Emily Reichert, CEO, Greentown Labs

Incubators can solve a lot of problems. From building the next great video game to feeding the local community, these entrepreneurial environments have launched hundreds of successful organizations around the country.

Now, Emily Reichert, a CEO with her doctorate in chemistry, wants to take that success and aim it at the biggest problem of them all: climate change. She believes her team at Greentown Labs can use the culture of an incubator to build the next big environmental solutions. She isn’t betting on one solution or even a few. At Greentown Labs, Reichert has hosted hundreds of startups, over 450 at time of writing, each with their own take on this problem. Each with the potential to quite literally help save the world.

“We absolutely have to take a portfolio approach when it comes to climate tech,” says Reichert. “We will need so many solutions, both disruptive and incremental, that we just have to help these companies build up and be successful as quickly and as efficiently as we can.”

Reichert began her career as a chemist with an emphasis on helping companies develop new products and refine existing ones. Eventually, she decided that she wanted more. She wanted to help solve a crisis that threatens the Earth and everyone on it.

“About six or seven years in, I got to the point where I was waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Well, I’m helping one company to incrementally make more profits; is that really enough?’ And I decided it wasn’t,” Reichert says. “I realized I had the entrepreneurship bug and realized I wanted to do this on my own. Could I be part of founding a green chemistry company and leading a green chemistry company?”

Today, Reichert helps launch hundreds of individual businesses at Greentown Labs, based in Somerville, Mass. Over the past eight years it has grown into the largest environmental-focused incubator in the country. Startups working at the space range widely, with products from new energy production techniques to materials sciences and agriculture.

They all have one thing in common though: Whether a business wants to create carbon-scrubbing forests or make concrete from atmospheric CO2, every entrepreneur who sets foot in Greentown labs wants to make the world a better, more livable place.

Emily Reichert intends to help them do just that.