On Wednesday 9 November, TIACA named the winners of the 4th Sustainability Awards, naming Edmonton International Airport the winner of the Corporate category and CargoAi as the Start-Up/Small Business category winner.
The awards programme, run in partnership with IT solutions provider CHAMP Cargosystems, recognises outstanding business and industry initiatives designed to make air cargo more sustainable.
In the Corporate category, Edmonton International Airport was recognised for its Airport City Sustainability Campus.
The campus is a growing hub of transportation, cargo logistics, manufacturing, sustainability, technology development and tourism. The integrated ecosystem spurs collaboration and innovation while fostering commercialisation of emerging clean technologies.
In the Start-Up/Small Business category, CargoAi scooped the $10,000 cash prize for its Cargo2ZERO product, a suite of solutions for forwarders to decarbonise the air cargo industry through use of a CO2 efficiency score.
The other two finalists were AeroVect, which is developing autonomous ground support equipment, and Elite Champ, which has a vacuum pallet. They were awarded cash prizes of $2,500 each.
The three finalists presented their projects at the show and the audience voted to help decide on the winner.
The first company to present its product was AeroVect, with Co-Founder Eugenio Donati explaining how he got into developing autonomous driving systems for GSE.
Growing up in a small town in northern Italy, Donati learned English on the Internet and applied to study in the UK and US, getting accepted at Harvard where he studied economics.
After graduating, Donati and a friend had agreed to start a company focusing on autonomous vehicles for airports.
Setting up operations in the Bay Area of San Francisco, they acquired the cheapest used baggage tractor they could find and developed the first version in the garage.
Donati explained, “We would test it by driving it around the neighbourhood. For the first few months, everything went well, but, after a while, the neighbours started asking what are you doing, why are there two ULDs on the driveway?”
Before going home for Christmas, Donati picked oranges from the garden and left them for the neighbours so everything was good and they did not call the police.
AeroVect retrofits vehicles with its technology and it is OEM agnostic. Working in aviation only, the software was built from the ground up for airport operations. AeroVect built the world’s largest dataset to teach the software to drive.
Donati concluded his presentation saying that the vision is to make airport operations much more reliable, cost-effective, safer and sustainable.
CargoAi, which won the award, was the second company on stage, with CEO Matthieu Petot demonstrating its Cargo2ZERO product, which aims to make it easier for smaller forwarders to cut their carbon footprint by measuring the CO2 efficiency score and comparing the options.
Petot was proud to announce that CargoAi had just launched a partnership with Neste so freight forwarders can buy sustainable aviation fuel.
Elite Champ was the other finalist with its inflatable vacuum pallet. E-commerce is booming but space is not used efficiently.
The solution is an inflatable pallet, which is lightweight, protects the cargo from damage and is easy to store.
The inflatable pallet can be used for other products such as lithium batteries, perishables or pharma. Using space more efficiently, Elite Champ calculates that general cargo revenue could increase $1,400 per pallet and almost $2,000 for e-commerce.
This article was published in the December issue of Air Logistics International, click here to read the digital edition and click here to subscribe.