Circular Economy Podcast, Series 01, Episode 1

TechForGoodLive Dsposal Circular Economy Podcast Series 1 Episode 1

The first episode of series one of Tech for Good Live and the Circular Economy asks the questions "What is the Circular Economy?", "What is No Zero Burden?", "Why Should Price Tell the Truth?"

Bex-Rae Evans - Consultant at UX agency Sigma

Tom Passmore - CEO and Co-Founder at Dsposal

Amanda Reid - Network Manager for Waste to Resource Innovation Network at the Manchester Metropolitan University

Ken Webster - Head of Innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Professor Amir Sharif - Professor of Circular Economy in the School of Management at the University of Bradford

Listen to Episode 2.

Listen to Episode 3.

Listen to Tech For Good Live and the Circular Economy on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

Transcript

Note:  Tech for Good Live and the Circular Economy has been made to be listened to and not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and most definitely contain errors. Please check the corresponding episode before quoting in print.

[Guitar Music "He Swear He Would" by George Fell]

Bex-Rae Evans: Everything is coming to an end. We're all doomed. The oceans are rising, and they're filled with plastic and sharks. There are too many people. There's not enough food. Te're running out of resources and the apocalypse is just over the horizon. But thankfully Tom Passmore from Dsposal is going to save us.

Tom Passmore: Am I?

Bex-Rae Evans: No, don't worry we just needed a dramatic intro. This podcast is a three-part series called Tech for Good Live and the Circular Economy. It's part of the Disruptive Innovative Festival 2018 and we're going to talk about, you guessed it, the Circular Economy. Is it a model that can save us from planetary crisis or just a nice idea that will never work?

Bex-Rae Evans: So, Tom why are we in the podcast booth?

Tom Passmore: So, a couple months ago I did a talk for Tech for Good Live all about the Circular Economy and since then I have done loads more research into it and about this kind of concept around No Zero Burden and the waste industry. So I thought I'd come and talk to you about it.

Bex-Rae Evans: So we're doing a podcast and this is relevant to you because you have a startup called Dsposal which is waste industry related.

Tom Passmore: Exactly, exactly I set up a green tech startup called Dsposal to digitally connect the waste industry and this whole idea.

Bex-Rae Evans: Which is more interesting than it sounds I really love it.

Tom Passmore: Yeah which is much more interesting the waste industry is fascinating and it's one of the things that I've started to get involved in with the Circular Economy is this idea of waste, whose responsibility is waste and what happens to waste when people throw it away. So since I did that talk I've gone off and I've kind of gone; right what else do we need to learn about and been talking to loads of people for this festival the Disruptive Innovation Festival and I thought let's do a podcast. Let's get Tech For Good Live involved.

Bex-Rae Evans: Okay. Well let's do it. But let's start at the beginning. So what's the Circular Economy?

Tom Passmore: Okay so great place to start. So, one of the people I interviewed will be able to answer that her name is Amanda.

Amanda Reid: So a little bit about me I am Chartered Waste and Resources Manager and I've been working within the industry for about 19 years. Currently I work in the Faculty of Science and Engineering and I'm the Waste to Resource Innovation Network Manager it's a big long title. Essentially it provides a cross faculty approach to drive forward Circular Economy through research and knowledge exchange. And this is both internally across our different faculties and externally to our business partners. Probably the last thing I needed to tell you is that I'm the lead for the Circular Economy Club Manchester.

Tom Passmore: So that's Amanda Reid and I asked her to explain what we mean when we say the Circular Economy.

Amanda Reid: You could explain it is as a framework that takes insights from living systems. It moves us away from our existing linear take, make, use, dispose model and one of where products and components are kept to their highest value. It would aim to reduce natural resource use through ability to deconstruct, reuse, repurpose materials which are then manufactured back into products.

Bex-Rae Evans: Okay so Amanda's telling me basically it's like recycling only better yeah?

Tom Passmore: So, I mean Amanda kind of talks briefly there about this idea of the take, make, lose model so it's that's the idea that that's the economy that we've got at the moment. So you take something from the earth. You make it into something and then you like lose it. You throw it away. You dispose of it and then yeah Amanda kind of talks about that recycling side of things. But like the Circular Economy is so much more than just recycling it's one of the things I've been talking to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Ken Webster about.

Ken Webster: My name is Ken Webster currently head of Innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. We specialise in encouraging the transition towards the Circular Economy. And we work with government, we work with business and we work in education and with industry. Well, certainly recycling is part of it because it's just so obvious you know. If you're going to have a Circular Economy, you're gonna have something recycling in it. That the problem, if you like, with recycling is is you've lost so much of the value in the material. Because all the inherent quality and opportunity you might have with products or components or parts by the time it gets to recycling, as we generally understand it, mashing materials up and trying to reduce them to their basic molecules or or links. In that way that's most of the value gone and that's a business loss. So if you can keep it in highest values at all times and higher value at all times there's more business opportunity. So recycling's essential but it's the right the loop of last resort. There are lots of other things that can be done to bring your business value, reduce impact on the environment, create jobs and that's really what the Circular Economy is about. Thinking through how materials flow, how product components materials interact with say product design or how different business models might mean eliminate some sorts of materials. Anyway so yeah recycling excellent, essential but it's not just recycling ramped up to the nth degree.

Tom Passmore: I'm loving what Ken says about recycling being the loop of last resort.

Bex-Rae Evans: Yeah what does he mean by that? What's a loop? Obviously loop of last resort would be an amazing band name, but what does it mean?

Tom Passmore: So, in the Circular Economy like Ken mentions there about flows. So there's this idea that materials, products, services flow down the system, the process, and then kind of loop back round. So like the loop of last resort so recycling is like really energy intensive it's really full-on and you lose a lot of value out of the product or the service and what we're trying to do is like move those materials away from that recycling loop right.

Bex-Rae Evans: So, so recycling should only be done as a last resort in a way.

Tom Passmore: Exactly I mean it's a great thing to do but you need to, you need to move away from recycling being the resort to it being the last resort. So, in fact I asked Ken about what other loops there are which could be a better resort.

Ken Webster: Well you can start with the one way you don't lose the product anyway. So you do product maintenance, so you do product refurbishment. Or you repair it, or you utilize components from it. Or you utilize the materials in defined sections. You know? So you don't, you don't have to take it down to mash it up, you could be selling materials as strips or parts or whatever. So it is it's on the way towards breaking up, but what has can be done with it as profitable. And that's usually by design. That you can't you say: “oh I've got this product what am I gonna do?”

Tom Passmore: Yeah

Ken Webster: You got to think first what's my plan for what's next and that's the key thinking. Actually the think is before we've even made the product, very often, or design the system what's next. If you can't answer the question “what's next?” it's very hard to do something satisfactory in a Circular Economy sense. Design is integral to it.

Tom Passmore: So it seems here that Ken is saying we can't just bolt the Circular Economy onto the systems that we already have in place?

Ken Webster: You can do. But you are not going to get the best outcome that's the point. Coz it's a bit like saying “oh what do I do with all this stuff that I have happened to have made oh it's a real problem?” Rather than saying “if we plan it right this'll fit the system”. It'll be, you know, waste will be food for the system because that's where we take our insight. Insights from living systems where everything that goes in and out is food, is a nutrient really it's out of technical nutrition for the industrial system or it fits the bio cycle. And well it's really so simple sometimes, it really doesn't need me to explain it, almost everybody gets that. It's just we don't do it yeah. We don't design that way.

Bex-Rae Evans: That was really interesting and he said it was really simple. It kind of I I have loads more questions. So I don't know if it was particularly simple. To me I like the idea of it. Designing in the end at the start. That was quite interesting.

Tom Passmore: Yes, yeah that's kind of a key part of the Circular Economy. It's kind of having that start with the end in mind, but yeah, and stop mashing things up and think about what you do with it before you mash it up.

Bex-Rae Evans: I like that as well.

Tom Passmore: Yeah, yeah and that is a massive problem that we do have it within the waste industry. Like so if you think about a car. It starts off as this beautiful pristine car that you drive around for 150,000 miles and then it gets turned into a cube. And that's it. It's done.

Bex-Rae Evans: Some of it you didn't mention that didn't and I didn't know what it meant was the bio cycle.

Tom Passmore: Yes, so this is the idea within the circular economy about you need to work on a butterfly. Like there's a butterfly diagram that kind of connects the two cycles of the the bio cycle and the bio nutrients. And then you've got the technical nutrients on the other wing of this butterfly. So you've got left and right wings and I think actually Amanda from MMU talks about this.

Amanda Reid: Myself and you are very well aware of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They differentiate between two different systems of biological and technical system. So a biological system follows a similar path as our natural cycles where one species waste is another one's food. And I think by rethinking the design of products and components we could actually look at building capacity in terms of biodegradable items that are back into the ground on the biological side. And things like washing machines, and mobiles and fridges that we know don't bio-degrade they are what they term as being the technical system. And where we need to go with these types of materials is to try and unlock the valuable metals and the polymers and the alloys so they maintain their quality and continue to be useful beyond the shelf life of an individual product. If you put these two systems together and we adopt different approaches it basically enables, in a nutshell, the goods of today being the resources of tomorrow. It sounds very simplistic but we both know it isn't that easy don't we Tom.

Bex-Rae Evans: So, I'm starting to get the circular economy bit.

Tom Passmore: Yeah yeah.

Bex-Rae Evans: We design it well in the first place, design it so you know where it's gonna go and it's ended.

Tom Passmore: Exactly yes and so yeah you kind of have that design path in mind and that system thinking, I suppose some people will talk about it like that. And to make products and materials well products and services kind of fit these different loops within the butterfly diagram. So you've got maintenance, reuse, distribute, refurbish, remanufacture but then also recycle there at the end that Ken talks about, like it is part of that that loop. And it's all about trying to make them all a little bit better than what we've got at the moment and also as you do that you get more value out of these products.

Bex-Rae Evans: You say that though, that sounds that sounds simple and easy and amazing, so why aren't people doing it? How does the economy come into this? Obviously, we've been we talked for years about how people design in something at the end of something's life deliberately. So you have to buy a new one. So that's the economy of like the model we have now. So how does economy the economy come into this and why is it a circular economy? Why is it the circular economy?

Tom Passmore: Yeah, no it's a good, it's a good question and so I thought would be a really good person to ask. So this is Amir from the University of Bradford. He's the Associate Dean of their MBA program, all about the Circular Economy.

Professor Amir Sharif: My name is Professor Amir Sharif. I am Professor of Circular Economy in the School of Management at the University of Bradford.

Professor Amir Sharif: Our whole of our, if we can put it this way, capitalist or capital driven economy for many many years, and this goes all the way back to you know great economists like Adam Smith and and others. All the way through to to to the great captains and men and women of industry over the years that have supported and and extracted the most amount of value and capital, let's be honest, from from products and services. And there's nothing wrong with that. And that's largely been the basis of an industrial society. Except now we are moving into, you know, a new type of economy. And we've been saying this for years, of course, since the advent of the internet and digital technologies. But we now really are moving into a different type of responsible economy, you could say, yes and an industry 4.0 but in maybe in an industry 5.0. Where we are seeing a more and more deeper integration of technology and and a natural world of technology in humans as well. And so if we're in that sort of world now we need to be very very careful about how we impact the world around us. But also in terms of, you know, the the the efficiencies that we can, that we can, efficiency gains, we can make out of machines, out of economies, we largely know now how those efficiencies can be made. There are no more efficiencies to be gained really in in most types of businesses and most types of machinery, most types of system. So what else can we do? Well, what are the opportunities there, well the opportunities, are clearly in terms of effectiveness. And again this is this idea that Ken and others have talked about a lot, Walter Stahl and and other people involved in in in concepts such as the blue economy, donut economics as well. But also what the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has been saying for a while. Which is how can we actually shift the perception of effectiveness of a business? And that means looking at these ideas once again of reuse and regeneration and benefit beyond that beyond into the wider community into the into a wider set of stakeholders. So, really is quite a quite a different concept that we're talking about when we talk about circular economy.

Tom Passmore: So yeah I mean when when I was talking to Amir about this like it was a concept I've just never heard before. This kind of move from being efficient to effective. Like, because, I like. I've always been told I like be efficient, be efficient like, be better and then talking to Amir it's this whole idea that switched in my head of, like. You can be brilliantly efficient at something but it's absolutely useless the thing you being efficient at and then but actually if you want to be effective like. That's all you need to be just be effective. and then Amir kind of ads ads added on to that of actually being efficiently effective.

Bex-Rae Evans: Oh that's complicated efficiently effective.

Tom Passmore: I know but I think that's just so neat.

Bex-Rae Evans: Well have you got an example of being efficiently effective? Or what does efficiency and what's effectiveness? Like I think you've said those words so much now they've both lost complete meaning to me. Ya know?

Tom Passmore: And that happened with me as well. So again Amir was talking about Ken. That's Ken Webster who I interviewed at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. He he puts it really really well.

Ken Webster: What's the difference between being efficient and being effective and efficiency, is actually there's no purpose to it? If you think about its just input and output. And how do you do that with as least energy and effort right. It's not making a judgement about it. But if I say I wanted effective lungs. You know lungs as a system, what's it for? Well it's partly for maintaining your body. It's effectively it's got a purpose if, as far as you imagine it, to function so that all of your body gets the oxygen it needs and the carbon dioxides. But it's got a purpose. So effective systems always have a purpose. If you can play with that one? Because they close the loop, but they close the loom to do this. A bit like your bloodstream. It's no point if it doesn't go to your toes because eventually you're gonna die and then maybe get gangrene and you are gonna die. When the whole, the whole thing can be undone because there's a problem at the periphery of just. Where as efficiency might be how's your heart today? Oh, that's pumping really well. But that doesn't tell you whether the whole system is working well, you see. So the purpose of the whole human body system is to maintain itself through time. Whereas an efficient body system could be, it's very efficient, but you won't last very long because you have you're totally wired and you know you convert all this energy, but you're like you're gonna burn yourself up a sense. It’s sort of like people overdo things in their youth and all their joints and all the rest of it you know that's not an effective long-term system. As it became very efficient and you burnt that energy or did that work and it's hardly fit for purpose going forward. So that's the thing to play with. We're looking for effective materials management systems, which have a purpose which is to make material stocks, which are replenished and feedback is sensible in that and is valued. And it's not not that hard but it is a bit of a change from how we tend to deal with it. Which is if we're efficient we're better but we don't really make a judgement. Like if you cleaning the stuff off the streets of Manchester yeah? It can be really efficient, well that job was just to clean it off the streets, it wasn't to say “how do we make this an effective materials management system?” and people go “well my job is just to do the streets” which is fair enough. This is the job, but somebody has to ask the question “how does this fit with the whole thing?” and we seem to be scared about asking that question these days. “How does it fit with the whole system?” we don't do it very much. We just go “my job is to do this then I'm going home”.

Bex-Rae Evans: So, he's talking about like everyone's just in their own little box. You're not really thinking about the bigger picture. So that was really interesting and now I know what effective and efficient are. Basically, we make loads of rubbish and there's no point making that really, really well if no one wants it. And it has no reason for being.

Tom Passmore: Exactly.

Bex-Rae Evans: Like you know when you go into a corner shop and there's loads of cheap plastic toys. They're just like a waste of space and time and they're probably made really cheaply and efficiently.

Tom Passmore: Yes, really efficiently. Get loads of them, they're out there in the wild. Brilliant. We've made loads of them, made them every year, we make them faster and faster and faster. Great. Why? Why? Like that's like it's not effective and like again Ken says “oh it's not that hard”. But it honestly like talking with Ken and Amir about this, it was, I couldn't get it. I couldn't get it, I'm like I think I'm hardwired to look for efficiency savings. Like I've always done it in every job I've done. And it's just that idea about yeah actually what what are you doing and why are you doing it first. And then take a step back and be like, so you can make your little box, like you said, as efficient as physically possible but if the one before you and the one after you is like is rubbish then what's the point? You have to say take a step back, look at the whole system and get that that whole system to become effective. That's really exciting. I got feels like I like that's the monumental shift. I think.

Bex-Rae Evans: It is but, it is because no one's doing it. Yeah well like you said it's kind of almost like that Ken was saying really simple and almost obvious

Tom Passmore: Yeah

Bex-Rae Evans: So why don't why don't people do it?

Tom Passmore: Okay, I think it's because it's always been that way. Like we've always just done: I've looked after my job, I've built the stuff I've built. My consumers want it, my like my boss wants it that way, my clients want it that way, whatever. It's in that kind of it's always done that way but surely it needs someone step back and probably spend a lot of time doing systems-thinking. To look at the whole system that they incorporate and then go “there we go, that's how we need to be effective”. But the whole idea of like the linear economy is based on being efficient, not being effective. Yeah?

Bex-Rae Evans: Yes

Tom Passmore: Whereas the Circular Economy because it revolves around this interconnectedness of different people it needs to be the other one. I gotta mix up in my head effective yeah. Like it needs to be effective and it needs a kind of all connect up. And that's a kind of the three pillars of the circular economy as well. So, you've got close the loop. You've got slow the flow, and you've got narrow the pallet. So, you need to make sure that the products that you make are thought about so they can go back into the loop. Then you need to actually just slow the amount of products that are being made so make them effectively rather than just efficiently. And then narrow the amount of products that are out there and what they're made out of so then they can effectively go back round these loops.

Bex-Rae Evans: Is this gonna make it more expensive for people? Because what you're saying sounds really bespoke and expensive. Do products become more expensive in the Circular Economy?

Tom Passmore: I don't think so no they don't. It doesn't have to. But I think there's a there's always going to be a transition period where people will try to make profit gains from it because we're built on the linear economy. Which is all about making as much money as fast as possible and all about kind of scale so scaling up your your products that you've got and get them out there as quickly as you can. Whereas there's another idea that we'll talk about later about this scope. Which is the Circular Economy is all about the effectiveness of scope within your business models and your business offerings. So if you can get a lot of things out there that benefit a lot of different people and like interconnect your business models with other people's business models then costs should go down. Should. But, people are part of the problem so.

Bex-Rae Evans: I mean I agree with you there.

Tom Passmore: So and then there's all part of this. So, the cost elements as well kind of fit in with this idea of no zero burden so this is the concept that I've kind of

Bex-Rae Evans: No Zero Burden

Tom Passmore: and No Zero Burden. So it's this concept of in the Circular Economy where people, manufacturers, retailers, local authorities, everyone throughout the system that you live and work in shouldn't have free rein to the products that you reign.

Bex-Rae Evans: Okay so you have you have no no you do have a burden?

Tom Passmore: Yes yes everyone has a burden.

Bex-Rae Evans: Is what it's saying?

Tom Passmore: On, on their on the products that they make.

Bex-Rae Evans: Is that a double negative? Because that confused me no zero burden, you do have a burden?

Tom Passmore: Yeah, yes so at the moment. Companies are out there that will make cheap, cheap goods, very effectively and they will have no burden on what happens to it next. Will just be like yeah we've created it. It's released into the world. It will end up in landfill. We don't have to worry about it. We made it cheap. Everyone wanted it. Fantastic. But then the cost of getting rid of it is really expensive. So I heard about this concept and I went to talk to a man about it. That man is Amir from the University of Bradford.

Professor Amir Sharif: So, basically this is the that, this is the concept that, for any given product. Less so services. But for any given product who has the burden the responsibility for the end of life of that product? Let's take a plastic bottle again because it's so much in the news. So when you buy a drink from a shop you buy that drink it's in then it might be in a plastic bottle. When you've finished with that drink, water or whatever else it is in there, whose responsibility is it to to deal with that empty bottle? Well it's it's you the consumer. Now the idea of no zero burden goes like this. Well you as a consumer because you've purchased that product you now have responsibility for getting rid of that empty product or reusing it. Now consumers at the moment they can't have they don't really have a stake directly in reusing or regenerating or recycling that that bottle. Yes they can put it in a bottle bank or whatever and maybe even getting recover some money from it. But really they don't really have a stake in it. The issue with with with this current model that we have now is that the producers of that plastic bottle they have no stake or responsibility in relation to the end-of-life of that plastic bottle. So the manufacturer of that plastic bottle really has given up all their rights. They've given up all of their responsibilities once they've sold you that that item or it's been manufactured. And so the idea behind a no zero burden assumption in a Circular Economy which this comes this is a title that comes from a title of an academic paper by Danica Ilic and colleagues in in from Linkoping University in Sweden. The idea here is that well perhaps producers and manufacturers should have more of a responsibility towards the end of life of products that they produce. And and that means that if we adopt and if manufacturers and producers adopt a circular economy approach to producing products and services but they actually have as much responsibility as you as a consumer in dealing with the end-of-life of that product. Now that has a massive implications for reducing or eliminating waste and of course as we know the purpose of circular economy is to have zero waste or as close to zero waste as possible. So if we can get more and more companies organizations manufacturers and indeed waste companies too and consumers and communities involved in understanding the removal of the burden of waste. Removing that burden and saying well let me take that plastic bottle off you let's see if we can reintegrate it back into into a production cycle. This is the idea, another big idea within circular economy is using waste as food. Well not literally as edible food but waste as resource for creating new products and services. So that's what the no zero burden idea is about and it's really really a nice concept that that many people can relate to and it's something that is is now being discussed quite a lot in the literature.

Bex-Rae Evans: I like Amir he says a lot of things I've been saying for years mainly because I'm lazy. Like I really struggle with recycling. I'm a bit of a hippie. I like to look after the world yeah, but I find recycling a massive pain and it's difficult and what plastic goes in where? Which is the glass bin again I've forgotten? So I hate it when I buy something from a supermarket. It's covered in stuff that I don't need and I have to find a way of disposing it. And I wished that the supermarket would have just not given me that in the first place. So I've always liked this idea of like the organizations that are creating the rubbish to have more responsibility. I don't, I don't want the responsibility, is basically what I'm saying.

Tom Passmore: Yeah, like and it makes perfect sense as well. Because if like like why should you have that responsibility when you know so little about that the materials in that product? So let's think about an example like like a building. If you you buy a building and then you have to get rid of it. Like you like it's ruined it's broken so you have to demolish it like as a as a building owner like you don't know what's in it so you're just gonna have to junk all of it. Whereas if you have a better understanding of every single material, everything. Every design decision that was made as part of the list of the spec that you've got and people had a responsibility to every single item within that building. Then that becomes really exciting. Because you just go okay I’ve finish with the building is no longer or like I can't look after it anymore. The manufacturer of that built, that, like that those contractors come in and go right we'll take this all apart now and all of these bits are now ours again. We have that money, that value, from those bits again. And I think that quite it's quite interesting, as a concept.

Bex-Rae Evans: It is quite interesting and thinking about kind of the capitalist culture that we're in as well. And everyone's after more money that seems like why would you throw that way if it's worth something? Wouldn’t you want it back at the end of the process?

Tom Passmore: Yeah definitely.

Bex-Rae Evans: It seems.

Tom Passmore: Yeah no it's true, true because and then Ken briefly touched on it before about this idea of stock management. So you become to own those, own those materials throughout the whole life but also what ties into that as well is something that Ken from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation talks about is idea that price should tell the truth. So, when you buy something you actually understand all of the costs that have gone into that product. So, I'll get Ken to talk about a little bit more.

Ken Webster: It's one of those bedrock things you're never going to begin to getting around that in some sense. If price tells the truth, that price really reflects the full cost. We get a bit, bit more rational market for these things. And then at the moment many of these costs are hidden or or are ending up in microplastics in the ocean or whatever or you don't even know where it's come from you certainly know it's gonna do harm.

Bex-Rae Evans: So it all sounds like it makes better sense than the previous model to me well what why aren't we doing it? Is this a new concept? How long has the circular economy idea been around and why aren't we doing it?

Tom Passmore: Oh the idea of the circular economy has been around for like a long time but it's taken a lot of kind of understanding from lots of different people to really get it into the mainstream. So Ellen MacArthur the woman that went round the world in the boat, the yacht. She after she came back from her round-the-world trip she … trip such an understatement.

Bex-Rae Evans: Her little holiday

Tom Passmore: She was just like actually no like we need to we need to combat this issue that we've got and actually the circular economy works really, really well. Okay it's not about kind of it's not on this hippie idea it's not just about recycling like it it connects all of these things together. And I think it just took a group of individuals to really take it by the scruff of its neck and drag it into the world. To go actually this is the way it should be. Like talking to Amir like he sees the future we're all we're like we used to have this thing called the linear economy and now we just have the economy. And I think that's like we just need to work towards that. So yeah it's like it is a breakthrough idea at the moment but people are starting to do it. And that's really fascinating the stuff that they're working on.

Bex-Rae Evans: And that's really important to me because we've we've talked a lot today about theory and about changes to systems and thinking. But we need to look about how that works practically right with some real examples. Because the circular economy sounds like the right solution to me. It's really exciting and but the big question in my mind is does it work?

[Guitar Music "He Swear He Would" by George Fell]

Bex-Rae Evans: Next time on Tech for Good Live and the Circular Economy we look at the real world examples from some of the UK's biggest retailers. We also find out that Apple have a robot called Daisy that can rip mobile phones apart but in a good way apparently.

Bex-Rae Evans: This podcast wouldn't exist without Tom Passmore and Sophie Walker from Dsposal. Music has been graciously provided by George Fell. Podcast.co make all of this possible thanks to the shiny podcast studio they provide. Thanks to the Disruptive Innovation Festival. I've been, and will continue to be, Rebecca Rae-Evans. Thanks also to Paul Jakubowski and Johnny Rae-Evans from the Tech For Good Live team.

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