Turning Waste into Bioplastic Gold with Genecis CEO Luna Yu
Release Date: 08/15/2025
Why Jim Mellon Is Still All In on Alternative Protein After Five Years
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: Five years ago, billionaire investor Jim Mellon came on Business For Good and laid out his thesis that cultivated meat and precision fermentation would transform the food system. Since then, venture capital has fled the space, plant-based stocks have cratered, and many startups have gone under. So why is Jim putting even more money in? In this episode, Paul Shapiro reconnects with Jim Mellon, Author of Moo's Law and Chairman of Agronomics, to find out what has changed and what hasn't. Jim reveals that his portfolio company, Clean Food Group, is producing precision...
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Investing in Biodiversity with Venture Capitalist Tom Quigley
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if the next great venture opportunity isn't in AI or fintech but in protecting nature itself? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Tom Quigley, Co-founder of Superorganism, one of the first venture funds built entirely around biodiversity protection. With a freshly closed $26 million fund, Tom explains why over half of global GDP depends on healthy ecosystems, and why the degradation of those systems creates massive risk exposure for industries and supply chains worldwide. The conversation covers how biodiversity...
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Using Wildlife Intelligence to Prevent Animal Collisions with Sára Nožková
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if AI could help prevent bird strikes, train collisions, and livestock attacks by communicating with wild animals in ways they already understand? In this episode of Business For Good, speaks with Sára Nožková, CEO and Co-founder of , about building AI systems designed to detect wildlife and guide animals away from danger. Sára explains how her company combines machine learning, wildlife science, and real-world infrastructure applications to reduce human-wildlife conflict across airports, train tracks, roads, farms, and other critical areas....
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Turning Green Leaves Into High-Performing Protein with Ross Milne
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if the most abundant protein on Earth has been hiding in plain sight inside green leaves? In this episode of Business For Good, sits down with , CEO of , to explore how a new approach to food production could unlock massive amounts of high-quality protein directly from plants. Instead of feeding crops to animals or waiting for plants to produce seeds, Ross explains how his team isolates Rubisco, a highly digestible protein found in every green leaf, through mechanical fractionation processes that separate proteins, fiber, and carbohydrates. ...
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Vasectomies, Family Planning, and Environmental Pressure with Dr. Douglas Stein (The Vasectomist)
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if one of the highest-leverage climate and poverty interventions isn’t a new technology, a policy mandate, or a venture-backed breakthrough, but simply making permanent contraception easier for men to choose? In this episode of Businesses For Good, host sits down with , a Florida physician known as “The Vasectomist,” who has performed 45,000+ vasectomies and taken his work internationally, including providing free procedures and (in some cases) small cash offsets for travel and missed wages. Their conversation moves beyond the clinic into...
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Feed the People Authors on Abundance, Food Policy, and Meat Demand
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary What if the global food system isn’t “broken” in the way sustainability debates usually claim, and treating it that way leads to worse decisions? Paul Shapiro sits down with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, authors of Feed the People, to unpack how industrial scale and trade created unprecedented food abundance, why “eat local” and small-farm nostalgia collapses at 8 billion people, and what practical policy levers can improve outcomes without fantasy. They explore a clear framework, more food, less feed, no fuel, why animal agriculture remains...
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Bruce Friedrich (Good Food Institute) on Taste, Price, and What It Takes to Scale Alternative Meat
Business for Good Podcast
Alternative meat looks like it is collapsing. Startups are shutting down, funding is drying up, and headlines are calling the category finished, but that reaction may reflect a misunderstanding of how technological revolutions actually unfold. Bruce Friedrich, President of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future, explains why most people will not change behavior for values alone, why price and taste are the real adoption gates, and why “only” $3 billion in cultivated meat funding is far...
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Modern Mill’s Chris Guimond on Upcycling Rice Hulls Into Low Maintenance Building Materials
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary A rice field does not look like the starting point for a scalable building materials company until you understand the economics behind it. In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Chris Guimond, Founder and CEO of Modern Mill, to explore how discarded rice hulls are being transformed into ACRE, a wood like siding, decking, and trim product designed to replace old growth lumber. Chris explains why deforestation is a supply and demand problem, how Modern Mill cracked the manufacturing and adoption challenges that derail most composites, and...
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Deep Fission: Using Boreholes to Cut Nuclear Costs and Deliver 24/7 Clean Electricity
Business for Good Podcast
What if the fastest path to reliable clean electricity is not a new reactor design, but a new place to put one? In this conversation, Paul Shapiro speaks with Elizabeth Muller, CEO of Deep Fission, about a plan to place a conventional pressurized water reactor roughly a mile underground to use geology, gravity, and groundwater for containment, pressure, and emergency cooling, potentially cutting total nuclear costs by as much as 80%. They unpack how a narrow borehole reactor could serve always-on demand from data centers and industrial users, what “proven tech combined in a new...
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The Incredible, Edible… Pea? How Meala is Using Biotech to Render Eggs Obsolete
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they’re simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they’re also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who’s avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs aren’t exactly a welcome ingredient to find on the ingredient deck. Enter Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, CEO and co-founder of , an Israeli startup that’s figured out how to make peas...
info_outlineIt’s rare that we contemplate where all the plastic we throw out goes, but rest assured that nearly none of it is being recycled. Simply put, it’s usually cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle old plastic, even the plastic you put in the recycling bin. Because it takes plastic centuries to break down, this means for each one of us you could build a mountain of plastic from all the packaging we use over the course of our lives.
But what if plastic didn’t have to take centuries to break down, and could actually biodegrade in a matter of days or weeks?
That’s exactly the vision Luna Yu is bringing to life as founder and CEO of Genecis Bioindustries, a biotech company using fermentation to transform food waste into high-performance, truly compostable bioplastics. In this episode, Luna joins us—at 1 a.m. her time from a manufacturing run in China—to share the story behind Genecis, from her early days as a teenage entrepreneur in Canada to raising $17 million for her startup in the climate tech world.
Luna walks us through how Genecis engineers microbes to turn low-cost industrial waste streams like glycerol into PHA, a biodegradable plastic alternative that’s already being used in consumer products like Mad Tea and Mad Coffee. We discuss why Genecis is taking a direct-to-consumer approach, how they’re preparing to launch in Sprouts nationwide, and what it will take to make sustainable plastics cost-competitive with petroleum-based ones.
We also dive into Luna’s big bets on the future—including cell-free biology, the promise of enzyme-only production systems, and her vision for a world where the most convenient option is also the most sustainable.
If you’re curious about the intersection of synthetic biology, circular economy, and product design—or you just want to hear from someone reshaping the future of plastic—this episode is for you.
Discussed in this episode
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You can learn more about Genecis' technology by reading their patents and patent applications here.
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Luna is very inspired by Isomorphic Labs.
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Genecis is backed by Amazon and is a graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator.
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CJ Biomaterials manufactures PHA via fermentation.
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Plastic has only been around since the 1950s but we believe it lasts for centuries. How do we know? Researchers simulate environmental exposure in labs by increasing UV radiation, temperature, moisture, and mechanical stress to accelerate plastic breakdown. They analyze how the polymer chains degrade and extrapolate those results to estimate natural-world decay timelines.
Get to Know Luna Yu
Luna Yu is the CEO of Genecis Bioindustries. She completed her Bachelors and Masters in Environmental Science at the age of 21 at the University of Toronto. During her Undergrad, Luna co-founded, grew and exited from two profitable software startups. The exciting advancements in fields of synthetic biology, bioinformatics, and machine learning led her to infuse her passion and experience together. This created Genecis, where biotechnology enables the conversion of food waste into high value materials.