Rethinking The World's Waste: Circular Economy | Climate For Change: Closing The Loop | Ep 1/2

a world choking on waste and running out of resources something has to change how can we design an economy where we don't waste all these resources meet the people grabbing opportunities around the world in a new way of doing business where nothing goes to waste the circular economy will change how we use everyday products and our urban landscape it could bring massive environmental and financial benefits this is just the beginning of really being able to solve a global problem but is the world ready [Music] [Music] at one of the world's largest landfills near jakarta admiral is one of thousands scratching out a living [Music] he often gets injured by broken glass and nails and there's an even bigger danger but should they live with it and should the world this is the linear approach to consumption produce use dispose but it's not really working anymore not for the environment and not for the economy half a world away an influential think tank is promoting a more circular approach we extract more resources from our planet than our planet can replenish so we need 1.6 earths to be able to feed all of us but also to provide resources and that's the problem we don't have 1.6 earths we have one planet earth almost everything we make in this economy is designed for a throwaway culture almost everything gets either burned dumped or landfilled and not only are we throwing away a lot of resources but we waste also a lot of money the foundation estimates the world economy would benefit by trillions of dollars if we changed our relationship with resources and products the daily items we take for granted would stay in circulation for much longer even indefinitely either as the same thing or repurposed into something else and so the circular economy is based on three key principles design our waste and pollution keep materials in use and regenerate natural systems and when you apply these principles there's an opportunity to capture this multi-trillion economic opportunity while also tackling some of the biggest challenges that we face today around climate change biodiversity loss and plastic pollution back in indonesia a team is tackling plastic pollution head-on it's a notorious waste problem that also has largely untapped economic potential jazlan and his crew go out once a week to collect plastic from the coastline they've collected almost 100 tons just in the past year so it's during moonsoon in the north side of bintan they get plastic pollution a lot from the ocean from south china sea but in the east side of bintan you might see plastic west from the local to be honest some of the people they still do purposely they throw it into the sea the rubbish [Music] they also work in the local mangrove forests where the plastic impacts the ecosystem for marine life and they visit a protected marine area of bintan reefs previously damaged by dynamite fishing now have to contend with fishing nets and other plastic i want to scream actually if it's i see river ocean is full of plastic i think why the people don't care about this why do people use ocean like huge trust bank for them the cleaner is part of a venture that's the brainchild of an entrepreneur who spent his life between asia and the uk [Music] so my background in singapore really is on the finance side i think it's fair to be said that i can be described as an accidental environmentalist my wife and i were on holiday in the south andaman sea and it was absolutely stunning now to our shock and horror what happened overnight was the combination of a high tide a storm and a garbage patch and essentially what had happened was the beach was so covered in plastic the next morning that you couldn't even walk on it it's really shocking and for us it just kicked us into action we we knew we couldn't change the world but we could come back to singapore and we could start to try and make a difference he's using his financial savvy to get the attention of backers with deep pockets we work with companies to allow them to offset their plastic footprint by investing in ocean cleanup and waste management infrastructure projects overseas in hotspots and that generates the capital we need to employ people on fair wages stop plastic entering the ocean and remove plastic from the ocean we are targeted to remove 10 million kilos of plastic from the ocean by 2025 across the seven worst plastic polluting countries all of which are either here in southeast asia or in south asia in the world of tomorrow plastics will certainly call the tune [Music] plastic is a relatively recent invention derived from oil it's undeniable usefulness has helped it reach every corner of our lives and so the amount of plastic has exploded by 2050 if nothing changes there'll be more plastic in the ocean than fish plastic micro particles are being found in our drinking water air and food it's estimated the average person could be eating a credit card worth of plastic every week [Music] the plastic tom's team retrieves currently goes to a so-called sanitary landfill but he's now got investors to help build a new recovery facility it will collect plastic before it reaches the ocean and send it for recycling i truly believe that society can change and evolve into a more circular economy it has to start with the waste management infrastructure if we don't have that in place we just cannot do it another project is a floating device to retrieve plastic from rivers which are the main source of plastic in the ocean we're actually working at the moment to get the first system installed in either vietnam or thailand as we speak so big things are coming but plastic is still being produced in huge amounts and it's still cheaper for most manufacturers to use so-called virgin plastic than try to recycle [Music] a u.s company thinks its technology might be the answer in a small town in indiana the founder is inspecting a brand new plant that's just weeks away from full operation they're actually from a local company are they right across the highway trim i spent 30 years in the energy industry and what brought me to the moment of wanting to found brightmark was a realization in the energy industry of the environmental impact of what we do what i'm feeling is an incredible sense of excitement because this is just the beginning of really being able to solve a global problem and here we are right at the end of construction i'm really excited this is claimed to be the largest plastic renewal facility in the world what's different about this plant is that it can take all types of plastics mixed together that has traditionally been either too difficult or too expensive the plastic is shredded and turned into millions of pellets so this is a really dense material that's ready to turn into new plastics and other useful products the pellets are fed into a huge chamber called a pyrolyzer pyrolysis heats plastic to more than 300 degrees with no oxygen which means no toxins are created the extreme heat turns the plastic molecules into gas that is then called to create new byproducts it creates a vapor which is turned into basically very pure form of crude oil and a gas like what we would get out of the ground but we don't pull it out of the ground the end product can be used for fuel or wax but is also ready to be turned back into plastic right away so yeah why don't we walk over there real quick and grab you a delicious handful of this visiting from singapore is shakil rachman the head of operations in asia i come from a renewable energy background i have been developing renewable energy plants for years this is the next step circularity taking something and returning it to its original purpose i view this plant as very critical in the asia-pacific project development process because people from that region will want to come and see the plant see it operating touch and feel so to speak shaquille wants to see similar plants across asia the first might be ready by 2025. we view the asian market as really the market for growth because that's where most of the people are currently the plastic that's in that region they expect by 20 30 almost 140 million tons of plastic to be consumed their per annum which is huge plants like this now have a chance at success because manufacturers and policy makers see the value that's been lost by throwing away plastic and the technology is reaching a large enough scale to make a difference so with long-term viable economics it absolutely makes circularity possible so we don't think of sustainability as just the environment or just economics we think they work together and that's how you solve these problems [Music] but despite technological advances experts say the challenges with plastic are still serious the problem of plastic pollution goes beyond beach cleanups it goes beyond recycling we need to look at it from a system level perspective and really go to the source and think about how do we design plastics so that they never become waste but what about replacing plastic all together that's the focus of other innovators in asia and beyond [Music] it's earth day the perfect time to try something new to fight plastic waste and change how business is done david christian is trying to get eateries in jakarta to switch to non-plastic straws made from rice he's offering a month's supply for free so indonesia consuming about 93 million plastic straws every day so that's uh when we put it together that's equal to about 16 000 kilometers and that's actually like the line can be from jakarta to mexico we are targeting this year about 5 000 uh food stalls uh to be joining our programs and hopefully by then we can replace about one million uh plastic throws so before i started ifuenko i was actually living in canada for around four years and then when i arrived to jakarta i can actually really feel the difference i was quite shocked because of the environments the pollution here that we have in jakarta he's a serial entrepreneur now focused on circularity with projects across the country in the thousand islands off the north coast of java a small revolution is taking place david has hired seaweed farmers like jamhoudin and abdul rasheed to harvest the crop for him seaweed has become one of the fastest growing sectors of food production in the world and this seaweed will be eaten too but with a twist once it's harvested the seaweed is dried it's then sent off to be turned into tableware for restaurants which can later be composted or eaten back in jakarta the items are already in use cups made from the seaweed are edible but kovid 19 has hit demand and david knows there's a long road ahead for him and his small team [Music] evoenco is actually my first business right so everything is a challenge for me but i think one of the biggest challenges that i face now is to educate people and raising awareness of the environment i don't think that i will ever stop like doing what i'm doing right now because i believe that what i'm doing is a very important in the world yet another of his ventures is providing restaurants with biodegradable packaging but some argue that single-use items even if not made of plastic are still a problem because of the sheer scale of our throwaway culture runs a singapore-based company that thinks the real economic solution lies in getting consumers to adopt reusable food containers this would avoid tons of plastic and other waste so the opportunity for packaging alone is that if we can replace about 20 percent of single-use packaging become reusable packaging then that market is about 10 billion dollars for every usage that you use backpack we reduce 90 percent of co2 emission compared to normal use packaging so our reusable items are our box that can be used at least 500 times in our reusable cups from stainless steel can be used at least 1 000 times the selling point for restaurants is that the containers are free when i just joined backpack we have about 70 locations and after that after six months we are now having more than double the numbers all the main food delivery services in singapore are now on board with the venture consumers pay a monthly fee and can drop off the containers at any participating outlet ling's move into the circular economy came after a variety of jobs including helping build golf courses in vietnam i started to see that the trees were cutting off to clear the sides to make the golf courses and at that moment i was aware by how beautiful the sight wouldn't be but then they were really sad to see the tree was cut down and then i told my boss like i don't know if i can do it anymore and he told me what ling if you don't do it somebody else won't do it for her and i told him but i don't want to be part of this broken system [Music] ling launched a reusable cup venture in vietnam but is now focusing on bear pack in singapore and beyond [Music] the startup is expanding overseas starting with france where ling's colleague nicola handles the operation after a few months it's already growing faster than in singapore most of my job is reaching out to two vendors and growing the network at home what's usually they accept right away because they have they don't have anything to risk working with singapore i think is great it's very insightful for for the paris team it helps to grow our service already here and we're going faster thanks to that the french government is pressuring delivery platforms to reduce waste so the timing is right for a move towards more circularity i'm passionate about waste reduction so i would not imagine myself working in any other project i've worked in charities in the past and now after working in charities i'm convinced that social enterprises are the key because you need to have to make money in order to to make your business that your impact sustainable it's very promising for the future and and i think we can increase this impact in the next few months and years we got from the vendors and the users are really good they like it nice and classy it fits the french area my hope and my vision on backpack is not only serving the takeaway and food delivery it is our starter what i want to see is i don't want to see a single use plastic floating around the earth anymore but while the packaging around food gets a lot of attention what about the food itself it turns out food production has a huge impact on the environment but the circular economy might provide an answer [Music] food it sustains us but the way we make it and waste it is causing problems on a massive scale and about one third of all food produced never makes it to consumers decomposing food in landfills gives off methane a powerful greenhouse gas in fact if overall food wastage was a country it would be responsible for the third largest emissions in the world in new zealand's largest city some people are trying to make a difference at a supermarket staff are getting ready to open for the day henry witihira puts out new bread to replace older loaves bread is new zealand's most wasted food product with more than 20 million loaves thrown away each year one of us but these loaves are going to take on a new life donald shepherd is taking the bread now converted into croutons an hour outside auckland it's a beautiful day and i love this drive up north he's part of a new collective formed to address the country's food waste by creating new products for people to eat and drink so i grew up on a dairy farm here in new zealand and have been involved in food production which historically has been very linear you grow it you produce it you sell it and then some of it ends up in in landfill or waste and then i had the opportunity to travel overseas and got really inspired by working with organizations in the uk that kind of opened my eyes up to the global challenge that is food going to waste [Applause] the destination is a brewery where the bread is going to be turned into beer the brewing process is just the same process as standard brewing however at citizen what we do is we replace 25 of the malt with a processed crouton bread everyone that has tried it really like the beer they love the story behind it with it being recycled and reducing food to landfill and all the bars and restaurants that sell it sell really well but the story doesn't end here the beer making process creates spent grey it would normally go to landfill or become animal feed always makes me hungry but donald has other plans for it we've just finished the brew so we've got a van full of spent grains and the next step is to mill that into a spent green flower [Music] andrew how are you i'm good thank you how are you excellent back in auckland donald delivers the flower to a colleague at a bakery where it will be turned into artisan bread it's been really interesting it's been a difficult bread to make to be perfectly honest to start with but people have got their head around the concept there are a lot of people who really take a shine to this bread and the fact that we are doing that circular economy type process it has been really well received oh fantastic there we go it smells delicious oh look at that so the beauty of this batch of citizen baked bread is that whatever doesn't sell tomorrow will go back up to the brewery to begin the beer making process again so we go from bread to beer to bread to beer to bread to bear round and round we [Music] the go is now moving on to new zealand's other highly wasted foods fruit and vegetables to create sauces and it's launching a drink from grape skins left over in the country's sizable wine industry they'll be sold at the country's largest supermarket chain alongside the beer which is now back where it began its journey as bread so we're pretty excited we see this as more than just new zealand we really see the export potential of this and when we're starting to talk export you're talking about scale and if you're talking about scale that means a serious impact on reducing edible food that's currently going to waste in singapore a new startup is also tapping into the sector known as food rescue design is the one you don't really want to sell anymore former law student turned social entrepreneur preston wong is at a warehouse picking up food that's about to expire so you can see here we have today oh like yogurts and not just yogurts but also other dairy products like cheeses the retrieved goods are packed for resale i think most people might have heard of food waste but they might not know the eventual consequences of it on singapore in 2019 show that actually more than 700 million kilograms of food had been wasted our recycling rates are very low at about 18 i actually witnessed my family clearing out the refrigerator of expiring but still consumable food items and i thought to myself whether it was possible to redistribute them away using a platform preston and his co-founder kenneth developed an e-commerce platform that offers surplus food at a discounted price [Music] you could arrange for delivery or a pickup at our concept store hi rick okay yeah let me check on your order so our target audience is actually not beneficiaries or the needy so treacher functions as a business model as a business platform that will redistribute and connect businesses that have access food to consumers at a lower price preston does deliveries in his spare time it helps him meet customers and gather feedback not just like delivery of settlement so you can actually get it delivered to you we currently have over 25 000 users in our community and we have over 30 businesses that are on board right now when i was faced with a choice between going down the normal path of perhaps a professional career in law accountancy or finance i was also thinking that would i actually be better off creating a niche for myself in this area that perhaps nobody has touched so i ventured into the unventured into a brand new territory i felt that that was the path for me [Music] back in new zealand another entrepreneur is tackling food that can't be rescued for human use ash andrew fisher runs a plant that turns commercial food waste into animal feed for the country's massive agricultural sector even if we built like an overhead gantry we lift it lifted and lifted out of components new zealand is a food basket that produces enough to feed many times its population three percent of waste is normal for a factory and when you've got the scale of new zealand it's actually quite a lot of food waste so our products might be starter run end of run oversized undersized products the salt hasn't come in the chocolate stopped pouring on it before this facility was set up the surplus food was thrown away new zealand has more than 100 landfills and they're a cheap way to dispose of surplus material so the problem we've got is that 30 to 36 of what goes into a landfill is actually food waste we're losing that opportunity to landfill and that's you know it's a huge economic element that can be reused the facility is a big achievement for a former army engineer [Music] my engineering site's about infrastructure clean water doing things and i guess challenging myself as the engineering mind i guess how can you do things better the pulverized biscuits bread and other food is ready for the next chapter in this food story at a dairy farm south of auckland the cows know its feeding time the feed from andrew's facility has been mixed in with grass and maize under the supervision of nutritionists it currently accounts for only a small percentage of animal feed in new zealand but it has the potential to grow i've been contract morgan on this farm for 20 years and we've just added this eco stock food into their diet there's been a waiting list to get into it it's very good feed high in energy carbohydrate and at a good price the supplement is high in energy which produces more milk so it'll be interesting to see over the next couple of months whether the cows increase milk production but andrew has much bigger ambitions than animal feed and milk production back at his processing plant he has a new obsession it's a pilot-sized anaerobic digester it takes food and converts it into other products including energy and for andrew it's the next logical step to harness the massive streams of food waste in this process biomass like food waste goes into a sealed tank it's fed into a digester or reactor where microorganisms spend days breaking it down this gives off a methane rich biogas that can generate heat and power the leftover material is called digestate and is full of nutrients making it a good fertilizer everyone can talk about you know the big picture and everything else but everything starts that first step that first commitment yeah puts a big smile on my face near the north island's geothermal heartland the future is taking shape in the countryside andrew is at the site of the country's first commercial scale anaerobic digester he calls the venture eco gas this is the foundation to the tanks this tank will be nearly 13 meters high the plant will handle about 100 thousand tons a year representing up to ten percent of new zealand's organic waste it will provide heating and co2 for local tomato greenhouses fertilizer for local farms and biogas that can be supplied to the natural gas grid for me this is 10 years in the uh the process 12 months from now this can be complete and actually doing what uh the dream had been the circular economy needs to have the same depth or width all the way around you need to create something as big to cope with the scale of what's actually generated and i think people understand the scale of waste and the need for infrastructure the problem can only be solved by putting in this appropriate sized infrastructure andrew already has a partner who believes in his ambitious move into circularity yeah so the health and safety measures you put in place here at a waste facility back in auckland the city council's head of waste is checking on operations mixed in with the general rubbish heading for the landfill is food attracting hungry scavengers that's all about to change we've been working to get a contract to divert our food scraps for quite some time and now is the time to actually put that into action and we've got an amazing contract with eco gas to do that uh working with andrew has been really amazing in my mind he's a bit of a legend his passion for that area is just enormous it's a 20-year deal starting in 2022 to divert food scraps from more than half a million households this is the future for auckland in terms of food scraps so every urban household will get one of these you put your food scraps in and you put it on the curbside and we will come and collect it every week this then goes to repair for eco-gas to process [Music] back at the site andrew sees the plant as the first of more than 20 nationwide we've got an opportunity to actually create local energy centres local fertiliser production and local employment and the opportunity to turn into a good business at scale to give you know economic outcomes you know it's why i'm here similar technology is already well established in singapore some think it's the answer to food waste others though are looking beyond traditional food there's an alternative that would avoid waste and unlock a market worth billions [Music] yeah okay so we're going to watch this very short video okay on food waste [Music] at a primary school in singapore the future of food waste might already be here while some countries are just starting down this road the city has aerobic digesters of all sizes in schools food courts and businesses this small one can handle five kilograms of food a day the food waste is digested by microorganisms within just 24 hours it decomposes and is converted to dry organic fertilizer [Music] the investor behind many of these machines only got into waste management two years ago at that time my instinct told me sustainability is the future i vision an opportunity to create a sustainable business that will be last perpetual [Music] with san sanfran's background in digital tracking it's no surprise he's adding data trackers to his digesters like this one which can handle 500 kilograms of waste a day [Music] load cells weigh the food and radio frequency identification tracks its journey from food stalls to digester i think we are the first in the industry to equip the digester with a computer system and we also able to deploy some ai technology analysis to analyze the food waste generated on a money basis [Music] it's a growing market because singapore still incinerates hundreds of thousands of tons of food waste a year so if we keep going on this just imagine how many incinerator we have to build in singapore and singapore we are only a very tiny city what's not tiny is the company's largest digester which can handle one ton of waste daily and there are big plans for the china market and at home in singapore i hope to see one day our smart digester will be in each hdb household is become part of their kitchen appliances this will happen when the day of this digester course come down tremendously but is dealing with surplus food the only answer can we use technology to produce as much animal protein as we need made to order without waste in a singapore restaurant there's a recent addition to the menu this is chicken but not as we know it it's cultivated meat it was launched to fanfare in late 2020 with singapore the first country in the world to approve its sale singapore is also home to startups creating plant-based alternatives but this chicken is real meat [Music] the exact technique is a secret but cultivated meat starts with cells from animal tissue fat cells and muscle cells are separated nutrients are added and one muscle cell can divide to produce billions of cells eventually new cell strands form and this tissue can then be layered back together to form meat [Music] the entrepreneur behind the new meat on sale in singapore is working remotely in hawaii away from his san francisco headquarters tetrick is convinced that the world's trillion-dollar meat industry is going to change cultivated meat aligns with the circular economy because you're only making what you want you don't have to have all the waste that normally comes from industrialized animal production you don't need to have the millions of acres of land either you don't need to have the billions of animals it's simply a more efficient process from the start to the end the benefits are economic the benefits are environmental and you know to some extent the benefits are also moral the need is pressing because the world's appetite for meat is growing along with a human population already heading towards 8 billion what happens when we have 10 billion do we eventually use 90 percent of the habitable land of this one planet the only one that we have to plant swimming cord that feed the animals wheat so what happens if we don't change it is instead of having a planet we have an animal farm josh's company is now supplying a second singapore restaurant a delivery platform is helping get the new meat to consumers at home it's still a pilot scheme but with big plans ahead it seems to be selling out so that's good but people definitely like chicken and rice the most and i still haven't tried the chicken and rice which is kind of frustrating because you're not on the ground in singapore you're in hawaii singapore is one of the most forward-thinking countries on the planet they're thinking about a world 30 years from now as opposed to the world today so as singapore becomes a hub for manufacturing then we look to other markets we look to indonesia we look to china we look to japan we can't ever forget in building out this company that more meat is being consumed in asia than anywhere else high-tech farms are planned where chicken and eventually pork beef and seafood will be cultivated in huge bioreactors we can't just build them all tomorrow but ultimately they will be the the infrastructure for how the world ends up consuming meat this is infrastructure that's similar to building the infrastructure out for the electric car economy it doesn't exist today we've got to build it from scratch and we all feel a real urgency of doing it as fast as we can today and not and not waiting josh bought patents for the cultivated meat developed by a dutch inventor who didn't live to see the results [Music] but in the netherlands willem van elen's daughter is keeping his legacy alive when josh tetrick called me what actually happened is that george turkic started to explain cultivated me to me and then i said hey wait a minute you're not going to tell me what cultivated meat is i'm going to tell you my father was in a japanese prison of war camp and had been extremely hungry for years and years and years so food was top of his mind and after the war he started medical school in amsterdam and he was brought into a lab space where they were keeping a piece of tissue alive all of his fellow students saw this as something very interesting medically interesting whereas he immediately thought of it as food because he had been so hungry in indonesia and in this prison of war camp that he had a food complex as he called it himself so he would see everything as a possible thing to eat hunger was an atrocity to him because he had seen what hunger does to people [Music] ira is an informal advisor to josh's company but has her own mission she's at a dairy farm outside amsterdam the farmer leon monan is in the running to host the first farm where cultivated meat will replace meat from animals and while josh plans large new facilities ira wants dutch cultivated meat to adapt existing infrastructure on most farms you already have barns and those are pretty big barns you could put in bioreactors in a barn instead of animals and viruses done in scotland ira is working on a pilot project and hopes to see the first cultivated meat farm operational by 2025. [Music] i think it would make me a very happy trooper to be driving around the countryside in the future we're growing cells instead of animals that we bring to slaughter and growing animals that are not very good for our environment my father would be right now very happy about what is going on but also frustrated because of course for him it should be in supermarkets all over the world already but he would love somebody like josh he would love to see what's happening in singapore and he would love seeing me talking to farmers and proving his idea that cultivated meat is perfect for farmers so the circular economy is starting to take shape but how fast will change happen the world has finally realized that we have a really big problem we know we can't keep doing the same things the same way innovators will lead the way to circularity and so we need to change the way we make money we need to change our business models if we can't make money out of it it's going to be very difficult to protect our planet it's going to require a lot of work and a lot of investment so we have our work cut out for us and it's not something that is left for a futuristic future no it's here it's now it's possible circular economy allows us to create a livable breathing thriving planet without wasting it up i truly believe that society can change and evolve into a more circular economy and my hope is that we can do it quickly and effectively [Music] you

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 632,357

Keywords: CNA, CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, Asian perspectives, inhouse, full documentary, documentary, narrated, sustainability, Climate For Change: Closing The Loop, climate change, circular economy, waste, environment, zero waste, waste management, food waste, circularity, throwaway culture, plastic pollution, plastic, barePack, cultivated meat, lab-grown

Id: 0EfsD7xNLIo

Length: 47min 48sec (2868 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021