Month: May 2023

Originally published by TriplePundit

When you think about vehicle innovations that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the internal combustion engine is likely the last thing on your mind. But New Holland Agriculture recently launched a new tractor onto the market that utilizes just such a powertrain. And though counterintuitive, the tractor offers the possibility to tap into an enormous opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and power carbon-neutral farming.

That’s because the company’s new tractor, the T6.180 Methane Power, does not run on diesel, but instead, as its name implies, is powered by methane. More importantly, the opportunity to power the tractor with bio-methane — which can be sourced from organic waste produced on the farm in a closed-loop system — provides a compelling opportunity for energy self-sufficiency.

It’s an important development in emissions reduction, which for New Holland has been close to two decades in the making. The company first looked toward carbon savings back in 2006 under its Clean Energy Leader initiative. Initially, this focused on efforts to make New Holland tractors capable of running on biodiesel, which the company achieved in 2007.

Though a good first pass, Mark Howell, New Holland’s global product manager of alternative fuels, and his team wanted to take things further and asked themselves: What about a product that creates no emissions at all?

The journey toward a zero-emissions tractor begins

This refocused efforts on hydrogen fuel cell technology initially, but in the process, limitations came to light on the availability of hydrogen and associated vehicle costs.

Instead, farmers were looking for something more near-term as a workable solution — which pivoted New Holland to develop a tractor that could run on methane. After several iterations over the past decade, the company developed the T6.180 Methane Power concept tractor, which won the sustainable tractor of the year award in 2019.

Methane is the key component of natural gas, a fossil fuel. And while the T6.180 can run on compressed natural gas (CNG) that, of course, is not what unlocks the tractor’s environmental opportunity.

“Turning waste into a commodity,” as Howell describes it, is where greenhouse gas reduction comes into play. And farms generate a lot of organic waste that has to be dealt with one way or another. If animal manure and other organic waste generated on the farm is left to decompose open to the elements, it results in the release of methane which vents directly into the atmosphere.

Turning waste into resource on the farm

The waste-to-commodity value chain begins when farmers instead collect and processes this waste through an anaerobic digester (AD). Containing the waste within a digester and allowing it to decompose without oxygen (that is, anaerobically) results in the production of methane, which can be captured, refined, compressed and used to power the T6.180 tractor.

Of course, there is some specialized capital equipment that farmers would need to harness this energy. AD technology is not new, and many large industrial farms in the United States already use large-scale digesters. The good news is that AD technology is always improving such that the necessary scale of operation is constantly being reduced. This means much smaller and cheaper AD projects are becoming viable, unlocking the potential for smaller family-owned farms to operate a closed-loop system for methane production.

To put that in context, any farm with 100 to 900 cows can utilize the technology and capture their own gas from the waste they generate, Howell explained. Alternatively, a number of smaller farms can form co-ops to capture enough waste collectively to generate their own methane. “Farmers can share the gas cleanup equipment because it’s mobile,” Howell told us. “It’s not much bigger than a grain trailer.”

Scaling the journey to carbon-neutral farming

New Holland recognizes the opportunity for unlocking this potential. In early 2023, its parent company CNH Industrial took a majority stake in Bennamann, a U.K.-based company that specializes in small-scale AD projects. In partnership, New Holland and Bennamann are able to provide a turnkey operation for a carbon-neutral, or even carbon-negative, solution for farmers to operate the T6.180 Methane Power tractor.

In light of rising diesel and natural gas prices, setting up a digester project can instead lock in predictable fuel pricing over time, and any investments the farmer has to make will pay back within 8 years, Howell said.

It’s a systems thinking approach. As well as running carbon-neutral tractors, farmers might also produce enough methane to run their own power generators on the farm. Alternatively, excess refined methane can be injected into the local power grid.

Further, the solids that are periodically removed from the ADs after organic matter has decomposed — called digestate — constitute a high-quality organic fertilizer which can be used on the land. “The fertilizer is as good a fertilizer as the manure that went into the digester,” Howell told us. “It hasn’t degraded in nitrogen, phosphate or potash.” The digestate is also much easier to spread on the land than raw manure, while bio-CO2, an increasingly valuable output, is also produced by on-farm AD systems.

When bio-methane is used for fuel, the T6.180 methane-powered tractor can seamlessly replace the existing duty of a conventional diesel-powered one.

New Holland mapped the power and torque of the T6.180 to replicate exactly the same performance characteristics as its existing diesel engine. Also, since it takes just seven minutes to fully replenish the methane fuel tanks, downtime during the work day isn’t significantly different from a diesel tractor, either. “From a driver’s point of view, you can jump from a diesel to the gas tractor, and just drive and get on with your job,” Howell said.

Beyond the farm

The tractor has multiple applications beyond farming too, such as hedge cutting, lawn mowing and even snow clearing — all of which can be fueled by bio-methane.

New Holland’s T6.180 Methane Power tractor also has the seal of approval from Charlotte Morton, CEO of the World Biogas Association. “I love the circularity around the fuel being generated from organic waste on the farm,” she told us. “It’s such a wonderful story.”

Morton also stressed that harnessing bio-methane is a massive opportunity, explaining that if we were to capture this gas from all available organic wastes globally, “the potential that’s there is roughly equivalent to one-third of today’s natural gas demand.” At today’s prices, that equates to roughly $104 billion.

The solution comes to market at an apt time: Under the Global Methane Pledge, signed by over 100 countries, the aim to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 percent from 2020 levels is just seven years away. Consequently, the waste-to-value opportunity in upgrading farm waste to fuel, coupled with the New Holland T6.180 Methane Power tractor, meshes perfectly with this urgent goal.

This article series is sponsored by CNH Industrial and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team.

Image courtesy of New Holland Agriculture

Originally published in GoDaddy’s 2022 Diversity and Pay Parity Annual Report

Representation

Teams comprised of people with different identities, backgrounds and experiences attract and retain more diverse talent, build better products and services, help inspire customer loyalty, and enable collaboration and innovation. Beyond that, valuing diversity is good for everyone.

We’re committed to continually increasing representation of those who have been historically underrepresented in the workplace.

We’ve made progress over the years, and we’ll keep pushing to make GoDaddy representative of all our customers and communities.

2022 Global Gender Diversity

In 2022, women represent 30% of GoDaddy’s global workforce. When these positions are placed into categories — leadership, tech and non-tech — the numbers stay flat apart from the leadership group, which decreases by 1%. Recruiting and retaining female leadership remains a key goal and priority. This is also our first year of being able to report on employees who identify as non-binary. Non-binary employees currently represent 0.3% of our workforce population.

Representation Data — Gender

All Company:

Women 2022: 30%Women 2021: 31%

Leaders (Directors +):

Women 2022: 32%Women 2021: 33%

Technical Roles:

Women 2022: 21%Women 2021: 21%

Non-Tech Roles

Women 2022: 38%Women 2021: 38%

Non-Binary

Women 2022: .3%Women 2021: N/A

2022 U.S. Ethnic Diversity

Across GoDaddy’s U.S. team, 37% of employees are people of color. That’s up 1% from 2021 and 5% since we began reporting this data in 2017. When looking at leadership roles, 31% of GoDaddy’s U.S. workforce are people of color, which is up 4% from 2021 and up 7% in leadership of color representation overall over the past two years. The percentage of people of color in technical vs. non-technical roles remains flat since last year.

Representation Data — U.S. Race/ Ethnicity

All Company:

People of color 2022: 37%People of color 2021: 36%

Leaders (Directors +):

People of color 2022: 31%People of color 2021: 27%

Technical Roles:

People of color 2022: 40%People of color 2021: 40%

Non-Tech Roles

People of color 2022: 34%People of color 2021: 34%

2022 U.S. Race/Ethnicity

The graph above breaks down our 37% employees of color by ethnicity in the U.S. There is a 0.8% increase of Black employees and 1.5% increase of Asian American employees. Hispanic or Latino/a/x employees decrease by 1% and multiracial employees fall by 0.8%. All other groups remain flat.

We recognize that ethnicity and race are not one and the same, and we are working to improve our data collection to better understand and report our representation more comprehensively.

A Closer Look at Representation Data — U.S. Race/Ethnicity

4.6% Undeclared 4.5% Multiracial 0.4% Pacific Islander 10.8% Hispanic or Latino/a/x5.2% Black15.3% Asian 0.7% American Indian58.5% White

Promotion Parity

When we shared our first pay parity analysis in 2015, it showed that while women and men were paid at parity for similar roles, women weren’t advancing in all positions at the same rate as their male counterparts. This finding led us to create a process to proactively identify qualified employees who should be considered for promotion. The initiative immediately impacted and continues to enable our ability to support the career advancement of all employees, while mitigating the potential effects of bias through the process.

We also partnered with Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab to create company-wide processes that reduce variance in performance assessments between demographic groups. In addition, our total rewards programs tightly align with performance assessments; the net impact is that our best performers achieve peak evaluations and rewards no matter how they self-identify.

Visit GoDaddy’s 2022 Sustainability Report for more information on related efforts to mitigate unconscious bias and enable equity across all phases of our talent management processes.

The journey continues.

It’s been eight years since we started studying diversity and inclusion data at GoDaddy. We’ve come a long way in that time, and we are incredibly proud of our achievements. We know, however, there isn’t an endpoint. We’ll keep setting aggressive goals and holding ourselves accountable to meeting them.

Our customers – entrepreneurs from all walks of life – should be reflected in the diversity of our workforce, demonstrating our dedication to creating a culture of equal opportunity and supporting customers who help our communities thrive. The more voices and representation we have at GoDaddy, the more we can reach and empower entrepreneurs around the world to pursue and achieve their dreams.

Please read our 2022 Diversity and Pay Parity Annual Report for more information.

Originally Published in Bloomberg’s 2022 Impact Report

Bloomberg strives to decouple company growth from environmental impact while increasing the efficiency and resiliency of our operations. Our environmental performance targets are aligned with multinational efforts to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and avoid catastrophic climate change.

Carbon emissions reductions and targets. 

We’re pursuing aggressive emissions reductions in line with best practices. Bloomberg is committed to reducing the company’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with a 1.5°C future. Our near-term science-based targets aim for an 80 percent reduction in our absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 30 percent reduction in our absolute Scope 3 emissions by 2030 from a 2018 baseline. These targets have been validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), confirming that they are in line with the global emissions reductions necessary to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C.

Our targets build on previous commitments we’ve made, including our RE100 pledge to obtain 100 percent of our electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Achieving our RE100 objective will satisfy the 80 percent reductions in Scope 1 and 2 emissions we are pursuing.

In early 2023, SBTi also validated Bloomberg’s overall science-based net-zero target to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across our value chain by 2040 from a 2018 base year, which includes long-term absolute emissions reduction targets of 90 percent across our global Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

The road to net zero 

We are committed to achieving our near-term and long-term science-based targets in accordance with a less-than 1.5°C future-warming scenario. We plan to achieve this through ongoing asset optimizations to reduce energy consumption and associated carbon emissions, continued investment in renewable energy projects and increased rigor in our procurement and travel activities.

Currently, Bloomberg is purchasing and retiring carbon credits from three climate change projects to offset our ongoing business travel emissions. Starting in 2025, we will expand this effort to cover all residual operational CO2 e emissions.

Once we meet our long-term science-based target reductions, these emissions offsetting efforts will result in Bloomberg receiving SBTi’s official net-zero designation.

Reducing our energy use is a top priority. 

As a company with approximately 22,000 employees based in 166 locations globally, addressing our global energy consumption is critical to reducing our environmental impact. Bloomberg’s energy strategy is comprehensive, focusing on reducing absolute energy consumption, implementing energy efficiency projects at our facilities, occupying environmentally certified new facilities and investing in developing both on- and off-site renewable energy projects.

Bloomberg’s energy profile is dominated by electricity, comprising 90.2 percent of our total energy consumption. Fuel usage, cooling and hot water account for the remaining 9.8 percent of energy use. In 2022, we consumed 352,686 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity across our global operations, an increase of 2.9 percent from 2021. Electricity consumption across our data centers rose by 5.6 percent as a result of increased capacity. Despite more employees and visitors using our buildings in 2022, electricity consumption at our offices fell by 1 percent, reflecting the effectiveness of ongoing optimizations.

Renewable energy 

In 2022, we secured 192,533 MWh of renewable energy, an increase of 9.7 percent from 2021, from 10 on- and off-site solar and wind sites and a hydropower allocation from a local utility. Sourced renewable energy from these projects represents 54.6 percent of our global purchased electricity, up from 51.2 percent in 2021.

We began investigating renewable energy projects in 2008; our first project, a 1.8MW solar installation at our campus in Princeton, New Jersey, began providing us with energy in 2012. In 2021, we expanded our solar energy capacity in Princeton, developing an additional 2.55 MW solar project at our offices there. In March 2022, the project went live, with solar energy now providing 100 percent of the electricity needed for the two buildings on site.

Currently, our biggest challenge is procuring renewable energy outside the U.S. Countries have different markets, incentives and availability, and Bloomberg has lower energy needs in these locations. In these regions, efforts during 2022 were focused on securing Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin (REGO) certificates and EU Guarantee of Origin (GO) certificates — certificates that guarantee that our suppliers obtain energy from renewable sources — bundled with our energy purchases. This approach helped us source an additional 46,782 MWh of renewable energy, equal to 13.3 percent of our global electricity consumption.

Read the full 2022 Bloomberg Impact Report.

by Selene Orellana, Planeterra

Tourism can be more than just traveling for entertainment and Bruce Poon Tip had a clear vision from the very beginning. He envisioned using tourism to do good things around the world and that is how the Planeterra Foundation came into being. Today, two decades later, his vision has become a reality and it is transforming the way the tourism industry traditionally works, embracing local communities rather than excluding them from tourism and making travel experiences more meaningful and impactful in the process.

Planeterra is the world’s leading nonprofit using tourism to uplift communities around the world. Born in Toronto, Canada, but rooted everywhere, Planeterra works with community tourism enterprises that are led by women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and rural communities, to break down the barriers that prevent them from leveraging the ripple effects of tourism.

Tourism is an estimated US$8 trillion industry, but the truth is that only a small fraction, if any, of that money reaches small businesses and local communities. This is one of tourism’s main problems, as it leads to a lack of opportunities for communities to be successful and have control over their own growth, development, and futures. Community tourism proposes a responsible tourism model that can break that cycle.

Planeterra defines community tourism as travel experiences owned, led, and run by communities – non-profits, cooperatives, community organizations, and social enterprises. At its very best, it bridges the gap to engage underserved communities in meaningful, life-changing ways. Years in the field have shown the team at Planeterra that community tourism is an opportunity to embrace a more responsible way to travel by encouraging genuine encounters between local communities and travelers while ensuring that local people are benefiting from tourism.

Read Selene’s insightful article with great photos too – https://greenmoney.com/the-power-of-community-tourism-planeterras-mission-to-turn-travel-into-impact

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