The Startup Survival Podcast by Peter Harrington

Series 2           Getting Better, Going Further

Transcript: Episode 8 – Why environmental sustainability is the future

                                                                                                                                                                                                            May 2021

Speaker 1 (00:12):

Hello and welcome back to the Startup Survival Podcast with me, your host, Peter Harrington. In this episode, episode eight, gosh, how time flies, I'm going to be looking at the subject of environmental sustainability and considering why this terribly topical and most important of issues has to be integrated into start strategies and thinking. To help me dial up the sustain on this podcast, I'll be joined by Dr Peter Melville Shreve, an eco-expert who has not only started and run his own environmental business, but he's also an experienced engineer and seasoned academic.

Speaker 1 (00:56):

Hopefully you managed to catch the previous episode and hear from the dedicated and energy fuelled Seb Jaramillo. Choosing to scale a social enterprise based on sex education in a predominantly Catholic conservative country seems overwhelmingly ambitious, almost crazy. Yet it was intriguing in its originality. Seb's obvious success should encourage all start-ups, not to think conventionally or be middle of the road. Being versatile, hungry for change yet recognizing the importance of building trust based relationships, were subjects that all shone through once again, as crucial, get better, go further strategies.

Speaker 1 (01:41):

Back in 2002 and with the help of a small team, I started a printing company. We all thought just like Seb. We had invested over 200,000 pounds and our main printing press was the most environmentally friendly on the market. The print process used zero water recycled people was the norm and digital technology meant artwork came into the Macs and completed designs, advanced straight to the press. It was all go. There was no stopping at the dark room, no need for acetate films, no production of aluminium plates. And the delight of digital printing meant designs could be shared with clients instantly online. The traditional energy sapping proofing processes were history and for our competitors. We were pioneering a print revolution.

Speaker 1 (02:34):

A little bit later, I'll share more about my experience in the print industry and what it's like to break new ground and persuade people to buy into ethical consumerism. But for now, let's get my special guest, Dr Peter Melville Shreve onto the show. Peter is an entrepreneurial engineer with years of experience working in the startup space on large consultancy projects, as well as within academia. Skilled in smart cities and industry 4.0 applications amongst other things, Peter also has an engineering doctorate that focuses on sustainable water management. As a lecturer at Exeter university, my namesake works closely with the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. He also has a passion for developing student entrepreneurial thinking and delivering workshops to support startups and spin-outs. Peter, welcome to the startup survival podcast.

Speaker 2 (03:30):

Well from one Pete to another Pete, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for having me.

Speaker 1 (03:34):

Great. Before we get into this podcast. Can you share a bit more about your background as an engineer, entrepreneur and the academic?

Speaker 2 (03:42):

I guess. So I'm an entrepreneur who loves to share my experiences with others. I currently run a program at the university of Exeter. Underlying that I'm someone who loves systems thinking. And I think that's a really important part of exploring the environment. I have a bachelor's degree in environmental geoscience, a master's in water systems and a doctorate in sustainable water management.

Speaker 1 (04:06):

Well, I'm glad you're here today. Peter, since you've clearly studied related topics for many years, and you've also run your own company too I believe.

Speaker 2 (04:16):

In 2015, I was just wrapping up research on my doctorate and around about the time the internet things was just starting to take off. So I took the opportunity to take cyber-physical systems technology, wrapped it into some intellectual property that came out of my thesis and we launched the business that was controlling rainwater systems in cities. So we take real time weather data and make sure that we'd release rainwater from tanks prior to storms, making sure that we could control flooding using the technology.

Speaker 1 (04:48):

Very entrepreneurial Pete. So what got you into engineering?

Speaker 2 (04:53):

So I'm, I'm kind of a mixed engineer and I think my, my grandfather was a, a more pure engineer and I grew up admiring all of the things that he used to do. He he's one of these people that I've got a photo of him on my wall of him watching a nuclear explosion out in the Pacific. He mapped a lot of the Fijian coastline as a hydrographic surveyor. And I remember as a kid growing up and kind of pottering around in his basement, which was a workshop for the lathes and wonderful things. And he even built himself a thing called a spectra helioscope, a sun telescope. And he used to map things like the moon. So in the 1960s, he was mapping the moon. He'd identify that NASA would need maps of the moon for their moonshot project and independently from NASA, he cracked on with photographing and then hand drawing the moon.

Speaker 2 (05:42):

And you can currently buy his, his maps of the moon in a, in a book online. But really as I spent my youth hanging out with this person, he's one of these people in the, in the eighties, he'd he built himself a word processor because he needed a word processor.  In the nineties, he'd modified his Volvo and installed an autopilot dial on the dashboard, just like Tesla are doing these days. But as a, as a young, as a young kid, I kind of was imbued with this this vision from a generation combined that you can always go out and do things that you want to support something anywhere on the planet. Even if it's NASA, just get your, get your telescope out, take photos of it and send them the documents later. So I think as a young person, I kind of enjoyed learning from this engineer and that's what really got me into the environmental sciences at the beginning of my career. 

Speaker 1 (06:32):

So do you think you have your grandfather's genes?

Speaker 2 (06:36):

Right? Yeah. I wonder how genetic it is if it's nature or nurture? But I kind of really strongly remember his astronomy and things as a, as a kid and this willingness to look beyond what was happening here today. So he was in his fifties and was thinking about, well, we need to, in the early 1960s, we need to be mapping the moon because it's of interest. And here we are with Bezos and Musk racing to be the next people to get there.

Speaker 1 (07:04):

Peter, you were inspired by your grandfather and I want us to inspire listeners to be greener, more environmentally conscious with their startup thinking. To kick us off can you say what environmental sustainability is and why it's such an important consideration?

Speaker 2 (07:20):

So I think thinking about sustainability, we obviously have people planet and profit, and it's a really obvious starting point to build our value propositions around profit in order to solve pain points for businesses in an economic sense. But actually, if we start to model things using a triple bottom line approach, so the sustainability approach of people, planet and profit, environment, social and economic then we're able to identify things that other businesses might not be exploring. So a client might have societal or environmental needs. As a, as a business startup, you can go and explore and solve. They might have pain points in that space. And more often than not, businesses are seeking to make a profit and might be missing these opportunities.

Speaker 1 (08:06):

For several years Pete, businesses of all sizes have been advised to improve their green credentials by using less energy, recycling resources, managing waste, and being more conscious about traveling in cars and planes, et cetera, what other things should or could businesses be doing?

Speaker 2 (08:24):

I think within, within a business, obviously, you form, there's the standards that you can attain like ISO standards in order to demonstrate that your business is meeting environmental standards, reducing its carbon footprint, having a sustainable travel policy and things like that. But from the kind of startup perspective, I like the idea that it's possible to identify problems within the companies that you're, you're offering to. They might have a corporate or social responsibility policy available on their website. And if you have a good trawl through, it might be offering targets for the future about de-carbonization or microplastics, any of these large environmental problems of the day. And from a kind of a startup perspective, if you're, if you're in an ideation phase, instead of exploring what the right startup is for you, then these represent problems that, you know, billions of pounds are going to be spent on in the future. And no one has solutions to. So I think from a startup perspective, there's lots of good environmental startups that are beginning to emerge to address these big challenges of the day.

Speaker 1 (09:26):

Yeah. You, you mentioned carbon footprint, Pete, a term often used, but not necessarily explained. Can you share what a carbon footprint is and how it's measured?

Speaker 2 (09:36):

Okay. So the carbon footprint of your business is involved with the scope of everything that your business does. So if we take a drawing a pint of water from the, from the kitchen sink, we might not think that buried behind there is a high carbon footprint, but that water’s had to be extracted from the ground with a pump treated, using chemicals that have been shipped here from Turkey. And then it's been pumped across your house. You put it in your glass, you've added an ice cube. So you do some electricity to freeze the ice. And all of these things have an energy cost and associated with the energy cost is a carbon footprint. Now, as we move towards de-carbonizing our grid, electrical energy is increasingly becoming low. The carbon footprint is being reduced within the electrical energy that we consume. But essentially anything and everything that we do has a carbon footprint embedded within it.

Speaker 1 (10:25):

Can a business measure its own carbon footprint?

Speaker 2 (10:29):

So there's some really useful calculators available on websites, such as the carbon trust and dropping on there and having a look at how your how the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis influence your carbon footprint. I mean, that you're able to help advise your staff and make good plans with the new policies to reduce your own carbon footprint.

Speaker 1 (10:50):

Thanks, Pete. So operationally, how can startups work to support the environment?

Speaker 2 (10:57):

I think there's two ways that startups can have really positive environmental benefit. There's an obvious way, which is to focus on a product or service, which is an environmentally focused offer. But for all of those other businesses out there, which is the majority of them, we can also make sure that we, we bring environmental good practices into our day-to-day operations. So big businesses always make sure they have good policies in place around environmental standards. But it's really easy from day one as a startup to make sure that we take off simple things like a good transport policy, making sure that people are using bikes and trains, not cars and planes. Making sure that we've got a good waste management policy, perhaps do we really need to have a paper printer in the office? Do we need to be posting letters out on a day-to-day basis? All of the things that seem like they might be wasteful can really be drilled out in the business on day one. And by using digital resources, we tend to be able to save on our waste footprint as well as other things.

Speaker 1 (11:54):

Got it. Now you're a water specialist, Pete. Well, what advice would you offer startups seeking a greener use of this invaluable resource?

Speaker 2 (12:03):

Most people don't tend to think about the, the broader environmental footprint behind our water usage. So a typical person in the UK will use a round about, 150 litres of water per day and a household and all that, although will only drink two litres of water. So the water footprint of that has been pumped across our city. And if you think about it for a minute, once we've flushed it, it's going to be pumped to a wastewater treatment works where we're going to put a load, more energy into it, to treat it and clean it before we drop it back off into the environment. So when we're looking at things like water, the footprint in terms of energy costs is, is, is both within our household where we might heat it up and we'll, we'll expend energy and warming it up for our bath, but it's also outside of our household.

Speaker 2 (12:46):

And this is back on the, the systems thinking approach. So we need to think about things as a holistic system, when we're looking at things from an environmental perspective, and we need to acknowledge that anything we do in our business will have a knock on. It's this butterfly effect concept isn't it where a small impact somewhere will flow through and what we need to do from my perspective, when we're starting a business is make sure that we've thought about the overall system in which we're operating. So we might find early doors in our business that there's some negative environmental activity associated with what we're doing. What we need to do is address that before we scale. And if we don't address that before we scale, then further down the line, we're going to have built a business that's got an environmentally weak basis. And no doubt in the years ahead, we'll bump into challenges related to environmental legislation.

Speaker 1 (13:38):

Yeah, that's, that's very good advice. What might appear to be tiny, irrelevant issues when starting up can become colossal challenges down the road as a business grows or scales. Peter, you mentioned the Carbon Trust earlier. Are there any other sources of information or websites that startups can refer to when designing their, their business model?

Speaker 2 (14:01):

So I think two things, I like the idea that the things like the Energy Saving Trust are a good place to get resources, help us make sure that we understand where we're using energy within our business or our day-to-day lives. Other than that, I think a key element is to understand where we can access opportunities from the environmental sector. So websites driven by governments will provide legislation around environmental opportunities, but they're almost impossible to decipher a long legal documents that set out the vision for de-carbonization in the next 10 or 20 years. So looking through those, it's not going to help you as a business startup, identify what the shape of the future will look like. It's too complicated. What we really need to do is if we can sign up to something like a, a tender portal that is offering environmental projects, then that tender portal will give us a nudge the next time something is available in our sphere. And we'll we'll receive a, you know, an, an email of a Tuesday morning that will help us find an opportunity to bid for some work in, in a space that fits our business.

Speaker 1 (15:09):

So far Pete, we've talked about the more obvious ways in which businesses impact the environment. Are there any hidden aspects to our work life where we might inadvertently be increasing our carbon footprint?

Speaker 2 (15:22):

The carbon footprint of our day to day lives is quite interesting these days. Now we spend a lot of time on a screen. So we will have seen in recent press reports that Bitcoin mining is now reaching the equivalent of the energy footprint of the entirety of Argentina. But we, on a day to day basis are firing off emails left, right and centre, whatsapping giffs to each other and perhaps streaming content eight hours a day, 10 hours a day. And each one of those things has got a carbon footprint because there's an energy cost at the server. That's, that's operating that. That server might be up in Iceland or wherever it might be, but someone is burning some kind of fossil fuel most of the time in order to generate electricity, to run the systems behind our, our internet and our day-to-day streaming activities.

Speaker 2 (16:13):

Back in the mid naughties, we were being taught on the energy module on my course that China was building a new coal fired power station once a week for 544 weeks. To put that in context, all of those are still operational. And in the UK, we currently have three coal fired power stations, operational. So we've shifted our energy use in the UK from around about a third of our energy use in the mid naughties was running on coal and it's really depleting down to nearly nothing. So globally, there's a lot of a long way to go to see other nations join this kind of de-carbonization journey. But we've seen in the last few days even over in the USA, President Biden's released a new target to reduce their carbon emissions by 50% really, really positive target. And if you think about the impact of that, that will shake down through all of the legal systems and the procurement systems across the entirety of the United States. And we're going to now see a green boom across both the USA and other nations that following this move. I think it will be a real boost for the global economy as businesses twist and change shape towards that.

Speaker 1 (17:24):

Since Peter mentioned the issue, it is worth referencing President Biden's recent and historic speech in April, 2021, where he pledged to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030. To put that in context, this revised target more than doubles the country's previous commitment under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Now, if only occasionally tuned into US and Trump politics over the last five years, you'll be aware there are millions of Americans who fundamentally disagree with climate change and prioritizing expenditure to improve the planet's health. For many citizens, the American economy should be the number one issue. Well, whatever your view on this matter, let's look at this point through a start-up lens and to do this, let me take you back to that printing business I mentioned earlier, I was company chair for 15 years. And in that time I regularly witnessed an ongoing tension and competition between the issues of environmental sustainability and making money.

Speaker 1 (18:29):

As a print supplier we had the best green credentials in the city of Nottingham and probably the wider region, but this came at a cost because having the latest eco-friendly technology meant, we typically struggled to be the cheapest printer. Sadly, many customer decisions were driven by price. Even if our quote was only fractionally more expensive than a competitor, our environment first ethos was often not enough to persuade people that we were the right choice. So a word of caution when considering sales forecasts, don't be surprised when people in business, people who may work to make a profit or must stick to a budget, prioritize money over your environmental credentials.

Speaker 1 (19:15):

Thankfully demonstrating green credentials and an eco conscience has become far more important over recent years. By way of example, big ticket investors are developing a much greater interest and appetite for organizations that prioritize environmental, social governance or ESG for short. According to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, investments that took account of organizations’ ESG, grew to more than $30 trillion in 2018. More significantly is the fact investor monies have grown again since then. And according to the Morning Star Direct, ESG funds have performed extremely well throughout this pandemic. In short, the pandemic, it seems has helped to focus investor interest and action on organizations that demonstrate clear and sound, environmental sustainability initiatives and policies. So as mentioned earlier, whatever your business, if you're looking to scale and attract investors, ensure your ESG house is in good order. Investors may like profits, but investors are increasingly recognizing that profits without a planet have little meaning at all.

Speaker 1 (20:39):

Now you may be listening to this podcast because your start up offers or is seeking to offer environmental sustainable services. With this in mind and knowing more and more opportunities are appearing in this space I wanted to ask Peter whether he could offer any tips or advice as to how you might grow your venture.

Speaker 2 (20:57):

If you're an environmentally focused startup, or even if you're an environmentally focused person, who'd like to begin a startup then you can do worse than to look at programs like BP's Startup Studio Program. I believe it's called the launch program and, you know, companies like British Petroleum are going to have to shift in the next couple of decades from being you know, a couple of hundred billion pound revenue businesses dealing with fossil fuels. And they're gonna have to shift across to this decarbonised economy on a global basis. So if you're a startup, you can scratch your head and think to yourself, well, what can I build that I can exit to BP in five years time? And they've got whole startup studio within 40 people sitting in it busy thinking about those things from an internal perspective, but if you're leaner and more agile and coming with an environmentally focused idea, organizations like BP are buying up wind turbines all over the planet and other kind of novel electric electrical storage systems. So there's a lot of opportunity there if you took someone like BP, but you could take any large business that's going to need to decarbonize and change shape. They're going to be looking for startups to get hold of that they can scale.

Speaker 1 (22:08):

So visiting corporate websites like BP is a source of ideas and potential revenue. Do you have any advice Pete, as to what startups should look for on these sites?

Speaker 2 (22:17):

Looking through the corporate social responsibility policy documents is key and also just their commitment. So you know, British petroleum shifted from, from there that that was their brand in the early noughties. They shifted onto a new brand at beyond petroleum. So telling you where they want to be in 20 years time, they want to be still operational. They don't want to lose all of their customers, but they need to move to a place where they're operating differently.

Speaker 1 (22:44):

One last question on this. Is there any information source you might suggest people look at?

Speaker 2 (22:50):

Well, it's possible to go and find accelerators such as Google's new climate change accelerator, where they're obviously looking to achieve these kinds of people, planet profit businesses, and nurture them from from day one in their programs.

Speaker 1 (23:05):

Peter, you've mentioned BP and Google. Can businesses working in the environmental space also take advantage of publicly shared tenders and plans for future work.

Speaker 2 (23:15):

Let me give you an example from when I was working in engineering consultancy. So I guess one cold morning, I arrived at my desk and wound up the email and around about seven, nine in the morning, I will have received an email and it, it was from something that I had done months earlier. And I I'd been thinking to myself, I want to work on more environmental projects. I'm working in engineering business, but I want to focus on environmental sector projects. So I'd, I'd signed up to attend a portal that focused on these environmental opportunities and then completely forgotten about it. So here I am, months later, and that morning there I was, and the environmental department in the UK had released 5 million pounds worth of flood management funding to local authorities across the UK to do a new thing, which was referred to as property level resilience.

Speaker 2 (24:01):

So it's where you take a house and you try and prevent the house from flooding rather than take a river and try and prevent it from flooding out of the river. So you let the river out of the banks and you try and stop the house from getting damaged by the river when it gets there. And we can achieve that by doing things like blocking up the air vents or putting a barrier in front of the front door. But when this funding came out, it was a completely new sector. It was the first time DEFRA had ever funded this. So I would have taken this straight downstairs to the director and said to him, excuse me, boss, we've got an opportunity here, a new sector. It arrived around about three minutes ago. Why don't we go and be the people that are the leaders in this space?

Speaker 2 (24:39):

And I pretty much remember just receiving a kind of a nod of yes, you know, good luck with that kind of nod. Anyway, off I went so by lunchtime, I'd found the 25 projects that had funding. And by the afternoon, I'd managed to make enough phone calls to get hold of a few of these offices. And by the next day, I'd have my first meeting. And by the end of the next month, we received our first purchase order for delivering the surveys that were required to get these projects underway. So just by keeping an eye on the opportunity space, this new legislation, driving new opportunities, we were able to open up a whole new business sector. A year later, I was promoted. We built a team of three or four people. And within a couple of years, we'd, we'd worked for probably five or six councils around the UK and protected hundreds of hundreds of property from flooding.

Speaker 2 (25:23):

But it was that opportunity space where I knew at the time there were no experts because it was the first morning in the history of time when those projects were being released. So it was a great opportunity as a, as a kind of a young engineer to jump in and say, I know our organization will be as well placed as anyone else to deliver this. Let's go and attack this. And then it's, it's just kind of down to a classic business development mindset of, you need to pick up the phone and convert those leads into opportunities.

Speaker 1 (25:55):

In the fast moving world of environmental sustainability it clearly pays to be enterprising and entrepreneurial, particularly when you are in the early startup phase and you don't have a network of eyes and ears to support your business development work. You need to be looking for tenders, checking research. And as Pete said earlier, signing up to newsletters. So how does Pete view the future for startups working in this sector?

Speaker 2 (26:21):

I definitely think that being an entrepreneur in the environmental sector is a great place to be in the next decade. There's going to be new opportunities like nowhere else. And I really do see a, kind of a green environmental revolution across, across Europe and the US, probably more globally and any opportunity to focus your business proposition towards these environmental targets means that on a day to day basis, you'll feel warm inside because you know, you're doing something purposeful that your grandkids will be proud of. But also you'll be able to pick up these new opportunities and you'll be, if you're the first person arriving in the room and you're 20 years old and you feel like everyone else there has more experience, if it's a brand new sector that no one else has worked in, it's an even playing field. And you can get your elbows out and go and win the project.

Speaker 1 (27:10):

It's great to hear your enthusiasm, Peter. And if I may, I have one final question for you. In your opinion, is there any one area within the environmental sustainability field that you think offers greatest opportunities?

Speaker 2 (27:25):

I think in the next five years, there's a real opportunity for telemetry, which would be sensing systems. So as we've seen cyber-physical systems, so these are sort of microcomputers that you can put out there into the environment. We've seen them come down in cost. They're now down to kind of a handful of dollars, rather than hundreds of dollars. And the sensors that go with them can be found you know, as cheap aspennies now. So we're talking for like a temperature sensor might be less than a pound to buy a temperature sensor that plugs into one of these microcomputers. So it means that for the first time ever, we can really move towards a smart city concept where we can install environmental sensing at every lamppost or we can install environmental sensing within every vehicle. And then, we moved to the next opportunity, which is the data.

Speaker 2 (28:11):

So the data flowing off these assets is being stored by the utility companies and government providers. Google, for example, or a car manufacturer will be gathering all of this data. And we're moving to a point now where car manufacturers have data product managers. So I flew out two years ago to Michigan, Detroit - motor city, if you will. And I went to go and visit some scientists in a lab there, and they happened to be working on internet of things, technologies to manage storm water, a space that I was working on at the time. The lab next door was the Ford autonomous vehicle lab. And the Ford autonomous vehicle lab happened to be streaming real time data relating to the windscreen wipers. So the two labs sat down, presumably over a beer and a pizza one evening. And the first lab realized that the Ford cars driving around their city were acting as rain gauges, and that they could stream real-time rain data from these vehicles driving through the city. And they could use that real-time rain gauge data in order to best operate and optimize the storm water infrastructure in the city. And so this is a crashing of two different spaces together, but it shows how really there's a massive opportunity to dig through the data that's being gathered by these sensing systems and, or provide a startup or an analytics startup that can provide environmental benefit from data that big businesses are collecting.

Speaker 1 (29:33):

Pete, it's been a pleasure and an intriguing lesson for me. Thank you so much for lending us your insight, wisdom and time, but before leave us, is there any final point you would like to make?

Speaker 2 (29:45):

I think I need to add my thanks. I've been a big, big fan of the podcast since I first listened to it at the beginning of last year and I've enjoyed everything so far. The only thing I wanted to add is is that this thinking like an environmental scientist is all about systems thinking. And if anyone wanted to go away and pick up a great book on that then just punch in the words, Lovelock James Lovelock, into Google and pick up his Gaia hypothesis book because everything on the planet is interrelated. And if we think in that systems approach, then hopefully we can solve problems at a strategic level for our, our businesses and our clients.

Speaker 1 (30:24):

Given Dr. Peter Melville Shreve's expertise. I think it's highly appropriate to make his suggestion, the book recommendation for this episode. If you didn't catch it, Peter suggested you buy the book Gaia. That's G A I a by Dr. James Lovelock. I'm yet to read the text myself, but after only a little bit of research, I've discovered Google is awash with praise for this highly published author scientists and Centurion. James Lovelock is indeed 101. 

Hopefully this get better go further podcast has shone a green light and given you a green light to help you embed environmentally sound practices into your startup thinking. But before the fade buttons are pressed, and we look ahead to the next show, let me recognize our expert guest. Peter, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and understanding of a complex, but oh so important subject. I am sure many people will be taking advantage of your ideas, tips and advice. Sharing your time and expertise on the Startup Survival podcast is really appreciated.

Speaker 1 (31:37):

And thank you to Duncan my producer, Chris, for your research, and another grateful nod to the music sponsors SeeJam moths. Finally, without the support of LJ at the London School of Economics, as well as the SimVenture team who allow me time out to do this, the podcast would not be possible. In the next episode to be published on Thursday The 20th of May, I'll be examining how you as a startup can become a better networker. Getting out of the building, getting out of your comfort zone and knowing what to say when to say it and how to read other people's behaviour will all be covered in episode nine. Until then, your podcast feedback is not just welcomed, it's needed. Share what you really like. And let me know the truth about what needs to be improved. And of course, whatever your listening channel of preference, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe until next time. My name's Peter Harrington, and this has been your Startup Survival Podcast.

Go well.

Stay safe.

And thank you.