The Triple Bottom - 🌱 Paying the price for plastic

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.

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.

• 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 Artificial Intelligence 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.