News In Context

Key Takeaways From DLD Circular

Senior executives from large corporates, consultants, startups, a women’s luxury ready-to-wear and accessories designer, an architect, a composer, artists, writers, and a film director were among those who spoke at the DLD Circular conference in Munich September 7 about the urgent need to move to a circular economy and the actions and innovations that could get us there.
 
The good news, speakers from McKinsey told the audience, is that it is possible for Europe to move to net zero at zero net cost but only if action is taken now. McKinsey consultants outlined the findings of the consultancy’s December 2020 report, The Path To Net Zero: How to Reach Climate Neutrality in Europe, which modeled every industry in Europe and every use of energy and found what carbon neutral means for it. The consultancy is following up by releasing a report on September 10 that focuses specifically on industries in Germany.

“It can be done, we have the technology and the means to de-carbonize,” said speaker Stefan Helmcke, a co-leader of McKinsey’s global sustainability practice. But, he said every year that Europe fails to take action will make doing so more expensive.

The report found that moving to net zero could add five million jobs in Europe, in areas such as building and energy but cautioned that many other jobs will be eliminated, leaving a portion of the population with no path forward unless the transition is well planned and organized.

“The good news is we are moving in the right direction,” said McKinsey senior partner Solveigh Hieronimus.  “However, we do think we are moving too slow.”

 The current rate of change must be tripled in the next 10 years if Europe is to meet its ambitious 2050 target, she said.

“Acceleration is so important because if we don’t and we still want to achieve that target it is only logical that the end will be rather dramatic,” warned Hieronimus. ” A cliff of stark tradeoffs. We will switch off to what kind of production system, what kind of energy system, and what will it mean to the livelihood of the people and to the competitiveness of European industry? These are complex tradeoffs. We need to understand so we can actually manage them.”

Speakers from European companies BMW, the conference’s host, E.ON and Telefonica outlined the steps they are taking to go green. (For more on E.ON’s efforts see The Innovator’s Interview OF The Week With DLD Circular speaker E.ON Executive Board Member Victoria Ossadnik, who is responsible for the Group’s digital technology and in-house consulting.)

While the onus is on established industries to take responsibility on averting climate change, startups and consumers also have a role to play. (See this week’s Profits With A Purpose story about how Ikea plans to make it easier for consumers to adopt renewable energy , control their energy use, and send power back to the grid)

 At the DLD Circular conference startups spoke about how they are engaging consumers to adopt more sustainable practices. Simpliigood, which claims to be the first company to develop and operate a technology for high-quality, cost-effective large-scale production of fresh Spirulina biomass in compliance with international food-safety standards, talked about how it is addressing malnutrition and food insecurity as well as the protein gap and implications of industrialized food, including environmental footprint and ecological life cycle of food products.  

Two other startups talked about how they are using technology-driven circular marketplaces to stamp out food waste, the third biggest emitter of global greenhouse emissions.

One, Sprk.global, which targets producers, wholesalers and retailers.is using artificial intelligence for match-making and local processing of surplus food. It constantly learns and uses patterns to understand why food surpluses occur in the supply chain. Supply and demand of potential buyers are matched to enable a demand-driven and speedy redistribution of surpluses. In addition, SPRK.global processes surplus food into new products that are returned to the retail shelves – for example, ketchup or tomato soup made from surplus tomatoes.  

Oddbox , connects to producers to collect fruit and vegetables that are too big, too small or too imperfect to be sold in supermarkets, boxes them along with recipes and information about the impact on the climate of preventing ood waste, and sells them to consumers.  CEO Emily Vanpoperinghe said the five-year-old company has already prevent 15,000 tons of produce from going to waste.

Refurbed, another startup presenting at DLD Circular, is addressing the fastest growing waste stream: electronics. It operates an online marketplace for refurbished electronics that are tested and renewed, preventing valuable resources from ending up in landfills. The products they sell are cheaper than new, and come with a warranty,

“Disruptive technologies can be a major driver for reaching climate goals and for implementing sustainability into our strategies and value chains and of course for running a circular economy,” noted DLD founder Steffi Czerny.

“To me circularity is an incredible vision, it’s a moonshot, a common goal, a mission,” Czerny told the hybrid audience. “Moonshots are always hopelessly ambitious. Putting the first human on the Moon seemed an unachievable goal of the 1960s but it did happen before the end of the decade, it happened because this ambitious goal had the power to unite different stakeholders to collaborate at scale, to foster partnerships between the public sector, science, and business and to get citizens like you and me involved. The enthusiasm trickled down to every aspect of business and society, from fashion to education to pop culture….  It is a catalyst for a necessary transformation we can no longer deny. It is vital for the future of our planet. “

Czerny talked about the importance of including artists, writers, and film makers into the conversation, as storytelling helps people visualize the consequences of action or inaction.

Storytelling around climate change can take the form of either cautionary tales or roadmaps to an aspirational future, explained speaker Liam Young, a film director.

He shared a film he directed that painted both types of futures: a dystopian one in which 10 million people live in a single sinister urban setting called Planet City or a world in which nature is allowed to flourish, urban sprawl is limited and cutting edge technologies are used to achieve sustainability.

“Planet City is not a proposal,” Young told the audience. “It is a provocation, a thought experiment. If we can imagine [green] systems working at the scale of billions, then the only thing standing in the way of rewiring and consolidating our existing cities is ourselves and our own biases and politics and prejudice.”  The film, he said, was meant to “visualize our possible worlds and visualize where we all might want to go next.”

To watch videos of the DLD Circular sessions click here.

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK

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MANUFACTURING

Shanghai Plans Data Exchange To Help Boost Efficiency In Manufacturing

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SUSTAINABILITY

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FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

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RETAIL

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About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.