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At our second World Ethical Electronics Forum (WEEF) in Munich on November 15, 2022, we handed out four awards to some very impressive people. From our WEEF Index, our jury selected four winners by looking at their contribution to ethical electronics on three dimensions:

1) Their level of influence
2) Their level of innovation
3) Their willingness to share

Our World Ethical Electronics Forum Index is filled with people that we at WEEF know are doing their very best for ethics in electronics and with people that were nominated by our members and people in the industry. If you know someone that should be included in this collection of good people (and should be in the running for the next WEEF awards), you can nominate them by filling out this application form on the WEEF website.

WEEF Winner: Sven KrumpelWEEF Sven Krumpel

Sven Krumpel is the owner of CODICO, which has a great emphasis on work-life-balance for their employees. They offer nearly full flexibility in work place and work time and are a great example of really investing in your employees. 

“Thank you for nominating me. I didn’t know I was an ethical person. We are a family company; we design and move forward electronics. We see how important it is to develop projects in energy efficiency. I think ethics is a people thing; you as a person are an example. As a company owner you do not only have employees, but you have people with the same values. Our people are part of the family. We just opened a 12.000-meter park next to our offices, not just for working outside but also for leisure time. Our people do sports in the park, invite their families and have birthday parties. We grow vegetables and herbs. We have bees. I think we have been living an extremely blessed life where we used too much resources and used other peoples’ resources and we need to give some back. This is what we are doing and it’s nothing special.”

WEEF Winner: Gopal Kumar MohotoWEEF Gopal-Kumar-Mohoto

Gopal Kumar Mohoto is an engineer working on electrifying transport in Bangladesh. He was chosen the Global No-1 entrepreneur at the ClimateLaunchpad of 2020 and was a Climate Ambassador at the Global Youth Climate Network. He has worked on battery swapping stations for electric tuk-tuks and is about to release the first cluster of retrofitted gasoline-to-electric cars to clients in Bangladesh. You can read an interview with him here.

“I am very honoured to be nominated, although I don’t know by who. The options for electric driving available in the West are too expensive in the Global South. This is why I am working on a sustainable and affordable option to electrify transport here. We must take better care of the things we already have and use them as they are precious. We must take care of all the materials we mined. We must take care of Mother Earth.”

WEEF Winner: Frank StührenbergWEEF Stührenberg

Frank Stührenberg is the CEO of Phoenix Contact and a board member of the KlimaWirtschaft Foundation. He is a major contributor to the All Electric Society, which is a world envisioned where regeneratively generated electrical energy is available worldwide as a primary form of energy in sufficient quantities for everyone.

”I am not aware who nominated us. The awards our company gets are usually technical, so I was surprised by this one. The tone of WEEF fits to our company. We are family-owned and now have more than 20,000 family members. We have to work on not losing our moral compass and we are actively working on this. We dedicated our long-term strategy to go for 100% renewable electrical energy. We felt we should do this and so we started. We need energy to develop the world, and what is the purpose of being a €10 billion company while not having a world we want to live in? Thank you for supporting this development and supporting this initiative.”

WEEF Winner: Milda PladaitePladaite

Milda Pladaite is a civil engineer from Lithuania and part of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) Young Engineers Future Leaders Committee. She set up a working group on Sustainable Development Goal 13 at the WFEO aiming to contribute to the sustainable development of countries by deploying WFEO young engineers’ work in climate action. Currently, she has is working on a social initiative, helping engineers to be more entrepreneurial by connecting them with industry, social investors and academic organisations.

“I have nominated many people for awards, but I don’t know who nominated me for this. A friend said when she heard I was nominated for this: ‘I didn’t know you were a specialist in ethics!’ Of course, this means that everyone can be into ethics. This forum is a great initiative, and I am sure it will be growing in the future. This is a unique opportunity to discuss ethics in electronics.”

Our Aim

We can see by the surprise of our WEEF award winners that it is not always obvious what is ethical in electronics. We are perhaps reluctant to talk about ethics as an industry while we don’t have to be. The aim of our World Ethical Electronics Forum is to provide a platform to discuss what we do and why we do this, to share stories and practices with each other, and to celebrate the good together.

Priscilla Haring-Kuipers writes about technology from a social science perspective. She is especially interested in technology supporting the good in humanity and a firm believer in effect research. She has an MSc in Media Psychology and makes This Is Not Rocket Science happen. 

The World Ethical Electronics Forum

The World Ethical Electronics Forum (WEEF) inspires global innovators with open discussions and publications about ethics and sustainable development goals. Visit worldethicalelectronicsforum.com for inspiration and to participate.