says. “The old approach of flushing out existing water was not only ineffective, but also unsustainable—wasting billions of gallons of water,” he says. It meant fire hydrants running for hours, and residents turning to plastic bottles for their water.

Boosting Regenerative Farming

Before entering her first year at Booth, Isabel Rodríguez García, ’22, was eager to swap her previous career in corporate law for life as an entrepreneur. A Mexico City native, she had already founded an educational recycling program there to help households sort and recycle their trash. And in the midst of the pandemic, as global supply chains became unpredictable, she was inspired to create a venture that once again made an impact close to home. 

In 2021, Rodríguez García cofounded Axo with classmate Clara Purk, ’22, who shares a passion for reducing the environmental impact of traditional agriculture practices. Their Chicago-based company connects climate-conscious farmers who are using regenerative agriculture practices with food companies nearby through an online B2B marketplace. 

Sourcing managers from companies can reach out directly to farmers, assuring the integrity of particular ingredients. Typically, the partnerships are local to each region of the country—using regenerative farms in the same area that the food businesses are based. 

Axo’s symbol and namesake is the axolotl, a Central Mexican salamander that has long fascinated scientists for its mastery of regeneration. It is an expert at adaptation and survival. Switching to regenerative practices is better for the land, enabling farms to become more resilient to the drought and flooding that comes with climate change.

“Around the world, illnesses can rise and spread due to the food we eat and the way it’s grown,” she says. “Regenerative farming provides the most nutrient density, uses less chemicals, and allows the soil to sequester carbon.” It’s healthier both for us and for the earth.

Smoothing Hurdles for a Low-Carbon Future

For Dominic Hofstetter, ’10, increasing the effectiveness of impact investing is all about asking different questions and rethinking traditional assumptions. Hofstetter, who serves as the space-building lead of the TransCap Initiative, is part of a group dedicated to examining how systems thinking and complex systems science can augment sustainable finance strategies in order to build a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. 

The TransCap Initiative was born out of the EIT Climate-KIC, the European Union’s main hub for climate innovation. The initiative is in the early stages of developing and testing a new approach to investment logic that’s at the intersection of systems thinking and finance practice. It also works as an innovation space that brings stakeholders together, initiates and supports experiments and innovation projects, and disperses its findings.

“We’re trying to redefine the paradigms of investing in the context of sustainability transitions,” says Hofstetter, who was previously the director of capital and investments at EIT Climate-KIC. “The science tells us that we need to fundamentally transform the way we live, work, and play as a society. Incremental innovation isn’t going to help us safeguard human civilization as we know it.”

In one project in Switzerland, where Hofstetter is based, he and his team are reexamining how a systemic investment approach can help the country transition to a net-zero emissions mobility system. In Vietnam, he and his team collaborated with the United Nations Development Programme on examining how to deploy capital to tackle plastic pollution at a regional level—Vietnam is fourth in the amount of plastic it discharges into the ocean, a problem only expected to grow as countries such as the United States continue to send their waste abroad. 

Improving Local Access to Fresh Food

After stepping off her bus to run an errand in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, Elizabeth “Liz” Abunaw, ’14, searched on her phone for a nearby bank or grocery store. To her surprise, both were nearly 2 miles away. 

“I could not do a simple task in a neighborhood, which sparked a sense of disbelief,” she recalls. “I realized that this is the other Chicago that I hear about on the news—it was very jarring.” 

Austin, located on the West Side, is one of the city’s most neglected neighborhoods. The working-class community spans an area of 7.16 miles but has just three places to get groceries, far fewer than more well-off neighborhoods in the city. For groceries, many of its roughly 95,000 residents leave to shop in nearby suburban Oak Park. After doing research, Abunaw found that about $90 million in grocery retail leaves the community each year. 

“Essentially, you have a working-class Black and brown area subsidizing an affluent community nearby,” she says. She was struck by the idea that it was impossible for Austin residents, many of whom looked like her, to purchase fresh food and access their finances as easily as she could in the predominately white neighborhood she lived in.

A year later, Abunaw set out to try to change that. 

The entrepreneur launched Forty Acres Fresh Market as a series of fresh grocery pop-ups for neighborhood shoppers in 2018. She used the monthly shopping events to offer fresh fruits and vegetables to locals while testing out the concept of having a permanent grocery store in the area. “I would bring in 70 varieties of fruits and vegetables and put up paper price signs,” she says.

Once the pandemic started, Abunaw needed to retool. Instead of frequent pop-ups, Forty Acres started to offer produce boxes filled with fruits and vegetables. Subscriptions have helped the business grow. Boxes are now delivered to roughly 200 families and businesses all over the city and are an essential revenue stream.