99 Ben Jeffreys transcript

Interview Transcript

Provided by AI – add 3:35 mins for the finished episode

Catherine Weetman  00:12

I’d love to start off by asking you how ATEC works and how you’re using circular approaches to create value for all the people that you’re serving.

Ben Jeffreys  00:33

Yeah, thanks, Catherine. So yeah, so even though I’m based in Australia these days, we originally set it up in Cambodia, we work mostly in the developing world. Originally, I was living in Cambodia when we set it up. And we do biogas digesters for small scale farmers is one of the products and I think the one most relevant to the to the podcast today. In particular, looking at how farmers can take their their wastes be that predominantly manure from animals, cows, pigs being the main ones, kitchen waste, and crop waste, and then convert that into biogas, which they can then use for cooking in their household much like you would normally LPG and then each system produces around 20 tonnes of organic fertiliser per year, for the for the household or for the farmer as well. So that’s a high quality organic fertiliser, it’s actually got an increase bioavailability of nutrients compared to just using cow manure alone. And then the other really big benefit, which is sort of would seem at some level side benefit, but to a farmer, it’s a very big benefit, is that extra diet digest station that goes through the biogas to just actually breaks down the grass seeds. So if you apply cow manure to your rice fields, you then have to wait it for all the grass etc. While if you’ve put it through a bio Digester, it’s automatically taking care of that, as well. So that’s another big benefit from there. And really, for us our focus, we’re a social enterprise, we were founded by myself and Engineers Without Borders, and live alone, which are two charity organisations as well around actually looking to really help sort of small scale farmers to, to live better lives, lives for themselves and their families, and really take advantage of the resources that they had on hand, and using technology to do that. And that’s what eight extends for what is appropriate technology. Such

Catherine Weetman  02:30

sounds amazing. And I’m already kind of putting Biodigester on my wish list for my veg plot. Because we don’t get our compost heap hot enough to kill off the weed seeds either. So yeah, I can even even on a tiny scale, I can imagine the, the, you know, the massive benefits for farmers from that. So can we just come come back a stage because you, you were talking about the you know, being able to use the biogas to heat stoves and so on in the house. So for people who are not familiar with the kind of the, you know, the traditional cooking methods used in places like Cambodia and so on, you know, what would they have been using instead of biogas?

Ben Jeffreys  03:18

Yeah, so So traditionally, in the countries where, I mean, we predominantly work in Cambodia and Bangladesh, and in those countries, people are generally using wood for cooking. It’s kind of the traditional priority, they’re just trees, cutting them down, much like you would for a campfire style cooking or, or buying charcoal that’s been sort of created and treated into charcoal as well. So So that’s traditionally what people use us for cooking in these in these countries. Obviously, that has a very large environmental impact. It’s in a country like Cambodia, it’s a leading cause of deforestation, and then leads to soil erosion and wash off as well. And then at the same time, it’s also has a huge impact on health, particularly of women of cooking with biomass on a day to day basis. So it’s actually the leading cause of premature death in of women globally. It’s around four and a half million women die per year from smoke related illnesses related to cooking with wood.

Catherine Weetman  04:21

Wow, that’s, that’s a big number. And I suspect that you know, the real numbers even more, isn’t it because it can often be an underlying cause that’s not identified specifically. And once they’ve got the biodigester you know, how how does that work? Do you sell it to them? Or do they get it another way?

Ben Jeffreys  04:47

Yeah, so our biodigester is a tech enabled Biodigester that does a couple of things. Number one, it has a payment integration with it. So that’s something we’d sort of designed after working with households over a period of time is, we saw the really big benefit of of the buyer gets to just household can improve their monthly income anywhere from 20 to $50. US dollars a month. And, but what they needed to be able to do is they couldn’t afford this typically the upfront cost of the system. So being able to break it down into small monthly payments for the farmers was a key thing. So that sort of pay as you go integration was a key thing that we sort of brought in from a technology perspective. And then the other part that we’ve then brought in as well isn’t around, actually carbon credits, integration into that as well. So that’s the for effectively we’re capturing methane from that would otherwise release into the atmosphere, particularly with cow manure, we’re stopping trees from being cut down. And then you’re effectively burning that gas into low impact, sort of gas and water. And around through that process, you’re generating around four to seven tonnes of greenhouse gas emission reductions per Biodigester per year. So we’re able to take that and then sell those credits to on the carbon credit markets, and be able to utilise that money to help fund the buy just to the customer as well.

Catherine Weetman  06:21

Wow, that’s that’s another impressive angle that you’ve used to kind of build in more more value for the customer? And how durable other biodigesters How long do they last for?

Ben Jeffreys  06:34

Yeah, so it’s an interesting point. And that’s, that’s something we came up with. So if you look by the just isn’t a new technology as such, they’ve been around for about 5060 years since the first ones were built. And they will always originally built with bricks and concrete. And if you build one of them really well, it’s a fairly complicated design to get right. Because you are dealing with a level of pressurised gas. But if you build it right, they can last for 25 years. The big challenge though, is in the countries where we work, the people are probably aware, Cambodian, Bangladesh get a lot of seasonal rain there monsoonal countries, and you get a lot of soil movement between wet season and dry season. And that’s where bricks and concrete particularly to be guessed type don’t perform particularly well. So from the reports, we’ve seen around sort of one in five to one in 10 by two, just as only working over an extended period of time in those traditional methods, just because of those changes in soil conditions leading to sort of breakage issues within the sort of gas tightness of the system. And once you lose that gas tightness, effectively, the system becomes redundant. So we actually made the decision to make our tanks out of a durable material, which is linear low density polyethylene type of plastic. But the the thinking behind that was that the with being able to do it in this material, would be able to provide a material that could actually change with the changing conditions in the soil around the biodigester over the course of the year and give farmers a sustainable solution. And for us then weighing that up and then looking at is obviously there’s some carbon emissions related to generating the product. But we saw that that was significantly outweighed by the carbon emission reductions from using the product. Plus, then the ability to be able to use it over an extended period of time or converted into other sort of useful goods, sort of post post product lifecycle as well, which is we say around 20 to 25 years on each product.

Catherine Weetman  08:41

So that’s that’s a, you know, good length of durability, isn’t it? And just so I understand when you said the material can change with the soil conditions? Can you unpack that a bit? Or do you mean more more about its resistance to the moisture in the soil Ingress, and so on?

Ben Jeffreys  09:01

Yeah, it’s a semi rigid material. So if you, I’m sure you’ve probably got them in the UK, like those plastic water tanks, not not the fibreglass ones, but the plastic ones. If you kind of knock them over, they kind of bounce a bit. So they’re able to sort of flex a bit because as the soil is wet during monsoon season, it puts pressure on the tank and then moves in the other direction.

Catherine Weetman  09:25

Right in drives. Yeah, so it’s a more flexible and resilient material. Great. And if something does go wrong, are they repairable by the farmers? How would that work?

Ben Jeffreys  09:36

Yeah, so we offer a three year warranty on the systems and then we provide for the post post sale support as well. It depends what the issue is. If it’s relatively minor that farmers can fix it themselves. Probably the most common one is just a blockage in the system. At some stage which farmers can do themselves, but if there’s any technical issue we can we can come to fix that for them.

Catherine Weetman  09:57

That’s that sounds that sounds good. I’m reassuring for the farmers because I can imagine different technology and so on is, you know, a bit of a sticking point with, do I? Why do I, you know, invest in this new system that I’m not familiar with? And where did the ideas come from? For the sale, sorry, that wasn’t the idea for the business. But for the design, you know, the different design compared to the other biodigesters that you described?

Ben Jeffreys  10:32

Yeah, so for us, it actually started off. As I mentioned, Engineers Without Borders, who’s one of our founding organisations, started off with a what’s called a design challenge. So it was actually getting university students who went on a trip over to Cambodia, and particularly, we’re looking at floating villages in Cambodia, which are on the main lake in in Cambodia called Tom, they’re set. And they had some significant sort of challenges around that around, sort of both gasp for cooking, but then also waste treatment in those areas as well. So it was through that setup, or that particular challenge and working with local partners at that stage that we started to investigate the Kol Biodigester might be a good solution. Here, we looked at what was already available, because generally as a design principle, with appropriate technology, looking to do the most simplified low cost, readily available solution possible which would have been using, say bricks, and concrete, which is readily available, but we could see that that was not leading to a sustainable outcome. So from that, we then moved into the plastic type, we did some early prototypes. And then when we went to actually commercially scale it, we almost had to throw out the prototypes and start again, which was, I think, a pretty typical thing from a sort of engineering design perspective, because what works at a prototype stage where you can be very hands on and fiddly, you just can’t really transfer into a commercially, manufacturing, sort of level product. So that was quite a, quite a crazy experience to go through min and lucky, who was our Lead Engineer at the time of effectively going we’ve got a product and then we had to basically start again, from same design principles would start again, from strapped scratch from a manufacturing perspective.

Catherine Weetman  12:20

Yeah, because I guess you’ve got to design it for people who, you know, my might unwittingly use it, use it wrongly, and I’m remembering a story I heard, I think it was from the author of a book about serendipity, and how you can kind of use that differently. And he was talking about a washing machine manufacturer, and how they were suddenly getting lots of complaints from China, with people saying, you know, the washing machines broken down when and, you know, they were, they were going to investigate, and they were full of soil. And they were finding out that the farmers were using them to wash potatoes. So rather, rather than deciding to just put it really, you know, on the front page of the instructions, or on the sales info that, you know, this is for washing clothes, not potatoes, they decided to develop a specific machine that would be good at washing potatoes and filtering out all the soil. So that was kind of the serendipity thing. But yeah, these kinds of, you know, unintended uses or ways that people people use the product can really, really trip up the the, you know, the careful design that’s been created by an engineer who knows that, you know, well, clearly it would be silly to do X. But But now perhaps we need to think about well, what if people do do X?

Ben Jeffreys  13:42

Yeah, so yeah. And I think the lesson we learned quickly, and thankfully, we took what’s called the some lean startup principles in there was like, rather than than design the perfect system, design something that’s hopefully possible, and then just get it out there and see what happens. And just do that with a select group of early adopters. And so we went through that I think we went through, effectively four designs within that first 12 months before we had something really that was commercially that we could scale.

Catherine Weetman  14:11

Yeah, that sounds good. And I think when we talked a few months ago, ahead of the podcast, you were also talking about the design ideas coming from, you know, understanding and trying to mimic the process that goes on in a cow’s stomach in terms of how cows naturally bio digest things.

Ben Jeffreys  14:30

Yeah, effectively, a biogas digester is just another version of the stomach. It’s an anaerobic chamber. And that’s, again, why that sort of air tightness is very important. You have to have an anaerobic setup, so that the bacteria can work efficiently. And really, you’re just taking the and this is the beauty of this system is you don’t need to have some special input or whatever. You’re literally using cow manure, which has that natural sort of range of anaerobic bacteria. It’s actually multiple Different types of bacteria in there that are called methanogenic bacteria that effectively convert waste into methane, which is what you’ll be looking to get me that is actually not smelly. That’s a common misperception. It’s actually there’s no smell. It’s actually the sulphur dioxide in gas that gives it that smell. But yeah, so getting that methanogenic bacteria up and running is sort of the key to doing that, which is effectively what cows do. Really well, so. So even if you’re using say, if you’ve got a pig farm using pig manure, you’ll actually start and you’ll get some cow manure to start the system then. So the introducing the pig manure to the bacteria, and then they’ll just adapt to that they’re pretty resilient little creatures, I’d say,

Catherine Weetman  15:47

bacteria are amazing, aren’t they? And we’re starting to realise just how valuable they are, for all sorts of things. And for people who might be worried about, you know, because we’re starting to hear quite a bit about methane as a greenhouse gas and the difficulties around that. So as I understand it, once methane is burned, it then you know, isn’t problematic. The problem comes from when methane is just allowed to escape, whether that’s from, you know, the back end of a cow, or from some of the refineries and so on, that are releasing methane. What have I got that? Right?

Ben Jeffreys  16:27

Correct. So So yeah, so what we’re trying to do is, I mean, there’s a lot of talk, because I think it’s probably humorous about cows farting, or whatever the case is, it’s actually burping is one of the main releases, but the other big release is actually from the manure. So as as the cows do their normal business, it’s actually then just aspirating from the manure. So what we’re doing is grabbing that, and then that that methane, so some of that methane there is then captured in the tank. But then most importantly, usually, methane is then released as the manure decomposes over over the next few days. So we’re then bringing that into the bio jester and capturing that which is the same as our natural gas is produced. This is done millions of years ago, but it’s actually the exact same process that we go through there. So. So that’s how we’re capturing it. I think, for us globally, there’s obviously, like, we need to look at this agricultural level, I think methane is around 50 to 100 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than then carbon dioxide. The upside of that, at least, I think it only lasts in the atmosphere for 20 years. So it has a shorter lifespan and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but a lot more potent. But I think probably the biggest challenges we’ve got on the methane front is actually number one looking at methane leakages from natural gas fields. That’s that’s a really significant problem, that there’s going sort of a lot of the time or as a production of using natural gas. And then yeah, the thing a big one, hopefully, we don’t have to deal with we do things right is then the, the defrosting of Siberia and other areas where there’s large, large peat moss balls as well, that could have a huge impact of methane released into the atmosphere as well.

Catherine Weetman  18:18

Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of focus, isn’t there now, kind of on the greenhouse gases beyond just the, you know, the the carbon one that people have been focused on? And so Ben, I’m curious to know, how did you come to be, you know, involved in this out in Cambodia, and so on What brought you to this?

Ben Jeffreys  18:38

Yeah, it was interesting. So, as I mentioned, Engineers Without Borders and live learn, had done some initial prototyping. And that was that was over a decade ago, that sort of kind of was on and off as a sort of a typical grant funded project. And then they were able to secure some seed funding some grant funding to actually then turn it into a sort of commercial product and a social enterprise. And it was at that time, I had no no specific interest in biogas as such, my businesses had been more on the background, a sort of my background is a bit more on the business side. But yeah, if for me, once I heard about the product and the the sort of higher level of both social and environmental impacts that could be achieved. And it was a good time for me, we just had our second daughter, we were looking to move over into into Asia and have a bit of experience with it with our kids over there. So it’s sort of lined up well, and I thought, hey, why not? Let’s move the family over to Cambodia and give this thing a go and see what happens at the worst end of the spectrum is we just have an adventure. Maybe the business doesn’t work out. And here here we are seven, eight years later, and it’s still going strong, which is really, really exciting. And I think the carbon side of things When I started was, as far as carbon credits go was talked about as a really high potential thing. But people really hadn’t got their heads around carbon credits and carbon markets more broadly. I think that’s now become a really serious sort of sector moving forward this, there’s still some growing pains there that occurring. But overall, putting a price on carbon and and making it a tradable commodity, in my view is a big step towards us actually accelerating solutions to sort of solving the climate change challenge.

Catherine Weetman  20:34

And have you got an easy way of measuring those? You know, in order to pay the farmers how have you developed that?

Ben Jeffreys  20:43

Yeah, it depends on the technology we use. On on one end, we have a Iot stove, which actually then measures down down to the second exactly how much people are using it then automatically calculates the carbon credits related with that. So that’s, that’s the best solution overall, and that those stones actually have a SIM card in them, which then transmit that exact usage data back to us. And then we can convert that into carbon credits, which we can share back with customers. That’s, that’s the ideal solution. With the biodigesters, we may bring in something like that, in the future. At this stage, we’re actually doing manual verification where you actually go and sort of survey the customers and track how much usage they’re doing from there. So that’s kind of been the traditional way of doing carbon credits. I think more and more, it’s going to shift to data, verifying credits, like that IoT solution I just mentioned, because people want greater and greater security to ensure that those credits are actually happening, which, which is fair enough that they’re paying for a product slash services. So they need to be confident that that it’s occurring. Yeah, absolutely.

Catherine Weetman  21:50

And I guess, you know, it’s history repeating, isn’t it as we’re seeing sort of some of the scandals around this, that anything to do with waste, you know, is an area where there’s historically there’s always been room for dodgy figures, and, you know, exploitation and so on. So yeah. And then, again, I’m thinking back to when, when we first spoke a few months ago, I remember you talking about how important you thought it was for businesses to have a purpose beyond profit. So can you tell us more about your, your views on that?

Ben Jeffreys  22:27

Yeah, well, I think it just makes good business sense on on different levels. I mean, number one, for just generally, if you’re looking to recruit good people into an organisation, a pure profit motive for people to join your company is not particularly attractive. In this day and age, people are often looking for a greater meaning in their work beyond just hey, come and make money as such, so I think from a recruiting talent perspective, having that purpose really drives a sign I mean, I’ve, I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m sure I can probably go into a corporate gig and earn of, I would like to think a significant more amount of money, maybe I’m kidding myself, I don’t know. But if that was really my driver, but that’s not really what drives me is the impact that I can achieve through that work. So I think for us, that’s one big point. The second point is if you look at the end, not looking at that traditional lens of impact enterprise, or whatever we like to call it, but if you look at some of the biggest technological shifts in the world, that it will tend to have a very strong purpose behind them. Anyway. So a lot of those, what are now seen as these big corporate, global multinationals that came out of Silicon Valley, if you go back to the early days, a lot of them had a much stronger purpose than just making a bucketload of money. They were really around connecting people other things. Now, some of them have probably gone a bit astray. That’s, that’s fair enough. But at the same time, if I take a couple of examples, I think one of the highest impact technologies in the developing world has been the smartphone, it’s just broad access to information that just wasn’t available to a large percentage of the world previously. And that’s a huge benefit. And then another interesting one, because it gets a lot of flack in the developed world is Facebook, it’s been not great in for a lot of us in the developed developed world. But in the developing world, it’s actually the main communication tool for people to keep in contact with family and friends along with WhatsApp being the other one, which is now owned by Facebook, too. And so it’s had a huge benefit. In these these countries. Also, it’s had detriments as well, but I think overall, they’ve been some hugely positive impact technologies to helping people to improve their lives.

Catherine Weetman  24:48

That’s interesting. Yeah, thank you. I’d certainly not thought about you know how essential social media can be to you know, connecting up rural communities and I guess it, it brings us back to some of the legislation that’s under consideration in in Europe, and it’s just going through at the moment in the UK, it’s about making sure that there’s proper responsibility, isn’t it behind behind those platforms, the platforms themselves can be a force for good. What we’ve got to make sure is that they’re not taken over by people using them for other other means. And so Ben, over the decade or so that you’ve been working on, on on these challenges with ATEC, what have you struggled with, and what surprised you?

Ben Jeffreys  25:37

Um, struggle with, I think the, the thing that’s always been a struggle for any impact, or social enterprise, or even environmental enterprise, is you’re constantly in this juggling act between making a successful, financially sustainable and successful business versus achieving the impact that you want to achieve in the world. And quite often, those two things sit in tension. Ideally, if you if you can work it out really well, they don’t sit in tension, they’re actually compounding on each other. But generally, there’s a level of tension there. So for example, I mean, for us, we could really target you know, wealthier households achieve greater margins on our products, much like you would with a traditional product adoption curve, you start with the sort of wealthy customers first, and then you move down to the mass majority from there. But for us selling products to high end people in in the in the cities within these countries, is not where we want to start. We want to be there for the impact of our products and designed for those groups, but then the margins you can achieve from a financial sustainability perspective is quite tight in that situation. So I think that’s always been probably one of the biggest challenges that that anyone doing this type of work has has to undertake. The thing that surprised me is, yeah, that were, that we’re still here. In some level, I think it’s amazing, the resilient, I think we underestimated how resilient the organisation becomes. I mean, we’re, we’re around 6065 staff now, across three countries. And we’ve got a lot going on. And you know, cash flow is always a challenge. And being able to do the work that we want to do is always a challenge. But, you know, no matter what seems to be thrown at us, be that COVID be that global supply chain issues be that rising inflation was still here. And that’s kind of surprising, in a very positive way. I don’t know, I think that’s a that’s a side benefit of doing high impact work is people don’t want to see you go. So I think I think we’ve been quite lucky in our networks and, and our ability to really get get some Paul behind us when we needed, which we were very thankful to.

Catherine Weetman  28:08

Yeah, and I guess all those people who have chosen to work for you, because of the purpose of the business, are also going the extra mile in terms of applying their creativity and problem solving skills to thinking about how you can overcome some of the challenges around supply chain disruption, and so on. And if you were talking to another business that wanted to start something circular, or go more circular with their existing model, what would your number one lesson learned be for them?

Ben Jeffreys  28:45

That’s a good question. I think it’s, there’s definitely potential there. I think it would be when it comes to looking at particularly say why wasted valuable that energy or other outcomes, there’s typically a lot of potential there, the ability to then convert that potential into reality, both. From a scale perspective, from a time perspective, there’s usually a few more challenges there than you’d expect. So, so it’ll look great on paper, which is great, because we should be doing it. But don’t ever underestimate the challenges or the number of challenges that will then come to really make that successful in the long term.

Catherine Weetman  29:31

And I guess that’s particularly true when it’s something like the bio digester and, and the stoves that are replacing traditional methods that have been been there for centuries, you know, longer millennia, you know, trying to convince people that this new technology has all these other benefits that they couldn’t have envisaged. must, must be, you know, hard hard for them to sort of, you know, absorb the air The difference and the and the reality of it, you know, just how easily those things will, will take shape.

Ben Jeffreys  30:08

Yeah, and for us, I mean, we’ve been quite deliberate just to do small scale farming households where the households own the biodigester. Like that people get excited buying going, you could do like a community level system, you could do a medium size pharmacist, you could do a school system with food waste, and all this stuff. And that’s, it all looks good on paper, but particularly once you move out of single household, single farm, single asset, a person responsible to any type of community level stuff, then you run into all these community related, you know, local politics, this third, etc. And it can make things much more complicated as we kind of stick to editing as such.

Catherine Weetman  30:49

Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. Thank you. And Ben is the someone you’d recommend as a future guest for the podcast?

Ben Jeffreys  30:57

Oh, for the circular economy, one. Trying to think any one off off the top of my head. I think there’s some guys. The name suggests this gave me this, there’s two people doing some fantastic work on waste, wasted fertiliser work. In Australia, and in Kenya, I think it is. Just the name escapes me. But they’re using insects through that process to sort of treat treat the waste, and then turning those insects into high quality protein for animal feed from there as well. And I think they’re both doing some pretty cool stuff. Olympia is the name of the person running the one in Australia, but I can’t remember the name of the company off the top of my head. I’ll try and search it up. And maybe we can include it in the show notes.

Catherine Weetman  31:55

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. And the penultimate question, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing to help create a better world? What would that be? And why?

Ben Jeffreys  32:09

Cool. Before I get to that question, it’s Olympia from GoTerra.

Catherine Weetman  32:12

Okay, thank you go to.

Ben Jeffreys  32:13

G O T double R A.

Catherine Weetman  32:16

Thank you.

Ben Jeffreys  32:17

So on the major magic wand, I’ve got an interesting one, because I knew you’re going to ask that question. And one thing we’ve talked about a little bit recently, just in blue sky thinking is for access to renewable energy to become as cheap and as effective as access to mobile data within the next 20 years. And I think the reason I raised that one out is is if you went to someone 20 years ago, when we first just started really using mobile phones and using data. And you said, Hey, one day, you’ll have unlimited access to data, you’ll be able to watch video bla bla, bla, they’ll be like, That’s ridiculous. Like I’m paying 40 cents an SMS right now, and limited to 120 characters, whatever it is, and you look at where we’ve come in the space of 20 years, I very much hope that we get to that within the next 20 years when it comes to abundant access to energy that’s both cheap, reliable and renewable. And if we can get that going, if we can make it as cheap as data is today, for us in communications, then I think we’re, we’re on a very exciting pathway to a sustainable planet. Hmm,

Catherine Weetman  33:31

that’s yeah, that’s a really interesting one. And, yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s those when we look, look back at things and how expensive they were, at that point in time, and then as as technologies improved, and scales improved, and all the rest of it, how things get transformed, then I don’t see that as being impossible, either. And I think you’re right, the the sort of, you know, the household, the single business scale, is where we should be aiming for because then people are really on top of the maintenance and, you know, not not leaving at somebody else. And in the biodigester field, I can imagine the difficulties of, you know, somebody deciding that they’ll put all there, you know, farm crop waste on it, or something. And that messes up the mix inside. So, yeah, kind of the responsibility angle, to keep things going in the right way is important, isn’t it? And Ben, how can people find out more and get in touch with you? And ATEC?

Ben Jeffreys  34:32

Yeah, so So for us, obviously, our website is one of our main portal portals, which is atecglobal.io. So you can go check us out there and find some more information. We’re also on on LinkedIn is probably our other main channel that we go through, which is again, atecglobal and at atecglobal on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Catherine Weetman  34:57

Thank you, and we’ll put all those in the show notes. So As usual. So, Ben, thank you for taking us through all the brilliant work that you and the quite big team now at a tech have been doing over the last eight to 10 years. I think it’s such an impressive range of innovations with the digester design itself. And then things like the pay as you go, the carbon credit credits and so on. And as we, as we heard near the beginning, there are just so many benefits for both people and on the planet in such a rich range of ways. So think it’s a really, really brilliant idea and kind of business model. So good luck with the next phase and making making a bigger impact for more people. Thank you.

Ben Jeffreys  35:42

Yeah. And thank you, Catherine. And, yeah, keep up the great work and getting word out around the circular economy where there’s a lot of upside there for us all to take advantage of.

Catherine Weetman  35:52

Absolutely. Thanks, Ben. 

Ben Jeffreys  35:60

Thank you.