Hello and welcome to the Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s feels like a package from Amazon - you know what you ordered but it’s exciting to get in to anyways.

Today we’re learning about Topanga, who have raised a seed round to get rid of all the packaging that comes with your delivery orders. Let’s get in to it.

Would you like emissions with that?

This week, Topanga announced a $3.6m funding round for their re-usable packaging solution to make food delivery a little bit less bad for the environment.

You thought the only thing you were ruining when you ordered KFC was your diet, you’d be wrong.

Packaging and containers make up almost a third of the municipal waste in the U.S. and the numbers aren’t much better elsewhere. In fact, they lead to almost 19% of global greenhouse emissions and these numbers have increased since the pandemic.

Topanga is taking an innovative approach to rolling out their product.

They partner with cafes and restaurants on university campuses making it easy for them to track their packaging and enabling students to easily return packages.

They’ve also recently announced a partnership with Grubhub, one of the leading food delivery brands in the U.S. enabling them to deliver their product at scale. On top of this, they’ve also scaled to onboard the three largest food distributors in the U.S.

Did someone say order in to save the environment? Sign me up!

With the goals they’re aiming to hit across college campuses, Topanga claims they are tapping in to a $120B market of wasted packaging. If Topanga’s product catches on, it could have a huge impact on the environment, and we’re fans of that.

‘Til next time.

The Strawman

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