As with so many things these days, the 2021 Greentech Festival was forced to find new ways of continuing its work in shedding light on innovative technologies and sustainable ways of doing things for a cleaner future.

Founded in 2018 by former Formula One driver Nico Rosberg with engineers Marco Voigt and Sven KrügerHeld, the Greenwich festival seeks to unite those with ideas for positive change for the future.

As a founding partner, Audi has been involved from the very beginning, participating in the annual festival and the ongoing awards that recognise those ‘disruptive thinkers’ putting ideas and initiatives to help create a cleaner and better future.

Held in Berlin recently over two days, the Greentech Festival, again offered thought leaders in the fields of climate change mitigation and sustainability a platform to present and discuss their ideas in depth. This year the event was staged in a hybrid format with both the live site at Kraftwerk Berlin as well as in a digital format allowing people to participate remotely from their personal devices.

The lineup included keynotes and panel discussions, including a number of senior Audi personal, shedding light on the many and varied initiatives the brand is currently involved with, from the obvious progress in its all-electric model assault, to less obvious but no less important behind the scenes initiatives and partnerships with other organisations. 

“We’re working hard to make carbon-neutral mobility possible, and the expansion of renewable sources at an industrial scale is the next, logical step,” says Oliver Hoffmann, Member of the Board of Management for Technical Development, on the brand’s plans to partner with European energy organisations to build new wind and solar farms to feed more green energy into the power grid.

“The expansion of renewable energy sources at an industrial scale is the next, logical step. Our first project, a massive solar park in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, will come on stream as early as 2022,” he says. This initiative will see Audi become a provider of carbon-neutral mobility. 

Other less obvious initiates also play their part, like intelligent algorithms that analyse news about suppliers from publicly available online media sources and social networks as part of a pilot project being conducted by Audi in around 150 countries worldwide. This analysis encompasses sustainability risks such as environmental pollution, human rights violations, and corruption. If the AI finds them, it sounds the alarm for more detailed analysis and appropriate action if necessary.

From this expanding the use of renewable energy for carbon-neutral mobility to processing and recycling mixed automotive plastic waste, to a number of projects carried out by the Audi Environmental Foundation including removing plastic waste from rivers and waterways around Europe, the work is as extensive as it is varied. One Audi think tank even came up with the idea of an app that allows users to calculate and reduce their own transport-related carbon footprint, introducing an element of fun and personal competition to each day, by creating goals to conquer – after all, even small steps make a difference.