I will never ever forget the feeling I felt as I saw the sea
and set foot on the boat for the first time.
And to that four-year-old kid,
it was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine.
I just felt, you know, from that age,
I would absolutely love one day, somehow, to sail around the world.
When you set off on those journeys,
you know, you take with you everything you need for your survival.
What you have is all you have.
You have to manage what you have
down to the last drop of diesel, the last packet of food.
It's absolutely essential, else you won't make it.
And I suddenly realized, "But why is our world any different?"
You know, we have finite resources,
available to us once in the history of humanity.
You know, metals, plastics, fertilizers.
We're digging all this stuff out of the ground, and we're using it up.
How can that work in the long-term?
Surely there was a different way we could use resources globally
that used them and not used them up.
That was the question I had in my head,
and it took me a long time to get to a place
where I realized there is a different way the economy can run,
there is a different way we can use stuff, use materials.
And that would be the circular economy.
The way the economy functions predominantely today is very extractive.
It's linear.
We take something out of the ground, we make something out of it,
and at the end of the life of that product, we throw it away.
No matter how efficient you are
with the materials you feed into that system,
even if you make that product
using a little bit less energy and a little bit less material,
you're still going to run out in the end.
If you turn that on its head and look at a circular model,
whereby when you design a product,
you take a material out of the ground, or you take recycle material, ideally,
you feed that into the product,
but you design the products
so you can get the materials back out by design, from the outset.
You design out waste and pollution.
Why would you ever create either in a world with finite resources?
It's about the design brief.
Today, if you buy a washing machine,
you pay tax when you buy it, you own all the materials within it,
and then when it breaks, as they inevitably do,
you pay tax again, landfill tax.
Within a circular system, all that changes.
You don't own your machine, you pay per wash.
It would be looked after by the manufacturer of the machine,
and they would make sure
that once that machine comes to the end of its life,
they take it in, they know what sits within it,
and they can recover the materials from it.
So you end up with a circular system by design.
We've studied at great length the numbers behind that,
you know, the economics,
and it's much cheaper.
It's 12 US cents versus 27 US cents per wash
to have that circular machine.
We would live within a system that works.
We would not be producing waste.
We would have a better service.
We would have better access to technology.
From all the studies we've done,
because those manufacturers aren't buying all the materials,
selling them on,
we would get a better price,
because they would be guaranteed their flow of materials
going back into the system.
I'm hugely optimistic
because when you look at the numbers,
when you look at the economics behind this,
it makes sense to switch to a circular economy.
There's more value in a circular economy than in a linear economy.
There's absolutely a cost in the transition for a big organization,
but maybe you need to ask yourself another question:
What's the risk in linear?
Because to me, that's a no-brainer.
There's a big risk in linear.
It simply cannot be the future, based on pure economics.
So, actually, where do you put your time?
Where do you put your effort?
Let's work out what circular really looks like
and try and paint that circular tapestry as best as we possibly can.
Subtitles by Maurício Kakuei Tanaka Review by Jenny Lam-Chowdhury