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Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.
Speaker B: Ho ho ho! Everybody’s thinking about Christmas already. Slade, Band-Aid, and Wizard are already rocking the supermarket aisles, and the technology industry is gearing up for the massive marketing hype that is now known as Black Friday, or November 29th, and Cyber Monday, for those basking in blissful ignorance, is December 2nd. Everybody except me. I’m Peter Warren, and this is Password, our exploration of technology and society. I’m not being a Scrooge, but this year I have to say not “Bah humbug!” but “They are selling you a load of rubbish.” Buying new shiny things for Christmas might be good for tech manufacturers, but it’s a disaster for the planet. Cracking oil and processing coal to make plastic damages the environment, and Christmas turns all of our old high-tech gadgets and devices into pollution. Just listen to marine biologist Dr. Kathy Townsend, who researches the plight of marine animals suffering from the effects of waste plastics in the oceans.
Speaker C: Marine debris can impact marine animals in one of two ways. So they can either get entangled in it. So think of animals getting, you know, those terrible images that you see with seals with plastic bags or rings wrapped around their necks, discarded fishing nets entangling sea turtles, and anything you could possibly imagine. So entanglement is one way. So bigger stuff that the animals can get tangled up in, and then obviously they’re dragging it around, they can’t feed properly, And I think, I think manta rays as well. Yeah, even manta rays. Yes, the manta rays, we get them tangled around. So they have these two big lobes out the front of their face that they use for feeding. It creates a type of funnel, and so things like fishing line and stuff can get wrapped around, and it will slowly squeeze one of them off like a bit of like a cheese wire. And if they’re missing one, they seem to be able to still be able to feed, but we’ve never found one with two missing. So it appears that If they do have— and we’ve seen ones where the second one’s about to fall off, but then we’ve never seen that animal again. So it appears they can sort of still get their nutritional requirements if they still have one of these appendages at the front of their face. But if they lose both, that’s it. They can’t feed themselves efficiently anymore. So that’s of course, of course a big issue. So entanglement, that’s one. And then the other way is if they actually eat it. And ironically, there’s actually more species that have been recorded having eaten marine debris than there has been ones that have been found entangled in it. And when they eat it, it can cause a couple of different things. If it’s something sharp, they can get what’s called a gut perforation. So it pokes through the gut of the animal and the gut contents spill into the body cavity and the animal dies slowly of septicemia. Extremely painful way to die. Another way is what’s called dietary dilution, where the animal feels like it’s full, but it’s full of stuff that has no nutritional content to it. And seabirds are particularly susceptible to this because they feed upon the wing, and their energy requirements are so refined because they do these very long global migrations. They’ll start in, for example, Russia, and then end up in Tasmania in Australia. So literally all the way across the world. And they’re feeding on the wing as they go. And if they happen to be feeding, instead of feeding on the fish that they should be feeding on and getting their nutrition, if their stomach is full of instead plastics, which they pick up in the same location where they would normally be feeding on the fish, they just don’t get the same amount of nutrition that they require. And so the energy runs out of the tank. And it’s actually happening right now. There’s the short-tailed shearwaters are starting their migration out of Alaska right now and are supposed to be heading down to Australia. And huge numbers of them have been recorded in stranding in Alaska because they haven’t been able— because of climate change and warming, they just haven’t got the food availability for them to be able to do this big migration. And those who escape that and do start making their way across the oceans, if already weakened, they then have to pick up plastics as opposed to picking up their actual food resources. The likelihood of them actually completing that trip is fairly unlikely. And we’re actually expecting, like my colleagues and I are actually expecting, another mass seabird stranding in Australia in the next couple of months because of this. So yeah, it’s— so that’s another way, this dietary dilution. And then finally, which happens a lot with the sea turtles, is a thing called gut impaction, where the gut itself— the plastic gets stuck in the animal’s gut, and it’s like the worst constipation you could possibly imagine. The material itself because the gut is starting to die off. The gut can no longer digest even the organics that are mixed in with the plastics, and that causes gases. And the gases build in the body of the sea turtle in this particular instance, and they start to float. And the animals can no longer duck dive down to feed on the bottom. They can’t get out of the way of predators, and they certainly can’t get out of the way of boats. And again, they’re basically starving to death. And because the reptiles they can survive for a couple of months before they actually succumb to starvation. So again, a really terrible, long, drawn-out way to die.
Speaker B: Even just tracking the estimated 8.5 billion tonnes of plastic in the seas is a massive undertaking and one of the missions of Mayflower, a new robotic ship developed by computer giant IBM. With no humans on board, the ship can safely sail into hostile places like the Antarctic. It’s remote-controlled like a toy ship on a boating lake, but using satellites for GPS tracking. Brett Van Urf talks to me about the process.
Speaker D: The interesting thing about designing unmanned vessels is that you end up with lots of excess volume that would have been allocated to keeping the people alive. Which aren’t there anymore. So the ship becomes sort of a pure machine, and it’s easier to design in many ways to get rid of some of that excess volume that would otherwise have to be filled up with weight to maintain stability. So you can get some rather exotic shapes, and you can optimize them for low-power propulsion. And then the trimaran shape itself allows us to stretch the top deck out to give it a good area for solar intake as well.
Speaker B: What’s the point? Why do we need a robot ship? What advantages does a robot ship give you?
Speaker D: Well, they give you lots of advantages. For starters, they never get tired or bored or distracted. They cost a lot less than a manned vessel to build. They cost less to keep at sea. And ultimately what they do is drive down the cost of collecting data to do scientific research. That data then becomes information that we can use to better understand our planet and to better target the manned research vessels that we do have specific areas of concern. Still vast areas of our ocean and the ocean floor that we know absolutely nothing about or very little to say the least. So this is a way to give us more knowledge about the planet and at the same time be safer. So we have fewer people out there that can be injured, that can be lost at sea, or that are just lonely. And it gives people better jobs. And with the new technologies we have, we can make them virtually present. And the ship, again, its AI is always watching. It’s ever vigilant and it won’t get distracted. So it should, it should be safer all the way around and reduce cost. And then when you—
Speaker B: this is a research vessel. This isn’t something that’s going to be taking large cargoes around. It’s simply for research.
Speaker D: No, this particular one is for research. And so the ship itself will conduct oceanographic research, climatological research, but it’s also a research project in its own right. So we’re testing hybrid propulsion systems. We’re testing issues around biofouling, particularly around, uh, and fouling of solar panels and how we integrate all these devices in a way that can capture the data, store the data, process the data, and then moreover, a resident local on the ship, and then moreover, sort of react to their environment. So detect an obstacle like another ship or some flotsam or jetsam and then deal with that in a way that prevents it from being injured, but still attain some objective we set for it and take into account issues of weather and then even damage to the ship itself. So it can sort of keep in its mind, if you will, the status of all the machinery, what it is capable of doing relative to its objectives, the kinds of objectives we’ve given it before, and the thing we want it to do now. It takes in real-time data, processes that, and then can make decisions about, well, I need to do this, but I have to avoid this obstacle, and then I don’t have quite enough fuel because I’ve had a battery go out, and so I need to replan my route relative to the wind so I can scavenge more wind energy to achieve the objective or know when it can’t. So, it’s very high-level research that should inform how we install automation and autonomy in manned, minimally manned, and future unmanned vessels.
Speaker B: What sort of propulsion system does it have? There are some robot ships that have been designed that are using no energy at all. They sort of slip along like fish, apparently.
Speaker D: Well, in some way, they use energy they extracted from the waves. So there’s a couple, there’s one wave glider that extracts energy from the waves and it propels itself at a very low rate of speed, but over very long periods of time. And there’s several like this. This is quite a bit larger. More than an order of magnitude larger than those. It’s capable of carrying a more significant payload of research instrumentation. And its primary propulsion is electric, so it’s got electric motors, batteries, lithium batteries, and solar panels and wind energy to reduce the load. And then it has a backup diesel, biodiesel generator, just in case it doesn’t have enough renewable energy and it needs to maneuver in a hurry to get out of the way of something like a hurricane or a ship that’s bearing down on it and hasn’t seen that it’s there and it can’t maneuver slowly to avoid.
Speaker B: Okay, so what are the problems that you’re hoping to solve? I mean, you say you’ve got all of this oceanographic work that you want to do. What is it that you want to find out?
Speaker D: Well, for me, the oceanographers, the meteorologists, the climatologists are interested in things like sea level height to look at sea level change. They’re interested in microplastics. They’re interested in seawater temperature and a vast amount of other data that can be collected by the ship in its modular payload base. Me personally, I’m interested in the ship itself and the autonomy and how we get it all to work to navigate safely with manned vessels and other—
Speaker B: Let’s just pick up on the thing about microplastics. What are you trying to do with microplastics? Just find out how many of them there are out there?
Speaker D: Well, we’re trying to support the University of Plymouth in their study of microplastics, and so what they’re interested in is determining sort of a distribution that’s a little bit more resolute. Right now we have very sparse data on the distribution of plastics in the ocean, so any data we get will be a huge advancement. And a ship like this and any others like it can stay at sea for weeks, months, years collecting that data, feeding back into the cloud, into a models of the ocean and plastics distribution, which is quite important when you think about pollution overall.
Speaker B: You’re always mapping out where the plastic is. I understand that sometimes it’s great big oceanographic gyres.
Speaker D: True, but that’s not what microplastics is about. So you’re thinking of floating flotsam in the, like, the Great Pacific Gyre, right? There’s other people addressing that. The team with Plymouth is specifically interested in the distribution of microplastics. Which are extremely small plastic fragments that have broken down over time that aren’t visible to the naked eye but that get mixed in with sediment and food and within the various populations within the ocean themselves. So we’re really trying to figure out what the effect overall is on the ocean, the food chain— very important food chain in the world, the ocean— and ultimately human beings.
Speaker B: What are the problems that you’re going to have to overcome in all of this?
Speaker D: Well, the biggest problem is the ocean. It’s, I would say, literally and figuratively the biggest problem. It’s not the most hospitable place on Earth to do research. And so in this instance, an unmanned vessel is nice because there’s nobody on it. But at the same time, there’s no one there to repair it either. So reliability is the biggest hurdle we have to overcome. And that’s not reliability of the autonomy. I mean, that’s a separate issue. It’s just the basic machine reliability. That’s going to be the ultimate test of the vehicle, and then the autonomy itself is sort of the next tier up, whether or not we can get the ship to effectively navigate in a safe way that it can continue on its voyage, not just across the Atlantic, but over and back a few times, and maybe a global circumnavigation in a year or two once we build up some confidence in the ship itself.
Speaker B: At the moment, Mayflower is just mapping the spread of plastic. But who knows, in the future it could perhaps be recycled. Technorubbish can be broken down and used to make new products, but only a tiny fraction of it is genuinely recycled. Countries such as Britain, the US, and most of Europe ship their electronic garbage to developing countries such as Ghana, home to the world’s biggest electronic rubbish dump at Agbogbloshie. 80,000 people live and work there in toxic conditions, trying to salvage bits and pieces that they can sell—a plastic mobile phone handset, a gadget that’s still intact, or the metal innards that can have a resale value. They burn the plastic off the components in open fires that poison the air, the ground, and the water. They’ve even developed a sideline in selling any data that they can find to cybercriminals. But the end of this metaphorical sweeping of our rubbish under the carpet is nigh. China has now joined a list of companies that are refusing to accept any more electronic waste products from the West. And technology companies are belatedly inventing new solutions to tackle the problem on an industrial scale. John Godfrey is the managing director of Intelligent Lifecycles Limited and one of the UK’s leading experts on the recycling economy. Now his company specialises in reusing and recycling technology products such as computers, mobile phones, and games consoles. There is an old adage that where there’s muck, there’s brass, but Godfrey has had 3 businesses that used to reclaim plastics and other materials. One was the largest recycling company in Europe, and he says the old adage is no longer the case.
Speaker F: Even when plastics are collected on or close to your doorstep, they’re not necessarily recycled. Some local authorities ship the difficult-to-recycle plastics abroad, and of course, once it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. And in some of those countries, then we find that plastics are— they take the high-value plastics because that’s where the profit is. But you cannot trust a developing economy with a much inferior recycling capability to recycle your discarded, difficult-to-recycle plastic waste. And so the proportion of plastics that are actually recycled, depending on, on depending on how and where you measure the statistics, can be as low as 22% up to just over 30%. But it’s still most plastics that are being used, especially single-use plastics, are— we’re failing to recycle them. We think we’re doing our bit by putting them in the green bins or putting them on our doorstep, but actually what happens down the chain is very different.
Speaker B: So single-use plastic, let’s get some definitions. Going. What is a single-use plastic?
Speaker F: So, a single-use plastic is the use of a plastic polymer where it’s, by its design, it’s only expected to be used once. So, a good example of that might be the tray that your meal deal or your convenience meal is served on. I mean, that is a very low-value, low-grade, cheap-to-buy plastic that’s only ever going to be used once, and then we discard it. And, and because the material value in that plastic is so low, it’s not economic to recycle that using the current funding system. And the current funding system is fundamentally flawed. But those single-use plastics are designed to be thrown away. So a plastic cup, a plastic straw, a meal tray, even the, the wrapping of vegetables or the wrapping on products that we buy, that’s only ever going to be used once.
Speaker B: So fizzy drinks bottle, things like that?
Speaker F: Well, a fizzy drinks bottle might be single use, but it doesn’t have to be. There are collection schemes and deposit schemes that will recover drinks containers, and those plastics can be recycled. They— the bottles tend to have a higher plastic value because of the material that is being used to make them. So it might be single use. It shouldn’t be. There should be, and there are very well-established actually, collection schemes that allow for plastic bottles to be recovered and recycled in a cost-effective manner.
Speaker B: Now, this recycling, does it go on in the UK? Do we actually recycle plastic materials here?
Speaker F: There are some plastic recycling capabilities in the UK, yes. They’re not necessarily the cheapest, and some of the technology involved in that recycling is a little bit out of date now. I mean, I know of some examples where recyclers have made very significant investments in plastic recycling and never actually taken them to market because the economics of plastics recycling is linked to the material value, not to the life cost or the environmental considerations of the material. So one example would be a plastics recycling business that spent tens of millions of pounds on a new plant, but because the oil price dropped, the site never went live. And the consequence is that we have a lesser capable plastics recycling capability within the UK.
Speaker B: Does that mean that the bulk of the material that goes into the bins that we also assiduously still that goes abroad, does it?
Speaker F: Some economies are now refusing to take that waste because they don’t want it. And so it’s— the market is actually making it more difficult for some of that material to go abroad. But in some markets, they will take the product, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, just to cherry-pick the good material from the poor material. And of course, in those economies, the The unwanted material, the difficult to recycle, expensive to recycle materials, or the materials with low value end up being burnt or discarded. Very often they find their way into river systems and they find their way into the ocean.
Speaker B: Godfrey says that there is no need for us to be in this mess and explains how mountains of plastic waste can be transformed into new materials without the need to build tech products out of substances like wood or bamboo?
Speaker F: Yeah, I mean, I don’t— I can’t imagine a market where bamboo laptops are particularly attractive or would be successful. I might be wrong. Perhaps I’m missing a lucrative business opportunity there. But what I would point out is there are major manufacturers out there now that are producing highly desirable aluminium products that have a very long useful life. And even when they have reached the end of their life for their first user, are probably being refurbished, upgraded, and repurposed for a, for another user. I mean, we run a business that does that. So I, I can see that there are solutions out there. And, you know, there are alternatives. We don’t have to make things from throwaway materials. We could— we can design desirable products that are designed in such a way that they will be repaired, refurbished, reused. And then when they finally reach the end of their life, then they’ll have a material value that, that will be that will be positive. And I think that if you balance the whole life decisions in choosing certain materials, then the whole economics of the industry would change and, and more products would be recycled. I mean, it’s a challenge that I don’t have all the answers for, but the fundamental principle that I think is that you cannot ignore the whole life cost of a product. We must consider what happens to that product at its end of life. And we certainly cannot ship that product into a developing economy that hasn’t gone through its industrial revolution, that doesn’t have an accredited, safe working environment for recycling, and then sit there with a holier-than-thou attitude just because we put our aluminum cans and our bottles out recycling out there on the front drive and, you know, look at those countries and criticize them for the waste they produce. It’s our waste.
Speaker B: The nub of this seems to be design, doesn’t it? The nub of it is that we don’t design the products to be repairable. We want to throw them away. If we did design them so that they did have not just this recyclable life or as you say, whole life view, but also we increase the lifespan of the products. We make the computers upgradable because then we don’t need to keep on buying the new cases for them. And we design the market so that the market actually pushes the use of different materials. And we also design a system that allows this material to be recovered. It seems that there isn’t very much thought going on in any of this at the moment?
Speaker F: Well, some manufacturers are better than others. I do think that design is a key part of the jigsaw, but it’s not the only part. We have to have a fundamental change in the economics of the, the dirty end of the lifecycle. And we also need to deal with the issue of culture and education. I mean, I’m pleased to see that my kids are taught aspects of recycling through school. Now, I wasn’t, even though I work in the industry. But we have to get away from the, the assumption and mentality of We can just put a Pingy ready meal in the microwave and then throw the wrapping away and that’s the end of it and it’s somebody else’s problem because that’s going to sit there for thousands of years. We have to change the economics of that. We should be using paper bags for vegetables because actually it works. We’d already solved this problem. We’ve created a new problem. I mean, my parents grew up during the war and the ’40s, and they are frugal to, to a point that actually those of us that are older should look back and learn because they’re used to getting everything out that they possibly can and they hate throwing things away. My food waste that my parents throw away is tiny. And we’ve got to change our attitude because the— we’re just creating a huge burden and legacy for future generations.
Speaker B: Another point there is that people of those generations used to also repurpose things. They used to get objects, make them into something, or they used to change their purpose. They used to repair things. There was not this culture of just throwing something away when it no longer worked.
Speaker F: Yep, I completely agree. I mean, interesting that the EU are finding it necessary to regulate that. I think that’s a big step forward. I mean, it would, would be nice if it had been done some time ago, but it is happening. Products are, will be made, or will need to be made to be repairable. But in some aspects, I mean, taking a mobile phone, for example, some mobile phones are designed to be very difficult, almost impossible to repair because, you know, for example, changing the battery on most phones is quite a relatively complicated technical process these days, whereas you used to just be able to pop it off the back and, and change it. And I understand the design aesthetics of of that, but, you know, we need to, we need to find good solutions to make products last longer. There isn’t really an incentive to manufacturers to make products that, that will last longer, and so because there isn’t that incentive, then there needs to be regulation.
Speaker B: The EU has just agreed new regulations requiring that all new television sets, fridges, washing machines, and other large appliances devices must be capable of being repaired and recycled and must be designed with energy efficiency as a priority. That’s on top of the existing Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, which governs the disposal of all of our old devices. The new rules are good for John Godfrey’s businesses. With Tech Trade, another startup, he offers refurbished kit at a fraction of the price of new tech. And his MacBack online store sells high-value used Apple products. So he’s keeping plastic from a lot of those devices from landfill or a turtle’s guts. The problem in all of this is getting people to invest in innovations and actions that will solve our plastic problem. Investing means putting money into new plants and demonstration technologies and methods. Investing means putting money into new processing plants and new methods, and actions would mean getting people to reduce their use of plastics. There are other ways of dealing with the issue. For example, waste plastic can still have a brief second life generating electricity. Bruce Davies is a director of Abundance, a venture capital company which specialises in sustainable product manufacture. He told me how an old South Wales coal-fired power station is being converted to burn pellets of compressed waste plastic.
Speaker A: The problem we had was that waste was seen as almost a— it was either a cost that wasn’t really measured on the balance sheet, so companies weren’t really paying the true cost of the waste they were producing because they very much outsourced the disposal of their product to their consumer. And I think secondly, also consumers weren’t demanding it enough. The UK is no longer able to export its waste, which, you know, we at Abundance don’t think is a very good solution. It involves an awful lot of carbon to transport it, and then you’ve got no control control over how that waste is disposed of. And I think we’re seeing the impacts of that in the Far East. But also the capacity of landfill is running out. And the estimates are that we’ll have 4 million tonnes of excess waste every year from the middle of this next decade. Now, there’s two responses to that. One is, oh, we should all change our lives and stop using stuff that generates this waste. And there’s sort of a pragmatic response that says, well, that isn’t going to happen overnight. Economic systems don’t change overnight. Companies can’t make investments overnight and we need to do something about it. And for us, energy from waste sits squarely in that bracket. This is a medium-term solution, not a permanent solution to our waste problem. But we do have a waste problem and it’s directly affecting our biosphere, our biodiversity. And for us, it’s then looking at the different technologies that are available to essentially treat waste. And in this case, treating waste generates energy, and that energy is used to generate electricity, and to do so in such a way that minimizes the environmental impacts of that treatment. That’s environmental impacts both in terms of compared to landfill, where there are Although there’s strong regulation, there are issues with that, particularly with plastic, but also in terms of carbon impact. And there, the picture is less clear, more balanced. I.e., there is carbon that is produced when you burn plastic. But the question is, is there a greater impact if you leave that in landfill and what happens to it? And also, this is not new fossil fuel. This is fossil fuel that’s already been processed once. But at the same time, We have to do something about our plastic waste problem, and my experience of working in the green sector for the last 10 years is you can’t have your cake and eat it. Being green is a necessity, it’s not a virtue, although quite often that is what people seem to want. You create carbon dioxide and you create water and you create heat, and there’s also often in that waste material there are other things that you need to get rid of and need to be scrubbed, which I think like fluorines and so on. But the other element in this particular Usmouth project is that we’re converting from a very dirty fuel, coal, which has enormous amounts of pollutants and huge carbon impact, to a less polluting energy from waste process, which is a mix of things. So I think what, what people often see when they look at energy from waste is an incinerator. They see something very simple. It just burns the waste. That isn’t the case. In the projects that we’ve been looking at. So you’ve got technologies now that use things like jet gasification, or in this case different types of pelletization, to produce the level of heat that you need, because in order to generate electricity you need a lot of heat. But also you should be minimizing the environmental impacts, and biomass is generally accepted as something that is positive to do. It’s not as big a step forward as, say, generating energy from tidal or generating energy from the wind. But as a transition technology, it’s important. The main thing is that you’re taking the most polluting fuels out of the system, but you’re still providing the type of power that we need. And in the case of the Usmouth development, that is power for local businesses as much as it is power for local residents. And the businesses local to Usmouth are things like steel, and we’ve got a data center, things like that. These, these These are things which need constant power, and with the best will in the world, renewables can’t provide that without some form of backup storage. So this for us is about pragmatic solution that gets us in the right direction without trying to make essentially the perfect the enemy of the good. I think there’s two ways that you can do it through the market. One of them is that yes, you either tax or price the cost to society of processing the product that you have consumed. And I think the other one knows that essentially this product has value. There are metals, there are other extractable elements from this which are extracted in the process. But you’ve also got the energy value of the hydrocarbons that are in the plastic. And so in a way, you are, you are, you know, you are actually paying for this. You’re paying for it through your energy bill. Effectively. Now, I think there’s a different thing which says, well, if we reflected the, the environmental cost through a tax onto plastic, would that stop people using plastic? Well, we’ve seen with plastic bags that 5p seems to be where our price sensitivity is at. I’m sure that would have an impact if you’ve got, in this case, a coal plant that’s got another 20 years of life in its turbines and the the assets that were created to create energy from coal, and you can create energy from something which currently is not being recycled. So this is not plastic that could be recycled. This is plastic which is unrecyclable, such as car dashboards. You can’t recycle those at the moment. They’re just being piled up and waiting for a solution, and one of those solutions is to burn them.
Speaker B: You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM. And after this, you can hear A World in London with DJ Ritu. We’re talking about our plastic world and how it’s damaging the environment. Knowing that old computers can be refurbished and waste plastic can become fuel for power stations, you might now think it’s okay to dump your mobile phone in the bin. Well, think twice. Some handsets are now collectible fetching well over £600 online. And then there are other ways to give your device a longer life. You can strip them down and keep them lean. That’s the advice from Chris Blomley at the Repair Cafe in Colchester. Chris thinks the emphasis on new stuff is wrong.
Speaker E: That’s another potential environmental crime. Of course, there is no such thing as an environmental crime in these terms, This is something that the hardline view that I’m taking. And manufacturers being conscious business individuals need to take responsibility for the whole lifecycle of the items that they’re producing. It’s fine taking the money for it at point of sale, but we need to think beyond a bigger picture. More of an environmental concern. We need to take responsibility for those items for the whole life cycle. And when they come to the end of their, their natural life cycle, then those parts need not to be made of cheap plastic, which is impossible to reuse because of the type of plastic. It needs to be made of materials that are in themselves reusable.
Speaker B: This issue of plastics is a big issue, isn’t it? Because the plastics— a lot of household devices now have plastic in them because it’s a very, very flexible material. It’s very easy to make it into the shape you want it. Black plastic is virtually impossible to recycle. A lot of our things have black plastic in them, and that plastic just goes abroad. And now There’s what, billions of tons of plastic in the environment that’s beginning to choke the wildlife.
Speaker E: Yeah, I do remember from many, many years ago, Tomorrow’s World was a program that I think was on maybe in the very early ’70s, and it came up with this fantastic idea, this new material called plastic, which they knew at the time was a derivative of petrochemicals and the oils and stuff. And it was the be-all and end-all, and manufacturers really took to their hearts of this cheaper material. Instead of using metal, they used plastic. Instead of using wood, they used plastic. And instead of— they never looked at the sustainability of this product. The challenge there is, of course, if those things are not made with a view to them lasting for an awful long time, you can multiply it by every household in the country who will have 2 or 3 of them. There’s a limited lifespan on those things, and they’re not repairable. Exactly.
Speaker B: I mean, some mobile phones now, you can’t even get the batteries out. They don’t want you to get the batteries out and to replace the batteries. Do you think that’s an issue then? Do you think that to go back to this idea about design that you were talking about, that these technology devices, because let’s face it, technology seems to be changing all of the time now, and that example of the mobile phone, we change our mobile phones about once every 18 months now. Do you think that they should be designed so that you can change components rather than get rid of the plastic case?
Speaker E: Well, yeah, absolutely. And here comes another idea, which is design integrity. The integrity of the item. Is it really fit for purpose? Is it serviceable? Is it repairable? I do know that the co-op phone is a unit, a modular unit, which has a replacement battery, which has a replacement screen. Which has an upgradable memory system. And it sits quite lonely in the corner, not able to compete with the likes of the bigger phone manufacturers. The challenge for me with the phones and with computers is that they would last a lot longer if they didn’t get bombarded with software upgrades. Which eats up the memory, eats up the hard drive to the point where your laptop or your computer or your phone slows down to a painful point, which as we’ve become more, more used to needing that level of communication and adaptability when doing business or day-to-day work that we cannot do without it.— and I think unfortunately there’s no intention from any of the manufacturers, any of the big software companies to stop that. And they don’t need, they really don’t need to bombard phones and computers and laptops with software upgrades. You look at the size of the lead creator of software for use on desktops for making documents, and then you look at some of the open source equivalents, and the size of their files are minute by comparison. So if you use the open source, your kit lasts longer.
Speaker B: Chris Blomley of Colchester’s Repair Cafe. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. Today we’re tackling plastics, the 21st century’s technological material of choice. Some supermarkets like Waitrose and Morrisons have already scented a change in the air. Morrisons is running a scheme in some stores that allows people to bring their own containers to the fruit and veg section so they are not packaged by the store. A response perhaps to protests that have seen people remove packaging and leave it in the store, retaining the barcode until they have paid and then leaving that too. So in all of this mess, do we need regulation? Governments are starting to crack down on single-use plastic, and there’s an EU directive on the issue. Italy was the first country in Europe to ban non-biodegradable plastic carrier bags And the Italians now use compostable plastic bags made of cornstarch instead. But is regulation the answer? Do we need to make it illegal to discard plastics? The polluter pays sounds good, but how can we make them? I put that question to venture capitalist Patrick Sheehan, whose ETF company funds sustainability startups. He thinks the polluter should pay and that the cost of cleanup should be factored into the amount we pay.
Speaker G: The technology industry, they’ve driven the use of plastics on a global scale, but I don’t think the actual technology industries are purely to blame for this. I believe that it’s— we need to address the consumer habits of the globe that actually drive the need for new products, that drive the need for new technology to be developed, and in so doing, new materials are used up and resources are used up.
Speaker B: How about repairability? That’s something that the design industry needs to start getting into these products. Beginning of October, the European Union said that it was bringing in regulations that were going to make it easier to repair. They said the right to repairability. Oh, sorry, the right to repair. That’s something we’ve got to have, isn’t it? Because, you know, a lot of mobile phones, for example, they’re now locked up so you can’t actually put new batteries in them.
Speaker G: New legislation is absolutely key for the, for the repairability of products. I think 100 years ago we were, as a society, we used to repair and reuse products so much more readily. Today, because we’ve turned into this consumer-driven society, we think it’s okay to throw stuff away instead of actually looking at actually how we repair and reuse stuff. So the movement now is to actually look at how we put these products together, how they can be taken apart, how we can reuse them. And I think designers can play a big part in this. Modularity is a key element where we can actually go and replace certain components as the technology develops, meaning we don’t have to replace the whole product, we can just replace certain key elements of it.
Speaker B: Like the screen, for example, or, or the processing chip or something.
Speaker G: Exactly. So, you know, I mean, you’re going to see this, I think, emerging kind of in the computer kind of world as options where you can essentially kind of upgrade. You can keep abreast of the new technologies but without replacing all of the kind of components, especially kind of, for instance, the shell, which is just a housing for these different components. And designers can play a big kind of part in this moving forward, really.
Speaker B: Isn’t there a need to abandon or refine our ideas of fashion show? You know, I mean, fashion’s not just wearing clothes, it’s having the latest iPhone, it’s having, you know, the latest laptop. Do we have to get rid of this idea of, you know, peacock parades and ostentation?
Speaker G: Um, I think it’s very important for, for us in society kind of to have a certain element of that. If you actually look at other animals display these, these traits, we’re not kind of a standalone animal on the planet to actually do that. But I think it has moved on from the actual clothes being a utilitarian product that we use to actually live our lives, and they’ve become this— the fashion world has really embraced it. It’s become this kind of fast fashion, this consumerism of clothes, you know, on a daily basis is a real kind of concern. From that because of the actual industrial kind of revolution of being able to create clothes and use cotton in such much more efficient ways. We can actually make clothes so cheaply so they can just be used on a daily basis. I think this really kind of needs to be looked at because actually on the side effects of all this fashion, one of the major key kind of elements into plastic pollution, especially kind of in the oceans is the actual fibers that are coming off clothes and ending up into kind of the marine ecosystem.
Speaker B: Going back to this point that you’ve said that, you know, everything seems to have a desire to show off, how are you going to design that desire to show off into a recycling and upcycling world? Everybody will think that you’re a little po-faced if you walk around saying, ‘Ha, I’m really good at recycling.’ Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right.
Speaker G: I think that’s a key driver for kind of these big companies to grow and grow because they can develop newer and newer products. But I think there isn’t the appetite in it, and there is a, there is a noticeable shift in society. It’s slow to start moving towards people who actually kind of buy products that are much more sustainable. I think the eco-warrior of 2 or 3 decades ago is now becoming much more kind of prevalent. And I think people are happy to display their kind of moral values out in public.
Speaker B: So is that what you’re saying, that you’re going to— you’re going to say, oh, look at— look at the recyclability of this, cool, that’s really good?
Speaker G: I think people are now becoming— it’s going to take a few years, but I think people are now thinking about this when they actually use a product.
Speaker H: We tend to think of the rubbish that comes out of diesel vehicles as pollution, but I guess increasingly we think of plastic bags as pollution, or the plastic detritus from supermarkets as pollution. I don’t know about you, but I seem to spend an awful lot of time just unwrapping vegetables I get from my local supermarket from their plastics. There’s no benefit to me in that. There’s a benefit benefit to the supermarket in, in getting the goods to me, I guess, more easily and perhaps slightly more cheaply. But it’s very hard then for me to create value by dealing with that plastic. Clearly there is a whole business of recycling and people trying to do that, but, but extracting value from waste is not always easy.
Speaker B: And that plastic that you’re talking about, that plastic, that food wrapping plastic, its value It— we, we’ve spoken to recycling experts. They say it’s about a hundredth of a penny, maybe a tenth of a penny if you’re lucky. And the problem that you have there is that quite often you’ve got 3 different sorts of plastic, each with 3 polymers in them. So you’ve got expanded polystyrene trays, you have cling film, and then you have the cellophane which has the pricing information.
Speaker H: Exactly, and sorting them is expensive. You know, separating and sorting is a real problem. So we are though seeing in our business, and quite recently, a number of companies developing and beginning to produce plastics that can be recycled or plastics that biodegrade. The problem with plastics that can be recycled is splitting out the waste stream streams, as you say, is difficult and expensive and sometimes just not worth it. So there’s a school of thought that would say plastic is simply solidified oil, just burn it for the energy and that’s the most efficient solution. Ultimately, of course, I think products that require less plastic is probably a better solution. So we’re very keen on seeing the development of more efficient technologies. Technologies that reduce the use of plastics. But we do have some fantastic examples of people taking waste and making real product, and there I think we see great economic opportunity as well as very positive environmental value. And I could give you an example of a company we support in the UK called eLeather, which makes leather from waste from tanneries. Tanneries, and waste— about half of the output of a leather tannery is frankly waste. And they could take this, instead of it going to landfill, expensively polluting the countryside, they can make very high-quality leather product out of it, which you’ve probably sat on actually, because it goes into seats in airlines and things like that. So there are some great examples which we’re really keen on.
Speaker B: Because of course people don’t realise tanneries are incredibly polluting. A lot of the leather we get comes from the Far East, it comes from places like Bangladesh where it’s actually killing the rivers. Yeah, it’s—
Speaker H: tanneries are a very old, dirty, nasty industry which has not really modernised. And of course, we should be focusing on helping industries innovate and modernise, but also to be able to do something with their waste streams that creates value from nothing is very attractive and incredibly beneficial to society.
Speaker B: You’re an expert in investing in sustainable technology. You deliberately go and look out for these industries that are coming along. What ideas have you seen? I mean, you’ve mentioned e-leather. Are there other things that have impressed you?
Speaker H: We get a surprising and diverse range of ideas. And actually, we probably see 1,000 ideas a year. And of course, they’re not all good ideas, they’re not all viable, but a surprising number of them could be with the right business skills and acumen. And so this makes me actually really optimistic about what we could achieve if we put our mind to things. But ultimately, we select a handful that we invest in each year, companies like eLeather. And as I say, at the moment we’re looking at a few companies that produce plastic alternatives based on, on products from nature, and we think there’s a huge opportunity in that area in the future.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, because it’s projected that by 2050— well, at the moment we’ve got 8.5 billion tons of plastic in the world that is really not doing very much good to anybody. It’s just hanging around and polluting everything. By 2050, it’s going to be 12 billion tons, and apparently by that time too, there’ll be more weight of plastic in the sea than there will be fish.
Speaker H: So we’ve got to do something, haven’t we? Absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s already an environmental tragedy and it’s just getting worse. And so I think there are various ways of solving this. Frankly, I think governments should regulate to force the reduction of plastic usage in areas where it’s not necessary, such as shopping, supermarkets, etc. And we’ve seen a tax on the use of plastic bags. That’s great, but it’s still on the trivial end of this whole problem. We need more of that. So reducing waste is is what to be the simplest thing to do. But being able to reuse waste and create real valuable products, I think, is actually another area where we could put a lot of useful effort.
Speaker B: I mean, but just to pick up on your point about plastic bags, they’re now finding plastic bags on the bottom of the Marinaris Trench, which is 7 miles down at the bottom of the sea, to actually get to reclaim that, that, that plastic bag would be, um, there was— there’s no economic value in it at all apart. But the fact that it’s, uh, polluting even at that level is, is quite, um, terrifying. Um, you said that perhaps the economic, uh, model isn’t right. How do you go about changing an economic model to make it viable for people to to get that plastic. And for example, people have been discussing putting deposits on plastic bottles so that people will bring them back and, and say, hey, there’s some value in that plastic bottle, I’ll, I’ll pick it up and I’ll take it along to somewhere where I can get the value.
Speaker H: Yeah, and, and so there are some, uh, examples of where that happens, where instead of having vending the machines that you take a plastic bottle out of, you have a reverse vending machine where you get paid some money to put plastic bottles in. I think it could be Austria or Germany doing that now. And so that’s a relatively simple idea. There you go. So that’s a simple idea, right? But I think fundamentally, if we don’t put the full price of pollution into the goods somehow, then it will take a lot for people to change their behaviour. So what people refer to as externalities, the cost of waste, does not tend to be in the product, and that probably has to be made to happen through legislation and regulation, I think. So if we put the cost in, it would drive behavioural change. And it’s not just plastics. If you look at the oil industry, it gets far greater subsidies in aggregate in the UK than the entire renewables industry.
Speaker B: That makes no sense at all, right? Changing government policy on taxation is not easily done. For real transformation, perhaps we need to go back to the drawing board. Something that Northumbria University’s design department is very good at. After all, Apple’s design guru Sir John Ive went there. Northumbria’s Dr. Simon Scott-Harden tells me there are ways to design products to last longer and cut plastic pollution. He says that we need to become more thoughtful, designing a future into the things we make so that everything has a future—the objects, the creatures, the planet, and us. As Scott Harden and everyone that we interviewed have said, the problem with plastics and the climate crisis we are facing is our economy and our disposable consumer society, something everyone plays a part in, and that has to change. The marketing industry has to stop projecting a futuristic wipe-clean world where the solution to our problems is simply getting the latest object of desire. The technology industry has to start selling us screens, new chips and batteries, and devices we can repair and upgrade with those replacement hearts. And the plastic industry has to develop materials that can blend into our environment by harmlessly decomposing into it. And we have to stop being so thoughtless and wean ourselves off our lust for fashion and bright shiny things. We asked for interviews from the Advertising Association, the British Plastics Federation, leading supermarkets and technology companies. Unfortunately, they either declined to comment, sent no reply to our queries, or did not reply at all. That’s all from this edition of Password. You can reuse it by going to our Mixcloud channel, and we’ll be back next month with more reflections on the technology underneath the Christmas tree. Password is made by Future Intelligence for Resonance FM, London’s alternative radio station. You can make a donation to keep the station independent. Just click on the Resonance FM website and pay with PayPal, Bitcoin, or a credit card. The producer is Blue Buffery. Jane Wyatt wrote the script, and I’m Peter Warren. Thanks for listening and goodbye.
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