blending trees and tech WAFFLE FOREST

THE NAME Waffle Forest might sound like something out of an imaginative children’s book, but it actually derives from a real-world effort to improve Phoenix’s air quality—which the American Lung Association ranks as the fifth worst in the nation for ozone contamination and eighth in terms of particulate pollution exposure.

Planted in a grid of 15-by-15-foot square footprints, Waffle Forest’s smart trees are designed to alleviate the problems by creating what the 501(c)3 nonprofit calls the first-ever tech forest.

“We want to plant smart trees on the site of a former landfill and use exclusive new technology to measure the amount of carbon they remove from the air,” says Waffle Forest founder Ernest Lerma. “Once the forest is planted, we’ll be installing state-of-the-art direct-air-capture infrastructure nearby to further reduce carbon emissions and improve air-quality in a green, sustainable, cost-efficient way.”

For Lerma, a successful entrepreneur who was born and raised in a poor Hispanic neighborhood in South Phoenix, the inspiration was highly personal. “In December 2020, I was sitting on South Mountain looking at the layer of pollution over the city, and I had the idea to bring new life to land ravaged by landfills,” he says. “I want to do something to improve my community and other marginalized communities across the country.”

With mature, desert-adapted trees that are 10 to 20 feet tall, the waffle concept also turns forgotten or mismanaged land into usable park spaces.

The organization’s leadership team includes chief scientific officer Dr. Riccardo Valentini, a 2007 Nobel Prize winner and top climate scientist. His patented TreeTalker technology uses small devices mounted to trees to monitor growth and general health, then relays the information to a nearby data server every hour. The system tracks each tree’s absorption of carbon dioxide and water needs, and even provides an alert if a tree is under attack from insects or fungi. Plans also include using solar hydropanel technology to extract clean, pollutant-free water from the air to be stored in reservoirs and used to water the tech forest.

The initial phase of the project will build 100 waffles on the 19th Avenue superfund site, with the ultimate goal of creating a greenspace containing 10,000 trees. Lerma is working with government agencies to plant Waffle Forests on unused or waste land sites in the Phoenix metropolitan area this year, with longer-term plans to expand the concept across Arizona and the U.S.

WHILE MUCH OF the sizzle in the electric vehicle industry is focused on passenger cars, Mesa-based Atlis Motor Vehicles has set its sights on the grittier work of powering heavy and light duty work trucks used in the agriculture, service, utility, and construction industries.

Founder and CEO Mark Hanchett brings a mechanical engineer’s mindset and skill set to the challenges of developing emissions-free trucks and batteries capable of matching diesel-powered vehicles. At the core of Atlis’s hardware platform is a battery technology that can charge a full-size pickup truck in less than 15 minutes, and a modular system architecture capable of scaling to meet the specific vehicle or equipment application needs.

Although the company technically launched in 2016, the milestones have come fast and furious during the past year. In fall 2021, Atlis debuted the prototype of its Atlis XT, a four-wheel-drive truck with 500-mile range and the capabilities of a half-ton truck—plus a few extras. The truck is powered with four identical motors and includes electric outlets that can be used to power tools and even welding equipment. Instead of side mirrors, the truck is equipped with 180-degree cameras that display on either side of the steering wheel.

In addition to 60,000 pre-orders at the prototype launch, Atlis has attracted international attention. Australia-based AUSEV recently placed an order for 19,000 XT trucks, as well as 270 of the Atlis’s 1.5 MW charging stations that will be distributed throughout territories in Australia where the XT vehicles will be deployed.

In the first half 2022, Atlis announced partnerships with VCST, a world-class automotive supplier of powertrain components, and a U.S. military supplier, which seeks to convert military vehicles such as gasoline or diesel-powered High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles into electric vehicles. In September, the company went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

At the end of the year, Atlis was named a finalist at the Arizona Technology Council’s 2022 Governor’s Celebration of Innovation Awards in the Innovator of the Year: Start Up category. “We believe our approach is unique, as there are few technologies available as flexible as our AMV XP platform,” Hanchett said. “There are currently no battery technologies based in the United States that are truly designed for extreme EV use cases.”

Looking forward, the company’s plans include building battery factories in Mesa and Australia—creating even more jobs and opportunities in a climate-conscious sector.