Happy Monday Tuesday. 👋
Welcome back to another episode of The Grumpy Optimists. Sorry for being so patchy with the updates here. It turns out that selling a company, scaling a global team, moving house twice in a few months, and realising how much I’ve worked for the last three years have meant this blog has been deprioritised. I have some great optimistic climate news to share with you today. I was thinking about how I can ensure I live life while also putting out content I’m proud of and I may make this a fortnightly newsletter to help with the workload. I’ll keep you updated.
In the meantime, I’d highly recommend following another great newsletter Following The Footprints for great weekly FMCG updates.
For now, you can enjoy today’s episode below. 👇
👀 Articles to read
🍺 UK breweries collab to create a regenerative beer. UK brewery Northern Monk has joined forces with fellow brewer Toast to create a regenerative barley beer using malt from Muntons. 60% of the grain in the brew comes from a single regen farm in Yorkshire, with a further 10% coming from surplus bread provided in collaboration with Toast.
💭 Two weeks ago I was in Las Vegas for the largest craft brewing conference in the world with Zevero. One thing was very clear. The UK and Europe are so far ahead of the US breweries on sustainability. While there is some cool innovation happening, including some great talks, the overwhelming feeling was one of sustainability being an afterthought. I summarise my thoughts for you to read here too.
P.S. The emissions from the trip were equivalent to 7,000 pints of beer. My goal with any event is to have an impact 100 times bigger than the emissions from it. The answer is a very bold yes for this one.
🍆 Lidl Germany announces huge increase in plant-based goods. Sales of vegan products at Lidl Germany jumped by over 30% in six months after the supermarket made prices between meat and plant-based alternatives the same. Interestingly, 55% of the German population identify as flexitarian. It’s a really positive trend.
🚗 EVs become the default in China. Over 50% of new cars sold in China during the first half of April were EVs, that’s around 6 years sooner than some analysts predicted. While this is a good sign, it’s also important to note that we should still prioritise building great public transport that makes the need for cars more and more obsolete.
🎼 Nature officially becomes a music artist. A new initiative, Sounds Right, aims to recognise nature as an official artist on streaming platforms. Artists incorporating natural sounds can credit "Nature" as a featured artist, with a portion of profits supporting environmental causes. Contributing artists include Ellie Goulding, Tom Walker and London Grammar. Get that Spotify on REPEAT.
🌾 Wildfarmed regenerative bread hits the stores. Wildfarmed, the regen ag brand co-founded by Groove Armada’s Andy Cato, hit the shelf with its own bread loaves and rolls. The range is available exclusively at Waitrose.
🪨 Microsoft signs the largest-ever deal for carbon removal. Microsoft and Stockholm Exergi have struck a landmark 10-year agreement, representing the largest engineered carbon removal deal globally at over 3.3 million tonnes. The removal will take place through bio energy production with carbon capture and storage at Stockholm Exergi's facility.
🤔 Can we still keep temperatures below 1.5°C? This tracker tells us. Speed and Scale, a global initiative to get more people to tackle climate change, has updated their tracker to show how we’re trending on the pathway to net zero. The takeaway? There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s possible. Their new report is well worth checking out.
That’s all for this week, folks; thank you for your patience. This episode was written after listening to a lot of country music and a delightful bank holiday weekend.
For the planet,
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚