Transcriber: Rebecca Bull Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Today, I’m here to talk about the story of a plastic bottle, and you will say,
‘Why do we talk about plastic bottles when we are talking about climate change?’
I will try to make the connection, and as I was saying before,
I’m here not to give you a talk, but to give you a tool.
This is a picture from the place where I was born, where I grew up.
I am from a coastal town in Spain, Valencia,
and this is the beach we used to go to every summer,
and it is still the beach that I go every summer, now with my little ones.
And if you see it from a distance, actually it hasn’t changed that much.
It kind of looks the same, but actually it is quite different.
Something indeed has changed,
and I realized, especially after having children, small children,
when I started to collect things with them on the beach -
seashells and rocks and stones to make sandcastles -
that in the last years, we collected more plastics than seashells.
We started to collect plastic bottles, plastic lids, straws,
and also small pieces of different shapes and colours of plastics.
And also, more recently, we started to collect a lot of face masks.
And this is the beach that I have loved
and the beach that I want my children to love,
and we started to collect more face masks than seashells.
Something, for sure, is wrong with that.
If we look- and actually, as a researcher, I also study plastics,
and I started to look into plastics.
What happens with plastics?
It’s a material, a really, really interesting material,
and we have seen, since the 1950s, exponential growth
in the production of plastics.
We went from producing less than 3 million tonnes globally
to over 400 million tonness globally.
We are using a lot, a lot of plastics, but that’s not the most critical bit.
It’s that most of that plastic will end up being in the landfill, incinerated,
or, even worse, on our beaches.
So the problem itself is not plastic. Plastic is a material.
It is an agnostic material - it’s not good, it’s not bad.
It is what we do with plastics. The problem lies in the system.
Something in the system is wrong.
The system is flawed, and we need to change it.
It's a system where we consume a lot of materials.
We extract those materials from the Earth’s crust
or from the ecosystems.
We use them for a period of time, and then we just dispose of them as waste.
Most of our waste,
even though some of us think we recycle most of the plastics we use,
end up in the landfill, incineration, or in our seas and our soil.
So we are not using that material very efficiently.
The problem is not plastics; the problem is how we are using plastics,
and how we have production and consumption systems
that use plastic in a very wasteful way.
But the problem is even bigger if we look at the global picture.
We are in a developed nation here in the UK.
We are consuming around 26 tonnes per capita.
Imagine how many skips of things you consume in a year - each of you.
But if we look globally,
there’s countries that consume as little as two tonnes per capita.
Something is clearly wrong with this system.
So here is the tool that I’m going to give to you today.
What if we think of a different system?
A system where instead of mining, you do urban mining.
A system where you use products for longer and when you no longer need them,
you recycle back their components or the materials to produce new products.
What about a system that,
rather than relying on extracting more things from Earth,
recovers and regenerates ecosystems and products and materials
back into the productive system?
A system that allows us, everyone in this globe, globally,
to reduce, drastically in some countries, the consumption of resources
and increase consumption of resources in other countries where they are needed.
And what if I tell you that that system already exists
and that system is called “circular economy”?
So if we go back to our bottle, what does it mean to be -
what does it mean for that plastic bottle to be in a circular economy?
First of all, it means that it’s produced in a different way.
We rely on biowaste materials
or we rely on secondary materials to produce our plastic bottle.
When we put it in the market, we know exactly what that product contains;
we know what it’s made of; and we have made sure,
during the design of that plastic bottle,
that everything can be either recycled or recovered in a different way.
It’s a system where we don’t produce plastic waste.
We use plastic waste to create new plastic products,
or we recover the monomers of the plastics through different processes,
especially biological recycling.
But the most powerful thing around this tool, circular economy,
is that you can apply it to textiles -
we were seeing, before, this skit from fast fashion.
We can apply it to fast fashion, we can apply it to fashion,
we can apply it to metals, we can apply it to critical materials.
We don’t need to extract more materials to have a new phone.
Maybe we can upgrade our phone
without the need to extract more materials.
Circular economy is here,
and I hope it’s a tool that you are going to use
to disrupt the way we use resources,
and the way we challenge or we face climate change.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)