In this interview with Robin Millington we discuss Planet Tracker‘s focus on using the financial system to drive sustainability, particularly in materials management, food systems, and financial risks. Robin highlights the use of Natural Language Processing to identify risks in company documents, noting a discrepancy between what companies say in PR and financial documents, particularly regarding plastic risks.

Robin Millington 0:09
My name is Robin Millington. I’m CEO of an organisation called Planet Tracker. I created it in 2018 to focus on how we can use the financial system to create change, and especially focus on sustainability and the issues in sustainable living, sustainable means of production, sustainable financial and global markets.

Global Philanthropic 0:37
We know you’re a guru in the sector, so it’s a pleasure to speak to you today. What does digitalisation mean to you and your work?

Robin Millington 0:46
So we look at a number of things. We focus very much on materials management, which is looking at plastics and textiles. We focus on food systems. In the work that we’re doing, we create reports and outputs that are valuable to financial analysts, and as such, we’re now trying to search out where are the risks in the system. So that’s very important to an investor. They want to know what the risks are. We’ve used Natural Language Processing, which is a form of AI as you know, to search for keywords. So in this instance that I’m thinking of, it’s plastics and it’s risk. And in all these company documents that we use the Natural Language Processing to research, we found very, very few references of plastic and risk. So what we believe is that the general industry, the people that use plastic containers, use plastic orbitals, they haven’t caught up quite yet, in a financial sense, with the looming risk that we see coming. So we think digitalisation has been an extremely powerful tool. There’s the things that people will say in their PR campaigns, and then they’re the things that people are saying in their financial documents and other documents,

Global Philanthropic 2:09
Right? So they’re like two different things?

Robin Millington 2:11
Well, I won’t say always, but I think it can be.

Global Philanthropic 2:16
Well, it sounds like the work you’re doing is really important then. What is your impression of Global Philanthropic?

Robin Millington 2:26
I think it’s a great organisation. I’ve been very impressed by the people that work for you, and I think that you are offering a service to the philanthropic space that’s really necessary. So thank you.