Tom Raftery's Weekly Tech for Good Newsletter - Issue #26

Happy St Patrick's day everyone ☘️ ☘️ ☘️

Today is the one day a year that everyone is Irish for a day - have a great day, and hopefully this day next year we can celebrate the day together, or in the company of good friends and family 🥃 ⬆️

I have some really excellent stories for you this week, and as always pointers to my most recent podcasts and livestreams

But before that, to celebrate St Patrick's day, check out the 2 minute video below produced by Tourism Ireland and a swarm of 500 drones with a message of friendship and hope for all (sound up when watching the video for some beautiful Irish music)...

Tech for Good stories of the week

And now the stories - there are lots of great stories this week in the transportation space for some reason - first up Volkswagen

7 Big Electric Vehicle Announcements from Volkswagen Today — cleantechnica.com

Volkswagen had a live 3 hour “Power Day” event on Tuesday where they made some big announcements including their plan to build 6 big battery factories to secure access to batteries for the millions of new electric vehicles they plan to build, and to reduce the cost of those batteries

Iberdrola, Enel and bp form E-mobility power alliance with Volkswagen — www.smart-energy.com

These large European power companies are joining forces with Volkswagen to roll out fast EV charging infrastructure and renewable energy to power them throughout Europe

Why petrol and diesel cars may soon be too costly to buy and maintain — thedriven.io

A leading Morgan Stanley Automotive analyst says the price of electric vehicles will fall to around $5,000 or below, in the not too distant future, making petrol and diesel cars too costly to buy and maintain - great, if true!

Stena Bulk unveils concept vessel design for electric, modular hybrid bulk carrier: InfinityMAX - Green Car Congress — www.greencarcongress.com

Shifting to shipping - leading tanker shipping company Stena Bulk unveiled its concept InfinityMAX hybrid bulk carrier design for zero-carbon, multi-modal shipping. The InfinityMAX concept, which is designed to carry both dry and wet cargoes in modular compartments, is built with several new core principles that, accumulatively, represent a paradigm shift in cargo transportation....

First microwave-powered home boiler could help cut emissions

Many homes use gas boilers for home heating, which is obviously sub-optimal from a climate perspective. A new ‘Drop-in’ replacement for gas boilers which uses microwaves for heating water may help

China’s appetite for meat fades as vegan revolution takes hold

Food production, particularly meat has a huge climate footprint. China's increasing appetite for meat has had many people worries, but apparently China is going vegan!

Climate change: Jet fuel from waste 'dramatically lowers' emissions — www.bbc.com

And speaking of food, a new approach to making jet fuel from food waste has the potential to massively reduce carbon emissions from flying. This would be a major double whammy as food waste today typically goes to landfill where it decomposes into methane, a potent greenhouse gas

Digital Supply Chain (DSC) podcast

On the Digital Supply Chain podcast this last week I talked to

• MSCG's Neil Patel and his customer Sam Carter, GDT's Director of Warehouse and Logistics. We had a fascinating conversation about how Warehousing has changed in the last year, and where things are headed, best practices in warehousing, and some out of the box thinking (using facilities tours to turn your warehouse operations into a profit centre!). Check out that episode here

• and in Monday's episode I had  Franz Hero, SAP's Head of Development, Digital Supply Chain on the podcast because on Monday SAP released our new 2021 Digital Supply Chain Strategy document. We talked about the what, the why, and the what next of this document. You can check out that episode here

Climate 21 podcast

On the Climate 21 podcast this week I talked about concrete. Why?

• Stopping global emissions is not enough. We have to also find ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it. One of the biggest contributors to global emissions is the production of concrete. Imagine if concrete production could be turned from a carbon emitting process into a carbon sink... That is one idea the Global CO2 initiative is looking into. They have come up with a new way to make concrete that uses CO2 as an ingredient. It is an exciting idea, so I reached out to the Director of the Global CO2 Initiative Prof Volker Sick to come on the podcast to talk about this idea. Check out our conversation here

Livestreams

My regular Tuesday Tech for Good went out yesterday but because the clocks went forward in the US many of the regular attendees missed out on the live show

• I put out my regular weekly Tech for Good - live show yesterday, and as ever this week's show went really well. We had lots of great stories (some of which you can see further up in this newsletter - but we went deeper into them in the livestream) and there was great audience participation as well. You can check out the replay here

• And this afternoon I'm hosting episode 4 of the Design to Operate: Live livestream series on LinkedIn Live. This episode is all about logistics, and specifically how logistics is critical to a sustainable, resilient supply chain. I'll be talking to my colleague Till Dingle. Because of the US time change, it will go live today March 17th at 4pm CET, 11am ET, and 8am PT. You can join us live, or catch the recording if you miss it live here

And finally...

Thanks for your interest and attention. If you like this newsletter, tell a friend. Heck tell all your friends!

And, if you have any comments/questions/suggestions on how to make it better, feel free to let me know :)

Have a great rest of your week