07 Sustainable Production Talk: "Sustainable Design for end of life" by Richard Kirkman

I work in recycling, produce renewable energy, and we do this around the world. So I've got a quiz to start with. You have to pass the test. Think back — 20 years ago, it's hot, you're out in the park with your family and there's no water.

The other option, I think, is debatable because it depends on the context. We're saying there's a bin — I say, you know, what's the best place you could choose to put it? This one's always really hard. So these ones are about three layers. We hang out with 12-year-olds in central London, so they're very, very hard for this. We normally would cover the fibre off the outside by mushing it in water, but there are other layers of metal and minimal plastic. It's really hard to separate. The metal pads — great recycling precedent — but uses a lot of energy even with recycled content to make them. And unless they've got the plastic means they commonly use, and of course...

So that's a corporate answer. A plastic bottle — I don't think it's that bad. It's lightweight, and when you transport it, you don't use a lot of diesel. You don't have a lot of waste, and you can recycle it yourself. Some of the big companies want to reduce the plastic because it has so much impact. This is a topic people paint a lot as it is, and it's a good example where people have really different views — including the company making it and people buying it — of what the impacts are. I think they can all work in different circumstances. So we recycle our plastic. We were stuck with 300 million plastic bottles produced every year in London. This is how we do it — it's a complex supply chain.

Normally people use virgin plastic, it gets converted into the format, and then it will be sold and disposed of. That's where we start. Our truck looks like... [Music] ...and then we transport it to a sorting facility. We have to sort it. Sorting is not really done by people anymore — it's done by infrared. The light comes back, the reflection we get back tells us what material it is. Then we shred it, grind it, and wash it into flakes, and it can be extruded back into plastic. But probably everybody knows that statistic about there being more plastic in the ocean than fish. And it's not really that some animals are getting killed directly — the main problem is that half of the oxygen we breathe is produced by plankton in the oceans. So if you care about breathing, plastic in the ocean is a real problem.

We'll probably be using material itself in ways you might not expect. There was a two-person trip to Mars — millions of dollars spent on it. It had to survive extremes of temperature, pressure, and g-forces. And the solutions they came up with — that's plastic. You know, you've spent 30 years generating all these different types of plastics. There are 150 different combinations, when you could just use paper, right? But then, think back — maybe it turns out that in zero gravity, paper floats into the air, short-circuits the spaceship's systems. That's one possibility. And there is some truth to the fact that plastics have medical applications and they keep food safe. You don't get sick as they used to because food and drinks are sealed. So there's a really good side.

The real problem is not putting it in the right bin. If you put it in the right bin, you massively improve things. If you wanted to make the biggest impact on the environment instantly, we'd just collect more bottles today — because we only get about 60% of the bottles back. 40% are lost in parks, mainly. If we could get that other 40% back, it would be the biggest impact.

So the impact — I think it's a really important point. I just want to ask you some questions about relative impacts of stuff. Who here thinks we shouldn't use plastic straws? Not many. More broadly — what about if it's recycled? Okay, does it matter if it's recycled? All right. Who's left? Does anyone here fly in airplanes? If you look at the relative impacts of those different things — you'd have to give up one burger a week and then you could compensate for all the straws you use. Everybody gets really stressed about straws, but they're a tiny change in behavior. So, I'm told some people have some questions — what's happening to make this better?

There's really a lot happening. The government are leading — I never thought I'd say this, having worked for a long time on this, because historically you never expected anything. But things have partly changed because Brexit has created new territory. They've actually done something quite good on environmental matters. They've got five things they've proposed, and we're trying to get them over the line in the next few months.

The first one is to move from the packaging tax we have today — where if you produce packaging, you pay a reduced tax — to extended producer responsibility. That shifts the cost of dealing with waste to the manufacturers. Today, when you throw something away, the local authority pays for disposal or recycling. But they can't let that go on, so manufacturers are not going to optimize the cost because they're not responsible for throwing it away. When you buy something, you haven't really finished paying for it. So shifting the cost to manufacturers, while it may be more than the tax they pay today, will make them think much more carefully about how they make things — because they'll have to pay for the final disposal. That's a great thing.

The second one is deposit return — like we used to have glass bottles you could bring back. We've moved to reverse vending machines where you can get 10 or 20 pence back for a container or a voucher. You see these already moving around, and that could be made a national scheme. The third one is a tax — if you don't put 30% recycled content in a new product, you'll be taxed. Manufacturers will then switch to using recycled content because they won't have to pay the tax. We do a lot of recycling, but sometimes people don't want to buy the stuff we've recycled, and that's really depressing — when we do the best we can, and there's always money to do it as a society.

The fourth one is more of a consumer measure. There's this constant discussion — you've got 350 local authorities and they all collect recycling in a slightly different way, which makes it confusing for people. So they want to harmonize collection. And the fifth one is design — it's multi-material packaging, and this is the most respective decision. It needs to be built into the design. We think labeling will help, harmonization will help, but it's down to the design community to design things so that people intuitively know what to do.

We've done a lot, and the brands are really coming on board now. We have about a thousand visitors from brands — sustainability teams, packaging design teams — every year. They come to our sorting waste plants and try to understand why their stuff doesn't get recycled. Unilever came to our plant and said, 'We didn't know.' They had transformational packaging going into the waste stream because you can't detect black — they should use carbon black to make their packaging black, and the machine shines a light on it to see what's likely to come back. So they've changed all their products to have a pigment that the machines can detect by, and now all their packaging can be recycled. They paid extra to do that, and it's a possibility.

People are acting, but that's just machines. This is a recycling plant — this is where the 300 million bottles get turned back into new bottles. And this is a new thing we're doing that we think needs to happen. You've got your main recycling at home, and sometimes there are things that don't always have a place to go — plastic straws, what are you supposed to do with them? Plastic toys, sweet wrappers, ice cream wrappers. So we've designed a return scheme where you can get boxes, put them where you want them, and businesses could use them. McDonald's could buy the boxes from us and put them out. The material gets sent back to us because it's all the same stuff in the box. So we think that's going to work.

And AI — artificial intelligence — is another thing we're doing. In a sorting plant, it's like a maze of conveyors and machines sorting everything. But everything on those conveyors is really hard to identify because it's crunched up, not as you bought it. So we've put cameras on all the conveyors, taking photos of everything. We collect data that's going into the crowd, and scientists are working on this. We believe we'll be able to sort things much more effectively using this approach. [Music] [Applause]