© RISE Luleå
Food security
Bringing leafy greens to northern Sweden
Food insecurity is a major issue across the Arctic. Because of the remote nature and difficult climate conditions of most communities, food—especially fresh produce—is hard to come by and expensive. So how can we make Arctic communities more self-sufficient? That’s the question that MOA JOHANSSON and two other university students from Sweden set out to answer three years ago when they created their start-up, Containing Greens.
Based in Luleå, Sweden, the company uses waste heat to grow vegetables that will help feed communities in northern Sweden year-round. Last year, their solution earned them the International Polar Foundation’s first Laurence Trân Arctic Futures Award. The award provides financial assistance to a fledgling start-up or young entrepreneur in the Arctic to help them establish their business. Johansson spoke to The Circle about the idea behind the company and where she sees it going in the future.
What are some of the food challenges in northern Sweden?
There is not a lot of food in northern Sweden right now that is actually produced there. Almost 95 per cent of greens are imported from southern Sweden or southern Europe. We need to start producing more. It’s absolutely possible to do it in greenhouses, but how to do that in a sustainable way is the question. That hasn’t been easy. A lot of greenhouses are heated with diesel or wood pellets, and we don’t think that’s the way to go—it’s not economical or sustainable. That’s where we come in. We’re trying to find a more sustainable way to heat greenhouses in winter.
How are you trying to do this?
The idea is to grow vegetables in hydroponic cultivation systems year-round in a resourceful way using waste heat from industries. We’re heating greenhouses with leftover heat from data centres and other industries. Right now, we’re focusing on data centres because there are a lot of them in northern Sweden, especially in Luleå—for example, the Facebook data centre. We want to make it possible for societies to become more self-sufficient and sustainable.
© RISE Luleå
What is the technology you are using?
We’re doing vertical farming with hydroponics. We bring the heat from the data centre to the greenhouse directly using a pipe. So the greenhouse has to be placed very near the data centre. We then use LED lights. Having the lights on 24/7 is not a good use of electricity, so we use them only during the hours when the plants actually need them. And we have the heat from the data centre instead of using the lamps for heating.
What kinds of vegetables have you been able to grow so far?
We’ve kind of tried everything, and almost everything works. But what we are focusing on is kale. We don’t think that fruits are something we need to produce here, but kale is something that you can use as a meal. There is a lot more nutrition in kale than in lettuce. But we can grow vegetables based on consumers’ choices—so, we could actually grow strawberries in minus 30 degrees. And that’s kind of a goal for us in the future.
What stage are you at now?
We have a pilot facility working with the Swedish Research Institute. Right now, there’s about 300 plants a month, so not too many. But we are delivering food to nearby restaurants. This spring, we are going from 300 to 4,000 plants a month—or trying to. We need to show investors that we can do it on a bigger scale and that the technology behind it works.
What do you see as the future of this project?
I think more people will see that there is a lot of potential in waste heat. Not only for harvesting, but for other purposes. We believe this is just the starting point to growing food in northern Sweden. Since the pandemic, we have seen that people are asking: Where do we buy food from? Do we have anything nearby? What do we do if there is another crisis? And we see that in other parts of Sweden, there is a lot of interest in buying locally produced vegetables as well as other foods.
Our focus has been on northern Sweden since the beginning. But these challenges are everywhere in the Arctic. So, we think we could scale up our company to expand to other places in the Arctic as well.
By Moa Johansson
FacebookMOA JOHANSSON is one of three co-founders of the start-up Containing Greens. Based in Luleå, Sweden, the company uses waste heat to grow vegetables that will help feed communities in northern Sweden year-round.
