Arthur Kay
Most organisations have a net zero commitment and a capital plan that does not match it. The gap between the climate narrative on the cover of the annual report and the cost, land, infrastructure and operational decisions inside the business is now visible to investors, regulators and employees. Closing it requires a working understanding of how cities, supply chains and the built environment are actually being rebuilt, not a refreshed slide on ambition.
Arthur Kay is an entrepreneur and urban designer who helps organisations turn sustainability commitments into infrastructure, capital and operating decisions that hold up under scrutiny.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Arthur Kay
- He has done the work he speaks about. Bio-bean turned London’s waste coffee grounds into biofuel that powered London buses through a Shell and Argent Energy partnership. Skyroom is building key-worker homes in the airspace above existing London buildings, backed by a £100m fund he raised.
- He sits where urban climate policy is set. Board roles at Transport for London and the Royal Academy of Engineering, plus chairing the Academy’s Sustainability and Climate Roundtable, give him an inside view of how UK infrastructure and engineering capital is being directed.
- His book Roadkill, co-authored with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore and published by Wiley in 2025, was named a Financial Times Best Environment, Science and Technology Book of the year. It gives boards a defensible reference point on car dependency, urban land use and the real cost of mobility decisions.
- He translates between three audiences that most speakers can only address one of: investors evaluating climate-linked capital allocation, public-sector clients commissioning infrastructure, and operators running businesses that depend on both.
Biography highlights
- The founder of Bio-bean, the clean technology company that recycled waste coffee grounds into biofuels and biomass pellets, acquired the company in 2023.
- Founder and CEO of Skyroom and founder of the £100m Key Worker Homes Fund, building affordable homes for key workers in the airspace above existing London buildings.
- Honorary Associate Professor at UCL Institute for Global Prosperity; architecture degree from UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and entrepreneurship study at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
- Co-author with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore of Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars (Wiley, 2025), named a Financial Times Best Environment, Science and Technology Book of 2025.
- Board Member of Transport for London, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Museum of the Home and Fast Forward 2030; Chair of the Royal Academy of Engineering Sustainability and Climate Roundtable.
- Recognised as a UN Sustainable Development Goals Pioneer, The Guardian Sustainable Business Leader of the Year, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 and Forbes 30 Under 30.
Biography
London’s buses spent part of 2017 running on a fuel made from used coffee grounds. The company behind it, Bio-bean, industrialised what had been a student thesis at UCL: every spent coffee puck in the city contains usable energy, and a clean technology business could collect, process and sell it back to fleets through partners like Shell and Argent Energy. Arthur Kay founded that company. It was later acquired in 2023.
The follow-on venture, Skyroom, takes the same posture toward another stuck problem. Cities cannot build enough homes for the key workers who run them, and ground-level land is exhausted. Skyroom builds in the airspace above existing buildings and finances the work through a £100m fund Kay raised. Both ventures share an instinct: treat the unused output of a city as inventory, then engineer a route to market.
That track record sits alongside formal positions inside the institutions that direct UK urban policy. Kay is a Board Member of Transport for London, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Museum of the Home and Fast Forward 2030, and chairs the Academy’s Sustainability and Climate Roundtable. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, with a degree in architecture from UCL Bartlett and an entrepreneurship study at Stanford.
His 2025 book with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore, Roadkill, published by Wiley and named a Financial Times Best Environment, Science and Technology Book of the year, makes the operating argument plain. Car dependency is not a cultural quirk; it is a recurring transfer of money, land and health out of cities, paid in instalments by the people who live in them. The book is the clearest expression of how Kay thinks about climate: as a question of where capital, infrastructure and policy actually land, not where they are stated to be heading.
Key speaking topics
- Sustainable cities and the built environment
- The economics of car dependency and urban mobility
- Climate-aligned capital allocation and infrastructure
- The circular economy in practice
- Housing, key workers and affordability in major cities
- Founding and scaling clean technology ventures
- The transition from net zero commitment to operating delivery
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees setting climate, ESG and infrastructure strategy
- CFOs, Chief Sustainability Officers and Heads of Real Estate are evaluating capital allocation against decarbonisation goals
- Property, mobility, energy and city-government audiences responsible for built-environment decisions
- Investors and corporate venture teams assessing climate-tech founders and ventures
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of where the gap between net zero commitment and capital plan is widest, and which decisions close it
- A working vocabulary for evaluating sustainability claims by what is built and financed, not what is announced
- Concrete examples from Bio-bean, Skyroom and the Roadkill thesis that translate climate ambition into operating reality
- A practical sense of which sustainability ventures and partnerships are worth backing, told by someone who has been on both sides of the table