United by a shared mission to drive cultural and social impact through storytelling, each innovator’s work is featured in an episode, the first of which premiered on 8 October. The other episodes will go live on 28 October and 10 November.
Directed by Academy Award nominee Edward Buckles Jr, whose film Katrina Babies demonstrated his ability to find hope and humanity within complex challenges, The Solutionaries hopes to bring emotional depth and visual artistry to the climate conversation.
“The Solutionaries demonstrate that the answers to our greatest challenges often come from individuals with the courage to build the world they imagine,” said Menaka Gopinath, chief marketing officer at PMI.
“To deliver real-world impact and address the urgent climate crisis, these innovations need to be unleashed – the world can’t afford to keep them in experimental labs.
“That's where the power of project management to scale innovation makes all the difference, and The Solutionaries are doing just that.”
- Episode one: Parley for the Oceans
Episode one introduces viewers to Cyrill Gutsch, a German-born designer and founder of Parley for the Oceans, a global environmental organisation that brings together creators, thinkers, and leaders to raise awareness about the fragility of our oceans and collaborate to end their destruction.
Through Parley Future Material, they are introducing natural materials, biofabrication and green chemistry as alternatives to conventional and often harmful and toxic material standards, disrupting the status quo of the fashion and design industries and driving a material revolution.
- Episode two: Glacier
The second episode spotlights Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder of Glacier, a next-generation robotics company reinventing recycling to reduce landfilling and unlock a circular economy at scale.
Today, Glacier’s robots process recycling streams for one in 10 Americans, a sign of how quickly material recovery facilities in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, and San Francisco are adopting the technology.
Glacier designs custom-built robots powered by proprietary AI models to trace and recover more recyclables from the waste stream.
Their compact units install directly into recycling facilities, where robots extract valuable materials and computer vision captures real-time footage of every item, using AI to classify each one.
- Episode three: Air Protein
Episode three features Dr Lisa Dyson, a physicist turned entrepreneur whose work was inspired by witnessing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
She is the founder and CEO of Air Protein, a company that is pioneering AirFermentation, a NASA-inspired process that transforms elements of the air (CO₂, oxygen, nitrogen, and water) into complete, highly nutritious protein.
The result is a flour rich in essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals that can function as a drop-in alternative to egg, dairy, and soy.
If you’re interested in catching the upcoming episodes, go to the The Solutionaries website.
