How do we deal with our crap?
We are creating a footprint of waste wherever we are – we’ve done it since the Stone Age and modern living means we produce more waste than ever before. It used to be out of sight out of mind, off to landfill, burned, just not visible – however we now need to change tack and see our waste as value, as resources.
That’s the belief of Dr Adam Read Chief Sustainability Officer from Suez. We started by looking at rubbish or waste, why don’t we care enough about it?
“I think historically waste you know, it was the it was leftovers. It was discards. It was it was residue. And if you could get rid of it cheaply, then you didn’t really have to worry about it. And I think what’s what’s happened is, you know, from the 70s on which we started to recognise that uncontrolled landfills weren’t good for the environment. Then we learned about, you know, climate change and carbon emissions. Then recycling started to become a bit of a thing.
“Then you started to go, well, how do we handle this? What do we need to do differently? And then you recognise that there’s more cost. And I think that’s why industries’ interest over the last ten years is more, because handling waste, or shall we say, resources, better takes a bit of time and effort.”
Is terminology is a factor here, I grew up with pollution younger people use the term climate change, has that muddied the waters when it comes to the way waste is seen? Adam believes partly yes.
I think pollution meant something to everybody. Yeah. whether it was polluting watercourses or the land or the air, I think climate change is a little bit of a wishy washy commentary. It kind of hides the facts, and I think it doesn’t localise it in a way that many people would recognise from historical pollution issues.
“I think society and I mean business and people, have kind of had a bit of a disconnect with the realities of their decisions. And I think modern resource management, modern environmental protection is kind of about reintroducing public and societal responsibility. And that could be quite difficult.
“So do you mean buying stuff is a problem? You’re choosing not to put it in the right bin is a problem when actually that’s not a problem on your doorstep. The impact isn’t immediate. It’s a year away. It’s a thousand miles away and therefore it’s not really a problem at all, is it?
“I think the disconnect is an obvious issue.”
But things are changing and with our green revolution we need to think about circularity from the start. How will be build EVs so they can be recycled? Can we extract more materials so we don’t need to dig up fresh resources? Adam told me the waste sector had learned lessons from past mistakes.
“We let packaging proliferate and evolve and materials change, there’s a niche that we’ve recognised that with EVs and the blades from the renewable turbines and everything else that’s coming. We’ve now learned that you need to innovate collaboratively in the value chain to have a solution ready to go that is both commercially viable – and can operate at the kind of scale that these materials are going to require. That didn’t happen with the packaging where we were playing catch up.
We handle lots of segregated material. We handle niche materials and we put them back into secondary, secondary, tertiary use reuse and repair. This is the future of our sector is going material specific and therefore the circular economy that loop that you talk about isn’t one loop. It’s a cobalt loop. It’s a it’s a copper loop. It’s an organic loop. And actually, the job of a businesses like mine is to innovate and evolve, to be able to provide all of those loops so that very few materials end up requiring ultimate disposal or end of life treatment. And that’s the goal of the sector.
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