Using technology and expertise to help clients and the world IBM continues to apply technologies and expertise to help clients become more environmentally sustainable and accelerate solutions to address environmental challenges. Using AI to help reduce landfill waste As Italy’s largest waste management and recycling company and a leading multi-utility, Hera is on the front lines working to reduce waste and minimize environmental impacts. Hera personnel manually analyze the waste unloaded at their plants and help direct recoverable materials for downstream sorting. It’s an onerous job, and consider it at scale: 1,400 spotters across 89 plants treating 6.3 million tons of waste every year. Hera worked with IBM to explore how AI-powered automation could improve efficiency and help channel more material to new use. By engaging IBM Garage™ and incorporating IBM Watson® Studio and IBM Watson Machine Learning technology, Hera and IBM co-created and released a minimum viable product (MVP) in just eight weeks that captures video of trash at individual collection points and uses AI to recognize plastic waste that would qualify for recovery and reuse. The teams continue their work to train AI to find recoverable waste and scale their MVP. Learn more here . Harnessing data and AI to operationalize insights Companies increasingly recognize the expectations to demonstrate their progress toward sustainability in a quantifiable way. IBM has a growing portfolio of AI-enabled software to help companies assess the impacts of the environment on business and of business on the environment, including its recently acquired Envizi. Using Envizi with IBM’s broader software portfolio, companies will now be able to automate the feedback generated between their environmental initiatives and the operational endpoints being used in daily business activities—a crucial step in making sustainability efforts more scalable. For example, Envizi will integrate with IBM Maximo® asset management solutions, IBM Sterling® supply chain solutions, and IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, which helps companies increase resiliency by assessing and planning for the impact of environmental conditions on their operations. Learn more here . Supporting renewable electricity market growth The state of Maine is encouraging greater use of renewable resources. This has resulted in significant changes to the electric distribution business to connect distributed generation facilities with electric consumers. IBM helped Versant Power, one of Maine’s largest utilities, define new business processes and upgrade its systems to support renewable electricity market growth. Since these modified systems were deployed in mid-2021, 11 new renewable generation facilities have been added to Maine’s electricity supply and 17.4 megawatt (MW) capacity has been brought online. Another 342.7 MW are expected to be added within the next two years. Accelerated discovery of more sustainable materials IBM researchers are using AI, hybrid cloud, and quantum computing to find novel and more sustainable materials faster. In the field of materials discovery, identifying a new material may take 10 years of research and can cost $10 million to $100 million to develop. The AI-boosted Accelerated Discovery approach, developed at IBM Research, uses a combination of advanced computing technologies to enable researchers to rapidly design new materials with specific properties that can be used to develop more sustainable products, mitigate climate change, and more. Some recent successes of this approach: Computer chips: Photoacid generators (PAGs) play a vital role in the manufacturing of computer chips, but they are one of several classes of chemical compounds used in semiconductor manufacturing that have recently come under enhanced scrutiny from global environmental regulators. IBM researchers were able to accelerate the process of designing and synthesizing new PAGs with improved environmental properties . Learn more here . Carbon capture: Invisible and difficult to capture, CO 2 is a great challenge in tackling climate change. Capturing it at the point of origin is thought to be one of the most effective ways to limit its release into the environment. IBM researchers identified several hundred molecular structures that could enable more efficient and cheaper alternatives to existing separation membranes for capturing CO 2 emitted in industrial processes. Researchers are now evaluating these candidate molecules. Learn more here . 48 IBM 2021 ESG Report