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welcome to technically speaking you're diving straight into the second of a two-part episode on zero waste and circular economy so if you haven't yet listened to the previous episode you should probably check it out because none of what we say is probably going to make any sense if you don't in the first episode we were talking about the first two life cycle stages in a jumper so we were talking about manufacture and use we're carrying on the conversation straight away here diving into what
happens when you dispose of your jumper and then broadening out to some more general concepts in circular economy so sit back and enjoy 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 it sounded to me like you were saying there's a whole load of stuff that goes into the manufacturing side of it that is a consumer i'm not aware of and it's more complicated than you'd think is the same thing true of disposal she talked about charity side of it a little bit but what else goes into disposal of clothing or considerations in disposal if say we go go down the first route of um charity you know if if it's in good nick someone else
would buy it and they get to also use it so if we're talking and there's in this sort of different areas of circle economy you found a reuse of it but then you know there are those and vintage shops which also add value by repairing clothes and actually can be quite desirable so they've kind of found a way to improve the clothes and yeah when i used to volunteer at oxfam we had a rule which was um obviously you don't resell underwear but also the manager there didn't like
striped shirts because they looked like pajamas we don't sell sleepwear so those went and because oxfam is quite a popular charity or also just well-known charity they would actually send it to other charity shops to then have their pick and then if it didn't make that cut then it went to fabric recycling i think attorneys kind of covered a lot of what the options are typically of um reusing clues as they are and where they might go to me i think with circular economy the
stuff when we talk about either disposal or kind of the alternative to disposal is really where circular economy kind of like comes into its own this is talking about trying to give value to things which we typically call waste and this is where in previous episodes of the podcast people might kind of hear that everyone else kind of comes in with really great facts or statistics about things that's not really how my brain works my brain tends to work more in
concepts um so hopefully we'll try and get explain this a little bit and kind of interesting concepts of what you can do so i would think when you start talking about clues like what is the option okay well a jumper is a very simplistic way of doing that but maybe if the jumper is made of wool for example you can really start thinking about okay well can that thing be pulled apart can we get the material directly back out of that do we pull it and could be unravel the whole
wheel jumper and now you've a ball of will again and you can use that for something else or actually do we want to start looking at is it a type of material that can be shredded down and turned into different fibers in a different way which isn't quite a new technology a few years ago that didn't exist when i was trying to find it but it also starts looking at okay well what are completely alternative uses for this without just letting it go straight to landfill and i saw um
a project recently that somebody has figured out a way i think it's an architectural student as part of one of their research project has figured out a way to make blocks auto shredded material they turn into these blocks but you're not structural you can't build a house remember what you can do is build internal structures with them as you can kind of build in you know partition walls and that kind of thing so it really starts saying okay well what values that material have in a
different way if it comes to you and you really can't you really can't use it for anything then choose the best disposal route and you have to start talking about okay well is it going to go to landfill or can't we maybe compost it in some way i think i've also heard of examples of people you know repurposing fabric in their own home where you know they get old t-shirts and make say a bathmat outfit and so i think a lot of people also turn it into arts and crafts
as well which kind of gives them a more personal feel to it on an industrial scale i think you know you could also use it for carpet insulation bearing in mind if it's fire retardant and things like that yeah i remember visiting bemidji museum in the northeast of england a few years ago and that's i think it's around about sort of turn the century so sort of i guess late-ish industrial revolution era i think and you can sort of wander into some of these houses and they have people
dressed up as a person from that era and they they tell you stuff and there was a mat on the floor and they were explaining to me how it was clothing and then it got sort of cut into strips and turned into a map that would initially go in in a doorway to stop dirt being tracked in across the floor and like prior to that it could be used on a bed to keep you warm so it's sort of gradually sort of downgraded from the really useful the high value thing i guess to a slightly lower value to then
something that goes on the floor until it drops to bits so and i guess that's quite an early example of that and it sounds like that used to happen quite a lot uh what's that like 100 years ago but maybe not so much now yeah i think a good example of that is actually my granny told me before so she would have got married in like 50s i guess the late 50s and she said typically um well maybe it was northern ireland i'm not sure maybe more than other places um you
would get a really smart suit made up for your wedding like a custom suit like a skirt suit type thing then that would become your good suit that you would wear to things until then it became a bit threadbare and then what you would do is unstitch the whole thing and reverse it and stitch it back up again so then you'd actually have like a new suit essentially so it's like you said you kind of like continue it might start off as nice as your wedding dress but
then it becomes your outfit for other things and it kind of yeah continues to get downgraded maybe a very basic example is how people have really nice blankets which then eventually ends up in the dog bed and the dog uses it i guess at the heart of the circular economy is run just maybe downgrading something but turning it into something of like maybe equal or greater value so you were talking about using wool in construction projects i think you can use it for installation yeah you could
actually directly take the material and put it back in as insulation yeah i mean i don't know much about fire safety so i don't know what process that has to go through to be safe insulation but i know that it can be used of course yeah is that one of the core parts of circular economy as a concept am i getting that right that it's about adding value to things that someone else considers rubbish yeah so to me it really comes back to the whole i mean i said this
when we were preparing for the episode of so cliche but one man's waste is another man's treasure and it really is and i think it's um so this is diversion obviously a little bit from talking about fashion specifically but it is very much looking at what is it put in landfill previously but actually has a lot of value that could be used for other things and in other countries for example maybe with more informal waste management structures people um will make a living
out of the fact that they go around and collect rich and then they can then sell it onto somebody else because there is value to taking metal and putting it back into things rather than you know disposing of electronics into a landfill at the tokyo olympics actually a really great example of circular economy is that they got lots of um people to donate their old electronics and then they took the gold silver and bronze out of the electronics and that's what they
made the metals from you don't have to kind of think of it as something worse like if there's going to be loads of gold and valuable metals in an old landfill site like that's valuable material so yeah it's just kind of trying to reframe them i actually think that in a sort of thermodynamic way you know if everything tends towards entropy unless you add energy and so it's about keeping you know these precious metals that that we dug up from the ground that were in low
concentrations we we concentrated it to get these gold bars and then we used them in our various uses and then putting them back together so we have that gold bar again i think is is also a key part and so it's about keeping what people say is so resources in the loop for longer so reusing the clothes before downgrading it and then keep using it there before that gets downgraded repair it if necessary before you know finally it might be just total you know your jumper is just now
loose fibers that are microscopic to come to entropy yeah yeah just try and gather that off again see if you get another ball of wall can i really quickly ask for definition of entropy again i always gotta get them confused so i think of entropy is a measure of randomness that's not what i was expecting at all okay sonia goes to google and looks of entropy i thought it was to do with hate hate and energy atoms you model them through for thermodynamic quantities
so pretty much your stuff is scattered everywhere it's pretty random right and you do work to bring order to it that's how i thought of it okay it's like if things aren't orderly my best example is just the room if you never tidy it if you just put everything where you when you last used it it never is where you wanted it to be because you know you just grab a pair of scissors you leave the scissors where you use it and then keep getting you know everything just tends to just be
become a pile of mess oh my god okay and so that's when you need to put energy in to actually put your scissors back in the stationary box put everything else back in its orderly place and that takes more energy than just leaving it where wherever you last can if we can diverge a little bit more from the fashion example i just thought i just thought of a good example of this is because i work in the built environment and people are trying to talk about secular economy and buildings
and they're trying to kind of come up with this idea that it's only been seen in a few places where the whole idea is that you build a building in such a way that you're able to take apart again that has a lot of issues with it first of all usually buildings are really strong because you've joined them in a way which doesn't come apart easily you weld metal together you can't just unweld things and there's been some ideas of how you can do this for circular economy and one of them is
talking about like every piece of steel that you put into a building gets a barcode and at the end of this after you're taking it apart then you can scan this barcode you get all the information from it which just sounds great in theory when you've spoken to people who actually say that how this would work in practice like you know who holds the information where's the parkway gonna scan back to you know if that company goes bust he built it you know in what
way is it actually practical to keep all that information started but what you've just said antonia is because you need to view a building as a system of parts that are organized in such a way that can then be kind of put back into piles again rather than having to demolish it the whole thing collapses in itself and then suddenly it's rubble and bent steel so yeah i like how you think of circular economy to use the organization of materials using physical concepts such
as principles of thermodynamics yeah you know because that's so understandable and relatable to everyone that you know if anything i've just probably confused matters more by including this oh yeah for sure [Laughter] yeah i think we need to think of a side example that we can put on twitter or something that explains entropy and how it relates to the fashion industry well i guess your fashion industry example is talking about um a messy room right a messy wardrobe [Laughter]
yeah i was thinking merry condo you know what what the first step of marie kondo is like getting all the clothes that you have and just putting it in a big pile so you see how many clothes you have and then imagine if you just left it there and then that that's what our landfill is and then how do you get any anything valuable i don't know where this example is going i think i've exhausted the uh untidy room example i i actually think it's it's a great example for what a landfill
is people forget sometimes that landfill is literally a big hopefully a big plastic bag in the floor if they've bothered to seal the edges of it otherwise it's just a big hole in the floor that stuff just leaches out of and then yeah so how do we get the material back out of that in a valuable way or how do we stop going there and this is what you spoke about antonio with the loop usually a product is like i say it's born cradle and it goes to grave it ends it gets disposed somewhere and
that's usually landfall that's one straight line of life whereas actually what you're trying to do with check your economy is to kind of loop it back around to the beginning again and it's trying to get things kind of going in the circle rather than just kind of having a straight line put on a conveyor belt directly into a landfill i think we should also talk about how what what happens in the landfill people kind of think it's an inert pile of things but over time things leave the
landfill and end up in the environment water will end up there and if there is anything in there it could get absorbed into water run off and end up back into rivers lakes etc also into the soil i'm not sure how widely known this is but have you heard of landfill gas i have because yeah yes methane things yeah yeah so so you know i think we were talking about um getting compostable cutlery and not knowing what to do with it and i kind of have a struggle with this because i understand
that that people have the intention that these are compostable cutlery but if you don't know they're compostable instead they end up in landfill and organic matter breaks down produces methane and so what you've actually done is what should have been controlled and um collected and contain carbon instead is being released accidentally from your landfill yeah yeah so the compostable cutlery plates and things is something i've seen sort of in the last few years so it
sounds like it's a relatively new innovation there's a way to take something that would be a plastic waste that would go wherever you put it into something that could be useful so you're talking about it breaking down and releasing gases but if it's not in a controlled way you can collect those gases and use them right so that's like an example of an innovation are there any others that you've come across that might be relevant to the conversation well i think before we kind of start
talking about a few more innovations i want to kind of make a connection here between the fact that what was designed is a really really great idea which was talking about compostable cutlery in implementation doesn't always work so well so my example of this is um well i actually didn't have a green bin in my flat for quite a few years because they stopped taking it because it became too dirty because it was amongst a group of flats so i couldn't compost stuff so i
did take away and i said to the guy i was like oh this is great it's compostable i put this in the paper ribbon and he was like i don't know and i was like well it feels like it's paper so i'm going to assume it's paper which is why it's compostable and he just literally had no idea what it was even though this was actually a vegan takeaway who kind of was like selling the fact that they had composted material and i was like well i don't actually know what this material is like
how am i supposed to best use it if i don't have a green bin more annoyingly i see it all the time at pop-up events and things like that and food places in time and they just about have a different bin for plastics and rubbish they don't have a bin for food waste so if it's compostable where are you going to put it and then actually do people even care if it's compostable do they probably just put it all in the same bin anyway you know so it comes down to there's lots of innovations in
design which can be really great but actually then the behavior of how you then can do something with it next becomes really difficult so antonio i sound really cynical about this i think you kind of said you are more um pro promotion of the idea that design ideas can kind of change how things work on a different vein but i i agree on this point where where there is only so much you can control as a you know again to use the word consumer you know you if in the
available resource you have to put the compostable materials you don't have quite that much control the only other option is to then take away your cutlery over to somewhere where you could compost it and that's probably not always practical who even wants to do that to an extent you have to have design in the economy in their system where there is a lot of recycling facilities and that logistical connection to be able to bring compost bins somewhere that's convenient for people
and that i think that's the other problem that people have with with recycling is if all the bits that you need to collect are really dispersed again how much effort would it take to get all of that back so if you designed it in such a way that you could bring it all back to one point take supermarkets for example more lately they have recycling points for plastic bags so you know that's probably the place where we get most of our plastic bags when we go food shopping and then any that are
broken you could take back to that supermarket and i think that kind of helps recycling happen a bit easier because it's the same point you're going to yeah yeah i think okay so i'm going to be a bit more positive now talked about how design can be a really good thing design that connects in with behavior and policy of organizations i think which then the consumer can be part of my partner a few weeks ago got a fair phone so i don't know people have heard of a fire phone or not but a fire phone
is like one of the only phones i think the only phone who um openly publishes information on where they source their materials from so they actively source the metals inside the phone from conflict-free zones they try and make sure that the whole supply chain they can do is paid like a living wage but also the phone itself you can take the compartments apart if the battery dies you can buy a new battery if you want to upgrade your camera you can upgrade your camera and it is
actually one of those things that is complete opposite to how the rest of the industry works which is really about making things as cheap as possible and exploiting lots of workers but also having bad environmental impacts as well as with planned obsolescence they want to kind of you know make sure you buy the flashiest flagship phone the fire phone is is a completely different way of doing things so actually economically the business works differently and then
the human environmental impacts are just like way way better and that's a really great innovation of innovation of technology but also innovation of business structure and innovation of environmental practices wow i gotta say i um i smashed the screen on my phone a few years ago and i i managed to replace it myself um buying like an i don't know if it wasn't even a genuine screen but i got one on ebay and it came with a little kit and explained how to take it apart and take the screen off
and it was fiddly but i managed it and my more recent phone i've also smashed the screen on that what happened it happens yeah i looked at how to replace that and decided it just there was too many things that could go wrong there were too many steps involved you had to heat it up because it wasn't screwed on it glued on but i don't really want to put my phone in the oven and i don't own a hot plate so i'm not too comfortable with that so the idea of having a phone
that you can just snap bits in and off like the old sort of express on covers from the nokia was it thank you guys yes so many years ago now and i think this this is a really great example of how so bottom up okay great we can do really great things i can put my toilet roll on my compost pile that's amazing but you know top down if the design of a phone is going to be so impossible for someone to fix themselves like you need to innovate that in some way where are the
incentives for the company to innovate in the way that the customer can do it because you used to be able to replace things your phone very easily but then also i don't know the details but i know in some countries particularly in the us it's a big issue that you don't have the right to fix things or i do know if you try and fix products um of like big companies in the uk as well and you go back and say i tried to fix my phone screen and then they'll say well that's
your fault that's your problem and we don't care because you you broke your phone and you know where is the policy for like everyday consumers to make sure that they can try and fix things themselves and without getting penalized for it by by the company that they bought the product from yeah in the uk there's something called right to repair isn't there is that a legislative thing i'm not too clear what it is i've just heard the term right to repair this is what i'm
also confused about it is in the uk and i think it's the u.s that we're trying to fight to get it into several states and this is why i don't know much detail on because i see lots of it through social media which is generally u.s led conversations so i don't bother reading the detail because it doesn't seem that relevant to me so in the uk i'm not sure and anyway i think it's why you have those places which are high street shops which can't fix things for you yeah so just to um just to add the
good old injection of facts it's it's something that the eu has been working on because they want to integrate circ economy more because you just get better resource efficiency another jargony word to use but it's basically you know where you get the most out of your materials and in the end hopefully keep it in the loop for longer so they've legislated that companies that sell consumer electronics which include refrigerators washers tvs in the eu need to ensure that these goods can be
repaired for up to 10 years so that includes you know keeping those parts because i remember when i used to work in in the rental estate market we had a fridge and one of the freezer drawers broke and you think it'd be nice to repair it so people could use it and trying to find a replacement was near impossible because the fridge model was out they they supposedly got an updated one but they didn't carry the parts anymore and essentially it would have been easier to either throw away the
entire fridge than it was to just get a freezer draw and it's just things like that that you know this legislation is gonna gonna help against so i guess that's sort of a form of so i tend to think of innovation as being a new product or a new scientific thing but that's more like an innovation in national policy yeah some things do have to kind of come from top down i think because companies have a certain agenda there does need to be an organization that is as impartial or
using evidence to bring in the right kind of policy that is better for for the whole society so yeah and um not to fear off too much but that's i think it's really interesting you said that about innovation always thinking about meaning technical innovation um but innovation is actually a really messy term that means a lot of different things and people use it in a lot of different ways it just is kind of quite a sexy term that people use in the past like 20 years so yeah it is
typically um it can mean new ways of doing things essentially in in any way i think part of this is not necessarily technological innovation i think some of its societal poli political well policy new ways of doing things and you know making better make investor connections between between um people who make things people who use things and people who dispose of things yes i guess my understanding of what motivates a company when they're selling a product is they want to sell as many as possible
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make it as cheaply as possible to make as much money as possible but it sounds like this the principles of circular economy will sort of put an end to that if they can so it's about overcoming how business is currently operate does that make sense that totally makes sense all right i originally studied engineering with business and i've always done a little bit of business alongside what i do and yeah i i personally have an issue that if you talk about sustainability you can't
always talk about the fact that success only means growth because you can't continue to grow and grow and grow and people can't continue to like buy more and more things if you really think we're going to like live within just the earth for the future like yeah it doesn't make sense so there it has to be a circular economy has quite a few different principles but um it is part of that is by breaking down this idea that you have to go for continuous ever everlasting growth all
right so it sounds like i'm a scientist it sounds like it's less about the science and more about sort of the behaviors that drive business i guess like i'm struggling here because i don't know i had a point but i forgot what i was gonna say as cara was talking so this happened a few times when i was like oh that's really good oh sorry no no it's good it's all good what did you say again can you just say again i said you can't have continuous growth secular economy has a few different
basic principles and one of them is talking about how you need to have not just continued more and more growth and i think laura was saying where does the well how does engineering fit i think engineering fits in the sense that you know instead of designing products to be sold designing services so you know you have the product that does the thing but you actually manage its service so i think the classic example given by the ellen mccarthy foundation is it's a washing machine company so
instead of selling washing machines they sell the service of clothes being washed and in which case you know being able to keep that that washing machine in use for as long as possible making it run more efficiently using less water and electricity would be on the manufacturer rather than on the consumer so you know it kind of incentivize a different stakeholder trying not to use that word so many things i don't think we've really um described what the other macarthur
foundation is either do you want to quickly summarize what that foundation's about some people might have heard of ella macarthur as a sailor who went round the world and as she was sailing everything that she had in her little bubble ecosystem on her ship was used to its maximum and that was when she thought about this in a in a wider context and created the ellen mccarthy foundation to sort of promote um so economy and works with a lot of different companies and i think i think
something that that's a company kind of struggles with it's quite conceptual so being able to talk to companies where they've implemented it bring out case studies and that can kind of i think showcase how it can be applied in different industries and also encourage businesses because at the end of the day there's a word economy in it because it's about businesses about how products and services end up in the world and so you know you kind of have to involve companies in that i see it's quite
impressive that this this woman who was in her own little ecosystem on her ship thought to widen that out to the entire world and create this i guess it's cultural shift we're talking about we're talking about how businesses change and it's about how we as a society do things differently it's quite impressive i think i think that's really spot on laura in terms of you were asking you what's the role of scientists and engineers within this so to me circular economy is a one concept that gets
people to think a little bit differently about what they do as scientists and engineers they typically are look to kind of provide solutions to problems that we have but we need to make sure that companies are asking the right problems or defining the right problems so they need to say okay well this is what we're trying to do but why are we trying to do it and that's where engineers and scientists come in to be able to say okay well if we want to start looking at re using
resources differently that we can think of the technical solutions but they have to be given the right environment to do that within if they're working for companies where they're saying that all they want to do is kind of find the cheapest most efficient way of producing electricity for example that's what the scientists and engineers have to kind of respond to because that's the business needs whereas if the business he starts to change that's where the science and
engineering comes into its own really and i think from an engineering background i know i can think about that with we're going to start talking about designing designing a new community for example okay well i can start thinking about i want to start designing the resources you know waste systems or drainage systems are kind of taking a new material to build in a certain way i can start choosing how i want to kind of close that system off and kind of bring in resources in a new way that might
have the same output but you're just kind of like making sure that the inputs and outputs are kind of used in a different way wow so we're talking about like i guess it's it's how businesses shape science and engineering and i've never thought about it in that way because i'm i'm the scientist that's always wanting to be a scientist so i just think about learning stuff so it's blowing my mind that fascinates me because as a scientist you're typically funded by
somebody and funding calls are shaped by what the needs are for people so it's so often shaped by the business needs you work in the nuclear industry which is very much driven massively politically and culturally and environmentally i've always as an engineer looked to the kind of outward forces around what the engineering does and that's to me where i've always been a champion for engineers understanding the real impact that they have in the world in a good
way and i think engineers don't always appreciate that or scientists always appreciate what kind of do things that they do to shape the world in a certain way and circular economy is one way to kind of connect that technical stuff to the sustainability and economic impact of what you're doing yeah it's very true the funding struggles of a scientist are very real and but i guess i guess what you're talking about is looking at how the circular economy could uh
could make use of scientific innovations or what are the innovations scientists could bring that would help contribute to that circular economy that's kind of my takeaway from this is a scientist that likes our atoms i guess um another way to think about is just um you know the the whole zero waste is is kind of a uh a parameter or a limitation of the system that you're trying to design and so if we just think about that as another parameter apart from you know optimizing for cost or
optimizing for material you know you can instead add this extra parameter on top of your problem that you're trying to solve you know it's another another aspect of sustainability and it's kind of funny we've managed to not mention the word sustainability in this whole topic but it's what so economy kind of is about or is it the other way around good question maybe not the topic of a future episode the element of foundation have an interesting fact which says
55 of our greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by switching our energy to renewable energy sources and the other 45 is locked in how we build our cities how we use our materials and in the products that we use so their stance on this is it's essential towards climate change thoughts that sounds like a story of a whole different episode it does yeah it sounds like talking about future episodes it's probably a good place to leave it so we started off talking about
how can we have a future that is truly waste free and it sounds like from what we're saying that that will be incredibly difficult to achieve it's less about the scientific and engineering innovations as i've learned but more about a profound shift or an innovation if you prefer depending on how you define the words the profound shift in the behavior in individuals and of entire markets and businesses and it sounds like a lot of that comes from national and international policies of
how people do business so you could argue that changing the behavior of an individual person who's just very very small part of one massive economic market might not make much of a difference so it would take some big influences and i guess maybe a lot of time to see some truly meaningful change but it also kind of sounds like what we're saying is the circular economy could be a future industrial revolution maybe if it's talking about how do we fundamentally change how we do things
so i guess if you're listening to this and you're interested and you want to find out more you can find us on twitter or you can make a comment on this episode the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're
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