Through the MI Climate Wise Business Program, the Centrepolis Accelerator at Lawrence Technological University hired Fresh Coast to provide technical consulting services. This three-year initiative, funded by the Erb Family Foundation, has served 30 businesses so far, helping them integrate sustainability into their core strategies, reduce their environmental footprint, and enhance their economic competitiveness.
The program offers a comprehensive suite of services tailored to the unique needs of each business, from developing corporate greenhouse gas inventories and sustainability programs to consulting on water stewardship and nature-based solutions. We have also conducted avoided emissions analyses for a handful of business through this collaboration. This case study explores how Fresh Coast’s expertise in quantifying potential environmental benefits is providing startups and SMBs with the crucial data they need to secure funding, validate their solutions, and drive market adoption.
Overview
Avoided emissions quantification
Investor-ready climate impact data
Life-cycle and scenario-based modeling
Validation of climate-tech solutions
Alignment with public climate funding goals
For many new businesses, the sustainability benefits of their products are a core part of their value proposition. While founders can passionately articulate this vision, they often face a significant hurdle: how to translate the vision into data that investors, grant-makers, and customers require.
Without transparent data, a startup’s claim that “our product offers sustainability benefits” lacks credibility. Climate-focused venture capital (VC) firms, state-level grant programs, and corporate partners require robust, defensible calculations of environmental impact before they invest. For a young company, commissioning such a detailed analysis can be prohibitively expensive and complex. This is the critical gap the MI Climate Wise Business Program was designed to fill.
Fresh Coast worked with 14 companies through the Centrepolis program, spanning a diverse range of technologies in sectors like data centers, mining, automotive, and outdoor gear. For some participants, we helped companies calculate the potential avoided emissions of their new technologies compared to existing, baseline solutions. This analysis provides a clear, quantifiable measure of a product’s potential climate benefit.
One such project involved a company developing EV chargers. Known as an enabling technology, technologies like EV charging stations don’t reduce emissions themselves but are critical to enabling the broader adoption of climate-friendly solutions. To calculate the avoided life cycle emissions, Fresh Coast conducted a multi-faceted analysis that modeled future scenarios based on projected sales volumes and broader market trends. The methodology involved:
Product & Usage Analysis: Evaluating the potential impacts of different charger types including assessment of embodied emissions, energy efficiency, projected use rates.
Regional Grid Analysis: Factoring in the carbon intensity of the electrical grid in the specific regions where the chargers would be deployed. An EV charged on a coal-heavy grid has a different emissions profile than one charged on a grid rich with renewables.
Baseline Comparison: Modeling the emissions that would be generated if the same number of vehicle miles were driven by traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.
By comparing the two scenarios, Fresh Coast could allocate a verifiable quantity of avoided emissions to the “enabling technology” of the EV charger. This data transformed the company’s sales pitch from a general statement into a powerful, data-backed assertion: “For every X chargers we sell, we enable the avoidance of Y tons of CO2e.”
Another example was a company that built a device to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect spoilage and contamination in food processing operations. By identifying defects before packaging, such as damaged raw ingredients or under-baked products, the system helps food processors reduce waste and improve operational efficiency.
We conducted a comprehensive avoided emissions assessment, referencing internationally recognized methodology from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Our approach involved:
Detailed scenario modeling to quantify the climate impact of the technology. The team established two solution scenarios, monitoring on a potato processing and frozen produce manufacturing line, representing operations with the technology and compared it against a reference scenario reflecting conventional food processing practices.
Establishing baselines and assessment boundaries through defining appropriate system boundaries, establishing functional units for comparison, and developing assumptions based on industry data and operational realities.
Analyzing the technology’s emission impact across its life cycle stages to identify and measure the greenhouse gas reductions achieved when the technology replaces traditional quality control methods.
Supporting Funding and Innovation
Avoided emissions calculations are an important part of many new businesses grant applications and pitches to climate-focused VCs. For investors, this data de-risks their decision, providing third-party validation of a company’s sustainability claims.
This work also supports state-level climate goals. By helping companies complete detailed reporting to the state of Michigan, Fresh Coast provided the verification needed to confirm that public funding was directed toward technologies with tangible, positive environmental outcomes.
Avoided emissions analyses are more than just numbers—they are the key that unlocks funding, validates technology, and empowers the next generation of climate-tech leaders to build a more sustainable future.
