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If we're to come to an extra three billion middle class
on the planet between now and 2030,
and if we're to loosen the vice-like grip
that China has on key world resources--
because this is not just about scarcity.
This is about control.
This is about economic growth.
This is about managing that economic growth.
This is really, really complex.
There's a whole load of geopolitics that are here.
And if we're to re-skill a population which arguably
has forgotten what it's good at, and if we're
to stand a chance of making things again in the UK,
we need that back.
We really need that back.
Then we have to look at circular economy.
It's got to be cool.
It makes any other approach to resource use seem irrelevant.
That whole old model of take, make, use, dispose,
that worked in 1930s.
And that worked for a long, long time.
The world's changed.
The demand's different.
And that model is not appropriate anymore.
So we have to change what we do.
We are living in an extremely complex world.
And talking of open data here is some free software, Sourcemap.
Everybody can go on, use it for free.
They can map their supply chains.
Somebody did for a laptop.
And they just started mapping it.
And you can see the flows going from around the world,
back again.
You produce it in one country, send it to the Europe,
send it back to China again.
And it would be hugely complicated to map that.
But somebody's tried to do it here.
But I would suggest that's only for a small number
of the components, an extremely small number.
Everybody recognised there are a number of mines around
the world that held the stranglehold on supply
of particular raw materials.
But if the pinch point in the supply chain appears later on,
then it doesn't matter if your material is freely available.
If the pinch point's later on, then you really struggle.
We thought we had it covered.
We had three or four different mines supplying us
with a key raw material.
What they didn't realise is all four of those mines sent
the material to the same processing plant.
There was a fire in the processing plant.
So, yeah, great.
They had four mines.
But the processing plant stopped.
And they were without a major product for a number of months.
I'm going to focus in on a particular product,
the evolution of a product, the BT's Home Hub router.
I'd like to think that this gives you
the gritty inside story of how you take the circular economy
and make it work in a very large corporation.
People who were our customers that
were collecting these [INAUDIBLE],
because the product couldn't be collected.
It was generating a huge number of vehicle miles.
That's a service design aspect.
I thought, aha.
I want to get rid of that.
I want to improve the customer service element by customers
not having their first experience
of a delivery of the BT Hub as doing this.
This is not a good experience.
And our product managers latched onto this.
So effectively, I created a Trojan horse
that I could start to design a product
to fit through a letter box, which ultimately
was to lead to materials recovery.
But the service design aspect of this
was that the customer wouldn't get a "sorry we missed you"
note on the mat inside their house or in their business.
In a sense what I was able to do is say, yes,
the carbon footprint savings, that's what I'm trying to do,
that's important.
And that matters.
But actually, look at the service design,
the customer experience aspects of it.
That is also a great benefit.
And those combined encouraged the cultural shift
to instruct the design agency to develop it in a certain way
all the way back from the printed circuit board
through to the outer box that could
go through the letter box.
And that's that cultural shift that is sometimes quite hard
to achieve, so you have to have a number of wins in there
to create that tipping point.
My organisation hosts community events where--
we call them Restart parties, where we bring together people
with skills, technical skills.
And they help people fix their own things.
We actually want to reinvigorate that and basically
stimulate demand for repair, get people thinking and feeling
that things can be repaired, that they're not
sealed black boxes.
All of our electronic products contain conflict materials.
A lot of them were mined in the Congo.
But what Fairphone's doing that's really genius
is that they're not trying to change and make
a responsibly-produced phone.
They're trying to change the industry.
And they're doing that by sharing information
on their supply chain.
So they're starting off a conversation
about where their materials come from.
And that's enabling that conversation
to start, whereas previously it was hidden,
because manufacturers just didn't want to talk about it.
They were embarrassed by the fact
of where the materials were coming from.
And this openness from Fairphone has actually enabled--
or the sharing of their information and information
on the supply chain, has enabled us to source better materials.
I'm going to talk to them about milk bottle recycling,
most specifically how we used an exchange of data, open data,
to make milk bottle recycling more efficient.
We start with a big pile of milk bottles.
We get some residual cap flakes.
We get some residual label flakes.
We get ink bleeds from the labels into the wash water.
So we do everything we can within the limits
of our process physically within our plant to minimise that
effect.
You can see this is just a video of a flake sorter.
So if you can see, those flakes are about a centimetre across.
That's chopped up drinks bottles.
But you see that blue flake there?
***.
Got it.
We've done all sorts of incredible things.
But the most important and the most interesting one is that.
So can you see?
Sounds really simple.
But it was incredibly difficult to do.
We reduced the cap tin.
And when I say we, we didn't.
We had absolutely nothing to do with that, apart
from feeding back data.
So we could feed back data to the dairies that showed
the impact of those residual coloured flakes on the overall
colour of the material.
We've moved from unconscious consumption, which
we're trying not to do, towards conscious consumption,
and probably conscious un-consumption at some point.
And I've seen more anti-iPhone-6 stuff on social media
this time than I saw with the 5s a year ago.
And the only way that these organisations can make us
dissatisfied is with emotional design and with software
design.
Consumption drives resource use.
And consumption drives business growth.
So how do we make more money by selling less?
This is really, really difficult.
And the circular economy, the reason it's become so prevalent
is because it offers an economic solution
to an environmental and resource problem.
And it offers a skill solution to a country
potentially that actually has forgotten what it does.