Last fall, the Financial Times, Tech Tonic Podcast, interviewed Kate Brandt, Global Sustainability Officer for Google. Kate brings a unique perspective, having worked in both the public and private sectors. In this podcast, she provides some key insights into the future of sustainability and shares some of the strategies Google leverages to achieve their sustainability goals. You can access the entire podcast, here.
Below are our top takeaways:
- Carbon Neutral: Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 by employing a three part strategy: be as energy efficient as possible, match all electricity use with renewables and purchase high quality carbon offsets. Kate noted this is incredibly challenging.
- The Circular Economy: How does this concept impact the operation of Google's data centers? The goal is to maximize reuse of finite resources across operations, products and supply chains and enable others to do the same. To do this, Google employs three core principles: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use and enabling the use of safe chemistry and healthy materials.
- Food Waste: According to Kate, about 1/3 of food gets wasted globally. Google attempts to design out food waste in their kitchens by partnering with Leanpath, a tech company that documents unused food. This provides Google with greater insights into what food its kitchens actually use and what they don't. According to Google’s data, 6.6M pounds of food waste have been avoided since 2014.
- Environmental Insights Explorer: this is a tool that cities can use to get a baseline assessment of their climate footprint in order to set climate action targets. For example, San Jose wanted to set an aggressive solar target. The city used the Explorer to assess the solar potential of available rooftops, which allowed city officials to feel confident setting solar targets that were actually achievable. Kate noted that cities account for over 70% of carbon emissions; if we can put data / insights into the hands of policy makers, they can set targets that are ambitious and also based on what's possible.
Smart tools and better information can help government entities avoid situations like the over-broad green building incentives that were implemented in Nevada in 2005 (more on that, here).
- Optimism: Kate noted that science tells us we have roughly 11 years to make significant changes. Within this work, there are important roles for policy makers, businesses and individual action. The challenge of climate change is great and can be daunting but Kate is encouraged by the level of engagement we are now seeing across all sectors; and we need everyone to engage. She’s also encouraged by the role of technology and machine learning.
