Matt Schlegel

Martin Stanley who goes by his nickname “Stan” shows us how we can address the climate crisis in any occupation or endeavor we undertake.  Stan is CEO at Treewise, a UK-based vegetation risk management service that keeps trees from disrupting critical infrastructure like electrical power lines. Stan is passionate about turning tree cuttings into energy that helps reduce the need for fossil fuels and their unwanted emissions.

More about Stan here:

Martin Stanley, known to his friends and colleagues as Stan

Stan is a passionate and committed entrepreneur, who built and sold his first Tree Surgery company to FTSE250 company in 2009.

More recently Stan developed and patented game changing methodologies for the way we manage trees a ”Assets” in particular around powerline and rail track Rights of Way.

To validate Stans methodologies he secured £2.1m funding from the European & UK Space Agency where his project identified how to efficiently measure trees with geospatial data. Measuring trees is one thing but with global warming it was apparent more and more waste was being produced from tree surgery and forestry operations.

As ever with the entrepreneur spirit Stan looked at doing something more efficient with the waste, something to better the environment, so with his UK based company Treewise has now partnered with a European technology provider who are leading a Blue Revolution, and between them their delivering ground-breaking projects where they turn tree waste into Hydrogen, food grade carbon dioxide or electricity, at the same time capture carbon in the process.

Stan also presents his other projects on the international vegetation conference circuits which include:

• Establishing ground-breaking principles on effectively processing LiDAR data for vegetation management for field crews and regulatory reporting
• Working with University of Leicester established new principles for using high spatial resolution, multi spectral satellite imagery for a new wildfire ignition risk index

www.tree-wise.com

#Leadership #Energy  #climatechange #EmotionalIntelligence #EQ

[Video Transcript]

Matt Schlegel:

Thanks for joining me in conversations with leaders who are engaging with their feelings as a leadership tool for both inspiration and motivation. Today, I’m speaking with Martin Stanley, who is using his feelings about the climate crisis to fuel the transformation of the tree maintenance industry into a source of green energy. And now for the conversation.

Matt Schlegel:

Today, I’m joined by Martin Stanley, who goes by his nickname, Stan. Stan is CEO at Treewise, a UK based vegetation risk management service that keeps trees from disrupting critical infrastructure like electrical power lines. Stan has increasingly become concerned about the climate crisis and realized that he could take innovative steps in his own business to develop alternative energy sources that will move us away from extracting and burning fossil fuels. I’m eager to hear about his climate journey. Thank you Stan for joining me today.

Martin Stanley:

Thanks Matt it’s an absolute pleasure. It’s great to be on your podcast so thanks for inviting me. I must say I’ve seen some of your previous podcasts and must give a big shout out I think to Betsy Rosenberg, I think I’m a big fan there. Some great comments there. “Wake up, smell the carbon” was great and “Go forth and greenify” I thought brilliant, when’s the t-shirts coming out?

Matt Schlegel:

Yes, yes. Yeah, she is great with her Betsy-isms, I love them. So thanks again for joining me today and I would like to start off and just ask you how you’re feeling about the climate crisis now?

Martin Stanley:

Well I mean it makes me very angry, the state of the crisis at the minute. I mean we live on a beautiful planet, which over billions of years, nature has made incredibly robust, diverse, and successful. The one thing that keeps it all in check and keeps us alive, the atmosphere, we’re destroying. And yeah it concerns me because it seems as a race that we’re happy to do that.

Martin Stanley:

And we often ask the question, why are these things happening? We like to understand it and obviously it comes down to people’s choices I think. Choices and the decisions that people make, a decision leads one way or another and obviously I think all in all we seem to be making some poor decisions. Whether it comes back down to education, is it the government? Is it society? I don’t know. I have to ask myself with the things I’ve seen in business that in today’s world it’s often about the bottom line. The pounds, the dollars, the euros that sort of call the shots and they seem to override some of the common sense about what we do with the environment. And its as somebody said to me recently, there’s a lot of pressures on businesses and sometimes it’s just about doing the right thing.

Matt Schlegel:

Yeah. And it is really interesting that you bring up anger and so many people they come into their climate journey from a different point. Some through grief or sadness or some through anxiety. So it’s really interesting that you highlight anger, which is a perfectly valid response and a perfectly valid feeling. And in your business you are out in nature all the time. You are with the trees and you’re working with the trees and you’re managing and preserving them and I can imagine that also impacts you as you see all of your tree friends being impacted.

Martin Stanley:

Absolutely, yeah. And I suppose mentioning the world of trees, it’s where we started off and when we looked at how better to manage trees, in relation to power lines, the best time to prune them, the best times to work on them, it’s an industry that we say that… I don’t think there’s another industry with so many anomalies because we have different tree species, different growth rates, different landowners, voltages, safety distance to work with. And one of the things to help us look at the impact of managing trees is the methodologies we’ve produced where we manage trees as assets, which was great for the operational side of life. Then we started to learn about the environmental benefits we could add to that.

Martin Stanley:

So when we looked at a tree as an asset, we also thought, well actually it’s not just about safety clearances, it’s about the environmental, the green tag to that.

Matt Schlegel:

Right.

Martin Stanley:

What’s the benefits of that tree if we remove it, what would be done to the wildlife habitat? What’s it mean in terms of biodiversity? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? And all that builds up into what we call the green balance sheets. So when we’re working on power lines, we have power line corridors and we look at what that means in terms of a green balance sheet and biodiversity.

Matt Schlegel:

Right. So just taking a much more holistic view of the tree and all the benefits that we accrue from that tree being in our environment. I think that’s great. So you mentioned anger specifically, and I’m just wondering now, how are the feelings that you’re having, anger, whichever that you’re having, how are they influencing your behaviors and your direction as a leader?

Martin Stanley:

Well, it’s an interesting one because there’s many roads we could take with this, but what became really apparent through the work we did, it was validating some projects working alongside European Space Agency. So that led us into looking deeper into data for climate, particularly with the Met Office and certainly-

Matt Schlegel:

And the Met office is the UK version that looks at weather, right? It’s the weather, the National Weather Service?

Martin Stanley:

That’s right, yes. And certainly in terms of UK and the climate we have, we’re getting longer growing seasons, so we’re getting up to 336 growing days a year. So when we said to the Met Office, “What’s that mean more in real terms, in layman’s terms?” So they said that the growing seasons actually kick in when the temperature is five degrees or more for five consecutive days and then the growing season ends when the temperatures five degrees or less for five consecutive days. So the example of the UK over the last 10 years, we’ve gained an extra month of growing season compared to the last 40 years. So this is all down to climate warming.

Matt Schlegel:

Right.

Martin Stanley:

So what that means for us, we’re getting more tree growth. So more growth means on the maintenance operations we’re getting a lot more waste. So if we take a context of the UK, and as we said the National Critical Infrastructure, just say power, rail and highways, we would estimate 2 million tons of waste are produced each year. So if you like to take the anger out and channel it in the right direction, we started to do some more research and ended up teaming up with a company in the Netherlands that make a very clever technology to actually do something useful with this waste. So it’s a process whereby we can feed waste into, for a better word, a gas fire machine, and we can turn that green waste into either hydrogen, food grade carbon dioxide or electricity. And the beauty is because it’s carbon based waste it captures the carbon in the same process. So we’ve actually nicknamed this within the company, the Magic Machiner.

Matt Schlegel:

Nice, nice. So that’s amazing. So as a part of your business, you have this waste, you’re finding you’re getting more and more from the lengthening growing season and then you found an innovative solution through this company. And do you want to tell us the name of the company that you’re partnering with?

Martin Stanley:

Absolutely. The company’s name is BlueRevo based in the Netherlands, and a quick www.bluerevo.nl and you can check them out. They are leaders in what’s known as the Blue Revolution. It’s an amazing technology that’s been developed and certainly for what was in the tree and forestry industry, it’s going to absolutely revolutionize how we operate.

Matt Schlegel:

Oh wow.

Martin Stanley:

It will take the road miles out of [inaudible 00:10:34] if you like, by the way this can be set up. So we’re getting a very low footprint on the carbon waste. The waste itself is unwanted material, so it’s a win-win. And every day that we use it, we are capturing carbon.

Matt Schlegel:

Right. I mean, that’s brilliant. That’s such a great way to address what you’re seeing, what somebody might see as a growing waste problem, but you’re saying no, here’s an opportunity for us to capture that carbon and then turn it into something useful that will provide energy and allow us to move off of fossil fuels. So that is brilliant.

Martin Stanley:

Yeah and it’s a dream scenario. So again, for the power companies that are producing their own waste, they can install these machines into their depots and as the waste comes back at the end of the day, it can be figured to produce different products. So if the company’s recently invested in the electric vehicles, they can charge the electric vehicles within their own environment from their own waste. And it’s the same as hydrogen for the crews that could adapt hydrogen vehicles, again they can bring their own waste back to create the hydrogen, they fuel the vehicles and fleet them back into the field the next day. So it’s an absolute dream scenario.

Matt Schlegel:

And it sounds like it’s very localized. So you are not transporting these materials long distances. You’re collecting them locally and then you are converting them into these useful products locally and being able to use those products locally, it sounds like. So it’s a very self contained system.

Martin Stanley:

Absolutely, and I think the difference compared to what’s out there today in terms of biofuel plants, set int the UK the size of plants will be few and far between, so the feed stock, if you like, that they use has to be taken to them. So that’s arctic lorries, tractors and trailers on the highways collecting road miles as they go. So these are of a size, if you like, 60 feet by 18 by 30 feet if you like. It’s something that’s a unit size that can be installed in local depots.

Martin Stanley:

So the way we look at reducing the road miles and the thought process behind it is that tree surgery crews leave a depot in the morning, it may mean a changing configuration of vehicles as in the carrying waste back, they bring it back at the end of the day. So that journey was being made, there’s no more road miles. With the waste is in one spot and it can be fed through the machine. And I think part of the clever technology behind this, tree surgery waste in this world, in the biofuel world, is often frowned at. But the technology deals with that. So we open up a new market to actually utilize a very low grade waste.

Matt Schlegel:

Yeah. This is brilliant and we have a lot of trees in my community. I’m in Palo Alto, California, and the city does put a lot of effort into maintaining a tree canopy, but also there’s a lot of maintenance. We have tree crews coming down our street several times a year collecting a lot of tree waste. So I will definitely share this with my city to give them some ideas about how they could use this. This is really brilliant.

Martin Stanley:

We’d appreciate that. Yeah, well we’re open for business, so anybody that wants to contact us for more information, then yeah, please don’t hesitate.

Matt Schlegel:

Absolutely.

Martin Stanley:

It’s an absolutely great opportunity.

Matt Schlegel:

Yes.

Martin Stanley:

Great story and it’s great for the environment.

Matt Schlegel:

So I would like to, as you have come to your realization about the urgency of acting on climate through your feelings, what advice would you give to other leaders and people, aspiring leaders, who they themselves now starting to have feelings about the climate crisis?

Martin Stanley:

Well, I say the first thing, it will always be, I think a long journey. So I’ve been knocking on the doors and trying to break down the barriers for some years now, but I think you’ve got to, if you’re passionate about it, you have to really understand what it exactly is that you’re trying to achieve or explain. I think you need to be very knowledgeable on your own specific subject. Be well read in those matters and never give up. You knock on as many doors as you can and just keep trying. Unless people don’t do that we won’t make the changes.

Matt Schlegel:

Persistence.

Martin Stanley:

Persistence, exactly.

Matt Schlegel:

Persistence is key. And that’s true for any leader. I think any leader appreciates that persistence is key. And I so appreciate how you have taken what you know in your area of expertise and then you’re passionate about climate and then found a way to apply your expertise to helping us solve the climate crisis and to move away from burning fossil fuels. So thank you so much for all you’ve done, all the insights that you’ve brought, all the energy and persistence that you’ve brought. So thank you so much and I wish you all the best and I will be in touch about maybe bringing this to our city. And if there’s any last thoughts you’d like to leave us with, please.

Martin Stanley:

Yeah, no, look just like I said earlier, any further information, we’re here. We’re here to help. Simple as that. Thank you for your time. Really much appreciated.

Matt Schlegel:

Thanks for listening. Stan’s leadership is such a fantastic example of how you can become a climate leader in whatever occupation you’re in. Stan focused his concerns about the climate crisis towards making his own industry, tree maintenance and management, into a source of green energy, thereby minimizing the use of fossil fuels and their dangerous emissions. If you found this helpful, please subscribe to the channel and click on the bell to get notifications of future episodes. Thanks again.