 talking about today. Welcome. We have Heather Callaway. She's a fellow from the National Geographic Society. She's working for the Zoological Society of London. She's also a honorary professor at the University of Exeter and she's an expert when it comes to animals. Also animals of the sea. I know she's very interested in seahorses and she's done her thesis about the brown trout in Wales. So, if you have a question about a sea and water animal, please refer it to Heather today. Then we're very honored to have Peter Thompson here. He's the United Nations Secretary General's Special Envoy for the Ocean. The first one in this position. I'm very happy and very honored to say you're actually the first feature citizen that I have on a panel. He comes from a region, of course, which is heavily involved and which is also a victim of these issues that we're talking about. So, he can give his own very personal opinion and approach to that as well. Then we have Tom Saki here. Welcome, Tom. He's the founder and CEO of Terra Cycle. They're the global leader in the collection and recycling of post-consumer waste. Very much involved also in the question what do we do with the plastic? What can we do better? How can we transition from a linear economy to a more circular economy? And we're very curious of what you have to say about the title here as well, Plastic Pollution and End Insight. And then, last but not least, welcome also to Gloria Fluxatineman. She's the Vice-German and Chief Sustainability Officer of the Iberostar Group. I think a group that many of us know, whoever has gone on a vacation in faraway countries, has probably been in one of the Iberostar hotels. She's from Spain and she's also a young global leader at the World Economic Forum. Maybe to start off and to give the people here a little kind of an idea why you are actually sitting here with some of you, it's easier just looking at your position of what you do in life but maybe to kind of, you know, ask you almost like in an elevator pitch way just that we do the rounds and why is plastic pollution, why is the plastic issue, high on your agenda as well, high on your list. Kathy, please. Thank you so much, Urs. Why don't I start by telling you a little bit about the Global Shapers Community of the World Economic Forum. So I'm here to represent the community, to represent the voices of youth around the world in this forum. Essentially the community is comprised of over 7,000 global shapers in over 150 countries that are committed to taking action on socially important issues in their regional communities. And we ask the global shapers around the world what is the one issue that you're passionate about that is urgent that we need to address together and together they identified, we identify climate change as a number one priority. So that's why I'm here today and I'm here to not only share ideas with you and share the great initiatives that young people around the world have undertaken on climate change and plastic pollution but also to take ideas from you so that we can then create a narrative and build action together. We have 50 global shapers here representing the community at Davos. That is less than two percent of the entire list of attendees at Davos. So I want to make sure that I'm amplifying the voices of youth so I will rely on you to tell me what your ideas are and what your call to action is as well. Thank you. Thank you very much Cathy. Very important input as well so we want to make this as interactive as possible so sharing ideas should be the idea of today as well. We will open the discussion of course as well so we're looking forward to questions comments criticism as well. This is an open forum so we're open for everything what happens today. Heather please you have you have been doing a session this morning also within the WEF within the conference center about that exact theme topic. It's easier to understand why you're an expert in this course but why is this issue so close to your heart. Okay well rather than representing youth which I wish I did but try to. I come from the angle of the fish. So I'm a marine biologist a freshwater biologist a fish biologist basically so I spend as much of my time as possible in on or under the water so coming to the mountains is the cold mountains is a very unusual experience for me but over time over the last 20 plus years of working in this job you I've become more and more aware of plastic and plastic pollution and that starts from my my own life and where I live I live in a coastal community. When I was a child if I went to the beach I just enjoyed the beach. Now when I take my children age 10 and 12 to the beach we do a beach clean because plastic is more and more present on our beaches and that's the first without even being a scientist you can see that change just in the behavior and what's present and how our environment is changing. And secondly I am very fortunate with National Geographic and with a number of the programs I work with to be able to explore some of the ocean wilderness areas and a few years ago I went to the Chegos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It takes several days to get there by boat you can't fly there and it's uninhabited 55 uninhabited islands and on one of these islands we stop for a very short period of time we were mostly doing scientific research from the boat. In just 20 minutes we collected 334 single-use plastic water bottles that came from 10 different countries from the labels that were still on the bottle. Now all of those bottles had been in somebody's hand at some point in time and those bottles will last in the environment for at least 600 500 600 years slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces where they then start being eaten by everything from plankton to whales and so this really elevated my action on plastic to try and do something about it and I hope to talk about some of the solutions and not just the problems during this forum. Absolutely that should be here for as well that we talk about you know how to get out of it and how how we can solve as much as we can. Peter I've talked about where you're from you're from one of those islands you know who are in those areas as well. You've been for a very long time involved in the UN. You've been amongst others the president of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly. You've been a permanent representative of the Fiji Islands to the UN. Now as I said the special envoy for the ocean or as a god of ocean as someone said in a previous discussion why is this why not a term you like to hear I take it from that but why is that topic so so close to you. Okay whether you come from Fiji or whether you come from Switzerland the ocean is central to your life where does the snow come from it comes from the ocean where does the snow go to when it melts into water it goes into a river that goes to the ocean. So you know the ocean is very important to Swiss people even though you're landlocked. You know Count Otto von Bismarck who was I studied him when I'm back in the dark ages when I was at university university at the unification of Germany I remember him being asked what is the difference between a politician and a statesman and Bismarck said that a statesman is a politician who thinks of his grandchildren. So I ask people to think like statesmen and stateswomen you know don't just think about your short-term lives think about what the world's going to be like for your grandchildren and when we look at the climate and when we look at the ocean we see that on current trends we are condemning our grandchildren to very very difficult times so we are not behaving like statesmen and stateswomen and we have to start behaving that way if we are responsible grandparents as I am and looking around the room I see some of you are as well glad to see you here. So that's the motivation of our work the good news as we'll discuss this morning is that there is a plan to do the right thing for the planet and the for the climate and for the ocean and I'll be happy to answer any questions in relation to that plan but you know see the world as connected in every sense see the fact that every second breath you're taking up here in Davos is coming from the ocean oxygen produced by the ocean and I think you will realize the importance of us stopping the plastic getting into the ocean from the river as it runs from Davos down to the sea. Thank you. Thank you very much Peter so we're part of the ocean people as well the swiss for for once thank you very much. We're all we're all statesmen and stateswomen in that regard we're all you know in a way responsible for what's what's happening. Someone someone who is heavily involved in that and who makes sure that we're all responsible is Tom of course. You're the author of three books as well one with the quite unusual title garbage is great. Can you elaborate on that one? Yes absolutely so I come to this from an overall waste perspective not necessarily just plastic but I think waste in general is incredibly problematic and it's a very odd academic concept I'm actually very surprised it's not even taught at school all that much or university there's no classes on waste yet every object in this room with not a single exception will become waste and will be owned physically by the garbage industry you know today we many times measure our status in society by the accumulation of stuff that we have yet all of that will be waste and not just will it be waste we'll have paid someone to take it when that happens 99% of it all becoming waste within a single year and to me I think you know waste really came about in 70 years ago or so so it's a very modern idea which is where I have hope I think we can solve it because it hasn't been with us for all that long the modern conception of waste so what I'm really passionate about is thinking through how can we solve this through business mechanisms and and other mechanisms as well to try to make things technically possible to be able to recycle then make that not just technically possible practically possible which is all about the economics of waste typically what tends to make something not recyclable simply that it's not profitable for a waste management company to do it and then most importantly looking at all of us as individuals is to actually take part and I think the you know we we tend to I'll just leave it at this last thought point our fingers to large organizations you know whether it's the manufacturers or retailers who produce or sell our goods but I think what's incredibly powerful is us as consumers we vote multiple times a day no matter how old we are for the future we want based on what we buy and this is the most powerful mechanism to change this and to change it incredibly quickly and I just hope that we all wake up to that privilege that we have and do it consciously. Thank you very much Tom Gloria you're in an area in an industry which produces a lot of waste when we talk about waste tourism hospitality industry I think that already is a reason why why you're involved in these questions as well as ahead of sustainability I guess precisely and for those of you who haven't been at that Iberia Star Hotel Iberia Star is a tourism group it's a family business based in Mallorca Spain we have different divisions tour operators travel agencies but our core activity being hotels we have 120 hotels operating in 19 countries we serve to 8 million clients and our family now of 35 000 employees and at the moment it's the third and fourth generation my father my sister and I and I believe we wouldn't have been able to write all the history we have had we were born in 1877 as a family business if we wouldn't have been responsible and it is a reality that each generation adapts that responsibility to what they're more close to and my sister and I have been born in Mallorca on an island in the middle of the Missouri Union we're both divers so we decided how can we take that responsibility forwards within our organization as well and that's why the movement the wave of change was was born it out of humbleness it is a movement that aims towards the stewardship of the oceans and its conservation and protection and it's based on one commitment by three action lines the first one being a responsible consumption of seafood the second one being an incentivation of the coastal health and the last one which is a topic that brings us today is plastics and we've made now the claim to become by 2019 a completely single-use plastic free organization within the limits that the legislation will allow us are you working together with other with other big companies or corporations or is there more kind of a you know an independent initiative that you're doing true I believe you first have to look inside and do your own homework and the collaborations come along the way your credibility comes when you start doing things right 2019 was was the first year we were the first hotel chain in Spain to completely eliminate the plastics and thanks to that action a lot of collaborations then came along and alliances there's a lot of initiatives going on at the moment we'll hear from one from here actually from a local perspective as well and we'll hear about corporations and I think that that that is a point we'll have to talk about you know what what is the responsibility of us all what is the responsibility of big business as well of corporations of the economy I would like to start however with some facts and figures because we've seen already some in the initial films in the fiction film that we saw but if you really go and dig deeper a bit I mean some of these facts and figures and numbers are simply mind-blowing when I read into it it really it really makes you aware of of the sheer size of the issue and the problem just something that you've you've heard as well by 2050 the weight of plastic indices will be bigger than the weight of fish if nothing changes if nothing changes of course of course at the rate we're going now all this is the disclaimer if we don't act now and if we don't if nothing changes this will be the case something that is already the case is more than eight million tons of plastic end up in our oceans each year and which for me hard to grasp but if if you put it the other way around or if you put another fact in there you can you can understand that's read somewhere the equivalent of five grocery bags full of plastics along every foot of shoreline in 192 countries of the world when we see and hear these facts header and you're you're you kind of teach them all day long that there might be a thought that this this this problem is so huge how can we even grasp it and then let alone try to solve it yeah it took a while there was a very small number of scientists working on the topic to actually discover the the problem and now we have the scientific information to know that the approximate quantities that are going into the ocean the amount that's coming from rivers the amount that's coming from mismanaged waste and that's the the primary problem it's coming from us and it's going into the environment and even ignoring the ocean it's otherwise going into landfill so at the moment globally only nine percent is recycled so we are way off looking at the circular economy and proper waste management that we that we we we dream of and the problem is it's such a persistent material it just it lasts for hundreds or thousands of years and and so it it doesn't go away so unless it's been burnt every single piece of plastic ever made still exists on our planet so now we're just working at what to do with that and we have that awareness the fact we have a full room today the fact that you'll see lots of stories in the media and the fact you see such an incredibly diverse panel and that's represented around the plastic conversation is one that everyone wants to solve in working in conservation which can be quite challenging in finding solutions that everybody wants the topic around plastic is really interesting because so many actors are coming to the table either from a business perspective who are leading because it it's with their personal values and identifies with that organization from a financial sense from an innovation from a design sense and for me as a scientist and a conservationist it's all about change let me just take up one one one figure you mentioned because i think it's an important fact that when we talk about the nine percent of plastic being recycled at the moment i think it's nine and a half or so at the moment this is not this is not because of a scientific reason i mean we are able to recycle them with with the pet industry we we could it's just that we don't that's that's the main issue right it's it's a it's a huge mix and i'll refer to tom who's a far more of a specialist on this but partly it's around the lack of waste collection and management and and and some of it's around product design which is designed to make it fabulous for us to buy and appeal to all of our marketing but not necessarily around what happens to it at the end of life and so what is starting to change by some organizations is to design with that future in mind with with the grandchildren in mind and a more sustainable system in mind so we go from plastic to landfill or plastic to the ocean then goes from plastic to plastic so tom yes please happily build on that i think to give a sense of what are the factors that play into this first everything in the world is technically recyclable there's basically nothing that can't be technically processed so it really comes down to is it practically recyclable even here in switzerland which is one of the more advanced recycling markets there's so many things that you don't have a recycling solution for and that's why a large percentage of the waste here in switzerland is incinerated what makes something practically recyclable is entirely due to economics waste management companies are in the business of urban mining that is actually recycling and that means that they're going to mine what they can mine that at a profit after their cost of collecting it and processing it if that cost is lower than what they can sell it for they will do so everything else if it costs more to collect and process that's an unprofitable business model so they won't do it and they'll instead look at what is the cheapest way to dispose it within the laws of the land here that would be mostly waste to energy because there's a lot of anti landfill legislation in countries like the united states where i live that will be landfilling and in countries that don't have the infrastructure which is a tremendous number of countries aren't developed yet it will be a lot of littering which ends up in rivers and ends up in in oceans and so it all comes down to the economics of waste and some of the big macro challenges that are taking us unfortunately in the wrong direction is driven by consumers which is that consumers we want things that are convenient and affordable so cheap and simple and if you think about packaging how's it progressed you know it's gone from heavy refillable bottles you know to aluminum cans to pet bottles to cartons to pouches if you think about beverages and every step along the way recycling gets cut in half not because they can't be recycled but because they're less profitable to recycle and the moment you get to a pouch it's not economical to do so and this is finally compounded by macroeconomic trends which are low prices of oil that's what recycling competes against so if oil became expensive recycling would boom and increase and also end markets countries like china who stopped importing make it also much more difficult to find places to take it to so recycling as an overall idea in the world is struggling because of all these factors and again it comes down to us as individuals who are out there purchasing these products to buy the products that you can locally recycle and then to do so that's so critically important and try to resist that urge of just the compulsive shopping where you blindly purchase just whatever makes you feel at the moment good thank you very much maybe peter if i take that point that you know it would be possible and we could solve it as much as we can quite quickly but if it goes down to you know profit if it goes down to money if it goes down to maybe also our personal laziness or that we want to we don't want to spend too much is that the main problem that you're facing as well that you see that you know it it would be we're not talking about the technology or technological problem or or you know the the the solutions would be there in a way well when you're talking about solutions first of all it's a complex problem with complex solutions i think we have to accept that that there's no silver bullet when it comes to plastic solutions plastic pollution we've got choices before us though as individuals and as governments and as multilateral organizations choices to make obviously the recycling one is a very important part of it and if you listen to pepsicola and coca-cola while you're here in Davos you will see that recycling is going to be a big part of our future but it's only like the end of point as far as i'm concerned there is also the refuse reuse and reduce aspect that we as individuals can take upon ourselves i remember in well first of all i remember when plastic started i'm old enough for that sitting in Fiji with sitting around 11 year old smoking our cigarettes at school break you know bad boys and somebody produced a plastic bick uh cigarette lighter and i remember that we were all actually appalled by it because there was nowhere to fill the lighter fluid in the top and we said what what what's going to happen to this i said we just throw it away they're so cheap you get another one and i said but what happens to this stuff oh it never destroys it you know so sure enough plastic uh cigarette lighters a year later were starting to shop on the beaches and they've been been accumulating there ever since so uh we have this personal choice of whether to use those or not i personally gave up smoking a couple years later when i was a teenager but uh i personally have never bought one of those plastic lighters i find them repulsive quite frankly the whole concept of them i remember my mother at that time she had got in the idea of using plastic bags in the kitchen but our clothes line in the backyard was always of these plastic bags on the clothes line drying out after they were being used so they could be reused again she wasn't an ecologist she was just living in that post-war generation that did not want to waste what we had right uh take me a fijian uh who always thought that okay if you want to be a modern person you got to own a car i always drove around fijian a car when i got to be an urban person in the uh late 80s i realized by about the mid 90s why the heck am i owning a car if i'm living in a city with with great uh public transportation what am i doing this for and if i'm in a hurry i can take a taxi i don't need to own a car now i have never owned a car for what 25 years now i'm now living in london if somebody gave me a car i won the lottery or something i would refuse it it would be a nightmare to me where would i park it you know i have to worry about the you know maintaining the car and everything so we can make personal rational choices which are about not being uh in the consumer trap of having to buy buy buy whenever i go on to an airline for example i protest because it's it's almost all airlines doer now everything is wrapped in plastic your pillow your blankets your your little kit everything inside the kits wrapped in plastic i didn't ask for that i didn't pay for that well in fact i did pay for it but uh i always protest why who is putting this stuff on us we as individuals have the power to refuse it not to accept it you know the obvious one being the plastic bag at the supermarket supermarket counter and i'm sure none of you ever take super those bags up developing countries are way ahead on this i'd like to tell you there's over 50 countries now have banned single-use plastic bags you know we've got to move on this stuff we have individuals uh consumers and voters and we have power to do this thank you very much some important takeaways not least one uh that you started smoking with 11 but that's not the uh the main issue today but i'll take that as a kind of a you know it is a it is a personal mindset as well and i was just wondering when we talk about plastic it's something that i don't remember having talked about as you say 10 or 20 years ago it was just normal nowadays i think it's it's safe to say it's almost like the most demonized material we can talk about kathy do you think it's that could that be the first step to kind of a you know more awareness more more a solution based uh a kind of kind of uh possibility that yes we still have everything wrapped in plastic but in a way we all know that it's not a good thing right i do agree that plastics are usually associated with a bad name a bad rep but on the other hand you know we know that there are climate change deniers out there but i feel that there are fewer plastic pollution deniers because you see the real impacts their effect in communities you see the plastics bottles that are washing up on on beaches so it's very very hard to ignore some evidence evidence that's right in front of your eyes so i'm kind of hopeful for the fact that you know it's harder to kind of turn away from that problem um and i also wanted to kind of talk about you know some of the solutions that young people are coming up with around the world to address this issue and this is all very regionally focused because you know every contact every cultural context requires a culturally specific strategy to make a real impact so um you know shapers around global shapers around the world have taken upon themselves to implement some uh projects to both conserve our natural environment reduce the use of plastic and also transform plastics into value-added products so um one example is uh from one of the global shaper hub in lima peru um they led an ocean cleanup movement that featured 10 000 youth volunteers um this movement is the largest beach cleanup movement in peru uh it was started by two global shapers and just expanded to 10 000 volunteers um and their initial objective was to uh basically uh shape policy and get the congress to adopt a plastic span they achieved that objective because the government saw the amount of work that went into collecting data on the different types of plastics that were being found on the beach on the beaches um this kind of data actually uh fed into a lot of the congressional legislative debates in peru um and it also kind of points to the importance of citizen science citizen science being all of us able to kind of work together and kind of come up with the solutions and collect evidence towards to inform policy um and so uh going to gloria's point earlier uh she mentioned that you know we need to kind of start locally before we can expand um this is an example of local really grassroots youth driven movement that actually now has um a lot of corporate partnerships because companies recognize that they need to get in this it's not just a problem it's an opportunity and the youth that are backing this movement that are leading this movement have a lot of energy a lot of willingness to make change so you know this is the right it's the right moment it's the right place and i just want to leave at that and i can come come to other examples later on as well in our case yes please in our case um there's actually no manual for an organization that tells you how are you making that change so we had to learn a lot along the process uh we started in spain we looked we didn't ban the plastic we also looked for the best alternatives in every moment we gave it a very rigorous approach we had guidelines like certifications like din in germany okay compost in belgium and we were looking at every time either for a way of recycling where there was a waste recycling system available or for elements that were completely compostable or biodegradable in order to prepare because right now in these three months we're doing the rollout to other countries with a level of complexity like cuba the minnecon republic jamaica and in that case we said right um there's no system of waste treatment there so the only way we can do it to start really walking the path is to have that guarantee of biodegradability and compostability in order to then shift forward but i feel that what differentiated the stress the stress and the effort that we did is the rigorosity on the approach of looking to the alternatives so when you mentioned before the collaborations i think it would be very interesting if there would be a common ground on what materials are available what kind of alternatives do really work and what are the best usages for that just quickly before we go to heather and then uh tom how do you deal with it on the daily basis in your company in your hotels for example i have you i don't know have you banned plastic bottles are you only only using glass bottles is there some kind of kind of a corporate strategy or corporate rules that you give in or give out to all the uh to all the hotels we have we were working for a whole year actually we did a an x-ray of what we were consuming when it comes to plastics single use plastics right and we had 3600 items different items of plastic internally in the organization so we did the analysis on to which department they detained whether it was a kitchen whether it was a room and then in every case we had some work groups and task forces in order to prepare for those changes i'll give you an example we wanted to change all the mini doses of gel shampoos that we have in the hotels we don't have them anymore there are multiple use dosers made of recycled plastic we had to train the ladies that were actually coming to clean the rooms to make that change in order for them to understand how to use the new products another example could be the coffee capsules we changed those for compostable items so we also had to explain how the client could come to a room and recycle that and where it had to place that item how it had to change it and all that process we really realized that speaking about the training and and training our people was the most important part of it because if our people didn't understand it it would be very difficult then for our client to understand it so did you have to explain more to the staff than to the clients i think you have different stakeholders so people that are of interest to you that you know that they have to help you to push this process and this idea that you have and for us the most important one was the employees we had to start with them so we had to start with the 35 000 employees because they had to understand why you were doing it one of the things that made me spark that idea is that one day i was walking towards one of our hotels in the dominican republic and i know it wasn't badly intentioned but i heard one of the waiters saying oh no no i pure star is doing this to save costs they're not sending any more plastic bottle individually and and i started smiling internally but it made me spark and said there's a lot of work to do in the training because people you cannot impose it you have to convince them so we've done a lot of conviction and a lot of training along this year that we've done it and now we're intensely dedicated to the rollouts in the 19 countries because we have a compromise now within the next year and a half to do it in the rest of the countries and when you talk about 3600 i think it was products is there a go end goal where you say we want to go down to this or this number so interestingly enough i think that without sounding arrogant but we're doing our homework right so but there's a last step that will come from the legislation there's certain areas like the kitchens that i would love to go into one of the fridges of my hotels and not see a card completely rolled in film with the date and the date of consumption but i cannot avoid that because legislation forces me to do that so what we're doing parallel to the effort internally is we're also promoting for the different stakeholders whether it be political speakers economical interests in the different countries where we are to to shift to make a shift in that aspect as well head of sorry i cut you short no no that's that's fine um i think it is important not to demonize plastic it's an incredible material a phenomenal invention and we basically it's it's transformed our lives improved life expectancy all thoughts are wonderful things we're targeting particular areas where we take this incredible product that lasts for hundreds or thousands of years and we it's a single use site so 40 of all plastic produced each year it goes to make single use plastic and that's the initial target i think of change um and again lots of different innovations happening on that and it does come back we we've actually got a project happening in london it's it's sort of an experiment to look at how do you change a system so it's uh obviously a developed country society where you can go to the tap and have you know perfectly clean water that comes out of it that's better regulated than water and plastic bottles and we were like how do we shift that system from one that's become over a very short period of time a plastic refill disposal plastic disposable society how might we shift that to a refill one so in the same way do your homework we did the research we looked at um interviews right the way across the supply chain from the producers to the consumers and we identified 11 different barriers to change and some of that is just uh people using a refillable bottle um they're worried about cleaning them they don't they leak they're not very good um men we found were less likely to carry a refillable bottle because they're less likely to have a bag with them so there's all these things that we have to overcome if we're going to change the system and another key was quite basic simple quite basic simple behavior um but also it was access to water so again a busy uh big global city um and it's on the go so people who are commuting traveling going to meetings taking their kids to school who who don't necessarily bring the water with us and with British culture it turns out that people want to refill their bottles but 80% were too embarrassed to go into a cafe or shop and ask if they could be refills so we're trying to break down those that system working with the mayor of London we've installed 17 water fountains already in public spaces and there's a hundred more going in so that they've got to be clean they've got to be looked after and maintained and we've got to encourage people to use them and we're also working with a scheme called refill where it's as simple as putting a sticker on a cafe or a shop or or a hotel and saying we're quite happy for you to come in and we'll fill your bottle for free so the famous British politeness can be part of the it's part of it's a very big barrier in our society and that's something that we we have to overcome so it is understanding the local context and targeting how you make the biggest change so whether it's training your staff whether it's engaging use or whether it's breaking down some of those barriers that are going to allow that change to happen then we can start to see really big transformations Tom I think you had something to add yeah I just want to echo the statement that that was said is that you know we see as consumers the visible part of this the the the bottles we touch the bags we interact with but what's really important to try to have a sense of is as well the entire supply chain to get that item to physically you know to you you know for example apples may show up at a supermarket you know with no packaging but they would have stepped through layers and layers and layers of plastics to be able to arrive at that supermarket and be consumed it's just like the food service items I think that you were chatting about just to echo behavior a little bit to build on on the point I think behavior is really really important you know we did a it was a scary study for me we went to a train station in New York City and put out a beautifully labeled recycling bin there could be no confusion and right beside it a really negatively labeled landfill bin you know and 50 percent of consumer of people who were walking by and had a recyclable bottle would put it in the wrong bin 50 percent it was absolutely shocking that even if the the packaging is technically recyclable and there's practical options available our apathy is so high now we tended to be more men so for the men in the audience we have to work especially hard women were were better kids were the you know by far below 18 were absolutely the the very best so just you know it's important to self reflect on that especially if you're in our demographic here but it was an interesting types of solutions you know you could solve this by incentivizing deposit laws are a good example of that and that does help boost recycling you could solve that by finding I know for example here in Switzerland there's fines if you do it incorrectly that also helps that's either through characteristics but you can also do it without concept of money an interesting idea there through a partnership with PepsiCo we installed little computers in these bins that when you put your bottle in to the right one it would sense a trigger an infrared trigger and it would give you back just a a sound file basically saying thank you for recycling or a joke or something like that and it boosted compliance to 90 percent in the right direction just by having people smile and then the best was little kids were running around trying to find the next bottle even taking them out of the wrong bin to put it in to get that next just auditory feedback so I think we need to also think about how do we make this topic exciting because I think as it as it loses that excitement we gain apathy and then no matter what infrastructure laws and capabilities are put in by all the stakeholders if we the people don't act then it's all for not I promise you Tom I will make this topic even more exciting now because it gives me there and I'm very glad to talk about young people and the kids and that gives me the opportunity to to kind of open up the discussion a bit and a little warning if your Swiss German is a bit rusty so maybe you take up your your headphones because I want to I want to introduce you to a to initiative from Davos and thank you to me a chance to switch into Swiss German a great action a great campaign we yes I'm sure there'll be applause later on and it's well deserved I can tell you plastic is an issue which has attracted a great deal of attention from young people in Davos and so I think it's interesting for you who live in Davos to hear about it but also for the others there three pupils from the secondary school that's Marat Ivan and Marco are with us here today and they are representatives of their class a group of boys in Davos or group of kids basically young people in Davos who have decided to do something about the plastic issue I'm going to put the question to you I don't know if you've decided who is going to answer who is allowed to or who has to answer the question Ivan is going to answer the question could you perhaps tell us briefly for the benefit of the panelists how did you come up with the idea well last year at the WEF we were part of the sales force and we had a presentation by a professor from California professor Douglas and we were absolutely horrified to see how much plastic just ends up in the ocean so we decided to and our teachers at school also discussed the problem at school plastic issue and we decided we had to do something about this we can't change the world but we need to start somewhere and plastic is probably the most problematic kind of waste at the moment and we thought we'd like to try and do something about changing that and start in Davos so you've taken an initiative you've just been told where the idea came from and Marco is going to tell us about the next step they were determined to do something they knew they had to do something and what exactly did you do what was your plan how did you implement this idea well we discussed our plan with our teacher and we thought we could do something about encouraging recycling in Davos our teacher mr Schlichting got some information he talked to someone who's been doing this for longer than we had he talked to mr Bueller about it we ordered bags and all of us from the secondary school got a bag we were given for free a recycling bag they're made of bio plastics these recycling bags so it's plastic yes but it's bio plastics and I said everyone got a bag in Davos as in many other places in Switzerland pet bottles are collected there's a collecting point for pet bottles but not much else is done about collecting plastic waste it goes into the regular household waste apart from the bottles so that brings us to the third step and that's when you really got going now these bags can be bought for six francs in Davos in some shops these special waste collection bags it started in the autumn it's a huge success and this activity is ongoing perhaps you'd like to tell us a bit more about it perhaps Mara can tell us what's going to happen next this is not a one-off initiative how are you planning to see this developing further in the future one of our ambitions obviously was for this to become a sustainable project and we didn't want it to be just something that happened for a few weeks and then stopped and that's an ambition we have achieved we wanted more containers in Davos we want to be able to process it here in Davos because if the waste is transported away from Davos to be processed that generates more carbon dioxide because of the trucks so that is what we are now working on now I think everyone can join in the applause because I think this project deserves a round hand this is really an example of an initiative which started on a small scale and it even started at the Wef last year and you've heard what's happened in the course of one year started on a small scale and a lot has happened since then I see hands going up so I'm sure that there will be an opportunity for questions and answers with these young people and I can go back into English we hear what these students have done you know start something from scratch they didn't have any help they just they were just they wanted more information and they wanted to to take action is that well it's it's something very encouraging I think we all agree on that in your experience is that something that's typical that the action has to come from I don't know from the bottom has to come you know the very grass roots like has to come from the young to all of you I think that plastic has its place obviously probably be with us till the end of the time but I do think that we'll invent new things particularly compostable things for example which are now already being invented just a matter of scaling them up it's gotta be the right plastic and Tom's better in better shape than me to describe to you what I mean by the right plastic because not all plastic is recyclable when it's mixed together it breaks the process down of recycling so has to be the right kind of plastics and the right kind of uses and most uses of plastic in my mind are unnecessary it's useful in life I think if you think about the world take it down to your household you know if you think about what you've got in your house and have a look around my wife and I do this all the time it's amazing how much plastic you've got in your house it's amazing how much stuff you've got in your house that you don't need at the heart of the united nations sustainable development goals there are 17 of them I'm sure you know about them sustainable development goal 14 is the ocean one in which plastic is mentioned plastic pollution at the heart of the sustainable goals is SDG 12 that is about consumption and production and we have to change our consumption and production patterns and that's up to us as individuals as much as it's up to governments to do so because we're just consuming too much producing too much we're all becoming middle class when the whole world is middle class and has two or three cars each I'm sorry everything collapses the planet cannot sustain that so we have to change our consumption patterns and plastics part of that let me just ask you again for the for the awareness part I mean we've seen here it's it's young people I know you have three granddaughters I think is do you think it's it's a generational thing as well that young people get it more or more living in New York I rang up my grandchildren and said no you must not use that horrible clingwreck black wrap stuff you know it's vile that people wrap their food in that clingwrap stuff it really is vile and you shouldn't use plastic lunchboxes anymore and they let me talk on as the grandfather eventually they said to me Papi at our school nobody is allowed to bring plastic to school the whole school is plastic free you know and this is just a little primary school in Auckland New Zealand and hopefully that's the way the rest of the world is going that that they get it you know they they see that they can't have that sort of stuff in their future Heather what do you think is it is it a generational thing um well firstly congratulations that's an inspirational example and I think a lesson for everybody in the room is uh if we're all sitting here this time next year what will you have done that compares with what a group of students did from coming to listen to a presentation and it is all something that everybody can do something about so it's starting small it can start with an individual so to my plastic water bottle example everybody in the UK and it's a very similar figure in Europe uses uh adults use about 175 single-use plastic water bottles every year so if you just do the maths in this room if all of us used a refillable bottle from this point on that's a huge difference it's a billion bottles at the London level so what I'm thinking of course is okay how from Davos how about Cloisters how about what's your community what other schools can you reach out to and in the UK there's a similar initiative because the youth are inheriting a plastic world from our generation and they are part of the solution both from innovation and pressure and so there's a charity I'm a trustee of called Surfers Against Sewage in the UK that has a plastic free schools initiative that provides examples to get from one you know plastic use to get rid of it so to your example Gloria of the case documenting the case studies to make it easier for everybody else so can you share your example to other schools in Switzerland to see how many schools could have signed up to do exactly what you're doing by this time next year first time and then Gloria please yes so I'd like to make two independent points one is to really echo what you were saying which is every not just waste but every environmental issue from species reduction deforestation climate change I can't really think of any environmental issue that is not directly linked to only one thing which is consumption and consumption is growing because the population is growing of course but it's also growing per capita if you compare someone alive today one of us sitting in this room to someone alive just a hundred years ago we consume 10 times more physical objects 10 times more stuff than someone alive just one century ago and so the absolute best thing you can do to save the environment without having to understand any of the details because it can get very complex very quickly is just stop purchasing it's it's that easy and or purchase less you can also share versus own these are foundational solutions and the easiest way to think about that is do you derive your joy from the act of shopping or do you derive your joy from some other way interacting with friends experiencing nature seeing learning like you're here today and I think we have to easily put our happiness into this act of purchase and I'm just a hypocrite as much as all of us are but that's the key thing to focus on and the other somewhat independent point I'd like to make is here's the simple guide to understand what plastics are good and what are not so good it's all about value that's the point it's not about some magic of what can be recycled or not what recyclers want are clear rigid plastics that's a very very simple we don't have to know what the plastic is just clear rigid is really good then the lighter the better in the sense that color is a contaminant it's just like when kids paint with paints it all ends up as brown and you can't ever unbrown the brown so you want to keep the colors separate so try to buy clear or white rigid and stay away from things that are complex those are some simple rules and one last point I know we've talked about biodegradable not everything is so clear you know biodegradable has a wonderful place in emerging markets where most waste is littered and if it ends up in the aquatic system it's better or in the natural system is litter better that it has a path to degrade faster than a non degradable choice but biodegradable plastics actually in developed markets are a very big problem and a good example of this not to go into too much detail is we've worked with Tesco a major retailer in the UK who has outlawed biodegradable plastics from being sold in their stores starting this April and the reason they have is because biodegradable plastics are a contaminant to the people who actually have to degrade them composters composters want your banana peels your coffee grounds your leaves while biodegradable plastic will actively degrade there's no question you couldn't grow a plant from it it's effectively a dead material and so in many countries when Tesco looked into this in the UK the composters are sorting out all that biodegradable plastic that's put into a green bin destroying it and then actively processing what they want so the key punchline here is give the waste management industry what it wants versus projecting responsibility onto it to deal with our problems and we learn from that there is indeed not a silver bullet and one one solution glory you had to so I'm a firm believer in the youth so first congratulations there's always such a special energy in the youngsters and the way you're doing things professor Makali is a scientific advisor of ours in our project so he's actually helping us a lot in constructing the way we do things and the first thing he said is that you have to tackle the children you have to tackle the youngsters so we did a lot of programs with the children that came to with their families to our hotels in order for them to explain how you can recycle what can you do and I could not agree more with Tom if you look at a biodegradable product ask yourself the questions what kind of product is it is it also biodegradable is it made of a natural material to give you an example we use plastic bags that are made of potato starch we have brushes toothbrushes that are made out of corn and shaving handles for the shavers that are made out of bamboo but we are in conversations now with all the recycling companies like TerraCycle there's another one in Mallorca called Tirme that we collaborate a lot because we are asking them that question is it worthwhile to look for that alternative and what do you do with it and I think those questions for you are key on what do you do in Davos how do you recycle it and continue expanding look for clusters and continue with that energy congratulations I'd love to speak more about initiatives that are going on more on a kind of an international level before giving it to you as well you know open up the the the panel as well for questions and comments but Kathy please you you you ask for the word as well all right thank you congratulations you guys inspire me you are the next generation of global shapers you don't have to be in part of the official global shapers community to shape your your society so really really proud of you and I want to echo Heather's point on you know the idea the question of what next you want to make the project sustainable and you know thinking about what what what can you do to scale up or expand or tackle other issues that are related to plastic pollution and I wanted to give you something that's maybe food for thought for you so few shapers in the Mumbai hub in India launch a project called bottle bricks essentially they collected over 6000 plastic bottles and they turned that into bricks so plastic bottles turn into bricks and those bricks then were transformed into buildings and furniture that people could use so it's the idea of using plastic to turn turning plastic into useful products that people can create generate value from so they actually partner with 50 schools and over 1500 students and so I'm just thinking in relation to the project you did there's an element of capacity building and training and spreading the word to your peers and also people in other generations I think you guys play a big role in terms of being the messengers and the emissaries of this important cause don't give up hope don't give up hope it's difficult definitely to start up a project from scratch with no resources you guys are already doing a great job you guys you know I think the benefit of our generation is that we're a little bit impatient and we want change to happen right away but you know sometimes we'll also need to take a pause and think about what are the what are the steps we need who are the partners we need to kind of scale up and move forward with this initiative and so I'm happy to continue the conversation with you later on as well great lots of praise for you guys feel hope it's my understanding lots of praise now I think you've got to spread these two closers and the rest of the pretty girl oh before I take over again so please you know feel free we have questions we already have raised arms I see three or four we have plenty of oh wow that's a lot that's a lot yeah start in all in the back maybe there we have do we have the microphones there okay great can I yes please well hi to all first of all I beg your pardon for my English it's not very good you can speak German or Swiss German if you'd like because there is interpretation okay I don't speak very well anyway I don't look like young but I am young my look is something others but I also searched the solution for this problem from one hour I not yet hear a word about solution for the plastic pollution three months ago I grounded with other people one new association that has already two solution for the two problems of the plastic pollution one for the micro plastic and one from the micro plastic are two different problems we have two different solutions and machinery for cleaning the waters in the world so yes please go ahead the the association is born now we start now to work I hope we can next year bring some results to you the association name is hydrosphere association in two weeks you can find online the website not yet ready okay before we go too much into advertising so but it's just good to know that you know there are initiatives and there are ideas I would suggest also there are people here on the panel so you can you know maybe you can you can bilaterally speak about about solutions and and possible ways out of the out of the issue as well we gladly take this on board maybe if you find and we can you know we can bilaterally speak about that thank you very much we will be talking about solutions I can assure you as well let me have a young voice there as well there's a student sitting there with the thank you so this question is mainly directed at Mr sake so if I said that wrong um you talked a lot about behavior and the effect this can have on the consumption and production um some experiments you ran on interactive methods those used on social media and if so whatever methods do you see possible for changing this behavior to in turn change the consumption it's a really good question because in especially here in Switzerland but I think anywhere where all of us live we're all a privileged audience the infrastructure more or less is there to give us the choices that wouldn't be the answer if we were sitting right now in Laos or Cambodia or other areas but we are here in Switzerland and so most of it has to do with behavior and the other thing that's very important is all of us I think are incredibly aware of the issue I think why there's an audience here so I don't think it's it's what we need to do is I mean we have to be aware but doing it through negative reinforcement you know all all the negatives could lead to someone saying what you said at the very beginning of this whole panel it is too big of a problem so I'm just not gonna take part and then I'm frankly gonna keep contributing to it uh because if you check out our our it's very hard to avoid disposability it follows us like a wake on a boat so you have to consciously avoid it like what you did in your hotels that's a conscious decision that wasn't necessarily the easy one that every hotel can follow and so the biggest lesson I've learned in behavior change is you don't need necessarily money you don't have to pay people to change the incentive to give can be in the form of happiness and feeling purpose you know today we live in a news environment where the news is horrible no matter where we look whether it's you know at the UK or the US or Brazil all these examples of negative stories even this plastic issue in in of itself and negative story I mean it's horrible there's not good out there and I think people are good people you know generally we we want to feel like we can contribute and we want to contribute in a positive way but we want to be given the choice to do that and framing in social media a good example is what doesn't work would be like shaming someone oh I saw someone putting the wrong bin and you know and that does happen on social media versus doing the opposite you know imagine if you know someone camped out at a recycling when it started posting everyone who did it right how cool would that be and it's that positive it may not seem as meaningful but it really multiplies in an absolutely brilliant way and and using that because we tend to focus on the negative so much that little smile is actually such a massive motivator and then to spread that and I think also you know it's it's to it's what was said earlier on this idea of consumption we need to make the idea of of modest or reasonable living the way that it was a few generations ago cool you know because if you look at tv what's cool right having three houses private jets big cars that's a lot of stuff to deal with you know like we have to also shift what is hip and what is cool and you know you're pretty look pretty cool do it yourself right and then hopefully i'm sure your friends will follow and that's how these movements get created but do it all through the art of positive peter can i just add to that is is is the personal initiative is is that the main driver or do you see it more as I guess the big elephant in the room is also you know does this have to be regulated does this have to be forced as well I mean should should it go beyond the kind of personal initiative look just to answer the gentleman at the back as if he hasn't been listening if he says no solutions have been mentioned from our talk this morning I've counted about 50 different solutions there is no single silver bullet solution to this plastic problem that we've put on the world there's going to be multiple solutions and we have to everybody with good intentions has to work to get there individuals families communities cities regional governments national governments regional organizations of nations and the global organizations everybody has a responsibility to sort out this problem by the way it's only one of the multitude of problems the ocean has the plastic one but it's a big one you know because of our clothing we have microfibers of plastic which has absolutely inundated the ocean from the Arctic to the Antarctic the microfibers and the animals are eating that it's ending up back on our plates to what the pictures you've seen of the plastic soups that are out there in the great gyres it is a major problem but it's just one of the many and responsibility I get back to that it goes from the individual to the global organization and everything in between and there is no simple solution we've all got to work at this with good intention I just echo this point on the clothing that you mentioned today there's basically three types of clothing you have your natural clothing cotton shirts and wool and so on those are absolutely fine but then you have your poly your plastic clothing you know nylons and so on and then especially most of the clothing today's hybrids you know these combinations of organic materials with plastic if if your pants stretch you have a hybrid 70% of the clothing in this room including ours on stage is plastic the big issue here is when you wash a garment microfibers come off and none of our washing machines have the filters to catch these microfibers they're all they are effectively the ultimate degraded plastics it's the same thing plastic packaging will degrade to over many years and it's monumentally bigger than the disposable plastic issue by far from a micro plastic pollution problem so what's the solution right not just here's the negative is when you buy a pair of when you buy a garment most of the microfibers are knocked off in the first three washes 90% and then relatively few every wash thereafter it's important to note that an average I know for female for women an average woman in the western world today by 67 garments per year and uses them on average three times before disposal which is exactly the maximum of the washing issue so the solution is buy awesome clothing that you're going to love and enjoy for a very long time to avoid this or just buy someone's used clothing that was hopefully also awesome and enjoyed very good very handsome solution yes one question so we now this year we started that all the uniforms that we have in our organization are made of recycled plastic how does that statistic apply to recycle plastic material exactly the same so exactly the same in three washes yes exactly the same because it's it's when a new item is made there's a lot of you know a lot that can come off in the first cycles so but the real answer here is keep those moving you know as long as the staff aren't rotating through the shirts very quickly it's it's it's better than if they have high rotation so you know the question is if you have seasonal staff you know can that garment travel to the next one or does it end with that staff member it's a big question here is about making things last that's a foundational solution to a lot of this but it's also important to look at these externalities right and then because it's a really incredible decision to go to recycle plastic that's really big and then the more information you have the the more you can point that in the right direction but that would challenge you then because we're looking at alternative products that are not recycled plastic but you realize that the organic materials don't have a life don't have the lifespan that the that the recycled materials and I I believe this questioning comes back to the mention of Peter that there's no cookie cutter solution you just have to keep on moving learning around the process but really start moving I'd say it's lifespan is the key right that is the great maybe let me see whether we've got other other questions here yeah we've got some so hard to pick oh someone someone's waving like crazy and so we're going to give him the the mic please make it as short as possible maybe all right I'll try to keep it short hi my name is Christian and work with LinkedIn and thank you so much for all being here I would like to my questions about scalable and financially sustainable solutions to plexi plastic solution so for example Mr. Thompson you talked about personal choice refuse reduce recycle I don't want to sound like the negative guy in the room but it sounds like a lot like the climate change movement when people were talking about taking shorter showers or stop taking hot showers all these different things we're always talking about behavior change and not about potential real incentives for people to change their behavior it seems to me that people's just willingness to change is not just strong enough and I honestly don't want to come back here 10 years from now and see the same panel I think nobody wants that so my question is about scalable solutions to plastic pollution and especially plastic is too cheap to be recycled right we've talked about this as well what is actually needed to solve the problem of the source for this non-recyclable plastic are we talking about a plastics tax like potentially a carbon tax and especially for Tom I would love to hear from you regarding technologies to potentially replace this type of plastic do we have this type of technology and is it actually scalable and sustainable thank you so much well I think we had the answer to your questions everything would be solved like that but as we've said it is a very complex situation and I don't want to be the negative guy in the room either I'm a grandfather I've got to give a world to my grandchildren which is livable in so the climate change movement I'd just like to say that this is not about movements this is about the fundament our climate is changing our ocean is changing all of us are involved you know and so you know this is as we've been talking about responsibility today this is what it is it's about individual responsibilities going up to the government responsibilities I'll let Tom answer the second part of your question but I would say that I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist I'm a pragmatist I believe in governance and taking action pragmatic action to change things and that's what we're doing and I think it was Heraclitus who said that was the first person to say has been said a million times since that change is the one constant I live in a house in London which was a house for horses a hundred years ago there are 10 000 houses like that in in central London they're the muse houses they were for the horses why because a hundred years ago there were no cars everybody was going around in on horses right change happened overnight and suddenly everybody's in cars the next change for the better is going to happen very quickly as well let's be part of the change yes please no um and I think the the interesting metaphor when you say from horses to cars is I think the questions we need to ask here because the car just is better than the horse for a whole host of reasons and why did plastic win really in 1950 that's when this all came about you said you remember pre-plastic I'm sure there's others in the room that remember it too I just romanticize over it myself but the what did it come to two things it beat what was there it was better it was and what people wanted was cheap and convenient and what I think the key challenge is and this goes to everybody this goes to young folks uh entrepreneurs large organizations governments to set the stage and then to think about what are the models through which we don't have this addiction to disposability that are in fact ideally better for the consumer because I believe that is what's going to really be the goal if we do it through sacrifice it's going to be always a small group but if we can do it through improvement uh and uh bringing out the future that is going to be what's really going to change the world and we see this already in sharing economy I mean look at what Airbnb for example did in the hotel industry and they are incredibly big and have done a lot of the travel industry oh yeah the whole the whole end right what has happened there and that's an example of sharing what has uber done in the transportation market what has bike sharing done I think if we really think about these there's lots of opportunities within them to explore and uh and and uh and to bring out a really a better world where this is no longer the case can I just take on that so if I just may because Tom said cheap and inconvenient were the winners right which they were he's quite right and we were sold a dummy there as we now know when we look at the ocean and look at our climate we were sold a dummy that cheap and convenient is the way to go the throw away society it was not the way to go it's got us into the mess we're in now so uh I'm hoping that the change that is going to come and I do believe you know change is that constant we're going to change for the better we're going to change in a way that's not cheap and convenient we're going to change in a way that's going to put us back into a relationship of respect with the environment on which we depend for our existence I'm just wondering how do you think like to to force that change some and that's part of that question as well maybe we have to force people as well beat via taxes or you know the incentives is one thing but maybe regulation is needed there as well what are your thoughts about it yeah I mean the the there isn't one solution we've said that multiple times but there is a huge portfolio globally of solutions out there some of those are developed at the grassroots level some of them are led by government some of them are led by huge change we're seeing within businesses so we're seeing supermarkets we're seeing the big drinks companies we're seeing the packaging companies on the case forming alliances changing the way they do things it's being taken very seriously because of the responsibility of what's happening the awareness of what's happening and from customer pressure so there is a role for factually correct optimistic social media in that way is you know politicians are saying that their inboxes are full of you know questions about what they're doing about plastic the same applies to businesses so it is a time of unprecedented attention on this issue and an opportunity to have your voice to be part of that and that means that the businesses make it a lot easier for you if you go into a store and you can't buy damaging stuff even if you're reducing the stuff then it's an awful lot easier if you're out and about with your refillable bottle and you know it's going to be super easy to refill it then it all starts to normalize more sustainable behavior it makes it easier for us to implement more sustainable behavior and it reduces the temptation for higher consumption that is less sustainable so i think we're moving in the right direction but it isn't something you can say oh it's the responsibility only of business it's the responsibility of only of youth it's you know it's a tax is going to work i mean it does in the uk of five pence tax on plastic bags reduced plastic bags by 80 percent yes measurably um you know that's a that's a huge response that's not going to work across all kinds of plastic it's got to hurt a bit it has and and i mean the economics behind plastic to incentivize oil versus recycling is a very complex economy but it's certainly not tipped in the balance of recycling and i think that not being an economist but certainly could change in a much more supportive direction to enable the recycling companies like terra cycle and others to compete fairly um and to actually develop more solutions that also can work in developing countries where there's no waste management systems which is a lot more complex speaking about fair i have the impression i have have unfairly treated this side of the audience because i've always got he agrees so maybe i'll give you that or shall we take yes please shall we take the the female student there and i don't forget you will come to you there's a really big um zero waste movement going on right now and i was wondering how do you think because a lot of people buy like one-use plastic for convenience like in supermarkets how do you think supermarkets and things like the fashion or beauty industry in the sport industry could reduce the one-use plastic to aid consumers as well in becoming more zero waste i think that will be a question for tom i guess gosh it's a really really good question um i'm gonna flip it right uh you're absolutely right there's a zero waste movement and thank goodness um and here's the way to think about i think the producer and the retailer the you know the those actors their job is not so much to give us you know to force things upon us their job and this is what market research is focused with all this whole industry is to figure out what you want and to give that to you in the best most cool affordable way possible and maybe then to extrapolate on what you want to think about what you may want tomorrow but that's about it right so think about in the beverage industry um uh carbonated sales uh like sodas are going down so what are the large companies in that space doing investing in more healthy drink choices because that's what you want and so what's going to be the leading goal in this because i work with all these organizations and i always see them say is the consumer ready will they follow it's always about the consumer is to start demanding those things and if they're not available start writing them they take their social media ridiculously seriously they take their customer service it's unbelievable how seriously they take it that's what they you know make their decisions on so complain complaining does so much in today's especially social media space that the little voice amplifies in a way that is much bigger than you would ever expect in the actual decision making rooms where people are looking making a decision on 20 posts that may have happened and really acting and so do that and those choices will start appearing in front of you and then and then especially when they appear vote for them with your money because if they appear and you don't vote for them they're gone and once they're gone they're very hard to bring back again because then the companies internally will say we tried authentically and the consumer didn't want it it takes another 10 years for that to be tried again and so it's very much in that mode because until that happens they won't have the internal ability to put it out thank you very much we'll take one more question from me i'm so sorry for all the others uh the shorter it is of course the better the chances that we thank you so i may ask you to use the headsets because i like to in german of course german yeah thanks also to it has to be linked also i'm grateful that you've also given the floor to the left side of the room let me begin to by correcting two points raised by tom in switzerland we don't have land fill household waste is incinerated in very sophisticated units we don't have any laws as to how we should handle plastic waste it's left up to us and the initiative of the kids they're actually my students is a good example of this it took us a year was the most important part was to get the people of devils to join in to follow the project they went to all the schools they provided information talked to the children to the parents they handed out loads of leaflets and they made a very detailed presentation which was on a on a site which got a lot of hits and then the plastic bags were handed out this was the basic work they did and they did it very well providing information information and these students showed how important information and training is we haven't said much about that i'm glad to see that everyone here has the same intentions 20 years ago it would have been different and perhaps in the american congress it would be different today as well there'd be opponents but i think explanation and information is crucial that's where we don't have curricula for the schools and a lot more needs to be done about providing curricula in the schools to train and teach the children thank you very much i think that's a very useful message as well because that's the you know that the main the main question here or issue was are we you know are we teaching it enough or are young people aware of it enough should it be part of a curriculum shouldn't we you know not not talking too much about you know i don't know new technologies but also going back to the basics and what does it mean for the environment yes thank you so much for raising this point i think it's so important to start in this in the classroom when we talk about you know extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation i think what is what starts in the classroom is teaching students about values of restoring nature conserving innovation and these are the same kinds of values that can inform the skills for the jobs of the future and i know a lot of these students are going to be thinking about what's next for them after graduating and you know a key theme of davos this year is the globalization 4.0 and what what skills are needed to kind of prevent the disruption to jobs or what are the skills that can be part of the modern economy that you can really make take advantage of and be of value to society and so i think starting with that awareness and capacity building of training students on how to you know how to communicate these values to others in their societies because once these students like learn about in the classroom they can also like teach their parents for example back home and so there was a from the i'm from the Ottawa Canada hub of the global shapers community and one of the one of my fellow global shapers implemented a project called robot missions which basically is a robot designed with 3d printed materials that also is powered by artificial intelligence to basically pick up plastic litter micro plastic litter from beaches and this is more it's more than just about like picking up plastic in this case it's more about the impact of this robot on kind of shaping the narrative around STEM like STEM education so science technology mathematics engineering and how important is that is to shaping the innovation of the future and how youth can really play a big role in it so i think really really big kudos to you for you know supporting our youth and really teaching them the values of restoration conservation and we have heard yet another solution or yet another you know trial to to to solve that problem thank you so much we stretched the time limit a little bit i'm so sorry for everyone who wanted to contribute and didn't have the chance to but i think we all agree that this is an ongoing discussion anyway so it's it's just the start of a bigger and wider discussion and thank you very much for the students and their initiatives for the economy and their initiatives and and the political initiatives as well i think we all agree as well that it needs all people involved in that as well and i think we're on a good way if if the students learn that as a curriculum as well or if they don't use plastic at all in schools like your uh granddaughters as well peter i think you join me in a big applause for all the panelists thank you so much for a very interesting discussion and i'd like to thank all of you for being here i hope you enjoy the rest of the web thank you very much for showing interest in this session