FROM IMCRC | MELBOURNE |12 April 2022. In a bid to replace the harmful chemicals used in durable water repellent (DWR) textile coatings, a new research collaboration is developing a sustainable alternative made from biopolymers. The Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC) has granted New Zealand based biotechnology research company…

Returning from maternity leave, our CEO and founder, Veronica Stevenson, reflects on her experiences of running a company and getting pregnant. It's 2019, and I'm sitting with a prospective investor. He asks, "Are you going to have a baby and ruin my investment?" Fourteen months later, I was pregnant. This…

Humble Bee will leverage Ginkgo’s cell programming platform to build its custom microbe for the development of bioplastic material. — WELLINGTON, NZ and BOSTON, MA (December 20, 2021) Humble Bee Bio, a developer of a novel bioplastic designed to replace petrochemical plastics in textiles, announced it will use the Cell Development Kit (CDK) product offered by Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, to advance its…

The real solutions to pollution (including plastic) are movements, and if implemented fully, will not only solve the pollution problem they’ll add trillions to the global economy. — First, holding producers responsible for the full life cycles of their products. In the United States, Democratic lawmakers introduced the “Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act 2020,” analogous to the EU’s “extended producer responsibility” schemes, that would require plastic producers to “collect and recycle their own waste” and “phase out…

Among the biggest pieces of global gaslighting the world has ever seen is the one that convinced consumers and local governments to accept responsibility for litter and plastic pollution. Gaslighting at this level is a decades-long endeavour, but it can be undone with less effort than it takes you to…

Exposure to plastic adversely affects our health, but in ways that often go unnoticed until it is too late. Unbeknownst to many of us, plastic occupies a fair share of our diets. To put its impact into perspective, data published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology quantifies that the…

We are looking for an amazing human to fill a Director of the board at Humble Bee With our wonderful Chair, Greg Sitters leaving [see post on this here] we’re looking for someone to join our board as we prepare for our Series A. I’ve taken inspiration from fellow wāhine founder, Anna Guenther of PledgeMe fame and we’ve decided to crowdsource applications. We want to go wider…

This week we are sad to announce that Humble Bee’s founding Chairman, Greg Sitters, is stepping down. After over two years of hard work, sage advice and mentoring, Greg is moving on to focus on the growth of his science focused investment fund, Matū, where he is a Founding Managing…

Pollution caused by plastics is a major problem globally. In New Zealand, it is number five on the list of things we are most concerned about. With good reason too. Our biological systems are being polluted by hormone-disrupting, gene altering and cancer-causing substances leaching from plastics that are used in…