Time to Transform - Tech for Good Magazine
Originally published in Tech for Good, written by Ben Mouncer.
Business leaders must aggressively tackle climate change and drive cleantech and data initiatives to save the world, believes entrepreneur and sustainability champion Karl Feilder.
Karl Feilder opens our conversation with an unexpected revelation. He has been busy during lockdown, but busy in a way you might not expect: he and his fellow band members have been putting the finishing touches to their debut album. Feilder is the frontman for Sandstörm, the aptly-named Dubai-based classic rock group. His sideline as a vocalist provides welcome escapism from a demanding day job, which he describes in simple terms as “trying to save the planet”. More on that later.
To combine a band hobby, however, with work as CEO of Neutral Fuels - the largest group of cleantech fuel facilities in the GCC - requires a certain personality type, and without doubt demonstrates a searing entrepreneurial spirit. And Feilder is all about the power of entrepreneurship. The purpose of his interview with Tech For Good is for us to hear Feilder’s ideas around climate change, technology and business, and his belief that entrepreneurs hold the key to preventing economic extinction in the face of the climate emergency.
“At this point, the world’s entrepreneurs are needed to innovate new tech solutions for climate change.”
His book, Taking Exception, explores this idea in depth. But first, how would Feilder define an “entrepreneur”? “Entrepreneurs want to build their own private kingdoms. And they get up every single morning and want to change the world,” he says. “We can be strange people but some of us can make big differences as long as we’re pointed in the right direction, helped along, recognise our own weaknesses and are successfully funded.”
Feilder would know, having forged a notable career as a tech entrepreneur over the past three decades. Prior to founding The Neutral Group in 2007, and Neutral Fuels in 2010, he helped build and sell five startups. His first, Network Managers, was bought by Microsoft in 1995, and Neutral Services was acquired by Deutsche Post DHL in 2009.
But by his own admission, Feilder eventually “had enough” of tech’s startup landscape. He refocused his goals with The Neutral Group, and if his experiences in the 13 years since have taught him anything, it’s that today’s technology leaders have an enormous responsibility to stem the environmental and economic consequences of climate change.
“In the next 20 years, we’ve got to reinvent the global economy,” Feilder stresses, referencing the startling 2018 conclusion from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “There’s such a huge challenge in front of us in order to get the planet to a point where we can actually continue our existence. At this point, the world’s entrepreneurs are needed to innovate new tech solutions for climate change.
“In my opinion we should not be investing in any other tech at the moment. If you’ve got a technology which is not aimed at solving a sustainability challenge, then the pressure on your business is going to be immense because the only thing we’re going to be doing soon is trying to fix this issue. We have 20 years to keep our planet less than two-and-a-half degrees above pre-industrial levels. And every year we’re going in the wrong direction.”
These are striking assessments, and thoughts Feilder passes on in another of his roles, that of a mentor to business leaders at the Hult International Business School in Dubai and San Francisco. He is clearly bristling with passion and concern on this topic, and has made it one of his professional quests to open the eyes of the next generation to these problems.
Right now, however, businesses are confronting a myriad of difficulties as they emerge from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic. A recent report from PwC suggested that companies should have five strategic priorities post-COVID-19 - and sustainability initiatives weren’t included. Instead, PwC focused on sharpening productivity and “supercharging” digital transformation. Feilder unsurprisingly adopts the counter-argument and makes the business case for “green” investments, while also emphasising his belief that living through COVID-19 has actually awakened many leaders to macro-issues like climate change.
“I see usefulness coming out of COVID-19, I see a focus of humanity on things that are more important in life,” he says. “Anything that’s being invested into a non-cleantech world at the moment is just missing the point. The target market, which for any innovation is humanity, has got to look at the current macroeconomic environment. And now it is about the survival of our way of life. We’ve had a great wake-up call with COVID-19, but it is nothing compared with climate change.
“In my opinion we should not be investing in any other tech at the moment. If you’ve got a technology which is not aimed at solving a sustainability challenge, then the pressure on your business is going to be immense because the only thing we’re going to be doing soon is trying to fix this issue.”
“I don’t see it as investing in sustainability, I just see it as making better decisions. But the first move is also not to do bad stuff; don’t invest in coal products, we should be out of fossil fuels, we should be away from petrochemicals. Then the second move is to proactively go and do good stuff.”
For an example of his theories in practice, Feilder doesn’t have to look far. When he set up The Neutral Group, he viewed it as a bridge between the technology that could help organisations become more sustainable, and the organisations themselves, often unwieldy multinationals burdened by size and long-held ideas and processes.
In their work with Deutsche Post DHL, Feilder’s team achieved some astounding results, driving cost efficiencies, improving profitability and, most tellingly, making the company greener. It deployed software to measure fuel consumption in 200,000 vehicles and monitor 13,500 office buildings, completing previously manual tasks in rapid time.
The Neutral Group went on to work with similarly-sized organisations, one of which was McDonald’s. It was from this relationship that Neutral Fuels was born, and Feilder picks up the story.
We’ve had a great wake-up call with COVID-19, but it is nothing compared with climate change”
“We worked with McDonald’s for five years on their sustainability strategy in 37 countries, and one of the things that came out of that was that McDonald’s could be self-sufficient in fuel if they could convert all of their waste cooking oil into biofuel,” he explains.
“We fixed that in the first year, and for the last nine years McDonald’s in the UAE [United Arab Emirates] has been running on 100% biofuel for their entire truck fleet. And we’ve taken that into other countries. We’ve recently opened in Delhi, in Bahrain, and we’re about to open our second UAE factory in Abu Dhabi.”
Neutral Fuels has gone on to work with a host of McDonald’s’ supply chain partners, and in 2019 it was awarded a place on the Mohammed bin Rashid Innovation Fund Accelerator (MBRIFA) in the Middle East. Earlier this year, it became the first company to be awarded a Certificate of Conformity by the Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology (ESMA) for its biodiesel quality standard.
Technology has been essential to these outcomes, underpinning the process of transforming local waste cooking oil into “net zero” biofuel for any diesel engine. Neutral Fuels uses Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to optimise waste and fuel management, and it has pioneered a cloud-based data portal that delivers complete end-to-end traceability of its product.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also deployed in its 24/7 control centres, but Feilder makes it clear that he is not one for technology buzzwords. Neutral Fuels’ processes and technology combine for highly-efficient production, and Feilder says that for businesses taking on their own cleantech initiatives, the motivation should always be the problem, not the product.
“My general advice to startups when they come along is ‘okay, what problem are you solving?’ And then they usually say ‘well we’ve got this really good thing that we’ve invented and we’ve managed to make it AI and blockchain’. Then I’m playing buzzword bingo with them. What I actually want to know is what five problems are you solving and what five solutions are you adding to those five problems?”
Tying it in with the business case, Feilder then highlights the importance of data. While he admits that a shortage of available data does hamper cleantech projects, he believes the biggest value technology brings is data and ultimately the ability to make business decisions using it.
“Finding the solutions to the climate change problem can only happen when we’ve got the data that allows us to do a return on investment [ROI] calculation,” Feilder continues. “And that’s something you won’t often get into a sustainability conversation, is an ROI calculation. But if you’ve got the data, you can look at the capital cost, you can do an ROI.
“If we go to decision-makers with a way that we can automate the collection of all of this data and it adds half a percent to their EBITDA, they’re going to be interested. We need solutions architects to actually say to people ‘here’s the problem and here’s the solution. Now, can we map the two things together’?”
Feilder is adamant that these solution architects are today’s entrepreneurs, and his ideas are being heard. He cites another example, local to Neutral Fuels, where Dubai has “turbocharged” its farming industry during lockdown, utilising agritech to support more than 500 farms and help ing the region become self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables.
At a broader level, Feilder has delivered keynote addresses at global events for the cleantech movement, including the World Future Energy Summit, and he presents the popular podcast and video series ‘Not Another Empty Suit’. A man on a mission, for sure, but one thing Feilder is not, he says, is an environmentalist.
“I have this phrase: ‘I am not an environmentalist, I just want us to save the planet’,” he says. “Let me explain: if you look at the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, we’ve got water scarcity, we’ve got poverty, we’ve got gender equality, we’ve got race equality, all sorts of stuff in there. All of which are really, really important - but none of which are going to actually save the planet that we live on. I think we need to prioritise.
“One of the challenges of environmentalism is the fact that it’s almost impossible to prioritise. If you see what’s happened with plastics, and the momentum that’s built up over the last two or three years to get rid of plastics in the sea, it’s really important. But you know what? We can have a planet we can’t live on with no plastic in the sea, or we can have a bit of plastic in the sea and a planet we can live on. I don’t see how we can do both at the same time.
“So my point is: I’m not an environmentalist because I’m not trying to solve all the world’s problems, even though I know they’re all important. I’m just trying to save the planet…”
About Karl Feilder: Founder, CEO and Chairman of The Neutral Group and Neutral Fuels, Karl Feilder is a serial tech entrepreneur, sustainability advocate and international speaker. His direct actions to mitigate climate change have resulted in over 14 million tonnes of CO2e savings from global corporations. Karl has previously built five companies to exit via trade sale, and taken two more to their Initial Public Offering (IPO). A British national, Karl is now preparing its Neutral Fuels LLC subsidiary, a company that produces bio-fuel from used cooking oil, for an IPO on the London AIM stock market in 2023. Karl is the host of Middle East podcast and video series, Not Another Empty Suit.
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