Shifting the System | Summit 21

[Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so hello and welcome to the final installment of the ella macarthur foundation's summit 21 an online event spread over three days exploring one big idea the circular economy our mission at the foundation is to accelerate the transition to a circular economy and hopefully inspire you to play your part i'm joe and i'm laura and we are here to guide you through a series of conversations that explore shifting the system it's easy to get theoretical and a bit fussy when talking about systems so let's start with something practical this is a film about plastic pollution actually it's about solutions upstream innovation offers solutions to design out packaging waste ask yourself do we need this or not [Music] sure you can't always just eliminate the packaging so rethink the product or rethink the packaging cucumbers need plastic to stay fresh right wrong you know what's really cool spray them with an edible spray instead reuse is another great solution to design out waste you can reuse this bottle to make your own cleaning product like that and don't buy single-use bottles with bubbly water if you can add bubbles to your tap water and should all these single-use bottles be different or can they share one reusable design now if eliminating the packaging doesn't work and reusing things doesn't work then at least the materials should stay at work so when we start to design a product or packaging maybe we shouldn't do it from many materials but from a single material and a single color or no color and that is just one example so if you're looking for packaging solutions read this guide get your copy because this film will eliminate in three two [Music] [Applause] plastics pollution is a symptom of a broken system too often products and their packaging are conceived in tunnel vision with one use case in mind designing an object that fits the system means recognizing where it has come from how it will be used and where it's going and it's not just about product design business models logistics infrastructure investment laws and regulations and many more factors that all combine make a system so shifting a system often requires making changes in a lot of places like in the structures relationships and mindsets or the culture embedded in it so how do you change the plastics packaging system and beyond that how do you change other systems like food fashion construction and ultimately how do you change the global economy brunswick group's lucy parker put these questions to the coca-cola company's ceo james quincy and mariano matsukatu professor at university college london and the author of the newly released mission economy a moonshot guide to changing capitalism [Music] [Applause] our focus for this conversation is shifting the system and i have two great guests who have a lot to say on the subject born of all their work to do exactly that try and shift the system james quincy who brings with him the perspective of private enterprise and mariana matsukato who is such a leading voice on public value so hello to you both and great to have you here coming from the same subject from different perspectives let me start by saying one of the problems in shifting the system is the system is so huge it's enormous not one of us can get our arms around it and there are so many players and so many challenges and they're all interconnected so surely the first question has to be how do you get started where do you actually get in on the question and so james can i throw that to you first where do you get in on the system to shift it um great question i i think you know we the system can be moved if we get a few things in place to start with firstly the objective do we actually all agree where we're trying to go um and and that's it's seemingly obvious but sometimes in in the milestone of trying to make things happen uh the objective gets moved and diluted and you know in this case we talked about the circular economy uh on packaging materials and and we're saying we don't want waste but it's more than just waste or eliminating waste we want to actually reduce our carbon footprint so we need you know in simple terms you could turn well okay we've got a plastic waste problem let's have no plastic and move to a different material that actually could drive up my carbon footprint so the key first step is what's the objective the objective in this case no waste lower carbon footprint it's not don't use a material it's the circular economy and then the second two critical elements to getting the whole thing started one is some degree of regulation the the the the shift in the system needs some regulation whether it's regulation to approve use of recycled materials that come back from the circular economy or set up collection systems and then it needs um demand and that's particularly you know when you ask what's the role of the code company one thing we can do is send a demand signal we're the buyer of the recycled material and so the demand signal comes from companies like us saying here's what we want to buy so that it meets our objectives in a circular economy and that then can help reshape the supply chain behind us so it needs clarity on the objective some degree of regulation and economics incentives particularly from those that create demand and thinking within the company that's a huge operational shift within an organization like yours so inside the organization what do you have to do to get it moving within a within a company like hope it very simply needs to become part of the business uh objective or the business vision you know you could look over all business history and whilst uh anything that people have done with this the business runs here and i got some ancillary or parallel objective that i have on the side uh it ultimately fails to attract enough to attention and sustainability if it's not integrated into business so for me the principal way of galvanizing the coal company in the koch system is to make it an inherent part of the business mission which is actually uh in a way a a force of driving the economics because if you can say the long-range vision of the circular economy is not just no waste and lower carbon footprint but it's actually lower cost than the alternative then the system can galvanize itself around reorganizing and reorientating towards it and we've already got countries um where we've got you know all our packaging uh uh or at least the plastic packaging in a hundred percent recycled so it's doable um and from an operational point of view if you can show everyone places where you've made it work sustainably and within the business imperatives then it's much more powerful than it being ancillary and that's a perfect queue marianna to ask you how you would actually move beyond what james has been talking about which is plastics and waste where are the other kinds of systems that we ought to be looking for this kind of intervention in because it's incredibly impressive to hear about the plastics and waste story and it's captured public imagination it's a way people actually can relate to it but there are many many systems we're trying to drive towards circularity aren't there what are the other ones you think we should be focused on so i mean i really um agree with what james was talking about in terms of vision and leadership and i think the problem is that it can't just be isolated companies or even you know kind of one government here and there it really has to go to the center of how we actually think about economic change and societal change and in fact um one of the things i've been trying to do over the years is trying to help governments redesign their policies so it's less about kind of pet projects whether it's around plastic or any sort of particular area it's really about saying what does it mean to actually design policy to be goal-oriented less about kind of picking random sectors or even random types of technologies or types of firms right there's this obsession about small medium enterprises instead of looking at a type of firm type of technology type of sector what does it actually look like if you have goals that are ideally starting with the sdgs the sustainable development goals are 17 of them every country has signed up to them there's 169 targets beneath them but the problem is that if you just stop at the goals they're quite broad right so you know sdg 13 you know life underwater clean oceans what does it actually mean to turn that into a moon shot right like a plastic free ocean over a certain amount of time and get as many different sectors involved in the process so whether that's you know the chemical sector or social innovation biotech design ai marine and so on they have to actually work together and that's what got us to the moon i've just written a book on called mission economy that you know getting to the moon was not just about aerospace it was lots of innovation and nutrition materials electronics the whole software industry in some ways was a spillover of that but the other thing is that government back then was much more confident i find and capable in some ways than many public institutions are today and they really focus on how to work with business how to actually design what i call a symbiotic mutualistic public-private partnership and not what we see in some areas like health where sometimes we have parasitic public-private partnerships so what does it mean to actually design the contracts themselves to be outcomes oriented the state i really do think at least in democratic societies has the duty to actually set the direction for change but then the very open the how right you can't micromanage that process but really setting a goal you know again plastic free ocean carbon neutral city but also ones around inequality and you know that kind of mindset of picking the willing having a mission oriented outcomes oriented approach to policy crowding in as many bottom-up solutions that just requires a huge cultural shift as well within the public service it means experimenting risk-taking seeing yourself as a co-creator co-shaper of markets of the future not just a fixer of markets because one of the big systems problems we have is that we keep waiting for the system to break down or to maybe break down before we really think about any sort of government policy and that's actually within the economic theory itself which unfortunately is very powerful in terms of how policymakers think which is that policy is seen as just fixing market failures so by definition you will always be too little too late so interestingly what i'm hearing there is an echo of james's point which is you need a picture in your mind's eye of goal or mission as you call it that you're designing towards and that's how how it actually works which i think takes us very neatly in a sense to the second theme which is you're saying everybody needs to be working together there's a different nature of collaboration needed here but how would you say that needs to actually happen in practice because one of the stresses and strains is that because everybody needs to collaborate with everybody you can't find a focal point so what's your experience of how different people play their parts in this collaboration in a constructive and practical way so i mean my view is that markets themselves are outcomes of how we design the governance structures within all the different value-creating organizations so within the private sector public sector third sector and one of the really interesting things right now is that there's a conversation within the business community about stakeholder value you know purposeful business and and my kind of real gut instinct is that that's never going to create real systems change unless it goes to the center of the system of how all the different actors actually work together so a purposeful system not just purposeful corporate governance as important as that also is and that means for example coming back to my point about design it means you know you should never just have kind of handouts you know and there's lots of handouts subsidies guarantees for all sorts of different companies it has to be conditional and not conditional like a stick it shouldn't be a negative thing that you're kind of punishing someone if they don't do something but you can imagine that you know even now with kova 19 trillions of dollars euros pounds are being injected into the system unless that is actually again designed in a way that truly builds back better and i'm not i'm not just thinking about cover 19 build back better but build back better towards more sustainable inclusive growth and james that seems to me to to offer you a a very interesting challenge you collectively as leaders of business because historically the relationship between governments and business once it's come to regulation has been somewhat adversarial it's almost a sort of traditional standoff and the very first words out of your mouth really included we need better regulation to make this stuff happen how do you see businesses being able to work in a different and more collaborative way with regulators and government than has been the past yeah clearly this especially if we talk about packaging waste it needs regulation and it needs it on multiple fronts and and the reality is the businesses possess more of the operational knowledge they possess more of vip knowledge on innovation and they can help shape what's going to work of course the the regulators need to have some uh appropriate level of skepticism about whether they're being uh engaged with fairly or not um but they need to set the they need to set the playing field and it happens and the the challenge is across multiple fronts we need we need regulation to allow the circular economy to function so that recycled materials can come back into um primary packaging and there are plenty of countries in the world where we're only just passing laws to allow recycled pet back into food grade packaging um only the government can put those laws in place um you get regulation on how do the collection systems the biggest barrier in the developed world uh to a circular economy are the collection systems um and those are not just complicated national issues they are often local whether you're in a state or a county uh issues and the way they're set up matters tremendously and how would you advise business leaders to kind of step forward into into an environment that requires regulation because it is still the case that many businesses are pushing back on regulation all the time almost regardless of what it is how do how do we help businesses change their stance to make this happen well i i go it goes back to the beginning do we agree on the objective and goal do we agree on less weight to the environment and a circular economy because it has a lower carbon footprint and this is a positive way forward and ultimately can be lower cost for business if if you agree with that as a premise then everything else can become responsible and businesses very typically need to work in collaboration with each other they need to form alliances governments find it much easier to deal with all manufacturers of a certain thing rather than each of them individually and mariana in the picture that james is painting there very similar to you bring the whole system together do you feel that business has an opportunity or indeed a regulation sorry an opportunity or indeed a really an obligation to demonstrate to governments that what is possible because very often in the in making shift happen in a real way in practical terms regulators sometimes find it difficult to see what is actually possible has business got a role in making that come alive in the regulatory world sure but can i just say i want to start from a very different premise you know the state and the public sector is not there just to be a regulator everything that makes our iphone smart or not stupid actually came from public investment very risk-taking internet gps touchscreen siri same thing with renewable energy most big innovations around solar wind marine fusion fracking even came actually from high risk early stage public investments of different types so let's just get out of this idea that sorry if i'm being so bold on this but this has been what i've been writing about for 20 years the public sector also invests and when they do so they actually should be then governing the system around these technologies in in such a way to produce kind of public goods and public value and we can come back to that later but i do think that just the narrative that this is just about regulation as opposed to collectively creating value in particular ways and i definitely agree with james if then the regulation is wrong if the environment is not certain for businesses to actually be able to be rewarded for doing the good thing as opposed to kind of you know whether it's problematic tax policy or you know regulations that are just kind of badly devised that's a huge problem but again it's not just about regulation and i think that one of the things that we wanted to touch on while we were all together is the fact that actually the circular economy doesn't exist yet we're all trying to make it happen and so and people are working on corners of it showing what's possible pushing it along so if we look into the future what should we actually be gripping what is the what are the really priority areas to focus on to take us to the next stage in in this arena mariana well i think if if we think of the circular economy not just as uh something peripheral to the economy that then you know the treasuries the ministries of finance and ceos can talk about but at the center of how we direct the economy and how we also build the economic models themselves of how we understand growth processes then that's where we're going to have change and unfortunately so far i think a lot of the people advocating for the circular economy haven't necessarily gotten their hands dirty enough in terms of the economics of it um and so i think that's a real opportunity and i do think it has to come go to the center of how we value you know i totally agree with james you know what are we actually trying to do if that has to be the starting point but what does that actually then mean for how we construct you know gdp indices that are much better than they currently are but also in terms of valuing what has been done and you'll know that everything government does whether it's public education public health public transport where their energy programs get evaluated often those evaluation metrics are really static they're based on kind of cost benefit analysis net present value calculations and i think we do need to ask ourselves what are the implications of having this kind of mission-oriented approach that i talk about james's point about actually you know focusing on the goals working together to achieve them and welcoming all the spillovers that might happen along the way across the entire economy for how we then evaluate how well we're doing and we have to get out of these static frameworks and linear frameworks and really kind of welcome the serendipity actually that might also happen along the way um but it has to be economy-wide intersectoral and interactor fantastic and james where would you put the priority focus for the future to the things on the lost grip so firstly the future is already with us um there are places particularly where uh we have high value for example packaging materials the circular economy has been brought to life we have countries uh where we we see a hundred percent collection of packages and and we reused material back in our own packaging and we've been able to demonstrate we can make it work the problem is it's just not widespread enough so the first point is for high value items it does not require a technological breakthrough it requires a systems and organizational breakthrough and it's doable because if we're doing it collectively with other manufacturers with retainers and with government it's about getting it into more places the bid where i think is the the next biggest challenge is all the low value uh items the you know plastics itself has high value items that can be recycled and has you know equal value to the original material and there's other stuff that once once collected has no recycling value there's nothing you can do with it or at least not today and that's where i agree uh with mariana profound innovation is required to change the the part of the story which is all about low value packaging or any other items we use in the economy so for high value items it's an organizational problem and it's a question of will among the actors and for low value items listen sachets and the famous straws and things like that there it's about innovation private and public innovation to come up with new materials or new ways of recycling those existing materials such that they can create a circular economy and can i just add it has to be i completely agree with james but coming back to the design issue any money given by governments to any sector should increasingly have these goals at the center of the transformation right so you know and it doesn't have to happen right away but you need to be committing to turning your whole value chain into a circular value chain in order to get a subsidy a guarantee a loan a recovery fund shifting the system requires action from all actors government business and citizens yerki katyanan the former prime minister of finland and now president of sitra has witnessed the circular economy move from just a fringe idea to the mainstream and he's seen that across both public and private sectors and nationally and internationally he spoke with joss who leads our work with institutions governments and cities about how to shift the system and what happens when the system starts to shift itself what is your personal experience of systemic change have you seen it at play and if so where does it happen where does it pick up fast where can it really scale funny that you ask because i must admit that when i still was a prime minister of finland and if somebody came to me and and said that we need a systemic change uh i almost immediately shot my ear ears because it sounded the term systemic change and i should do a systemic change sound so overwhelming but then being in the commission and being one of those who was uh introducing the circular economy as a policy matter in the european level i must admit that it is the first time when i experienced that that systemic change can really happen in relatively short period of time so i started to believe that all these single pieces of market regulation for instance or all the legislative legislative proposals concerning product policy they are parts of the systemic chains and we saw already that market is changing and now we see it much better than than five years ago so this is the first time to wrap up this the first time when i i when i participated really to to systemic change and the first time when i see it happening really here and and and fast when it comes to climate which has been a big push of the world circular economy forum this year do you feel that the link between circular economy and climate is being made in with more detail more granularity now i try to understand the history of of circular economy as we know it today it's not that long so um circular economy came to came to the political agenda some six years ago one would say and now it's grown up enough that a big amount of people are um or a big amount of people understand how important vehicle it is for instance when addressing climate change so this year is the first year when i see really circular economy taking off for instance when we talk about climate change and and it's very very encouraging so companies but also policymakers seems to understand that at the same time when we create global rules how much each of the countries needs to reduce the co2 emissions we have to devise uh ways to enable economic growth to continue but the quality of it must change significantly and and here circular economy comes to the picture you mentioned biodiversity i believe biodiversity is next climate so it's going to be a big issue politically and economically and from societal change point of view as the climate change has been during the last few years so we need market based solutions that stress biodiversity loss and here again circular economy can play or will play a crucial role and finland has a really really big bio economy the uh the biomass and the nature-based economy is is really important in the country's gdp so how are you tackling this nationally is it through potentially having better indicators to understand the impact or to make the contribution of biosource materials greater in the economy for instance what is the country doing on that level yeah i think we need both we need more protected areas we need new market-based solutions uh and we need more buyer-based products which replace a fossil based product etc but um there's a debate going on how big a part of the country including water area modern water area should be protected if if we end up protecting 30 of the overall size of the country equally important issue is to look at what happens to the seventh the rest seventy percent so we cannot uh pretend that just protecting certain amount of the country or the the water area is enough we have to do a systemic change how our economy is functioning what kind of choices consumers can do what is the role of of municipalities or public sector for instance when when doing city planning etc so this again needs a systemic change but it's very practical and pragmatic systemic change which is needed so still we we want to get economic growth because it's very important from social perspective uh well-being perspective but the quality of it must change significantly maybe one final question because we're now on the international stage there is an important dimension of the circular economy is what does it do to trade and to commercial relationships between countries and and i know that uh finland have has been thinking about that was uh instrumental in putting together a study uh created by the uh iep a few years ago so that debate how do you see it panning out when potentially you mention the united nations environmental assembly some countries might feel that actually circular economy is not great for them because they sell their natural resources and that's the way they fuel their gdp so how do we get to alignment and consensus on these notions yeah it's um this is a typical way of thinking but i i guess that also in those countries who are mainly a seller of raw materials they they understand that it's always better if they could process the raw materials in their own country so so this is the first thing but the second thing is that the market will change market will change and and the circular economy will win more space that that is for sure it's a winning card so that's why we need better international cooperation also trade policy can be seen as a great enabler for promoting circular economy so in order to address the climate issue or or biodiversity loss we need economic related innovations and secular economy offers lots of opportunities in this front so this kind of international agreements or decisions which uh handle for instance economic or trade related issues are never easy but um but i'm quite confident that the time is time is up so that that people see where we all are going to or what is the direction where we have to go in order to address these these challenges in addition to action and regulation incentives and policy governments are big investors in innovation at the top of the show mariana referenced government-funded breakthrough technologies from the moon landing to the and the circular economy is a huge innovation opportunity it requires the discovery and scale up of new production distribution and recycling infrastructure a new generation of materials and a wave of new business models but all of this needs to happen at great speed to do this we need a strategic and ambitious public private investment let's zoom in materials innovation could offer profound new opportunities and unlock the shift to a circular economy the mit technology review's david rothman spoke with chemist and professor at toronto university alain asbury guzik an mit professor and architect sheila kennedy about the present past and future of our [Applause] materials take one we're going to talk about materials now it is such an interesting topic to me because materials are at the big core of so much of what we do in our lives and yet we don't talk enough about how to get better materials more sustainable materials materials that can improve climate change so we have some great topics to discuss but i want to first ask each of our speakers just to tell me what you do in terms of materials alon i know you're a researcher you invent you create you discover new materials just very quickly how do you think about what you do in terms of the future of materials i am very obsessed with how slow we discover materials materials are discovered usually in a time cycle of 10 to 15 years from idea to market so what i do is i look at applications that matter to the world like energy storage energy generation or displays and try to build materials for those applications in a faster way by means of artificial intelligence and automation so i combine the chemistry artificial intelligence and automation to try to speed up the process of materials discovery with the hope of having these materials in the world faster to solve some of the largest challenges that humanity has right now right we'll get into some more of that but sheila your architect tell us how you think about materials right um well i've got sort of two two big jobs i think um as an architect i'm involved in everything that it takes to make ecologically responsible buildings and really um uh furniture objects products across a range of scales and then as a professor i'm i'm really obsessed about connecting research and education and in understanding the the culture of materials in the built environment and how we can evolve and transform that julia i'm curious what is an example of a material that we might be familiar with and that we might not be thinking enough about the benefits of um well if we're talking about structures i could put air out there i think we're on this planet i think we're pretty familiar with air although we may be getting less familiar with it um in that we can think about inflatable structures very strong beams um the use of so-called soft structures like air like textiles and deploying those instead of the really reduced pallet of materials that we've somehow culturally inherited when i say we i mean the sort of discipline of architecture and and maybe uh people in general we think of a very small set of architectural materials concrete as allah mentioned we might think of steel we might think of glass so our palette has become very reduced and as we move from a a economy to an ecology of materials we're going to see that really broaden out including all the augmented and and and new materials that ellen is working on right we really have to think about the whole materials are used on a macro skill it's a whole system and a system approach to materials yeah so how how do we think about incorporating into this the system into all these things we're talking about new materials or old materials with benefits um how do we think about sort of the next generation and making sure that we're thinking about the consequences of this next generation of materials well i think there are two parts to that question maybe talking about the first part first um how what's the paradigm shift um what's changing um i think that materials were understood as kind of singular things you didn't think much about them if you're an architect you just specify them in other words you order them and they come to you somewhat like amazon actually you know but mature big vast masses of material coming to a building site and then once they were in a building you didn't think much about them you didn't think much about their end of life somehow you know they when the building uh you know was taken down or whatever they went into a landfill so that's extremely linear and i think that we are seeing a shift from um a linear singular notion of one material at a time that we understand and use to a much more plural ecology of materials where we're really thinking about what has been called an externality in other words we're thinking about the energy that goes into extracting that material into processing it into augmenting it um into getting it to the building transportation labor and then how at the end of life it returns back into that larger ecology returns back safely and in a way that it can be up-cycled or re-used so long when you're thinking about creating inventing new materials you know you must think about the long-term consequences of of those materials how they could be used what would be their impact um but take us back when you first start thinking about oh this might be an interesting material how do you think about sort of the longer term um consequences of those materials well this is interesting right it depends on the class of material for example if in my working display molecules or in organic laser molecules the amount of organic molecule that's going to be in a cell phone display or a computer display is tiny you know literally the world production of this display materials is a few tons so compared to you know building materials really we're talking about extremely sophisticated things that you can think about them as the most expensive inks so to speak in the world right um on the other hand we also are thinking of super large scale right like what kind of molecule could store the entirety of the world's energy in scale i mean it will be a fraction of it but the same order of magnitude and when you the reason we're thinking about this problem is you think about uh you know uh going 100 to renewables you need to have batteries and in those batteries you probably don't want to use transition metals that were extracted uh from mines with terrible conditions but rather why not think of organic molecules and for example in that particular case together with roy gordon mike aziz early on about five years ago we thought about what molecules our body used to store energy and turns out there's this biomolecule called quinone that we plants and our body uses all the time to transport electrons and we said if if it transports electrons in our body why don't we just mass scale and imagine a world where we can mass scale and produce a quinone molecule to store all the world's energy but then the question was which quinone or quinone-like molecule now we're working in other molecular classes that are similar to it and that led us to search literally about a million molecules in the computer so far and many of them have been tested experimentally bought at harvard and now in toronto where i am to to fulfill this role right they have to be long-lived but they also have to be non-toxic ideally we want to drink our battery that's our joke but it's kind of true we really want to do is drink our own batteries let's talk about time scale um this is an interesting topic always to me you know when can this happen how fast will how fast can it happen we're talking about huge changes to the economy to industry to how we build and construct things um well i think alas trying to make it faster that's for sure you're trying to make it faster we we know the target of decarbonizing improving biodiversity so each of you um time scale how do you think about time scale how do you try to speed it up along maybe you want to take this one first sure so let's talk about lighter meaning diodes were discovered in the 80s commercialized in the early 2000s that's the 20-year time period that i'm talking about so in my laboratory we are now working on organic lasers okay so the next technology will be a coherent emitter that does the same thing and for that we built a huge robotic system that synthesizes characterizes them and tests them in the same place we call those systems materials acceleration platforms or self-driving laboratories a little bit more colloquial but more accurate because ai is driving the laboratory to make its decisions in the most optimal way those laboratories in principle should be able this is our thesis to lower this by an order of magnitude to take us to one or two years between ideation and production of a candidate material if we're integrated with people like sheila that know the application context and can actually for example give us lower requirements or better applications or creative ideas right then these materials could eventually start making an impact sooner so we need all the chain from the basic scientists to the applied scientists to the engineer to the factories to the users uh which could be the architects or other different uh sectors of society talking to each other and this is what we like to call a platform last thing i will say to invite a lot of the viewers is that we are trying to make toronto the mecca the capital the world's uh place to look to for this so i would invite everybody to look at acceleration consortium.ai in that consortium we're bringing government industry and academia and industry is extremely important here to build the pre-competitive technologies that will be needed to do this yeah you know i think that we tend to think that um the materials of the future that we're going to need in the near future are going to need to be very durable and i think that some do um you know for example i'm i'm thinking about uh understanding a building as a as a kind of carbon bank um something that can amortize all of its embodied energy and that maybe can change like you know change its cladding and so forth over time but at the same time in terms of time scales i think we can also see very ephemeral materials that we actually maybe just use once or twice and throw them away why is that not a problem because those materials could actually merge into a compost pit those materials could um really be designed for a very short term so i think it is essential to understand um the functionality of the materials and not get caught up in searching for the perfect material when there's a really important application that can happen that's just in front of our noses interesting it does strike me in terms of thinking about time scale you have a whole spectrum from the discovery of materials which milan is really a leader in the world in doing speeding that up to testing them i think it's really important as an educator that we continue to try to connect education learning with material experimentation and living materials living materials i think alan would agree with this too that um we're moving from um industrial mechanical uh uh applications from materials to biological and living applications for materials and um while while molecules have these amazing properties so too around us things like um agriculture plants trees are absolutely amazing uh forms of of technology that are biological right if you think about a plant it um it uh it can uh it produces its own renewable energy it produces it stores that chemically it's pretty resilient um it it finds its own water it's a pretty amazing thing so at mit uh there is a new field that uh michael strano and i are developing called plant nanobionics and there we are actually looking to augment the um chemistry and energy of plants to give living uh plants and uh living materials new capacities for example the ability to make ambient light um and that light is is ambient it's it's it's relatively dim but it's gotten a lot brighter and i'm pretty confident that the time frame for that is going to be decreasing so imagine growing your own light right imagine getting rid of the electrical grid altogether and being able to to take a small plant and bring it close to the page that you're looking at and be able to um you know enhance literacy so we can ensure that we're working with materials um that are are safe because we could start with materials that are safe we don't need to modify plants they're already doing these amazing things that's great um i think this is just a start of a conversation and i think as you put it imagine the future of materials and imagining a future of materials that is leads to a much more sustainable environment a much more sustainable economy and really brings many benefits that we're hoping for alain sheila and david talked about the shift from a materials economy to a materials ecology and they are not the only ones who think this way alicia garmalevich from the universidad de santiago de chile is involved in a global movement to transform how and where we produce and use materials enabling a system shift to a circular economy in some ways materials are kind of unthought about part of our economy in a weird way like obviously i'm interacting with a whole host of materials right now and all of us are in our daily lives is some of the impetus behind materium that fact that actually the world of materials is slightly unexplored i think that's true and it's something that we've lost touch with in terms of being really having a deep knowledge and understanding about um about the material world that we inhabit and and consume in every every day and that's a large impetus and motivation behind material material is to open up access to that knowledge and specifically through the lens of biomaterials bioplastics biocomposites these are actually with kind of with chemistry methods that are very accessible we use life-friendly chemistry methods this actually enables people to participate in ways that that previously is is really out of the realm of possibility for for for people so unless you're a polymer chemist or um or a material scientist you never really get in touch with material development where we're trying to open that up to more people in more places and we think that will actually drive innovation as well commercial innovation and there's this there's a focus on bio materials what is it that's exciting about the idea of biomaterials i guess you tapped into a little bit just now but why are the focus on biomaterials yes well the potential of biomaterials is massive when you look actually at just the volume of biopolymers that are in flow in the global biosphere that compose and make up the incredible material production that the natural world is is is made out of and so for instance you can look at um the biopolymer chitin which is the composes the exoskeletons of insects the crustacean shells as well as the cell walls of fungi it's an incredible biopolymer that's so abundant it's about 100 billion tons in flow in the biosphere annually and that's actually the amount of chitin produced in one year is equivalent to greater than 300 years of the current worldwide plastics production so it just shows the kind of scale of materials that we could actually be building with and developing and that's not even mentioning cellulose so cellulose is two teratons per year which is orders of magnitude um higher and so that why i why i mention that is that you have to put our production of petrochemical plastics in context and and that is minuscule where we're producing about over 300 million tons um per year of petrochemical plastics which is incredibly problematic when they bio accumulate um and are in our drinking water and and causing problems for for other organisms but um it shows that it's not necessarily the the material world that we're we're part of it's what what that's composed of what the actual building blocks we're using and so substituting those building blocks i think will have an enormous potential for us to have build habitat products etc that are fundamentally regenerative so this is not to say that biomaterials need to compose everything in our economy but where the real opportunity lies is in fast-moving consumer goods where you've got high volume and it's the throughput is really fast and you need to therefore grapple with the fact that there's going to be leakage it's incredibly difficult to design that out and so that's where it's really important to look at using bio-based building blocks that are effective after end of life no matter where they they they go so you can have small amounts of leakage depending on the quantity and volume that are regenerative and not necessarily detrimental and that's where i think by the bio material economy is specifically um suited to that that sector i always i really like it when you you give that fact about kite and alicia because i quote that quite often so whenever i hear you say i sort of just i'm getting it right and i think what what it illustrates really powerfully is this notion that very often our response to the challenges we see is to do less is to have less and that example and the point about being inspired by natural systems emphasizes the fact that we can have abundance um if the building blocks are right if the principles are right if the design is right and i guess that we're getting into it already but it's worth while making maybe the connection a bit more explicit in your view how does this kind of materials innovation space contribute to a circular economy so the importance of of regenerative materials for the circular economy is really it's the starting point for for everything when you think about product life cycles and so if you get materials right in terms of making sure that the building blocks and that the way they're composed and fit together make sure that they can go back into natural systems as productive nutrients after end of life that means that that entire product can be thought of as regenerative now there's lots of steps along the way but it's really really important to get that foundation right so i see materium and what we're doing and providing that layer of information is providing that kind of that paint box that that palette for what you want to compose for products in circulation everywhere and as soon as we we get the materials right and the chemistry right we're well along the way to make sure that any product we make goes back into a cycle in in a way that's that's um not just zero impact but actually has a positive impact impact on any kind of any source ecosystem that's actually supporting our our uh our productive economy how do we scale these innovations that people might be watching and saying well i'm really excited but what does it look like to take this world of materials innovation by materials to scale it really requires changing our lens on what scale means so in today's world we're very familiar with the concept of scale being associated with centralized mass manufacturing so we produce a lot of things in one location and then export it globally and that's something that doesn't work with a biomaterial economy and biomaterial supply chains because a there's a lot of secondary and and third generation biomass that is highly distributed so think of food waste for instance or agricultural byproducts that's something that's very difficult to centralize and and produce from and you actually risk over extracting any given source ecosystem if you try and scale up in any one location in a traditional mass manufacturing sense the thing that we need to think about is scaling horizontally so actually we want to scale by propagating these solutions at local and regional scales so if you imagine again being nature inspired we're talking about cycling nutrients cycling materials at local and regional scales where the intelligence the knowledge the understanding of what's available and therefore the rate of nutrient return that's necessary to keep the system regenerative that's built in to the system and so we see material and the kind of the sea change we want to inspire as being the information layer that allows people everywhere at small and medium scales to be able to adopt new materials commercialize them and enter into the market now that's not to say that large companies are somehow not part of that potential vision it's just that we have to rethink the way supply chains operate so you may have global brands but the way in which they're sourcing nutrients may actually be more regionalized um and the great thing about working with the palette of building blocks that we talk about the biopolymers like chitin and cellulose and starch and um and seaweed biopolymers for instance all of these amazing building blocks they actually are repeated across biomes everywhere and so even though you may be sourcing from different slightly different uh sources of biomass depending on location the building blocks themselves are are quite um are quite sourceable everywhere and so it's something where we can share knowledge across uh biomes and we can share knowledge across these kind of these more regionalized supply chains so the knowledge is digital but the the materials cycle at local and regional levels and what i what's really interesting about that story is in many ways what could be viewed as a material story is really a system story like the material innovation is a lens into redesigning the system they're the building blocks of the system but you know you're beginning to talk about well the supply chains the the scale how it works toggling between that global and local view alicia gomez thank you so much for joining us for making the time to chat [Music] alicia offering there an exciting glimpse of the future ok we are nearly there joe the summit is just one part of a series of conversations that the foundation hosts on these themes here is a taste of some of our recent content from our circular economy show [Music] china is planning to build something between 20 000 and 50 000 new high-rise buildings that is up to 10 new york cities um by 2025. so we think about the scales um so china is still continued you know having this rapid urbanization and and all of these should present a massive opportunity for cities in china to apply the social economy principles latin america has always since the colonization times depend on extracting and exporting its resources having added very very little value to it and hence intelligence and you know skills jobs etc are limited and not not even compared to the the wealth of resources that we have so i think circle economy can close that gap and deliver better growth but i think what people are beginning to realize is that it's a billion dollar informal sector that is not really being taken seriously or being approached in a in a in a meaningful way and so i think people need to change the attitude towards what um electronic waste is and sort of the opportunities that lie because i don't think that i i think they're simply discarded as waste is you know there's irony you know imbued then because because it's just sort of like undiscovered um resources that just need to be channeled towards the right value chains however in china circular economy is widely adopted to solve the environment pollution associated with industries to reconcile the economic growth and environment and the social concerns um but i think what really adds value to the latin american and caribbean continent is about creating and adding adding value regenerative value to its abundant natural resources it is about the the very important and core aspect of a circular economy which is to create a resilient and distributed and diverse and inclusive economy that will create prosperity to all in the long term [Applause] from china to ghana to brazil the ideas of transforming the economy to fix the climate better growth and shifting the system have global resonance our circular economy show takes place every two weeks on youtube linkedin and facebook so make sure to follow us and tune into those regular broadcasts so that's a wrap the circular economy can address the root causes of our most pressing global challenges hopefully we have managed to demonstrate that business leaders policy makers designers researchers and entrepreneurs are taking action and they are doing so globally it is a journey and we are in the early days but we are seeing progress now we need to go bigger and we need to do it faster thank you for joining us and tune in to the circular economy show to stay connected to our latest insights and developments we'll see you there [Music] [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] [Applause] you

2021-06-14 02:10

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