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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity.
I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Cara and Antonia to talk about how we can produce less waste and from what i know this relates to a concept called the circular economy which is one way of producing less waste but i get the impression from what very little i know about it that it's not a simple thing to do so to start off with cara given that you know more about this than i do please could you give me an example of something in the circular economy
i'm quite passionate about wasting about how people kind of dump things behind themselves or about how people use things and for how long they use them so like how long a product is going to last for a person the one example which was in the news today was looking at reading festival that there was i don't know like thousands and thousands upon thousands of tents left behind and people just left them for whatever reason sometimes it's because it's broken and people buy a tent and
it's so cheap that they don't see the value and bring it home and amending it some people buy a tent that's so cheap they just can't be bothered carrying at home to use it again so it's about how you see the life of a product from a consumer's point of view directly related to how much they value if 50 years ago you told somebody you'd buy a tent and use it once people would just think you were bad because it was not how you invested in things so to me that's an example of how people's
behavior and how um their perception of what the value of products are and materials it's really demonstrates something about trying to create less waste but also then that starts kind of introducing the idea of circular economy which we'll get onto but explain a bit more in a minute okay so is the idea that if there are all these tents left on this festival site that someone has to do something with them and they have to make a decision about what that is oh
yeah so previously about 10 years ago i guess i've worked on festivals in lots of different ways and one year i did do litter picking at glastonbury if you worked on the crew afterwards you went around and you had to smash the tents off pretty much as small as you could just to make them small to fit inside skips in the most uh efficient way and they were taken away some festivals allow skype groups to come along and collect the tents but festivals such as writing have a
reputation for not being overly clean so a lot of the tents are left in really bad condition anyway so you don't really want to take them home there's sometimes this idea that someone is going to come along and take your tent they're like oh charities will take out but you have to kind of wonder a pop-up tent that's been used once and cost 20 pounds because they produce as cheap as possible is it going to have a life for somebody else after you've trashed it for the weekend
you know it's how you respect the use of materials overall but yeah so now there are some examples that people will come along actually and collect the tents and the material and they make other things with them such as raincoats or bunting or flags so you can kind of get some use out of the material again after the person is let alone there okay so is that like an example of um it's not repurposing izzy it's turning into something else is that more like sort of a down cycling or an upcycling
well i guess the term you would see on pinterest is upcycling but you have to wonder whether it really is upcycling implies you're improving the quality of the waste material right surely intense it's not being upcycled if it's made into bunting like surely it's more valuable as a tent so i'm not sure really how would you even freeze that antonio what do you think is it repurposing i guess i guess bunting you can kind of make out of almost anything you can make out waste paper
and waste plastic but a tent can't be built out of waste paper and waste plastic so i think that's down cycling yes okay yeah because it's lost sort of it's its purpose and value as a tent is now is now hanging as decoration and i think decoration you can get in a lot of ways but tent you can't ah interesting i think we'll probably return to these ideas a bit later on so i have an example from my garden where all the leaves that fall from the trees and all the grass that we cut is then put into
the compost heap and allowed to compost down and then that goes back onto our vegetable patch so we can get a little bit of food that hasn't had to travel very far and it's from sort of a system that we can sort of contain as much as possible in that we can manage how that vegetable is grown i feel like that's an example of recycling because i'm taking stuff from the garden and putting it back into the garden but is it recycling i like how you use the word system there i think systems is the
right way to think about this it depends how you frame what the boundaries are what you're looking at so within your garden it probably is zero waste because you aren't putting it in rubbish bags if you put into the dump but i'm not sure you would call it recycle necessary unless you think of like the cycles of nutrients recycling would imply that it gets taken away somewhere to be processed in a certain way so again i'm not sure how you would define that is it possibly reuse plants are quite
complicated right and they do a whole load of stuff with the uh the elements the atoms the atmosphere i love it's a chamber meter isn't here but uh yeah i guess the plants sort of do something i guess it's kind of why i think of it as a way of recycling so it's not being taken away in process but the plants are doing something to process it or the bacteria in the soil is doing something that's true so maybe i think of recycling the definition in terms of um industry so people who have
a plant that they've built another a granite plant a plant which is a factory an industrial plant an industrial plant yeah so i guess this is very territory which antonia loves of how we define words differently yeah and tony you've got a bit of background in the stuff we're talking about you want to tell us about it so you can tell me i'm wrong cause i feel like i'm just rambling yeah i i guess this gardening example kind of fits in a natural or biological ecosystem
tangentially heard about you know plants being used instead of fossil fuels as basic chemical building blocks so instead of using say oil and gas to get syngas which is a common common use in industrial processing of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to produce bigger molecules um you break down oil and gas and they're basically hydrocarbons which of course you get from nature and so instead of using a non-renewable source you can use renewable sources because you can grow plants in a shorter
time frame than fossil fuels came across that and then i came across this concept of so economy about five years ago in the context of trying to meet climate change targets countries like the uk need to use more renewable electricity technologies like wind turbines and solar pv but then there was the problem of depleting metals because of the metals being used into the technologies that renewably generate electricity for inverted commas free but then afterwards
what do you do with the materials how can you reuse them or are they trapped in that that product you've made and actually it's really hard to recover so instead of using fossil fuels to to generate your energy you've replaced it with a not another non-renewable resource like metals antonia i think that is really fascinating and it connects back to what we were saying before actually which is about the value of materials so it's not just about how you use material in a certain way but
it's how you choose which material and the example you gave of saying bunting you could use lots of different things for that i was actually thinking of fossil fuels and how plastic is like one of the most important things we have in the world actually people hate plastic but in the medical industry plastic is incredibly important for making clean environments that are going to be saved people's lives and you just connected right back to that and said we shouldn't
be using fossil fuels because obviously plants are better for that in lots of different ways but actually that's because fossil fuels are quite valuable for other uses and it's about trying to connect those systems together and think in bigger terms what materials we're using for what and i think you know going back to the example of the garden it's great that laura puts the right kind of waste in her composite if you just put a bunch of plastic that would be less valuable for your for your
vegetable patch because those materials aren't going to be useful there but they could be useful elsewhere i also think of it as sort of like keeping the materials organized so if you organize your organic waste and keep your organic waste in organic systems and keep your metallurgical waste all together you can get more value out of it i like that organized materials yeah so tied your room yeah oh yeah you're taking me back down the route of like self-assembling molecules
and things sorry everything i think about is in terms of atoms and it doesn't connect very well whether you talk sort of the engineering scale of things but i think i guess we're talking around this a little bit and one of the things i wonder about is the practicality of turning waste into something useful i mean can a resource be infinitely useful for example ah i mean if you're talking to my mum she'd probably be like yes absolutely keeps absolutely everything she finds
really new ways of of using things like you know you know file holders she she'd cut up cereal boxes she caught them diagonally and then they're they hold a4 paper and then boom file organizing that's a good idea actually and so actually december people don't threw things away i had i was second earlier today i was laughing as a kid i know i hated throwing stuff away and i hated throwing away toilet roll tubes i don't know why i was always just like they must be useful for something
and oh my god laura you'll appreciate this i've now started composting in my allotment and it has given me so much joy that i don't throw away toilet roll tubes i know i use them in my compost sleep it makes me feel so satisfied that i knew they had a purpose i think toilet roll trips are maybe a bit um something a bit too simple to talk about let's talk about something a bit more interesting actually i think it's interesting you said can a resource be infinitely useful that's a big question
that people are trying to answer but i think actually what we can maybe do for one example is taking a take a item from the clothing industry and we're going to talk about the life of this product that goes the whole way from the materials it was at the beginning the whole way through to when it becomes waste at the end that actually typically is called cradle to grave so whatever it's born or whether it when it dies but actually what we want to start talking about is
going from cradle to cradle so how do we get something which is reborn essentially so we can use that material again and again and again so yeah antonio if you give an idea you think we can talk about yeah um an idea i i had for for this episode was to talk about a jumper i've been looking for jumpers and there's a lot of materials they've made out of and also there's a lot of things i want out of my jumper i want i want a jumper that doesn't bobble want a jumper
that looks nice jumper that's warm that also fits what do i do once i don't want it that's what i think about but if we just start from the beginning let's start from from before before i get get the jumper and we go through the product life stages we'll sort of simplify them into three some of the criteria you mentioned about something lasting for as long as possible and i think it's key for a jumper to be warm because that's why you put the extra layer on right they're
things that i look for in a jumper as well um and i really hate throwing things away so i i think i would want a jumper that would last a long time so i guess i have to think about the fibers that it's made from for example when i work i'm in an outdoor shop selling hiking socks you told people to look for a certain amount of i think it was nylon or acrylic that was in there because it's a hard wearing fiber so it'll last longer than some of the other fibers
and you also want a lot of wool in there because it will keep you warm and keep you warm when it's a little bit damp as well so i guess i'd be looking at what the jumper is made from and then thinking about has it been constructed in a way because i do a little bit of sewing has it been shot in a way that i think will last is that something that is thought about even before it gets onto the shelf in the manufacturing process i'm not a fabric designer or anything but i always
hope that people do because um because you know the amount of times you go to a shop and they're just different sizes
even though they're all size 10. so i always hope that there is design put into this but i'm not sure i do hold up that much hope not to be that negative well well i would say i'm a cynicals antonia i think a lot of people don't think about this i think what they factor in is how to make things as cheaply as possible i think that becomes the biggest factor for a lot of brands but you have to appreciate then there's also actually well we're all alumni of um university of manchester and the
fashion school actually sits within the materials school isn't the material school it's in the engineering school anyway because the material scientists sit alongside the fashion designers there is a whole academic field that goes into the science behind what clothes are made of and that's what you said laura about how given advice of what material you want for different uses really and actually sometimes that's why people will say in a really basic way you know that's why you want
to buy cotton because cotton's really good for different temperatures but also sometimes you want to buy things which are made of like something which is really hard wearing like tweed but then you get into a bit more detail with that hang on a second because tweed is a it's a particular type of weave right so it could be made from cotton yeah yeah yeah so sometimes there's materials and sometimes it's in production so it's about the way those fibers are woven
together saying denim is actually cotton i think oh it might be a twill but it's quite similar to tweed yeah yeah you're right actually so it's it's materials and then it's production method black people think that handmade handmade's always better but actually sometimes you get the strongest spawns with a machine right you can imagine so i guess it depends on how quickly the fibers can be put together and how securely as well and yeah yeah so yeah that's a long answer to say i
think things you talked about can be considered in the design of things and how they're manufactured doesn't necessarily mean that they always are i think we're all sort of on the same page and that we like something that will last for a long time and will look good for a while but do you think because what's in fashion one month might not be in fashion next that things are made knowing that they won't be around a long time so they don't necessarily have to last
yeah i think that does play a part it's like the festival tents because people know that they that it's it's not a single use quite as bad but just you know some clothes you just know are not going to be trendy or are you not sure how long the trend will last i mean do you remember the time when ponchos were really popular past me buy that one obviously when was that when was that oh god like 10 15 years ago i want to say and okay and they they were really they went like that
obviously you missed it completely but then you know if if you are buying something that is on a trend then you might not think necessarily about wearing it for 10 years because it will probably be out date it makes me think back to um the episode where anika talked about fashion it's planned obsolescence where you don't need it to be that long so you design it for that sort of short lifespan and then you can make it cheaper from a consumer point of view you always think ah that's fine if i
don't wear it i'll give it to a charity shop and the charity shop will find a use for it have you worked in a charity shop or do you have something to say about this cara oh uh i have something to say about it i have something to say with everything yeah i actually read a report yesterday i think just again talking about how people have this idea the disposable fashion essentially or fast fashion which alludes to the fact that people don't hold as much value against their their
items anymore especially if they've only paid a quid for address so they think it can go to somebody else in a charity shop and there's just so many other factors about why that's so wrong like does someone else even want to buy is it good enough quality to pass on to somebody else do the charity shops need it and then you end up actually in this messy territory that there's no value to resell in the uk so they package up all these clothes and they send them to
other countries which messes up markets in other countries and it's just this whole thing that people just don't look beyond like their own kind of like use of something to understand where it's come from or where it's going to go to next and they just think like ah we can recycle everything but because they've they've been kind of lied to essentially this is where a lot of it comes into like it is economics and that's why it's a lot to do with psychology and
marketing and a lot of the science is twisted in such a way to tell people that like you know oh it's okay you can buy this thing for really cheap because actually you can recycle it and then somebody else uses it you shouldn't feel guilty and it's green washing essentially i guess in somewhere another wow that's my runt i'm sorry i have a lot to say about this i think that's something that that gets missed by a lot of people about recycling is it's an industrial process
in some sort of way or a logistical process and so there's economy to it you can't recycle something infinitely simply because the value goes down and also you have to apply energy so you know guess it's sorting all these clothes into whether it's wearable and resellable or you know putting it down to to fabric recycling you know down cycling it it costs labor it costs money and it costs energy and and at the end of the day if it's not much value at the end of it then why would you bother
doing that and instead it it could end up in landfills i think we've kind of blurred between the first stage what we're talking about the product life cycle which is manufacturing and the design decisions which are made as well as the kind of behavior drivers which come from that and we're not kind of veering into what the uses when consumers purchase a product like how they view the value of that and whether they understand what the manufacturing is and how long they plan to hold on to
that and actually i think in contrast to fast fashion and disposing of things which i think is definitely one thing a lot of people maybe of our generation would do but i know that my mom's generation they don't throw things away that fast so she she will actually tell me that i bought something very cheap and she's like oh but it'll last you 30 years and i have to kind of say like like there's no point in buying stuff every season that you don't really need to then have it all in your boardroom
for another 40 years if it'll even last that long so it becomes this really kind of messy kind of behavior of how you hoard too many products as well as disposing of too many products and it just kind of yeah it gets really really complicated yeah i gotta say i'm definitely guilty of hoarding stuff at the start of lockdown i actually went through my wardrobe and i've done this a few times and tried to work out like if i wore a top every single day like a new top how long would
it take me to actually get them through my entire wardrobe i think i worked out that i've probably got an outfit so not a top but a full outfit for like every single day of the year just about it's not incredible and i think it's incredible here like we're having this conversation and we're people who try to be very aware of what our footprint is in the world and we try to kind of like consume less and we try to maybe not buy as much and you still just have so much
stuff and it just goes to show that like it sounds like i'm renting 10 people are being careless making these decisions but it's just we've kind of had this like economy set up against us that forces us to have so much more stuff than we necessarily need yeah and i got i haven't bought anything new in a fair few years now i think i bought the odd thing out of a charity shop but i thought i obviously have more than enough clothing and i don't wear a lot of it all that often
i mean for last year i've just been sitting around the house in the middle of a pandemic so i haven't like gone finally out or gone to a conference or even gone to the office well something to be said as well that society expects us to wear clean clothes new clothes you have to wear for the right occasion you can't just wear what you wear at home in the office or at a conference and that's why we have so much stuff because we just have so many uses for it or
in my case you know i bought a pair of trousers or something and it and it kind of fits but it's not the most comfortable so i try to find another pair and it again it was like kind of fits kind of doesn't and you kind of think okay maybe it'll work maybe it'll work and now i've just got 10 pairs of trousers which are okay but not great but i don't want to throw them away so i just kind of rotate them all to be uncomfortable in slightly different part of the the trousers area yeah precisely
just just slightly uncomfortable if i sit down so these trousers i can wear when i'm standing these ones when it's hot these ones when it's born these ones with tights underneath when it's extra cold you know i think then so there's some people who are very extreme i guess environmentalists would you say are people who are very into sustainability you always almost end up with this like dystopian version of the future where everyone basically walks around wearing the same clothes and
everyone just all dresses in white for example we all wear the same thing every day i'm someone who actually does quite like fashion i do like clothes i have a real thing about how things feel material and colors and there's so much culture that comes behind what our clothes are so how can you start making like environmental decisions about what people can or can't buy or produce whenever people have so much like emotion attached to what it is that they are wearing and then this is where it
starts becoming very complicated how do you start telling people who have a traditional method of creating their clothes maybe have a bad environmental impact or maybe those traditional method of making their clothes can't be recycled in an easy way and that's when it starts getting quite complex who's making those decisions top down as you would in san antonio or else bottom up trying to like you know reframe what what are the drivers behind what we do and why i feel like you're going down
this route or giving people like a clothing budget every year you know we're sort of a one in one out once you've reached you've got your maximum quarter of clothing that you're ever allowed you can't buy something until you get rid of something else and you have to get rid of it in a way that is sanctioned somehow but i think that's probably extreme it sounds impossible when you say it like that actually doesn't it yeah yeah trying to find a solution to this is difficult
i've got an a polo shirt from a company i used to work at they didn't take it off me and now i don't know what to do if i put it in charity shop someone else composes that person that employee which i'm sure anyone really cares to but also i i'm not just going to walk around wearing it i can just come on if people don't want to pose is there any value in reselling it does anyone actually want to wear the logo of a company which they've never worked for do does anyone
want a polo from travelodge let us know well when do you get away with if you pretend you're an employee at travel lodge [Laughter] all that power of the travelodge housekeepers such a glamorous life you led [Laughter] but one of the things i wonder about when it comes to what i do with my clothing is washing it i i kind of hate washing machines because i like knowing how things work and washing machines i've got this myriad of programs none of them explain what they do and why why is
one better for cotton at 60 degrees what's the difference between cotton at 40 degrees why is there a cold wash i don't get it everything goes on the same wash cycle in my house and i wonder if that affects how long things last i think once upon a time when people designed clothing labels it did have a meaning you know they they put on a dot for ironing level they put on a dock for whether or not you should use fabric and whether you can dry or it should be dry clean only
the amount of times i've actually tried to look at a label and then realize i just need to google what any of these symbols mean and then i do what laura does and just put it all in the same i think they actually have in the manual they actually stayed at different speeds and i think that will you know impact how many fibers get sort of battered around and loosened off your clothes and that's you know a fact that i think you know when we were talking about micro
plastics and some people found facts about the micro plastics that come off our clothing and how there aren't filters for that um some people are actually making filters that can be stuck into your washing machine drains but yeah definitely i think spin fin speed i think they call it in frequency frequency is more accurate but yeah i think it says speed in the manual doesn't it yeah yeah i think that does do something so that's why they suggest if you do have
delicate clothes which you know again fashionably if you have a lot of chiffon and silk maybe you don't want to use those high spins because that will just weaken it and shorten the lifespan of your clothing and actually yeah a good example i think is jeans jeans traditionally aren't really supposed to wash at all they say it damages the quality of them obviously you wash if you spill curry down the front or something but typically you aren't really supposed to wash a lot of things
like that or suits a lot of kind of like stiffer things you don't really want to wash that often it now sounds really strange to say you would not wash a pair of chargers that you wear quite often so like of course i still do but i think i watch my things a lot less often than my friends do um but then i tell myself i'm like okay well it's saving the clothes the clothes last longer as well as saving energy as well saving water as well as saving fabric softener and washing powder so um
maybe i smell slightly more but you know it's good for the environment yeah yeah i've got to say i think i wear my jeans until they start to smell i probably shouldn't be admitting this in a podcast levi's give that advice leave i say don't wash your jeans i think just air them out if they start to smell surely that's allowed right well yeah maybe just for reason yeah well i think i think if that's if that's the goal you know if the objective is to to have clean clothes
you don't smell in public then there's your measure you know i definitely have some friends who would never wear a pair of jeans twice without wash like did you wear them once and watch them wow yeah i've been doing all sorts in my garden today in these jeans um i think so then i'm also talking about fibers though i thought so i know we're talking about use right now but back to manufacture a little bit you just kind of reminded me because well i live in manchester and thinking about all the
cotton mills that we have and a lot of people died because they used to work in cotton mills and when they would quit cutting up the fabric so many little pieces of material would be in the air and they absorb they would breathe in a lot of these cotton materials and it led to lots of cases of lung cancer which we don't have in the uk anymore because we do typically have better employment laws but like circular economy is typically about the environment and less waste but
you have to consider the human cost in it in some way or another and there is definitely cases in the uk where there has been fast fast warehouses in the past few years underpaying people like they've called it modern slavery and in other countries they don't have those health concerns they don't care about people breathing this stuff in they probably also don't care that much about the stuff washing out into rivers and things so you do kind of start thinking
about that there's like the scale of um pollution that comes from the fashion industry from like tiny little fibers to huge mountains of clothes is is this incredible clothing i am labels do say their country of manufacture on don't they but i don't really know what that means i'm not going to look up the employment laws for every country before i buy an item i think that's one of the reasons i kind of stopped buying more clothes partly because i don't need to and partly because let's do it
responsibly it's an awful lot of mental effort it is and i think even there's um the website i always get the name of it because you have to pay it's all behind the paywall think ethical consumer yes and i would say arguably like if you really care about people knowing the information like it's crazy that's behind the paywall again it's it's that whole thing of like recycling can't be done infinitely you know people can't research infinitely for free in an economy they can't so i get what they
charge for it but if i'm not gonna pay for it and i'm someone who works in the field like who's gonna pay for that apart from maybe just like some some specific academics i don't know it's just i get what's behind the paywall but it is just questionable that information arguably should be open access to a lot of people who maybe might learn a bit more about where stuff does come from so i guess we've spent a bit of time talking about the first two product life
stages of sort of resource gathering and the manufacture which then you know gets transported and used by us maybe we should talk a bit more about what happens after weaver we've got our jumper and found for whatever reason it doesn't fit it's worn too much or it's just not fashionable what happens then that's the end of part one of this two-part episode about how we can think about ways of reducing the amount of waste that we produce so we've talked about some concepts that
are inherent to this idea of a circular economy and we've thought about two of three of the product stages that's the manufacture and actual use by the user you'll have to wait in the two weeks to listen to the second part of the episode we talk about what happens in disposal in more detail and also broaden out to talk about different industries and how circular economy can be applied there so thank you all for listening so far and find us on twitter if you want to ask us any questions
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