In East Buffalo, New York, the median yearly income is just over $25,000. Two-thirds of the population lack a college degree, and the poverty rate is 39%. But after battery manufacturer Viridi moved into the old General Motors factory on Delavan Avenue in 2018, founder and CEO Jon M. Williams saw an opportunity.

Viridi made a $500,000 investment into a nonprofit called GreenForce, which trains East Buffalo residents in electronic proficiency and other battery manufacturing skills that help them assemble Viridi’s lithium-ion batteries. The nonprofit also helps Viridi’s more than 100 local employees with non-work related issues, like getting daycare, accessing transportation, acquiring adequate identification, and even raising money for employees amid family tragedies.

A fifth of Viridi’s current workforce was hired through GreenForce—which also gives equal opportunity to formerly incarcerated individuals.

Commitment issues: Williams told Tech Brew that working with GreenForce and embedding the manufacturing plant in East Buffalo wasn’t a philanthropic endeavor; it was an intentional business decision.

“If we can create economic opportunity for people that live in that neighborhood and they can walk to work, we’re going to have a more reliable workforce,” Williams said. “We’re going to have a more committed workforce, and we’re going to have a workforce that’s going to be less likely to jump to another job.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Shockingly, only 5% of plastics are recyclable.

That’s right, only a smidgen of what we put in our recycling bins is actually recycled—the vast majority goes to landfills or deteriorates into microplastics.

Two recycling-focused startups are working on changing that statistic: MacroCycle is a recycling technology that returns plastic to its “virgin-grade” form, a process it says is cheaper and uses less energy than traditional recycling.

• The company just announced it raised $6.5 million in seed funding from Clean Energy Ventures, Volta Circle, KDT Ventures, and Neotribe Ventures.

FutureBio, on the other hand, is producing biorenewable plastics that are “up to 95% recyclable.” And like MacroCycle’s recycling process, FutureBio claims its materials are also cheaper and greener to recycle.

• The company will be UC Berkeley’s first tenant in its new Bakar Climate Labs, affording its scientists lab space, networking opportunities, and other resources.

Ready, aim, hire: MacroCycle aims to use its tech to recycle bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyester waste from textiles. FutureBio said in a press release that its biorenewable plastics will make recycling more cost effective than producing new plastic, “creating a natural incentive for businesses to recycle.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Big Tech brought in billions last quarter, but it wasn’t enough to please investors. Of the three largest ad platforms in the US, only Meta beat analyst expectations.

One common thread? Executives at Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta evangelized a future with even more AI, and said they’d spend a lot of money to get there. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said it would invest $75 billion in capital expenditure including data centers that power AI, while Meta said it would spend about $65 billion on “generative AI efforts and our core business.” Amazon said, hold my beer, telling investors that it would spend more than $100 billion this year, with a focus on building out generative AI services.

Let’s dive into the numbers.

Amazon: The e-commerce juggernaut brought in $17.3 billion from ad sales in Q4, an 18% YoY increase, bringing its total 2024 ad revenue to $56.2 billion. Additionally, the company’s Q4 revenue surpassed Walmart’s quarterly revenue for the first time.

With all that said, its revenue outlook fell short of analyst expectations, and shares slipped.

Alphabet: The internet giant, which is still awaiting a ruling on its ad-tech antitrust case, brought in $72.4 billion in ad revenue from Google and YouTube in Q4, but a slowdown in cloud computing sales sent shares falling.

Meta: The company that owns Facebook and Instagram got a gold star for the quarter, beating analyst expectations. It brought in $46.7 billion in ad revenue for the quarter, and ended 2024 with ad revenue of $160 billion.

When asked on the company’s Q4 earnings call about its pullback from fact-checking, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company hasn’t “seen any noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend.”

Warning signs? In December, advertising analyst Brian Wieser wrote that he expects US ad revenue to grow 4.5% this year, down from roughly 9% in 2024, citing concerns around tariffs and proposed restrictions on pharma advertising.