 Good morning, everyone, and welcome. My name is Jimmy Chen, and I am the Managing Director of StorageX. On behalf of Will Chu and Yi Trey, the faculty directors of StorageX, we welcome you to our very first StorageX student-led symposium on a topic of interest to our students, special interest, creating opportunities for energy storage leaders throughout the battery supply chain to collaborate to establish strategies for sustainable development. So I would like to welcome my student co-host, Melody Spradlin. Hi, I'm Melody Spradlin. I'm a working student who is a PhD in the Sustainable Design and Construction program. Along with my co-students, Gabby, Melissa, Alan, and Paul Meke, we're students in the Stanford Sustainability 220 class, which focus is on sustainable leadership. What our student group represents is many departments across Stanford. And while sustainability has become a major focus for many industries, few of these conversations engage the actors across all stages of production, post-consumer process. And what we'd like to see is that truly sustainable practices engaging and bringing together this wide range of stakeholders, complimenting the cutting edge technology along with the achievements and all of the frameworks for manufacturing, business, and finance, bringing it all into global systems thinking. So we're really excited to be here and thanks for welcoming our idea to your forum. So now we will have our panelists introduce themselves after a brief and offer a brief keynote. So I'd like to, Melody, do you want to introduce Jeff? Yes, I'll introduce Jeff Cares. Jeff is a professor of geological sciences, previously professor of energy resources and engineering at Stanford. Jeff, do you want to take the mic from here? Yes, absolutely. And welcome, everyone, and thanks for that introduction. So yeah, personally I'd also direct the Stanford Center for Earth Resources Forecasting, which is a large consortium by people from all kind of industries, minerals, water, and energy. And we look at everything from discovery, so exploration to bringing things to a decision in terms of bringing it to market. So Jeff, we have two questions for you. First, what do you believe is the current challenge of the mining industry in bringing vast amounts of metal market and how does your research contribute to that? Can you show your slides first to give us a little bit of a deep dive so that we can understand your response to that question? Well, I also want to thank the students. I think this is a great initiative and it shows that our students really care about these fundamental questions and bringing so many people on campus together. The questions that I'm interested in is really in terms of the research that I'm doing is if you look at history of humanity, we've been blessed and we've been cursed with natural resources, right? Our modern convenience wouldn't have been here without oil and gas, but at the same time we know that it's wreaked havoc on our planet and that there has been a lot of conflict around it. So I think the point I want to make is that we're possibly at the precipice of such a next iteration of what I've called the resources curse, but hopefully, we can avoid that. And the difference perhaps this time around is that we have technology at our disposal that was just wasn't there when we drilled the first oil well. And one of those technologies is artificial intelligence. So I think if you look at all the numbers and there's probably no doubt in a month's mind is that in order to transform to these new forms of energy and energy news, it's going to be built on metals and earth materials. So while we often hear about lithium and cobalt, there are other important metals such as copper, nickel, platinum, and also rare earth elements. Just think about copper from in a Tesla, for example, contains five times more copper than a regular car. And charging stations also contain as much metal as a, as much as copper as a regular car. So we're going to use all of these in vast quantities. And so many of these have yet to be discovered and put into a scale of a mining supply chain. So not only do we need to discover these deposits, we need to discover them at an unprecedented rate that has never been done in the history of humanity. And I think we have about 20 years to do so. So yes, we need metal, but we also need just metal, I call that. And this brings us to the question of environmental justice. So that really hasn't really been just oil. And that's what I'm saying is we need to start avoiding repeating history. It's well known, for example, that in both countries and countries that have regulation and it showed that here, such as the United States and Canada, but also in Brazil that native communities have been significantly affected by these mining activities. The other thing we want to avoid, of course, is future moral wars over metal. And they are already being seeded by countries. And we know, for example, that China is a big player in the Congo in terms of cobalt production. In fact, they control half of the cobalt production in China in Congo. And as you know, the Congo has more than half of the cobalt production in the world. So these are questions that we need to start addressing. We don't want to build our sustainable future in our communities based on the back of workers in other countries, such as Africa and South America. So what can we do? I think there are a number of things we can do. There's a very simple idea that I've sort of come up with. And that is that you just need to make metal more abundant. For example, we're not fighting wars over concrete. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is that there's just a lot of supply. Right now, because of the lack of discoveries and concentrations in few countries, there is this problem that is occurring. The second thing is that in terms of sustainability, we need to make it more quantitative. And I've always advocated for something that's called quantitative sustainability where we start to balance it and understand quantitatively what are the trade-offs that companies are making in terms of profit and environmental risks and costs. The second thing that needs to happen is we need to have a scale-up and we need to do this extremely fast. If you look, for example, at the vaccine, Moderna, a company that I just got my vaccine shot from, used artificial intelligence to bring a vaccine to market in six months. This is extremely fast because they use AI. We have to do the same for metals and we have to do this in six years if we are going to make any impact into the climate change by doing this. So what is happening today is that there are new alliances being formed and I work, my group works very closely with Cobble Metals, which is the only major new exploration company that exists in this industry. They are not funded by mining companies, they're funded by tech billionaires. And so this is a new kind of world that we're entering where new alliances are formed. So what is the technology that I have been developing? There are three parts to that, two parts that I've worked on significantly. The first one is a massive data engineering, simply because we have to ingest a huge amount of data. In fact, with Cobble Metals, I'm trying to build the Google Earth for the crust in terms of metals. This is a huge undertaking in terms of data. The second one, of course, is machine learning where you need to build based on all the information, these are geophysical information, geochemical and the expertise related to this information to build maps of the earth with anomalies. And this by itself is a significant big data machine learning challenge. So we've developed this called machine prospector. But a map is not enough. Here I show altered in many ways, where I can show it really a map of a nickel anomaly somewhere in the world. And I'd like you to focus on the distances here. So you see that there is a couple of black dots which are anomalies and there's also a major anomaly to the right hand side here. So this major anomaly is still over 500 kilometers long. So in order to make a discovery, you need to drill a well right into the middle of it. So that doesn't mean here on the right hand side, you have continuous nickel. So you need to still further explore. So one technology that I'm developing is called intelligent prospector. And this is a whole different set of AI where we develop what we call an intelligent agent that can make very informative sequential decisions on their own certainty. This AI is very much like playing chess. And I always compare it to playing chess against nature. You can't just make one move at a time and the move is drill a well or a drill hole or get some more to physical survey. You need to start thinking about this in sequences because simply because you're not gonna hit deposits right away. In fact, in the mining industry, the success rate of finding deposit is less than 1%. And the reason for that is that there's a gigantic false positive rate. So we all think there are deposits there but when we drill they're not there. And as a consequence, only one major copper discovery has been found in the last six years. And that copper discovery is in fact a gold discovery. A lot of the mining industry has been focused on gold mining. It's of course the metal we need the least. So this problem is urgent. And so what I'm using in my group is the speed and intelligence of artificial intelligence, right? To really get better insight in how make the chain of explorations that are going to be surveys are going to be needed in order for us to start reducing this false positive rate. If we can go from 1% success to 5% success I think we can get there. So that's hopefully addresses some of the questions that you're asking. And of course this would not have been possible with all the students and postdocs that I have the pleasure to work with. And as you see, as diverse as the topics I work on is also diversity of the group of students that I have the great pleasure to work with. So thank you. Thanks, Jeff. That was really interesting. How can you give a specific example of how your technology might help with social justice or environmental justice? Just to bring us a little more to the point. Yeah, I think the first one, as I mentioned is just the fact that we need to not necessarily go to mine all the deposits that we know but to increase the availability of known deposits. Then people are going to have options to choose rather than having to go mine it because there's just not enough metal and people will force to mine to bring metals to market for batteries. It's already happening. If you look at metal prices in the last six months for lithium and cobalt have increased by 40, 50, 60%. So what's that's going to put a lot of pressure on mining existing mines in areas that we may not want to be mining? So that's number one. And the second one I think I mentioned is this quantitative sustainability part is where environmental issues and justice should become part of the decision-making process for mining companies, but it has to be made quantitative. And so I've worked in my research a long time with oil and gas companies, but also in groundwater and trying to find out what is this trade-off that companies can make. And the trade-off you can make when you have many more deposits in your portfolio if you don't have a few deposits in your portfolio you're forced to take actions that are not to the benefit of local communities. So that's very interesting. Eliminating the scarcity helps with that. Thank you. And Jimmy, you're going to move on to the next guest. Yes, thank you, Melody. So I'd like to introduce Sibyl Diver, who's an environmental governance scholar here at Stanford teaching in the Earth Systems Program. Sibyl. Great. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you to the hosts and the student colleagues for organizing. Welcome everyone. We know it's a difficult time for many so appreciate your being here. I want to take the opportunity today to invite this conversation that we're starting about environmental justice and how it relates to the energy storage sector and sustainable engineering. So as Jimmy said, my name is Sibyl Diver. I study environmental governance and I've spent the last 20 years engaging in research and policy in partnership with Indigenous communities around the Pacific Rim, including the Russian Arctic. And this is work that I initially started as a Russian translator leading international exchanges. And now it's issues that I study and do research on. One of the things that I'm learning from my Indigenous colleagues is that there's a very important connection between responsible mineral sourcing and building a decarbonized economy, as Jeff was alluding to. So as demand for minerals is increasing, Indigenous leaders are looking at companies that design and manufacture batteries and asking them not to buy materials from mining companies with longstanding histories of human rights and environmental violations until meaningful conditions are met. And these are conditions in this case that follow the United Nations declaration of the rights of Indigenous peoples, including free, prior and informed consent. And this is an example. I can share these letters from Russian Indigenous communities who are asking companies like Tesla, like BASF that manufacture batteries, not to source nickel from mining companies like Noryal's Nickel, that is one of the most polluting companies in the Soviet and post-Soviet period. It's also one of the largest nickel producers in the world. And then as an additional example, my colleague Emma Harrison, who's a geoscientist here at Stanford, is partnering with Indigenous communities impacted by lithium mining, who have written an extensive policy to cut to your beat here at the bottom to establish how they would like to be consented and consulted with by companies. Next slide. So this is an environmental justice issue as we've been discussing. And the concepts of environmental justice and environmental racism were initially defined in the US where communities and researchers clearly demonstrated that toxic industries were being preferentially located in communities of color. And we see similar injustices in the transnational context where the minerals being sourced for batteries and electric vehicles are coming primarily from the global South, developing countries and Indigenous lands. And it's these communities that are experiencing disproportionate impacts of environmental harms as well as inequitable access to benefits. And this points to the conversation today and the importance of starting to talk about this because in this case, energy storage innovation is bound up with these deep challenges of mineral extraction and its impacts on Black Indigenous people of color communities through the global supply chain. So I wanna acknowledge this is a very hard problem but this is a great audience to talk to about it. These are fabulous engineering innovators in our community. So the first step towards an environmental justice solution is really choosing to have this difficult conversation and beginning to see these problems from the perspective of impacted communities. So to highlight EJ approaches to problem solving, this includes intending to problems of structural inequity and institutional racism that are deeply connected to environmental degradation, including problems like colonial legacies. And it also includes centering the lived experiences and leadership of Black Indigenous people of color communities who are leading social justice efforts. Next slide, please. So I'm a co-lead here at Stanford for our environmental justice working group. And we think a lot about these issues and how they link to your work as sustainability engineers. So the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 suggests we really need to be talking about clean energy and equity as co-equal goals. And let's just step back for a second and talk about why this is. So one argument is that when we talk about sustainability as intergenerational wellbeing, we don't wish to achieve wellbeing for just one group at the expense of another. And an additional argument comes from environmental justice scholarship showing that inequity disproportionately impacts the health of communities of color. But inequity also brings down health outcomes for everyone. So the point here is that in our quest for sustainability, for decarbonization, for green technologies, if this is leaving behind large parts of the global community, if we enable sacrifice zones for particular parts of the world, racial, ethnic groups, social classes, we will fail in our goals for creating a more sustainable world. So the opportunity here, I think, is first to ask ourselves sustainability for whom. And then second to develop a clearer understanding of how clean energy innovation can drive inequity through global supply chains. And third to be engaging directly with impacted communities who have a very essential perspective on what's happening and how these problems are affecting them on the ground when we begin to discuss and address these problems. And we do this in order to avoid deepening current inequities between more affluent developed countries and the rest of the world. So I'll close here by saying that, this is a challenging topic and we don't have all the answers, but I think I can share one framework for approaching a solution and not as this concept model for a just transition for a green economy. And I invite everyone to have a deeper look at this framework. And I also invite anyone who's interested in an additional conversation to send an email to us at the Environmental Justice Working Group, EJWGStampford at gmail.com. And we look forward to being in touch. So thank you everyone for organizing, especially Gabi Sayiz, Alan Joe, Emma Harrison, and Paul Mickey Pobli for their contributions to the presentation. And I'm glad for questions. Yes. Thank you, Sybil. So this is a timely subject, especially given the determinants of interest now in climate pledges. So there's gonna be a lot of changes on the horizon. So one of the questions I have is, how would you incentivize environmental and social justice among the different stakeholders in such a manner that will foster collaboration and action? Thanks for that question, Jimmy. When I think about incentives, I really think about incentives coming from multiple centers of governance. So we have regulatory drivers that are more traditional top-down incentives. We have market-based drivers and some of the examples for corporate responsibility standards within individual companies and also within sectors. And then we have community-based governance. And all of these things come together and there's incentives and tools for encouraging more responsible supply chains and mineral extraction in all of these areas. And I'll add two more points. One is that I think it's important to just acknowledge that there are different ideas of what the goal is with this, different ideas about what success looks like and what is sustainability and how do we engage in the problem-solving process. And I think we need to create space for working together to really align with some of the community-based goals that are in this space. And that's starting to happen with corporations really getting educated about what are some of the community leadership requests. And those include engaging with the rights of indigenous peoples under the UN Declaration and also procedures for free prior informed consent and procedural justice. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Sybil. Melody, back to you. Well, it's my pleasure to introduce my classmate, Peter Kukowski. And this is from many moons ago, back in 92 when I had my second daughter there, right, it's not at school, but brought her to class a few days later. Peter and I were classmates in the civil engineering department. Peter is now the president and CEO of Hudbay Minerals and is going to talk to us some about his work and his connection to this. Peter? Thanks very much, Melody. And good morning, everybody. And thank you, Stanford and StorageX and all of you for the opportunity to participate today. So maybe a quick few words about Hudbay. We're a mid-tier copper miner focused on low-cost, long-life copper assets in the Americas. Copper is our primary metal, but we also produce significant amounts of gold and zinc. Now in Peru, we have our flagship constancia copper mine that we put into production in early 2015. And in Manitoba, we have our 777 copper zinc gold silver mine. There's been an operation for over 17 years in our LaLore gold zinc copper mine. We also have a sizable pipeline of exploration and development copper properties located in the United States, in Canada, in Peru and in Chile. All this said, our mission is to create sustainable value through acquiring, discovering, developing and operating high-quality assets in jurisdictions that support responsible mining. A few quick words about sustainability and what it means to us at Hudbay. It's fundamental to our business, not only because it's a stakeholder imperative, but also because it makes business sense. And I'm a firm believer that companies who do not believe in this imperative will quickly be marginalized. Overall, we find that by living our values, those which you see on the slide, we're able to build strong relationships with our host communities and governments, which makes us a better partner and a better company. A little bit more detail about sustainability. The foundation of our business at Hudbay is our environmental and social principles. These are embedded in every decision that we make. The slide here highlights a few of our achievements and important initiatives in each of the environment, social impact and health and safety areas. And while I don't expect folks in this forum to be aware of it, we at Hudbay adhere to the Towards Sustainable Mining Program or the TSM Program of the Mining Association of Canada. Consequently, we follow and report publicly on protocols for biodiversity, energy, greenhouse gas emissions, tailings management and more of all and more at all of our operations. And we take pride in our Manitoba division having actually been awarded the TSM Leadership Award in 2019. Then on the diversity front, we've received the government of Canada's Employment Equity Achievement Award in Manitoba and in Peru, 40% of our mining operators come from nearby indigenous communities. And finally, what I'd say is if you can't mine safely, you shouldn't mine. Hudbay is a leader on health and safety in Peru with the best safety track record among the Peruvian copper miners. Now let me touch briefly on Canada and Manitoba where we've discovered, developed, operated and closed some 20 plus mines for over 90 years. Not all are closed yet, of course. Our processing plants are powered by renewable hydropower source from the Manitoba grid. So our greenhouse gas emissions at intensity are relatively low. And we know that successful mine closure begins during the design phase of a project's development and it continues throughout the mines life cycle. Our most recent closure was the reed mining Manitoba in 2018. We refilled and capped the portal to the underground mine using rock excavated during mining operations. Popsoil that had been stockpiled during construction was returned and contoured to replicate the original topography and drainage patterns. And then in consultation with the Manitoba Sustainable Development Organization, we conducted environmental monitoring and analysed site conditions to ensure that all waste rock and contaminated materials had been removed from the site before revegetating the area. Then to encourage natural revegetation, we conducted soil preparation work to allow for proper seed germination. So here you have an example of how we strive to leave our mine sites with the minimum environmental impact possible. A few words on our constancy of mine in Peru where people safety is absolutely our top priority. Safety of course is a challenge for us in Peru. Yet during construction, which can be particularly dangerous in a remote location at an altitude of 14,000 feet, we completed over 20 million work hours without a severe injury. And in Peru supporting the communities in which we operate is a critical component of ensuring that when the mine is depleted we leave behind a community who have preserved their way of life and the need improved it in a sustainable manner. We prioritise local employment and we work to build capacity among local workers and suppliers to generate economic benefits and symbiotic relationships. So nearly 20% of the nearby economically active population works at our mine. Now we recognise that mining activities can impact biological diversity. So Constancies Biodiversity Management Plan includes objectives that aim for the goal of no net loss of biodiversity as a result of mining activities. And we continue to progressively achieve these objectives. A few quick words about copper. We believe that by focusing on mining copper apart from the obvious economic benefits we're helping support a greener and more sustainable future. The key element in addressing climate change is copper which is key to electrification and to decarbonisation. A move towards electric vehicles and social and political pressure towards renewable sources of energy and zero emissions targets will undeniably drive copper demand. But more fundamentally copper remains a core raw material for industrialisation of economies that has no real practical substitute. At the same time large high grade copper projects are becoming scarcer and scarcer, as Jeff said and the technical and social hurdles to bringing these projects online are becoming more and more complex. So that concludes my introduction and I'm happy to take any questions of course. Peter, as a working student my day job is at Ultrogenics, the global VP of engineering and facilities. And I know how difficult it is we're just now standing up our own sustainability department. How do you take what's happening in the copper industry and your overall sustainability goals and bring it down to your workers, your employees, your leaders? That's a really interesting question. We miners have to work hard to change the average way the average way that a person thinks about mining and that goes from the external community as well as to our workers. In my introduction I spoke of the Mining Association of Canada's Toward Sustainable Mining Initiative and the TSM guiding principles recognize that our opportunities to contribute to and thrive in the economies in which we operate have to be earned through a demonstrated commitment to sustainable development. And we think of sustainable development consistent with the definition used by the Bruntland Commission which is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So at Hubei, at Constancia in Peru for example some 20% of the nearby indigenous community works at our mine and we strive to invest in advancing healthcare education infrastructure and those sort of initiatives with great sensitivity to the way of life in the population but by employing a big chunk of the population it becomes much easier to bring the concepts that we try to drive into the overall workforce. And so while 20% of that population is employed in our workforce, 40% of our workforce actually comes from the local indigenous population and understanding what it is that drives them and what their needs are currently and in the future brings enormous sensitivity to the people in the organization who have to work with them on a day to day, in a day to day way. I would say that's in a nutshell. We cannot mine without ensuring that we understand exactly what the sensitivities around us are because we'll go out of business if we do, if we don't. Thank you. Jumi, do you want to introduce the next speaker? Thanks Peter. Thank you Melody. So it's my pleasure to introduce Paul Mickey Aikavle. He's a student in the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford and is also the CEO and co-founder of Coddy Africa and represents one of these new generation of sustainable entrepreneurs. Paul Mickey. Yeah, thanks Jumi and thanks to everyone for having me here today. So just a quick background, I was born and raised in a small village in Ghana. And growing up there, I've had first hand experience with some of the challenges of the energy storage industry because I pretty much grew up without electricity until today my grandmother is still struggling with her health because of some of the energy sources that she had to use at the time that she was growing up. And so with the theme for today which is moving forward together, I come from the lens of equity, equity within the energy industry that how do we ensure that some of this new and really exciting innovations to build a better and cleaner energy future end up in the hands of some of the people who needs it the most. And just to get us thinking about the opportunity just imagine that a place like Congo is producing a lot of co-bots for the world today. And that's really essential for the future that we're building. But on the flip side, Congo has the lowest electrification rate in the world almost 9%. So that is where I see the opportunity that on one hand you have these communities that are providing all the natural resources that we need to build our future, but they disconnect and where I see the biggest opportunity is how they can reap the benefits of some of the amazing technologies that we are producing today. Because when you look at the industry like some of the speakers already highlighted we have a system today where you have the global south in Africa, Latin America and Asia that are predominantly providing the materials for building this new and exciting battery technologies. And unfortunately a lot of the end products tend to focus a lot more in the global north. And so my company, Caddy Energy which I started in 2013 while I was in college was focused much more on bringing low cost and affordable battery storage solutions to rural communities. And at the peak where we had about 17,000 families that were using our batteries. And it's really, really exciting the transformational effect of providing affordable energy storage solutions to this market where the grid infrastructure is almost non-existent. And just providing those batteries we've seen firsthand how that changes their whole economic ladder. And so really I just like to encourage all of us on the call today to think about when we are building new innovative technologies especially within the energy storage industry we have to think about how do we close the loop? How do we make sure that some of the people who need to the most also have access to this new storage technologies that we're building? And I've seen also firsthand some of the cases that are super exciting. For example, Tesla because of the founder of Solar City actually invested in Zola. And Zola is one of the biggest energy player in Africa with off grid electrification. And because of that arrangement they are able to work with Tesla supply chain to bring some of these batteries find ways to reduce the cost and bring them into these rural communities. And this is a company that I've raised over $200 million and their electrification rates and their ability to bring electricity to these rural communities have just been really inspiring. And so I see a lot of opportunities in terms of, yes, a lot of when you're building batteries it takes years to bring it to market, right? But we also have this exciting opportunity where there's a market where the electricity like billions of people don't have electricity. And so if some of these new technologies are very infant I see great opportunity where we can partner with private companies such as the companies that I started to bring these technologies to quicker to this markets. So these people have access to the right amount of electricity to really increase their productivity and to ensure that they have the technology ability to build a much better future. And so this is kind of the lens of taking the sustainability class with Julia and taking a step back to think about my experience building this company for six years and starting it when I was just 20 years old and getting deeper into the battery supply chain and realizing that there's just so much to do and there's so much unique opportunities in terms of bringing this new and innovative technologies to an untapped market. And that is what I want to, you know contribute to that conversation today in terms of how do we move together whilst bringing these people on that journey with us. So thank you and I'm ready for any questions that you might have. Oh, Mickey, that's a remarkable and inspiring story. And I salute your passion. So a question I would have is as an entrepreneur, how do you navigate between the sometimes competing challenges of environmental and social justice with the need to grow your business? That's one that I'm sure a lot of people wonder about and wrestle with. Right, I mean, that's a great question. And it's something that I personally wrestle with as well but I think about it more as, you know giving my background and my experience I tend to align more with industries that the economics and the social and environmental impact are interlocked and not in conflict with each other. And the energy sectors is a very, very good example that, you know, on one hand we need to sustainably source, you know this materials on the flip side you also have, you know millions and billions of people that do not have access to electricity today. And so I think that, you know there's a middle ground of really, you know reconciling the two. And to give a very unique case study with the communities that we work with it's kind of surprising because this family came to us and they are like, hey guys we love that you're providing this battery technology and we're so inspired by, you know your support for us. And so how about you guys dedicate 1% of your profit to building or planting trees within our community. You should have just seen the expression on my face because this is coming from somewhere in a remote area that doesn't have access to electricity and having a battery for the first time. And so these people are already thinking about, you know this sustainability element. And that is the, I think the part that I'm super excited about in terms of how do we create that balance and it start with just speaking to these communities because they already have a lot of ideas on how you can, one, provide these technologies to them and two, also make sure that the environments or the space that they live in is protected. Thank you so much for such a great answer to that challenging question. Let me turn it over to Melody. Thanks Paul Meekie. Our last speaker is Alexis Georgetown, the VP of Communications and Government Relations for Redwood Materials, a leader in lithium ion recycling and battery materials. Alexis, would you like to introduce yourself and take a deep dive into how we're trying to connect everybody? Our professor told us the framework is connect, adapt, innovate. So we've got everybody here. We're trying to connect with the circular economy. What do you and Redwood Materials are contributing to this? Thanks so much Melody and thank you everyone for having me here today. A bit of background on me. I was fortunate to begin my career, actually about 24 hours after graduating college at this very small sort of scrappy electric vehicle startup called Tesla. And I joined prior to the launch of the first production vehicle, the Model S. And so I was fortunate to be with the company for about five and a half years and really witness the mainstream birth of kind of incredible growth of the electric vehicle industry. Fast forward a few years, I've joined Redwood, a company that was founded by many of my old Tesla colleagues, JB Strobel in particular, who was the co-founder and longtime CTO at Tesla. And at Redwood, we're really focused on inventing sustainable materials by creating circular supply chains and turning waste into profit and developing the solution for a fully closed loop recycling. We know that in the next few years, the hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles are gonna start returning from the fields and we wanna be ready to be able to recycle them and return those raw materials to the supply chain. So within the coming decades, we believe that all transportation is gonna be electric and all electricity will be sustainable. And so the lithium ion batteries and other materials needed to power those solutions are gonna need to be reused in a closed loop. And therefore advanced recycling will need to ultimately, you know, displace terrestrial mining. And so to do that, we are focused on relentlessly improving recycling economics with technology that will reduce the cost of materials and ensure the sustainable circular economy. So we are focused on mining, basically post-product materials, which is a feedstock that is growing incredibly quickly as we know right now, that's heavily consumer electronics and an e-waste like tablets and iPhones as well as production scrap from battery manufacturers. But in the coming years, when some of the early electric vehicles start coming off the roads and maybe the next five to 10 years, we're going to have to start recycling those batteries at a really incredible rate. So demand for lithium ion batteries is growing and there's just so many raw materials in these products and there are materials that really can be recycled almost infinitely without degradation or loss of efficiency. You know, every electric car, tablet, phone, scooter, bike, and now is requiring a lithium ion battery. And then in addition, there's something like 100 battery factories since the Tesla Gigafactory came online that have been announced. So demand growth is enormous for these materials. And we know that there's going to be a looming shortage of battery materials such as nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper in the coming years. And as Peter and Jeff both emphasized, mining isn't going to be irrelevant anytime soon. We need to be responsibly mining and it's great to see a lot of people that are involved in this call today that are very focused on that. And ultimately recycling will help to bridge that gap and then eventually it will sort of sustain the supply chain that we need. So this is just a quick slide that I find kind of staggering on the supply chain today. Lithium from South America travels to China to Japan and then ultimately to Nevada to end up in the end product. So it's incredible how far these atoms really travel and that contributes heavily, of course, to the environmental footprint as well as the cost of creating these batteries. And so ensuring that we're recycling, or in our case, kind of mining from post-products locally is a big way that we're going to drive down the cost and the environmental footprint of these materials. Next slide, please. So this is sort of our business outline. It's broken into three groups. One, we're sort of a waste handling company. Batteries are the problematic waste and we're dealing with the shipping and storage of those. And then we are a materials refining company and recycling is a key part of this equation, but to capture the opportunity, we need to link recycling with refining and manufacturing to invent a new pathway for how to create these materials sustainably. And so Redwood is currently developing processes to produce battery grade materials from our total processing activities and return those into the supply chain. And we've partnered already with a number of major battery companies such as Panasonic at the Tesla Gigafactory. And also recently formed partnerships with Envision AESC, who is another major battery manufacturer in North America, as well as companies like Amazon to recycle EV and other lithium-ion batteries and e-waste. And we're already recovering those elements from batteries and are able to return that raw material back to the battery and EV manufacturers. And really the lever that's letting us do this are the used products like electronics and electric vehicles that are coming back from the market. Well, thank you, Alexis. That's just really inspiring how you've gone from Tesla to innovating with Redwood on these ways to recycle. Do you have any ideas or thoughts on how you might connect with on the ground smaller businesses like Paul Meekie and Ghana, how they can recycle batteries in Ghana, how Paul Meekie could jump right in and get to be part of it? Sure, well, it's great to see the work of Paul Meekie and others and the innovation happening in all the corners of the world. For Redwood, we really see the ultimate strategy to localize our operations, where the problem is. As I noted on that map of sort of the supply chain and how far these atoms are traveling, bringing recycling capabilities to the source of where these batteries, factories and ultimately the markets for these products are located as key. Our facilities right now are located in Nevada and that's very strategic due to the fact that we're partnered with Panasonic at the Tesla Gigafactory, which is about 30 miles away. And additionally, we're located right near what is the largest and the earliest electric vehicle market, which is California. So we know that the first wave of EVs are gonna start coming off the road and they'll start coming off the road in California first. You know, as we grow our operations, we're gonna be placing facilities near battery manufacturers and EV OEMs and near electric vehicle and energy storage markets. No plans to be in Ghana in the near future, but certainly hope that that will change. Yeah, that's really exciting. And Jimmy, do you wanna open up to the panel now for a question that maybe Alexis can start with is there a framework or forum that we can apply to bring us all together in the future, something like Circular 2021 to keep this connection going? Any ideas, Alexis? Yeah, I think forums like this are really a great way to get us all together and to have thought leaders in a space that can really collaborate. You know, this issue is not gonna be solved by any one company and it's really important that we have sort of the entire industries thinking and expertise to help address this problem. Great, thank you, panelists. So I'd like to start with a question that is similar to what Melody just spoke of, which is, so can you imagine an existing framework in the battery space that it can enable collaboration across the supply chain to create successful strategies and adoption of these strategies? Any examples that you're familiar with in the past or current? This is open to any of the panelists. Yes, certainly. You know, it's a really interesting question, but it's one that actually has been attacked fairly consistently, certainly in my space in the Miami industry by various industry organizations. And if it could be done by them, it certainly can be done by groups like us. And I don't want to pop on too much about the mining association of Canada, but what they've done through their towards sustainable mining initiative is they actually reported protocols or they have protocols that govern indigenous and community relations, energy use and GHG emissions, a tailings management, biodiversity management, safety and health, prevention of child and forced labor, water stewardship, all of those kind of things which are obviously of intense interest to what I hear from it to this group. And they've done it in a way in which it highlights the importance of all these and brings different players into one forum. More than that though, if you look broader than the mining association of Canada, you have the International Council on Mining and Metallurgy that addresses all of these subjects, but is more tilted towards sustainability of the industry and drawing in players in the supply chain as opposed to just mining industry players. So I'm confident that if we utilize frameworks like those employed by ICMM on the one hand or by the mining association of Canada on the other hand, that it's pretty easy to get the dialogue going. And I think you've seen from a forum like this that once you get it going, probably will be difficult to stop. Thank you, Peter. Any other frameworks that people are aware of? Yeah, so, yeah, so I mean, coming from Ghana, Ghana is also, we have a lot of mining, yeah, with gold and a lot of this. And what the government did, I mean, it's still not perfect, but something I feel like is in the right direction. The challenge with mining has to do with a lot of illegal miners, right? They're small scale people who set up shops and they don't have the technology or the capability to mine, the way that Peter was describing. As well, they've done is they've basically licensed a few private large organizations to mine. And if you're a small scale miner that want to get a license, you have to go through those businesses. And so they've effectively created a system where these companies are now responsible for ensuring that these small miners actually adhere to the strict EPA regulations and some of this stuff. And it's not perfect, but because it's difficult for the government to actually regulate this themselves. And so by that private partnership, we're seeing a lot of good results. Great, thank you, Paul and Micky. Sybil, you have some thoughts? Yeah, I'm looking at the questions which are really good also about how do you just integrate all of these different problems together? And I just want to reiterate that I think the solutions are going to come from multiple locations. And so thinking about the community centers and what communities can do to move things forward. What are regulatory processes doing? What are companies themselves doing? But all of these are different centers of innovation that sometimes have different goals but can move this effort forward on the global supply chain issues in a productive way. And I think it's really helpful to think a little bit more about the work that Alexis does with addressing toxic waste issues and the justice issues around toxic waste management and where toxic waste gets goes, who gets dumped on, what are the working conditions around that? There's been a lot more time and energy devoted to that question and we have international conventions like the Basel Convention that helps to align goals between multiple countries on that issue. And so in terms of mining exploration, I think there's opportunities to look to the issue around toxic waste management and how that very diverse and multifaceted infrastructure has gotten developed over time where it's not just one center but multiple centers of solutions that are happening in many different community spaces as well as in the regulatory space. And that's really important because even with mining with a country like Canada, some of my colleagues who are indigenous scholars are writing that Canada has really important assessment processes but this question of how do we include indigenous peoples, indigenous knowledge in a way that doesn't tokenize those communities is very challenging. And even in a place like Canada, it's not quite there yet. So there's room to grow and it's a good group to start that conversation. Thank you, Sibyl. Any other thoughts? We have some great questions coming in from the audience. I'm going to try to meld some of them together. Oh, Alyssa Cockatkova, PhD in Eton from Russian Federation is asking how we pull together academia and industry. And just to meld this with some of the other questions, how can a company academia cultivate solidarity with communities in creating a sustainable and just future? So, Jeff, what do you think? How can we bring academia into this? Yeah, that's the question I've been thinking about for the last 25 years of my career. And I think we're at a point where academia needs to think seriously about scale up. We have great ideas. Just to give a good example, a solid state battery is a great idea, but to scale it up to say industrial use is going to take about 10 years. So this is the other thing I think that we need to think about is how fast can we do this rather than just doing the research? I see new alliances being built that are unusual alliances. And the example I gave of the billionaires working with a mineral exploration company, working with an academic unit or research group, this is one of the models, I think, going forward. I think we need to go from proof of concept in the lab to really scaling it up to the planet-wide scale. And that is, I think, in terms of everything we do in sustainability and climate, this is the real challenge that we're facing today. So any thoughts on this from anyone else? How about Alexis with integrating the academia with the industry? What are your interactions with academia? Well, we're actually very excited and kind of fortunate at Redwood to be conducting an exciting sustainability study with a group of faculty from Stanford across various departments around the energy and emissions in different battery material pathways. And this is, we're just in the early stages of beginning this study, but ultimately we're really interested in looking at, in particular, recycled material versus virgin mind material. And for us, we're committed to not only contributing to the industry sustainably through recycling, but also by furthering our operations and our process in a sustainable and safe manner. And so, having an institution like Stanford helping us to identify ways that we can continuously improve that process is really key. So Paul Meekie, just to pull in one question from the audience, Leslie Quintilla, I know I said her last name wrong, when you're trying to get this integration, you've come to Stanford, you've got your education, how would you take it back to Ghana when you have post-protesters saying, you know, to mining on all lands, how do you bring this connection back there and serve justice and also bring in all the forces that you've made connections with? Yeah, that's a great and complex question. So, I mean, I came to Stanford for one reason and I've always just thought about the future where we relied up Africa. And so, you know, really the challenge is how do you, you know, balance, balance this sense? And I think it starts with, you know, having very, you know, meaningful conversations and in a sense, I think a lot of the hesitation has to do with, you know, how these communities feel like they capture value, if that makes sense. So in a lot of sense, you know, when you look at every supply chain, especially when it comes to mineral sourcing and some of this stuff, the local communities aren't getting enough value out of it. And that is where you can see a lot of their hesitation, the value and also how longevity, right? How do you make sure that the environment gets, you know, protected? And so the challenges and the opportunity is being able to communicate to these people that, you know, to build a better energy future or to even put electricity in your hands, we need these materials, that's a no-brainer. But on the flip side, helping them understand that, you know, there are ways that we could do that whilst protecting the environment and looking at, you know, other industries like in oil and gas and taking some of the insights and learnings from there, we can build a better future. So it's one, having that conversation and two, you know, proving to them that there's a model or the opportunity to reconcile those two. And if those are not there, unfortunately, a lot of you always face a lot of resistance. And back to my earlier point, it's also that disconnect, right? You know, provided this essential material for batteries, but you don't have electricity. I mean, I would say don't mind here, right? And so that's the opportunity. We can also put some of these innovations into their hands. It's just to create that, you know, better incentive for them to be like, okay, you know, we see the opportunity and we're really empowered to be part of that future. So Jimmy, if I could turn the tables and ask you a question as one of the researchers at StorageX, you're in the beginning of this supply chain with creating the ideas about battery. How do you integrate with Alexis and others and Peter and the miners to make sure that your inventions are sustainable and feed into sustainable and equitable environments? Yeah, Melody, that's a great question. And I would say, Alexis, we're also very excited here at Stanford to be working with breadwin materials. And that's actually an example of how we work at StorageX is we find the linkages between various companies and people in the whole supply chain. And one of the big things that we're doing right now in StorageX is we're creating a consortium called the, I always call it C2E2. I think it's the consortium for, I'm gonna forget. But basically it's a consortium to bring together the various players on looking at a sustainable battery supply chain, whether it's recycling, reuse or repurposing. And that's actually we're kicking that off in about a week. So it's a very important area. And we are focused on that. To get that tied together. Jeff, I was just thinking about the linkage between your work and Alexis's work. She's doing industrial mining. You've got all these various recycling places around the country where maybe phones were put inappropriately. Can you use your technology to find landfills where Alexis can do industrial mining? Yeah, so my work and my group works in general in earth resources subsurface. So we work on a variety of problems related also to water. I think water is often not mentioned in this context of mining, but the mining industry uses a gigantic amount of water and also even metals pollute naturally water. So if we're going to expose things, so what I'm saying is that the ideas of geophysical imaging and other types of data acquisition techniques are gonna be increasingly be used. Of course, have been used extensively in the oil and gas industry, but they are not used at the level for these kind of new purposes, such as the kind of problems that Alexis is working on. So it's really again, of how do we use modern technology in these new settings? And I think that's one of the challenges. That's interesting. Lexis, any ideas on how you might partner with Jeff? Or I also know, Peter, that you've studied up a bit on what Jeff is doing. What do you think about traditional finding locations of mine versus what Jeff is doing here? Any thoughts, Peter? Yeah, absolutely. And the two traditional methods are geophysical and geological. So geophysical, you use electromagnetic tools largely and geological, you drill. But as Jeff said, drilling is a fairly random exercise. And if you're looking at an anomaly that's 500 kilometers in length, where do you poke your holes? It's very, very complex. So to the extent that you can utilize artificial intelligence to guide you better in order to start your traditional work, it's a huge plus for the industry, so there have been the other elements of it too. There's collaboration between academia and operating companies and mining companies whereby there is material sorting done at the shovel of an excavator where you can determine what the primary elements are in the rock that is about to be put into a shovel so that you can direct or in one way or another one direction and waste in a different direction and avoid creating wastage and energy wastage or crushing all of it instead of separating it first. So there are a lot of initiatives like that with think tanks who feed industry. I just think it's an incredibly fertile area for collaboration and the company that did that particularly I think was called MindSense, I think in Vancouver, but what Jeff is involved in a cobalt is equally exciting. Actually, I had a question along those lines. Jeff, so we're working and starting to work with a lot of mining companies. If they're interested in these technology that you're developing, how would they use it or utilize it in their work going forward? Yeah, that's a great question and I'm very excited to be involved in something like that this summer. So this summer I'll be involved with a mining company and a mineral exploration company to go to that 500 kilometer area and do real-time, as Peter said, geophysical data acquisition, but at the same time we're not just gonna get in data acquisition and then work on this data for two years. What we'll do is to employ the techniques I developed that interact with the real-time data acquisition and steer the data acquisition to the areas that we believe is the most valuable for exploring the next data acquisition. So we call this a value of information problem, which we have to find out what is the most valuable area of acquiring not drilling to get to the target but reducing the false positive rates because the fact simply is that we're gonna have to try hundreds of times. And the model that's today used by the industry is often that exploration has been formed out to more junior miners we call those. And those are people with a $5 million budget but that budget is not gonna cut it in terms of exploring vast amounts of areas. So that is what we're trying to establish and I'm very excited to be involved in that. I think at one point that we haven't really raised and perhaps something the panelists can discuss is education because I ask in my class every single time, what's in your cell phone? And I think about how the students know that the lithium ion batteries in the cell phone and then I asked them, what is in a lithium ion battery? And then most students do not know what's in a lithium ion battery. And then I asked them, where does the cobalt come from? And that is absolutely nobody knows that. So educating our communities around the resources and the materials that they're using. And while we say sustainability, I think educating them around that materials are not necessarily fully sustainable because of their sourcing because of the environmental justice issues around that. I think Stanford needs to really invest in education which is our primary goal but education from a holistic point of view not just about, I'm gonna take a class in machine learning and a class in this and that. But where do batteries come from? I think that'd be a great class. So I just wanna make that point. That cross-pollination is really important. And I was wondering, Paul Miki and Sybil, the whole other part of the university we've carried people on is the economical and the governance awareness and education on that. Paul Miki, is there anything with the finance and the governance that might help on the ground in Ghana? Yeah, definitely. So that's actually something that we're working on right now. And six months ago, we started a FinTech platform focused on mining and oil and gas and this big industries. And the goal is to bring technology, to bring better transparency and financing to these industries because as you can imagine, a lot of this issue stems from the fact that a lot of local miners or people working in these industries don't have the liquidity to effectively source or mine this materials ethically. And on the flip side, it's also, they don't really have the tools or the liquidity again to bring some of this innovation. That's really important to do that. And so, yeah, it's been really exciting working with some mining companies in Ghana and trying to help them with, how do you contract better? So you're not just taking this contract off some middleman, right? How do you clean up this pipeline so there's better transparency? And so we've been digitizing the contracting, the operations, like once you mine, even reporting the data on all of that. And this is something that no one has access to that data today, not even the government. They're just like, you just bring them a bulk of gold that you've mine and they have no idea what happened before then. And so it's just been really exciting to build tools like that that can bring better transparency. And then we can connect those tools to the global supply chain ecosystem to do two things. One, to ensure again that the economics favor this local communities. And two, to also, to Jeff's point, and this data will become valuable in the future bringing other AI systems that can help them ensure that one, they get enough material from the ground, but two, how do you do that sustainably? And it's just been really exciting to bring this kind of technology to this industry. Thank you, Sybil. Do you have anything to add on the governance? We also spoke with our colleagues in the Hoover Institute and they were talking about the Belt and Road Initiative. Maybe Sybil and Paul can, Paul Miki, can you comment on how governance can help our colleagues in academia and in government who set up these structures? Thanks, Melody. I'd love to comment. And perhaps I can bridge some of the conversation about education and governance. One of the things that I think is very exciting is that colleagues from the Environmental Justice Working Group are really starting conversations on campus about environmental justice in engineering. And I think the student leadership in this is really key that there are a number of students who are really engaging at a deep level around community impacts related to clean energy design. And Emma Harrison is one person that I'll highlight who's a great resource. And we have the opportunity and the convening power at Stanford to really enable these direct conversations where we can hear from communities and from researchers who are doing deep community partnerships so that they are not, we're not operating with blinders on, right? We think we know what we know, but often we just, there's gaps because we're here at Stanford, we're working in the global North, we're in a very elite institution. So this opportunity to broaden our view to take off the blinders and to convene conversations that directly connect us with impacted communities and enable communities to speak for themselves because often as experts we don't have the same viewpoint or same lived experience. So that is, I think a huge opportunity to help drive innovation and goal setting in a way that we maybe wouldn't otherwise be thinking about. And then governance, just to offer a few examples that I think are important. So this idea of working from traditional regulatory frameworks where it's government driven top down, there are a number of laws and regulatory systems that are in place to help us with these problems. One of them being the Dodd-Frank Act, which has provisions around conflict mineral sourcing, which the US has a part of, right? There's also the industry frameworks that are in place around corporate responsibility standards. And an example of that would be Irma. So this is an initiative for responsible mining assurance where companies can regulate themselves acknowledging that transparency and improvement is better for everyone in the industry because of the reputational risk that is involved with these problems. And then third, community-based instruments. I shared at the very beginning of my presentation this Kachayupi initiative where indigenous communities across multiple cultural groups got together and wrote their own provisions for consultation and consent on how they would like to be approached. And this is very important because the idea here is that these are multiple communities not individuals and they're responsible for a large group of people. And so in terms of solving this problem of how do we have respectful and legitimate consent processes, these community governance instruments are extremely important. So those are three examples just to share, but there's many others. Thanks. Thank you. Paul Miki, did you have anything to add on? We have lots of questions coming in about the impact locally on the Belt and Roads initiative in Africa. Any impact or awareness you have of that? Yeah, yeah, I've had some first-hand experience and I just came back from Ghana and went to some of the mining sites myself and I'm still recovering from just kind of the emotional damage. But that's kind of the opportunity. And to Jeff's point, I mean it's like education is a big part and it has to do with not just educating education at the Stanford level but our governments as well. Because I don't think they really understand the global supply chain, the material that has been sourced and what it's gonna be used for. And so right now we're facing a lot of challenges especially with China relation across Africa. And that has to do with, I think our leaders need to be equipped with the data and the information that they need to go to the table and strike a fair deal that could work for a lot of these countries. So that's where we're seeing the biggest challenge because obviously because of this governments are not equipped with the right level of education to really bag in and make sure that even the mining practices, right? That okay, you can come in mine but these are the rules that you have to follow. And it took Ghana a long time. We finally have an EPA, right? Before we didn't. And now they are regulating the mining sector. So you need to get certification from them and all of them. And it took us so long to really ramp up to this. And so back to the earlier point, it's more about how people like me can go back to my country and help the government understand that the conversation has to start from the top down as well. Because before, you can come into these countries and mine, you need to have some arrangement with these governments. And if they are able to strike a good partnership that could work for the local communities, then we have no problem at all. But in most cases, they're just like, okay, you give us this, you take that and then the local communities have to stand up for themselves. And so back to Jeff's point, the education element is not just Stanford, but beyond that, how do we take that to the real world and equip these governments to really think about the decisions that they are making and how they can make a better decision that will ensure that the local communities are protected. Thank you, Paul, Miki. Jimmy, we've got that question, a lot of questions on balancing the corporate need to return money to shareholders with balancing with social and environmental justice. The B Corp framework is out there. Alexis, what do you think and your company think about how to balance the need for profit and these other goals? I spoke a lot about it in your slides. Yeah, certainly. I mean, at Redwood, we really understand that driving down the cost of these materials and making recycled materials price competitive with mined material is ultimately going to help drive this technology forward and solve this problem. So that's a really critical part of this equation for us. Redwood is already pretty cost effective today and we're already able to return value back to partners even at this early stage. So it's exciting and it's promising and our goal is really to continue to drive down that cost. And I'd love to make just another point on education. So everyone was sort of mentioning it. Obviously we're well on our way to making transportation sustainable and everyone here has sort of noted that the materials and mining industries are amazingly just not getting the same sort of level of attention and that the materials needed to build our sustainable worlds need more focus. We can't have a sustainable economy with a zero carbon footprint if a system is based off of a single use plan to just mine it and use it and then discard it. But as we were talking about sort of landfill as well as mines, one other area that we need to be educating is just around the material that we already have, the devices that we've already purchased that are at the end of their life. And that's an incredible opportunity to mine those materials as well. It's believed that one of the largest lithium mines and perhaps many other critical elements is in the junk drawers of Americans. And so the good news is that people aren't putting that in landfill necessarily, but they also don't know what to do with it. And so it's sort of just sitting there. And there are a number of different third party consolidators that are doing a really great job of pulling those old cell phones and tablets and power drill batteries and sending them to recyclers like Redwood. But it really comes down to education of consumers to get those devices out of our junk drawers and into responsible pathways to have those material three used. Yeah, that's a great answer, Alexis. And one of the things I should mention is that one of our goals in StorageX is to educate and educate holistically. So we are putting together these classes now along those lines. And we certainly welcome Jeff and other people to be involved in these new holistic class offerings that we're considering. And so, I mean, I think right now, for example, we're putting together a class on manufacturing, battery manufacturing. And I can easily see us folding in segments of that that cover the other aspects, like where the materials come from. And how do we get those materials? It's a big opportunity. And what we tend to find is that they're siloed. The educations are siloed. And that's one of the things that we want to address going forward. Could I maybe just jump in again on the question with respect to balancing profit and of four shareholders and the needs of the environment and other stakeholders? And I'll just make a quick comment. And I think that this has become a topic that has been massively more important during the pandemic. And so the sharing of the pie has become more and more and more in focus. And if you look at communities in rural areas, Peru's a great example is they've not been able to rely on government to meet their needs in an environment where a lot of economic activity is all but vanished. And so, of course, what they are looking at is they look at the operations that are underway around them and what they're generating. And there's an expectation that they too should benefit from those. And even if they are, the level of economic activity has declined so much that the pressure is greater and greater and greater. And I do not expect, even when the pandemic is over, that these pressures will go away. So I think that we are facing a redistribution of the spoils from industry in so many ways in the years and generations ahead. And again, I think that you ignore it at your own peril. But it is an incredibly demanding environment that has to be paid close attention to. And I think shareholders are gonna demand it as well. They're gonna demand profits, but they're gonna demand more equitable distribution. Thanks, Peter. There's another great question that just came in. And I'm wondering from all of the panelists, do you have any ideas how we transition if the recycled content, Alexis, isn't sufficient to meet global demand for materials, especially if the materials, if Jeff goes out there and he finds and finds and finds and there's not enough, is there some whole systems thinking that we can think about another way? Jimmy, it might be back at you about designing again. I can give you some thoughts. Why don't you take it first, Peter? So, I was looking at some numbers a few days ago and given the demands of decarbonization and in general, a greener environment, just on copper as a conductor of electricity, there is about 2050 in order to meet global decarbonization targets, you need approximately 30 million tons of copper. So about 30% of copper today is recycled or about a third is. So you need 20 million tons of new copper supply, 20 new tons over 30 years. You talk about, you know, three quarters of a million tons a year, which is the equivalent of about seven and a half, or call it seven, new mines a size of high base constancy in Peru every single year, every year just to meet that demand. If you look at electrical vehicles in the U.S., there's, I don't know, there's 275 million vehicles registered in the U.S. today. If only, if let's say half of those are to be electrical vehicles in the years ahead, you talk about a million tons of copper. I mean, that is just extraordinary and it has to come from somewhere, or as you suggest, we have to get better at recycling because today we only recycle 30% of copper that goes into applications. So lots of opportunity. The only alternative is substitution, but, you know, we've been trying, people have been trying to substitute for copper for decades and have not found a way. Yeah, if I can pick up on that, I think those are, you know, you can make this for any metal in the table of elements. And, you know, we can look for substitutes, but the time is running out, right? We can't just go and let's find the next technology and that'll be done in 20 years. I think there is enough. And the point is that we have been looking for oil and gas for the last 100 years using seismic techniques and drilling and we have spending trillions and trillions of dollars in doing that. So now is the time to start looking for metals and there are an abundant of metals in the crust. We just haven't really looked very well at this particular point or mining companies have certainly been incentivized by looking for gold, which has been a high price over the last number of years. And I think that brings me also to the point that was raised earlier is you may have noticed that even in the last months, the American Petroleum Institute has said that we need to have carbon taxes. That is a huge, huge, huge turnaround. And I think this is what we can do for the metals as well is there is pressure from the outside. There is pressure economically for all companies to change and to reinvent our businesses in terms of say, hydrogen storage or CO2 storage or other types of things. I think that same pressures can be applied to the whole mining industry, such that the things that mistakes that we made for oil and gas we're no longer making when we're going to mine this huge amount of metals in a very short amount of time. Yeah, I don't know if people are aware but certainly in the recycling of lead acid batteries, we're very high, north of 90% easily. And if you take a look at lithium ion batteries, we're, I think we're under 5%. Alexis, you probably have the most accurate number on that. So there's a tremendous opportunity there. We're just starting that path. Of course, it's a lot more complicated with lithium ion batteries, but I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Alexis? Yeah, absolutely. That's about the statistic that we have as well, Jimmy, which is less than 10% of these batteries at this point are making their way to recyclers. And again, it comes back to education. It comes back to defining those materials and also ensuring that they don't end up in landfill. And ultimately, we're gonna need to continue mining as everybody has sort of noted because we do need more and more of these materials, but mine materials are going to get more scarce and more expensive because there's simply a finite amount and then recycling will over time hopefully become easier as the number of old products increases and the ability and the pressure to recycle them will also increase as well. Thank you, Alexis. Yes, Sybil? Yeah, just alongside this conversation about like in the increased demand, I think that the, I just wanna bring us back to that just transitions framework for a green economy, which is a really great thinking tool, I think for us to continue to have these conversations about how do we address the demand alongside with not leaving particular communities behind. And I think that as we talk about these issues in our goal setting at a very high level, it's some of my colleagues, I think you have a colleague, Leah Seligman who works for the corporation and they're really taking business leaders and aligning business leadership to really enable higher levels of goal setting, both at the government level and also in industry about how do we do this work where we link clean energy needs and equity needs together? And so I think this just transition framework is just a really key way, a key idea and concepts that allows us to maintain these multiple questions and multiple needs as co-equal goals that we're pursuing at the same time and that we all take on regardless of what, whether we're working at the community level or industry level or government, but that we all have opportunities to engage in this and really thinking about that, how do we get to a just transition? How do we build in communities into that framework? I think it's really helpful. Yeah, that's a great point, Seville. And one of the questions actually that came from one of the students was, is there value or should we create some sort of metric? Like where we have a measure of sustainability or social and environmental justice that can be measured against and businesses can then be measured against that and tracked. And this is actually open to a number of the panels, Peter, Jeff and others as an idea. Right, yeah, so I can take that. And so with my company, I mean, we work a lot with the sustainable development goals. And they already have very good metrics for across this multiple industries, right? What should you track and what should we do collectively to usher in a new world? And so they're already like a lot of metric out there and models like that in terms of what to measure and what is considered being on that and a good path. But I think some of these metrics and obviously they also recognized that a lot of them tend to be much more just at the high level. And so it's left up to back to Jeff's point around education, how do we equip leaders with the ability to be like, what is it gonna take to reach like zero waste, for example, right? Because the sustainable development goals could be, okay, we want to reach zero waste by 2050. I'm just giving you an example here. But bottom line is that every company or every institution have to figure out on the individual level or on the corporate level, how can you orient the internal structure of your company or your institution to go towards that goal? And that is the biggest challenge. And Jimmy, it requires a lot of leaders start looking at some of these impact metrics. And so yes, profit is always your leading indicator with most businesses, but sustainability could also plug into that. And like what a lot of the panelists shared today and the train has already left the station. And there's so much pressure that we have to create a better future. And so it's not when, but like how fast can we move? And so yeah, it goes back to education. And that's why I'm super excited and why I took this sustainability course that kind of brought all of this together because it also starts with being able to usher in new types of leaders that are just not looking at profits, but also how do we protect the environment? And it's just been so inspiring for me to be, I've been thinking about this recycling thing for six or seven years. And then suddenly I'm in a class where, I'm in a group with Melisa, who is doing a lot of this in a battery innovation. And then Gabi that's been doing a lot of social justice work. And it's just so amazing how they all just came together on this project because I was like, and I wanted to do something with the energy sector and they were all just came together. And so I think the leadership element is kind of the key missing piece and the biggest opportunity for all of us and being able to track the metrics effectively and looking at it, you know, sustainability metrics, the same way we look at profits. And I like what Alexis shared as well, that, hey, you can make money while it's doing good. And there are already models that are on the way. And it's just, how do we adapt and put every company or institution on that path? Thank you. Thank you for that, Paul-Makie. Alexis, there's a couple of questions. There's a lot of interest on this whole recycling thing. Oh, did you have something, Jeff? It's a brief because I see we're running out of time and I did want to make a little plug here. Yeah, metrics are great. And I think Stanford should have its own metric for our own community. When I, you know, 10 years ago when John Hennessey was president, he said, we are going to improve our undergraduate education. I'm going to raise a billion dollars. He ended up raising $6 billion. I think it is, I'm calling up our president to start raising a billion dollars for these kinds of initiatives because this kind of transition, recycling, the economy, the materials where it comes from, the environmental justice, this is our future that's at stake. And many people have said that this just transition is what is going to define our contribution to climate change. Simply because we are at this, you know, as I mentioned, precipice where if we don't act right now and we don't follow up on all the promises that we make and the great thoughts that we have, we're going to end up with having driving still the internal combustion engines in 30 years. And this is what at stake. So I think Stanford should set some real goals here as well and I just want to leave it there. That's a great point, Jeff. And certainly those are the people that don't know. Stanford's embarking on creating a new school of sustainability and there's tremendous discussions around that throughout the whole campus. Many, many meetings on that. And this will be a great point to include in that. I think any last thoughts from any of the panelists? I'd just like to thank our professor, Julia Novi and my teammates, Alan, Gabby, Paul Meke and Melissa. Everybody's not on the screen now, but lots of work by everybody. And thanks for inviting us, Jimmy. I know it was a leap of faith to have students help with it, but we really appreciate being able to get, especially the new young leaders out there. Oh, well, I would like to thank all of our speakers, Alexis, Sibyl, Paul Meke, Jeff and Peter. And actually I would like to thank the students. I know that when the students approached us with this topic and their passion that they showed on this, we were inspired. And we said, well, we can bring you to our flagship event that we have. And it's really important and it's great to see this new generation of leaders that are so talented, passionate and driven. Anyway, I would like to go ahead and also thank our staff for putting on this event and thank everyone for attending. And we look forward to subsequent student led symposia.