Andrew Lee pitches Backlight, a microbial growth enhancer made from discarded bananas. 30 million tonnes of bananas rot in landfills yearly, releasing 400 million tonnes of CO₂. Lightgrow plans 50 production plants by 2028 to boost fermentation yields and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Hi, my name's Andrew Lee and I'm CEO of Lightgrow. My company is trying to turn a huge environmental problem into a massive commercial opportunity. Now globally, there's 120 million tonnes of bananas produced each year, but unfortunately 30 million tonnes ends up in landfill, either as consumer waste or farmers are seeing an increasing proportion of their crop rejected and this just gets thrown away. There's nothing done with it. The problem is this 30 million tons rots and gives off 400 million tons equivalent of CO2. So it's a massive environmental problem that we hope to change. And the way that we're going to do that is essentially take this waste to make our products, which are microbial growth enhancers. We make a water-based banana smoothie out of black bananas like this. It undergoes some clever filtration to produce our product Backlight. Backlight has been applied to processes such as fermentation and biofuel production, and we can consistently show that it increases yield and reduces process time. So there's the possibility to roll this out globally because of the huge distilling industries in the regions that actually grow bananas and obviously an increased demand for bioenergy. Now, we plan to have our first plant operational in Q1 2024, and then we aim to roll this out globally through partnerships. We're aiming for 50 plants by the end of 2028, and that if we achieve this, it'll have huge impact— financial impact, environmental impact, and social impact. We'll create hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue each year. We'll reduce landfill, burden of waste, which reduces greenhouse gas, and will create jobs and valuable revenues for the communities hosting our plants. The XTC Award will help us gain recognition worldwide and will help us change the world with banana smoothies. Thank you.
