Isobel Wild [00:00:07]:
Hello, everybody. Today, we are going to bust some big sustainability myths. This is the State of Sustainability Podcast brought to you by Altruistiq. So, what are these myths? Myth one, we should be all phasing out plastic. Myth two, methane mitigation feed supplements are the solution to methane reduction. And myth three, the future of green transportation should be electrified before I get into those myths. Saif, how are you doing?
Saif Hameed [00:00:40]:
I'm good, thanks, Izzy. I'm good. I'm looking forward to getting into those myths, but in general, I'm well. Thanks.
Isobel Wild [00:00:48]:
I feel like we haven't podcasted together for a while. You've been off gallivanting with different interviewees.
Saif Hameed [00:00:55]:
Yeah, actually, I was kind of thinking, where's our guest? Is he. Where's the guest? Are we missing someone? But actually, it's just you and me, right?
Isobel Wild [00:01:01]:
Like, this is the ogs.
Saif Hameed [00:01:03]:
Back to the future. The ogs. Exactly. Back in the day, what, three years ago, we always had a guest, and now we do these, just the two of us, which is fun.
Isobel Wild [00:01:12]:
I know we were counting up listeners, the episodes we have done, and full disclaimer, we have had a few iterations of this podcast, and I think we're now at about 60 or so episodes in total, which is massive. But, yeah, I think our latest season is the best so far.
Saif Hameed [00:01:29]:
Yeah, I think what we missed, Izzy, is we should have done the outtakes. But not just the outtakes, but also all the failed attempts to set up the equipment and get the camera positioned right and get the mic. And then I think there was the time when, like, the laptop died mid record.
Isobel Wild [00:01:47]:
And that was such a good. It was such a good.
Saif Hameed [00:01:50]:
Yeah, it was the best episode ever. Like, our listeners will never, never know what they missed. There was the live stream where we tried to, like, live record while, I think it was with Henry Dimpleby. Right. That one. We were trying to, like, record live.
Isobel Wild [00:02:03]:
Groups of kids behind what happened.
Saif Hameed [00:02:06]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Isobel Wild [00:02:08]:
Well, we're into pastures green now. Maybe we can do a. An outtake Christmas edition just to give everyone a bit of amusement, but to get to it, myth one, before our.
Saif Hameed [00:02:20]:
Listeners forget what the myths were. Yes. Myth one. Let's go, Izzy.
Isobel Wild [00:02:23]:
Myth one. We should be phasing out plastic. So plastic, for many, many reasons, is perceived as the villain of all packaging materials. It's produced from fossil fuels. It's not biodegradable. It's that one, which is suffocating turtles littering our seas, countrysides, and beaches. And it's just, in all honesty, a bit of a dirty polluter. But I think the question for this myth is, is plastic deserving of this rep? I think for all of its sins, it has many important uses.
Isobel Wild [00:02:57]:
So it's flexible, it's lightweight, it's cheap, it's a pretty cool invention, but is what consumers kind of don't want as an option. It's not what they want to be buying around there getting their lollipop. They don't want it covered in plastic. But I think the question for you, Saif, is, is it actually a good idea to phase out plastic if this is what the consumers want? And actually, I think I got a statistic from Bain and company which said that 71% of us consumers claim they want to buy products with as little plastic packaging as possible. So, Saif, is it a good idea?
Saif Hameed [00:03:37]:
I love how you kind of took suffocating the turtles. And then on the other hand, it's flexible and cheap. So we get to this really nice moral dilemma where I have to basically defend the turtle suffocation. I'm not going to try. I was about to say I'm going to try. I'm not going to try to do that. Instead, I just want to maybe look at what we think of as plastic packaging. And I think that in the global north, let's say in Europe and North America, for example, we tend to associate plastic packaging with a lot of excess.
Saif Hameed [00:04:06]:
We think about the wrapper around the lollipop, the even more grotesque wrapper around the banana, the wrapper around the orange. I've seen that. And for sure, I think a lot of this plastic packaging is excess and unnecessary and seems like a slap in the face to the environmental movement. I maybe want to contrast it with something at the other end of the spectrum and then talk about what I think is the right answer. Here at the other end of the spectrum, you have the incredible use and value that plastic packaging brings to things like pharmaceuticals in emerging markets or food products in rural areas, where it actually manages to get things out into distant locations, keep them fresh, keep them sort of uncontaminated, while also carrying information in an easy way around expiry dates, ingredient mixes, et cetera, et cetera. Plastic packaging is, for sure, the workhorse of our time. And if you kind of look at the combination of values that it brings, and, Izzy, you touched on a number of them. One is that it's flexible.
Saif Hameed [00:05:13]:
The second is that it's cheap, and a third is that it's sanitary. These are really hard to replicate easily with other packaging materials. And so we just look at a few of the options right. If you take, let's say, fiber, pulp and paper. So cardboard packaging, for example, often you actually might need more cardboard packaging to get the same effect versus what you could do with plastic cardboard packaging. Or pulp and paper packaging might just not even do the job for certain types of purposes. If you look at, let's say, glass or metal, you're adding a huge amount of weight, often a huge amount of cost, and in many cases, that might even just make certain materials unviable. Let me pick on one example, which environmentally I really hate, but from just like egalitarian perspective, I think is really amazing, which is shampoo sachets and soap sachets.
Saif Hameed [00:06:04]:
So obviously, I grew up in Pakistan, and in Pakistan, soap penetration and just the penetration of cleaning products has been on a steady rise year on year, decade on decade. And a lot of that is through the remarkable innovation of breaking up the product into really small quantities such that a person can buy one shampoo sachet because they only have enough money to pay for one at a time, and they're going to buy that and then use it sparingly and then buy another one, and they would never have been able to afford to go and buy, let's say, a larger bottle in something more durable. And so I think there's just a lot of good that plastic packaging does, which we often tend to, I think, ignore. For those of us that are very sustainability conscious in developed markets, I think there is definitely a safe space. And I really like the reduce, reuse, recycle framework, which I've seen reflected many times and in many different ways. And I think that's a good framework to apply to any packaging innovation program. And so the first would be, let's actually just reduce the amount that we're using. Let's get rid of the excess, let's get rid of the shrink wrap that might not be needed.
Saif Hameed [00:07:12]:
Let's get rid of a lot of the kind of fringe or edges of plastic stuff that we might not need to have. Let's get rid of a lot of the single use cutlery that we throw in unnecessarily. There's just bunches of stuff that we can take away. Let's then look at reuse and see what actually could we reuse, whether it's plastic waste in a manufacturing context, for example, or an assembly context, or even whether it's actually shifting to more durable forms of plastic, like a reusable cup, for example, that can have many more uses in its lifetime. And then the third, I would think about recycling and within recycling, I would look at not just am I using more recycled content, which is important, but also is the product that I'm selling or producing likely to be recycled. And those two things are completely different. It might be 100% recycled content and have a 0% probability of being recycled. And I think important is to solve for both of those aspects.
Saif Hameed [00:08:08]:
I would prioritize that lens rather than having a sweeping statement like saying all plastic is bad. Because I think the truth is you're always going to need some plastic in the system until we manage to engineer something that, remarkably, has all the same qualities but none of the downside.
Isobel Wild [00:08:25]:
Yeah, I think that seems to be quite a strong point, is that it's not as simple as just saying boo to plastic. And in a previous podcast that you did with Patrick from Mondelez. Mondelez.
Saif Hameed [00:08:38]:
Mondelez.
Isobel Wild [00:08:41]:
And he even corrected us in the podcast, every time. Mondelez.
Saif Hameed [00:08:45]:
He corrected you. He corrected you, Izzy. He didn't correct me.
Isobel Wild [00:08:49]:
Sorry, I put my hands up. Mondelez was saying that actually there's this misconception around paper being better than plastic because of exactly what you were saying, Saif, that sometimes leaking into the paper, or you have to put additional films of plastic within, say, a takeaway coffee cup, which then means it's harder to recycle because you have to remove lots of different kind of types of material. You also have to look further upstream to see whether the fiber is sustainably sourced. So it's not that easy. But I think what I was saying at the start is that the consumer perceives plastic to be the villain, the criminal, the devil. So if you are a brand and you are working on trying to create sustainable packaging and communicate that to your customers who are buying your product, maybe because they want to buy a more sustainable product, how do you communicate this? This is a really complicated topic that even us right now, it's hard to communicate. What are the hacks?
Saif Hameed [00:09:51]:
So I think this is a really interesting area to study in terms of just the psychological response of consumers. And unfortunately, I don't have the data. And, Izzy, I would love. We've been discussing this today. We should get the data. But if I just think anecdotally about my own experience, for example, as a consumer, what I react against as a buyer of, let's say, a fizzy drink or a soda bottle, and I kind of get the plastic bottle, I react against the single use aspect of it much more than I react against the plastic aspect of. I actually have the same reaction when I buy, let's say, a drink in an aluminum can. And in fact, I have a stronger reaction when I buy.
Saif Hameed [00:10:32]:
Let's say I have to buy some bottle of water on the go, and now you have kind of canned water. And even though I know that aluminum has many advantages over plastic, from a recycling and reuse perspective, if I know that the chances are that what I'm buying is going to end up in a bin with mixed content and never get recycled. I actually have a much stronger, visceral reaction to buying an aluminum can of water than I would to buying a plastic bottle of water, because I actually know that the material footprint is bigger, and if it's being wasted, it's worse that way. And so I think the thing you react against is the single use aspect of it, more so than against the actual nature of the material. And my test case for this is when I look at, actually, we were talking about the Monmouth coffee cups, for example, or like, if you kind of look at the Starbucks reuse cup model, if you actually look at something more durable that is designed to be multi use and is designed to be a keepsake, and actually, you know that this is specifically replacing a single use alternative, I actually think that creates the opposite feeling where you're like, wow, this is actually great, and I'm happy to be using this.
Isobel Wild [00:11:42]:
And Saif, can you give us the story you told me earlier, but can you tell our listeners about the Monmouth experience that you had?
Saif Hameed [00:11:50]:
Yes. Having said this, right, I showed up at Monmouth Coffee to buy a cup of coffee, and there was a long queue, and I was waiting in this. The queue was like, literally like a ten or 15 minutes, like, out the door and onto the street. And so I was waiting in this queue and someone comes up to me from my Monmouth coffee and says, hey, are you waiting for takeaway? Yes. Do you know how it works at Monmouth? And I said, no, I'm sorry, I don't know how it works here. And they said, well, you have to buy one of these, these reusable cups, and it's five pounds per cup. And if you return the cup, you get the five pounds back, otherwise you get to keep the cup. And I'm kind of thinking to myself, I'm going to walk around town all day and I'm going to be carrying this dirty used cup with me.
Saif Hameed [00:12:30]:
And this is going to be super inconvenient. And so, as much as I love the idea and the initiative, I'm actually going to go to this other cafe around the corner, because I really don't need to be carrying this heavy plastic used cup with me. And then I was kind of thinking, actually, is it likely that Monmouth is going to lose business as a result of this? And my conclusion was no, because the minute that I left the queue, someone else comes and takes my place in the queue. And I think in this case, Monmouth would have been, let's say, supply constrained, which is they have more people who would have wanted their coffee on that day than they could serve. And therefore, the queue kind of reaches an equilibrium as people leave, basically get tired of waiting, and someone else comes in and it has an equilibrium in terms of just how long that queue is going to be. So actually, there's probably no downside to them, which means that they can solve for sustainability and use it as a limiting factor on demand. And I was just limited out on that day. But I actually leave feeling much more positively about Monmouth, and I'm happily advertising them for free here, which means that even while turning away a customer, they actually managed to succeed, which I think is quite cool.
Isobel Wild [00:13:39]:
I also think it's cool because monmouth have been doing this for a while. They are like the ogs of the keep cup. And I love how kind of how true they are to this. They will say, no, we won't serve you coffee unless you do have the keep cup. And I think that was what we were saying, steph, in a previous episode about being true to your mission. And actually, if that does cause some consequences, so be it. But actually, if you kind of continue on that path, it will be valuable in the long run. And I think that's testament in the queue going around the corner.
Isobel Wild [00:14:09]:
And I've spent a fair amount of time in one of those Monmouth cues. And they take a while. They take a while. Right. Okay, let's go on to the next myth. Myth two. Methane mitigation feed supplements are the solution to meeting your methane reduction targets. So methane is a big focus for professionals at the moment.
Isobel Wild [00:14:32]:
Professionals. And actually, it's just a big focus in general. So reports from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization say that livestock are responsible for about 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions. And this is mainly from sources like manure and also like cow burps. Businesses and countries are responding. So the global methane pledge, which saw that 150 countries agreed to lower methane emissions by 30% by 24. And then on the corporate side, at the latest cop that Saif and I, we were both at, and it was very exciting when this announcement came out was the Dairy Methane Action alliance, where big dairy companies. So Kraft Heinz Bell Group, Danone, Nestle General Mills, they agreed to disclose their methane emissions.
Isobel Wild [00:15:22]:
And so it's clear that methane is a big material area for these companies to work on. But a solution that has been kind of painted as the silver bullet is methane mitigation feed supplements. These are essentially additional nutrients added to feed to reduce methane emissions from ruminants like cattle. And there are some wild figures out there. So I was doing some research about how much these methane mitigation feed supplements, which is, to be honest, it's a bit of a mouthpool to keep on saying. So I hope I could cut down the amount of saying this that it says to reduce enteric methane. And some of them, you know, I saw some which was saying like 30, 40%, but on average, across the board it was around eight to 12%. However, it is not that simple.
Isobel Wild [00:16:12]:
And a few conversations that I've had, we, I spoke to Carbure group yesterday and they were also saying a few things. So it's expensive. It's about 33 cent per cow per day. And if you could times that by 365, that's $120 a year for one cow, and you could have a herd of 250 on just one farm. So it's a very, very expensive solution. It also provides no added benefit for the farmer. So it only reduces methane. It doesn't improve efficiency, it doesn't improve the cow's livelihood.
Isobel Wild [00:16:49]:
So it's hard to actually make the business case to the farmer to fork out for this. The other key areas that it's actually quite hard to use, it's temporary. So most, mostly last for about three to 4 hours. So if you have your cows out grazing, you then have to bring your cows in to feed them again. And that's also the other thing. If your catalog pasture fed over summer, like, how are you going to actually add that feed supplement? And then the last one, which carpet group brought to my attention was actually, it comes in a powder form. So it's actually really difficult to figure out how much you are adding to the feed. So, so if you're doing this on mass, you're like, okay, a scoop here.
Isobel Wild [00:17:27]:
It's like, did I under scoop? Did I over scoop? Am I kind of reaching the maximum mitigation threshold? So those are some of my challenges. But Saif, can you add a bit more color to what you think of methane reduction feed supplements?
Saif Hameed [00:17:40]:
Yeah, just as you were talking about the scoop of powder that you're mixing into the poor cow's feet, I was kind of thinking of my attempts to mix my protein supplement into something that I would enjoy drinking. And the estimation process with that cup was kind of what I was visualizing for this poor cow. I think its useful to bring the numbers into perspective. And so you said what, $125 or thereabouts per year? Right. And if we say that thats for one cow and lets say one cows emissions per year, I dont know what the emissions are on average cow in most markets per year, but I would hazard a guessdev that it is in kilos rather than tons of emissions, which is kind of sticking my neck out there. And I would say that if you're making a 1015, even a 20% reduction on that, that's on a per ton basis, we're talking about easily several hundred dollars, if not $1,000 plus per ton. And again, I'm not even attempting to do the math in my head because someone's going to call me out on it. I would say it's safe to assume we're talking over $1,000 per ton per unit of reduction there.
Saif Hameed [00:18:51]:
If you just look at what that is competing with and let's just have almost like a massive array of interventions that you'd be competing with. You're competing with everything from, let's say electrifying equipment on a farm, and there's a lot of equipment on a farm. There's tractors, generators, warehouses like power being used, etcetera. You're competing with that which is probably going to be in the single digits, dollars per ton. You're competing with, let's say anything you could be doing in terms of regenerative agriculture interventions. Let's say if you have some crops also on the farm, and you can actually have cover cropping or you can have rotation, you're competing with whatever you could be doing on increasing the yield of the cow. And let's say increasing the yield might get you not quite a halving of the emissions, but again, maybe 1020, 30% reduction on the emissions of the cow. If you can double the yield, I would say at least which will have another benefit for the farmer in terms of more revenue.
Saif Hameed [00:19:48]:
The spectrum of things that you compete with at that price is basically anything else that you could be doing in dairy farming. Literally, I would say almost any other intervention would end up being cheaper. I mean, Izzy, am I, does my kind of rough high level math and estimation check out with what you'd be thinking?
Isobel Wild [00:20:06]:
Yeah, I think so. And I think, I guess methane is more potent than other carbon reduction initiatives. So that's to take into consideration. But I also agree that I think there are other solutions. So I recently went to Waitrose's demonstration farm, Leckford in Hampshire. And one of the crops that they produce, well, they produce rapeseed oil, and they actually process it on site. So they press down the seeds to kind of create the oil. And what's left from that process is a rapeseed.
Isobel Wild [00:20:38]:
They call it rapeseed cake. And this cake, they actually feed back to the cattle. And it's very like, high in oils. And basically, the high oil yield means that it helps to reduce the enteric methanes. But also, as well as doing that, it improves milk production of the lactating cows. So they've got, like, many more benefits of a byproduct that they're not even spending more money on to be able to do this. And so I think that's a great solution. Well, another one I came across was bell group.
Isobel Wild [00:21:09]:
So Simon Bonnet, who works on dairy sourcing there, he cited linseed, which is another high oil seed, and he feeds that into their feed and also helps with the welfare of the cow and the efficiency in production. So I think there are other solutions that you can find within the realms of your farm as well, that can have more multi benefits, for sure.
Saif Hameed [00:21:34]:
Right. And even while we're still on feed, Izzy, you're still on, I think, the more innovative side of feed improvement. But if you look at how most animals are fed, most animals are fed on grass and relatively low quality silage with very low protein count. Even just improving that, increasing the protein share can have a radical improvement on yield per animal. And again, comes with farmer gains as well. And so if were talking about a global problem, global livestock, I would struggle to see how this sort of solution could scale to the level where it could actually be a very meaningful lever. And if I sort of take maybe a bit of a utilitarian hat and just think through, where would you deploy capital to decarbonize or demethanize this industry? I agree. There are just so many other places to focus.
Isobel Wild [00:22:22]:
I also wanted to flag a couple of other cool initiatives that I've come across. And this is less on the kind of enteric methane, but also. But more focusing on methane from slurry. And I've heard of two awesome initiatives. So the first one is from Edna from Carbure group, who basically they've started adding a slurry additive to that kind of slurry lagoon, for a better word, to use it. So cows in Ireland are mainly housed from November to February, and then they're put out onto the grassland after that. And they actually calculated that around 10% of their on farm emissions was coming from this slurry lagoon, which was all the kind of manure that was being collected in between those months. And they have, like, for the last few years, have started to dose this slurry with a chemical adjective.
Isobel Wild [00:23:14]:
I'm not actually completely sure what that additive was. They said hydrogen, so I missed that. But I'll make sure to find out what it was. And they have seen a 68% overall reduction in the emissions from that slurry lagoon, which is awesome. Although they did also note that it is expensive. And I think this is the same as these methane mitigation feed supplements. They're kind of new, exciting. They're pilots.
Isobel Wild [00:23:37]:
They can work, but they are expensive. So they were saying that the actual setup of this to the storage, the actual product, costs about €5000. And then each time they want to fill up the big tank of this, it costs €7000 at a time. So you're having to put quite a bit of money behind this. The other one, which was also really cool, was from Waitrose at the Lekford farm. And they have partnered with this Cornish startup. I'm cornish, so I'm very happy, happy about this one. And they're called benamin.
Isobel Wild [00:24:10]:
And what they essentially do is put a tarpaulin over the slurry lagoon to capture the fugitive emissions, and they capture this methane and then turn it into biomethane gas on site. And when we went to the farm, we were actually pulled around in a tractor that was powered using biomethane, which was really cool. And they also power some of their delivery trucks as well off this. Again, this was very expensive to implement, but I think, from a first mover position, it's a really cool initiative to actually say our fuel is powered by our cows. It's a very cool kind of net zero initiative. Saif, what are your thoughts on those expensive but flashy initiatives?
Saif Hameed [00:24:54]:
Yeah, I mean, I think often the pr value of these can be significant. I think that there are two kinds of initiatives here. The ones where it does make some sense for sustainability purposes, and it's good pr, and the ones where it is probably just good pr. And so I think about, for example, bottles made from ocean plastic. Right? This is a pr piece. It is symbolic of what could be. I don't think there's any expectation that this could actually work at scale, because the economics of getting plastic out of the ocean and converting it into a bottle, like, there's just no way that that makes sense, I think, or anyone would pretend it does. But it's simple, and it has pr value, and it helps get people maybe excited.
Saif Hameed [00:25:37]:
And there are good things in that. I look at the other end of the spectrum, where I look at this intervention that we've talked about a bit, which is Evian taking the plastic film off the bottle, the evian nude bottle. And that's really cool. Like, actually, it looks like it probably would save a bit of money, it would save a bit of emissions, it would save a bit of just downstream complexity, because that film ends up being very difficult to recycle and separate. And there's a clear first mover advantage in that as well as in the next brand to do. The plastic bottle doesn't get the same pr value in the same way the next brand to take the film off the bottle. You start to look a bit silly, I think, having your water bottle on the shelf next to Evian, you're both kind of both label free, and everyone knows that everyone did it first. I think there's diminishing gains for being the follower on either trajectory.
Saif Hameed [00:26:38]:
And we're back. Small clarification for our listeners. Izzy and I did the actual math on the methane emissions reduction example. My random guesstimate of $1,000 per ton was a little off. I think we're landing closer to $500 to $600 per ton when we factor in the actual emissions of a cow, which we got at around 100, 2130 kilos per year. The methane conversion, where we use 28 times just as ballpark, kind of multiply for potency. And then we did. We used, I think it's like a 10% estimate on reduction that you could get through the methane inhibitor.
Saif Hameed [00:27:21]:
And so we landed up at around, I think, five, $600 or thereabouts. So not a million miles, and obviously, like, half of the number I was kind of putting out there, but, yeah, not a million miles. And I think all the logic still holds true.
Isobel Wild [00:27:34]:
Yeah, our brake listeners was just intense number crunching. So I hope this adds some. Adds some color and flavor to the example we provided before. But onto the third myth. Myth three. The future of green transportation should be electrified. I'm going to caveat this. So the myth that we need to electrify ourselves out of the transportation problem.
Isobel Wild [00:27:58]:
This is the case in some countries where the grid is powered by renewables. But if you take other countries, for instance, China, who is the biggest producer of EV's, this is not the case. If every car in China went electric, we'd be in a worse place than if we kept those diesel guzzlers. And China is well on its way, by the way. So in April 2024. So a couple of months ago, nearly half of the cars sold in China were actually EV's or plug in hybrids, which are known collectively as new energy vehicles. Nev's. But why? This is because, as mentioned, the majority of their energy is powered by coal, and this is actually similar in other markets.
Isobel Wild [00:28:40]:
So, Saif, when we were at CoP 28 in Dubai, we were getting the green Ubers to the expo together. And I remember you actually flagging, I'm not sure this is greener because it's mainly the grid is not powered by renewables as of yet. So, Saif, what are your thoughts on this myth? And can you add any more color?
Saif Hameed [00:29:02]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many angles to this. Right. I think one thing I actually want to comment on is Middle east energy strategy, which I think is super interesting, where historically, and I'll come back to the myth, Izzy, but historically, the Middle east has subsidized a lot of local fuel use for vehicles. And so anyone kind of driving a car in the UAE, in Saudi, for example, tends to pay less per liter than consumers outside because it's heavily subsidized. What the Middle East, Ive noticed, just having played an advisory role to some of the organizations in the region and some of the governments in the past, is that theres this increasing realization that actually the best way to get rid of this subsidy is to start replacing a lot of their domestic energy with renewables and replacing it with electrification, and then export the hydrocarbons to other countries and let them continue using those while they. Well, they do actually shift their local grids to renewables. We're not there yet, but I noticed lots of flavors of this strategy emerging across the Middle east, which I find really interesting. Having said that, because we're not there yet, I think there is an interesting point or an interesting case to be made, which is you want the transition to electric vehicles to happen fast, but not too fast in some markets.
Saif Hameed [00:30:22]:
I think about a lot of markets where it's actually really difficult to switch to renewable energy, like the serious infrastructure challenges, whether it's on the transmission or distribution or whether it's around, let's say, nationalization versus privatization of power generation. And so it's just very difficult to decarbonize the energy generation, which means that it might be easier to decarbonize the transportation side of that. And then you could get locked into, let's say a 1015 20 year period where you're actually using HFO power plants or fossil fuel based power plants to produce electricity that then gets used in vehicles, which is much less efficient than converting the fuel in the actual internal combustion engine of the vehicle itself. And for anyone not super familiar with how this works, if I'm basically burning fuel at point a and using lots of pipes and wires to get that electricity from point a to point b, which might be hundreds of kilometers away, it is actually much more efficient if I just burn that fuel locally in the place where I'm going to use it, which might be in the engine of the car. Having said that, I do actually think electrification is the best answer for most forms of transport to be decarbonized. I think there are some exceptions. I actually think that marine shipping and aviation are super interesting areas where there's a network problem here in that you need every fueling point or like every port to be able to refuel the same alternative fuel that you're going to be using, whether that's electric or whether it's a synthetic fuel of some sort. And that can be very difficult.
Saif Hameed [00:32:03]:
But for road transportation, I do think electrification seems to be the right answer. There's obviously talk about hydrogen. I think that in an abstract sense, if you were to redesign the energy system from scratch, then a hydrogen system could be very attractive potentially, because you can burn it and you can convert it into electricity and back from electricity into hydrogen, so you get storage as well. Having said that, I think just given the embedded infrastructure at play here, switching transportation to electric probably is the most efficient way to go.
Isobel Wild [00:32:35]:
Yeah, and I think building on that, the example that I gave at the start, China, obviously they are a huge producer of electric vehicles, but they're also making incredible investments into renewable and renewable energy and cleaning up their decarbonising their grid. So I've got some stats here which say China installed as much solar capacity as the rest of the world, and in 2023 it doubled that capacity. They also made 890 billion investment in clean energy sectors, which is as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023, and that's a similar GDP of Switzerland and Turkey. So huge amounts of money are going into decarbonising their grid. And at the moment I think renewables power about seven to 8%, but this is expected to grow to 38% by 2050. So I agree with you there, Saif, that actually it is a bit of a balancing act. So maybe at the moment they're outpacing their renewable supply, but hopefully as we go on, it will be able to meet a match.
Saif Hameed [00:33:41]:
Although to be honest, if you're talking about sub 40% renewable energy penetration by 2050, that doesn't sound like a lot actually. And so arguably that sounds much slower than you'd need if you end up decarbonizing the whole of your transport system. But 60% of your energy mix is still fossil fuel based even at 2050 actually sounds like potentially a disaster in the making. I think what is really interesting is to see does that change in the coming couple of years as you start to get an ambitious industrial policy coming into play with China trying to build larger scale storage systems? Potentially. And therefore you have larger scale renewable energy generation, but also maybe storage that can act as baseline load for an energy system at scale could actually mean that that number maybe even doubles over the next couple of decades.
Isobel Wild [00:34:38]:
Yeah, I hear you. It also is a bit of an interesting conundrum because of the tariffs that the EU and the US are putting on China selling EV's into different markets, which does make it look like China will be having a local EV kind of boost as well, because all the cars will be sold internally. Saif, are there any last thoughts on any of these myths?
Saif Hameed [00:35:02]:
No, I think, you see, we landed in a good place, right? So we said we are skeptical on the methane inhibitors. We think there's a bit more myth than matter in that, if that's not too, too cliche. I think our first one was actually plastic. So on the plastic one, I think, again, we think actually we wouldn't aim to phase out all plastic from everything. We think it's much more nuanced. We think there's a reduce reuse, recycle play that is much more interesting here on methane inhibitors, we said, actually, that seems a little overblown versus the economics and versus what the money could get you on the electrification. We think that electrification is actually the answer, but we think there's an important phasing and timing question where actually too fast electrification of transport in some markets might just numerically end up causing more damage to the environment than good.
Isobel Wild [00:35:59]:
That's a great summary, and I think for myth one, I would urge all listeners to go and listen to the podcast with Patrick Showell, who's global director of packaging at Mondalez. Did I get it right?
Saif Hameed [00:36:13]:
You got it right, Izzy. But I think Patrick clarified his surname as Schuel.
Isobel Wild [00:36:19]:
Oh, no, I'm scuppering it off.
Saif Hameed [00:36:22]:
Sorry. I'm sorry, Patrick.
Isobel Wild [00:36:25]:
If you're listening to this, I'm sorry. And I take it all back. Awesome. Well, Saif, thank you so much for diving into those myths. We've done a lot of this behind the scenes, in general conversations, so it's fun to bring it to life on the podcast.
Saif Hameed [00:36:40]:
Great to be here, Izzy. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
Isobel Wild [00:36:42]:
Thanks. Goodbye.