The US Department of Energy wants to accelerate the development of carbon capture technology. On Friday, the agency announced a program called Carbon Negative Shot. Part of its Energy Earthshots initiative, the goal here is to foster the development of carbon capture technology that can sequester CO2 at a cost of less than $100 per ton, and can be deployed at the gigaton scale. To put that in perspective, that much carbon is equivalent to the annual emissions of approximately 250 million cars.

“By slashing the costs and accelerating the deployment of carbon dioxide removal — a crucial clean energy technology — we can take massive amounts of carbon pollution directly from the air and combat the climate crisis,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “With our Carbon Negative Shot, we can help remove the greenhouse gases already warming our planet and affecting our health — positioning America as a net-zero leader and creating good-paying jobs for a transitioning clean energy workforce.”

If it wasn’t clear already, the Energy Department has set an ambitious target. In September, Orca, the largest direct carbon capture facility ever, opened in Iceland. The plant will capture 4,000 tons of CO2 per year at a cost of about $600 per ton for bulk purchases. Chimeworks, the company that operates Orca, aims to reduce the cost to $300 or less per ton by 2030. That’s a long way away from the Energy Department’s goal of less than $100 per ton, but sustained and substantial support and investment from the government is exactly what could make that happen.

Meta (Facebook's parent company) has joined other major tech companies in making more climate change pledges as the UN’s COP26 summit commences. Along with taking measures to reduce its own carbon footprint, Meta is focused on "helping people find accurate, science-led information, while also tackling misinformation," according to Nick Clegg, Meta's vice-president of global affairs and communication.

The company says that when its fact-checking partners rate a piece of content as false, a warning label is added and the post pops up less often on users' News Feeds. There's a keyword detection feature that Meta switches on during "critical public events" to help fact checkers find relevant content faster. This will be enabled during COP26 to help fact-checkers in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, French and Dutch find and debunk climate misinformation more quickly.

The Climate Change Information Center, which debuted last year to provide users with knowledge from experts on the issue, is now being rolled out to more countries and it will soon be available in more than 100 territories. The hub will also show national greenhouse gas emissions alongside countries' targets and commitments to perhaps make governments more accountable. On top of that, in more than a dozen countries, Facebook is expanding its use of labels on climate change posts to direct users to the center.

The UN will soon update its ActNow chatbot on Messenger, Instagram and its website to suggest 10 more actions users can take to fight combat change. There are new camera stickers on Messenger, Instagram and Messenger Kids that aim to help users "strike up a conversation" about climate change.

In addition, Meta is starting up a program to help businesses that use its apps reduce their carbon footprint and adopt more sustainable practices. The Green Boost for Small Businesses project will start this month in the UK and Spain, primarily centered on food producers, restaurants and the hospitality sector. Meta will broaden the program to Italy, France and other nations in 2022.

Elsewhere, Meta says it's a founding member of the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance. The group's goal is to push toward net zero air travel by investing in sustainable aviation fuel.

These efforts are intended to complement internal actions Meta has undertaken to combat climate change. The company hit net zero carbon emissions in 2020 and as of earlier this year, it's using 100 percent renewable energy. Other environmentally conscious efforts include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 97 percent in the last four years and supporting measures to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Like Microsoft, Meta aims to restore more water than it uses by 2030.

As promised earlier in the year, Tesla is expanding access to its Supercharger charger network. Starting today, the company is opening 10 locations in the Netherlands to non-Tesla EVs as part of a pilot program. Provided you live in the country and you’ve installed the Tesla app on your phone (version 4.2.3 or later), you can use them to charge your car. The stations are located in Sassenheim, Apeldoorn Oost, Meerkerk, Hengelo, Tilburg, Duiven, Breukelen, Naarden, Eemnes and Zwolle.

The one thing to note about the pilot is it's only open to EV drivers who live in the Netherlands. However, if you drive a Tesla vehicle and you’re visiting the country, you can charge your car as normal at the stations. Additionally, how the program expands beyond this initial pilot will depend on congestion at the stations. “Future sites will only be opened to Non-Tesla vehicles if there is available capacity,” the company said.

On Monday, the company also put a non-Tesla port home charger on sale. Both the pilot and charger are a sign Tesla is looking outside of its ecosystem for revenue. That said, it may take a while before we see the automaker open its charging stations in the US to EVs from other companies since those use a proprietary connector.

With the UN’s COP26 climate summit now underway, Qualcomm has become the latest company to announce a sustainability pledge. The chipmaker says it will achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. Here’s the roadmap the company laid out. By 2030, Qualcomm says it will reduce its Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from base 2020 levels. That same year, it plans to reduce its Scope 3 emissions by 25 percent from where they were in 2020.

Scope 1 includes all pollution produced directly by the company or any emissions sources it owns or controls. Scope 2, meanwhile, entails indirect emissions created from the electricity, heating and cooling Qualcomm consumes. Lastly, Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions produced by its value chain.

In the context of a company like Qualcomm that relies on TSMC, Samsung and other foundries to produce its chips, reducing its Scope 3 emissions is the most impactful (and difficult) way the company can lessen its impact on the environment. According to an estimate from Imec, which recently announced a sustainable chip program involving Apple, approximately 75 percent of the greenhouse emissions tied to a mobile device are produced when it’s made, with almost half coming from the chip fabrication process.

Notably, that’s where Qualcomm says the least about its sustainability plans. It notes it’s working towards purchasing all of the power it uses at its San Diego headquarters from renewable sources and decarbonizing its operations using a “minimal” amount of Renewable Energy Credits and carbon offsets. That’s not to say the company is trying to greenwash its environmental responsibilities, but there’s a significant difference between making its offices environmentally friendly and doing the same for its supply chain.      

COP26, the UN’s climate change conference billed as “the world’s last best chance” to prevent the most disastrous effects of global warming, kicks off in Glasgow on Sunday. Delegates from around the world will convene to hammer out another round of emission reduction targets with a goal of achieving “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and keeping our rapidly heating planet temperature rise to a more manageable 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the calamitous 2.7 degree bump currently predicted.

With the eyes of the world firmly focused upon humanity’s disastrous planetary stewardship to date and wondering what might be done to rectify our past pollution, leading tech companies in recent weeks have become increasingly vocal in their pledges to reform business operations to help “save the planet.”

Apple, for example, announced the launch of 10 new environmental projects as part of its Power for Impact initiative as well as that 175 of its suppliers will switch to using renewable energy, the company said in a statement Tuesday, and that, by 2030, every device the company sells will have a net-zero climate impact. The company also noted that it has already reduced its carbon emissions by 40 percent over the past five years.

Google, on the other hand, pointed to its goal of achieving net zero emissions “across all of our operations and value chain by 2030,” according to a blog post published on Monday. The company also called out its efforts to assist its partners with reducing their own emissions, such as through the Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) program which helps cities map their pollution data, air quality and solar power potential. Google also made sure to mention just how sustainable its products actually are for consumers.

Microsoft

Microsoft made even loftier claims on Tuesday: to be “carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted, either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975,” before expounding on the rapidly increasing efficiencies of its massive data centers.

Amazon, for its part, announced that its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund investment program has selected three low-carbon startups: Resilient Power, which produces transformer-based EV charging technology; CMC Machinery, an order-specific-sized shipping box manufacturer; and Infinium, which devised “ultra-low carbon fuels that can be used in air transport, marine freight, and heavy truck fleets,” per the company’s blog post.

But do these protestations of environmental progress signify a legitimate effort by Big Tech to clean up its collective act or are they simply more PR spin seeking to offset their bad behavior? Because we’ve seen this sort of behavior before. It’s called greenwashing.

What is Greenwashing?

Merriam-Webster defines greenwashing as “expressions of environmentalist concerns especially as a cover for products, policies, or activities.” The term was first coined in 1986 by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in an essay examining the hotel industry’s practice of leaving placards in guest rooms admonishing them to reuse their towels to help “save the environment.” Back then, people got their news from three places: newspapers, television and radio — the same sources for virtually all advertising at the time. This information availability imbalance created a system wherein corporations could promote themselves in any flattering shade they wished, regardless of their actual actions, with little fear of the public actually realizing that a deception had even occurred.

The practice of greenwashing in America goes as far back as 1953 — though it wasn’t called as such at the time — when beverage manufacturers launched the Keep America Beautiful campaign, reminding the public to be good environmental stewards and not litter, in what was actually an effort to forestall incoming regulations on the use of disposable containers. Greenwashing metastasized in the 1980s as Big Oil companies ladled out their own laudations while they sought to minimize their own liability and culpability in environmental pollution scandals and global warming. These companies went so far as to work to actively prevent the government from passing clean energy laws. But you wouldn’t know it from their television ads.

The spot above is from ​​Chevron’s People Do campaign. It should be noted that many of the programs promoted in that campaign were actually government-mandated actions and that while this campaign was running, Chevron was repeatedly found in violation of the Clean Air and Water Acts, and was caught dumping oil in wildlife refuges.

Exxon’s actions through the ‘90s were equally abhorrent. The company continually muddied the waters around humanity’s role in climate change, knowing full well how the burning of fossil fuels inflamed the growing crisis.

In 2017, a Harvard study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (both internal memos and public-facing advertorial newspaper content) produced between 1977 and 2014 found that while more than 80 percent of internal documents acknowledged that human activity was largely responsible for global warming, just 12 percent of the company’s advertorials did the same.

"Within hours of publishing our study, ExxonMobil responded with ad hominem attacks," Harvard Research Associate Geoffrey Supran, told Client Earth last year. "I was invited by the European Parliament to testify about ExxonMobil's history of climate denial. The day before, they sent a private memo (which has now been leaked) to Members of Parliament to try to discredit me. If these experiences tell us anything, it's that the Exxon tiger hasn't changed its stripes."

Greenwashing in the modern era

Greenwashing remains a widely-used marketing tactic even today — and not just the mealy-mouthed word salads regurgitated by oil executives during a House Oversight Committee hearing this Thursday.

Take bottled water, for instance. Nestle alone has spent millions of ad dollars over recent years in an effort to convince the public that, as it claimed in 2008, “bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.”​​ This despite the fact that barely 31 percent of plastic water bottles actually get recycled and the rest end up cluttering landfills and the ocean — scientists estimate that around 8 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean annually.

And they are far from alone. Coca-Cola came under fire in 2015 in Australia when it rolled out Coke Life, a supposedly light sugar variant packaged in a bright green can. Sure it made consumers feel like they were making a health conscious purchasing decision but that was despite health advocates pointing out that “the reduction to 10 teaspoons of sugar in a 600ml bottle made little difference in terms of health impacts.” More recently the company launched its World Without Waste campaign which, at its essence, pushed consumers to simply recycle more, rather than actually adjust the way the company conducts its business.

In 2013, Tyson Meats was taken to task over the fawning self-framing of how it cares for its animals and their relative well-being, not two years before five Tyson supplier employees were charged with 33 counts of criminal animal cruelty for repeatedly kicking and punching pigs. And who can forget Volkswagen, which launched a “Clean Diesel” marketing campaign amid the Dieselgate emissions scandal?

Why Greenwashing works so well

So why do companies insist on greenwashing their operations rather than actually reform themselves? Because it is far more profitable to simply adjust public perception than it is to make meaningful reforms. A 2015 Nielsen poll found that 66 percent of respondents would be willing to pay a premium for “environmentally sustainable products” and among those willing to pay more more than 50 percent were influenced by sustainability factors such as “a company being environmentally friendly (58 percent), and company being known for its commitment to social value (56 percent.)”

It’s also because we, collectively, keep falling for it. Consumers’ desires to help address the climate crisis, especially in the face of barely tepid responses from world governments, primes us to view virtually any action on that account as a positive one. “SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] and ‘net zero’ have kind of created an opportunity for a lot more greenwashing, because it allows you to describe yourself as a green company when you’re doing a thing that’s fundamentally not green,” Dave Powell, co-presenter of the Sustainababble podcast and the former Head of Environment at the New Economics Foundation, told Client Earth. “You effectively buy your way out of trouble, for example, by promising to plant large numbers of trees.”

"As part of their climate strategies, many companies are relying on voluntary carbon offsetting. However, if not done well, offsetting can result in greenwashing,” Dr. Aoife Brophy Haney, Research Lecturer at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, added. “To mitigate this risk, government and society at large should support the use of best practice guidelines, such as the recently released ‘Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting’, to help ensure offsetting is done in a rigorous and credible way that ultimately contributes to net zero goals."

And, most importantly, companies continue to engage in greenwashing because there is very little downside to doing so, at least from a regulatory perspective. In the US, the FTC guidelines for environmental marketing claims are only voluntary, though the FTC does retain the right to prosecute outright false or misleading advertisements.

However, cracks in the greenwashing facade may be beginning to show, starting in the financial sector, as regulators’ interest in ESG fund (environmental, social and governance) oversight grows. As Financial News London reported Monday, German asset manager DWS has recently been investigated by both US and German regulatory agencies after a former employee accused the company of fudging the environmental credentials in its 2020 annual report.

“You have to be careful, as there is a big reputational risk,” an unnamed senior executive at a European asset manager, told FN London. “We’re not saying we were bulls***ing before, but there’s a recognition now that it’s more complicated.”

“Most have probably been a bit too pushy in marketing their alleged ESG expertise and they are now applying more caution,” ​​Philip Kalus, managing partner at consultancy Accelerando Associates, added. “Some would even say there is panic in the house. Nobody wants to be the next one being accused, but it is an important and overdue wake-up call for the industry.”

That’s not to say that environmental pledges made by Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon are meant to intentionally gaslight the public (though Exxon, Shell and Chevron absolutely did). These companies have a vested financial interest in at least appearing as positively as possible to their customers because, frankly, nobody’s going to have time to talk about the slick new features of the Pixel 8 or iOS 15 when we’re in the midst of a global climate meltdown-slash-water war.

Is Google’s “moonshot goal” of operating its data centers and campuses entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030 going to make more than a blip of difference when it comes to mitigating the impacts of climate change? Probably not, definitely not on its own and certainly no more so than Microsoft’s promise to reduce water use in its data centers by 95 percent by 2024 or Apple’s plan to build robots to more effectively recycle old handsets. But these claims do not, in and of themselves, constitute greenwashing. Their changes may not be enough to make a noticeable impact at this point, but these good faith efforts attempt to do something, anything, to stave off what could well be humanity’s self-inflicted extinction. And given how America’s most recent effort to invest in environmentally responsible energy technologies was single-handedly killed off by the coal-loving Senator from West Virginia, these sorts of corporate initiatives may likely be the best we’ll soon see.

Mercedes is using the impending COP26 climate conference to highlight its EV efforts — and show how sustainability can involve more than a switch to battery power. The newly unveiled Sustaineer delivery van concept is fully electric, as you'd guess, but it also improves the environment around it. Fine particulate filters on the front and underbody purify the air around the van no matter what its speed. It even uses cast iron, ceramic-coated disc brakes that both reduce the amount of dust in the air and limit brake wear.

The Sustaineer also has solar panels on its roof to extend range and reduce the need for plug-in charging (this sometimes contributes to CO2 emissions). It can further power devices whether or not the van is running, such as tools and laptops. Solar power on electrified vehicles is nothing new, but Mercedes clearly hopes implementations like this would keep EVs as green as possible.

Other eco-conscious technology includes an energy-saving heating system that hews close to the body (including the seatbelt) and a heavy use of recycled materials. The filler is made from household waste, the cab partition is built from natural straw and the underbody includes recycled polypropylene and used tires. Mercedes lowers noise pollution, too, thanks to a quiet electric drivetrain, low rolling resistance tires and a hushed automatic delivery door.

Safety is a concern as well. A camera monitors road conditions to share reports of potholes and other hazards with cities, while digital mirrors provide a clearer field of view than you normally get with cargo vans. A "biologically active" light keeps the driver alert by filling the cab with illumination similar to daylight while maintaining a natural rhythm.

There are no mentions of plans to mass-produce the Sustaineer. With that said, Mercedes stressed that all the van's technology was crafted with large-scale production in mind. You might see this in other vans, not to mention other Mercedes vehicles. The company already has other green tech on the horizon, such as sustainable repairs for EV batteries in 2022, and Sustaineer is ultimately a logical extension of those plans.

Ahead of the UN's COP26 climate change conference, which starts on Sunday, Microsoft has revealed more details about its plans to make its data centers greener. Among those is a goal of reducing the amount of water its data centers use by 95 percent by 2024 — around 5.7 billion liters each year.

Data centers often use water to keep servers cool. Microsoft has researched server performance at higher temperatures and found that it's able to "create higher set points for a variety of different climates for when water-based, evaporative cooling is necessary to preserve server performance and reliability," as Noelle Walsh, Microsoft's corporate vice president of cloud ops and innovation wrote in a blog post.

The company says this project, which it expects to be fully implemented by 2024, could completely eliminate the need to use water for cooling in locations such as Amsterdam, Dublin, Virginia and Chicago. It may reduce water use in desert data center locations (like Arizona) by up to 60 percent.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continuing its research into liquid immersion cooling to reduce its dependency on water. The company says that, this year, it became the first cloud services provider to run "two-phase liquid immersion cooling in a production environment." It's been looking into overclocking as well and found liquid cooling can increase performance of some chipsets by 20 percent.

"Because of the efficiencies in both power and cooling that liquid cooling affords us, it unlocks new potential for datacenter rack design," Walsh wrote. "In short, liquid cooling paves the way for more densely packed servers in smaller spaces, meaning increased capacity per square foot in a datacenter — or the ability to create smaller datacenters in more strategic locations in the future. This adds to the benefits of waterless cooling design."

Last September, Microsoft announced plans to become "water positive" (i.e. to replenish more water than it uses) by 2030, and these data center efforts will be a key part of that goal. It also aims to be carbon negative by the end of the decade by removing more carbon than it emits. By 2050, the company plans to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it has generated since it was founded in 1975.

In addition, Microsoft says it's designing data centers with local ecosystems in mind "to renew and revitalize the surrounding area so that we can restore and create a pathway to provide regenerative value for the local community and environment."

It's attempting to use more environmentally friendly processes in designing and building data centers to reduce its carbon footprint. The aim is to use building materials that reduce "embodied carbon," or emissions linked to materials and construction during a building's life cycle. Concrete and steel are said to be major contributors of such emissions. Microsoft says it has found ways of reducing embodied carbon from those materials by up to 60 percent.

Elsewhere, the company has opened up a public preview of a tool called Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to help companies and other organizations record and report their carbon emissions. The tool will also offer suggestions on how to reduce emissions. Earlier this month, Google announced similar features for its Cloud Platform customers.

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) kicks off on Sunday, and ahead of it some of tech's biggest companies are announcing new initiatives. Amazon is investing in three companies working on creating sustainable technology as part of its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund. 

The first of these companies is Resilient Power, a company working to make delivering electricity from the power grid and delivering it to electric vehicle charging stations more efficient. The company appears primarily focused on fleets — think businesses that need to deploy vehicles en masse, like shipping services — rather than individual vehicles. The company claims it can build out EV fast-charging stations at one-tenth the standard size and installation time as current stations. Naturally, an efficient, fast-charging solution for fleets of delivery vehicles is something that could be directly relevant to Amazon. It also could relate to the company's existing investment in EV maker Rivian, which could plausibly make EVs for Amazon delivery services down the line. 

The second company, CMC Machinery, can design and manufacture custom-fit boxes for whatever items need to go inside, without waste like extra space and single-use padding materials. Again, the benefit to Amazon is obvious here — if the company is going to continue to ship things at the rate it currently does, reducing the amount of packaging waste the company produces would be significant.

Finally, a company called Infinium is working on renewable fuel technology as an alternative to traditional diesel and jet fuels. The company claims its Infinium Electrofuels are "ultra-low carbon fuels that can be used in air transport, marine freight, and heavy truck fleets." This marks Amazon's second investment round in Infinium, and it'll be used to help develop facilities for producing the company's fuel. Amazon also says that this investment will help the company actually deliver its fuel for the first time, which would be a pretty major milestone. 

With these three new companies, Amazon is now supporting 11 total companies with its Climate Change Pledge, a key component in its plan to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2040. Given that goal, it makes sense that these investments are in companies that can directly help Amazon reduce its carbon footprint. With COP26 about to start, both Apple and Microsoft have also made announcements around moves they're making to become more eco-friendly. Apple, which plans to be carbon-neutral by 2030, announced it has "more than doubled" the number of suppliers committed to using clean energy. Microsoft, meanwhile, is hoping to reduce data center water consumption by 95 percent by 2024, just a few short years from now.

Apple has announced that it's "more than doubled" the number of suppliers committed to using clean energy and unveiled new measures toward its goal of being carbon neutral by 2030. It's unveiling the initiatives ahead of COP26, the upcoming UN conference that many observers feel will not produce the breakthroughs needed to achieve aims set at the Paris climate accord.

As part of its 2020 environmental progress report, Apple said that its products and supply chain would be carbon neutral by 2030. That includes not just Apple itself, but 175 supplies that also need to transition to renewable energy, it wrote today. When that happens, "the company and its suppliers will bring online more than 9 gigawatts of clean power around the world," avoiding over 18 million metric tons of CO2e annually, Apple wrote. 

In total, 175 Apple suppliers will transition to using renewable energy, and the company and its suppliers will bring online more than 9 gigawatts of clean power around the world. These actions will avoid over 18 million metric tons of CO2e annually — the equivalent of taking over 4 million cars off the road each year.

Apple noted that 19 suppliers in Europe are now part of its Clean Energy Program, including Solvay and STMicroelectronics. It has 50 more in China, along with 31 in Japan and South Korea, including SK Hynix, "one of the first Korean suppliers to participate." Its also creating "new pathways" for recycled materials, including recycled sources of gold, cobalt, aluminum and rare earth elements. 

Apple also added 10 new projects for its "Power for Impact" initiative designed to bring clean energy solutions to communities around the world, particularly in under-resourced communities. That includes a project with six Sioux tribes in the US to finance, develop, build and operating power generation facilities, along with renewable energy projects in South Africa, the Philippines, Columbia, Israel and elsewhere.

While Apple appears to be making good on its promise to deliver products built with 100 percent clean energy, it continues to take heat over e-waste and related right to repair issues. Many of its products are difficult and expensive to repair, meaning that they either end up as e-waste or recycled toward new products. Both of those things use energy, clean or otherwise, that wouldn't be consumed if the product was simply fixed.

Recently, President Biden ordered the FTC to draft right to repair legislation, and Europe announced that it would take measures forcing phone manufacturers to use USB-C — both rules that seem to primarily target Apple. 

The modern world has grown around steel bones — everything from tools and home appliances to skyscrapers and airplanes use the versatile material in their construction. But the process of making steel is a significant contributor to global warming and climate change. In 2018, reportedly every ton of steel produced generated 1.85 tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 7 percent of global CO2 emissions that year. This poses not just environmental challenges for our ever increasing world, it could also impact steel producers’ bottom line, which is why the industry is developing a “fossil-free” means of making the alloy, one that relies on renewable-sourced hydrogen rather than carbon coke.

Steel is an alloy composed of iron, which in its pure form is relatively soft, with a small amount of introduced carbon, usually about 2 percent of its total weight. This improves the material’s strength and reduces its propensity for fracturing. The process starts by combining iron ore, before coking coal and limestone (which remove impurities) in a blast furnace to create pig iron.

That molten pig iron is then poured into a furnace and high pressure air is introduced via a water-cooled lance. The oxygen chemically reacts with the molten iron to purge impurities — as well as produce significant amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The oxygen also forces impurities like silicates and phosphates present in the pig iron to react with limestone flux, trapping them as waste slag. Today, per the World Steel Association, some 1,864 million metric tons of crude steel are produced annually with China producing a vast majority of it.

While the WSA points out that “in the last 50 years, the steel industry has reduced its energy consumption per tonne of steel produced by 60 percent” and notes that steel is infinitely reusable, and that “new” steel typically contain 30percent recycled steel on average the traditional methods of iron and steel production are becoming untenable — at least if we want to mitigate its impacts on climate change. What’s more, the International Energy Agency estimates that global steel production will grow by a third by 2050, which will only compound the industry’s environmental impacts. That’s where fossil-free steel comes in.

Take HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), for example. This process has been developed as a joint venture between three Swedish companies: SSAB, which makes steel, energy company Vattenfall, and LKAB, which mines iron ore. Rather than using coking coal and a blast furnace to convert raw iron ore into metallic iron, the HYBRIT method uses hydrogen generated from renewable energy sources and a technique known as direct reduction, which lowers the amount of oxygen contained within the ore without heating it above the metal’s melting point, to create sponge iron.

HYBRIT

Like pig iron, sponge iron is an intermediary material in the steelmaking process (it’ll get shipped off to SSAB to be turned into steel slabs), but in HYBRIT’s case, its production results in the creation of water vapor rather than carbon dioxide.

“The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry,” Martin Lindqvist, CEO of SSAB, told reporters in August. “We hope that this will inspire others to also want to speed up the green transition.”

The HYBRIT coalition opened a pilot direct reduction plant in Luleå, Sweden last year and has announced plans to increase production to an industrial scale by 2026. The team claims that eliminating fossil fuels from the steelmaking industry in Sweden could drop the country’s total CO2 emissions by at least 10 percent. However, they are not the only group looking into fossil-free steel production. The H2 Green Steel company has announced its intent to open a large-scale plant in northern Sweden by 2024 and expects to produce 5 million tonnes of the material annually by 2030.

In June, Volvo announced that it would be partnering with SSAB to develop fossil-free steel for use in its products — both passenger cars and industrial machines. Last week, Volvo unveiled the first vehicle to be made with fossil-free steel, an 8-plus ton load carrier designed to operate within mines. Not only is the load carrier powered by a fully electric drivetrain, it can autonomously navigate across a worksite as well. Granted only about 3 of the vehicle’s 8 tons were made from fossil-free steel (the drivetrain’s steel components, for example, were made through traditional smelting means), this marks an important first step towards a carbon-neutral transportation future.

“When we have been talking about ‘fossil free’ in the transport sector, we have been focusing a lot on emissions from the vehicles in use. But it's clear to us and to everyone else that we also need to address the carbon footprint from the production of our vehicles,” Volvo Group’s Chief Technology Officer Lars Stenqvist told Forbes. “That's why it's so important now to team up with everyone in the value chain and collaborate in order to drive out all the fossil fuel also used in the production of components, parts and also running our production facilities.”

Volvo expects the autonomous load carriers to enter real-world operation by next year, though the company concedes that its ability to ramp up production of fossil-free vehicles will depend largely on SSAB’s ability to deliver sufficient quantities of the material.