It is with great pleasure to announce that Dr Maurizio Bragagni OBE, CEO of Tratos UK Ltd and Honorary Consul for San Marino to the UK, has fully committed himself to actively take part in the COP26 deliberations, taking place in Glasgow on 31 October -12 November 2021.
Tratos UK CEO’s full commitment to the COP26 is an expression of the long-time Tratos’ strategic vision to remain fully committed to protecting the environment, our planet and our common shared future. Tratos’ business has been always tailored to support sustainable development, to embrace quickly and adequately the available technology and innovation, to perform extensive R&D activities toward making Tratos’ business more circular and to drive positive changes globally.
Since its establishment in 1966, Tratos has created jobs for people in the most deprived regions, has lifted them out of poverty and helped them to dream bigger about their own and their kids’ future. Starting in 1980, Tratos has used clean, renewable energy from its own hydroelectric plant. In 2001, the company started producing Tratos Green, a cable made using only hydroelectric energy.
Throughout the years, Tratos has been consistent in achieving its goals, by excelling in showing high-quality social and environmental performance across all its operations and in increasing its stakeholders’ knowledge of its working practices through meaningful disclosures and transparency.
Sustainability, if you really mean it – and at Tratos we do –is not about ‘supporting’ a cause, it is about helping deliver it, every single day. We fully believe that innovation is driven by more than just need; it is driven by ‘better’. In Tratos’ culture, ‘better’ covers every step of a cable’s journey. From setting desired outcomes for improved performance, reliability and quality to the sustainability of production, materials, delivery and installation, and most importantly, to serve for longer. That’s why in 2019 the company won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation.
In 2015, Tratos supported the outcomes of the Paris Agreement and the long-term goal to limit the global average temperature rise to well below 2°C, recognising that doing so will require governments and companies alike to approach climate change with more ambition and action.
In the UK, Tratos supports the Climate Change Act, a legal commitment of the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero – a 100% reduction – by 2050. Tratos not only has in place standards for measuring its CO2 emissions but as well as has put measures to mitigate GHG effects on the atmosphere, by planting trees and using clean and green energy sources. It is continuously sharing with other UK businesses its environmental policies and best practices.
Tratos believes it is playing a great part in tackling climate change – from helping to develop technology for producing clean energy as Fusion for Energy project, where it was able to produce a very important component, the Superconductors, to building a new low-carbon economy and smart, eco-friendly products like electric vehicles and smartphones.
Always embracing innovation, Tratos continues to explore new ways to redesign its business to a model which is more compliant with the circular economy. For example, Tratos is actively performing research on ways to reduce and reprocess all the scrap inside the cable production.
Tratos is serious about playing an active role in achieving the 2030 development agenda and globally contributing to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Understanding how we can contribute more to climate change, remains a priority, as is ensuring strong relationships with our communities.
Tratos genuinely has reason to believe it is doing its part in this global endeavour. But, as much as it has been achieved, there is more to do. We appreciate that changing our traditional linear economic model to a circular one presents opportunities for our business, but also significant challenges for many.
Not only always measuring the CO2 emissions, planting trees to offset its carbon emissions (by December 2020, Tratos has planted a wooded area of about 5,000 square meters in a place owned by Tratos itself. ), or using its Hydro-power plant to produce its “green cables”, but currently Tratos is seeking to invest in securing the latest advanced technology, allowing Tratos to capture the carbon emissions and safely store them to a ground facility. Tratos supports and is a partner of the HyNet project that will allow us to collect from the atmosphere and store in a ground facility the CO2 emissions produced by factories in the North West as well as North of Wales
Most recently, Tratos is actively seeking to build a new factory by the sea, which will solve a significant part of the problems of supply chain shortage in offshore wind energy installations for array and export cables and offers all the advantages to the UK to not be any longer prone to supply chain shortages.
At COP26 Tratos CEO, making good use of the opportunity to meet with world leaders and business representatives, Dr Bragagni has been vocal about an innovative idea of taxing businesses based on the final amount of CO2 that they emit in the atmosphere in producing goods and he recently has published an article in the Journal of Public Affairs about this.
Dr Bragagni’s new idea builds upon the need for the right taxation system and it could help the green recovery of our economy. While everyone has to pay tax, he believes the truth is that some bigger companies go to extreme measures to minimise their contribution where they are based and where they sell.
The thinking Dr Bragagni is putting forward is that we should tally the CO2 emissions a company produces when it manufactures its solar panels for example and then recycle them and you’re taxed accordingly. That drives two things, both are financial incentives to comply. First, it is a very persuasive encouragement for companies to look at cleaner ways of producing and disposing of their products and second it is a compelling argument for making products that last longer.
The tax follows the product where it is made, sold, and recycled. For a circular economy to stand a chance, this kind of thinking has to be looked at. Dr Bragagni believes market-driving built-in obsolescence also had to be flipped for the circular economy to be genuinely workable. Tax penalties or incentives could be scaled against the length of service for products.
Tratos by the means of building this new factory will be able to be a reliable partner in delivering the UK Government’s ambitions for a world leader for green energy, job creation, export boosts, net-zero emissions, a ‘clean’ supply chain and a sustainable and environmentally sensitive approach to manufacturing and maintenance, including recycling.
Tratos is pleased to be a reliable partner of the UK government to drive change and pave the way toward a sustainable economic recovery. It is eager to work with the UK Government to build up its industrial capability. Tratos array and export cables will also play a crucial role in achieving the UK Government’s commitment to 40GW installed offshore wind capacity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.