Transcriber: C Wong Reviewer: Jimmy Tangjaitrong
(Applause)
Can one person redesign the economy?
Or make sustainability reality?
I think being from the Isle of Wight, it sounds too big time,
even for a TED Talk.
So I want to start with something a little more relatable,
or at least, with something that we’ve all got in common.
And that’s that we were all kids once.
When I was five, my mum explained to me how bins work.
At that age, I think the whole world is like a massive game,
all the adults are playing in it, and putting stuff in the bin
is one of those grown up rules you must learn and follow.
And this is how it works.
We take all the material, packaging, and all the stuff from everything
that we buy, make, produce, use, consume,
and we stick it in this special plastic bag.
And then a lorry comes round, and each home throw their bag
in the back until it’s full up.
And then it drives away, over a hill and reverses into a field.
And then when nobody’s looking,
we dump all of that into the ground, and then we run away.
That’s what we do.
And when I learned for the first time that that’s it - that’s our system,
obviously I started crying.
And then I decided I was going to do something about it.
So I took out my pencil case,
and I started writing a letter to the person responsible.
Here it is.
It says, “Dear Mr. Binman,
I’m five years old.
I am very worried about lots of rubbish.
Will there be enough room for me in the world when I’m a grandad?”
And I actually got a reply. They said, “Don’t worry.
By the time you’re grown up, this is going to be a non-issue,
beacuse we’re working on this thing called recycling.
So I did exactly what they said,
and followed the recycling instructions on the packaging my entire life.
And nearly two decades later, as a student,
I got to go to a waste management center.
On a field trip. And we came over the hill,
and there was a lorry reversing and dumping the trash into the ground.
And I realised that it had been.
Every day.
Every year. Everywhere.
Ever since I wrote that letter.
I felt sorry for the person that had to reply.
Obviously, they’re doing their best, but clearly out of their depth.
And not through a lack of trying, it’s just they’re drowning,
trying to hold back this tsunami of everybody else’s trash.
And here’s a snapshot of what they’re up against.
Just something simple, like clothes - we’re all wearing them.
60% of clothes are made out of plastic.
99% of textiles waste, and this is a fact,
it’s not recycled - it’s landfilled or incinerated.
And that equates to a flow of 40 tonnes burned or buried every second.
I’ve seen what that looks like,
real world with my own eyes made me realise that
whatever I was going to do with my life, I didn’t want to be a part of that.
And when it comes to these sustainability conversations,
I think, like a lot of young people, my brother and I,
we’re done talking about it, we want to do something about it.
And we get told constantly, don’t we?
As consumers, “Well, change what you buy then.”
“Educate yourself.”
“Make better choices.”
“Do your bit.”
So we went and tried to ‘do our bit’
and buy products made from organic materials,
or products made using renewable energy,
or products designed in such a way that
they don’t eventually end up in landfill.
It’s like they don’t exist.
And actually, the more we looked, the more we learnt that
almost everything in the world seems to be made like the exact same way.
I think the model is almost like this giant conveyor belt,
where you take resources out of the environment
and turn it into products designed at the other end
of the conveyor belt to be thrown away in the dump.
Now, if there’s only one option:
linear consumption and waste,
how is a choice with one option a choice?
For us, if we couldn’t find the products we wanted to see in the world,
it felt like the only option was to make them ourselves.
I think we’re really naive at this point, we thought it would be really easy.
Like t-shirts, for a start, are so simple.
But more important than that, we’re trying to do a good thing.
And you do the right thing, you get rewarded.
That's what they say.
We took our first positive steps in this direction,
it felt like the system itself gave us this hardcore smackdown.
I want you guys to think about what I’m saying here for a second.
The more we used clean materials, the more we use renewable energy,
the more expensive it got, the more we are punished with cost.
If we’d have opted to use polluting materials,
or chosen fossil fuels, we’d be rewarded.
And you still are rewarded with lower prices.
So, stopping pollution - punished,
but polluting is rewarded.
We’re all cool with that?
Now, I’m not a politician.
And we didn’t think that we could just change that fundamental in one go.
We’re actually just two teenagers in a shed, at this point.
So we decided we would just go out and see what we could change ourselves.
And that’s how we ended up in places like this, in a factory.
I actually really like this photo.
Because it shows, for me,
what working in sustainability actually looks like.
It’s not about taking photos
It’s about working
And when we went to and worked in places like this,
we just kept seeing the same thing everywhere.
Waste.
And I’m not talking about
waste on the floor, or wasted time or wasted electricity.
I’m talking about the waste built into the business model itself.
For example, in the fashion industry,
something like 40% of all production is never utilised.
Now that’s a fancy way of saying it’s manufactured, then landfilled
without ever having really been worn or used.
It turns out, that’s because these products, like most in the world,
are produced speculatively.
Now, if you start making stuff before anyone’s actually ordered it,
you have to guess what to make.
And guessing guarantees waste.
So if you have a model based on wasteful overproduction,
then you scale it to mass production, you end up with massive amounts of waste.
And for us as noobs, we’re like, “This is insane.”
Why don’t producers just produce what people need
when they actually need it?
It turns out there are some understandable excuses
that explain why people don’t normally do that.
It would mean producing things one at a time, in real time.
And at a speed and scale that require
hundreds of people looking after thousands of processes,
making millions of decisions
round the clock, 24/7, at the speed of light.
Basically, people's minds just cannot process that much information.
But a computer can.
And when we made that connection, that's something that we acted on.
We started looking into digital printing and digital equipment because
you can connect digital things to computers.
And you can connect computers to the Internet.
And on the Internet, you can learn to code and write code.
With code you can see how these zillions of little processes
could be digitized and automated.
You can sort of see how
you could solve this problem for good.
And then we made a discovery
here on the Isle of Wight.
An abandoned supermarket.
And this was our ‘if not now, then when?’ moment.
So we borrowed some money and we bought it.
And we started building our own factory inside it.
So this is a look inside.
Rich is holding a product
at the end of the production line in Freshwater.
And it’s just been made,
but in the seconds after somebody ordered it.
I said earlier,
how speculative overproduction produces massive amounts of waste.
Well, not doing that saves massive amounts of money.
We save so much money, in fact,
we can afford to use the organic materials we want to use.
And we can afford renewable energy, and sustainable packaging,
and even pass some of those savings back to our customer
to make sustainable products affordable for everybody.
Progress!
This is our recipe for progress.
Redesign the business model if that’s what it takes to eliminate waste
and then spend what you save on sustainability.
And everywhere there’s waste,
there is an opportunity to do that.
So if we’re looking for big opportunities to move forward,
where are the biggest piles of waste in the world?
Well, back to landfill.
And stood on the edge of a landfill,
it doesn’t take long, I think, for that frame of mind to realise
that maybe, the word ‘waste’ is part of the problem.
I mean, you can tell if you say what you see:
like steel, or aluminum, or paper.
I think we use words like trash, so it’s cool to treat it that way.
But these are materials, and materials worth something.
And I always find it surprising, actually,
that producers themselves haven’t acted on this.
Like, how weird is it that a drinks company
goes out and uses their capital to buy, say, polyethtlene
for the bottle they put their product in, and then they sell it to thirsty people,
but give those people no choice
other than to throw that in the bin,
giving themselves as a producer
no choice but to go and take the money they’d just made
and use some of it to replace the material they already had to begin with.
I mean, if material is money,
every time they sell something, they throw money in the bin.
From what I know about business,
this is not a very intelligent way to play the game.
It trashes the environment, too, by the way.
But stupid games, stupid prizes.
And we just didn't want to play that way, basically.
So we made a decision to design every product that we ever made
to come back to us when it was worn out.
The idea was to make new products from the material that we recovered.
We developed some tech to help us do that.
I can take my phone, and when it’s time,
scan the label inside this T-shirt right here
to activate the freepost recovery process.
It’s easy.
And it needs to be more than just easy.
But because we’ve designed the products in such a way
that this material is worth something to us,
we can afford to pay people for doing that, to reward them.
And then material starts to flow.
But not to landfill, back to us.
The maker.
To be remade, resold and reworn.
And I think,
to me, that’s what this design thing’s meant to be all about, isn’t it?
Not just designing lots of different products,
but designing fundamentally different outcomes.
But things don’t design themselves.
People do - I think people get inspired by things they see.
So I want to show you guys something.
The whole time we’ve been talking about waste,
you've been looking at it.
But not on the slides, I’m wearing it.
The shirt that I’m wearing is made out of old shirts.
And when it’s worn out, it’ll come back to us
to be remade back into a new shirt, again and again.
So this idea that maybe the future
might be something called circular economy.
This is what circularity looks like for real today.
Now, if we want that to be the solution,
we need to scale it up.
Beause the solution needs to be as big as the problem.
Otherwise it won’t work.
The fastest way to do that basically is on the Internet these days.
So we decided to package all this tech up,
and put it online on our platform, and give it away for free.
It basically means that anybody can design and sell their own products,
but connect it to our digital infrastructure that we’ve built.
You can start a brand, basically, but on a circular model.
Literally anybody can do it, it’s free.
You guys could use it if you want.
Even our competitors can use it.
After a couple of years,
something like 10,000 brands, businesses, charities, events are using Teemill.
I think the cool thing is that together, we’re all using
a more sustainable means of production.
And while people say that in our economy,
there’s one force that drives it forward, drives progress:
that’s competition.
But in my experience,
we got way further, way faster
with cooperation.
So in the end, I think we can all be guilty
maybe of thinking about the economy
as this rigid rule set that’s applied to us.
And we talk about those rules like we’re just players.
If we’re not happy, we need to ask who makes those rules?
You know, I think it’s a lot like that experience of growing up.
When you’re a kid and all the adults have everything under control,
and then you become one.
And you realise nobody’s in control.
Or like, ‘scary version’.
Is it meant to be me?
Am I in control?
(Laughs)
The economy is not something that happens
It
It’s just a word for the playground
where all of our ideas and our actions play out,
and anybody can create it and contribute.
Next time we want to ask and challenge with a question,
it’s totally okay and cool
to actually build the answer yourself.
And it’s meant to be fun.
So if there are parts of it that are not,
who’s to say we can’t re-imagine what that might look like?
Not just new products,
but new business models too, the places where products come from.
Now, I’m not saying that we won’t upset a few people
if all of us here just bust out of here,
and come up with a new idea of what ‘business as usual’ might look like.
But if the economy
is a big game made up by all the adults,
there’s no rule that says that we can’t change the rules,
move the pieces around, and change the game.
So I’m a grown up now, if see something I want to change,
I know exactly what to do.
I take out my pencil case, and I start writing.
But not a letter,
a plan.
(Applause)