We need to talk about waste.
Every year we throw out a huge amount of stuff,
about two billion tonnes.
Let's break that down a bit.
One rubbish truck load of clothing is burnt or
dumped in landfill every second.
I don't know how long this video will end up being,
but by the end at least 300 more trucks
of clothing waste will have been dumped.
And electronics are no better.
The weight of all our binned electronics is more than
the weight of all commercial airliners ever made.
Food?
If you loaded our food waste onto 40 tonne trucks
and parked them bumper to bumper,
those 23 million trucks would circle
the Earth seven times.
And the weight of all our plastic waste is
roughly equal to the weight of
the entire human population.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
We waste. A lot.
And it produces a whopping
1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 every year.
To get to net zero,
clearly something needs to change.
And if we're going to change our
approach to waste,
there are two main routes.
Waste less or recycle what we waste more.
Let's start with recycling. We all think,
well, I've put my stuff into the right bin.
Great, job done. Right?
But the problem is when we zoom out
and look at the system as a whole.
Take plastic. It's everywhere.
Even places you really don't expect it,
like a tin can. Eroding the aluminium shows that
this can is not actually all can.
Even it has a plastic layer inside.
And we have a really bad record of recycling it.
Since we started producing plastic, about 8.3
billion tonnes of plastic has been produced.
About 76% of this has become waste.
Only 9% of that waste was recycled.
Actually, virtually all plastic can be recycled,
but collecting it, sorting it, melting it
is expensive and complicated.
And in the UK we send a lot of our waste overseas
to deal with, about two-thirds of it.
We don't actually know what happens to all of this.
And according to a report by the UK's
National Audit Office, some of it could be
sent to landfill so not as squeaky clean
as we'd like to think.
And the plastic that actually is recycled?
PET is the most recyclable plastic
that we know at the moment and even that
you can only recycle it eight times.
Eight times!
If current trends continue,
about 12 billion tonnes will be sent to landfill
or littering the natural world by 2050.
Okay, that's the bleak but necessary part.
Now we can be a bit more optimistic
because experts around the world are
working on solutions.
AI robots are helping us recycle quicker
and more efficiently.
We found that bugs like common waxworms can
nibble through plastic, breaking it down,
and other scientists are using
plastic-eating enzymes
found in fungi and bacteria.
If you think about a brewery making a beer,
so instead of putting in the hops, it's plastic,
and instead of your yeast you're putting in
this type of microorganism that can digest it.
Then you'll come out with this soup of monomers
that could be used to make new plastic.
So there are some really exciting innovations
out there, but to tackle the massive scale of
the problem, clearly something else
has got to give.
I'm not saying don't recycle,
it's still very important, but what if we reduced
the amount of waste we produced to begin with?
So here's the problem.
We've inherited linear, degenerative economies.
We take Earth's materials, we turn them into
something we want, use it often only once,
and then we throw it away.
So we have to transform this system
to a circular, regenerative one.
Everybody needs a drill every now and then,
but we don't need it every day.
So why not borrow it and loan it
from the library like you would a book?
In cities and towns all over the world,
repair cafés are popping up. People who are
frustrated that they can't fix their watch or
their phone or their bike or their toaster.
Taking it to a repair café where there is somebody
who has a spanner or knows how
to take apart a computer and repair it.
But the circular economy cannot be left to
those grassroots initiative, it has to be
taken on board by industry. We need to put
regulation in place that makes it happen.
So I have this drawer, right, full of old electronics,
things like phones, which I end up replacing
every two years or so, but why can't I just fix these?
This isn't a technical flaw, it's not an accident,
this is by design, and it has a name.
Planned or in-built obsolescence.
And it's exactly what a law in France
is trying to tackle.
It's called the Repairability Index,
and it rates things on how repairable they are,
which encourages companies
to make their products last longer.
And that's not just good for the wallet.
Extending the lifetime of electronics in the EU
by just one year would save around
4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide,
and that's the same amount of CO2 as taking over
2 million cars off the roads for a whole year.
One of the ways that people individually have
got hooked into the linear economy is through
100 years of consumer advertising that tries
to convince us that we will improve our lives
every time we buy something new.
We need to mimic what Earth has always done,
which is reuse and repurpose and regenerate.
And that's an incredibly exciting 21st century
economic transformation.
So, clearly there are some major changes needed
to the way we deal with our waste.
But it could be an opportunity to rethink
our relationship to our stuff more generally.
I think that's a parcel, actually.
I needed this one.