Rethinking recycling and reimagining climate capital
Imagine a world where conversations have moved beyond climate strategy to delivering climate solutions — that’s the impact the Abrams Climate Academy Fellows are driving. From rethinking what happens to a carton after you toss it in the bin to redesigning how capital flows into the climate tech ecosystem, meet two student teams from the Abrams Climate Academy who are collaborating with global impact leaders to help build more sustainable solutions.
Rajiv Dwivedi ’26 Two-Year MBA, Gaurav Gandhi ’26 MMM Program, Ethan Ramer ’27 Evening & Weekend MBA and McCormick School of Engineering student Soham Shah ’28 have partnered with venture capital firm gener8tor. Together, they are helping reshape how climate tech investment is sourced, evaluated and scaled.
Two-Year MBA students Mia Chyung ’26, Dylan Goodwin ’26 and Vivek Kannan ’26; Sally Minn ’26 MMM Program and McCormick School of Engineering student Dinesh Tayi ’26 have teamed up with Oatly, a Swedish plant-based beverage company, to help accelerate recycling reform and explore the systems behind packaging waste.
Learn more about their innovative fellowship projects and how they’re contributing to sustainable solutions that drive real-world impact.
Tackling climate challenges and creating value
Kellogg: If you had to explain the climate problem to a friend with no sustainability background, how would you describe it in a few sentences?
Team Oatly: Many people assume that choosing a lower-carbon product automatically translates to a lower climate impact, but that isn’t always true. Waste and materials management contribute roughly 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with packaging of common consumer goods making up a significant share.
In Oatly’s sustainability reporting, our client partner has committed to cutting its climate footprint per liter of product by 40 percent by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. However, whether these goals are realized depends in part on what happens to its cartons after use. Because recycling access and infrastructure vary widely across the United States, the same Oatly carton can have different environmental outcomes depending on where it’s consumed.
Team gener8tor: Climate change doesn’t need one hero solution — it needs a million solutions working in parallel. The advent of various new technologies in this space makes it imperative that we deploy capital wisely. Early capital builds proof of concept; middle stage capital validates market and financial viability and late-stage capital is used to deploy solutions at scale.
Our collaboration with our client partner is to answer how to connect the people who have the money and care about climate, to those who will bring the biggest impact and figure out a way to evaluate the future impact early on.
Kellogg: What’s the core insight or innovation behind your solution, and why do you believe it could meaningfully shift the status quo?
Team Oatly: While recycling delivers clear environmental and economic benefits, the U.S. residential recycling system remains highly fragmented, limiting its ability to realize these benefits. The core insight behind our work is that Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws can meaningfully shift the status quo by realigning incentives across a complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystem.
By requiring brands and states to join a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO), report standardized data and pay fees tied to packaging decisions — often made through third-party vendors — EPR laws create both accountability and a learning environment for the producers themselves. These programs also generate dedicated funding for recycling infrastructure improvements and drive much-needed standardization, enabling coordinated action across producers, policymakers and recyclers.
Team gener8tor: Below are three core findings from the work we’ve done so far. Together, these insights shift the status quo from “picking” companies to design capital that enables them to scale.
- Capital structure matters as much as technology itself. Mismatched instruments can stall viable solutions.
- Climate focused startups face a pronounced “valley of death” piloting a technology and commercializing it, where capital needs spike, risk remains high and traditional venture models pull back.
- Climate tech is becoming a lens through which investments are being evaluated.
An interdisciplinary approach to tackling climate issues
Kellogg: What has the collaboration between your team and the partner organization been like?
Team Oatly: Our collaboration with Oatly has felt like a true partnership. The Oatly team is full of committed change champions and consumer packaged goods sustainability experts. We connect biweekly to balance progress updates with hands-on work sessions.
From the start, we aligned on scope and expectations, while staying flexible as EPR policies and recycling systems continued to evolve in real time. We focus on being additive, bringing fresh research, perspectives, and synthesis, while learning from Oatly’s deep industry expertise. Above all, the relationship was built on transparency, trust, and shared curiosity about what would be most useful as Oatly navigates its packaging transition.
Team gener8tor: It’s been amazing! Ryan Jefferey, the vice president for sustainability, is really engaged, and we meet every two weeks to discuss past work and future plans. He has been making helpful and meaningful introductions with relevant startups, venture capital (VC) firms, and even people outside of the investing world that might be relevant for us. He’s very strategic with the connections he provides, supporting us in a focused direction yet not color our opinions too much.
Kellogg: Speaking of collaboration, your teams consist of students from both Kellogg and Northwestern University. How has this mix of perspectives shaped your approach, and why do you think interdisciplinarity is essential when addressing climate challenges?
Team Oatly: Our team brings together both Northwestern’s business and engineering schools and professional backgrounds spanning strategy, design, product, engineering and data analytics. What we share is a passion for sustainability problems and a relentless curiosity about how to break them down in order to solve them — which matters because sustainability challenges are systemic.
Packaging sustainability, for example, isn’t just about materials; it’s a coordination challenge that involves stakeholders across the value chain, fragmented regulation, uneven recycling infrastructure, business realities and consumer behavior. No single discipline can solve a challenge like that alone; progress depends on different domains solving together.
Team gener8tor: All of us come from different backgrounds but having a common denominator of excitement around climate action has been helpful. Team members bring expertise in fund raising and deployment; consulting; organizational project management, climate tech. The expanse of the breadths of our experiences, combined with our eagerness to go deep and learn new things, brings about a very active and effective team dynamic.
Kellogg: Every project hits a bump or two. What has been the biggest challenge so far, and how did your team navigate it?
Team Oatly: As U.S. states adopt EPR programs, it has become critical for Oatly to understand how recycling works in practice across the country. One of our biggest challenges was navigating limited and inconsistent data across the roughly 450 material recovery facilities in the country. Rather than aiming for exhaustive coverage of all, we pivoted to focus on a targeted, yet representative sample of facilities and a focused set of key metrics, turning messy data into insights that can inform Oatly’s long-term packaging transition strategy.
Team gener8tor: The main challenge the team is navigating is that none of us come from a VC background, so it has been a process of learning, unlearning and relearning. Conducting plenty of interviews has really helped us close some gaps and validate some of the concepts we have learned from our own research. Leveraging Kellogg resources and leaning on our client partners have been key in helping us navigate the process.
The road to sustainability
Kellogg: What have you learned about building climate solutions — technically, strategically or personally — that you didn’t expect going into this program?
Team Oatly: What surprised us most about building climate solutions is how messy and nonlinear the work really is. Policies, data and technologies are evolving in real time, which means adaptability is just as important as technical rigor. We’ve learned that climate progress comes from many partial solutions working together, and that has made us pivot several times from our initial approach of finding “the” solution.
Effective action requires coordination among governments, producers, recyclers and consumers, supported by both policy levers and market mechanisms that standardize behavior and motivate action. Our main takeaway: climate impact is often constrained by systems outside any one organization’s control, and meaningful progress comes from enabling better decisions to move forward despite imperfect information.
Team gener8tor: Our learnings have been how solutions in the space are bound by the same constraints that you expect a consumer goods or SaaS Business would face in terms of commercial expectations, product market fit etc. Folks commonly assume that expectation of returns in the climate space are lower but we found most funds/founders are driven by classical building principles while maintaining the focus on lowering emissions or improving adaptability.
Building a sustainable future
Projects like these are testament to the power of collaboration between academia and industry to drive climate innovation. Learn more about the Abrams Climate Academy or submit a project proposal.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Kellogg School of Management or Northwestern University.