Tech For Good - Issue 10

CLOSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN RURAL ENGLAND AI’S FIGHT AGAINST REAL ESTATE CARBON EMISSIONS THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF THE E-MOBILITY REVOLUTION CAN FACIAL RECOGNITION BE A FORCE FOR GOOD?

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS A new app dubbed the Uber of wellbeing democratises mental health support. It also raises concerns. We find out how it balances reaching more vulnerable people with providing adequate care

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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s some countries take baby steps to normality on the back of a COVID-19 vaccination programme, it could still be many months and years until we get to grips with the toll that being locked down has had on people’s mental health.

Kaiser Family Foundation, an American mental health organisation, found that adults reporting symptoms of depression or anxiety rose from one in 10 in the summer of 2019 to four in five in February 2021.

While mental health support and therapy has had to find a way to adapt to a remote lifestyle, an American app has seen rising numbers using its peerto-peer mental health support service.

Already attracting the moniker of the

Uber of wellbeing, Happy the App connects support workers – or Happy Givers – with people seeking support in the USA. While it democratises the process in a country where it is often expensive, it has also raised ethical questions. We chatted to its CEO Jeremy Fischbach to get the inside story.

Elsewhere, we visit Dorset, UK, to learn about the great work being done to bridge the digital divide in rural areas, investigate how AI is being used to curb carbon emissions in buildings, find out why the future of e-mobility is at a crossroads, chat to a 13-year-old coder and inventor, and plenty more.

I hope you enjoy our 10th issue!

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From cities on Mars to Dubai’s master plan, we round up the latest news

BrainBox AI’s mission to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings

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Could Happy the App become the Uber of wellbeing?

Hannah Cox on the importance of B Corp certification

GLOBAL NEWS

HEALTHCARE

ENVIRONMENT

EXPERT INSIGHT

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Inside 5G RuralDorset’s drive to bridge the digital divide

Behind the drive to end food waste and feed communities

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Nikhil Shah, carbon-capture expert and Co-Founder of S-Cube

We meet coder and inventor Samaira Mehta, 13

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SOCIAL GOOD

10 MINUTES WITH… TEEN TECH STORIES

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How Charge Enterprises is increasing e-mobility access

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GOOD OR BAD?

Should facial recognition be banned?

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GLOBAL GOOD

Ghanaian healthtech startup Redbird raises $1.5m Redbird, launched in 2018, has raised $1.5m in seed investment.

The healthtech startup enables easy access to rapid medical testing and also allows patients and medical staff to view the results wherever they are. It allows pharmacies in Ghana to provide rapid testing for the likes of blood pressure, malaria, typhoid and prostate cancer. Its aim is to expand in Ghana and then into new markets.

The first sustainable city on Mars has been designed The design plans for Nüwa, the first sustainable city to be built on Mars, have been unveiled by Abiboo as part of a competition organised by the Mars Society.

The city has a vertical design and will be built on the side of a cliff to reduce the impact of atmospheric pressure and radiation. According to Abiboo, if construction starts in 2054, the project will be completed by 2100.

GLOBAL GOOD In case you missed them, we’ve debriefed six of the most interesting Tech For Good stories from the last four weeks 6

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Paraguay deploys its first satellite and uses it to track Chagas disease Guaranisat-1, Paraguay’s first-ever deployed satellite, has been released from the International Space Station. The satellite was developed by the Paraguayan Space Agency to track a tiny parasite that causes Chagas disease, a condition that affects 8m people in Central and South America. The satellite will keep track of these insects to control the spread of the disease.

NEWS DEBRIEF

Google commits $29m to EU misinformation commission Google is contributing $29m to a new European Union media and information fund. The fund aims to support the strengthening of media literacy skills and fight misinformation. According to Google, fewer than one in 10 Europeans have participated in any form of online media literacy training. Tech giants like Google have been criticised for not doing enough to combat the rise of fake news.

AWS to upskill edtech companies in India AWS is partnering with a government thinktank in India to upskill the country’s edtech startups. A partnership with the Atal Innovations Mission and NITI Aayong will also see more than 7,000 Atal Tinkering Labs educate their students on cloud-related learning. “The support of AWS for startups will accelerate their productisation and commercialisation,” said a spokesperson.

Dubai to become 60% nature reserves by 2040 The Dubai 2040 Master Plan has been revealed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The project maps out a comprehensive plan for sustainable urban development in Dubai. By 2040, over 60% of the city is expected to be turned into a nature reserve and more than 55% of the city’s population will live within 800 metres of a public transport station.

Several renewable energy plants will also be created.

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IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS Dubbed the Uber of wellbeing, Happy is making big strides as a peer-to-peer mental health service in the United States. We speak to CEO Jeremy Fischbach about its place in a country reporting rapidly rising mental health issues AUTHOR: Martin Guttridge-Hewitt

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ecently separated from his wife, Jeremy Fischbach moved to New Orleans in 2015. A former corporate lawyer who five years earlier switched to work in mental health and technology, the fresh start was the change he needed but meant sacrificing the immediate and robust personal network that comes with established roots.

Relying on phone conversations with friends and family, he quickly learnt how many calls go to voicemail and how long a reply can take. Life, after all, gets busy quick. Then you have the difficulty people have in finding the right words. Loneliness crept up, and soon he was thinking about the need for a non-crisis-led mental health and emotional support service that 10

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connects anyone who feels alone with someone who cares.

“I specifically remember a barista at a coffee shop that I frequented who was getting paid to serve coffee,” Fischbach says. “She engaged in meaningful conversations with many customers and everybody’s face lit up when they were lucky enough to be served by Meghan, that was her name. She’s one of several people I met at that time who reminded me that the person I was looking for – that inherently, innately caring person – was out there.

They existed. They were all around me.”

The idea began as a brick and mortar business – conversational drop-ins focused on improving emotions and feelings – but this soon proved unscal-

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able. Having already collaborated on sports analytics and education projects, Fischbach looked to software developer and tech project manager Ely Alvarado to take the project digital, and Happy the App Inc. was born in 2016.

The US company links those in need with approved support workers, or Happy Givers, via smartphone. Instant space to be heard at the touch of a button, and the promise of a call that will always be answered clearly resonated with people on both sides of the service. The network now has thousands of Givers supporting tens of thousands of users. “[Happy] is a universal peer support platform where the only requirement for using it is that you’re a human being.

And every human being needs emotional support. Not just people struggling with alcoholism, or other addictions. Not just people with eating disorders, or a cancer diagnosis. Every single person needs emotional support,” says Fischbach, before moving to the app itself. “I think comparisons to Uber are valid, at least with respect to the version in existence now. Uber, along with Lyft, has centralised peer transportation. Nobody has successfully centralised peer-to-peer based mental health support.”

Happy launched for iOS, and was developed in Swift with the backend constructed using Ruby on Rails.

We have a very different approach to privacy and data than most major tech companies.

We really feel that unless it’s critical for us to have data we don’t want it” Jeremy Fischbach

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A version was then built with React Native to target the Android market. “Ely believed it would be quicker to build an iPhone app first. That was great. It allowed us to understand how we needed to build the technology to plug into Twilio, our voice-over IP provider partner,” Fischbach says, explaining the biggest challenge has been balancing supply and demand for an on-demand service that cannot be automated or pre-recorded.

“It can easily become a really untenable situation. Like the first week we probably got one call, but we needed to recruit hundreds of Givers to be available around the clock so as not to miss that single call. Over time we realised we had way more Givers than needed, bringing about pressure to build demand to meet supply. That’s been a lot of our focus — nailing the operational challenges of a two-sided marketplace.”

The idea of creating an Uber for mental health raises serious questions. Most Givers have professional training in this field, but that isn’t a strict caveat; they really only need to be caring and compassionate. Hence the books boasting social workers, teachers and musicians. Lack of comprehensive training could pose a potential risk, and the logical solution – recording calls – would be a serious breach of confidentiality, destroying the foundations of 12

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a supposedly safe space. Instead, the system relies on user feedback, and strict screening processes for Givers.

Just 10% of applicants are accepted, the vast majority of which are women.

“For us confidentiality and anonymity are paramount,” Fischbach says. “We have a very different approach to privacy and data than most major tech companies. We really feel that unless it’s critical for us to have data we don’t want it, and in order for us to provide our service effectively we can’t do that.

So we don’t record calls, if we did we’d have to shut our service down.

“And we do every other thing we could to monitor calls. If somebody has a call

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Uber, along with Lyft, has centralised peer transportation.

Nobody has successfully centralised peer-to-peer based mental health support”

of an anomalous length, whether it’s very short, just a few minutes, or very long — we’ve had calls last eight hours — we will check in with our support givers. The average call length is about 45 minutes.”

Fischbach says any calls that are rated below 5* are followed up on, and that there is an average 50% decrease in anxiety for a single call and an average 45% improvement in mood.

Desiree Hackett-Hickson is a registered Happy Giver based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although not a qualified mental health professional she has experience in therapeutic situations as both student and client, and joined Happy in 2016, when the app was still

in development. She tells us the service can work well for some alongside more in-depth support, while others use it as a sounding board.

“Many of our callers use Happy in conjunction with regular mental health counselling or therapy that can only take place during regular business hours,” says Hackett-Hickson. “A lot of our callers are simply lonely or frustrated and need someone safe to talk to regardless of the time, day or night. Sometimes you don’t need advice or care to hear anyone’s opinion, you just need to share something that is on your mind.

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The app is always there, 24/7, so people can dial in any time, whatever their mood, and speak to a third party for validation that their experience, their story, and their voice matters, without judgement” Desiree Hackett-Hickson

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a number of callers. Some called daily but now only call every three months.

“The app is always there, 24/7, so people can dial in any time, whatever their mood, and speak to a third party for validation that their experience, their story, and their voice matters, without judgement. We don’t offer opinions on callers or the themes they bring to the app. We hold space for them to express themselves anonymously and safely.”

Happy’s price point clarifies its position. Therapy in the United States can be prohibitively expensive, with average costs between $60 and $120 per hour. So a $24 per hour service ($15 of which is paid directly to Givers), with your first call free no matter the length, clearly has real benefits and mass appeal. Unsurprisingly, then, Happy is signing up health insurers to add subscriptions to their standard policies, making it free at the point of delivery.

Less about disrupting the therapeutic landscape itself, instead the focus is on using technology to open up this kind of support to more people, some of who may not otherwise reach out. And the need for that has never been more urgent. According to the National Council for Behavioral Health’s America’s Mental Health 2018 report, accessibility is believed to be the single biggest contributing factor to what

IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

many organisations have long-since considered a mental health epidemic, and the research was published before the current pandemic began to put even greater pressure on resources.

The Stress In America 2020 study, conducted by The Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, reveals the extent to which 12 months of chaos and uncertainty have taken their toll. 78% of adults in the United States reported feeling more stressed as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and restrictions.

Mental health organisation Kaiser Family Foundation backs this up, too; in February 2021 it found 4 in 5 adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, compared with 1 in 10 in summer 2019.

With that in mind, bolstering mental health support by allowing vulnerable

people to remain in a safe environment, while connecting to others who are committed to caring, doesn’t sound like the worst use of technology we’ve seen. And with future plans including the expansion of Happy Music, a project aimed at de-stigmatising mental health by encouraging people to share songs and talk about emotions online, with global artists helping amplify through their own communities, many more are likely to find themselves taking a look in the coming months.

Martin Guttridge-Hewitt is a freelance journalist and editor based in Manchester, UK, whose work primarily focuses on music and culture, technology, social enterprise and society.

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RURAL ROBOTISATION 5G RuralDorset has brought together public and private organisations to leverage 5G to create solutions that will disrupt the agricultural sector and bridge the digital divide. Tech For Good meets them

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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RURAL ROBOTISATION

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s internet access a human right?

Many people would not have thought so a year ago, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made evident how essential broadband is in our everyday lives.

When social interactions, work and even healthcare are dependent on your internet connection, it is more important than ever to ensure that all areas of the country have adequate connectivity.

A 2019 UK government study found that almost 6% of rural areas in the country had no voice or text coverage from any mobile operator, and 9% of them had no 4G coverage. In January

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2021 the Public Accounts Committee published a report revealing that 1.6 million households across the UK today - mainly in rural areas - still cannot access the broadband speed needed to meet typical needs such as watching Netflix or YouTube. The Committee warned that, if this situation was not addressed, rural areas would be “left even further behind”.

Dorset Council is taking action to change this. Last year, the council launched 5G RuralDorset, a £8 million research and development project that aims to explore how 5G can be used to

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address the challenges of rural communities, such as public safety, economic growth, food production and environmental concerns. The two-year project is part-funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and developed in collaboration with industry partners.

“We’ve had deregulation in the United Kingdom’s communications markets for the sharp end of 35 years and, yet, we still have a massive digital divide,” says Dave Happy, Security, Spectrum and Collaboration Lead for 5G RuralDorset.

“There are many reasons besides COVID why that is unacceptable. It’s damaging for society, and it must be addressed.”

Traditionally, investment in next-generation mobile networks has focused on larger centres of population, where the number of mobile phone users is highest. Coincidentally, these areas are also the ones which are already better connected to all kinds of services through roads or public transportation.

Because of this digital divide, many people living in rural areas have not been able to make video calls to their loved ones or access remote healthcare services during the last 12 months.

“Rural areas need brilliant connectivity as much, if not more, than urban ones,” says Colin Wood, 5G RuralDorset Programme Manager at Dorset Council.

“With no motorways, limited public trans-

Rural areas need brilliant connectivity as much, if not more, than urban ones” Colin Wood

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port and public services focused in often remote market towns, digital connectivity is the lifeblood of rural communities.

“5G networks can fulfil multiple purposes relevant to the needs of rural areas, from using Internet of Things devices to monitor the environment, to farming with autonomous robots. We aim to show how 5G can make rural places like Dorset a better place to live, work and visit.”

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However, there is a reason why these locations have a hard time getting internet access, and that is the extremely high cost of providing bandwidth in remote locations or protected landscapes such as Dorset’s UNESCO-designated world heritage coastline.

“Getting power and fibre to these locations can be difficult and expensive,” says Wood. “That challenge was part

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of our pitch to the Government. If we can do this in rural Dorset, with the right partners, passion and ambition, it can be done anywhere.”

Collaboration seems then to be the key to success. Dorset Council has brought together large companies such as Vodafone, SMEs with expertise in niche areas such as the Small Robot Company, research organisations like

the Satellite Applications Catapult and universities to work together to look at innovative and cost-effective ways in which 5G could be brought to rural areas and help close the digital divide.

“This is a truly collaborative effort,” Wood says. “Some of the things we are attempting as part of the project have never been done before and no one organisation has all the answers.”

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Some of these organisations such as Wessex Internet have extensive experience using different techniques to bring connectivity to remote locations. Digby Sowerby, Wessex Internet’s Project Manager, explains how the local and independent business is contributing to the Future of Food workstream within the 5G RuralDorset project.

“From a Wessex Internet point of view, we were born out of a farm about 10 years ago,” he says. “Our roots are very much in agriculture. But we also have this strong fundamental belief about bringing connectivity to places that are the hardest to get to. none of the mobile network operators are getting to some of 22

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these places because it’s not commercially viable to take fibre that far.”

Over the last decade, Wessex Internet has been delivering fibre connectivity across rural areas of Dorset. Now, the company is looking to expand its provision to 5G and use the many benefits of these new networks, from lower latencies to increased speed and bandwidth, to increase productivity and reduce the environmental impact of the local agriculture and aquaculture industries.

“5G offers a massive opportunity both to connect the agricultural world and to make technology cheaper, more reliable, and more interoperable for farmers,” Sowerby says.

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One of the most significant pain points of farmers is, according to Sowerby, the large amounts of time they have to spend transferring data between systems or manually transferring information. Many of the projects and trials that Wessex Internet is collaborating on for the 5G RuralDorset project focus on solving this issue, as well as paving the way for the automation and robotisation of farms.

These projects cover a vast amount of use cases within the farm, from integrating a 5G modem into a drone to send live images back to a server in the field, to setting up a new AI camera software to monitor the wellbeing of cows. A trial alongside the British Geological Survey will use sensors to monitor cliff stability and increase safety along Dorset’s coastline.

“The week before our project extension was granted there happened to be a cliff fall right at the very point where we said there would be one,” Happy says. “And all I’m going to say is that I was accused of putting dynamite at the base of the cliff. I would just like to reassure you that that was untrue!”

In addition to increasing productivity and coastal safety, these trials also place a huge emphasis on sustainability, allowing farmers to deploy acoustic sensors to reduce their water consumption or use sustainable robots to assess the impact of farming activities on the environment.

5G offers a massive opportunity to connect the agricultural world and to make technology cheaper, more reliable, and more interoperable for farmers” Digby Sowerby

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“It’s amazing how little we understand the impact humans and animals have on the environment,” Sowerby says.

“If you’re able to deploy sensors in remote areas, you can collect all sorts of information. And the robots and drones can transfer information between them, so that you could deploy a whole system on a farm that works together and understands each other, and is able to go and drill a field or weed a field, and even understand the best day to do that, based on factors like weather or humidity.”

One of the most interesting startups that are taking part in these trials is the Small Robot Company, which seeks to transform farming with robots and artificial intelligence. Their goal is to create the first-ever 5G-ready agri-robot. The company’s three robots, Tom, Dick, and Harry, are already being developed to reduce farming’s impact on the environment and increase outputs across 32 farms.

“We are focused on building sustainable farming robots to help farms regenerate farming systems while also producing sufficient yields to feed the planet longterm,” says Sarra Mander, Small Robot Company’s Chief Marketing Officer.

“The current system based around big tractors is very much all about speed. It’s about getting across the field as quickly as possible to achieve the workforce and manpower required to 24

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farm the land. The bigger the machines are the quicker farmers can get that job done. But in robotics, it’s all about precision. If you’ve got lots and lots of small robots, it really doesn’t matter how fast they are. It’s about being able to farm at the plant level and not the field level.”

After all, robots do not get tired after a long day of work. They can work 24/7 without supervision, so they can afford the time to be precise and do time-consuming tasks such as individually

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© QinetiQ 2020

removing all the weeds in a field, which can become a huge problem for farmers, as they become resistant to the chemicals used to get rid of them which, in turn, are very damaging to the environment.

Moreover, the robots can also identify the biodiversity of an area and keep tracking the impact of farming practices on it, to help the farming industry reach its goal of becoming net-zero by 2040.

Each of the robots that the company produces has a specific role. Tom is

a monitoring robot, “a bit like a Mars rover”; it is fully autonomous and can scan 20 hectares a day and identify potential problems. In turn, Dick and Harry are the robots that address the issue, such as planting seeds, remembering where each individual seed is, or conducting weeding activities.

“Our current 5G system is designed to be asynchronous,” Mander says. “We send the Tom robot to scan the field and collect the data. We then analyse it with ISSUE 10

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We see connectivity as a utility, not a luxury” Sarra Mander

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our artificial intelligence system, work out where action needs to be taken and activate the other robots.”

However, because of this need to analyse the data separately, immediate action often cannot be taken. For example, if Tom were to detect an infestation in a crop, it would have already caused great damage by the time the data is processed and the problem identified. With 5G RuralDorset, Small Robot Company is developing and testing real-time data analysis capabilities to allow for immediate decision-making.

“We see connectivity as a utility, not a luxury,” Mander says. “It is vital to economic performance and to rural communities, and the biggest obstacle that UK farmers are facing in adopting new technology is the support connectivity around the farm. This blueprint will really pave the way for growth in the rural economy and alongside it greatly improved quality of life.”

Nonetheless, those real-time decision-making capabilities would not be possible without 5G millimetre wave spectrum. In order to leverage the benefits of this architecture, 5G RuralDorset has recently announced a partnership with Qualcomm technologies. Together, the organisations will assess the capabilities of its latest Qualcomm Snapdragon Platforms and

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5G Modem-RF systems and apply them to Dorset’s many innovative agri-tech projects, including the agri-robots.

“Spectrum in different bands is like brands of cars; you have different sorts of cars for different purposes,” Happy says. “Mobile networks typically don’t use these higher frequencies at this time. They are still cutting-edge. But it has always been one of our aspirations in the radio spectrum world to use higher frequencies and to make them commercially viable.”

The concept is, in theory, quite simple: the higher the frequency, the greater the speed of the information that travels from robots like Tom to the central locations. However, this is not the only benefit that 5G mmWave would provide.

The architecture offered by the Snapdragon processor would allow the fleet of robots to learn from each other, as they would be constantly sharing information. Moreover, the use of this technology would reduce the processing

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RURAL ROBOTISATION

capabilities required by an individual robot, therefore reducing the cost of each unit and increasing its battery life.

Nonetheless, this technology is still being tested.

“We’re talking about moving terabytes worth of data, huge file sizes; we simply can’t do that on today’s infrastructure,” Happy says. “The deal with Qualcomm means that we’ll be able to look at some of these Snapdragon platforms and see what might be possible with them. We don’t know for sure, that’s the whole purpose of having a 5G test-bed but based on the evidence, it would appear that having an opportunity to look higher up the radio frequency and do more, faster and better, fits perfectly with what Sarra wants and what Digby needs.”

The 5G RuralDorset project has just hit the halfway mark and, with the infrastructure already deployed, it’s ready to begin testing this summer. If successful, the projects will pave a way for the exportation of these technologies around the world, but also fundamentally change the life of the people of Dorset. From environmental monitoring and coastal safety to farm productivity, the potential of these projects to transform rural areas is truly enormous. And it is that determination to make an impact that has brought all of these organisations, big and small, public and private, together.

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10 MINUTES WITH…

10 minutes with... a carbon-capture expert In this new series, Tech for Good gets a 10-minute glimpse into new technologies. This month we sit down with Nikhil Shah, CEO and Co-Founder of S-Cube, to find more about carbon-capture technologies and how to hear inside the Earth

INTERVIEW BY: Ben Mouncer

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NIKHIL SHAH

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FG: Nick, tell us why learning about the Earth’s crust is so important?

Nick: Sure. Wells penetrating the Earth can cost tenths of millions of dollars to drill, so that’s why we definitely need to probe the Earth several kilometres down before drilling and we need to be able to target sufficiently large accumulations within the Earth’s crust to justify the cost. And, very importantly, we need to be able to reduce the risk of a dry hole.

TFG: What are the benefits of carbon-capture?

Nick: Currently, only about 100 million out of 40 billion tonnes of emissions arising from human activity are captured and stored underground, so there’s clearly a major opportunity for controlling climate change by increasing that amount. Hence the number of

projects right now being lined up by governments and big companies looking to offset their emissions. And S-Cube has a role to play specifically in making carbon capture storage much more cost-effective than it currently is.

TFG: What does S-Cube do and why is it more advanced than what was out there before?

Nick: Our algorithm, XWI, is a form of extreme machine learning. It learns to predict recorded sound waves from the seismic survey and focuses on the velocity. This is the parameter that allows you to see inside the Earth and make predictions, based on X, Y, Z location.

With XWI you can increase the resolution of this parameter at target depths and use that to identify left-behind and hidden resources and increase success

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in strike rates above the industry norm of only 20 to 30%. But, more importantly, XWI is also being used to identify secure and high-capacity storage sites for future CO2 injections, especially with impermeable rocks holding the CO2 in place and preventing escape.

TFG: How was this technology born?

Nick: S-Cube is a spinout from academia and it’s backed by venture capital. What’s unique about it is that it’s built on theoretical fundamental breakthroughs in the space of unravelling multiple interfering soundwaves into a clear intelligible signal. It’s essentially solving what’s called a ‘cocktail party problem’ but inside the Earth. Our work can be described as creating the brain for the Earth’s audio.

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TFG: Tell me about the people you worked with and that have made this happen.

Nick: In my days at Cambridge and Imperial, I absorbed Maths from the best minds, from Stephen Hawking to Professor Mike Warmer. I met our co-founders through the Earth Science doctoral programme at Imperial. I’d say we bring to the table our individual skillsets and experience but, at the same time, we have a shared vision.

TFG: How vital is your collaboration with AWS? Nick: The main thing it allows us to do is to actually create those industry-firsts.

The most recent one has been Million Core workload, which we ran for one of our early adopters. We take advantage of their unprecedented scale and

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combine it with the unprecedented resolution that XWI gives to lead the industry.

TFG: And it’s that kind of power that you get from the cloud hyper scalers that can revolutionise the work that you do?

Nick: That’s right. We’re always looking at the next frontier and I’d say for XWI that is seeing what is happening inside the Earth but in real-time. Then we’ll be able to measure concentrations and extraction zones and injection zones. For that, we are also partnering with the leaders in downhole sensing. We are running on custom hardware, we are streaming from the sensor. And the intention and the vision is to be able to deploy SWI at every industrial plant for CO2 storage.

TFG: How are you planning to really market this technology?

Nick: At this stage, we’re still rolling it

out. All of our growth has been thanks to revenue we’ve generated ourselves.

We’re working with operators in the most complex geological settings.

Essentially, they’re looking at left-behind reserves: for example, mass below-soil structures and we’re developing the algorithm so it’s ready for the future, which is CO2 storage.

TFG: You’re at the very beginning of your own personal journey. How excited are you for the future?

Nick: I’d say that getting to this point is very satisfying. We have been able to evolve through customers needing our solution, and now we can add that vision for the future in terms of the problem we’re trying to solve and the impact that’s going to have on the Earth, the environment and humanity in general.

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E-SCOOTERS REACH A CROSSROADS

E-SCOOTERS REACH A CROSSROADS Charge Enterprises is trying to smarten up the ugly side of smart mobility. We spoke to CEO Andrew Fox about how deploying its agnostic electric charging stations will provide safe e-scooters to under-served communities

AUTHOR: Joe Appleton

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-scooters have been on the scene for a while now, but they’ve only recently arrived on the streets of New York City. In the summer of 2020, the city passed a new law legalising electric scooters and throttle-controlled bicycles. The law came into effect in November 2020, bringing a much-needed transport solution to a city struggling to stay moving during a global pandemic.

Despite a hesitance to follow adoption trends in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, New York greenlit the use of e-scooters, starting with a pilot programme that began in March this year, 36

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to help ease the city’s transport problems.

“It couldn’t come at a better time during this Covid era,” Councilman Fernando Cabrera, explained in an interview. “The world is recognising that we have a new, alternative mode of transportation. For essential workers especially, they’re going to feel more comfortable now.”

The United States has been slower to adopt these micromobility platforms, which are commonplace in cities across Europe, but change is coming. However, without careful planning and the adoption of dedicated infrastructure, the streets of New York City could become cluttered, crowded, and unsafe—raising

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the ire of the residents these scooters are supposed to be serving.

The details With rising urban populations, city councils, startups, and venture capitalists have been on the hunt for new ways to keep cities and their citizens on the move. E-mobility has offered up a number of practical solutions, from bikeshares to e-bikes and, now, the latest trend: e-scooters.

In principle, these smart micromobility services are the solution to many urban problems: they’re cheap to run, easy to operate, and quite green in nature when

compared with other mobility options.

But, like with all things, they have their fair share of negative problems, including incorrect parking or no parking at all.

It’s not exclusively a New York problem. Almost every city that has adopted e-scooters has reported teething problems.

“It’s not far from anarchy, and it’s extremely difficult for a city like ours to manage this kind of service,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said in a 2019 interview. Ever since Lime first rolled onto the Parisian streets in 2018, more than 20,000 scooters have appeared and now occupy space on the capital’s sidewalks and streets. While surveys have stated that more than 1 in 10 Parisians actively use these micromobility services, the public aren’t happy with some aspects of the technology.

To the Northeast in Poland’s Western metropolis, Poznan, the city council pushed for new laws to combat the nuisance of abandoned scooters. These laws included placing time limits on mobility companies to collect abandoned scooters, and making it mandatory for each vehicle to have a hotline number that allows concerned citizens to complain to the offending company, rather than to city hall.

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The Achilles heel for the micromobility movement was a lack of infrastructure.

Dockless transportation is convenient, but it comes at a cost” Andrew Fox

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its ugly head, even though the city is only weeks into the pilot project.

“How can a city call itself a ‘smart city’ with these scooters cluttering the sidewalk?” asks Andrew Fox, entrepreneur and CEO of Charge Enterprises, a US-based micromobility charging platform that aims to bring order back to the city streets and make micromobility more equitable for citizens.

Charge has a presence in 19 countries, complementing the micromobility market with a number of interesting projects.

The most successful is an innovative agnostic smart docking system for micromobility vehicles. Regardless of brand, these docks can securely store, charge, and maintain e-scooters, and more. By partnering with local garage parking operators, property owners, city councils, and e-mobility providers, these elegant docks are helping to clean up city sidewalks in major cities across the globe.

“I was an early investor in Lime,” Fox says. “I saw a platform with huge potential. However, I already knew that the Achilles heel for the micromobility movement was a lack of infrastructure.

Dockless transportation is convenient, but it comes at a cost.”

Blocked sidewalks, technology that’s hard to maintain, and charging that relies on an army of gig-economy workers, highlights that this smart industry isn’t

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as smart as it could be. However, with Charge’s innovative infrastructure, and partnerships between micromobilty operators and city councils, e-scooters can provide substantial value to the urban ecosystem, and bring the fledgling micromobility industry onto a path to serious profitability.

Addressing social inequity Street clutter is the main headline-grabbing side effect that cities are facing.

The term “clutter” generally refers to free-standing scooters gathering in one place. Many of them are parked in a tidy fashion, but many are improperly parked in the middle of walkways, and some aren’t

even left upright at all, blocking pavements and causing chaos for pedestrians.

These sideways scooters have contributed towards pedestrian injuries, but they also create problems with furtherreaching implications. “A modern smart city is supposed to be socially inclusive,” Fox says. “If you’re a physically challenged-person, trying to share the streets with micromobility is like walking through a minefield. There’s no easy way to navigate around poorly parked scooters.

It can make life a misery.”

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gain access to a building a wheelchair user will have to navigate the pavements, which is becoming more challenging with e-scooters cluttering them.

According to the latest estimates from the UN, approximately 15% of the world’s population lives with a disability.

As the planet struggles to cope with an aging population, that figure is likely to rise as the years roll on. Creating inclusive and accessible streets should be at the heart of any urban planning solution.

The dockless model for micromobility has many benefits. It offers easy and convenient “on demand” transportation that’s unlocking our cities for the many, but locking out an entire demographic that’s already under-served.

“Those that don’t use micromobility can’t be destroyed in the process of micromobility’s progress,” says Fox. “You can’t ruin sidewalks for others. To try and right this wrong, I felt that proper infrastructure was the best course of action.”

Charge’s smart stations are masscharging hubs that can be placed anywhere, providing simple charging infrastructure, a safe and convenient place to park, keeping the sidewalks clear and scooters readily available.

They’re agnostic and can charge any company’s vehicles, but most importantly they can save mobility companies money, and keep people safe, too.

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They’re already making a big impact in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other cities.

However, convincing e-mobility start-ups to abandon their business model is no easy feat. “We had the unenviable task of trying to make our case and make our voice heard,” says Fox. As a serial entrepreneur with a track record for creating successful businesses, Fox understood that the secret to making his voice heard was base economics.

Reversing a scorched earth policy To understand the damage being done

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by e-scooters, you need to know how they’re maintained. Different companies have different approaches, but most share the same model. Once riders have finished their ride and leave their scooter, it’s either picked up by another user, or a target for an army of gig-economy workers who hunt for scooters, take them home, charge them, and drop them off at designated spots for the cycle to repeat again.

It’s a cutthroat business which can pay gig-workers very well. But there are drawbacks to this service. Gig-workers have few rights, and to make money they need

to grab and charge as many scooters as they can. Charging e-scooters has led to fires in residential buildings, injuries, and property damage. In some locations, gig-economy workers have been replaced with private companies for legal reasons. But both forms of charging and redeployment aren’t particularly smart.

Fires aside, the punishment these scooters endure can make them unsafe for riders to use. “You pick up a scooter, throw it in the back of a truck, and you drive 10 miles or so to go and get it charged at a centralised charging station or worse, at a residential property!”

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says Fox. “Then you throw it back in a truck to go and drop it back off on the street somewhere. In the process you’re damaging the brakes, and the wheels, or the steering column, causing a serious rate of scooter decay.”

Scooter decay is costly to service providers, but even worse if a passenger injures themselves due to an avoidable mechanical problem. “Someone might ride that scooter, and something might come loose, and they might be lucky 42

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and finish their journey without a problem,” Fox says. “But if there are a million of these scooters in a city, and 99.99% of them are still perfect, but one tenth of one percent are not, then you’re still talking about a pretty staggering number of injuries or fatalities.”

Using smart docks to keep scooters tidy, charged, and well-maintained is a cost-effective way for mobility companies to protect their assets, but it can also help them to bring their service

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At the start, there was this thought process that you can connect under-served communities. But without the infrastructure, you wind up pulling back from those areas.

Right now, these e-scooters are creating transportation deserts”

to under-served areas, away from city centers in so-called transport deserts.

Serving transport deserts According to a 2018 American Community Survey, the average weekly commute to work time for New York City was 3 hours and 8 minutes. The same study found that 22.6% of workers had daily commutes of more than an hour.

This data has been corroborated by Fox, who understood that modern transport

infrastructure wasn’t adequately serving those who could benefit from it most.

“I built a primary business in New York City that has 5,000 employees, and we have employees that take two hours a day to commute,” he says. “So, when I saw Lime, and saw how my employees could cut that commute down to 45 minutes by hopping onto a scooter to a train station, and then hop onto a scooter again at the other end rather than waiting for a bus, I was so excited ISSUE 10

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by it. This was the social inequity piece that people weren’t appreciating.

Imagine spending so much time just getting to and from work.”

Unfortunately, the reality of micromobility couldn’t live up to expectations due to running costs and the current business model used by micromobility companies. “Right now, you’ve got to go all the way out there to retrieve a scooter, to bring it back to a place and charge it, and then take it all the way back out again to drop it off,” Fox says. “It’s a broken model, but it doesn’t have to be.”

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According to Fox, the current business model fuels inequity, as businesses rush to flood the most profitable downtown markets, and ignoring the areas furthest away from city centres. These underserved areas may not be the most profitable but the residents of those areas would gain the most from these micromobility services.

“At the start, there was this thought process that you can connect underserved communities,” he says. “It was somewhat misleading, because without the infrastructure there, you wind up pulling back from those areas. Right

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now, these e-scooters are creating transportation deserts, not curing them.”

The need for wider micromobility networks has been in the spotlight recently, as the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for more resilient urban transport options. With public transport services being cut and governments advising against using crowded trains or buses, e-scooters could be a vital lifeline for some communities. However, without a presence in these areas, these scooters won’t be able to serve an entire demographic that could really benefit from them.

“Micromobility is currently in more than 150 markets, with over a million scooters deployed,” says Fox. “Our research predicts an expansion of over

40 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a lot of scooters. Let’s make life better for everyone by reducing dangerous clutter, reducing injuries, complaints, and lawsuits.

We can even stop the poorly regulated work conditions for the gig economy.

“We’re only in the first 15 minutes of micromobility. It’s still in its infancy. But with some fine-tuning and a focus on usable infrastructure, we can make it an industry that’s democratic, inclusive, and truly beneficial to citizens.”

Joe Appleton is a freelance journalist, writer, and author, who focuses on smart city development.

He has a particular interest in smart mobility and sustainable living

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GOOD OR BAD?

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, and that is particularly true of new technologies. Each month, Tech for Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of technological advances that are coming to market. This month we ask: Should facial recognition be banned?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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FACIAL RECOGNITION

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GOOD?

acial recognition is already present everywhere, from airport security to the latest mobile phones.

The technology’s goal is clear: to ensure safety. Facial recognition technologies have been extremely useful in finding missing people, as well as monitoring crowded spaces and controlling crime.

Even Taylor Swift used this technology during a Los Angeles concert to keep her stalkers at bay. Moreover, in the COVID-19 era, facial recognition ensures safe and contact-free identification for banking, medical or commercial purposes.

Similarly to other technological developments, facial recognition still has many faults. However, an independent test carried out by the National Institute

of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that facial recognition technologies became 20 times better between 2014 and 2018. During these four years, the tools’ failure rates fell from 4% to 0.2%, thanks to neural networks. It’s only a matter of time before facial recognition technologies can be improved and prove themselves to be trustworthy.

What the expert says: “ When used responsibly, facial recognition is an incredible thing. The fear associated with technology should not be allowed to drive the way forward in the 21st century. Instead, we should embrace these wonderful benefits that technology can bring and make sure we work together in the best possible way as new technology continues to become a more integrated aspect of our everyday life” Gal Ringel, Mine’s CEO and Co-Founder

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FACIAL RECOGNITION

TECH FOR O

ver the last several months, many cities in the United States and across the world have taken the step to ban the use of facial recognition technologies by police forces or in public buildings.

The decision was taken in the wake of pressure from civil rights organisations, which claim that facial recognition technologies contribute to privacy erosion and reinforce bias against minorities.

NIST researchers found that facial recognition algorithms falsely identified African-American and Asian faces 10% more times more than Caucasian faces and an MIT study shows that the technology has a 35% error margin when asked to identify Black women. If used by law enforcement, these error margins would lead to an increased number of wrongful convictions.

China is an example of the dangers of this technology. The country has a vast facial recognition system that logs every citizen and collects over six million records a day. However, the Chinese government has recently been accused of using this technology to

BAD? What the expert says: “ The combination of overreliance on technology, misuse and lack of transparency — we don’t know how widespread the use of this software is — is dangerous. Facial recognition should be banned at the moment” Timnit Gebru, former Google AI Ethics researcher

identify and track Uyghur Muslims and facilitate what the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China has described as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

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BUILDING BETTER BUILDINGS

BUILDING BETTER BUILDINGS Buildings are the largest energy consumers on the planet, much more than humans. Sam Ramadori, President of BrainBox AI, talks to Tech for Good about how artificial intelligence can help reduce the carbon footprint of the real estate sector and combat climate change

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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echnology has allowed humans to control temperature. Thanks to heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, extreme weather conditions no longer face us.

But at what cost?

According to the International Energy Agency, there are about 1.6 billion HVAC units in use today. This number is expected to rise to 5.6 billion within the next 10 years, significantly increasing the environmental impact of the technology to two billion tonnes of CO2 a year, the same amount that India, the world’s largest emitter, produces today.

As a result, by 2030, HVAC systems alone will be responsible for 13% of the world’s energy consumption.

As climate change causes temperatures to rise, it also increases the demand for air conditioning and heating systems which, in turn, continue to contribute to global warming in what seems like an endless pollution cycle.

But artificial intelligence might just be able to break it.

BrainBox AI was founded in 2017 with the goal of using artificial intelligence (AI) to make commercial buildings energy-efficient, significantly cutting down the world’s CO2 emissions and slowing down climate change. The company uses a combination of machine learning and cloud computing to tap into 52

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Buildings are the single largest energy consumers of the planet. And if you take the energy consumption of a building, 40% to 50% of that comes from the HVAC system” Sam Ramadori

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commercial HVAC control systems and optimise their behaviour, by predicting the future energy needs of each room within the building and adjusting its temperature settings accordingly.

Sam Ramadori, BrainBox AI’s President, believes in the need to embrace new ways of reducing the energy footprint of commercial real estate buildings and address the environmental and cost-control concerns of the sector, which he considers to be reaching “an all-time high”.

“Buildings are the single largest energy consumers of the planet,” he says. “And if you take the energy consumption of a building, 40% to 50% of that comes from the HVAC system.

After that, lights, people’s personal

computers, those buckets get smaller very quickly, but the big bucket of energy consumption is HVAC. So, if you’re going to take the biggest energy consumer on the planet - buildings - and you want to make the biggest impact possible as fast as possible, that’s where you’re going to go attack.”

In order to make the biggest impact in the least amount of time possible, the BrainBox AI team set out to develop a system-agnostic sensor-free solution that requires the installation of only one edge device. The device collects information from the HVAC system, as well as from other data sources such as the building’s occupation, utility extractor and weather information related to humidity levels, temperature and sun/ ISSUE 10

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cloud positioning. With this data, BrainBox AI can identify a building’s operating behaviour and energy flow, and make recommendations to reduce its energy consumption.

“Buildings are already full of sensors,” Ramadori says. “Every room that you’re in has at least a thermostat to begin with, as well as CO2 sensors, humidity sensors, etc. And I’d say 99% of buildings don’t keep that data. They generate it, they store it in the computer that is the HVAC control system and then, once

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they run out of memory, it gets thrown into the garbage. So we’re changing that state of affairs right away.”

The information is already there, waiting to be used. BrainBox AI keeps this valuable data from being lost by storing it on the cloud and using it to train its algorithm. This way, the data does not only not go to waste, but it is used to reduce a building’s energy consumption by up to 20% in just a few months.

“Artificial intelligence is very good at predicting the future when you have the

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dataset to support it,” Ramadori says.

“Once we plug into a building and learn how that specific building behaves on a room-per-room basis, we’re able to predict what’s going to happen in each of those rooms for the next five to six hours with over 99% accuracy. Today’s HVAC systems across the board don’t even know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes.”

However, BrainBox AI doesn’t only predict the energetic needs of a building, it also autonomously decides what the

ideal HVAC settings will need to be to address those future needs with the least amount of energy possible. To replicate this computational capacity on a human basis, you would need 50 engineers working in each building 24 hours a day, and even then they would struggle to keep up with the algorithm.

“It is very exciting to see how autonomous artificial intelligence is creating entirely new approaches to delivering material energy savings,” Ramadori says.

Although other companies have been working on ways to reduce their energy consumption since the 2015 Paris Agreement, progress in the real estate sector has been slow, and not because of a lack of technological developments.

The reason? The very large investment that comes with making the transition to a sustainable economy, and which forces whole industries to completely transform their operations and invest billions of dollars to upgrade. This is why Ramadori stresses the importance of both speed and impact.

“Impact is important but so is speed, and that’s where we really shine,” he says. “We are generating energy savings of up to 20% in a building. Typically, those kinds of projects cost a lot of money and many many months to do.

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Impact is important but so is speed, and that’s where we really shine”

and rapid to implement, so that you start to see energy savings from month three or four.

“Good ideas are great, but we have to find the ones that we can implement really really quickly. Our goal is to generate very meaningful improvements in the performance of those commercial HVAC systems very fast. As a result, we’re saving the property owner money in terms of energy cost, improving 56

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comfort for the occupants and generating a real change in the footprint of the building in a short period of time.”

The best example of this speedy implementation is BrainBox AI’s recent partnership. At the end of last year, the company announced it had signed a deal with AMP Capital, one of the largest investment managers in Asia-Pacific, to install its AI solution across the manager’s entire real estate portfolio, which

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includes including central business district office buildings, retail shopping centres and logistics facilities throughout Australia and New Zealand. But, instead of taking years to make this transition, BrainBox AI aims to install its AI HVAC systems within AMP Capital’s 14,000,000 square feet of commercial real estate within six months.

“Our partnership with AMP Capital is a great example of how BrainBox AI

can help a real estate owner, anywhere in the world, make their portfolio fully autonomous and achieve levels of efficiency that are only possible with AI,” Ramadori says.

“Typically, the real estate sector is one that is a little bit more slow-moving from a technology-adoption perspective, but when we met the AMP team, they understood right away that this was going to be as revolutionary as ISSUE 10

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self-driving cars. So we got into the process of installing a pilot and then quickly started into a wide-scale roll out across their entire portfolio, and that’s what we’re working on right now, quite aggressively.”

This speed and scalability are possible because of the lack of hardware involved in the installation of BrainBox AI’s tools, a process that has been 58

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made even more efficient since the beginning of the pandemic. Instead of sending its engineers to install the edge devices, BrainBox AI has, for the past year, been shipping the devices to customers and helping them to install them remotely in order to adhere to social distancing tools. Once the AI has been able to analyse a building’s behaviour, it then goes into autonomous

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mode, requiring little maintenance. This significant scalability is the key to the company’s rapid growth.

In the two years that have passed since its commercial launch, BrainBox AI has grown from 17 to 80 employees and expanded from working in five buildings in the area of Montreal, Canada, to managing a portfolio of over 100 buildings and more than 30 million square feet in four different continents.

The company has also created strong partnerships with many prominent institutions including the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Institute for Data Valorization, Montreal’s École de Technologie Supérieure, and McGill University.

“We are firm with a very strong technical team, always have been, and that team is always trying to push the limits of AI,” Ramadori says. “Every time we install in a new building is a new improvement in the fight against climate change. It’s mathematically straightforward. We just want to keep going and going and get this as deployed as possible, as fast as possible.”

In addition to its core product, which optimises the energy consumption of individual buildings, BrainBox AI is now working with these research institutions to develop an exciting new project that will allow buildings to interact with the

As a company, we go from one big problem to another big problem to find solutions using artificial intelligence. That’s just our DNA” energy distribution grid, to make it even more efficient.

“As a company, we go from one big problem to another big problem to find solutions using artificial intelligence; that’s just our DNA,” Ramadori says.

“The whole world is trying to increase the amount of energy generated by renewable sources. But the big challenge is that they are intermittent and not reliable. So, what do you need to make that work? Well, the more you have energy sources that are not 100% reliable 24 hours a day, the more you need to influence the demand side in order to find that match. That’s an enormous problem globally, and that’s what we want to tackle next.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT

EXPERT INSIGHT: B Corp certification Sustainability consultant Hannah Cox tells us how businesses serious about creating a sustainable future can get B Corp certified

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n 2020 millennials made up 40% of all consumers, and, according to a Deloitte survey, 40% of this demographic believe that the goal of business shouldn’t be a healthy bottom line, but contributing to society.

A report by global think tank Wunderman Thompson showed that 92% of consumers around the world want to be more sustainable and 70% will pay more for products and services if they protect the environment, so it can act as a valuable sales tool for businesses wanting to be a force for good.

When it comes to a business’s bottom line, in the UK alone, B Corp-certified brands grew 28 times faster than the national economic growth rate of 0.5% in 2018, according to the Office for National Statistics.

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HANNAH COX

If you’re unfamiliar with B Corp certification, here’s the detail: B Lab is a nonprofit organsiation that has created the B Impact Assessment, an online tool that identifies the different areas a business has an impact. If the business meets the performance requirements, it can then apply for B Corp Certification, which shows that a business gives as much consideration to its social and environmental impact as it does to its financial returns. It acts as a simple way for customers, clients, and employees to see the true values of a company and that it takes sustainability seriously.

In the last 12 years the global community of B Corps has grown to over 4,000 with certified B Corps in 75 different countries across 150 different industries, so it’s a diverse group. Worldwide

names such as Patagonia, Ben and Jerry’s, and Allbirds are just some famous B Corps.

So what is the best way for a business to communicate its sustainability impact and values to its customers?

Sustainability means meeting our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In addition to natural resources, we also need social and economic resources to survive. Sustainability is not just environmentalism.

Sustainability is a way for us all, both as businesses and customers, to ensure that future generations have access to a better future as a result of our actions.

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B Corp Certification shows that a business gives as much consideration to its social and environmental impact as it does to its financial returns”

to be profitable. The easiest way to start the process is to look at how they can implement a sustainability strategy within their own company and values.

One way to do this is to assess and measure their existing impact using an existing framework to see what areas they can focus and work on. This is where B Corps and the B Impact Assessment come in, as a way to identify a businesses impact and areas that can be improved.

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tool has doubled in the UK and annual certifications have climbed 40%. The movement is growing as more and more businesses look at how they can not just look after the shareholders of the company, but also the stakeholders.

It is this 21st century thinking, the independent analysis of the assessment and the transparency of the process (all scores are displayed on the B Corp Website) which make it a clear way for customers to see how the businesses they buy from operate.

HANNAH COX

It helps businesses attract talent that cares about the same values, build relationships with other businesses as well as amplify their voice and show that they stand by their mission.

While the B Impact Assessment is a tool in helping business become more sustainable, it’s important for business leaders to know that the values they want to communicate need to come from an authentic place. Sustainability is a process not a solution. Businesses need to work on the quality of what they

design and create - and this can often mean changing systems and processes within the company.

Recognising that progress is something to work towards rather than a final destination is key for businesses wanting to pass the B Corp Assessment. It may take businesses a while to get to the performance requirements needed to become a B Corp, but by embedding it into their future planning it allows them to ensure they are resilient in growing into strong and impactful organisations.

A good starting point for a business is to contact a sustainability professional for support in choosing the right plan for them. Educate themselves on the frameworks available, such as B Corp Certification and larger initiatives like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

A sustainability professional can help a business on measuring and creating impact goals that are relevant to them.

They can advise on the best framework and certification processes for that business, and help create a clear and actionable plan to move the business forward. They can also support the way the business can communicate that to their stakeholders.

No matter what the industry or sector, being sustainable and profitable go hand in hand.

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RESCUE FOOD, FEED A COMMUNITY Every day, millions of tonnes of food are sent to landfill, while the global rates of food insecurity only keep growing. We speak to representatives of non-profit organisations about how digital tools like Neighbourly and FoodCloud are being used across the UK to save food, and people

AUTHOR: Jemma Beedie

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he sudden UK shutdown in March 2020 was enough to spur many local groups into action, to provide stability and food to their communities.

It is estimated that between a third and half of all food produced is wasted and sent to landfill sites, where it decomposes rapidly and causes methane gas.

In the short-term, this is much more damaging than carbon dioxide. Food waste accounts for around 8% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions — three times as much as aviation.

In 2019, WRAP found that 3.6 million tonnes of food is wasted in the UK each year, and of that, 2 million tonnes is still edible and could feed the eight million people that face food insecurity in the UK today. This is the goal of community fridges.

Community fridges are popular in cities across the world: surplus food is placed in a communal space, available for anyone to either help themselves or leave more. They differ from food banks as users are not assessed and do not require a referral. Transition planned to

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Community cafe follow the basic principles of community fridges in order to provide a new service to the people of Stirling, a city with a population of 37,000.

Transition Stirling had plans for a community fridge in development before the pandemic begun. They accelerated the process, launching Stirling Community Food in conjunction with The Kitchen at 44 — the town’s arts hub — within the first week of the shutdown.

The first weeks were a blur, with food being rescued from cafes, restaurants, and pubs, as well as local producers. As time went on, the charity made the majority of food rescue from supermarkets.

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One year later, the charity has saved nearly 43 tonnes of food. Meals have been provided to more than 3000 people, and Community Food works alongside community groups in satellite towns to make surplus food accessible to many more people. With so much food coming through their doors each week, there was a need for some way to streamline their activities.

Stirling Community Food has accounts with both Neighbourly and FoodCloud (partners of FareShare), online platforms that facilitate efficient communication between charities and their suppliers.

Supermarkets including Aldi, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Waitrose agreed to

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donate food near its Best By date to the project instead of discarding it.

FareShare is the UK’s longest-running food redistribution charity. They organise collections and sort food in their own warehouses. Suitable donations are then delivered to charities within the network. In its 26-year history, FareShare has saved 24,000 tonnes of food from waste, assisted nearly 11,000 charities and groups, and provided an estimated 57 million meals.

FareShare began working with FoodCloud in 2014 as a way to link the established food distribution network with a new way of working. Accessing smaller amounts of perishable food that might go to waste within a supermarket is a different challenge from rescuing at other stages of food production and service. Collecting, storing, sorting and redistributing takes time. Developing a platform that created a simple way of connecting charities directly to local stores was a unique solution that has since been rolled out internationally.

Both FoodCloud and Neighbourly provide an online space for supermarkets and other retailers to log donated food items, which instructs charities that there is surplus available. This is a great resource for organisations that run on volunteer time, and aids busy supermarket workers.

Our network of local good causes has reached over 16,000 people, which gives us the ability to access insights into the needs of communities at a hyper-local level, and in turn create giving programmes that allow our partner businesses to have the greatest social impact” Steve Butterworth, Neighbourly’s CEO

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“Neighbourly was launched in 2015 as a CSR [corporate social responsibility] platform designed to grow community investment and engagement by making it easy for companies to donate time, money or surplus to where it’s needed most,” says Steve Butterworth, Neighbourly’s CEO. “We’ve grown to be the UK market leader in back-of-store food surplus redistribution and mass employee volunteering, helping businesses to deliver community engagement at a local level, at scale.

“Our network of local good causes has reached over 16,000 people, which gives us the ability to access insights into the needs of communities at a hyper-local level, and in turn create giving programmes that allow our partner businesses to have the greatest social impact.”

Neighbourly was a vital tool when the pandemic hit the UK. “A survey of Neighbourly’s network of causes at this time revealed a sharp rise in the number of requests for help, at the same time as these organisations were being forced to close or reduce services due to social distancing measures, lockdown restrictions and a sudden drop in volunteer capacity,” says Butterworth.

“77% of small charities supporting vulnerable older people were expecting services to be disrupted, and more than 68

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Our clientele has changed since we reopened, in part due to the different provision, but also the increased need. Numbers have increased significantly — last week we served over 200 meals, where it was previously in the region of 75” Eve Cina, SaSh Trustee

RESCUE FOOD, FEED A COMMUNITY

A Neighbourly volunteering project 60% had already started to see a reduction in food surplus donations as a result of instability in the food supply. Government statistics at the time were showing that three million children were at risk of going hungry during school holidays — and these schools were now facing an uncertain number of months closure.”

Guided by the principles that saw Neighbourly become one of the UK’s first B Corps — corporations that put social and environmental concerns at the forefront and work with transparency and accountability to make real change — the organisation launched a COVID-19 fund to give unrestricted mini-grants of £400 to causes across the UK and Ireland,

eventually giving away £1.2 million and helping one million people.

Salaam Shalom Kitchen (SaSh) is another charity set up with the intention of saving food, reducing waste, and turning it into positive action within the community. They work in a different fashion to Stirling Community Food, showing the range of ways frontline charities and community groups in the UK are making use of food waste.

SaSh is a partnership between Muslim and Jewish communities and since 2015 has provided hot nutritious meals and warm drinks free of charge, reducing social isolation and loneliness while also tackling food poverty. This was done via a weekly ISSUE 10

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Food For All, London meal, cooked by a chef and volunteers using rescued food, and welcoming all.

“We used to receive food from FareShare but more recently have collected it solely from Neighbourly,” SaSh Trustee Eve Cina said. “In the past we used donations primarily as food for meals, adding it to food from Himmah foodbank, who also use Neighbourly, or purchased locally.

Pastries and cakes provided desert. Any unused items were offered to guests.

Flowers were consistently very popular!

“Until March 2020 SaSh provided meals at the Bridge Community Centre which is 70

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situated in a church in an inner-city area of Nottingham.” Restrictions put an end to the family-style meals, though SaSh began providing takeaways in August.

Cina expands on how the charity’s activities have evolved to reflect current need: “Since we reopened, reflecting the changed delivery method and increased need, we provide a grocery bag to as many service users as possible,” she says. “We have different bags for the street homeless who do not have access to cooking facilities. It is our impression that many people, espe-

RESCUE FOOD, FEED A COMMUNITY

Tackling the scale of wasted food in our society is an economic, environmental and moral imperative, and redistribution of good food is part of the solution” Ylva Haglund, Zero Waste Scotland

cially families, value the grocery bags as much, if not more, than the hot meals.

“Our clientele has changed since we reopened, in part due to the different provision, but also the increased need.

Numbers have increased significantly — last week we served over 200 meals, where it was previously in the region of 75. There are more young homeless people and more families with young children using our service.”

Over 70,000 families have become homeless in the UK as a result of the pandemic, according to date obtained

by The Observer. Moreover, food insecurity has become an increasing concern for the younger population, with 26% of 16-24 year olds reporting accessing food through foodbanks and charities.

“Food waste is a significant and costly challenge for food businesses,” says Food Waste Campaigns Manager Ylva Haglund, from Zero Waste Scotland.

“While preventing food waste from arising in the first place should be a priority, redistribution is an important tool in ensuring that high-quality food surplus does not become waste and can instead go to people and communities that can use it.

“Tackling the scale of wasted food in our society is an economic, environmental and moral imperative, and redistribution of good food is part of the solution.

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redistribution is often near its end of life.

Speed and ease at which solutions can be found is crucial for ensuring food doesn’t go to waste. By reducing the amount of food we throw away, we can make a significant contribution in the fight against climate change.”

There is one major negative factor to supermarkets and large retailers using food rescue and redistribution charities to get rid of food that is past selling: instead of being responsible for their waste, they simply pass it along to a charity, which must then utilise volunteer hours to sort food into useable donations, items for animal feed, waste that can be sent to biofuel conversion, © Edward Steel Photography

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and that which cannot be used and must go to landfill after all.

Instead of sorting donations of food past its Best By date from food past its Use By, some retailers offload everything at once. Food safety standards prohibit food past its Use By date from being provided for human consumption. Of the charities contacted in researching this article, this was the most common complaint about the process.

Food waste is especially bleak when set beside the UK’s statistics on hunger and food poverty. 14.5 million people, a fifth of the UK population, live in poverty. The number of children living with food insecurity — ranging from moderate to severe — has risen to 2.5 million during the pandemic, according to UNICEF estimates.

Charities and community groups working on a hyper-local basis are able to save food from landfill and adding to climate change concerns, and put it to use by feeding people, for free. Both Neighbourly and FoodCloud charge businesses a fee to register and use their platforms, and provide access to charities free of charge. There is no cost to these frontline organisations, meaning that they are able to more efficiently and effectively do work that makes a difference.

Carly Ramsay, a coordinator at Community Food, explained that, without

RESCUE FOOD, FEED A COMMUNITY

FoodCloud’s food rescue project Neighbourly and FoodCloud, the organisation would require someone checking donations and organising pickups constantly between 7am and 9pm.

“It would end up being me organising collections all day long,” he says. “With the apps, we can send a screenshot to the volunteers asking if anyone can do this, and get a quick response. If we were to try and do it by phone call I think it would take hours to organise something that takes a few seconds on the app.”

With the introduction of platforms

providing free, user-friendly services that connect food suppliers and charities tackling food waste, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food, and carbon, have been saved. Volunteer hours are put to the best possible use, and a variety of charities and organisations have been able to utilise otherwise landfill-destined food to ease hunger and loneliness.

Neighbourly and FoodCloud are incredible examples of how national organisations can enable local groups to enrich the lives of the people in their communities.

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TEENAGE TECH STORIES

Teenage tech stories Each month, Tech for Good speaks to one teenage entrepreneur about their incredible achievements in the world of tech, and how they’re contributing to making the world a better place

Name: Samaira Mehta

Age: 13 Born: Silicon Valley, California, USA Achievements: Samaira is a CEO, coder and inventor. At seven years old, she created the boardgame CoderBunnyz to teach children coding.

Since then she has designed two more games, hosted over 500 workshops for libraries and organisations such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, and even the United Nations. Her latest initiative ‘Yes, One Billion Kids Can Code’ aims to give one billion children access to coding tools by 2030

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SAMAIRA MEHTA

I

got interested in coding after my dad did a prank on me when I was seven years old. He showed me a programme on his computer that said ‘Press this if you’re beautiful’. But when the mouse pointer touched the ‘beautiful’ command, it just disappeared.

My dad told me he used something called ‘coding’ to create this prank, so I decided to learn it because I wanted to prank my friends in a similar way.

I started talking to my friends about how I was learning this new coding thing and how much I was enjoying it, but they said they found it boring and hard. And to me, that was confusing because the way I was learning to code made it seem so easy and fun.

I had this crazy idea to create a boardgame that would put together my love of games and my passion for coding to prove to my friends how fun coding could be.

When I presented my idea to my parents, they didn’t say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

They asked me ‘How’ I was going to do it. I think this was a very important question because it made me think about how I was going to achieve it.

From there, it was just a lot of me drawing rough sketches, play-testing and prototyping. Eventually, I made my first boardgame, CoderBunnyz. It was so surreal to see something that started as a Saturday afternoon project had now turned into a real boardgame.

To date, I’ve done over 500 workshops with CoderBunnyz at libraries, schools and companies, always with the same goal I had while teaching my friends: to prove to other kids how fun coding can be.

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CoderMindz really started when I was nine years old. At the time, I realised that artificial intelligence (AI) was going to become ‘the thing’ for our generation. It was going to help us solve so many problems, cure so many diseases and fundamentally, I think, improve the way we live.

I created CoderMindz to simplify the intricacies of how AI worked and to build the next generation of problem solvers who will use the power of AI to create the solutions of the future.

CoderMindz is actually the world’s first-ever AI boardgame, which is pretty insane and pretty crazy.

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‘Yes, One Billion Kids Can Code’ is a mission I started when I was 10 years old with the goal of helping a billion kids in the world gain access to Computer Science tools. I truly believe that basic coder understanding will help children become better thinkers, better leaders and better dreamers.

Now I am in the process of developing an app to streamline the way kids learn how to code. If we can bring that computer science education directly onto a cell phone, it would be so much easier for anybody anywhere in the world to learn how to code.

Last July I also started the Boss Biz Entrepreneurship Academy, with the goal to share everything that I’ve learned in my very short but eventful entrepreneurial journey and support other young entrepreneurs.

We host talks and workshops and, in the end, participants pitch their idea to me and a panel of judges for the chance to win some seed money. The last Boss Biz I held was in December 2020 and the grand prize for that one was $2,000. I am actually in the process of planning my July 2021 Boss Biz, so that’s really exciting.

SAMAIRA MEHTA

One of my biggest challenges was after I made the first prototype of CoderBunnyzs. I went to a few of my local libraries and pitched them this idea of hosting workshops and they essentially rejected me.

Over time I’ve learned that there are people who do not believe that age or gender determines what you can or cannot do. And because of the people at that one library who originally trusted and believed in me, I have gotten the chance to teach over 15,000 kids how to code.

The World Mobile Congress was probably one of the coolest places I’ve spoken at.

I am confident there will no longer be a tech gender gap in my lifetime. I think there are so many things people are doing to fix this and I am so excited to see so many girls getting interested in STEM. What I do is a very small part in bridging the tech gender gap, but I hold lots of workshops for girls only, with the goal of helping them feel more welcome in STEM fields. Last year, I also spoke on International Women’s Day at the United Nations General Assembly.

Michelle Obama has been someone I’ve looked up to my entire life. Receiving a letter from her was just a huge motivator for me. She gave me a few lines of motivation and told me how the work I’m doing is really important. It’s definitely something I’ll always remember.

My dream university is Stanford because of its amazing tech entrepreneurship environment. But making education accessible is definitely something I want to continue my entire life.

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