Dr. Bonnie Nixon is the Sustainability Director for the Long Beach Container Terminal (LBCT), one of the world's busiest and greenest ports. The terminal handles 3.5 million, 20-foot containers annually. Its 4,200 foot long wharf can unload three of the largest container ships in the world at once.

Air quality is an issue that drives Bonnie. She grew up in an industrial community in Northern New Jersey and knows painfully well the devastating impacts of bad air on human health. The San Pedro port complex receives 40% of all goods entering the United States. Bonnie explains that ports have five major sources of emissions: ships, short and long-haul drayage trucks, cargo-handling equipment, locomotives, and tugs. The result is that the communities surrounding LBCT have suffered from some of the worst air quality in the country.

LBCT has addressed this head on. When ships come to its wharf, they receive shore power and turn off their engines run with dirty bunker fuel. The Port's 93 cranes work without emissions as do the 102 automated electric transport vehicles that are guided by sensors embedded in the concrete that move containers on site. The Port is home to the largest battery exchange buildings in the world that automatically exchange batteries in 5 - 8 minutes.

In 2030 Bonnie completed a net zero strategy for LBCT with a $250 million price tag. So far, she has raised $130 million of this to drive down Scope 1 (onsite combustion) and Scope 2 (purchased electricity) emissions. The Port has reduced Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 85 - 90%. Thanks to monetizing Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits, LBCT has been able to purchase offsets for Scope 3 emissions related to ships, trucks, and trains run by its vendors.

Bonnie is now working to clean up the Port's 270 rolling stock vehicles -- tractors, forklifts, trucks, buses, sweepers, etc. She is working with shipping lines to promote e-methanol to power the ships that come to and from Long Beach to achieve net zero status at the Port in time for the Los Angeles Olympics. She is also focused on resiliency strategies. Her quest is to demonstrate that even massive industrial complexes like LBCT can fully decarbonize their operations.

After growing up in England and Egypt, and a 25-year stint in Australia, Nigel Mason moved to Bali, Indonesia. There he met his wife, they ran a restaurant and a rafting company, and became highly concerned about the plight and extinction of Sumatran Elephants. Visiting Sumatra, seeing the gross attack on its forests, the dire consequences of deforestation for palm oil that displaced elephants, orangutans, tigers, monkeys, and rhinos, Nigel and his wife decided to take action. Over three trips and a seven-year period, they rescued 27 elephants and created an elephant park in Taro, Bali.

Ted asks Nigel about moving the herd to Bali, a 1,700-kilometer voyage over land and sea. Nigel explains that yes, it was very challenging, particularly getting enough food and water to sustain the elephants for the five-day trip. Elephants consumer 250 kilos of food a day... plus lots of water, the latter made hugely challenging during one trip during an intense drought in Java. But the transport was successful, and the elephants that would have lived only 3 - 7 years in captivity in Sumatra, now had a special park in Bali with all the food and drink and care that they needed to live for 50 - 60 years. Today there are less than 1,000 Sumatran Elephants in the wild.

Nigel describes the care that his herd of elephants get. Elephants tend to succumb to death in many cases due to problems with their feet. Nigel devised a special material for the paths that they walk that is cooler than concrete yet with enough grit to properly scale back the elephants' nails and to maintain the health of their feet. Each elephant has a "mahout," a "carer," who looks after the elephant from morning to night... bathing it, feeding it, and giving it the interaction with which they thrive. Since opening the park in 1997, six babies have been born and raised there too. The park is proud of having met the strict, 200+ standards of the Asian Captive Elephants Standards, being certified for over ten years.

Despite Nigel's good rescue deed, for the past few months the park has been embroiled in a major controversy with animal rights groups that claimed that elephants in Indonesia have been subject to cruel behavior. The groups took particular exception to the practice of riding elephants. While Nigel made clear the need for elephants to get sufficient exercise -- they normally walk 20 kilometers a day, versus 7 - 8 km in the park -- and the relative light weight of the riders, the animal rights groups would hear nothing of it. Then the Indonesian government suddenly banned riding elephants outright causing the number of visitors to the park to plummet from 400 to 40 a day. Nigel and his family have had to subsidize the park -- which employs nearly 200 locals -- to care for and feed the elephant herd.

The park continues to be supported by Nigel and his family with only the fees paid by park visitors. The park gets no government funding. Now the challenge continues... finding new ways to bring in visitors without the popular riding. Visitors now walk the elephants, and wash them, and swim with them. Visitors also enjoy the lush habitat and the park's restaurant. Nigel, his wife, and two sons remain dedicated to the park. Nigel makes clear that they will carry on and will find new ways to care for the elephants and to welcome visitors to this unique experience. If and when you're in Bali, please make sure to visit the Mason Elephant Park.

Richard Savoie is the CoFounder and CEO of Adiona Tech, a high-tech logistics company that helps suppliers of both B2B and B2C -- business and consumer services -- optimize the efficiency of their delivery fleets. Richard's passion for and contribution to sustainability is pronounced. Since 2021, his firm has enabled delivery fleet operators to save millions of miles of travel, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel, and 7.2 million kilograms of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. Using machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Adiona Tech optimizes the efficiency of delivery fleets in real time, reducing the number of trucks and clarifying delivery times.

Richard was born and raised in New Hampshire. After studying at Northeastern University in Boston, Richard and his wife moved to Australia where he worked for a number of years in medical device engineering. Then Richard flexed his entrepreneurial side... ultimately cofounding Adiona Tech with a partner who specializes in optimization and computer science. They saw massive inefficiencies in the delivery supply chain and built software address this. Their first client was CocaCola.

Today Adiona Tech has clients throughout Australia, New Zealand, in parts of Southeast Asia, and pilot programs in the United States. He notes that Australia Post... one of the world's largest postal distributors... is a key client that Adiona Tech helped to greatly increase the efficiency of its operations. In fact, Adiona Tech helped it to cut its fleet size, increase its delivery services, while providing a 100x return on the cost of the delivery optimization.

The conversation hits on several facets of the supply chain, notably the last mile. Traditionally and on average, trucks serving the last mile have been only 60% full. Using Adiona Tech's services, delivery trucks can be 80-90% full, fleets can be smaller, and tremendous financial and environmental gains can be realized.

Adiona Tech starts with its focus on both the supply side -- where products originate -- and the demand side, where they are delivered to businesses and consumers. Factors and optimization parameters considered include cargo size, weight, and volume; whether the products are palletized or not, the types of fleet vehicles used and more. Routes vary based on demands and on actual traffic patterns through what Richard calls "dynamic routing."

The conversation shifts to the rise and potential for electric vehicles, noting range considerations that alter routes, but also the efficiency of EVs and their promise to further increase the efficiency and decarbonization of logistics. Autonomous vehicles are discussed, with Richard explaining the necessary orchestration of three technologies: AI, autonomous vehicles, and robotics. We are not there yet, but Richard anticipates the effective convergence of these in the next ten years... further enhancing the efficiency of delivery services. These advances will continue to boost Adiona Tech's outsized beneficial environmental impact.