Technology for Net Zero

Magway presents itself as a new way for home delivery. Its co-founder Phil Davies says: “We are a sustainable delivery solution and we work in partnership with like-minded people to address the greatest threat: saving our planet”. 

By Jenny Daniela Salazar Zapata | YPA

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COP26 is a place for politicians to agree on the path to NET ZERO. It is however also an exciting opportunity for startups to pilot technology that will help us reach our net zero targets. We had the chance to speak with Phil Davies, co-founder of Magway, a zero emissions and low footprint, high capacity delivery system.

What brought Magway to COP26? 

What gets us up in the morning and keeps us in the office until late at night is sustainability. 

We are a sustainable delivery solution and work collaboratively with like-minded people to address the most existential threat to our survival and save our planet. 

What are your expectations for this Conference? 

COP26 gathers people from all over the world to address this crisis. We’ve got world leaders, the pope, the US president, the UK prime minister and Greta Thunberg. It is a place where the young and the old collectively try to sort this problem out. I think that together we can crack this climate crisis. 

How does Magway contribute in mitigating the climate crisis? 

What our technology does is combining old and new technologies. Currently when you order something online it is very easy. At a click of a button now you can have anything. Those goods are picked and delivered by very polluting vehicles that congest our roads. Our solution, that is, to take those vehicles off the road and give the space back to the city and its citizens, is a holistic one. So we basically transport those requested goods through underground pipelines with a zero emissions solution given by a magnetic wave. 

How does this technology work? 

We took a digital approach with regards to the design of our system. The pipes themselves are a tried&tested technology: engineers from all over the world are installing the pipes for us on an industrial basis. We designed the system to harvest all the load of information that we then analyze to optimize the system. We’ve also designed a digital twin of our system to hand it over to cities around the world so that they can familiarize themselves with its implications. In this way, cities can understand the cost of installing the system and ots impacts on the environment. Once ready, we install Magway in a holistic way to make it engage with the world around it. 

The environmental impact is very clear. How do you balance this with social and governance factors?

We are promoting diversity in our organization, we are people-driven. We want to encourage the next generation of engineers to come through our organization and engage with local communities around our space in our offices in Wembley but also more broadly. There is a lego challenge where the topic is transport, we got engagement from schools that were designing new systems. The vision of the future is not about flying cars, but it is about open spaces. 

The governance is managed backwards to history instead of forward. If you look at how railways, utilities and canals were rolled out, initially they were owned by private organizations. Then you had consolidation, then you had nationalization and regulation. But if you think of Google and Facebook, they just had regulation, so we eventually expect there to be regulation and consistency to build up our network. As a matter of fact, we will initially install Magway on private sites hence connecting warehouses, delivery to airports, then we will build the network on a larger/national scale. 

What are the next steps for Magway? 

We signed our first contract early in the year with clients. We have a number of other dedicated systems we are looking at, not just for the sole use of an organization. We also have a multi-user route in West London which is 16km long. We are calling it the ‘West London Zero Emission freight zone’, so it creates a template for other locations in the UK. We also have major organizations from retail, logistics, software, engineering and warehousing to make it happen.