Pioneering Lighthouse Offers Space-Savvy Sustainability on Wheels

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In the early 1970s, a group of fishermen organized a campaign to dump 2 million used auto tires into the Atlantic Ocean, about a mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., between two living coral reefs.  The goal was to build an artificial reef that would promote sea life. But it had the opposite effect: The mass of tires became an underwater blight.  William Nuckols, with Coastal America, the federal office that is helping coordinate a cleanup of the tires, says the original goal was a good one.  “The original intention,” Nuckols says, “was to try to provide a fish habitat and add to the natural coral reefs that were there.”

For several years at METSTRADE, we have been asking our Sustainability Panels the question: ‘‘How green is green in the leisure marine industry?” The topics we have covered have included disassembly, life cycle assessment, material selection for better recyclability at end-of-life, and the development of clean energy storage and propulsion solutions.  For the 2021 sustainable panel at METSTRADE, we considered the intensifying global pressures on achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. For instance, the climate change targets set out by the UN Sustainability Development Goals, and the EU Green Deal. With this in mind, we decided to narrow the focus, by homing-in on the latest innovations aimed at achieving these climate change targets.

Northern Ireland tech and innovation non-profit Catalyst is offering CEOs the chance to work with leading entrepreneurs to scale their businesses. Belfast tech non-profit Catalyst is inviting ambitious CEOs to apply for its ‘Way to Scale’ bootcamp in late September. The bootcamp has 20 places for CEOs and up to two members of their senior teams, and it offers a series of four 90-minute, online workshops focused on topics such as value proposition, business growth, go-to-market strategy, market positioning, team dynamics and business risk. CEOs can progress from the bootcamp to the ‘Way to Scale’ programme, which runs from January to March in 2022 and is comprised of three weeks of intensive training modules delivered in Belfast, Boston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).