Sustainability Needs Entrepreneurs: Lessons from LA’s Cleantech Ecosystem

By Dara Miao

I walked into the LA Cleantech Incubator thinking sustainability meant paper straws and beach cleanups. Two hours later, I realized I’d been thinking way too small.

The founder showcase at the La Kretz Innovation Campus featured seven startups, but none of them resembled the “eco-friendly” projects I had expected. No one was pitching reusable water bottle campaigns or compostable packaging. Instead, the room filled with bright projector screens, prototype displays, and founders discussing systems problems I didn’t even know existed: AI that detects contamination inside recycling trucks, modular direct-air-capture machines built for cities, and shoes made from California algae. Every pitch aimed at a failure point in our infrastructure—problems individual actions could never solve.

One detail stuck with me: the recycling contamination statistic. A founder explained that this is why one out of every three recycling bins ends up in a landfill, regardless of how carefully people sort their waste. All those hours I’d spent rinsing containers? They mattered, but only if the system behind them functioned properly. The real problem wasn’t that people don’t care about recycling—it’s that the infrastructure for handling recycled materials is fundamentally broken. This startup’s AI cameras targeted the exact moment where everything goes wrong: the contamination that quietly sends entire truckloads to the dump.

The pattern continued. Another team presented small, modular carbon-removal machines that each capture as much CO₂ as taking 178 cars off the road, designed to tuck into alleyways, rooftops, and dense urban spaces. Then there were the algae-based shoes—a response to the 300 million pairs dumped into landfills every year. These founders weren’t pushing for lifestyle changes; they were building tools to redesign the systems beneath our lifestyles. They had found measurable problems and spent years gaining the technical expertise to fix them at the root. That, I realized, is what real sustainability looks like.

What surprised me most was how approachable the founders were. After the pitches, the crowd moved into the open lobby and I ended up talking with a few of them. They weren’t distant tech executives; they were people who had spent six months in LACI’s accelerator refining their ideas through constant reiteration. Hearing them describe how they arrived at their solutions made entrepreneurship feel tangible, even for someone like me still in school.

I left LACI thinking differently about what it means to “work on sustainability.” Beach cleanups and reusable straws still matter, but they’re not enough. The biggest impact comes from people who develop deep technical knowledge in a field and use it to identify the exact point where a process becomes unsustainable, then fix it at the root. And the striking thing is that this ecosystem exists right here in Los Angeles. Minutes from campus, founders are solving problems that once felt unsolvable. USC gives us an abundance of technical skills—whether you’re an engineer, a designer, or a business student—and we could be using them to dig into industries and redesign broken systems.

The real question is whether we’re willing to think on that scale. If sustainability is going to mean anything in the long run, it won’t come from performing small acts perfectly. It will come from people who learn enough, care enough, and build boldly enough to redesign the systems the rest of us depend on.