The Matcha Initiative
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I'm a scientist who is passionate about creating, proliferating, and assessing sustainable technologies. My team and I develop tools that enable companies and governments to make data-driven choices on sustainability initiatives. Our expertise includes maturity assessments, business model innovation, energy modelling, industrial symbiosis, and life cycle assessments.
We also train companies to use these tools effectively. I’ve personally guided several companies to perform a holistic sustainability assessment of their organisation and create targeted action plans.
I would love to chat about how to prioritize and implement sustainable technologies and importantly, track their impact.
I grew up in Singapore but moved to Shanghai during high school because my father was posted there for work. Every day on my way to school, I saw black smoke spewing from cars and chimneys. It made me very aware of the impact that economic growth has on the planet. Although I recognise the importance of growth, I always feel that there is a better way to go about it without harming the environment.
My organisation is a research institute focusing on manufacturing technologies. I helped to integrate sustainable thinking into various research groups outside my area of expertise - such as robotics and metal forming - by training colleagues to incorporate life cycle thinking into their projects.
There are over a dozen different research groups across the company all working on very different, nuanced areas that require a deep level of expertise. It’s not always easy to understand their research, and even more challenging to integrate elements of sustainable thinking into the research. On top of that, it can often be hard to convince colleagues that sustainability should even be considered in the first place.
To encourage teams to proactively incorporate sustainability into their research areas, I first invested time to understand the broad sustainability trends in each of these areas. Next, I reached out to individual researchers and each of the group leaders to learn about their specific research work, long term goals and discuss sustainability trends. These conversations were great for clearing up misconceptions on both sides and subsequently generated impactful ideas that came from the researchers themselves. Establishing ongoing synergy between domain experts and sustainability experts is very important to ensure that practical actions are consistently developed.
I was part of a team that helped a government agency quantify emissions from an entire industry sector in Singapore. We ultimately developed a comprehensive series of mitigation measures to address some of the hotspots identified that can potentially mitigate 1% of Singapore’s national carbon emissions.