Happy Tuesday. Plastic polluters are on notice – stop the flow or pay the price.
In today’s edition:
🥤 The world’s first plastic tax
🌴 Traceable palm oil
⛽️ What’s a heat pump?
Big Business (2-minute read)
E.ON to support green hydrogen supply in Germany
The situ: Germany is reliant upon Russian gas – which accounted for 65% of gas imports in 2020 (the highest of any European country)
Enter Green Hydrogen: European energy company E.ON, and Hydrogen company TES, have agreed on a strategic partnership to import hydrogen at scale into Germany through a Green Energy Hub in the German port of Wilhelmshaven. The energy hub will allow Green Hydrogen to be received, stored and converted to electrical energy.
Importance? Green Hydrogen allows Germany to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels (from Russia or elsewhere) and move towards net-zero.
World’s first plastic packaging tax to hit the UK
The World’s first Plastic Packaging Tax has come into force this week, placing a £200 per tonne levy on UK-manufactured and imported plastic packaging that fails to include at least 30 per cent recycled content. A powerful tool for inspiring industry to move towards a circular economy of plastics
Avoiding the Gotchas: To ensure desired impact there needs to be: 1) Clarity over who will police new measures 2) Roadmaps to increase the tax to a higher % of recycled content and greater £/tonne. 3) a clear strategy for what the tax proceeds will be used for (e.g. better design for recycling, fund research into recycling technologies)
Green shipping fuel network to be set up in Scandanavia
The Norwegian company, Yara, has signed a deal with Azane Fuel Solutions to build Scandinavia’s first-ever network of ammonia fuel terminals to supply ships with zero-carbon fuel. The “green” ammonia will be created using renewable energy and available in 2024. In 2020, international shipping accounted for 2% of global emissions.
🤖 Future of Tech (1-minute read)
Traceable palm oil: Unilever and SAP team up for blockchain supply chain tracking
Challenge: Palm oil is estimated to have caused over 5% of the deforestation in tropical forests and is integral to our food system. Businesses have trouble ensuring ‘sustainable’ sourcing of palm oil as raw materials from verified and unverified sources are mixed in the supply chain.
Blockchain… is a digital ledger that creates a tamper-proof audit trail. Every physical unit of a commodity is assigned its own digital token, and data can be associated with the token about its sourcing, human rights, habitat protection and emissions. When the physical good is exchanged across the supply chain, the associated tokens are as well.
Result: Unilever and SAP collaborated to launch GreenToken, in Indonesia, covering 188,000 tonnes of palm oil fruit – allowing anyone to see palm oil’s origin and journey across the supply chain.
A home recycling machine to fix our recycling problems
The issue: Plastics and glass are the least recycled materials in the US (just 16% of plastic is recycled annually).
Enter Lasso… a home recycling appliance that undertakes a large share of the recycling process in the home by chopping up and storing plastic and glass (rather than relying on council/state collections). The contents are collected and sent straight to manufacturers for repurposing into new products.
Our take: Lasso provides a novel way to boost recycling rates by increasing engagement in and accountability for household recycling.
💡 Deep Dive (1-minute read)
The humble air source heat pump
What are they: While it might not seem like it, there’s some heat in the air outside on a cold day. A heat pump captures this heat and moves it into your home. So rather than creating heat directly by burning gas, it uses a little electricity to run gadgets that move heat into your house. As a result, heat pumps become energy-efficient heating and cooling machines that effectively turn 1 unit of energy into 3 or 4 units of heat (See here for a deep dive)
The 3 E’s:
Energy costs: Whilst upfront costs are higher, the lifetime cost of heat pumps is reaching price parity with gas boilers for the first time within the UK.
Emissions: The appliance itself burns no fossil fuels and uses only electricity. Even when this electricity is generated entirely by natural gas (40% UK now renewables), it will still emitfewer emissions than a conventional boiler.
Energy security: We’ve spoken at length about efforts to reduce reliance on Russian gas. The IEA predicts heat pumps could reduce 2 billion cubic metres globally within a year
What is the latest:
Subsidies… are key to making boiler upgrading an attractive proposition for all, e.g. The UK government announced it would provide £5,000 for households to install air source heat pumps
Labour shortage:Governments’ ambitions to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 could fail unless there are enough skilled engineers.
Equality driver: Growth could be a driver for equality – with governments considering relevant green training subsidies in disadvantaged communities to ensure an equitable transition
💭 Little Bytes
Quote: “Having the right policies, infrastructure and technology in place to enable changes to our lifestyles and behaviour can result in a 40-70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This offers significant untapped potential.” IPCC Co-chair, Priyadarshi Shukla.
Stat: 3 in 5 Brits would switch their job for a more sustainable one.
Watch: Innovative technology revolutionising the clean-up process for heavily polluted wastewater.
🗞 In other news…
IPCC released a 3000-page plan to limit the root causes of climate change, which will involve using tech to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere (we’ll take a deeper dive next week).
New York governor proposes plans for a green hydrogen energy hub for the region.
Global footwear retailer, Clarks, uses ArtificialIntelligence to reduce emissions and waste in its supply chain.
The announcement of the first set of global guidelines was published by the ISSB, expected to set the baseline for sustainability disclosures.
- The world’s first carbon removal indexes were launched by Nasdaq. The three new commodity price reference indexes, tracking the price of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, will increase transparency in the carbon removal market.
