Eco-Friendly Latin American Startups: A Sustainable Dream Journey
New green innovations from hispanoamérica.
Photo by Snowscat
by Brian Alcamo
Latin America is home to breathtaking Patagonian vistas (pictured above), delicious Puerto Rican cuisine, adorable Peruvian alpacas, and so much more. What do all of these things have in common? They’re all inextricably linked to Mother Earth. With so many cultural treasures at risk of severe change and damage, it’s a no brainer that Latin Americans are stepping up their game when it comes to beating climate change. These innovative latinx companies aren’t simply advocating for climate justice or positioning themselves as carbon neutral, they’re getting their hands dirty, combining cutting edge technology with a deep connection to humanity’s earthly physicality in order to transform the global economy into a one that is sustainable and circular.
To show you how amazing all of these companies are, we’ll be taking you through a journey showing how their innovations can work in tandem with each other. Let’s imagine we’re all venturing out into the world of sustainable food production. Pleasure doing business with you!
(Pro-tip: To beef up your Spanish reading skills, check out these companies’ websites en español)
Step One: Plants
Our food-production journey begins with sowing seeds and scouting soil. As eco-friendly food producers need to respond to the demands of a changing climate, we’ll be employing technology developed by Instacrops. Claiming to be “the most powerful AgTech full stack platform in Latin America,” the company bills itself as a virtual agricultural advisor, transforming data into concrete recommendations for farmers.
Based in Santiago, Chile, this startup’s goal is to connect Latinx farmers to data about their plants, including data on climate, soil, and irrigation, by installing devices connected to the now ubiquitous “Internet of Things.” What is the Internet of Things? It’s a system of web-connected gadgets that benefit from their integration with the ‘net by communicating with other data-sharing devices. If you’ve ever owned a FitBit, a smart thermostat, or an Internet-connected coffee pot (yes, those exist), then you’ve participated in the Internet of Things.
Instacrops also uses satellite and drone technology to provide farmers with easy-to-digest visualizations of their crop data to keep them up to speed on how their plants are faring in our rapidly changing climate. Plants may seem to grow slowly, but farmers need to know how their terrain is faring as our weather patterns shift and become increasingly extreme.
An Agricultural Vocabulary Check-In
El granjero/el agricultor - Farmer
Semillas - Seeds
El riego - watering/irrigation
Step Two: Factory
Once our crop yields are as abundant as can be, we’ll need to move them into a warm and secure indoor space to be processed and turned into delicious consumable products. We’ll use building materials provided to us by Green Bricks, a Chilean company that recycles plastic bottles into concrete alternatives that is heavily invested in creating and promoting the world’s transistion towards a circular economy. Our food processing plant will not only be sustainably constructed, it will also be beautiful. Green Bricks isn’t simply producing rigid building materials, they are interested in ensuring high quality, beautiful construction experiences for their customers.
A Quick Construction Vocab Break
Hormigón - concrete
El Ladrillo - brick
La fábrica - factory
Step Three: Production
To help the planet transition away from constantly consuming animal by-products, our factory will be producing some of the world’s most high-end plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. Two companies we might take inspiration from are Heartbest and NotCo. Heartbest is a Mexican plant-based food company founded by a father and son whose dietary restrictions helped them come to realize that being vegan in Latin America is can be challenging. They take a community-oriented approach to crafting plant-based “dairy” products made of amaranth and quinoa. The company tries to connect to people who are in search of a food experience that allows them to connect with their lifestyle goals.
Compared to Heartbest, NotCo’s operations are more wide-ranging. This Chilean plant-based company is growing fast in Latin America while still struggling to enter the US where the plant-based food market is more saturated with competition. Despite these challenges, NotCo’s production process sets itself apart from others with its ability to produce not only dairy alternatives, but meat alternatives as well. This is in contrast to companies like Impossible Meat and Oatly, whose products are sequestered to one side of the plant-based spectrum.
Plant-Based Vocabulary Pit Stop
Basado en plantas - Plant-based
Vegano - Vegan
Alternativas a la carne - Meat alternatives
Step Four: Packaging
After being chopped, blended, melted, and molded into delicious plant-based products, our foodstuffs will need to be packaged to be sent off to stores and consumers. In the Beforetimes, we’d most likely use plastic. Unfortunately, plastic takes 400 years to biodegrade. That’s such a long time that we haven’t ever seen any plastic biodegrade, since it was only invented in the mid-1800s.
Instead of using plastic, we would use plastic alternatives courtesy of Bioelements. To circumvent plastic’s degradation process that would take five and a half human lifetimes, Bioelements has developed a special resin called Bio-E8, which naturally degrades in fewer than two years, and fewer than six months in favorable conditions, such as in professional composting facilities. The Chilean plastic alternative startup has clients in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and now the United States.
A Packing Vocabulary Wrap Up
La botella - the bottle
La caja - the box
El embalaje - packaging
Part Five: Consumption
After our food was ready to leave the factory, it would be sent out to happy consumers all over the region (or world). Satisfied customers would rejoice in their nutritious plant-based food, and have no qualms about sending their containers off to be composted and put back into the soil. These composted bottles could be used to create fertilizer suitable for growing more seeds for more plant-based goodies, and the cycle would complete itself time and time again. Welcome to Eco-topia!
We’ve highlighted only a few of the myriad Latin American startups looking to make our world a more sustainable place, but rest assured that learning Spanish will help you stay up to date with all sorts of wonderful innovations like the ones touched on during our journey through an eco-friendly production process!
Thanks for reading!
Excited about an environmentally conscious future? Tell us about it in the comments below, and be sure to share this post with your crunchiest Spanish learning peers!
Thumbnail photo by Cristian Castillo.
The Sky is Falling! How to Talk About Weather in Spanish.
Step up your Spanish-language meteorological skills!
by Brian Alcamo
Despite this post’s title, falling skies are fortunately not a real weather forecast. That being said, talking about the weather is something we all do so often. Be it part of your small-talk with a cashier, your small-talk with your neighbor, or your small-talk with an estranged relative, weather plays a crucial role in how we see and discuss the world around us.
Weather shapes how we plan our days, weeks, months and years. It’s one of the first things we check on our phones to help us figure out how to spend our free time, and is a major factor in deciding when to take a much-needed quarantine walk. It’s also becoming a big source of discussion as climate change continues to accelerate, especially in the tropical Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America.
Missed our Instagram Live where we go over Describing the Weather in Spanish? No worries! Check it out on our IGTV with Isabel.
How to Talk About the Weather in Spanish
In Spanish, there are technically two words for weather: el clima and el tiempo. More formally, el clima means “climate,” but over time, its usage has shifted to include everyday weather. You may have learned to talk about the weather using the question “¿Que tiempo hace hoy?” Unfortunately, what the textbooks don’t tell you is that that sentence formation isn’t all that common among native Spanish speakers. So when would you use word el tiempo? Mostly in a longer phrase such as el pronóstico del tiempo or “weather forecast.”
More typically, you’re going to ask either ¿Cómo está el clima? (How’s the weather now?) or ¿Cómo es el clima? (What’s the weather like in general?).
Here are some responses you may get to the question ¿Como está el clima?
Está soleado / Está bonito (It’s sunny/It’s nice)
Está haciendo (mucho) calor (It’s hot today)
¡Qué calor! ¡Qué solazo! (it’s so hot! The sun is too strong!)
Está lloviendo / Va a llover (It’s raining/It’s going to rain)
Está lloviznando (It’s drizzling)
Está nublado (It’s overcast/cloudy)
When someone asks you ¿Como es el clima? you can answer with one of these phrases:
Es caliente. (It’s always hot)
Es frío. (It’s always cold)
Es templado (It’s always mild weather)
Want to describe a weather phenomenon beyond the base terms like “sunny” and “rainy?” Here are a few words that can be used to describe what’s going on in the sky:
Escampar (V: rain that is diminishing in strength, rain that is scattering)
Lloviznar (V: drizzling, lightly raining)
Una tormenta (A storm)
Relámpago (Lighting)
The Forecast (El Pronóstico)
Weather not only influences how we discuss the present moment. It also helps us plan our future activities. When you want to discuss what the weather will be like in the future, you typically use the future tense. For example: está lloviendo changes to va a llover in conversations. You will sometimes hear the simple future used on the news (lloverá) since it’s a touch more formal.
Knowing el pronóstico helps you figure out what to wear. Here are a few words that will be ever-important depending on what Mother Nature is bringing your way:
Impermeable (o poncho) (Raincoat)
Botas de lluvia (Rainboots)
Lentes o gafas de sol (Sunglasses)
Protector solar (Sunscreen)
Paraguas (Umbrella)
Gorro de invierno (Winter hat)
Botas de nieve (Snow boots)
Bonus Points: Idiomatic Expressions(Expresiones Idiomáticas)
There are many idiomatic expressions that have to do with the weather. “It’s raining cats and dogs?” they have a saying for that. It’s “un palo de agua.” This term is used most frequently in the countries of South America. Another word that means the same thing is is aguacero.
Used in a sentence, the phrase functions as follows: Cayó un palo de agua o Cayó un aguacero (It was pouring rain)
A brainstorm? More like: “lluvia de ideas”
“Si así llueve, que no escampe” (If it rains like this, don’t let it slow.)
This phrase refers to a time of good luck and good things coming to one’s life and the hope that this lucky time won’t end.
“No hay nada nuevo bajo el sol” (There's nothing new under the sun.)
It refers to the idea that everything has already been said or invented.
That’s It!
Learning to talk about the weather the right way is a key part of becoming fluent in Spanish. Being able to strike up a conversation about the weather is both a cliché and a necessity. The next time you’re asking about the weather in Spanish, make sure to abandon the textbook-style ¿Que tiempo hace? in favor of the more-native ¿Como está el clima? You’ll be sure to impress your conversation partner.
If you’re looking to read up on climate change news in Spanish, check out http://calentamientoglobal.org/.
Be sure to give this post a “heart,” share with your friends, and discuss your favorite type of weather down in the comments below! ¡Hasta pronto!
(Thumbnail photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash)
Climate Change & Tourism
There is one big change facing the country that could doom the system…
Climate Change & Tourism
Any country that relies on a tourist economy will always be subject to many factors out of it’s control. Tourism still secures the most jobs in Spain, even though the country is dealing with a higher the usual unemployment rate. Because of this, the tourism sector has been given priority to be supported in any possible way by the Spanish government. However, there is one big change facing the country that could doom the system if not addressed: Climate change.
At the moment, Spain still has to import $45 billion worth of gas and oil annually, mainly from Algeria and Saudi Arabia, but it is believed it could save a portion of that cost by investing in solar energy with it’s 3,000 hours of sunlight per year. Energy costs are also crucial for the tourism sector, being one of the largest energy consumers and accounting for 15% of GDP.
A lot of energy is consumed in the roughly 750 desalination plants, which pump the salt back into the ocean, thus changing the underwater landscape near the coasts to keep tourist destinations running year-round.
In the north of the country, there's mounting soil erosion along the 3715 miles of coast where 90% of all tourists spend their vacations.
Inigo Losada, research director at the Environmental Hydraulics Institute of Cantabria, warns that vacation homeowners and hotel chains will inevitably feel the effects. Diving will become less attractive for tourists if coral reefs disappear, and the danger of coastal areas being flooded will put a burden on all tourist based companies on the coastline.
Losada says German holiday homeowners in Spain should do the same. "I have no way of knowing whether we'll be able to stop climate change," he warns, indicating that in his opinion some people should already relocate to be on the safe side.
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Climate Change & Tourism in Spain! Do you think the reduction of energy consumption will help the impending situation for Spain’s tourist economy? Join the conversation below!