At some point, maybe in, let's say five years we'll start to look at the product carbon footprinting on packages. And determine, is this something I want to buy? So yeah, I think I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Europe that, there's A, B, C, D, E, kind of how healthy the product is that influences me a lot in choosing, let's say, this pasta versus this pasta. And I think it's going to be the same thing for carbon printing as well. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening where everyone in the world. Welcome to episode 62 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one show focusing exclusively on the intersection of sustainability and supply chains. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and I'm thrilled to have you here today. Today's episode of the podcast was very generously sponsored by Component Sense, who are providers of sustainable excess and obsolete solutions for electronic manufacturers. As they say, save money. Save tomorrow in this episode, I'm delighted to be talking to Simon Kim, who's the CEO of Glassdome, and in upcoming episodes, I'll be talking to Rhea Rakshit, who's the vp, product management for Sayari. Rene Schrama, who's the CCO of Peak Tech. Paige Jansen, who's the CEO of Engie Impact and Jen Chew, who's head of solutions and consulting for Bristlecone. So some fantastic episodes coming up. But back to today's episode, and as I said, my special guest today is Simon. Simon, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, Tom. Pleasure being here. Yeah, my name is Simon, founder and CEO of Glassdome, and we're a manufacturing software company that specialises in data gathering from manufacturing floors. So give me the background to Glassdome first, Simon, why did you kick it off? Cause you are CEO and founder what made you decide to set up Glassdome? What was the kind of genesis? What alerted you to the problems that Glassdome solves for manufacturers? We started back in 2019, actually a couple months before COVID hit. What an interesting time to start a company. And that was back in San Francisco. And I used to be a software engineer for an IoT, Internet of Things, startup in San Francisco, building air quality monitoring devices. And about five or six years I spent there, I realised the kind of big potential of IoT data and especially for businesses. And I started looking around and there's just huge potential in manufacturing. Especially, where I was born in Korea manufacturing still takes up a huge portion of the GDP, but the software and systems that I hear about are really, inflexible and still not, gathering data from the actual machines, just kind of guessworks. So that's kind of really prompted me to start Glassdome, where we wanted to make an impact in manufacturing industry by utilising IoT data that's coming from the machines themselves. And who would typical customers be and what kind of problems are you solving for them? Yeah, so in my introduction, I, I introduced Glassdome as a company that specialises in gathering data from manufacturing floors. But obviously we don't stop there because data that's not being utilised is, maybe not so good. You know, it's we got to use, put, put it to some use, right? So what we help with in terms of helping manufacturers is in two areas. One is running a factory more efficiently by using the data that we gather from the machines. Second is helping them with product carbon footprinting. And for those of you who is not familiar with product carbon footprinting, or product carbon footprint, it's basically tallying up how much carbon was emitted in producing certain goods. And in manufacturing, that's very important because the companies exist to produce goods, and nowadays, obviously, sustainability, especially carbon emission tracking is a very important topic, and a lot of manufacturers face challenges around just accurately tallying up exactly how much carbon emission was made. And there's a growing urgency for manufacturers to track and report their product carbon footprint. What's driving that shift and why is it such a big deal now? Yeah, I would like to give a big kudos to the European Union, actually, EU I mean, there are so many different reasons why there's a huge demand for sustainability data. But I would say EU is definitely leading in that. EU just came up with for example, EU battery regulation in 2023 that demands all of the EV battery makers and selling EV batteries or not just EV, but you know, batteries of certain size to disclose accurate site specific carbon emission data. For them to be able to sell products in EU. So that's really creating a bar for all the manufacturers to meet and pretty high bar actually. And I, I would say that's definitely the biggest driver for this kind of demand for sustainability related data. The EU is only one market though is this kind of legislation popping up in other markets or is the EU a big enough market to require manufacturers to do it globally. Yeah. Very good question. I would say maybe starting from looking at manufacturing and companies themselves obviously EU is just one market, but, I would say most kind of big ish companies sell products in EU. So, just like Apple, when EU mandated that you need to have USB C instead of your own adapter Apple changed their design to meet that demand. And obviously now globally it's USB C, right? And also with GDPR, the privacy related acts that started in EU now has gotten into California, all of US and rest of the world is following the privacy practices online. It is interesting that EU is just kind of one market, but it's definitely kind of a leader in setting up these kind of standards and regulations for the rest of the world. And what you're doing you said is you're collecting the data and then somehow telling manufacturers the product carbon footprint. Or the carbon footprint for their products. Walk me through how that works. There are a lot of corporate greenhouse gas emissions accounting companies and services out there, but product carbon footprint is relatively nascent field, especially with such kind of high demand. I mean, it's been going on for decades, but the main difference is that it's a subset of carbon accounting, but specifically for products. And what it allows and why it's important is that it allows, let's say you have some display components that you're sourcing from suppliers, you're able to, with this Product Carbon Footprint, which has a lot of kind of international standards backing it, you're able to compare product A versus product B in a very scientifically proven way in terms of carbon emissions. So what that allows is in sourcing materials, or components, or parts, you're able to make decisions around sustainability ramifications, and obviously with OEMs all, you know, obviously committing fully for decarbonisation by 2050 or so, it matters a lot to be able to make such kind of responsible decisions around carbon footprint of these parts that come from supply chain. So I would say in a nutshell, product carbon footprint is a subset, but also. A very important kind of emerging field in that it allows manufacturers to really move towards decarbonisation goals. And talk to me a little bit about the fact that you're referencing primary data because a lot of times in a lot of this reporting, it's industry averages that are used, but what you're saying is that's not what you're doing. Exactly. Correct. So I would like to just give you some context and background for how things are done usually, and for the past, you know, decades before technology really enabled companies like Glassdome to be able to do what we do. So before, obviously It's been impossible just because of the manufacturing, if you go to a factory, there's so many different controllers, machines, all of the systems are put in together into factory by so many different vendors. It's impossible to gather live real time data from all these systems. And then utilise that to do things like carbon footprinting. So what the industry has been doing is there are databases and also kind of assumptions that people have been using, best guesses basically for, let's say if you're making an aluminum foil you break that down into kind of reasonable chunks of processes. And for each process, you have guessworks of how much for this material, the industry average carbon emission is X. And, you have different let's say some lubricants that you use the industry average for carbon emission is Y, and you kind of sum that up, then you basically have a carbon footprint for a product. But if you think hard about what we're doing here, we want to be able to differentiate supplier A versus B and their products, A versus B in terms of how sustainable they are, because of what that that's enabling us to move towards slowly towards decarbonisation, right? So you, you, you need accurate and as accurate of a carbon footprint or for these products as possible coming from real live process data from factories, not just guessworks. I can tell you about how we do that, but essentially that's kind of our, core belief that if we're actually serious about decarbonisation, especially in manufacturing industry, you need to use primary data. And fortunately, I think regulators are understanding the importance of primary data. And as, as I said, with EU battery regulation, it is specifically set in the legislation that it needs to be site specific primary data for it to be certifiable and also kosher with the regulation. Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean. It stands to reason because if you're trying to compare two manufacturers for a particular product and they're both using industry averages to report their carbon footprint, they'll have the same carbon footprint because they're using the same industry averages. So obviously that's useless. So what you do need is you need to have the primary data. Now you mentioned you have a background in IoT. So talk to me about how you're gathering that primary data. And as you said, as well, different manufacturing sites have a mishmash of machines, typically on the floor, all with different standards, different ways of reporting data. How do you overcome that mishmash, to actually get and calculate the product carbon footprint? Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, kind of need to give you that story of how we got started. If you don't mind. You know, it was during COVID and we're trying to get started and with the mission of just helping manufacturers. And we visited a lot of factories and realised there are so many different systems, and there's really precious data being trapped in these controllers. But the clients and manufacturers just didn't have access to that because they were built for automating things, not necessarily for sharing data. So we spent a lot of time and resource in building these, what we call drivers. And so you can think of them as the printer drivers. If you remember from back in the day, you needed to download all these USB drivers to talk to printers, right? I shudder at the recollection. Yeah. But unfortunately, manufacturing world is still running in that age where all these machines are not communicating to each other. So we've built these drivers which is definitely not a sexy work to do, but we knew it was important. And once we had a good number of them, we could really very efficiently extract data out of almost any manufacturing site. And that caught the attention of a global EV battery maker that's based in Korea, which I cannot name here unfortunately. But that got us to think a lot about, okay, we can use this real time primary data to do product carbon footprinting. And I want to say it is quite unprecedented, the only project in the world I've seen that is doing this kind of high fidelity automated data for a product carbon footprint is Echofact that's actually commissioned by European Commission itself I think about a 10 million euro project over the course of five years to demonstrate do the proof of concept of this concept of using live factory data to do product carbon footprinting. We've already commercialised our technology. And we're working with some of the global players kind of the technology that I'm talking about to do accurate product carbon footprint that's automated and all real time. Okay, And you've mentioned automotive. Is that the only manufacturing industry that you work with or are you across the board or, is there some discreet ones that you're interested in working with or can work with or, you know, where do you fall in that spectrum? Yeah, since we're on Climate Confident podcast, I've been talking a lot about Product Carbon Footprint, but as I mentioned towards the beginning, we also help just manufacturers run factories efficiently, regardless of carbon footprinting needs. We work with various kinds of industries like confectioneries, plastics, defense components, all the way to obviously automotive and EV battery industry where that's where the regulations are starting from, from EU's perspective, but with the upcoming regulation in digital product passport and the ESPR eco designs for sustainable products regulation we believe, and there are rumors that it'll spill over to many different industries. And it makes sense, right? It's, we don't want to track carbon emission for just EV batteries and cars. We have a lot of other products that we use in everyday life. So it's coming to the computers and digital devices and home appliances and plastics, textiles, what have you. Yeah, we work with many, many different industries, but in terms of product carbon footprint, we are working heavily with EV battery and automotive for now. A lot of manufacturers are small to midsize businesses with limited resources. So what would you say is the best way of bringing them into the product carbon footprint reporting fold without overwhelming them? Oh, that's such a beautiful question, because I think in order for this effort to scale, it just won't be like big, top 100 manufacturers. It has to be 90 plus percent of the manufacturing industry, right? And like you said, a lot of SMEs, they make up the vast majority of manufacturing industry. From just bystander or outsider, I would recommend that you really need to get a good grasp of just your data infrastructure in general for you to be able to both efficient in manufacturing goods. But also dealing with regulations like, EU's battery regulation and ESPR and DPP regulations. It'll pay good dividends once you have good data infrastructure because you can use that data over and over again. It's just different applications. So that's what I would recommend. I mean, full disclaimer. Glassdome does set up that data infrastructure for SMEs. That's what I personally believe and we believe in. I'm not shying away from promoting our business. But yeah, I think it'll pay good dividends once you have the infrastructure. And fortunately with the advancement of IoT, especially it's getting easier and easier to set up the data infrastructure. It doesn't need to be millions of dollars that you need to spend to, set up such infrastructure. It could be just tens of thousands of dollars to get a small portion and most important portion of your factories to be set up for a good data gathering, data reporting and such. And the Siemens partnership. We haven't mentioned it so far, but it was part of the intro call that we talked about. You've gone into a partnership with Siemens. Talk to me about that. What is it? And how did it come about? Yeah. Firstly, we're. We're extremely proud to work with such leading company in the industry, Siemens. So we met them first in Hannover, Messe, and obviously their counterparts in Siemens are amazing. And what we found out immediately is that our services and products complement each other. So Siemens is Sigreen, S I G R E E N service. And it specialises in product carbon footprint data exchange. What that means is, across supply chain once you have the product carbon footprint values, they can be exchanged across supply chain, up or down, or horizontally, in a very secure, and efficient manner. And why that's important is because I mean, obviously, if you can't share the data, it's kind of useless. There's a lot of nuances in terms of data sensitivity and correctness. If you don't have the same framework for sharing data, imagine all these PCF values being shared across Excel's and it gets out of hand really quickly. So that's what they do best. And we realise you know, that's great, but also a lot of companies in general have challenges associated with just calculating product carbon footprint to start with which is what we do best. So we just saw it as a natural partnership. Siemens is providing that data exchange platform for the supply chains and we're helping each individual companies in the supply chain to calculate their product carbon footprints. Okay. And is it like a joint marketing partnership as well? Are they marketing Glassdome to their customers and you marketing Sigreen to your customers? Exactly. If we fast forward five years out, what does best in class emissions tracking look like in 2030? You think we'll have a finally have a global standard or will it still be the wild west of competing frameworks? Yeah. That's a good question. I would like to talk about manufacturing industry specifically because I think the needs are vastly different, although it's kind of same carbon accounting, let's say for banking industry versus manufacturing, I think the needs and the future will look very differently. In my personal opinion and Glassdome's opinion, we think the future is in product carbon footprint for manufacturing industry, because as I said, It allows apples to apples comparison of different products, and there are already very well established standards like ISO 14067. That, you know, very, very specifically mandates how product carbon footprinting is done and such. So there's little ambiguity in terms of what the methodologies are and framework looks like. So if I were to guess in 2030, the best in class carbon emission tracking for manufacturing industry would be that it's definitely Product Carbon Footprints that people are talking about PCF and then it'll closely follow ISO 14067 and it'll be heavily primary data based because without primary data or maybe 80, 90 percent of primary data we're talking about guessworks and we've talked about that just now. But to back that up, if you just look at across the board, from the efficiency standpoint, and also the labor and kind of resource intensiveness perspective, gathering the primary data from utility bills, PDFs, and Excel's and talking to your IT departments or your quality departments, exchanging emails, all that is hugely wasteful. And we think automation of data collection from the source itself it's going to be the future, it has to be that way, otherwise it's just going to be doing so much work for this little value that you end up with, which is a pretty much a single number for product carbon footprint. And right now it's starting to become a legal necessity, but how do we change it from being a legal necessity to making it more attractive, making it say a competitive advantage instead of a box ticking exercise for companies? Yeah, legal necessity is, I think, great to kickstart an industry, but like you said, it has to be more than that. I think, fortunately good example is automotive OEMs. They have net zero goals by 20 something, 2050, let's say. And I think that's really driving the whole supply chain to pay attention because at the end of the day, let's say BMW has this goal and their suppliers, if they don't meet certain benchmarks and it'll slowly be kind of forced out of their, the supplying capacity right now. So that's, I think, driving the suppliers to pay serious attention to their decarbonisation efforts and goals. But like, like you said, Tom, I think the manufacturing industry, or, you know, different sub industries within manufacturing who's producing, especially the and consumer products are very conscious of what people want, which is they don't want to be having harmful effects in consuming these goods. And they pay attention to, you know, just like we look at calories, I think we'll pay attention at some point, maybe in, let's say five years we'll start to look at carbon emission the product carbon footprinting on packages. And determine, is this something I want to buy? So yeah, I think I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Europe that, you know, there's A, B, C, D, E, kind of how healthy the product is that influences me a lot in choosing, let's say, this pasta versus this pasta. And I think it's going to be the same thing for for carbon printing as well. Yeah, I've mentioned it on the podcast here before, but when I'm using milk, I typically use Oatly, which is an oat milk. And they say on their package, this package causes the production of 55 grams CO2 per liter, and I think that's fantastic. But then I look at every other milk container, be it dairy milk or be it soy milk or be it whatever. No one else is reporting that. So I have no idea whether that 55 grams CO2 per liter is fantastic or whether it's terrible. And so we do need everything to be, I think, mandated initially, so that it does report in the same way that, you know, you can look at labels and food here in the EU and say how much sugar per 100 grams is in it, how much carbohydrate, how much protein, how much sodium, how much et cetera, et cetera, you know, you can cross compare those no problem, but there's nothing here for carbon yet. And I think carbon is obviously a much bigger problem than say, sodium or sugar or although they're problematic too. Yeah, I think what's going to change is the Digital Product Passport regulations and initiatives coming out of EU. And I think regulators are really smart in setting this up to create a future that you Tom just mentioned. Be able to look at a packaging and be able to quickly determine what was the environmental impact. So what Digital Product Passport just for the context does is it'll be kind of like a QR code or sometimes fancy things like RFID on packaging of the consumer goods. And, you know, any consumer can look it up on their phone by scanning the QR code. What the, I think most important is the product carbon footprint of this product. But also other issues like, maybe labor issues. Any sort of sensitive, just like basically bad practices within manufacturing. If there are any issues with that. And regulators are starting with EV batteries, because it's, a very hot industry but it'll spill over to other, other industries pretty soon. So it's not too far away, Tom. Yeah. Good. Yeah, I know. My own car, there's a QR code on the dashboard of my car. And when I scan it, it gives me a whole breakdown of all the materials that went into the production of the interior of the car, not the battery, but the interior of the car, all the plastics and their origins and things like that. So, And it's a Korean car so, wow!, Yeah, it's a Kia EV3. Kia EV3. See, yeah. I think that's, that's the kind of the future. And I think they're doing a great job of just preparing themselves for this future. It's yeah. It's great to hear that. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. What would you say to CFOs who are reluctant to invest in emissions tracking? Because they see it as just another cost center. Yeah I would say it will come to up to their neck or chin level pretty soon if they don't start investing in, I mean, firstly, data infrastructure, whether it be you know, just aggregating all the data from manufacturing floors to kinda maybe upgrading one of the controllers or systems to be able to communicate with other systems. You just got to start with data infrastructure if you're a CFO of a manufacturing industry, because you will have a lot of people asking you for data, and if you don't have that infrastructure, your employees will suffer, and it'll slow down the company. And we haven't talked about it yet, but obviously data infrastructure is hugely important for things like AI as well. You need to have a proper data infrastructure to make any use of AI. And obviously AI is transforming every industry today. Do you think it can help with this, with the emissions reporting mess, or will it just add to more layers of complexity? I think it eventually will. But I think it's right now, as I mentioned, the problem that manufacturers are facing is more rudimentary. They just don't have access to data. So I think we definitely got to work on that first. But once that's solved, I think there's, like you said, so many benefits that the industry can reap from the AI or LLMs and just kind of artificial general intelligence that's about to come in the next few years. For example, this is kind of a product level goal we have in the future, but all of the kind of manufacturer specific process set up, methodology set up, some human judgments around allocation, cut off system boundary set up, right now requires human judgment, but I imagine with the advancement of AI, it'll get to AGI pretty soon, and that can be more efficient as well. Therefore lowering the cost of implementing such systems for manufacturers. So I think it's going to be an exciting future, but AI cannot be helping us if we don't have data. We got to feed them data for them to do the work for us. Okay. And for any manufacturers who are listening to this podcast, what would be just one thing they could do tomorrow to improve their product carbon footprint reporting apart from data infrastructure? Cause we've hammered that home to them several times so far. So number two on your list. Let's see manufacturers for improving their product carbon footprint. I would have a serious look at your supply chain because scope three emission for any industry it takes up. And you're from 50 to 80 percent of your emission, and it's going to be the same for your product carbon footprint. Just like with data infrastructure within your company, within your four walls, you also want to pay a lot of attention. Your podcast is for supply chain sustainability, which is great because that's probably one of the largest impacts. Work with your suppliers, set up a program to well, clearly define your reduction goals first, but work with your suppliers to communicate that goal and then examine your supply chain comb through kind of, you know, whatever supplier looks like in terms of their PCFs, et cetera. Supply chain focus, I think is pretty important. And a left field question, if you could have any person or character live or dead, real or fictional as a spokesperson or a champion for product carbon footprint, who would it be and why? As contentious as it might be, I think Donald Trump will be the biggest supporter. If he can support Product Carbon Footprint, I think the whole world will champion Product Carbon Footprinting for the industry. So President Donald Trump. Okay, fantastic. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Simon, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? No, I think we touched upon everything. And those were great questions, Tom, so thank you so much. Super, super. Okay. Simon, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yeah, please check out our website glassdome. com. That's G L A S S D O M E dot com. And, you know, leave us a message or LinkedIn Glassdome should pop up as well. Fantastic. Great. And I'll put links to those in the show notes of the episode. So everyone has access to them. Great. Simon, thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much, Tom. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.