Circular transformation lessons from London

Visual summary

This video shows three speakers at an event held by the Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre (CEBIC).

The three speakers are:

• Matt Genever, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Sustainability Victoria
• Jodie Bricout, Circular Economy Expert, Aurecon
• Wayne Hubbard, Chief Executive Officer, ReLondon.

Matt introduces the session and then hands over to Jodie and Wayne for a discussion.

Text

Matt: Hello, welcome. So fabulous to have you here in our space at 321 Exhibition St. And I believe according to the team, there's something like 150 to 200 people joining us online today, which is absolutely fantastic.

My name is Matt Genever, I'm the Interim CEO of Sustainability Victoria. For those of you that don't know us, Sustainability Victoria is an agency of the Victorian government. Our purpose is to accelerate Victoria's transition to be a clean, circular, climate resilient state. We do that in many, many ways. We work across industry, we work across behaviour change and education, we work across community action and have many different programs. And in fact, at the moment in the circular economy space, we probably have more than 300 different projects happening across the state. The purpose of today isn't for me to give you the long corporate spiel about who we are. But I do invite you, if you're not that familiar with this, please check out the SV website, have a look at the many things that we're that we're doing and hopefully some of that inspires you in terms of what you're doing.

About 15 months ago, we used to be in a building around the corner at Lonsdale Street. In fact, I've seen many faces here, particularly people up the back that are previous SV employees that know that space very well. About 15 months ago, we made the decision to move here and the reason was so that we could have events like this, so we could bring people together both in person and online and really foster these very important conversations about zero net emissions and about circular economy. So, it's wonderful to see the space in action and what a glorious Melbourne day to be to be in person. And in terms of the space, I do want to acknowledge that this space is on Aboriginal land. I want to pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to the Traditional Custodians of where our online audience might be joining us from hopefully all over Australia. So, please allow me to pass on that Acknowledgement and pay my respects.

The really important conversation that we're here for today is part of one of the programs that we run called the Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre, or CEBIC as it's lovingly referred to. We're very fortunate to be able to deliver that on behalf of the Victorian Government. CEBIC was set up to be to be a melting pot, to be the place where government, industry research bodies, universities and think tanks come together to start exploring and help solve some of the challenges associated with circular economy. But equally, to realise the many opportunities that exist in in the circular economy. And that's really the reason we're here today, to have that conversation.

We've got a very special guest who I'll introduce in a minute. But before I do that, I did just want to acknowledge and thank Jodie Bricout from Aurecon, who's the brainchild behind getting Wayne here for what has been a whirlwind speaking tour. And I think if you're charging by the hour, Wayne, you'd be a millionaire. He's been to all sorts of conferences and events and we're really lucky to have him here today.

And so, before I do my actual job, which is to introduce Wayne, I better do some housekeeping. I've got some notes, so I don't get it wrong. Firstly, I do want to say that we have a photographer here. The photographer will be taking photos and you can imagine those photos will pop up on LinkedIn and social media as we like to promote these types of things. If you have any objections to that, please and just grab one of the team or tell the photographer and we’ll make sure that we're not inadvertently exposing you. Maybe you're supposed to be at work and you're wagging or something like that. We don't want to get you in trouble. Bathrooms are out towards the entranceway and around the back of the lifts. If you get stuck or get lost, Kim at the front desk will be able to support you equally. If you need to come in and out and you haven't got a pass, I think level 12's probably unlocked but if it's not… Mark is nodding. Yes, great, so you're all good in that. You're lucky because last week we had a fire drill which means this week we won't have a fire drill. So, if you do happen to hear some sirens then take it that it's probably a real one and somebody will come with a red hat. They're not hard hats anymore they're really cool baseball caps. But somebody will come with a red cap that says warden on it and please follow them. They will escort you down the suitable fire exit. Hopefully that won't happen. So enough for me.

We're really fortunate to have Wayne Hubbard here joining us today for this important conversation. Wayne is the Chief Executive Officer of ReLondon, a partnership of the Mayor of London and London boroughs to transform the city into a leading, low carbon, circular economy. Wayne's mission is to transform the way London boroughs businesses, citizens create, consume and dispose of stuff, drastically reducing carbon emissions and protecting our future by enabling London to become circular sooner. This has meant one of the key issues being bringing circular economy statements into London's planning process, which is a really big achievement. Prior to this, Wayne was the Head of Waste Policy, the Greater London Authority, a trustee for the international development charity Waste Aid, and the Chartered Institute of Waste Management.

Facilitating our conversation today will be Jodie Bricout, the Circular Economy Leader from Aurecon. Is that right? Did I get that largely right? Fantastic. And we'll be talking about some of Wayne's expertise and experience and what's possible in terms of circular design models and building principles and hear about the challenges that that they present and obviously the opportunities that they can realise. So that's enough for me. I'm going to hand over, I think, to Jodie and we'll take it from there. Thank you.

Jodie: Thanks very much, Matt, and thanks everyone that's made it despite all the train problems this morning. I'm assuming you didn't all come by car. While Wayne takes a seat… So, yeah, Wayne has been run a little bit ragged this week and I think he's still talking to me, but I'm not completely sure.

Wayne: I’m still talking to absolutely everybody that's what's and tomorrow.

Jodie: he's got this little button on his back and he just talks. It's great, it's been amazing, hasn't it? We spoke to business leaders in Queensland, from CEBIC, we talked to people about the Olympics, we talked to people about the resources centre sector. We came here to the Ecologiq conference yesterday, which is another incredible initiative of the Victorian government, and talked to industry folk that are building the infrastructure of the future here. So, I think the conversation in Australia around circular economy has come a long way.

And because Wayne's been talking a lot, I'm just going to ask him questions in a really random order so we can throw him a little bit for this one. So, are you ready? Yeah, great.

I met Wayne in, we reckon about 2015. Yeah. I was working in France and leading at Northern France's circular economy program and you were leading London’s circular economy program and we were both part of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. At that stage, you were doing a really impressive, groundbreaking piece of work. Can you tell us about where you were back then and what had led you to that point, before we fast forward to now?

Wayne: Yeah. OK. So um, the, I guess the history of our journey is, my boss at that time, believe it or not, was Boris Johnson. I don't know why you laugh. I didn't say anything. He had the foresight to develop, or asked me amongst other people, to help develop a London Infrastructure Plan. And the London infrastructure plan was essentially a lobbying document to Treasury to lobby for capital funding, as London grew, to say we need this money for our transport system, etcetera, etcetera. And part of that was waste. So, he asked me to help the team to work up the estimates for waste facilities needed in London. So, the traditional way to do that would be to say, oh, you know, it's such and such one tonne per household. The city's grown by X number of households over this many years, we need this much waste arising. We need this much capacity or we've got this much capacity, we've got a deficit.

And what I said was, well, I've heard about this thing called the circular economy. There's going to be more reuse and recycling because at that time, that’s what I thought the circular economy meant. And we need less waste disposal. So, it is a more storage, more reuse facilities, which had the ironic effect of making the Mayor less interested in waste because we didn't need that much money to buy new waste facilities. So that was ironic, but one of the things we said we do in that document was develop a circular economy route map because that would give us a bit more time to understand what the circular economy was and what the implications might be for London.

And then the Greater London Authority and its agencies, the Transport for London, the Met Police etcetera would then develop their own circular procurement policies. So, we started down the route of trying to work out what a route map was. And I think, the people in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation cities and regions initiative at that time were all actually, I think almost by accident, all at the same time wanting to do this.

So London did the first one, first city in the world to produce a Circular Economy Route Map.

Jodie: He said that was such confidence. I'm really impressed. Definitely the first.

Wayne: Yeah, we were definitely the first. There's no question about that and no one here’s going to contradict me. I suspect so. But we did that by, and the methodology had already been developed by, the Danish business authority working with Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey and they developed this thing called the policy makers toolkit, or toolkit for policymakers, which was a very comprehensive but really drawn out, detailed methodology. And we employed that in a kind of light way, to develop our own route map.

And that essentially does what you know, what Matt just articulated, you work out your city’s focus areas. We worked out who our stakeholders were. We worked out what the opportunities were, in consultation with our stakeholders in those groups, in those industry groups, we worked out what the barriers were and then the net opportunities and they became actions. And one of the actions was to develop a route map, sorry, a circular economy statement requirement for the London Plan which so that that that that did follow through.

Jodie: Something I loved about the route map as well was that you did all this engagement with other parts of the economy. You know, your part in London's only one part of the systems change. Right. So, it wasn't just the government saying it’s going to do this, it was the construction industry saying we're going do this. And so, it was everyone actually playing a part. And the economic figures around the benefits of that as well, I thought were really powerful from that report.

Wayne: Oh yeah, everybody had their own number at that time, and it was usually a big number. And our number, I think it was 7 billion a year. The benefits from a circular £7 billion a year.

And now we've got, we've got more numbers, you know we've got numbers on jobs, so half a million extra new jobs by 2030. So, this is jobs rich and this is, you know it's a value to the economy. It is and also, as life continues and new problems arise, we see the circular economy having applications to those new problems. So, shortened supply chains means more resilient businesses able to defend yourself from supply chain geopolitical shocks. Cost of living crisis. Well, the circular economy is by definition redistributive. So, and you know talks to tech poverty or food poverty or furniture poverty or you know whatever it is because of that, clothing poverty.

Jodie: Let's go back into the definition then of circular economy, because we talked a little bit about at the beginning, you thought it was reuse and recycling and you've realised it's much further than that.

We talk about the three principles of circular economy. So, design out waste, keeping stuff at its highest value, and also regenerating nature. You've really focused in on supporting circular businesses as well with a particular definition around what you consider a circular business.

Wayne: So I think your definition is really you. You're putting into words that Ellen MacArthur Foundation butterfly diagram where you know the circular economy has a technical side which is stuff, and the biological side which is, you know, regenerating nature. And if you look at that diagram, you'll see there's all these loops on the stuff side and there's kind of not so many loops on the agriculture side because it's kind of, you know, more regenerative there. Whereas the technical side is by definition, by definition, but it seems more complex. There's more loops and you need to bring those loops in inside. You need to, you know, the power of the inner loop. I think it says.

So, we have adapted these five business models which come from work that Accenture Strategy did way back in 2015, I think as well. But they seem to me as true now as they were then. And other people have, you know, you'll see like the European Union or somebody else will say, well, there's seven business models, there are eight business models, there are 9 business models. I mean at one point the Ellen MacArthur Foundation had an acrostic, RESOLVE.

Jodie: RESOLVE

Wayne: So they had their own framework. But essentially, it's this, right? There are five business models. The first is designing out waste or making your thing from stuff that has a recycled input, business model number one. Business model number two, making your thing recyclable. Business model number three, making your thing durable or designed for disassembly, repair, modular based. on part number four, The sharing economy utilising underutilised capacity and Business model number 5, servitization, Leasing, renting, product as a service, selling light instead of light bulbs. And that's it.

Jodie: That's it, easy.

Wayne: That's the circular economy. So any business that exhibits one or more of those business models is, in my view, by definition circular, and by definition is about reducing waste. And I will talk about it later, but also reducing climate impact.

Jodie: I'd like to give a big plug here to Victoria, cause I really think the Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre is the best organisation supporting circular businesses in Australia. I am saying that as well because I'm on the advisory committee, of

Wayne: I'm glad you didn't say in the world, in the world.

Jodie: I wouldn't dare. Glasgow might get upset, or the Dutch. Um so yeah so CEBIC are really great example of going beyond just looking at recycled material and really pushing that waste avoidance. How did you go navigating that terrain between, alright we’re gonna build big shiny recycling kit that you can like, cut the ribbon on and get great photos.

Wayne: Yeah.

Jodie: Supporting businesses

Wayne: I’m, by trade, I'm a waste manager so I come from that discipline. So I was managing landfill sites and well, not, I was managing the contracts. When you're a waste manager, you say, I was managing this contract and say, I’m in operations and then the person who's actually in operations just laughs at you and said no, I'm in operations and then the person is actually doing the work, laughs at him and says, no, I’m in operations.

But so I was, you know, dealing with waste and most waste managers I think, because they are dealing with end of pipe, kind of feel powerless in a way, and you will find, and I speak as a trustee of my professional institution back at home, you will find that they kind of blame business, quite rightly in some respects. They blame government. Again, quite rightly. They blame consumers and citizens. But there's no way they can have power. And so and I found that very frustrating and that was exemplified in the first business plan that I wrote from my organisation which said that there's no point in doing, um, the first bit of our objective is to produce less waste to help Greater London produce less waste. We can't do that. That's the that's the least cost-effective way of spending our money. The most cost-effective way of spending our money is on recycling and new technologies. So we spent a lot of money on anaerobic digestion plants and stuff like that.

And I kind of regret that in a way now, because I didn't realise or understand the power of the circular economy and the power of circular business and the way that would enable citizens and businesses to have a plethora of tools which they could then purchase, that would be inherently waste reductive.

So it's my thesis now that we essentially crowd - in the way that you're doing here – you essentially crowd-source good ideas from the entrepreneurial community out there. You support those businesses, and you want to see them scale.

So we have great examples in London like Notpla, who have the seaweed balls. They used to be called UHO and we supported them in 2017 when they were an imperial startup and I think last year they won the Earth Shop prize. Now I'm not saying, I mean, obviously that was largely because of our support. We were…

Jodie: You wrote the application.

Wayne: We were part of, I'm proud to have been part of their journey and it's great to see them succeed. And I hope that they will and I'm sure they will scale.

Jodie: can you just explain, for anyone that's not heard of these magic seaweed balls, why that's a thing?

Wayne: Well, so it's a container of biomass that holds a liquid. So if you're doing something like a mass participation sporting event, like a marathon, instead of having lots of plastic bottles, you can distribute the seaweed balls. You pop it in your mouth and it pops and you get a drink of water. It's kind of

Jodie: Designing out single use.

Wayne: Yes, you're designing out single use plastic. Exactly. It's amazing. It's an amazing innovation. And so having been involved in that, it's great.

There are other examples like Toast Ale to give a shout out to one, is a sort of industrial symbiosis project, beer from waste bread. We helped them just recently. We have helped them a couple of times, but just recently we helped them and that led directly to a £1 million VC round, you know, so which is great, you know, so there are some really good, and if you look on our website, there's loads and loads of case studies of these great businesses and people love these businesses.

When you talk to people about, I don't know, like, baby clothing hire or leasing or bicycle leasing for children or clothes or children's toy leasing or um, Too Good To Go, where where you, you get the best food from the restaurant at the end of the day, cheap or whatever it is, or Olio, where you've got food sharing through an app. You know, people love it.

People love those ideas and I think COVID also, you know, many bad things about COVID, obviously. But one of the things that it did was I think, you know, at small level, neighbours started to exchange and share excess stuff and that still happens on my street with my WhatsApp. It's almost annoying the amount of stuff that gets posted on there's nobody want this or does anybody want that.

And it's great that never happened before, that went in the bin. So these things I think enabled us to kind of take advantage of the trend towards more sharing, um, more exchange. And that's all part of the circular economy.

Jodie: And then when you're working on behaviour change, you're actually giving people an interesting alternative and not just telling them to do the hard thing, right?

Wayne: Yeah. So going back to my point, like waste managers would often, I don't mean this in any demeaning way, but I found it as a waste manager, I found that all I could do was kind of do food waste campaigns, which are really useful, you know, food waste reduction. We are running one now. You know, I'm not denying the use, or encourage people to use reusable nappies.

Again, really useful stuff, but it's kind of, it just feels, it just feels really hard what you have to put a lot of hard work in there and the results that you get are limited. Whereas a circular economy, our ambition is a world without waste in a circular economy would largely see that happen as these businesses would essentially produce very little waste or keep stuff moving within the economy, at it's highest utility, it's highest value.

And a lot of these businesses, they dematerialize. You do it anyway, don't you? Without even realising it. You know, you consume Netflix - 10 years, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, I know you would have got DVD through the post, wouldn't you, from Netflix? That really ages me now, doesn't it? There are some people out there saying, what the hell is he talking about? What's a DVD?

Jodie: And we've had questions about, well, isn't this just the good old days, right? We used to repair stuff. We used to treat stuff better. Can you talk to us about how digitalization has shifted and unlocked the potential of circular economy and business models?

Wayne: Yeah, I think. I think so. I mean, in a way, this is all old learning, isn't it? This is all old. It's nothing new here. And people are quite right. I mean it's been packaged up and presented in a way that articulates it. That in a way that I think citizens and crucially, business can understand. You know, when it talks about hedging your risk against volatility market commodity prices.

Yeah, The thing that really unlocked it, I think for me and I would say the start of the 21st century was when the iPhone was launched, all of the problems that that causes, but all of the benefits too, you know, we have to kind of see it in the round.

And the benefits for me have been, well, it's unlocked this entrepreneurial tech community who have enabled the circular economy, for better or worse, it's this, it's disruptive, right. So some of these things are difficult. And we know, we know the sharing economy examples, the big global sharing economy examples that are, you know, disruptive, but there are also local play space, community examples of this. So you can have it at the very, very local level where you can have people exchanging stuff at a very local level to the global level, where you can have people exchanging stuff, you know, internationally. And that's all done through the smartphone.

Jodie: Fabulous. CEBIC’s got a focus this year on the built environment. Can you talk to us about how in London and perhaps what you're seeing interacting with other organisations across Europe as well? How do you see circular economy shifting the built environment?

I believe that was one of your five focus areas.

Wayne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, built environment is probably the largest um opportunity.

I just want, before I address that, I just want to just be clear about why this is important from a carbon perspective. So there are two pieces of work which I always refer to and if you've heard me say this before I apologise, but I think it's worth repeating. The first one is one called The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World which was published by C40 cities
and authored by C40, Arup and the University of Leeds. And it has a pathway to achieving 1.5 degrees C for cities, but crucially looks at that through a consumption based emissions lens, through materials lens. So it's looking at what are the, if you allocate the extraction, production, transport, use and disposal emissions associated with stuff to the end user. And that massively skews the figures from in-boundary emissions, it calculates the out of boundary emissions, and they are typically two thirds bigger.

And why that's important is that 45% of the world's global CO2 emissions come from materials that are hard to abate. And that's from a study by Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Material Economics, called Completing the Picture. So it's they're hard to abate because you can't just, and then this isn't simple anyway, but you can't switch the energy system and flick a switch and I'm making it sound simple, let me be crass, and solve that problem, you have to solve the problem through behaviour change, so like food or steel production or cement or whatever. These things are high energy uses and the only way we can really address them is through behaviour change and that's really difficult.

So onto materials and built environment, um, so therefore you need the industry to you know think about what we already have, think about the current built environment, how it can be used as a as a materials bank for new buildings, at the outset whether you need to demolish something. If you do need to demolish it, what's going to be put up in its place? How's it going to have recycled material? How are you going to build in layers? What's the operational lifecycle of this thing going to look like etcetera etcetera. And that all of that detail is well known.

But in our context, we now have a requirement for the biggest, the most strategic developments to be accompanied by a Circular Economy Statement, which sets out this, which has to give a rationale for why you're not…

Jodie: This is mandatory. It's not enough to have…

Wayne: It's mandatory. And I understand at least one application, there's been 200 so far, at least one application has been refused because the Circular Economy Statement was not up to scratch. So you know, I know you planners out there you'll say, well it's all you have to kind of balance this and trade off that and that's true. So it's good to see that some weight is being given to this document. And then you have at the end of your construction, you have to produce a report which identifies whether you, what your targets were, whether you kept your targets, lessons learned, where you failed. So we have a case study that we can use or a library of case studies that we can then use to hopefully improve and refine the policy.

So 200 applications so far, because they're the most strategic, the biggest application, none of them have actually been built yet. So we're going through a process and we'll see how that turns out.

And the next stage, we want to get that down and see if we can make that guidance appropriate for the local level. So in London, you have the strategic authority, the Mayor of London who is responsible for the whole of London in, in strategic planning terms, the transport system and the police and the fire and emergency services and other things. And then you have the local authorities, the municipalities called the boroughs who are responsible for waste collection, waste disposal and local planning issues. So it would be nice to get a form of circular economy statement requirement at the more micro level that was appropriate for that scale of development which is probably to be honest, that's where most development happens.

Jodie: Yeah, it's really, I find it really interesting cause you've got the sort of mandatory requirement aspect but also the guidelines are fabulous. It's a fabulous document that actually educates industry about circular economy. So we can all go on the website and see all the guidelines and all the questions that they asked. So it's quite an interesting journey in terms of getting the industry to understand.

Wayne: Yeah.

Jodie: And then you gonna have all this data after.

Wayne: Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely. So I would recommend downloading the circular economy guidance document because it's just really a good, essentially a good practice guide to construction so anyone can use that and apply that to their own development and then yes, there will over time be a library of learning that will be available publicly that people can learn from.

The point I was making yesterday at the Ecologiq conference, it's not just us, but there's lots of information out there. So, you know, whatever stage you're at in your circular economy journey, you can probably leapfrog two or three stages because a lot of the work has been done by, you know, somebody somewhere.

Now when we were starting out, it was, it was really just the stuff that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation had produced. So there were those big weighty McKinsey-esque reports that were kind of difficult to digest and they've gone through our brains and we've kind of regurgitated them in a in a more simple way in but I don’t know about you, Jodie, but, you know, so there's stuff out there now that kind of, I think it's just more accessible.

Jodie: Well, I haven't been looking at my phone because you're ridiculously boring. I've actually got all the Sli.do questions up there. So things everyone that's been putting stuff in. I will start with a really respectful question from Scott from Bendigo, who's doing a lot of fabulous work in this area.

And Scott has asked how does ReLondon interact with other circular cities in the UK and border Europe? What's that collaboration aspect like?

Wayne: Yeah. OK. So, Hi, Scott. Yeah, so we, um, we've established a circular, a UK circular cities network which is, which is great, emerging, you know lots of cities in the UK are really interested in this, in this topic and there's a lot of development.

You know, typically it was London and Scotland, I think cities in Scotland like Glasgow who were the first movers on this and subsequently a lot of the big cities have started to move on this. The thing is as you know the circular economy tends to reside in the waste department, so which is not a bad thing, but it also really needs to sit in the economic development department and the procurement department. You know, it could sit in all of the departments. It needs to be kind of sitting across government. So you know we're still going through that phase of trying to get it integrated into local government thinking.

In terms of Europe and the rest of the world. So we have um, something coming up called Circular Economy Week which you can all, um tune into. It starts on October the 16th and there is actually a city's component of that that will be done in different time zones. I haven't got the details exactly. I know one, um, one part of the program has Sao Paulo I think and another North American or South American city. So there are various different time frames that we're trying to do this and make it a bit more global and a bit less, um, Eurocentric, um.

But yeah, we do have lots of contacts with Canadian cities. I'm a member of the Advisory Board for the Canadian Circular Citizen and Regions initiative and we've worked and have contacts with North America cities and European cities extensively through the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and also through the C40 network of cities of which of course Melbourne and Sydney are members.

And importantly, I think it's worth remembering that the C40 has leadership standards. You can look these up on the on the website if you type in C40 city leadership standards and you will note that one of those standards is to start to lead on emissions that are produced by your consumption habits that occur outside of your city.

So this idea of consumption-based emissions and the role that materials play, hard to abate materials play in contributing to climate change. All of the C40 cities have a kind of leadership standard to start to address that. So this, this way of thinking and the work that you're doing in the material space is really now, I think, going to be at the mainstream and the cutting edge of future work and it's politically difficult. I mean, I, you know, I know that all too well. The Prime Minister's recent statement,

Jodie: I was, yeah, I was just about to ask, we're talking about cities. And before you got some, you know, average news this week about UK's flip flopping around climate change, you talked a lot about cities as being a real driving force for this. How has that, has that changed or has that been reinforced?

Wayne: Talk about an easy question. I mean, you know, well look, my thesis, not just mine, you know, the C40 cities, the Mayor of London said in his address to the, you know, he was at the UN Climate Week. You know, he was at the UN climate conference this week, not the Prime Minister. So the Mayor of London was there talking about climate. And I think that just shows that, that cities are leaders in this space, whatever national governments do to an extent. And it will depend upon the devolved power that your city has. And in the UK those devolved powers are relatively weak. But cities lead on this, where people live. Let's not forget where most people live. So cities can take lead on this, which I think is empowering and its citizens who are at the forefront of this. So we need to give those citizens options and opportunities that, and I and I do believe that circular solutions often are, in fact I'm going to say, always are better than the linear alternative.

So, um, and that's important because otherwise you run into this kind of political, political issue where politicians are loathe to, you know, to talk about issues that require behaviour change but they don't want to address.

Jodie: We've got a lot of really wonderful questions here. We'll have to have a look at them once we've finished as well. But you did mention that circular economy has come a lot from the waste sector. Donna has asked what are your thoughts on whether we should actually decouple circular economy from the waste sector? Should we take it out of the waste space completely?

Wayne: We don't know how you do that practically. I mean, I think to your point, it needs to be more integrated, right. So that's the important thing. It doesn't matter who's kind of, you know, the waste sector in my view is it's because it's end of pipe. And you know, I expressed this frustration that waste managers have and they kind of rage at the at the unfairness of the world. So I think that's why, you know, it tends to come from that space, and probably why it's often used as a euphemism for more recycling rather than in its true sense, you know sharing, design for durability and servitization, all those other funky business models.

And there's another report which I'll um reference was is one by the World Bank called Squaring the Circle - and they love to have these circle titles, don’t they? And that kind of analyses the success that European nations have had in translating European circular economy policy at the national level. And it's not massively great picture, lots of work needs to be done. But it does, I think, act as a really good manifesto for how you should do it.

And it talks about kind of four properties, which I can't remember, but they are things like incentives, information, finance and another one which I can't remember, but it's really worth looking at the integration, that's the key one. So integration across government, having the Treasury and the Department for Business and the Environment department and all departments involved in that.

And there was a great report by Chris Skidmore recently in the UK, Conservative Party MP, who did the Skidmore net zero review, who talked about this in his report. And it was kind of, I don't think, properly addressed by government.

They kind of gave a reply that didn't fully address what I think the report was saying, which is really important that every department needs to understand how circular economy applies to them, particularly the Treasury, and then send the right signals through the economy. Because it does require regulation. I'd love to think that cities can do this all for themselves without regulation. And I think there's a long way we can go. But it does require regulation and it does require the government sending the right signals.

Jodie: System change. Right. So everyone has a part to play in this, everyone in this room, all levels of government, business as well, right?

Wayne: Yeah, absolutely. So the, you know, the business, civil society and government all need to have a symmetrical relationship in changing this system. And obviously we don't, we have an asymmetrical relationship, which means some parts are pulling harder than others. Um, but yeah, I love the narrative that that you give people when you explain that change, changing their behaviour, can save the world. You know, one behaviour at a time. I love that narrative. I find it empowering and I think people in my industry have found it difficult to articulate that because for forever net zero is still importantly but still defined as in-boundary emissions. But we're talking about out of bound emissions, so when you ask someone in your climate department what recycling contributes, they'll say, they'll probably say, well, it prevents stuff going to landfill. So it's in the UK about four to 8% of emissions. But what it really does it, it deals with those hard to debate emissions. It deals with the 45% of global emissions, not the four to 8% of in-bound national emissions. And that's empowering.

That means everybody who's doing that work, every citizen, everybody who's involved in collecting waste or everybody's involved in sharing or everybody's involved in making stuff well, they're all taking their part and helping to save the world from disastrous climate change. And I think that's quite empowering.

Jodie: It's very positive of you. Anonymous asks, have you had, have you had to put into place any particular levers, policy, financial, regulatory to help drive the circular economy for business? If so, what's worse worked best?

Wayne: Well, we don't have the luxury of being able to do much in terms of fiscal instruments. But what we have is, what we actually have is a business support, finance and some grant capability. So we have since about 2017 I think offered a really comprehensive package of hand holding advisory service to circular economy businesses. So not sustainability support by the way.

So we're not teaching these people how to, how to save water or how to save waste. They do that anyway. That's their business. We're teaching. We're giving them advice on you know how to scale up, how to how to present to VC companies, we’re in introducing them to a financiers, we're introducing them to potential customers. We're doing all of that kind of work for them. We also offer grants and we did that through the Mayor of London's Green Deal, Green New Deal and we're doing that through a UK share prosperity funding that we've just got.

And we've invested in the Greater London Investment Fund, a part of which is, our part of which, is ring fenced to provide venture capital to circular economy startups.

And finally we also invest in a fund called Circularity Capital which is for more developed circular business. So we think, we'd like to say, we have a solution from start-up to majority for circular businesses. So we hope, we've supported over 400 in the 6-7 or so years that we've been doing this. And we hope that, you know a few of those will scale up and corporates will kind of you know look across this, this, this kind of, we've sowed this field of startups and they'll you know, pick and choose and scale up some of those on a global level.

Jodie: Right. I'm going to pull up a question from Caitlin on this because she's asked how, us in the circular economy sector, how can we place pressure on large corporates to make circular transitions. I think that's a really interesting question because it kind of rings to the place of large corporates in driving these. Are we pressuring them or are they part of the solution?

Wayne: Well, you know, I mean, in my role now there are some corporates that we would have trouble working with. You know, we just would, because of their, you know their corporate behaviour. There are some corporates who we would work with because we see them as wanting to make a difference. So we don't, we don't, we don't brand all corporates in the same way and you know, let's, let's face it we need those corporates to change their behaviour right. So all I can do is help provide good business examples for them to emulate and you know and transition towards. What I do firmly believe is that the linear economy is dead or dying. It's the old way of doing things, that the new way is the circular economy. And we're going to have a circular economy, or we're gonna be toast.

So by, by disaster or design, things are going to change. So, let's design it.

And I think the corporates know that, they're not stupid. They want to keep on selling, right. So they want to figure out a business model that allows them to sell. And there are some significant economic advantages to circular business models. That was the that was what the original Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey work was predicated upon really, it was about hedging your exposure to global commodity volatility which is more appropriate now you could argue than it was 10 years ago, given the scale of you know where we are geopolitically and the accelerating level of climate change and all of the problems that's going to potentially bring. You know, corporates needs to think about their business models and how they can transition. So we want to help them do that.

Jodie: I found it really interesting around that time when I was working in France as well, that it was actually corporates lobbying Europe that got the circular economy package across the line in Europe. So I sort of had a very different worldview, that it was about government dragging corporates kicking and screaming. But that was a great example where the European corporates were saying we need a level playing field if we want to make quality products that we can last, to repair, and shift our business model. We need government to back it up with strong regulations. So it's a really interesting

Wayne: Visa are sponsoring our circular economy week. So you know they're really interested in re-economy. So you could argue well, Visa, they're enabling the consumer society but they know that stuff has to change they're really interested in figuring that out. So we're happy to help them.

Jodie: Fabulous. Emma from Wodonga's got a great question. Um, I'll show you where it Wodonga is later. Have you come across any impressive examples of circular economy in the health sector? Oh, please don't say no.

Wayne: you know, I don't. I don't know if we work too much in the health sector actually. Well, I mean, no. Phillips.

Jodie: Phillips Healthcare is in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They do some awesome stuff.

Wayne: Phillips do. Yeah. But I, I we, I don't think we've… I'm sure we have. I'm just trying to think it's difficult when you’ve, you know, dealt with 400, difficult to think. I'm sure there'll be some application, but I can't think right off the top of my head. You've kind of foxed me. I'll get back to you on that one.

Jodie: Congratulations on, on foxing, Wayne, Emma, that's very impressive.

The Philips Healthcare example is around a lot of remanufacturing and leasing of health electronic assets as well. So there's a lot of work going on in the asset areas, how we can go from product to a service. So maybe we can bounce back on any sort of product or service businesses that you've been supporting in London, and why is product as service a good model?

Wayne: Um, well, I think that's more in the kind of, yeah, in the leasing. So there's lots of, there's lots of examples of those, but there I mean there that some of them are kind of um, you know the traditional, so the traditional place where this works is in the child or high or the high end capital equipment or costly piece of clothing space, that's you know that's, that's the establishment, isn't it? We've been hiring wedding wear forever, right, that’s circular economy isn't it? But you know that's kind of become a lot more, a lot more prevalent in lower, it's kind of lower down, if you like, it's not just um evening wear, there's been there. There's lots of companies in London now that offer kind of high or expensive clothes that you can just hire for the day.

And there's also there's loads of stuff that do child's clothing. There's one that called bundle that has a piece of clothing that grows as you grow. It's like it's all kind of pleated and it grows as your child grows. That's probably not a product as a service.

There was another one, um around some of the people that we, our venture capital company invested in was one that had, it was a wine one, believe it or not and um you could lease, you could you could buy wine as a service and they would post it. I think it's called Garcon. They post it through your letterbox and so it's in a letterbox shaped bottle, so you can have wine leasing. So I'm not sure that's particularly circular. Maybe that is circular, I don't know.

Yeah, um, there were loads of them. I mean there are absolutely loads of them and there are loads that we don't know about because, which I think is great because the sharing economy is pretty prevalent out there and the sharing economy and the service model, the subscription model is pretty prevalent out there right now. And lots of these people just don't think of themselves as it remotely circular. They're just they're just coming up with good business ideas and that gives me hope that this is not, it's not random, we're kind of, we're pushing downhill, not pushing uphill.

Jodie: Wayne, how are you engaging in powering civil society at the local level and open source DIY knowledge platforms play a role in this? Maybe start with the first bit.

Wayne: Yeah. So this is a really important thing for us We, so okay, so London is a population of 9 million and um there are, do you call them precincts? what's the precinct?

Jodie: probably neighbourhood, we might be you say neighbourhood.

Wayne: Yeah. So if I say neighbourhood you know what, you would use that terminology too. So we have things called high streets in London. So that's the main shopping street, and London is really a collection of those high streets that have kind of just become a big city over time. So London is a collection of neighbourhoods essentially and there are 600. You could identify 600 neighbourhoods in London and London is typically live within, 90% of Londoners live within 10 minutes of those 600 high streets, right?

So if you treat each one of those as a neighbourhood and have a specific project aimed at circular, place-based neighbourhoods, you have theoretically, you know, addressed 90% of Londoners.

And so we have a couple of projects, one in particular called Heston in the Loop which is a project in Hounslow in West London around where Heathrow is, that involves schools and businesses, the High Street and citizens in a circular project which is enabled, it's kind of sub municipality level. So it's not the whole municipality, it's a smaller area of the municipality. And, yeah it's really successful. We had a competition to find businesses who wanted to be involved. Um, we've given tools to citizens and champions to promote circular business models and circular living. The schools have kind of involved the kids. It's just been great. So we'll kind of look at the, and then as a as a follow up to that, other local areas and neighbourhoods have started to ask how we're doing this and what they're interested in.

There's some funding from the Mayor of London so we now have a network of emerging neighbourhood projects and I can see that snowballing and that's that gives me great hope because if you think about the top down it's like it does your head in it's impossible to kind of think well how am I going to deal with all of London but if you turn it around and deal with the bottom up then that that gives me a number I can I can deal with. 600 is a lot easier to manage than 9 million.

Jodie: OK. So that place-based or precinct-based approach is quite important. I've got sort of two questions I'm going to melt together because we had someone ask about how important are places like this that we're sitting in. We got a bit of a tour before that how this space is used to share ideas and people can come and rent space and you've got this physical place that you can exchange. But then also we're going to be talking to some people this afternoon that design precincts. So how can we re-imagine like the physical space as well to help all of this happen?

Wayne: Yeah. I mean you know taking some of the principles from the circular economy design guide and circular economy statements. You know if you imagine a world with less cars, more shared cars, there seems to be um a tricky space now to say that it seems to be a you know, well we're you know back home have an election about whether you're the party that is for the car or against the car. I'm not. I'm not either. I'm kind of, you know, for liveability and for the planet and that seems to me to be worth thinking about, you know, places, if you imagine a place that you don't need so many roads and parking spaces and stuff and that requires you to have, you know, a more compact city. So, um, yeah, I think, you know, this is, I mean, we know about these things. These are not new concepts, right?

So I'm just looking out the window. I don't know if well I guess Melbourne is a quite a big sprawling city is that. Yeah you know so and so is London to an extent, but it's also getting increasingly dense and compact and that's going to you gotta do that in a liveable way. You know we don't want to recreate the problems of the 1970s. We need to have kind of nice places to live that are more compact and a bit more dense and I think you know think about and incorporate elements of the circular economy like sharing and and you know stuff like that.

Jodie: Great. We had, I believe, Geoff in the audience that really wanted to pop a question as well. Geoff, you still got it? Oh, no. Yeah, hang on. Let me get you to speak in the microphone. The mic, the people online can't.

Geoff: Thank you very much. So I wanted to talk a bit about some, I work in the automotive industry and we've written a big report for end of life vehicles. You know what we do with them, how much we can recycle. And in Australia we recycle about 70% of what's in a car when it's when it's at its end of life and it's mainly, mainly metal obviously. And looked around the world and I was looking at Switzerland recently and they recover about 84% out of a car. So I thought that's really interesting. I'm going to have a really close look at that because we're at 70, there are 84 and it works out that about 15% of their waste goes into waste to energy burners and then they claim 50% of that back as a recyclable product. They're allowed to do that, by the way. So they burn it and then they can get a 50%, if you like, as a recyclable product. Hence we recover 70%. They recover about 84%. In Australia, there's only two major waste to energy burners being built in WA and there's some sort of pilot work around, but we've sort of haven't really gone there. And I'm wondering, you know, in London, in the circular economy and you know, you're out of the waste industry, You know, we're running out of space. A lot of people don't want to talk about waste to energy burners because, you know, they've got these views about these toxic bricks that, you know, what do you do with them. But it seems to me that there's a lot of stuff that we can create circular economies around, there's some stuff that, whether we like it or not, just doesn't have a lot of use when it reaches this end of life.

And I'm wondering in the for the purpose if in the London boroughs, you know is there a discussion about waste to energy burners is it sort of not you know we've got NIMBY stuff happening, I'm really interested in, in ultimately we can't reuse everything. What do we do with the stuff we can't use? And is our waste to energy burners on the map?

Jodie: Thanks, Geoff.

Wayne: Yeah, thanks for that. That's like the, there's like two questions that you hate, isn't there? What do you think about incinerators, and in the UK context, should we have curbside recycling where you sort at the curbside? So, you know, the Prime Minister just talked about 7 bins and that that's like it's such a live issue and the only other issue is incineration. So you've really helped me out today.

So yeah I mean the way London developed was um traditionally the, the clay to make London houses as it expanded were taken from places like Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire I guess just outside of London and big clay pits. And then the rubbish from London was sent back to fill those holes and then eventually the people in those areas said we don't like this. And in my, you know, working life that discussion was very live and it in part led to the creation of my organisation because the Mayor of London at the time said, well, in order to solve this we need to have a properly planned system and one single waste authority for London instead of these plethora of waste authorities.

And that was a big debate and the government decided to uh to create us as a another, another part of the puzzle in London to help kind of that make that relationship easier. Um, I'm just waffling here so I don't have to answer the question.

The look, I mean, I have to say that nobody, I don't think, really thinks that incineration is a good thing. I think most people think incineration is a necessary, I'm not saying evil, but unnecessary undesirable thing. It's the it's the the least worst option for some types of waste. Um, I'm not sure that it's the best option for mass unsegregated waste disposal. Um. And we have to be careful about building these things in terms of capacity because unlike landfill whose capacity is imminently and very flexible, landfill up, incinerators need to have a certain amount.

Jodie: You have to feed them, right?

Wayne: And so you have to be careful about how you. And it goes back to that London infrastructure plan thing I was saying at the start, if you kind of say, oh, we're planning for ways to go up, you know, and then waste goes down or even worse, you don't want to have waste policies that force waste down because you got to feed your incinerator, that would be a bad thing.

I think the context that you're talking about is a very specific industrial problem. And in that context, I think there is an argument and I think you know, your industry I'm sure will make that argument. And you know, there are other contexts like specialist healthcare ways or specialist kind of industrial wastes. However, you know London is now kind of circled by some big incinerators which we've had to build to as we've diverted from landfill and the next step on our journey. I hope he's thinking about how we kind of step down now from the need for those incinerators. As you know, I'll just give you some numbers again in the in the 1.5 degree C report, the pathway for most, um, European cities is around 12 tonnes of consumption emissions per capita. Currently London's down to about 10. I think at the moment by 2030 that 12 needs to be about 6 and by 2050 that's six needs to be 0.7, right? And just think of the behaviour change that we need in order to get from 12 tonnes per capita to 0.7 by 2050.

I mean there are some examples in the report if you wanna go and read. I won't say them here, but I mean they're pretty significant behaviour changes that we're gonna have to do. And I suspect that means that we need to reduce waste, a lot.

So this thing about us having a vision, ReLondon having a vision of a world without waste, we're not saying that because we're being namby pamby, we're saying that because that's where we need to be in order to be on that 1.5 pathway, um. So we need systems to enable us to do that.

Jodie: Great. We need to wrap up now. So I thought rather than asking you a question, do you have a last thought that you would like to leave with everyone that's online and in the room?

Wayne: Yeah. I honestly been really impressed with the people that I've met here and people have said, oh, we, we're really glad you've come because Europe’s really ahead of the game and London’s really had the game and whatever and you know, London is ahead of the game by the way. I'm not saying it's not, but, I've just been really impressed with the discussion here, the level of discussion, the passion of the people. And I, and I actually think that Australia is on the verge of becoming a circular economy leader because you have the benefit of all of the work that's out there. You can go straight to the front of the queue, no messing about. And you don't, you don't really need to wait either. You can just crack on and do it. I know you guys are, like, circular economy pioneers, so you know you are going to reap the rewards big time because this is the future of the planet.

The other thing I would say, in my world, waste is defined as something which the holder intends to discard, right? And the important thing there is the intent. So this isn't something you can just legislate away. The word waste. You can use any word you want as a euphemism for waste. But intent is important there. You need to change behaviour, you need to change that intent, which means you need systems to change it. So you guys are part of the part of that revolution and you know, Yeah, thanks a lot.

Jodie: Thanks, Wayne. Joining us for the round of applause. Thank you so much for coming and thank you so much to SV and CEBIC for organising today. Thanks heaps team. Oh, and the survey, please. Oh, is that on there? No, sorry. Thank you. Two questions live on Sli.do are very simple, very important. Please give feedback on the slider survey. Thank you.

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