 Right folks, we're about a minute or so after our start time, so I think we'll get going and this is being recorded and will therefore be available for others to view later as well. So my name is Doug Johnson-Pernskine, I'm the co-founder and chief exec of Circular. We've been members of Hyperledger since about 2017, contributing to a variety of the Hyperledger projects and our platform, which I'm going to tell you a little bit more about as we go through this uses Hyperledger fabric. What I'm intended to cover in the next sort of 25 minutes or so is an introduction to some of the problems that we solve, how we have implemented a platform to do it and to unpack a little bit some of those lessons from the front line of trying to deal with carbon emissions. So the title of this presentation is Tackling the Supply Chains Contribution to Global Carbon Emissions and what I want to, after giving a little bit of an introduction to who we are, I want to explain a bit about why that is a problem and something that is worthy of being solved or addressed and then get into a little bit more of how does it actually work. The reason you're seeing me like this and I'm not actually putting my PowerPoint into full screen is so that I can actually keep an eye on the chat and also the Q&A, which I can't do if I go into full screen mode. So if you want to ask questions, either pipe up in the chat or the Q&A and I'll try and either pick those up as I go along or, alternatively, turn to them at the end of this presentation. I've also put my contact details in chat if anybody wants to pick up with me offline after this. So just a brief introduction then to who circular are. We were formed in 2017, originally in the UK we now have officers in London, Dublin and Berlin just opening an office in Singapore and about to open one in the United States. About 40 people so far and we focus on complex industrial supply chains. The reason why complex industrial supply chains is there are some inherently critical challenges in those industrial supply chains where materials change between their origin and their consumption, which need tackling both from a responsible sourcing perspective but also from a carbon emissions perspective and that's what I'm going to be talking about today. There have been traceability applications for things like food for some time and also gemstones. But unlike a diamond, which is a diamond at a mine site and it's still a diamond will be cut and polished by the time it finds its way, for example, into a piece of jewelry. The challenge with the commodities that we deal with is that they change. So you dig out or from a mine site in say Australia and it will undergo smelting and refining and amalgamation without materials co-mingling as well with materials from other batches at various stages in the life cycle before that that material is incorporated within components that might find their way into a battery cell that go into a battery pack and go into an electric vehicle, for example. And so those multiple transformations are what make these supply chains far more complicated than say tracking a tuna steak or tracking a diamond. And that's the use case that we've given ourselves. We're venture funded. We've raised around 20 million dollars so far. And just to give you an idea of some of the people we work with, the customers shown on this slide have gone public with what we do or their downstream OEMs have talked about what we do with them. You'll see car manufacturers there like Volvo, Daimler, Polestar, you know, manufacturers of industrial vehicles like CNH, for example, mining companies like BHP and a whole variety of midstream participants in primarily the battery supply chain, but also hard to recycle plastics. You can see Total Energy as they're now called. They're just renaming themselves from Total, the oil company. There is both a customer and an investor at last. And you can see a selection of some of the investors that have investors. Many of our early customers also chose to invest. And we built our platform on top of the Oracle blockchain cloud service and also use some other components of Oracle, which is why you see Oracle on there. And I'll show you an example of the art of platform logical architecture as I go through this talk. So why am I focusing on this question of carbon emissions and supply chains? Here's a quote from from the United Nations high level climate action champion talking about the role of supply chains in global carbon emissions. I'm going to bring that to life a little bit for everybody in a second. But last year, of course, when we all went into lockdowns all around the world, global carbon emissions fell by about seven percent because we weren't travelling. And so many of the things that we as consumers do stopped, whether it's car travel or air travel or, you know, et cetera. However, your global supply chains still continue to operate, whether it is shipping, logistics or the processes that go into the manufacturer of goods that we ultimately consume. And so that's why dealing with the supply chain challenge is such a significant one. The start of this year, the World Economic Forum published a report about the supply chains contributions to global carbon emissions. They identified eight supply chains. And you can see them described on this or some of them described on this slide. They identified eight supply chains that between them account for about 50 percent of total global carbon emissions. And the reason for that is the enormous amount of energy that is invested in the production of various materials or that those materials just by their nature produce carbon in their manufacture and example is cement. The production of cement means, you know, that the the mind material goes to a refinery and the process of creating cement drives off CO2 in very, very large quantities. And of course, carbon capture is possible at those plants, but in many cases isn't yet being used. And I want to pick on two of these electronics and automotive, which are our principal target sectors at the moment. And the reason why total emissions are so high there is because obviously they're large consumers of materials like aluminium and steel, but also batteries. EV batteries, consumer electronics batteries, lithium ion batteries are massively energy intensive to to manufacture and and subsequently to recycle. And that's that means that at the point of which you or I might collect the keys to a new electric vehicle, the inherited carbon in that vehicle is enormous. And of course, it's offset by lower carbon emissions during the lifetime use of that vehicle. But the supply chain contributes about 70 percent of the total embedded carbon within that vehicle and the battery is half of it. So a very, very significant contribution. So what this means is that if car manufacturers are to achieve the net zero ambitions that they're now setting out and many, many car manufacturers have now started to go public and talk about a desire to be net zero by the late 2030s or about 2040, many of them will be net zero within their own manufacturing plants, probably by the middle of the by the middle of this decade. But it'll take them potentially another 15 years in order to get to a point where their supply chain has also managed to decarbonise its operations. The embedded carbon within the cars that we buy has come down to zero. One of the car manufacturers and you might have seen their logo on the slide I showed a couple of minutes ago. One of the car manufacturers on that slide was Polestar. Polestar is a spin out of Volvo cars. It's their performance EV manufacturing line. And they're currently on their second generation of cars. They're a direct competitor of Tesla, although perhaps not quite so well known. They've just set an audacious target to try and create a net zero car by 2030. So about 10 years ahead of other car manufacturers and have announced what they're doing with us in an attempt to try and get a better grip on the supply chain. Now, to decarbonise a supply chain, there are a number of challenges. First of all, you have to understand who is in your supply chain for your most polluting components. Secondly, you have to know what level of embedded carbon is coming through each supply chain, of course, and not linear. What level of embedded carbon is coming from each participant in the supply chain over time and use that knowledge in order to buy more sustainably so that, you know, procurement professionals, for example, in car manufacturers now need to be able to marry data about sustainability alongside price and quality, which has traditionally been what procurement professionals are focused on in order to try and use their buying power as a way of, you know, selecting the lower carbon reach through supply chains. And some, you know, some of our customers are starting to do this just now. And it's it's really that that I want to unpack a little bit more and explain for the benefit of this presentation. So our business is traceability. And in order, and I touched on this just now, traceability means understanding the flow of materials in a supply chain. Now, you know, there are already two approaches to doing this. One is to track the various bits of paperwork generated by a supply chain and use that as a proxy for creating a picture of the flow of materials, which participants of different tiers of the supply chain were involved over time. But that's not the same as giving a digital identity to a blob of commodity and following that commodity all the way through that network of suppliers, sometimes from tier seven, all the way through to the original equipment manufacturer, in this case, the car manufacturer, and then attributing a dynamic slice, if you like, of the embedded carbon, the scope one and two emissions from each participant over time, based on how much material from each of those participants in the supply chain aggregates up over time into the things that you buy month on month. And one of the things we already see is a significant monthly variation in embedded carbon, just for something like an EV battery. And that's because various midstream participants are buying from different, you know, different suppliers over time. Some are using a combination of renewable and non-renewable energy. And some of them are using no renewable energy at all and not also not offsetting their carbon emissions. And so you end up with this very fluctuating picture. The fundamental driver, of course, is you cannot manage something you cannot measure. So the first thing is you have to know who is in your supply chain over time. And you have to understand what contribution each of them makes to the things that you as the manufacturer consume, because then you can start to engage in a dialogue with your tier one suppliers and then with their tier one suppliers about how to select lower carbon routes through the supply chain. So what I'm going to do is unpack a little bit of how that works and start a little. I'm going to start with a brief discussion of how traceability works and why a blockchain plays a part in this. So I mentioned complex industrial supply chains and the challenge with complex industrial supply chains is the material changes on its journey from source to consumption. So the first thing you obviously have to do is reliably reliably digitize, create a digital identity for a blob of material. It could be a 200 ton parcel of nickel from the mine site in Australia or a 30 kilo bag of cobalt or from an artisanal mine site in the Congo. But you have to be able to give a reliable identity to that blob of material. It depends how you do it. Of course, depends on the availability of technology in different locations. If you're talking about the toughest use case of all, which is an artisanal mine site in the Congo, there is no technology. You may have a mobile signal. You may not have a mobile signal. And so you need to be able to identify who the actors are, where you are. Reliably, you also need data on your working conditions, for example, at that mine site, possibly scope one and two emissions, if it's relevant at a particular mine site. And of course, a technology can't completely replace any form of physical due diligence. They work together. But the first point is the creation of that digital twin at the origin of the material, which could also, of course, be scrap, e-waste, for example, or scrap batteries. And then that material undergoes change on its journey. And at every one of those circle steps that you can see here, where it says trace materials, every one of those, which is refining or amalgamation of other materials, the input ingredients go through an industrial process, usually consuming a significant amount of energy. What comes out often has a completely different chemical composition or sort of it's a totally different material that comes out from that process, from the ingredients that went into it. So you have to be able to reliably connect input ingredients through a combination of process and mass balance and elapsed time and other logical tests to the output product of that process, doing it multiple times through the supply chain. I've already mentioned that there are many participants that each tier of the supply chain. And over time, a car manufacturer will have, perhaps, 30 or 40 different participants in its battery supply chain. And for each of those, we're looking to collect data about their Scope 1 and 2 emissions. And for those of you that are not experts in carbon tracking, Scope 1 emissions are your direct energy consumption, if you like, in the manufacture of your goods. Your Scope 2 emissions will be inputs from, for example, your wider workforce or logistics. And Scope 3 is everything that happens downstream and upstream of you. And if you're going to achieve, if you're aiming for a net zero target, it's Scope 3 emissions that you need to try and get a handle on. And there are many, many different methodologies for the measurement of carbon emissions. And that's part of the challenge here because every car manufacturer will take a slightly different approach. Every tier one supplier will take a slightly different approach. So trying to make sure that everybody's talking about the same things consistently is one of the key challenges in this space. So just a little bit then on the architecture that makes this possible. You can see here that this is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We deliberately chose to build this on Oracle Cloud because we were creating, which is quite unusual for a startup, but we were looking to create an enterprise class application out of the box. And I didn't want to have to be trying to explain to customers why we had, why what we had built, it was secure and scalable. One of the reasons we picked Hyperledger Fabric as our blockchain as our blockchain layer was because I didn't want to have to explain why we had picked a particular blockchain technology. Hyperledger Fabric has been recognised for some time as pretty much the enterprise standard for a blockchain technology layer. I'm sure we can have a big argument about whether or not there are other better or different blockchain technologies, but it's still a reasonable assumption. And what you see here is the ability to combine blockchain alongside other technologies. So obviously, whether it is for the inputting of information, which can be done, I'll show you some screenshots in a second through a mobile app or through a desktop application. Or we also take data certainly from the midstream onwards directly over API from production management systems in large industrial plants. But also the ability to check data that is provided by supply chain, self reported by supply chain participants for for veracity, looking for anomalies in that data where potentially material is being introduced from unknown place. Or you're not able to make sense of the chain of custody information that's coming from the supply chain. And that's why you'll see in here a mention of traditional databases, machine learning, various analytics tools, as well as, of course, a blockchain. And it's the combination of all of these technologies together applied to a very specific use case that's allowed us to get to a point where we are working on three or five year contracts with all those car manufacturers that I mentioned earlier across a variety of commodities, but primarily in batteries. I can come back to this in questions if people have questions about how we've done it and what we do. So forgive me for this slide being quite busy. I put it all up here so that, you know, if you want to, you can see it in the recording and study in a little bit more detail. But essentially what we're trying to do based on that flow of materials to a supply chain is attribute a slice of the scope one and two emissions from each participant in the supply chain based on the flow of materials. So at a tier two supplier, they might over tier two in the supply chain. There might be three, four, five, six different participants over time. Each will have a different scope one and two emission factors data. And so what we're taking is an attribute, an attributable slice of that based on who got involved in the supply of material in a given month and how that aggregates up over time. Because, you know, where you have lower months, the question then for the OEM is how do I replicate more of those lower months, essentially using buying smarter as a tool to drive greater sustainability. So although there's a lot here, the basic principle is how much stuff came from who over time and what are their skip one and two emissions and how do I therefore attribute a proportion of this to the material that I consume. Now, there's a world of complexity in here, because as I mentioned, there are different approaches to measuring scope on two emissions. And you want to be able to measure that consistently through a supply chain. But also, of course, some of this data is commercially confidential. So you don't you don't want your immediate customer to be able to to to work out what proportion of your total production is finding its way to them. That's something that most companies will jealously guard. However, I need to know that what proportion of scope one and two emissions in a particular month, I attribute ultimately to a battery that goes into a Mercedes as opposed to a battery that goes into Volvo. And so we've we've developed a whole selection of privacy preserving technologies in order to allow the the input by a participant in the supply chain of some of that commercially sensitive information, what proportion of production in a given period in time is finding its way to a particular set of customers. But without that being disclosed further on down through the supply chain. There are zero knowledge proofs in here, but but actually a lot of it is done in other ways to preserve the privacy of that information so that, you know, a supplier in the supply chain is uploading information which is used to aid in a downstream calculation without that underlying data being directly disclosed. So what does that look like to a user? Well, I mentioned a mobile app. There's a couple of screenshots on the left hand side of this slide of our mobile app being used in the field for recording, you know, creating that first digital twin for commodity. That's the most difficult use case because, you know, if you're going to an industrial mine, for example, in Canada or Finland or Australia or places that we currently work, they already have quite sophisticated technology platforms that manage production and allow you to essentially draw data directly from those systems. It's where, you know, in the smaller scale and more artisanal end of the mining world and a significant proportion of some of these materials are artisanally produced that you need to be able to provide technologies that are very, very easy and intuitive to use in order to be able to reliably digitize that commodity. But if you then take that process that I talked about of the material undergoing its multiple transformations and the aggregation of this data over time, you end up and I've shown here four screenshots from the platform. The first talks about, you know, the flow of materials. You can see a Sanky chart there showing how different participants over time have been involved and how much material is flowing. And there's a whole variety of different ways of visualizing this data in order to understand who is in your supply chain. And by the way, you know, this level of transparency is not common across many supply chains, but increasingly in the battery supply chain, particularly driven by things like the European Battery Passport Project, you're starting to see a far greater level of transparency about who participants are that are involved. I've talked quite a lot about the attributable CO2 footprint. Those yellow bars, I know this is a very small image, but bottom left of that second circle, the one in the middle, you can see sort of those yellow bars, wildly different month on month. And that is largely due to uncontrolled buying behavior by the midstream within that supply chain. So a tier two supplier buying from different tier three suppliers, some, you know, with lower emissions than others. And that's and what this is doing is highlighting that for the downstream that has the net zero target. You can't manage something you can't measure. So the first point is understand why your carbon footprint is higher in some months than in others and start buying smarter. Obviously, when you know the participants within your supply chain, you can also collect other information from them such as, you know, the fair pay, gender balance, you know, the whole variety of ESG metrics, environmental, social and governance metrics, which are increasingly important to downstream brands in their own reporting of doing responsible business. So, you know, if you know who the actors are and you're collecting information from them, you can not only produce supply chain maps, but also help create heat maps to manage risk in your supply chain. And then finally, on the right hand side, obviously a whole suite of tools for being able to visualize and report data on this. All of this can be integrated into into core ERP platforms within within car manufacturers. And some of this data actually then forms the basis of a battery passport, which is, you know, something that is is coming in the European Union. And we think probably likely to to to come to the U.S. fairly soon as well under the Biden administration. But you can see, you know, this data actually has value in life and then into a second life, the provenance of the materials, the total embedded carbon footprint, which of course you will need to have for things like carbon border adjustment taxes. So that's, you know, that's how this is that this is working in practice in the field back to where we started. The the digitization of supply chains is in its relative infancy, although increasingly, I think, you know, we see our customers recognizing the importance of understanding who is in their supply chains and what contributions they make and the risks that therefore need to be managed by the downstream manufacturer. And also, you know, what is the supply chain's contribution to totally vetted carbon footprint and then seeking to engage the supply chain in a conversation about how to try and reduce it. And we are starting to see that flowing down into contracts that have been let tier one suppliers, both around the requirement for traceability, but also to work together on carbon emissions and those contractual obligations are what's starting to drive change through these supply chains. Clearly, it's early days, but the reason we wanted to share this presentation today was because this is, you know, some some good work being done by car manufacturers like Volvo and Polestar and Daimler on this, which actually deserves to be amplified because we as citizens of the earth or need carbon emissions to fall and supply chains contributions are very, very high. Thank you for your attention. We only had a relatively short period of time, but I'd be very happy to answer any questions. Very happy to answer any questions. I can see one from Ashie five minutes ago asking, is there a download link for the deck? What I will do is I will I will upload this and I will share it. Does anybody have any questions for me? I'm conscious that we only had a relatively short time window, but does anyone have any questions for me or anything that they'd like me to cover? I don't know if you can write. I've just got a question from Joachim in chat. What kind of machine learning approach are you using in your architecture? How is it integrated into your architecture and how the models are validated? How to detect suspect activities? Right? That's quite a rich question. So we're using machine learning in a number of different contexts. So first of all, imagine you're standing in a muddy puddle in a mine site in the Congo, we use facial recognition as a way of knowing the identity of the individual or knowing that the individuals involved in a transaction at the start are registered miners or registered employees. We're also using machine learning as a basis for anomaly detection. So, for example, where the chain of custody data that is provided by participants in the supply chain don't add up. So material being introduced from an unknown origin at various points in the supply chain is very common, co-mingling, etc. And we're looking for those anomalies because they might be risk factors about material coming in from other places. When it comes to when it comes to two calculations, we're also comparing third party data that is available, whether it's emissions factors data or, you know, imagery analysis, for example, from from particularly polluting sites where you can, for example, find fugitive emissions of methane gas, for example, in the oil and gas space and augmenting the self-reported data with that to essentially test the the degree to which you can trust the self-reported data by the supply chain participants themselves. I'm sorry, that's such a short answer to such a complex question, your thing, but by all means, ping me an email and I'd be happy to happy to help some more. What I'm doing is just putting in chat my email address, if you haven't already seen it, for anybody that wants to take a question offline. Any other questions from anybody? Well, I think we're pretty much out of time. So I'll stay in the room for a little bit longer if there are any questions. If not, I'm very grateful for all of your time. I appreciate you joining and I know recordings recordings will be available for people. And so thank you very much indeed for your attention. Much appreciated. Thank you. Bye bye.