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TIME magazine has launched its first list of America's Top 250 green-tech companies.

You won't find many miners on TIME and Statista's inaugural list of 250 companies reducing environmental impact, but one green mining tech company has arrived.

Sailing in alongside several hydrogen producers as one of America's top green-tech companies of 2024, deep-sea mining firm Impossible Metals is one of the rare few resource-related organizations to be granted the honor.

This year, TIME launched its inaugural list of America's Top GreenTech Companies from an intensive process surveying over 4,600 companies, acknowledging 250 notable stars rising up in the field.

One of these stars comes from a contentious and unlikely corner of resource extraction – deep-sea mining.

In an interview with Metal Tech News, Impossible Metals CEO Oliver Gunasekara pointed out that "People are definitely more aware of sustainability and environmental stewardship than, say, five years ago, but there is still a lot of misinformation being shared. Education is so important because we're in a race to halt global warming, and there are so many moving parts that take time to activate and involve government regulations and funding, raw materials and supply chains, and technology innovation and adoption."

The selection process

The Time GreenTech survey statistically measured and scored three key aspects – positive environmental impact, financial strength, and innovative drive.

The analyses were done in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings, which gathered and scrutinized data through desk research, online application forms, and collaborations with data and market intelligent companies.

To measure positive environmental impact, HolonIQ joined the collaboration to assess companies on the quality and impact of their product and/or service portfolios based on key performance indicators specific to each industry, including carbon capture, offsets, and renewable energy generated.

Regarding financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee and funding data obtained from annual reports, company websites, media, databases, and company disclosures submitted via an online application form on the TIME website.

For innovative drive, Statista cooperated with LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions to analyze the quantity and value of each company's intellectual property portfolio.

This comprehensive data was then consolidated, with final scores calculated as 45% impact + 45% financial strength + 10% innovation.

Focusing on green tech

The emerging green technology sector – predicted to grow to $9.5 trillion by 2030 – is a hopeful and ideal endeavor, leveraging innovation and disruption, testing new business models with a different bottom line that takes into account a more holistic calculation of value.

Best practices now include long-term visions and big-picture plans; consideration of stakeholders and stockholders; transparency; and an aversion to unintended or unacknowledged costs to third parties, namely the environment and future generations.

The green tech boom is equally about inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers and ecopreneurs. Due to the acknowledged climate crisis and keener social consciousness, more and more companies are now on the bandwagon of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting human rights, and reducing the use of unsustainable materials.

ZeroAvia, the top company on the list, develops hydrogen-electric planes and already has 1,500 provisional orders for its aircraft.

"The most important action is to tackle the hard-to-abate sectors, such as aviation," ZeroAvia CEO Val Miftakhov told TIME. "Yes, we can and will tackle the low-hanging fruit like switching to EVs and building more renewables, but as that happens, we will have stubborn emissions in certain sectors that begin to make up a vast majority of the greenhouse-gas impacts."

The second company down is Ohmium, which designs and commissions reliable, cost-effective green hydrogen electrolyzers, with several other hydrogen-centered companies also making the list.

Brimstone, based in Oakland, Calif., produces zero-carbon cement, a critical innovation replacing a fundamental material responsible for 5.5% of global greenhouse gases, a product increasingly in demand with global urbanization ever on the rise.

This new status can also help put companies out in front of potential talent. With climate change and net-zero aims putting U.S. industries on a short timeline, there is a need for more community buy-in and policymaker support to promote rapid infrastructure development, an overhaul of resource extraction and widespread interdisciplinary green tech education.

"Our most valuable resource in solving this problem is people," Marcelo De Oliveira, vice president of materials science and geology at Brimstone, told TIME. "We urgently need more individuals dedicated to addressing it."

Acknowledging outliers

The diversity of companies who have secured rankings is of great interest, demonstrating the effectiveness of investment through the Inflation Reduction Act and reflecting the myriad of approaches needed to target and solve the environmental impact of almost every industry; not just heavy industry, power and transportation, but food production and our day-to-day individual and household footprints of recycling and product consumption.

Impossible Metals stands at number 119 on the list amidst sustainable food tech, agriculture, mobility, and energy storage.

With the deep sea's abyssal plains hosting two treasure troves – biological and mineralogical – the technology to harvest one without destroying the other is in short supply.

Impossible Metals is developing a robotic collection system for critical mineral-rich metallic nodules found in the depths of international waters. While countries, miners, politicians, and ecologists hammer out the details, this nondescript Southern California-based company has been pressing steadily onward in its engineering and testing of the technology.

Celebrating and encouraging green tech industry leaders is an important aspect of global net-zero ambitions. In one generation, saving the planet has become demonstrably more than a bumper sticker slogan on a gas-powered vehicle. Real solutions are underway, with significant support from policymakers, legacy corporations, and venture capitalists alike.

Land-based mining is evolving at a dizzying rate to meet intensive environmental, social and governance demands, and deep-sea mining is expected to follow a similar learning curve without the added burden of historical mistakes and stigmas.

Impossible Metals has a cost-effective, scalable, and low-impact solution, which was recognized by TIME and partners and, with any luck, will also be recognized by nations seeking to stabilize their own green technologies with the wealth of minerals safeguarded deep beneath the waves.