This week France’s Hopium, which makes hydrogen fuel cell powered sedans (see the photo) signed a multi-year agreement with Crédit Agricole Consumer Finance for 10,000 cars, a provisional order worth €1.2 billion, and eight European green tech companies announced the formation of a new Cleantech Scale-up Coalition, with the goal of helping Europe become climate neutral, energy autonomous and industrially competitive. The hope is that these developments will usher in a new era of climate and industrial leadership in Europe.

Hopium is the first French manufacturer of high-end hydrogen-powered vehicles and a key player in the field of zero emission mobility. Established in 2019, the company was founded by racing driver Olivier Lombard. The coalition members are decarbonizing industry and energy with renewable hydrogen, producing scalable low-carbon cement, electrifying transport and recycling materials and batteries. The coalition is supported by Bill Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy, and Kadri Simson, European Commissioner for Energy. Both attended the coalition’s October 24 launch.

 “If we create the conditions for their success, the EU stands to become the climate and industrial leader of the next decades,” Ann Mettler, vice-president of Breakthrough Energy Europe, said in a statement. Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Multinational companies are now using technology to calculate their carbon footprint. But how many can say they have reshaped their supply chain to preserve nature rather than deplete it? 

Metabolic, a 10-year-old international scale-up headquartered in Amsterdam, is proving there are concrete ways for multinationals to address decarbonization goals through reducing the damage to biodiversity and even restoring it. This is the essence of their work with France’s Bel Group, the agrifood company behind Babybel, The Laughing Cow, Boursin, and Kiri cheese brands.

The key, says Eva Gladek, the company’s CEO and founder, is a holistic and science-based approach.

Metabolic employs economists, industrial ecologists, scientists specialized in agriculture, forest, and land use as well as social scientists and data scientists. The team uses peer-reviewed scientific data sets to understand a company’s overall impact on nature, including climate change, fresh water, land-system change, nitrogen biogeochemical cycles, and biodiversity loss within specific geographies. Metabolic leverages that information to pinpoint problem areas and then specifies ways to not only fix a company’s carbon footprint but repair Nature while doing so.

The company’s work with more than 300 organizations in over 40 countries is an example of how teaming young companies with established players can help meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.