Thank you, Madison.
As a nation of just under 40 million people, Canada has already done a fair bit in terms of investing in carbon utilization technologies and moving the needle to show how carbon can be reused to enable the circular economy that we think we need to be able to hit our targets for 2050 and 2100.
Over four of the recently concluded Carbon XPRIZE finalists were companies from Canada. These were companies that were changing carbon emissions into construction products and into plastic materials and a range of other end products such as those Madison mentioned for consumer product use.
Within the clean-tech sphere, the idea and the notion of how [Technical difficulty—Editor] in Africa and to a certain extent parts of Europe and the States, where costs can be the biggest driver.
Looking at this from an export perspective, what's important to note is that the normal way of trading goods and services across the border, such as having cars built in Ontario and sent over to the States, for example, is not something that translates very well to the context at hand. Instead, what is required is a long-term view as to what is required to build our society better and how to retrofit very long-term facilities, which run for anywhere from 30 years to 50 years, in a way that has a made-in-Canada tag on it.
One silver lining in the way the U.S. tackled the COVID-19 pandemic was Operation Warp Speed, where they were able to bring a whole range of resources together. Although their initial ways of curbing the curve weren't as effective as ours were in Canada, the way they were able to develop vaccines and build capacity to roll them out at a rapid pace is something that no one else in world has been able to achieve.
We think that with the types of opportunities Canada has already begun nucleating, such as the clean-tech export program, there is a foundational element there that can be further evolved into a longer-term partnership with our partners in Europe, the States and other parts of the world that are rapidly emerging and growing. Through such initial partnerships, companies such as ours can go out to those regions for two to three months at a time and look at identifying local partners. This could be done over a longer period of one to three years and enable companies with capacity issues, which most start-up companies have, to translate these partnerships and MOUs into longer-term engagements where businesses produce not only on the Canadian side but on the partner side as well.
I'd be more than happy during the questions to discuss some of the experiences we've had through CanExport and other programs, but I would like to finish by saying that the space around clean tech, and especially around circular economy and carbon emissions or carbon tech, is in a very exciting stage. Just in the last four months alone, we've seen major commitments come from companies such as LaFarge, Cemex and CRH, which are talking about reducing the carbon emissions of their products by 30% to 50%.
There are other companies in plastics and a range of industrial products that have come in and talked about scope 1 and scope 2 carbon emission neutrality by 2030, or in some cases by 2050. Within that scope, Canadian entrepreneurs have already shown that they can play a massive part in helping these companies enable their achievement of these targets. We're very excited about seeing how policy at the federal level can further support this.
Thank you.