Reduce, reuse, recycle – dealing with the waste we create should be simple, right? Explore the history of recycling, social enterprises and circular economies with Bruno and Alexandra, and deconstruct what you’ve likely always been taught about waste.
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Music credits:
“Peril” by Xylo-Ziko, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Xylo-Ziko/eventide/peril
“Ice Flow” by Bio Unit, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Bio_Unit/aerostat/ice-flow “Forwards Backwards” by Bio Unit,https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Bio_Unit/aerostat/forwards-backwards
“The Fire of Your Peace” by Siddhartha Corsus, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Siddhartha/night-psalms/the-fire-of-your-peace
Sounds from www.Zapsplat.com and https://freesound.org/people/kevp888/sounds/463981/ PSA from https://kab.org/
Photo credit:
Photo by the blowup (https://unsplash.com/@theblowup) on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/t06aN6vewaQ
Transcript
Aditi Sriram (Podcast Host) 0:05
It’s May 22 2019, and we’re in the Philippines.
Salvador Panelo 0:13
President Rodrigo Roa Duterte is so upset about the inordinate delay of Canada and shipping back its containers of garbage. Obviously Canada is not taking this issue nor our country seriously. The Philippines is an independent sovereign nation and must not be treated as trash by other foreign nations.
Aditi 0:35
That was Salvador Penelo, the chief presidential legal counsel of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. This press briefing occurred at the height of the dispute around the shipment of 103 recycling containers from Vancouver to Manila. Rather than containing recycled plastics, these containers were filled with household trash, newspapers, and adult diapers. This is not an isolated incident of dumping, Canada can hardly keep up with the waste the country creates, instead shipping their waste to countries in the Global South, such as Cambodia and the Philippines. In 2018, Canada exported over 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste, a weight that is just shy of the CN Tower. Given the ethical implications of dumping our excess garbage in Asia, how conscious are Canadians about where their waste ends up?
Joshua 1:27
I sometimes briefly wonder how recyclable that particular plastic is.
Xin Hao 1:32
And if I’m not 100% sure is recyclable that I just throw it in the garbage without a second thought really,
Sriram 1:37
As I am more aware of environmental damages. I definitely feel hurt.
Gayatri 1:43
Every time I use the garbage bin, I feel sad that I’m causing damage to the habitat of animals.
Katya 1:48
I wonder every time if there’s a place where I can get things that I wouldn’t need to buy extra packaging, and then throw it out.
Aditi 2:01
Now that’s the million dollar question. Are there any solutions to the pervasive issue of waste? And does the solution start with us as consumers or at a more systemic level with businesses?
Recent environmental movements placed the onus on individuals to recycle and use less plastic with little conversation on why such egregious amounts of plastic are being produced in the first place. This wasn’t always the case. In fact, in the early 1970s, the US saw large protests demanding corporate accountability for all the plastic packaging being created. This shift in environmentalism, from systemic to the individual is traced back by many activists to the famous public service announcement title, the crying Indian.
Public Service Announcement 2:51
Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. Some people don’t. People start pollution, people can stop.
Aditi 3:14
In this public service announcement, an Italian-American actor dressed with stereotypical Native American clothes canoes through a polluted river. He reaches a busy highway where a woman throws a plastic bag filled with trash from her car, which explodes by his feet. The scene concludes by zooming into the actor’s face, showing one single tear slowly sliding down. This narrative gripped the country, reinvigorating people to play their part by not littering and using the recycling. However, there’s a cynical history here – just as the actor himself was not Native American, the campaign was exceedingly deceptive. It was commissioned by the recently formed anti-litter organization called Keep America Beautiful. However, a closer look would unveil that their work was and continues to be funded by the biggest polluters themselves, multinational corporations such as Coca Cola. This campaign was successful in convincing the public that creating waste was okay, so long as people disposed of it properly. Fast forward to today, we know now that only 9% of the plastic created in the past 50 years has ever been recycled. Let’s shift the conversation back to the systemic and learn more about the role of business in damaging the environment through wasteful and extractive practices.
Alexandra 4:37
I’m Alexandra Bailey and I run Good & Well, which is a Toronto based impact fund and we invest in early stage businesses with a social or environmental purpose. Our objective is to help catalyze a more sustainable market for all.
Aditi 4:53
We asked Alexandra about her fascinating career path and how she decided that working within the for profit business sphere could scale her impact,
Alexandra 5:01
Actively working in conservation and just seeing the impact that business had on the environment. For example, I spent a summer working in Mongolia and seeing the impact of the mining on the landscape and realizing that there was no way we were going to be solving any of these environmental challenges, or really conserving wildlife or nature without business as an ally. And as I learned more and more about business models and structures, I got really
interested in how do you leverage the scalability and sustainability of the business model to drive social and environmental change?
Aditi 5:36
How does business as it exists incentivize short term wasteful business practices?
Alexandra 5:41
The whole objective of business is to maximize shareholder value and maximizing your use of the comments or making sure that any impacts you have go into the comments instead of into the business. So you end up with a lot of environmental impact, waste included, as a result of the way that we think about what business’s objective is. Another thing that our economic system has really driven us to is a real sense of materialism and an expectation that we can just replace something, you know, get a hole in a piece of clothing that we just replace it, we don’t think about mending it. Because it’s all accessible to us.
Aditi 6:18
The businesses that good and well have invested in all work to minimize the amount of waste that they produce. One example is Fresh City Farms, an organic grocery store and organic food delivery service.
Alexandra 6:29
In Fresh City’s case, they’ve tried to eliminate a lot of waste around food delivery. All of the food comes in jars that are recyclable and can be returned to our city and washed and then are refilled. And then those jars and the rest of the food comes in reusable bags and you leave your bag outs picked up. It sometimes takes a little bit of extra effort or a little bit of extra cost, but trying to minimize the environmental impact of the convenience that we’re all accustomed to now.
Aditi 7:00
Similar to Fresh City Farms, there are many social enterprises in Canada and around the world who are working to innovate waste out of the system. These businesses work to reimagine the products we use, and in the long term, establish a circular economy. This would be an economy that is regenerative, eliminating or repurposing byproducts that would typically go to waste. Up next, we learn more about what a circular economy might look like and why we should be excited about it.
Bruno 7:30
I think the idea of the circular economy is so interesting, because it’s a great intersection of innovation of how we run businesses, and also of how we can generate social and environmental impact. This fascination around you know, how do we do things better, and not only better, but just like a radically different way of essentially enjoying these things that we normally just do on a
day to day basis, but don’t realize that there’s a lot of hidden environmental or health costs behind it.
Aditi 7:54
This is Bruno Lam who is a manager at Canvas impact advisors, a consulting firm for impact investors who want to deploy capital into social enterprises and impact investment funds.
Bruno 8:02
I have been involved in circular economy in a few different capacities. One, as a researcher actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on electronic waste. So what happens to our laptops and phones, when we discard them. More on the applied side, we’ve been involved with a group called Mugshare. In the short, we create a program where people can borrow a mug. So in that case, you don’t have to use a single use cup.
Aditi 8:28
What are some of the trends that you’ve seen within the circular economy that you’re excited about currently?
Bruno 8:34
Almost every month or so, I see a company pop up, they all have one similar framework, which takes waste from one process and convert it, upcycle it, reprocess it, repurpose it. It’s quite interesting looking at how many different types of wastes there is in the world, the amount of use cases that could be applied to many different types of waste.
Aditi 8:58
So where do we go from here? What does the future look like 10, 15 years from now, if we are committed to creating a more circular and environmentally friendly economy,
Bruno 9:07
This just becomes the norm. The idea that impact investors exist implies that there are non impact investors, or the idea that there are eco friendly customer segments means there are also non eco friendly customer segments. In an ideal world, you can understand that this is just the way that things are. We can make these choices accessible to everyone and not just the people that are zero waste Vancouver Facebook group, but it’s available to everyone as well. I think that comes with a shift in mindset from multiple stakeholders from the consumers as well as investors who are financing them to government’s policies that help consumers and investors and make those better decisions.
Aditi 9:52
With the assumption that most of us listening to this podcast are consumers rather than investors or policy makers, let’s talk about what better decisions look like for all of us outside our occupation. An obvious suggestion is to support social enterprises which champion
zero-waste and circularity. These individual changes are significant in creating systemic change because investors are more likely to support eco-friendly businesses if there is a strong market for these products. Another important stakeholder are policy makers and government officials, who create policy and regulation that determines how seriously zero waste efforts are taken on a national or provincial level. In these two cases, we can all vote both with our dollar and with our actual vote, supporting businesses and political parties who are committed to creating a less wasteful world.
Beyond waste, this narrative can serve as inspiration to take a closer look at the social issues around us. At first glance, it may appear that plastic waste doesn’t have anything to do with soaring rates of personal debt and chronic health conditions. However, underneath all these issues and so many more are corporations, financial institutions and the top 0.1% who have strong vested interests in keeping things the way they are. By deflecting the blame onto individuals and telling them to make better choices, these powerful actors rid themselves of accountability and secure their positions of immense wealth. For this reason, the issue of waste is intimately connected to all other social and environmental issues.
To take a stand on waste, we can vote and change our consumption patterns but it is equally important to question the entrenched power structures in the world around us. By being courageous in imagining what a radically different society and economy might look like, we can work together to reach true environmental justice.