tons of stuff in the city and I
redistribute it to people and projects
and I know you’re probably thinking like
why would a middle-aged mom and three
kind of be even able to do that and why
would she do it so I’m kind of going to
attempt to explain all the reasoning
behind that and the first thing to
understand is that the word waste really
has bad reputation so we think of waste
as being moldy or smelly or broken or
unusable and in fact it’s just something
that we get rid of that we don’t want
anymore ourselves and so you know the
other reason why I’m able to intercept
so much waste is that basically I’m
afraid world tosses you know we’re part
of a throwaway society whether we like
it or not and you know and I’m a toaster
as much as you’re a tosser but there
there are really dramatic implications
to our planet and our quality of life
and our health through our ability to
throw so much away so being Australian I
kind of feel obliged to state the
bleeding obvious so to start with I’m
just kind of going to explain where all
this stuff comes from and the whole
process involved in it because I think
if we understand where things come from
then we value them and we have more
respect for them which would be really
good if we could do that so every single
year year on year year after year we
harvest and extract around 50 billion
tons of raw materials now a lot of those
raw materials are finite once once we’ve
used them they don’t come back the
planet replenishing a lot of the
especially a lot of the valuable
minerals that we’re digging up out of
the earth and in that process of
extracting the raw materials what we’re
doing is making the things for seven
billion people that are all wandering
around this little tiny planet but
actually as it turns out it’s only the
Western world around fifteen percent of
the world’s population get most of that
stuff where it’s disproportionate
things aren’t distributed fairly at all
so I’m addressing us being in rich west
country that we have a lot of
responsibility about the things that we
use and consume every day a lot of
pollution is created to make all this
stuff indeed this tee shirt I’m wearing
now required the same amount of water
that I’m going to drink in the next
three years just to make one single
t-shirt so next time you go to buy a
really really cheap p shirt you might
want to consider that something or
somebody has been exploited along the
way to enable you to be able to buy
something so cheaply the true value and
the true cost of making that item is not
reflected in the slashed prices that we
can buy things that in the Western world
and I’m it’s just incredibly sad that
also the impact of making all this stuff
affects the livelihood of people in
far-off countries so we’re not exposed
to it we don’t see it every day but the
only reason that we can consume so much
and have it so cheap is that they’re
living in really poor conditions and
working in poor conditions and I’m very
conscious that we’re responsible for so
much equality across the world just
through the stuff that we endlessly by
and then of course we’ve got to get it
from China or Brazil or India or
wherever it’s made and then we’ve all
got to dash to the shops and there are
trucks and Korea vans zooming around
endlessly just moving all this stuff
around so that we can buy it and have it
and then there’s the unintended
consequences that happen a long way
those sort of breaches of what we meant
to happen and there’s litter and it’s
getting into our natural ecosystems and
it’s polluting the rivers and the oceans
and right now in the oceans around the
world there’s over six trillion pieces
of plastic in the ocean and that’s
obviously not particularly good for the
water cycle it’s a pollutant plastic is
made from petroleum it’s a fossil fuel
product
and it never ever ever goes away it
never breaks down it remains in some
form for eternity and indeed fish
swallow microscopic chips of plastic so
in fact we now have plastic in our food
chain which is kind of not ideal it’s
not very good for people and the slide
that you see on the screen at the moment
is from midway island in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean in a thing called the
Pacific Garbage Patch where there are
thousands of square kilometers of ocean
that have absorbed the last sort of 40
years of plastic that has escaped being
recycled and most pertinent what I do is
that every single day around the world
we create 5 million tons of waste and so
what do we do with that waste well there
is actually a system and this is used
all around the world on how we should
deal with stuff that we discard and the
ridiculous thing is is that we all agree
it would be a great idea to minimize it
and prevent it and to reuse what we’ve
already got and they’re at the top of
the pyramid you see behind me but
actually what we’ve done for 50 or 60
years if we is we’ve invested at the
bottom of the waste hierarchy so we have
amazing factories and processing plants
that would destroy objects to get them
back down to their base materials so
that those materials can be recycled raw
materials and we’ve built what are
called energy recovery facilities which
is a nice euphemism for an incinerator
we burn stuff now if you order your
average black bin bag in the UK up to
seventy percent of the content is
compostable reusable or recyclable but
we kind of didn’t separate it yeah we
left it in the bag and disposal on the
diagram is landfill and as you know
we’re all obsessed with keeping stuff
out of landfill but I’m kind of um I’m
conflicted because I’m not sure it’s so
much better to burn it although we make
a tiny bit of electricity out of burning
it so the doom and gloom that I’ve just
presented to you actually means that
there are lots of opportunities for
fantastic
things to happen and so I’m going to
tell you about some of the things that
I’ve done in the city over the last
couple of years to facilitate reuse and
i think that the saddest thing about
recycling is that we’re just not very
good at it and we’ve got bins and
awareness campaigns and facilities and
tips and all sorts of systems so that we
recycle in everyone’s obsessed with
recycling but we’re not even very good
at it only forty-five percent of plastic
bottles get recycled in the UK and then
of course lots of people are lazy or
disrespectful or don’t know any better
or have other issues which means that
they do not get their discarded staff to
the right place and so in 2014 there
were nine hundred thousand fly-tipping
incidences around the UK just in London
alone it caused some 25 million pounds
every year just to mop up fly-tipping
and this is why it’s been a fabulous
thing for me over the last seven years
to be able to build up a really
flourishing reuse network on the
internet and I did that with hundreds
and hundreds of other volunteers all
around the UK and basically we just want
it to be easier for people to not throw
things in the bin and to not fly tip
them and to be able to pass them on
locally so that other people can use
them and so there’s a Freegal is how 2.6
million people do that around the UK
it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to be
part of and it’s not just about
preventing waste because reuse is
actually a social activity so you get to
meet people and you can help people who
may not have enough money to buy the
things that they need so what gets free
galled just really ordinary stuff
toasters sofas clothes food anything
that’s legal and you’ll see on the chart
there that ten percent of what gets free
gordas DIY but actually in the real
world about around thirty three percent
of all waste is from the construction
industry and so in 2012
I was absolutely thrilled to become part
of a project at the University of
Brighton I was invited by local
architect Duncan Baker Brown who wanted
to involve lots of people in the city to
construct a sustainable building to try
and avoid some of these big impacts that
the construction industry has and so
Duncan and I came up with the idea of
building this house he designed out of
waste and we’re going to look at in a
minute and there it is and it’s actually
five hundred meters from where we’re all
we are right now it’s cladding carpet
tiles that have been flipped onto their
back 400,000 tons of carpet goes to
landfill every single year in the UK it
is actually recyclable most carpet by
the way is made out of plastic but we
don’t have collection points for it to
be recycled so we were highlighting
issues like that in the waste house and
we use normal construction materials and
we also use lots of ubiquitous things
that everybody has in their house which
actually you can’t recycle and they kind
of we have them in volume in lofts and
garages everywhere things like video
we also use normal construction
materials like concrete blocks and
timber and I it was my job to sourcing
materials for the project and we
actually got 25 tons more stuff than we
actually needed because stuff just came
out of the woodwork excuse the pun and
in fact we got brand-new plywood from
Brazil which was going to go straight to
be recycled when it arrived here because
it was slightly damaged and what the
waste house done really is just exposed
all sorts of ways that you can’t imagine
even goes on so why would why would we
use toothbrushes well we created really
deep interior walls that we could fill
with stuff and test them to see if
they’d be good insulation and the thing
about toothbrushes is their kind of
usually made from four different types
of plastic and so they’re just
unrecyclable and guess how many we make
every year this will shock you who wants
to have a guess how many manufacturer
and the world every year anyone 35
billion yeah so as it turns out why
would we need to make that many
toothbrushes when you know over five
billion people don’t even have enough
money to buy a toothbrush and so they’re
all mainly coming to the west well
actually we just make them disposable
for single-use and we give them out on
aeroplanes willy-nilly and in all sorts
of places and so on your left is what
20,000 toothbrushes look like and they
came from gatwick airport and a little
company collected them for us in a
couple of days easy-peasy and they paid
for them to be bought to astound here in
Brighton because that was cheaper than
what they paid for them to be disposed
of normally and we also use some a
couple of ton of denim jean legs and
like he knew that when you buy buy a
pair of shorts that they probably
started life as a pair of jeans but
there is a factory up in Yorkshire that
imports 20 tons of denim jeans every
single year and just drops the legs off
and refashioned them into shorts I mean
we are bonkers right we’re just totally
bonkers and I I kind of helped them to
when landfill tax increased and they
didn’t want to send it to landfill
anymore oh my help them redistribute it
and as a thank-you they sent me two tons
of denim jean legs so that’s why they’re
in there but anyway it doesn’t look like
you know ATP or a hippie tea tree house
you know it’s a beautifully finished
property that passes all building
regulations has won several Royal
Institute of British Architects Awards
so it is a beacon of sustainability
we’ve created no waste when we built it
I could have speed up because my timings
way out here when when I was working on
the waist house I used to load meetings
at the council I was absolutely
horrified because there would be skips
outside all the buildings full of
reusable stuff so I suggested to them
that they could be a lot more
resourceful and not call waste
management sir
but get me in to redistribute the stuff
that they have that they no longer need
why they have so much stuff they no
longer need is because they’re going
paperless so they get rid of hundreds of
filing cabinets and all the gizmos and
gadgets that go with paper and they’re
modernizing their space and it’s not
glamorous it’s very messy it’s really
dull boring stuff and I I had one of the
fun parts of the job is working with the
staff and dealing with human behavior
and there’s an awful lot of decluttering
that goes on and you know I’m faced with
this every minute of every day at the
moment because right now I’m clearing
this building down on hope seafront and
today is the last is the day that the
last staff member moves out of this
building and I’m not there and there’s
just going to be all sorts of chaos but
if there’s one thing I know there’s a
whole pile of stuff that we really don’t
need to manufacture anymore and one of
them would be ring binders so I’ve got
6,000 of them if anybody needs one I can
supply we the whole of the UK for the
next 10 years we don’t need to make coat
hangers anymore either or paper clips
but where we can’t get things reused I
try to work with local artists and
designers and clever people to repurpose
stuff into upcycled it and we fitted out
the whole interior of silo a zero-waste
restaurant a few blocks away and then
stuff like this plastic accessory
students have made prototype new
materials and beautiful designer chairs
but the best thing about reuse is I just
get to meet lots of lovely people in the
city and not just the hipsters I get to
meet lovely old people like this and the
great thing about the council being so
innovative in letting me redistribute
their unwanted stuff is that it creates
so much goodwill with the people in the
city and then I get too many people like
Felix who think it’s completely normal
and reasonable to pick up a to draw
metal filing cabinet on a BMX bike god
bless him and he texted me when he got
home and it was all uphill
and my favorite charity shop in Shoreham
who naturally collects all the furniture
in a purple hearse but hey it’s it is a
rare olive laughs it’s a lot of hard
work but it’s incredibly rewarding so
I’m just going to appeal to all of you
to find your inner resource god s to not
treasure planet and to rethink your
relationship with stuff because it
really does matter we’ve only got one
planet and we can’t recycle it so please
don’t trash it thank you [Applause]