In this episode, host Gene Tunny sits down with Simon Schillebeeckx, co-founder of Handprint, a nature tech startup. Handprint aims to help companies profitably and seamlessly integrate planet-positive actions into business activities. Simon shares examples of companies that have gone above and beyond regulatory requirements to positively contribute to the environment. Among other questions, Gene asks Simon about the scalability of Handprint’s approach and the role of consumers in driving profit-maximizing businesses to make positive contributions.
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About this episode’s guest, Dr Simon Schillebeeckx
Simon is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Handprint Tech. Published author, former sustainability consultant, TEDx speaker. Strategic Management Professor at Singapore Management University (SMU), specialising in Digital Sustainability. He holds a PhD in Innovation Management from Imperial College London.
What’s covered in EP223
- [00:01:18] Regenerative economy and business activities.
- [00:04:33] The concept of Handprint.
- [00:11:28] Capturing value through sustainability.
- [00:16:02] A-B testing to determine how consumers respond to sustainability measure.
- [00:18:30] Linking ads to social impact.
- [00:23:06] Gamifying sustainability initiatives.
- [00:26:31] The potential for Handprint.
- [00:32:45] Plastic pollution and its impact.
- [00:36:03] Regenerative practices in agriculture.
- [00:41:28] Trust in carbon crediting.
- [00:48:49] Large-scale mangrove conservation and afforestation.
Takeaways
- According to Simon, companies are increasingly looking to go beyond just reducing their negative environmental impacts and instead create positive impacts through initiatives like planting trees or restoring coral reefs.
- Done right, these types of regenerative initiatives have the potential to improve business metrics like sales, click-through rates, and employee engagement.
- Handprint is working to make it easier for companies of all sizes to integrate positive impact actions into their business activities in a profitable way
- Handprint offers a marketplace for companies to invest in credible positive impact projects, such as mangrove restoration and carbon sequestration, and provides tools for companies to visualize and capture value from their positive impact initiatives.
Links relevant to the conversation
Handprint Tech website:
Companies/organisations mentioned by Simon:
https://www.sevencleanseas.com/
Transcript: Nature Tech and the Future of Business w/ Handprint Tech founder Simon Schillebeeckx – EP223
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Simon Schillebeeckx 00:03
You could do something in what we define as the regenerative economy by saying, for every 10,000 downloads, so for every 10,000 listeners, I’m going to do something good in the world. And that’s going to be part of how I attract new listeners how I attract new baby customers or attract sponsors. that’s accessible to everyone.
Gene Tunny 00:34
Welcome to the Economics explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Hello, thanks for tuning into the show. My guest this episode is Simon syllabics. Founder and Chief vision Officer of handprint a nature tech startup headquartered in Singapore. handprint describes its vision as enabling companies to become part of the new regenerative economy by integrating planet positive actions into business activities in a profitable and seamless why? In our conversation Simon provides some good examples of our companies have gone beyond regulatory requirements and have made a positive contribution to the environment. But How scalable is this approach? To what extent do we need consumers to drive profit maximising businesses to make positive contributions? These are questions I’ve been pondering since my conversation with Simon. And I expect this conversation will get you thinking to. I’ll be very interested in your thoughts on this episode. So please send me a note or a voice message. You can find my contact details in the show notes. Before we get into it, I’d like to note that this episode is brought to you by Lumo coffee, which is a new coffee line from my occasional co host Tim Hughes. This grade one organic specialty coffee from the highlands of Peru is jam packed full of healthy antioxidants. Tim has tweaked the roasting process and lab tests to confirm that his beans have tripled the antioxidants of regular coffee. And I can confirm that Lumo coffee tastes really good too. Until the end of March 2020. For economics, explore listeners can get a one time 20% discount on Luma coffee, go to Lumo coffee.com. And at the checkout use the code explored 2019 explored is all in capital letters and followed by to zero. Check out the show notes for details. So again, Lumo Liu, mo, coffee.com. Friday, we’d better get into the episode. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Simon syllabics. Tom and syllabics Welcome to the programme. Hi,
Simon Schillebeeckx 03:19
Gene. Thanks very much for having me. Oh, excellent.
Gene Tunny 03:22
Simon, good to have you. On. You’ve been involved in, you know, a number of issues that, you know, I have great interest in as an economist and one of the things that I’ve come to appreciate, as an economist, over the last, you know, few decades since I started studying economics is just the growing interest in environmental and ecological issues and, and just thinking about, you know, how do we manage the environment? What are the trade offs? What does it mean for economic growth, etc. So I’m really interested in in all of these issues, you founded an organisation, or you’ve co founded an organisation called handprint? Could you tell us, please what is handprint? And what was the path that led you to handprint? Please, Simon? Sure.
Simon Schillebeeckx 04:11
So I think first and foremost, handprint is a scientific concept. That was originally, I think, in 2011, or something proposed by some MIT researchers to quantify and qualify the opposite of a footprint. So footprint is something that most people will be very familiar with. It’s the sum of environmental damage that an organisation or individual does to the wider world, by virtue of its existence, right? That’s kind of a broad definition of footprint. Now handprint as its opposite is the sum of quantified positive of impacts that an individual organisation seeks to create in the world. And so we founded a handprint tech to the full name of the company in in 2019, with a vision to enable companies to create positive impact in the world in a more convenient and accessible way, but also to capture value to capture business value from the creation of this positive impact. And I think, in the past 2030 years of rapidly accelerating interest in sustainability, this ability to capture value from doing good is really where organisations have largely failed. And so this is the gap in the market, I’d say that we are seeking to address.
Gene Tunny 05:59
Gotcha. Okay. So a few questions that come out of that, first, how are companies thinking about this? Because I mean, companies have to, you know, they have to be sustainable financially. And so they, I mean, are they wanting to go beyond they’re wanting to meet certain regulatory requirements? Or are they trying to go beyond the regulatory requirements? How do they think about that? I mean, and also make sure they’re financially sustainable? And then where do you come in? And what sort of like, how do you helped them with that? I’d be interested in, in that Simon, if you.
Simon Schillebeeckx 06:33
So I mean, I would almost think about this in a slightly different way, right? So I don’t see handprint as the opposite of footprint. It’s and when we think about the legacy sustainability approach, which still permeates most companies right now, the focus is really on, how do we reduce our negative impact in the world? Yes. And typically, that comes down to the sustainability paradigm of reduce, reuse, recycle, and the kind of Lansing clatter in sustainability. And so this is the, the framework of under the mindset of most companies, and also the regulatory framework, right? If we see what’s happening in Europe, around the EU taxonomy, if you see GRI reporting or issb, all of these things within the sustainability space, largely the focus is on can we force with norms? Are we going to soft regulation? Can we force companies to better delineate how damaging they are for the world. And I include kind of social in that, although I’m generally more interested in more focused on the environmental, but the focus is really on this kind of delineation of guilt. This is the this is the approach, right. And as a consequence, what comes out of that is a compliance mentality, especially nowadays, where more and more governments are making governments are making these kind of CSR or ESG, regulations mandatory. I will see this in Singapore, we see this in Australia, the European Union, do us all of the publicly listed companies right now almost have a regulatory requirements to report on their sustainability, which really means to report on your negative impact, and then convince us that over time, your negative impact is shrinking. This is the essence of sustainability reporting. So and then if you do this, then we applaud you. And you’re a very good corporate citizen, which is I always like to say the equivalent of applauding your kid for coming home, when when he says, like I only punch the teacher twice today is that that is really the essence of kind of sustainability reporting, how it’s been approached over the last decades. And what comes from that is that the focus because of compliance and because of this, we have to do less bad mentality is that turning that into a strategy for value capture is very difficult. Because it’s not really aligned with a capitalist Grossman’s mentality, it’s always do less, do less, do less rather than do more of something which is much more aligned with kind of capitalism and growth. And so on the one side, that entire ecosystem of sustainability exists and has an incredibly important role to play as we need to move towards a more decarbonized economy. And as we need to reduce waste, and especially reduced poorly treated waste and all of those kinds of things. But on the other hand, on the sides, if companies really want to do something that is going to speak directly to their customers to their employees, enable them to differentiate themselves in the market from their competitors, then doing what The regulator is mandating is not helping. So the entire paradigm of sustainability as it’s been approached over the last 30 years, doesn’t lead to differentiation anymore. Which is also reason why it’s the driver of costs. And what we are advocating is that it is new and emerging paradigm around regeneration, and enabling and asking companies don’t just focus on reducing your negative impact, also really think about creating a positive impact this paradigm is where a lot of differentiation is possible. And so the entire question of how does it align with kind of financial sustainability and so actually resolves itself, because there is evidence that if companies do this, and they do it in the right way, this can actually support the bottom line purely financially, very quickly, because it changes customer behaviour, because it changes employee behaviour, then because it changes, like in the b2b context, the opportunity to engage with new business partners. What
Gene Tunny 11:09
evidence is there, Simon? I mean, have you seen this? I mean, are you able to give any examples of where you’ve had this, they’ve been able to capture this value, or they’ve been able to actually go beyond just this compliance framework, and actually add value or improve things? Sure.
Simon Schillebeeckx 11:28
So the I think the most famous example of the success of this strategy actually comes out of China. And we are not involved in this. But we did write a case study on it. And so very quickly, so what it’s done by Ali pay, and so the one of the Chinese payment ecosystems, and so back in 2016, they started with what is known as and forest, which is a loyalty programme, that gives people points known as energy points, for engaging in specific behaviours, such as taking the bus to work, walking to walking to work, paying your bills with Alipay, rather than getting a paper bill buying vegetarian food, like all of these kinds of nudging behaviours that consumers might want to engage in, they are rewarded with energy points, they can keep those energy points. And if they collect enough of those points, they can convert those points in a virtual tree. And if they keep that tree alive for a long enough period, Alipay will plant an actual tree in various locations in China. Now, this is quite a simple programme. But there are two things that make it really incredible. One is that they’ve, they’ve gamified this point system in such a way that your friends can steal your points, if you don’t claim them early in the morning. Okay, so. And that’s just a really ingenious way of thinking about a loyalty system and adding some kind of social dimension to it. So that makes it so that all of my Chinese students tell me that oh, yeah, I’ve been using this for years. And the first thing I do in the morning, every morning for the last five years is open my payments app and claim my points. And that costs elevate that level of loyalty and kind of stickiness costs Ali pay less than one tree per year, because that is the average number of trees that is planted per user. And, and that means it costs less than $2 to create the most sticky loyalty point system in the world. That also creates an incredible positive reputation for this brand. And has created many followers we have now in the Philippines, you have G cash in Vietnam, there is Momo. They’ve seen this. And they are kind of copying that improving on it. But they’ve seen that this is a way of creating really strong engagement with our users and stickiness. And so that’s kind of retail banking. And we’ve seen similar things coming out of the US you have aspiration, which is a bank card that plants trees, you have tree carts in Germany from exposure, another bank card that plants trees, very simple piece of technology. You’ve got bonsai app in Belgium. And these are really fast growing organisations like aspiration raised at a $320 million valuation before they even had a product, which is insane. So but it demonstrates that, that kind of connection between doing something good and making it really easy, for instance, by integrating it in payments, is really powerful. So that’s, I think, one series of examples coming up similarly from the payments industry, but we have seen and kind of proven in our own work with the different clients that you can actually actually have similar benefits in advertising in E commerce, in peer to peer. remittances. And in, yeah, employee engagement as well. Okay,
Gene Tunny 15:21
so. So you’re talking about e commerce, ad advertising, remittances, and employee engagement? Just want to make sure I understand what you’re talking about here. Are you talking about? Some of your clients have been in those industries?
Simon Schillebeeckx 15:40
And so, so we worked with a large Australian sports brands, and they were interested in figuring out, do people really care about this? And so yes, we plan trees in Australia, with every sale, but isn’t something that actually is going to move the needle for us. And so what we did was together with Google, we did a B testing on their store said, Send 50% of your customers to the original store, send 50% randomly to the store, where we integrate two things. One is a plug in in the checkout that says, if you buy this product, we plant a tree in Australia. And one is a tree counter on the landing page, where it says this is how many trees have been planted so far. So we did this for two weeks, then in Google the analysis via Google optimise of okay, what is the effect actually on sales, and the effect was a 16% increase in revenue, and a 16% increase in cart conversion. Now, of course, increasing revenue is great. But increasing cart conversion in E commerce is a massive business advantage. Because globally, the average cart abandonment rate in E commerce is at 4%. Yeah, which means that all of this kind of product has basically been put in limbo and creates inventory and storage issues. So if you can reduce this, you can reduce overhead costs and inventory costs and management costs substantially. At the same time, you’re reducing this, you’re increasing revenue, because you’re selling more product. So everybody happy. So you solve a critical problem in the E commerce world around product, this that kind of abandoned in the cart and stuck in limbo, while increasing sales. That’s a massive business argument. So even if you don’t care at all about anything that relates to sustainability, or that relates to tree planting, or coral restoration in the Great Barrier Reef, if you don’t care, but you only care about we want to sell more actually doing this might work for you as a business. So that’s the E commerce example. In advertising, what we did is we partnered with T IDs, which is an ad tech company, to enable companies so advertisers to link their ad that they’re putting on phones and on websites, typically on the big publishers like the big newspapers, and so it will have ads in between articles, and that will be put there by teats. So that’s one company that kind of dominated that market globally. And so what they’ve enabled is to link a visual an ad to creative whether it’s a video or a static image, underneath, they put this little message that says, for instance, this ad plans trees, or this ad provides to elderly people. And so we did this with Uber Eats in Japan. And they were supporting access to food for elderly people that aligned with what Uber Eats, of course, stands for it makes sense. And then after that campaign, we did a comparison teams did the work to kind of see what has been the effects of this campaign, on how people perceive the brand. And we saw a 9% increase in brand recognition and positive brand recall, which is substantial effect. We also saw, I think it’s a 32% increase in click through rate on the ad. That’s massive. Yeah, it’s about 50%. Higher than industry average, we also saw higher app completion rates when it was video. So people actually spend time watching the full AD rather than scrolling through it. So these are the target outcomes for any advertising campaign. And if you can enhance those by saying for every 1000 clicks, or for every 10,000 impressions, we’re going to do this good thing. And credibly communicate that within the ad unit itself. You can actually improve your ad performance. So that’s, again, the this is an example of how do we link the business performance to the the sustainability or the impact impact performance in a seamless way. And if you can do this, then the only thing you have to kind of tweak is, what is the financial amount of money that you’re actually linked? Getting to your KPI, whether it’s your number of impressions or your number of sales are so in such a way that there’s a net benefit for the company, because the benefit for the for nature is going to happen anyway when there is a sufficient engagement. So that’s yet another example, from one of our clients with like, how we’ve been able to show that there is real business value in doing this.
Gene Tunny 20:23
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. That’s those are those are really good examples. Just a clarification on that example, for e commerce, you mentioned there was an A and, and B, C, did some A B testing. I’m trying to remember was one of them. You had the counter on the homepage, and then elsewhere, it was it was when they were checking out? Is that what it was? Is there? No,
Simon Schillebeeckx 20:49
the eighth the eighth site was just the original website without any spring integration, the B site was the counter on the landing page and plugin in the checkout. Oh,
Gene Tunny 21:00
yeah. And so that boosted the sales that Yep. Okay. Great. Yeah. Just wanted to make sure I understood that. That’s terrific. And what about one of the things you mentioned was employee engagement, are you finding that these types of initiatives improve the employee engagement, morale, productivity, even,
Simon Schillebeeckx 21:20
we can’t really say much about productivity. This is this requires much longer measurement. But what we’ve seen with companies that have used one of our systems, which is in a voucher redemption system, it’s very simple. Again, if you can get lots of employee engagement software, has some kind of points system behind it. And then after a while, you collect points, and then you can use those points to buy vouchers. And that could be a voucher for your local supermarket or for a sports brand, or it can be an impact voucher. And so we are providing these impact vouchers. And so what we see in many of the partnerships we have with large scale employee engagement software, is that firstly, people actually buy these vouchers. So there is something that some people not everyone, of course, say like, Okay, this is interesting, I find this a better way of spending my points my voucher money than whenever a discount voucher for the local supermarket. But what we also see is that some of our clients come to us directly and say, We want to use these vouchers, let’s say for Christmas. So we’re gonna give our employees this, this thing we even had, this is a bit left field, but it’s a funny thing. We even are in the discussion, I can’t name the company. And this company is known for throwing big parties where the staff there’s to drink more than a little bit. And so they were thinking like it, so we want to do something around impact. They want to do something on coral restoration. But they want to see like, how do we make it part of our corporate culture. And I propose the idea about next time you do a party, why not say we plant we’re going to restore a coral for every bottle of champagne that’s been drunk. And they’re like, this is great. Like, everyone’s gonna love that. And it resonates with what they’re doing. And it makes it fun. It makes it gamified. And then it kind of lets drink for nature, whatever you want to turn that into a story. But it isn’t something that speaks to people and it gets people involved in this. And I think this is really what’s missing. For a lot of the especially large multinationals where you have dedicated teams working on sustainability, building all these strategies, trying to make all of these things happen at a very large scale. But it stays very far away from the lived experience of the vast majority of employees. Right? So in reality, there are very few employees. Even in a large company, let’s say like, like an Amazon or an apple, there’s very few people that are actively involved with a sustainability strategy. And what this impact vouchers, for instance, can accomplish is If a company wants to find out who are the people that actually care about this in the company, because they’ve got 30,000 employees. And not only the people in the sustainability team really care about this, there might be people in marketing and operations in whatever like in any other department, but it’s not easy for the company to really find out, like who are the people that really care. And so by giving them vouchers in this way for a year, like every month, you get a new voucher, and then you’ll see some people will never redeemed the vouchers because they don’t necessarily care. But some people will and will ask questions. And so and what we’ve seen with some of our clients is that the reason why they’re doing this is because it helps them identify potential change makers across departments. And that is where they see a little value. Because then they say the next time we have to roll out a bigger sustainability initiative that might actually face some internal opposition. We know the people that are going to be champions. We can bring them in early on across departments. We can say this is To plan we can engage them, we can educate them. And then we can hopefully in the future, if there is resistance, lower this kind of resistance. So there’s a lot of ways in which these tools can be used creatively, to achieve specific employee goals. And get, that’s what we’re trying to facilitate.
Gene Tunny 25:20
Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
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Gene Tunny 25:55
Now back to the show. And Simon, how wide an application? Do you see your this philosophy, the philosophy of handprint what you can do for companies? How wide an application Do you see it as having? Is it just for some companies? Or some sectors? Or do I how wide a scope Do you think this? What what’s the potential here,
Simon Schillebeeckx 26:20
I still believe the potential is, is massive. Because on the one side, there is an genuine need. Right? So we are facing climate change that we just had. I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent report coming out that 2023, what was the hottest year on record, we ended December on 1.78 degrees. That’s bad news, we are experiencing a significant decline in biodiversity and regulator regulators have put a lot of policy in place to start addressing these things. And so companies will have to jump on board. But I think the real potential for this is not interestingly maybe is not with the big oil companies, or the big steel companies or even the big transportation companies, because they have more important things to do. The reality is that if you’re in the business of making things, moving things or mining things, your focus should be on doing so while creating significantly less environmental damage. This is the key thing you need to decarbonize, you need to reduce your water consumption, all of those things, but for the vast majority of people in the developed world, and so think about this, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Europe, US, Australia as well, although Australia has more mining industry, of course. But for the vast majority of people, we don’t work for companies that make things move things are mining things. That’s about 70% of global GDP, is in the service sector is in digital is in NGOs. And the reality is that the classic approach to sustainability has almost nothing to do with those businesses. Because if you don’t have a big footprint, big negative impact, you’re kind of left out of the entire sustainability movement. And I think the potential for handprints and our approach is really winning those companies that want to do something more that want to turn this into a competitive advantage and a differentiating factor. And that realise that if all we’re going to do is reduce our negative impact, it’s basically too easy. And so we’re going to do something else that’s going to create more value for us, but also more value for the planet. And so I think that potential is massive. And with a bit of luck, and a lot of hard work. This could be a multi billion dollar business easily. Hmm,
Gene Tunny 28:59
yeah. Yeah. It sounds like to an extent you’re being led by consumers, are you the consumer preferences are important? And to what extent are there differences between older and younger consumers? Have you? Are you looking at that sort of thing?
Simon Schillebeeckx 29:16
Yeah, we’re looking at this. I mean, we’re looking mainly at research that others are doing about this. We haven’t really done much of our own research specifically on this. But the main trends that we’re seeing is that one, there is an assumption that the younger generation, the Gen Z, and millennials care more about this than the boomers and, and so, and, actually, most of the recent research doesn’t support that. Right. Secondly, there’s an assumption that most of the awareness about these issues is especially prevalent in markets such as Australia and Europe, with the US kind of trailing and In Asia and the rest of the world far behind. And this is also really incorrect. Now, Australia is very advanced. But the best research we’ve seen on this shows that China, and that awareness in China is higher than anywhere else. So it’s a massive thing in China, it’s not yet a massive thing in say, Indonesia or India, or other kinds of Asian countries, Japan is also rapidly rising Europe, you have very strong awareness. And in the US, it’s it’s kind of split according to political affiliation, as we may expect, but in most of these regions, we see a growing consumer awareness across all levels. I think there was a recent was in BCG, I think it was BCG report that kind of found that, on average, based on all the research they did globally, consumers are willing to pay 11 to 12%, more for more kind of sustainable, positive, responsible products. But companies charge like 26 to 35% more for these kinds of products. And that’s really where the big problem is. So if we companies can reduce that, identify the additional margin they’re trying to make, or reduce the cost base for these most more sustainable, sustainably produced products and services, then I think we can really quickly hit that pivot, where suddenly, it makes a lot of sense for many people to adopt these other products. And then we can see very radical shifts, and handprints for many small companies, even if you’re in let’s say, you’re an eco small ecommerce store, you don’t really have the opportunity to say we’re going to fix our supply chains. And we’re going to force our suppliers to only use organic cotton. I mean, you can try but you don’t have the market power. But you can do something simple at the end of the funnel. Namely, we’re going to plant a tree, restore coral, do X remove plastic from the ocean for every transaction, and turn that into a story. And I think the fact that every company no matter how small and what they are doing, can do this makes it potentially very appealing, and hopefully very scalable.
Gene Tunny 32:24
Yeah, you just reminded me when you said remove plastic from the ocean. One of the issues that my producer Joshi suggested I have a cover on the show is the Great Pacific Garbage, plastic garbage patch, or whatever it is. So yeah, just just reminded that is a that is a big issue. And yeah, no,
Simon Schillebeeckx 32:45
and I think we underestimate that issue. Because it’s, I mean, it’s not as much in our face, especially living in Singapore or in Australia. We don’t see plastic pollution that much. But if you go to India, you go to Indonesia, you go to Vietnam, you go to Thailand, it’s everywhere. And it’s a massive issue. And this the Great Pacific vortex, or it’s been described as a giant toilet that doesn’t flush, is is a massive threat to ecosystems, right? So we did, we did, researchers in the UK, in 2021, did a piece of research on plastic pollution, and found microplastics in the blood band, between the baby and a mother and unborn baby. So it is what is the word,
Gene Tunny 33:37
the umbilical cord in
Simon Schillebeeckx 33:39
the umbilical cord. So we have plastics in the umbilical cord. That is the extent of our pollution that our kids right now, even in a country like the UK, where you have very good waste management, but our kids are born already intoxicated with the pollution we bring to this world. And that is shocking. Right? So there are people who argued as a consequence of that study that this is a new species. Because fundamentally, This species has is born with plastic as part of its constitution. And so that is very scary. And so I think this problem which companies like seven clean seas here in Singapore, plastic bank, from from Canada, are addressing at massive scale is really worth solving. And it shouldn’t only be the companies like Coca Cola and Swire group and Pepsi that are largely responsible for much of that plastic pollution. They shouldn’t be the only ones that have to take responsibility. It is a collective responsibility. And so governments need to take they need to put the policy frameworks in place, but everyone can contribute to this by supporting cleanups and this kind of work.
Gene Tunny 34:53
I’ll have to look those companies up. Was it seven clean seas in Singapore and then plastic bank in Canada. You Got a good one? Okay. We’re getting. Yeah, that’s been fascinating. Simon, we’ll get getting getting closer. Just got a couple more questions. Sure. You mentioned this regeneration and enabling No, you’ve got this idea of Is it a regenerative economy? How does that compare with a what people are calling a circular economy? Yeah,
Simon Schillebeeckx 35:20
that’s a good question. So there’s a lot of debates and and on some of our LinkedIn profiles with my CEO, Matias and I, there are many discussions with, let’s say, I’d say regeneration purists that fundamentally don’t believe that you can have regeneration within a growth oriented capitalist system. So we don’t kind of follow that belief system or that narrative. But so the idea of regeneration is really about can we create an economy that is not extractive where we don’t extract natural resources from the planet and pollutes as a consequence, but where the production processes themselves and business models around them, fundamentally lead to a positive net impact on the world. And so it aligns very closely with circular economy. When we think about the application of kind of regenerative practices to manufacturing and agriculture, right, so you have regenerative agriculture, which is kind of the big thing, you have circular economy, which is fundamentally an approach to how do we reconceptualize the supply chains of more or less complex products. But again, that is a very small part of the global economy. So if you want to get everyone involved, if you want to get your local accounting firm informed, or your local podcast host, you cannot do anything about circular economy, because this is not your business. But you could do something in what we define as the regenerative economy by saying, for every 10,000 downloads, so for every 10,000 listeners, I’m going to do something good in the world. And that’s going to be part of how I attract new listeners, how I attract new, maybe customers or attract sponsors, that’s accessible to everyone. And so I think this is really why I prefer the idea of a regenerative economy, because it’s not as exclusive as a circular economy, where only really manufacturing companies can play a big part in. Okay,
Gene Tunny 37:38
that’s a, I like that as a, as a concept is an idea. But how would I go about it? So say, there were, you know, I’m the accounting firm, and I say, I look for every extra, you know, for every extra 10 clients, I’ll I’ll plant a tree or I don’t know, whatever the metric is, or what makes sense or I’ll, or role invest in regeneration of a forest? How would I actually go about that? Are there are there marketplaces or portals that you trust to be able to identify offsets or projects that regeneration projects that I can invest in?
38:20
Yeah, handprint. Okay,
Gene Tunny 38:22
that’s what you do.
Simon Schillebeeckx 38:23
We exactly have such a marketplace for credible, positive impact in the world where you can buy units of impacts across a wide variety of types, whether it’s trees, or ocean, plastic cleanup, like seven clean seas and plastic bank are both accessible through the handprint marketplace. You can plant trees, you can restore corals in the Great Barrier Reef, you can, you can support cleanup projects in Australia, for instance, as well. So we work with all these nonprofits, we bring them into our digital ecosystem. And we facilitate funding flows from companies to them, that is the essence of what we do. And then we create a tools for companies to demonstrate visualise and capture value from doing this. So that is our business. So if you’re looking for a place to do this, then you can comprehend print, there’s others as well, of course, but I’d recommend out print. Yeah,
Gene Tunny 39:17
I don’t want you to give names of any of your competitors have necessarily I’ll look them up and, and check it out just occurred to me that because I know that those sort of things are out there, but I wasn’t sure what the what the names of them of them are, but I’ll definitely check out handprint and put a link in the GBR the Great Barrier Reef, of course, is something that that’s, I mean, I’m in Brisbane and Australia and I mean, the reef is north of us, but it’s not that far north. And you know, I used to live in in Townsville, which is you know, the reef was reasonably accessible. So yep. That’s, that’s terrific. And what validation is there Simon how Do you know that these are worthwhile projects like, because there’s a lot of concern about some of these offsets, and just how robust they are that I think there are a lot of concerns about, you know, a bit of dodgy behaviour there? How do you make sure that you’re looking at, you know, legitimate, legitimate projects?
Simon Schillebeeckx 40:21
Sure. I mean, this is probably the most complex part of our work and handprint is in the onboarding, the sourcing the identification of the right partners. And then the, the system that we’ve developed is one in which we collect a lot of data. And from the all of our impact partners, we have a strong economic alignment model, where we basically allow new projects to come on on the handprint platform after they go through the necessary KYC, which is a pretty lengthy and rigorous process. And then they can launch a small projects, like maybe five to $20,000. If that gets funded, then we’ll see how they report on their progress and what kind of data they provide. And if they do a good job, they can get a bigger, bigger project, and so on. So we built this kind of trust by design. So which is a very different system than the let’s say, the system of what you’re referring to with offsets like the carbon crediting system. So the carbon crediting system is a system where you have trust by centralised authority, right, so you have got a group like like Vera, or gold standards, these are the most famous ones that sets the standards for how you can quantify and earn carbon credits. And then you have a variety of authorities auditors that go and verify that this all has been well done. And this should create more trust, because you have this third party verification, and you have this centralised authorities that are doing this. Now the reality is what we’ve seen is that many of these standards become outdated as more digital technology becomes available. And that’s been the issue with Vera. And then the centralised authorities that do this validation have a very perverse incentive system. And the reason why they have a perverse incentive system is because they’re validating that, yes, this is indeed a real project, but they’re also the ones selling it. Which means in most cases that their interest is in justifying that the that let’s say the carbon sequestration is real, and then maximising the price difference. And this creates this issue where then this was a finding of this UN commission report, we wrote in 2019, that up to 80% of the price that somebody or company pays for a carbon credit doesn’t reach the local communities. So it’s typically between 60 and 80% of the of the money that goes to intermediaries. So the question is, do we want to pay, let’s say, on a $20, or carbon credits, do we really want to pay $16, to the intermediaries to guarantee that it’s trustworthy? And in some cases, you might say, yes, that’s fair. In many cases, I think that’s not fair. Now, the specific reason within the carbon crediting system, in particular, why it’s so important that you have all of these layers of trust, is because companies buy carbon credits to compensate for pollution. It’s basically it’s a pollution rights. They say, like we’re polluting this much, we want to be able to make claims that we’re carbon neutral, or that we’re on track. And as a consequence, we buy these carbon credits as offsets. And I guess my perspective on this and handprints perspective isn’t and this is that this is required because we’ve invented this really complex concept of an organisational carbon footprint. And we are attributing responsibility, based on blame and based on guiltiness. In the environmental space, we make the big guilty parties in charge of solving the problem, rather than saying no, this is a universal problem, and everybody should be kind of contributing to this. And we should put everyone in charge of this. And so yeah, we’re advocating for a real kind of radical mindset shift there where the idea that should be that companies should contribute to, let’s say, nature restoration and not based on how much damage they’re doing to the planet, but on how valuable they are on or on how much profit they make, or how much revenue they make, we need a different distribution mechanism. And if you have a different distribution mechanism, then the whole problem that we currently have on carbon credits, and offsetting just doesn’t matter anymore. Because you still need to invest in nature restoration and doing good things for the world. But it’s not about oh, we are going to calculate our carbon emissions, and then just buy just enough so that we can make claims about this. There is so much money going into this space, that is, I think, not very well spent. Because that money could be much better spent on actually doing something in 2022, we spent $154 billion on sustainability reporting. And there is no evidence that sustainability reporting leads to improve sustainability performance. This is one of the sensible one of the few sensible arguments of many of the ESG haters that they have, like there is there’s just no evidence, right? We see that. I mean, some of the most polluting companies on Earth score very high on ESG metrics, because they’re very good at reporting, but it doesn’t mean they’re actually doing something good for the world. So yeah, we’re revving this quite radical perspective. And we are actually working on a on a thought piece on this called Nature integrity, which we will hopefully published in the next two months, where we’re delineated kind of expanding on this perspective, and, yeah, hopefully, we’ll happy to send it to you when it’s when it’s done. Yeah,
Gene Tunny 46:41
absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll be keen to have a look at that. Right. Assam has been, there’s been great. I’m learning a lot, particularly about the oil, you know, what, what companies are doing what you know, what the different players are, and who’s doing interesting things. So, so that’s, that’s really good. Right. Before we finish up, I’m keen to learn about global mangrove trust. So yeah, we’ve got quite a lot of mangroves here in, in Australia, in Queensland in particular. So what is the global mangrove trust and what’s been your involvement in it?
Simon Schillebeeckx 47:18
So global mangrove trust was a nonprofit, Ryan and I, so Ryan’s also one of my co founders at handprint, which is a nonprofit, we founded about a year and a half before we set up handprint to initially specifically work with a Myanmar based Norwegian nonprofit that was restoring mangroves in the Bay of Bengal. And over the last five years, it’s evolved into a ecosystem coordinator for mangrove restoration and mangrove conservation worldwide. And so our mission is to put a conservation easements on every mangrove in the world and restore mangroves to their maybe, like 1980s 1970s level of occurrence across across the world, which would be very valuable for carbon sequestration, ecosystem protection, flood protection and fish in the ocean, like mangroves offer so many benefits that they’re one of the most important ecosystems on the planet. And so but we are a small NGO, my involvement now is I’m a non Executive Director. We’ve got a very talented team of people in Europe and and, and Asia, that are kind of leading this work. And our main kind of concrete projects are in Indonesia at the moment. So where we work on large scale mangrove conservation and afforestation. Together with local reforestation partners, and then we’ve developed together with Oxford University, a new carbon accrediting agency that certifies the creation or the issuance of carbon credits, based on state of the art, digital MRV as a monitoring, reporting and validation, using satellite based intelligence and machine learning, and yet, the key vision of ox carbon, which is the certification agency out of Oxford, is to certify high quality projects but have a certification approach that’s much more scalable, and much more cost effective and can be deployed much more rapidly than the existing kind of incumbent certifiers like a Vera and, and gold and gold standard. Because these are fundamentally analogue organised as Asians in a digital age, and so they struggle with the adoption of the what we consider to be the much more scientifically rigorous approaches to measure carbon sequestration and, and state changing forests at scale. And so we are yet we’re working on those kinds of things.
Gene Tunny 50:24
Gotcha. Okay. I’ll put links in the show notes regarding that, and ox carbon and global mangrove trust. And okay, Simon, where can we find more about what you’re doing at handprint?
Simon Schillebeeckx 50:40
So most of the information you’ll find on handprint dot tech, that’s our website, also on my LinkedIn profile, so And on our CEOs LinkedIn profile, Matias was Oh, no. So we are pretty active on LinkedIn. And so that’s where a lot of our conversations are taking place. And otherwise, we have a YouTube channel, and Prindle tech, which is not super active, but there are now and then there’s some videos being posted of talks we do in podcasts that are also appearing on YouTube. And then yeah, I’ve done a few other podcasts as well. So if people want to learn a bit more, they can google my name, if they figure out how to spell it. And just put it into in Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts and probably be able to find quite a few more terrific. Okay,
Gene Tunny 51:33
Simon, anything else before we wrap up any, anything you think we missed? Or that that’s an important point that we should go over?
Simon Schillebeeckx 51:41
The final point might be that we are launching a public fundraising campaign on we funder in the US. So if you’re in the US, or you’re have a US bank account, and you want to put a couple of dollars into the next or the first nature tech unicorn, let’s come to the US, then I recommend you go to WWE founder.com/and. Bring the tech and yeah, make a reservation to contribute to the to the project. Okay,
Gene Tunny 52:13
well, good luck with that. Yeah, that’d be terrific. If we had an interview with a founder of a of a unicorn. Before they were a unicorn, that’d be that’d be terrific. Nature Tech, I was wondering what the term was, you know, because we’ve got med tech and fintech and all that. So it’s nature tech. So that’s, that answers that question for me. Yeah. Okay. Simon zorbax. That’s been terrific. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for your time.
Simon Schillebeeckx 52:43
Thanks so much for having me gene. It was a pleasure
Gene Tunny 52:47
rato thanks for listening to this episode of economics explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact at economics explore.com Or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.
53:34
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Credits
Thanks to Obsidian Productions for mixing the episode and to the show’s sponsor, Gene’s consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au. Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.