Giri Tenneti:  Good morning everyone. Welcome to Listed@ASX. We have Jessica North, Chief Executive Officer at LGI. Good morning Jessica.

Dr. Jessica North:  Good morning Giri. Thanks for having me today.

GT: You are welcome. So, LGI has gone form strength to strength since being established in 2009. With innovation and a number of firsts in the carbon abatement space and it culminated with a strong operating performance and your successful IPO and listing October last year.

Can you tell me a bit about your journey in the waste industry and what drew you to LGI.

JN: Thank you so much. Yes. So my journey was a little bit unusual. It started when I was in my late teens and I was on a government scholarship from Canada to Thailand. And my intention was to spend a year gaining my first year of university degrees in Thailand, focusing on Asian studies and fine arts.

However, during that year in Thailand, I worked partly as a translator during my holidays with a trekking company in the northern hills of Thailand. And during one of those treks, when I reached the village, the village elders who found out that I could speak Thai, they asked if I could come and help them with the problem, and they took me to the hillside behind their village and showed me what was just a hillside full of plastic waste.

Because all of the trekking companies would bring the tourists in for the treks with packaged meals and packaged snacks, and that waste would remain in the village. And they were just dumping it. They had no idea what to do with it. And I had a bit of an epiphany and coming from a family where my parents were very strongly involved in recycling and composting and my mother is an environmental geographer.

I realised that there was a big issue in the world. And from that point, it was pretty much about saving the world one landfill at a time. So that was how I entered into the waste management environment. I returned later, some years later, with a degree in physical geography and soil science, and I returned to Thailand to work for a Canadian NGO that was delivering solid waste improvement projects in communities in Thailand, and that really launched my career in waste management.

I went on subsequently to focus my research, so I gained a master's degree and a PhD. in the sort of microbial processes in landfills and the emissions from landfills, both liquid and gaseous. And over the years after various roles in different organisations, I was attracted to work with LGI who was one of my consulting clients when I was based in Sydney with a multinational consultancy, and the attraction of joining LGI was to actually physically be involved in carbon abatement projects.

So I had done a lot of reporting, a lot of research, a lot of presenting results to clients. But to be able to be in private industry and deliver those projects, deliver that real abatement within that, that climate story linking the implications of waste and climate and doing something absolutely tangible was incredibly attractive at the time. When I joined in 2012 and it has remained a huge motivation.

GT: That's amazing. It does sound like it was destined to be. So looking at the lead-up to the IPO, a number of global and economic factors made it a very interesting time when you came to market. What was the thinking as you were going through the process and how have things worked out for LGI today?

JN: So as probably many people in the market are aware, we had hoped to list in March of last year and very shortly before we were to launch a prospectus, the war in the Ukraine occurred.

The market was understandably shaken and we made the decision to postpone the listing. At the end of the day, I think that it gave a very useful perspective. We will simply try again when the market conditions are more conducive and more settled. The experience was a little bit rocky. We had expectations for March. We realised them in October.

I think that having that delay was very valuable because it really brought out the investors, the cornerstone investors who truly believed in what we were doing and the fact that our activities are inherently ESG related. Our cornerstone investors have a deep understanding and commitment and interest in the ESG space. That didn't change, hasn't changed, was not affected by global factors.

And in the interim, we saw a new government come into the federal government space in Australia with an equally strong commitment to ESG and immediate strengthening of those climate targets, those emissions reduction targets, which is absolutely what we are contributing to. So our experience since the listing has been certainly a continuing approach to market, interacting with existing and potential new investors.

And for me it is incredibly uplifting to see the genuine interest in what we are doing in terms of environmental outcomes. So that's been phenomenal to know that. And personally, as a long term ethical investor, my super is an ethical, has always been held in ethical groups, etc. to know that there is this burgeoning interest in this space.

GT: It's fantastic. I just thought I'd ask you about some of the key projects that you've got in place across Queensland and New South Wales and what other projects you have in the pipeline and are they going to contribute to your long-term strategic priorities?

JN: Sure. So our project base across Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT is, as you know, it is the management of biogas from landfills and the conversion of that landfill gas or biogas from landfills into various revenue streams.

And so we currently have 26 landfill gas projects across those states and we now have eight landfill gas-to-power facilities. So renewable energy facilities, our eighth power station is finalising, commissioning it is exporting power at Toowoomba, at the Toowoomba landfill. And that was an incredibly exciting project to see reach this point, particularly over the Christmas period, which is never an easy time to be commissioning a power station.

So our focus continues to be on that, optimising the beneficial use of biogas from landfills. So we have our existing projects which are often long term up to 30 plus year contracts with local governments. So local governments are our primary client base. They own the majority of landfills in Australia and working with the councils to expand the assets that are on our existing sites in order to further manage the gas, reduce emissions, more carbon abatement, more power generation on those sites as the majority of those landfills continue to receive waste, continue to grow and produce more biogas from the waste itself.

We also have a program of pursuing new projects. So in Australia, there are, particularly in regional Australia, a lot of landfills that currently do not have landfill gas management on them. There's no regulatory requirement to do so, but there is an increasingly strong community desire to do the right thing, to reduce that footprint, that carbon footprint to their community.

And if you have a landfill as a local government, it's probably going to be your largest source of carbon emissions. So working with local governments to identify those sites and what solutions we might be able to offer for them, whether it's carbon abatement through flaring with the potential for future renewable power generation, and also looking at how we can enhance that power offering through storage to battery storage on the sites, which can really help us to provide power at the times of day when it's most needed in the grid, particularly as we transition from that 24 seven fossil fuel sort of power source into a more intermittent renewable power source.

And noting that landfill gas provides a 24/7 renewable power source. So we are on all the time barring obviously if we have to be down for maintenance. But so it's an increasingly important part of the transition for Australia towards more penetration of renewables into the electricity grid.

GT: That sounds amazing, very inspiring and be really good to see the progression of all of those efforts.

So Jess I'd like to thank you. We've come to the end of the interview. I'd just like to really thank you for coming on to Listed@ASX and sharing the story of LGI and your own journey towards it.

JN: Thank you so much and thank you for the interest and for presenting this to the market. Really appreciate it.