For almost 200 years, the way we produce and consume products is basically the same. Regardless of what is produced, the first step is the extraction of raw materials from nature. Later this raw material is taken to a factory where it will be transformed into the final product.
The products are then put for sale and after the purchase we, consumers, use these products. Some of them are made to last for years, maybe even decades, but many have a shorter and shorter programmed life. Even the most complex and expensive ones follow the same logic of programmed obsolescence, that is, a very short usage time before we need to switch to a new one.
And that's basically the way linear economics works. Extraction, transformation and then you already know, discard. But that has a limit.
There is not enough raw material on the planet for this model to continue to work for a long time. In 2018, the planet hit the overshoot day on 1 August. This means that after that date we started to borrow our natural resources savings.
The problem is that every year that day comes sooner. And then we continue destroying, destroying, destroying what we can not afford. In 2050, besides having more plastic than fish in the oceans, we will also have a population of more than 10 billion people.
Does this bill checks if everyone wants to consume and produce the way we do today? What if there were another way of production that would have the least impact on the environment on the seas? What if there was another way of distributing the goods to those in need without us having to produce more and more?
What if this was already a reality? EPISODE 9 THINKING NEW ECONOMIES There are people who still think that when we talk about sustainability and environmental preservation, we are going against progress, but that is not true. There are other ways of thinking about economics and growth that take into account things that we know today, unlike those we knew 200 years ago.
The big problem with capitalism today is that it does not take into account the environmental cost. So it's as if we could pretend that nothing has happened to the planet and that it will continue to provide all the resources necessary for every business in the world to grow double digits per year, every year. But there are other ways of thinking about economics, production and growth that more intelligent and profitable than this model we have today.
Rodrigo Sabatini: We have to change the economy. And this is something that is happening. We have to dematerialize the economy.
Why do we have to dematerialize? Because we don’t have more materials to produce. This is actually happening with the shared economy, people no longer care about having.
In 20 years everything will be shared. This change is happening. Of course, we have a problem that is the inequality of the planet.
If we turn the economy, to dematerialize the it, to make an economy based on service, on the being and putting the materialization, the matter, to balance the world, I mean, who have it, has it and doesn’t need to have more and who doesn’t have we will balance, I think we can achieve this balance in a century or maybe a half-century. Beatriz Luz: The circular economy brings both environmental and social benefits. In the environment we see a scarcity of resources due to this rampant production and that brings volatility and risk to the companies.
And that is why we need to provoke a new economic model that grows disconnected from the exploitation of these natural resources. Through a model that preaches the reuse on remanufacturing and in this sense we will have great gains in the generation of employment and education, where we’ll need new skills and professional qualification. We can't talk about an economic model like that while we keep treating and calling raw material as garbage.
We’ve already talked about the 8 billion reais that Brazil loses by burying raw material every year in landfills. So, to talk about circular economy and shared economy, we have to talk about zero waste. All these ideas are complementary and none of them are impossible.
You must’ve seen here the case of San Francisco and what they are doing to become a metropolis without trash. Zero Waste is a goal. That means it is not a magical process, nothing is going to happen now, you have to set a goal.
An ethical goal, because it depends on our behavior, depends on our responsibility to our society. It’s an economic goal, because instead of spendings and damages you will try to earn resources, decrease extraction, avoid foreign exchange, all of this. It’s an efficient goal because there is no process in our post-industrial world that has a great deal of waste at the end of the line that is efficient.
So actually, we can define the Zero Waste in an engineering way as a total quality program based on continuous improvement whose indicator is the generation of waste in the end. And it is a visionary process, where you direct humanity, direct the citizen to a future, a better future for all. Robert Reed: This was something that our grandparents did.
This was something that was much more common 50 years ago and then someone in the accounting department at the large beverage company concluded "we can be more profitable in our corporation if we can transfer the responsibility for that container onto society. We don't have to have all these beverage washing plants and employ all these people washing all these bottles and drive them and transport them back and forth. We can put our beverages in a plastic bottle and then we're out of the loop".
That's a more linear kind of model, but it's very bad for society and it's an unnatural model. In nature, we all know, we have circles. So much better to refill the bottle and include everyone along the circle in the loop.
Nowadays, if a product cannot be recycled, reused or reduced, this product does not fit into 2018. It should be reimagined, redesigned. It's no good anymore.
It’s like an asbestos tile, it has to be redesigned, because society today no longer accepts it. One important thing in this configuration is that the role of the State is not to collect or clean anyone’s rubbish. The role of the State is to design this process and provide the infrastructure, the necessary instruments so that I, citizen, can exercise my citizenship.
The great challenge for production is the understanding that you cannot do it alone. We need to establish a culture of collaboration. Work along and also even out of the value chain, with our competitors, industry with government, with society.
It’s a more balanced economy, which restores social and natural capital. I live in Florianópolis. Florianópolis is a city of 500 thousand inhabitants that spends around 150 million reais to clean and give destination to the garbage.
Just to give destination, to keep the trash out of the city, it’s spent 30 million reais. Okay, you know what is 30 million reais? It’s 15 schools per year.
It’s 30 health posts per year, kilometers of sanitation, kilometers of road. So today, Brazil goes through a very serious problem, we are choosing to pay a maid to clean up our crap instead of giving study to the children, instead of giving health to the children. So we have people who are minimalists, who are seeking a simple life, a life more in the being, in the experience, that’s a movement.
We have a movement for dematerialization of the economy, which is another movement. On a local base, there’s one called Zero Territory, where you have zero emission, zero kilometers and zero waste. We have the industry movement, which obviously the industry lives of production and so we have the circular economy, which is actually a production efficiency program, but no one so far has talked about stopping production, right?
But we have an example like that of Patagonia, which says "okay, I don’t want to stop producing, but I'm going to produce something that will last a lifetime". Durable goods. We have the technology that is there for us to communicate, to exchange experiences and to be able to create an anarchic management system of the world.
I think we need to go through life with eyes wide open and ask ourselves, how can we live more simply, how can we live more in harmony with nature? How can we model nature? A tree in the spring comes to life and has many, many leaves in the summer and does all this photosynthesis and post carbon back down into the soil and in the fall, the leaves fall off the tree and they fall to the ground and they decompose, they compost around the base of the tree and that compost feeds the microbial colonies, it feeds the little animals that are in the soil and it makes the soil more healthy and then the healthy soil can feed the roots of the tree and the tree can have another year and another life and produce fruit and produce shade and attract birds and just start to listen to the benefit on top of benefit and on top of benefit.
. . And stop the wind and create more photosynthesis, get more carbon back into the soil.
The same thing happens when we have composting in our community. We're just modeling the simple natural process, but we're doing it in a bigger way. Circular economy is modeling nature into the production process.
And since nature has no trash, everything is reintegrated into the cycle of birth, growth and death. The circular economy is born thinking the process where the linear economy stopped: at post-consumption. Nothing else can be designed to be thrown away, after all there is no away.
All products are now thought to be reintegrated into production at the end of its usable life. Then the concept of trash ceases to exist and along with it, all the environmental problems it causes. And that's it.
Stop using the straw is just the tip of a thread that we’re start pulling now. A thread of a new way of thinking and acting in the world, that guarantees that there will be life in the next years for us, human beings and for all the other beings that share this planet with us. Mares Limpos is about that.
The sea brings us oxygen, food, leisure, health. The prognosis is still desperate, but you who accompany us here know that there is a lot going on and that change starts with us. So the challenge of this week is about this: Shared economy, it's a lot easier than you think, wanna see?
If you have clothes that you no longer wear, take them to a thrift store. If you have a piece of furniture, give it to someone. That toy that your child doesn’t play anymore, that can be the great toy in the life of a child in a daycare.
We have to think that something that is broken and that we sometimes think as it’s rubbish, for someone else it may be one less consumption. And two weeks from now, at the end of our web series, I'm going to present you the great heroes of this change, people who have inspiring stories and who are pulling the movement around. I wait for you, subscribe to the channel, share this video and join us, because together we’ll make it happen!
