The GREENTECH FESTIVAL: London welcomes around 1,200 visitors, successfully exploring how climate crisis can be transformed into opportunities

The second edition of The GREENTECH FESTIVAL: London welcomed around 1,200 visitors to London’s Truman Brewery, successfully exploring how climate crisis can be transformed into opportunities.

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The GREENTECH FESTIVAL (GTF) celebrated the second stop of its World Tour in London, on October 13th and 14th. GTF and its partners, including this year’s Partner Country Italy, global founding partner Audi, conference founding partner Vodafone Business, Mini and e.ON, gathered at The Truman Brewery to explore bold visions, inspiring concepts, forward-looking projects and green solutions.

THE GREENTECH FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS:

  • The festival included a clean-up activation in partnership with Hubbub, fishing plastic litter out of the river Thames.
  • The conference welcomed keynote speakers such as Sir Paul Smith, Bella Lack and Charlie Martin.
  • The festival’s conference included a ‘Bootcamp’ activity, dividing groups into moderated and themed workshops to address complex challenges. Topics included Energy for TomorrowVibrant and Sustainable Communities and Financing Change.

GREENTECH FESTIVAL welcomed visionary thought-leaders, changemakers and experts to engage in critical conversations about the systemic need to tackle climate change and create solutions. The festival saw 1,200 festival attendees, with 50 participants taking part in the Thames Clean-Up and 300 guests in attendance at the GREEN AWARDS.

“We believe that with the unprecedented crisis comes incredible opportunity. This year’s Greentech Festival in London was all about the idea that we can and must find new ways to replace outdated business models and ways of living to proactively contribute to our future and want to make change happen,” said Marco Voigt, co-founder of GTF.

The two-day festival saw speakers, partners, exhibitors, and attendees discussing the entire spectrum of green technologies, the challenges arising from the climate crisis and the opportunities to create and implement new development approaches.

The Thames Clean-Up activation, ran in partnership with Hubbub, saw participants engage in ‘Plastic Fishing’: collecting plastic bottles from the Thames in three of the world’s first 99% recycled plastic punts.

Nico Rosberg, GTF Co-Founder, said “At GREENTECH FESTIVAL, we envision a long-term commitment in each region of the world and want to connect like-minded individuals to tackle the problems of our time together. We want to act on what we’re preaching about sustainability. Allowing business professionals to get their hands dirty in the clean-up activation leads to an outcome truly more than the sum of its parts: we raise awareness and bring plastic and marine pollution issues to life.” 

The Awards Show, hosted by Co-Founder Nico Rosberg and the Director of Audi UK, Andrew Doyle, celebrated winners such as Snam’s “H2 Infrastructure,” obtaining the Green Awards for their outstanding contribution to creating the energy solution network of tomorrow and UCL’s “The Loop” for its deep engagement in addressing unsustainable consumption. The Awards were accompanied by Alphaville’s Marian gold, and Uwe Fahrenkrog-Peterson.

The conference and exhibition featured deep insights into how climate crisis can become opportunistic in the context of sustainable business and global policy. Bella Lack, Director of Reserva Youth Land Trust said, “We can’t have effective action without an engaging dialogue and it’s at conferences like this where action begins and is carried out into the world by the attendees.”

Sir Paul Smith on stage with an extraordinary keynote

From C-level keynotes to panel discussions and a start-up slam, attendees discussed what a greener future could look like in the context of mobility, green finance and sustainable communities. In a witty and inspiring opening session, Sir Paul Smith, Chairman and Founder of Paul Smith, kicked off the conference and exhibition with insights into what design can teach us about climate protection and how several paths can lead to long lasting change.

“Design is about being curious and about thinking differently. Not always down the obvious road,” said Sir Paul Smith. In the gripping and very personal closing speech, British racing car driver and LGBTQ+ activist Charlie Martin invited festival attendees to think about how we can see adversity as an opportunity to learn, to grow and to improve: aligning with GTF’s motto: ‘Turning climate crisis into opportunity’.

GTF held Bootcamps, inviting participants to connect and collaborate with others in a moderated workshop. They tackled complex problems and outlined tangible, practical approaches and strategies to accelerate action. The informative value of the Bootcamps was enormous, with one participant saying, “I learned more about energy transition and energy transformation in this short period of time than I did in the whole year before.”

The next GREENTECH FESTIVAL will take place in Singapore from November 17-18. The next GTF event in Berlin will take place from June 14-16, 2023.

Adam Parry
Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.

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