 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to our second Marketing Club webinar for the 22-23 academic year. Today we'll be hearing from James George, who is the Strategic Advisor of Pixera Global. James will be talking us through why the circular economy is so important and we'll discuss the challenges in addition to the opportunities it can unlock. James spoke at our flagship sustainability summit earlier this year, so it's an absolute pleasure to have him back with us again for today's webinar. So before we get into the session I'd very quickly give you some info about today's webinar, how you can get involved in the live Q&A and what the Marketing Club is. If you've watched any of our Marketing Club webinars before then you'll know how this works but essentially we'll be hearing from James for around 45 minutes or then move into the 10 to 15 minute live Q&A session to answer some of your questions. If you registered for the webinar you'll be able to post your questions for the Q&A at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark. If you're watching on a laptop you'll find the question mark on the right hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if you're watching on a tablet or on a smart phone. If you're watching us live on YouTube or Facebook and would like to take part in the Q&A's in future webinars you'll need to register for the session either via the CI and Events page or through our posts on the socials and watch via the link in your booking confirmation email. James has very kindly agreed to his slides to be available to download whilst we're broadcasting so if you'd like a copy just click on the handouts icon and you'll find them in there. If you want to watch the session again it'll be available on our YouTube channel shortly after the broadcast is finished just head into the playlist section and find the Marketing Club folder. You'll find the entire back catalogue of our Marketing Club series to date in there too with sessions covering a broad range of marketing skills and personal skills all free to access and available whenever you want. So just quickly explain what the Marketing Club is. The Marketing Club was created primarily to help students get the most from their CIM accredited degree and prepare them for a career in marketing. Although the Marketing Club is designed for students, CI members and other marketing practitioners are also welcome to attend these sessions. The uninitiated CIM accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the accredited degree provides. If you're a university student you can sign up now to receive the Marketing Club newsletter. Simply take a photo of the QR code you can see on screen and that will take you right through to the sign up page. 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For more information about the competition visit our website using QR code you can see on screen here and don't forget to register your interest by the 2nd of December. If you'd like to share any thoughts about today's webinar on the socials you can use the hashtag CIME events. We'd love to see your comments, the good, the not so good and everything in between so just remember to pop the CIME bit of the hashtag in capital letters. So I'd now like to introduce our guest speaker James George. If you want to turn your webcam on James I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours whenever you're ready. Thank you Phil, hopefully you can all see me, I can't see myself so that's probably a good thing. Hello everyone, so today we're going to be talking over the next sort of 40 minutes or so about the circular economy and as you can see there how do we tell a brand new story. As Phil mentioned this conversation has been going for a while and some of the concepts we'll highlight today we pulled out in the sustainability conference earlier in the year but I want to start with a couple of provocations today if I if I may because first and foremost my first provocation for you is that circular economy is a beautifully nebulous theoretical topic. You've probably heard about it before you're probably very familiar with what the circular economy is and what it isn't so why are we talking about this today. Also how does this sit alongside frameworks such as donor economics, biomimicry, a net zero economy, a low carbon economy. A lot of these adjectives and frameworks that we here talked about. I guess if we think about these concepts as a whole it's about changing the system that we exist in today and for the circular economy the economy part of that is how do we shift or change our current global economic system. Most of us I'd say almost all of us now get the reason why we should be thinking about some of these topics and some of these changes. We all see the stories in the news we all feel the realities of some of the you know some of the lighter climatic shifts in the in the west and we see newsreels and feeds around some of the more intense climatic events across the globe over the last 12 months and before. But there are lots of other ways that this shows up which maybe we don't necessarily link to that systemic approach. So while most of us get the why the big thing is cracking the how. How do we make this real? How do we operationalize this within our organizations? How do we talk about this from a commercial perspective. So as part of this first provocation about this being a nebulous topic is make sure you do your homework. I'm going to talk to you today about my perspective in my opinion. There are over a hundred working definitions of what a circular economy is. Now that's a lot of noise out there. Some of that noise is good some of it not so much. So allow yourself to be challenged in your thinking but also continue to challenge because I say this quite often fairly playfully there are no experts and what I mean by that they're clearly are experts but this landscape is changing so quickly. How do we stay up to date? How do we make sure that we remain relevant? And as I say over the last three to five years this space has got extremely noisy and not all of it is good noise. We've just calming off the the middle towards the end of COP 27. We've seen about four or five IPCC reports in the last 18 months spelling out a red alert for humanity. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, reduction in carbon, diversion from landfill, access to clean energy. If sometimes hard to understand where we should put our effort or energy or indeed where should we start? And sometimes it's easy to feel that you know from a bottom line perspective that actually we're pretty screwed as the feces. We can't agree on the priorities, we can't agree on the sacrifices and we can't agree on where to start and even now there are differences between developing and developed nation economies on where the reparation and cost should come but this provides a huge economic and innovative opportunity. But we've got a lot of work to do and my third provocation for you and I love this one for this particular audience is that we won't solve this by just buying better stuff. Greener, eco, higher recycled content, we can't consume our way out of it, we can't just replace slightly better products with slightly worse ones. We're never going to solve this problem by just consuming more or consuming differently. This doesn't mean there should be no growth but we need better growth. You hear people also talk about a de-growth agenda. First we have a real issue with de-growth because it's not without its complexities. When we think about equity, when we think about access, when we think about choice, those of us in developed and western nations can't rightly say to those in developing economies, you can't have the same choices we had over the last two to three hundred years. So de-growth for me feels like a concept that has value here but we can't layer that across everyone on the globe. It's not about taking away people's choices, it's about designing a system so that there are better choices so that when you and I make those choices we can only make good choices because the system allows us to do so. So what is the circular economy then and why should you care? For the most part of this conversation today I am going to focus more on the economics, the economy part of circular economy and this is a conversation that's been going now for about 10 to 12 years quite importantly because by talking about the economics and its intersection between society and the environment it's allowed us to mobilise the engines of our global economies, the businesses, the corporations out there, those that potentially have the most impact in shifting the way the system operates. But of course we do need to think about what is the social component, what is the human capital component of the circular economy. But I'm going to focus mainly on the economics today, again it's a beautifully nebulous topic so I do encourage you to read around and read more around where the priorities sit at the moment. But before we answer this question I want to take you back and I want to take you back to Switzerland, Geneva specifically in 1924 and on the 23rd of December in the lakeside city as Christmas lights were being hung and chestnuts were being roasted in open fires on the street there was a meeting taking place in the heart of Geneva in this conference room were representatives from some of the world's leading lightbulb manufacturers these were people like Osramp, Billips, General Electric and others and they had a real problem at that time in 1924 the sales of lightbulbs had taken a real dip there was real worry amongst the industry that people weren't buying enough lightbulbs and the reason was because the technology had advanced so much that they weren't failing as quickly as they used to and this was really starting to impact sales and turnover. So this group came together with the explicit ambition to limit the lifespan of lightbulbs to reduce the ability for people to create lights in order to boost sales this group of companies became known as the Phoebus Cartel and their approach which one marketer at the time summed up as a sound and genuine philosophy in free spending and wasting and it's these principles that became the cornerstone of the foundation of modern consumer economics they've made a decision in order to limit lamp life and they would fine each other's brands if they were found their lightbulbs were lasting too long it was the first example of planned obsolescence something we know too well in today's modern consumer economy if we go back even further the industrial revolution was a fantastic time for developments in our ability to make stuff. Energy, labor were cheap and abundant and access to raw materials to make things seemed almost limitless we developed processes with more and more efficiency to make things quicker and quicker and cheaper and cheaper than ever before for example when Henry Ford first started mass producing the Model T they were able to produce thousands of vehicles per week which was a huge step in production and over the following decades we developed smarter and targeted marketing campaigns pioneered methods to convince people that old constantly needs to be replaced by new owning the latest stuff has become the new normal whether that's from a status perspective a cultural perspective an emotional perspective and this system has dominated today's economy even now you hear about comms and creative agencies reaching for their marketing bibles and saying things like hmm this won't land or it won't resonate with our target market too many organizations are leading with the story rather than creating the right impact and allowing that story to follow to sell more stuff to keep the economy growing we have to take more resources from the ground which we make into all of those weird and wonderful and fantastic products that people want and then when it's no longer wanted or needed it's disposed of it's thrown away it's landfill it's incinerated it leeches into our environment we've normalized a consumptive attitude to growth even in the global economic crash of 2007 2008 the only solution that was really given to us by our political forebars was to spend more consume more that was the only way we were going to get the economy growing again it's a take make waste economy a linear economy a line resources in at the beginning waste out at the end but it's important to acknowledge that this way of doing things has brought great prosperity to millions if not billions of people across the globe whilst our grandparents shot in their towns our parents shot in their nations we consume across the globe we've enjoyed incredible technological innovation we have access to almost anything we desire at remarkably short timelines and most ridiculously artificially low costs however this is where things start to go wrong the linear economy because first off it doesn't make very effective use of resources which we know are not infinite at all it doesn't plan for the long term it doesn't take into account geopolitical shifts and associated risks with changes to global commodity prices such as we're starting to see within the rare earth rare earth metal market we're all feeling today the elements of the current inflationary and global factors that are affecting our pockets and our choices but we never look to the root cause the average car in you in europe spends 92 percent of its time parked that's north of 22 hours a day ask yourself right now where is your car and what is it doing i can see mine out the window and it's been sat there for about five days so there's a huge amount of underutilization of that remaining 8 percent of usage about one to one and a half percent of it is stuck in traffic or looking for a parking space and despite most cars having four seats the average journey has one one to two people in it and 50 percent of all of our city infrastructure historically has been designed around the car if we assume for a moment the average car in europe costs about 30 000 pounds then there's a huge amount of economic capacity to unlock a huge amount of underutilization a huge amount of inefficiency in that existing system inefficient inefficiency that's not realized generally because of convenience not only that our current global economies are incredibly wasteful one third of all food produced is wasted before it reaches our plate actually that's probably closer to about 50 percent now from that original report eight million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year of course we aren't blind to that fact we've seen the blue planet we've seen the images of marine life being blighted by by plastic and ghost fishing gear but when we look at plastic specifically what's the common response useless banning beach cleaners recycle but those elements by themselves none of those in isolation will solve the problem in the long run as they treat the symptoms rather than the root cause the recycling symbols been around for about 45 years but we only collect four 14 percent of all the material we collect that we create globally and only two percent of that is truly closed-loop recycled so we're never going to recycle our way out of this problem from an economic perspective every product every piece of material that ends up in landfill ends up in an incinerator ends up in the ocean is a wasted economic opportunity all of that labor energy IP that went into making that material is wasted where it's thrown away therefore we need a new way to capture this waste to capture this secondary resource and unlock its economic value and our environment is suffering too all over the globe land is being degraded by industrial farming techniques that use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to try and artificially prop up yields to meet the demands of more and more retails those chemicals run off the land contaminate water systems creating a eutrophication and biological cycle breakdown global wildlife populations are disappearing a recent WWF the living planet report mentioned the wildlife populations have declined by a staggering 69 percent over the last 48 years with animals in central and southern america being particularly hardest hit the planet's wildlife are biological biodiverse systems the support life on this planet are being decimated within the span of a single lifetime animal populations that scientists have been monitoring have declined by over two-thirds whether you believe all the scientists or not those numbers are staggering and i would now hope are unmissable if that wasn't enough over the last two years the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world restricting movement of millions of people impacting lives and jobs and disrupting international supply chains bringing global economies to a halt which was linked in part to our current consumptive models and behaviors in doing so the pandemic and lockdown measures have revealed our existing linear systems exposures to weakness shortcomings of a system in which resource extraction and waste production which are inherent to the way we make and produce goods cause untenable environmental degradation climate change biodiversity loss and pollution a new economic model then is more relevant than ever as an insurance decouple economic growth from resources and environmental impact and it opens up further challenges for us to think about how we redesign our global economic model you have to ask yourself if we were going to create the economy today on the 16th of November 2022 would we use the 300 year old thinking that we have to do that with all the amazing technological changes we've seen and experienced surely we will design something very very different with all of its inefficiency waste pollution the linear way of doing things can no longer support a growing global population especially as we briefly spoke about before if we think about access and equity and choice so the system needs to change entirely if we continue going to continue to build prosperity for all so changing the system does mean doing something differently moving from a linear economy where we extract value from materials at its simplest level the circular economy then is taking that straight line and turning it into a circle a new system based on creating a global economy that is restorative and regenerative by design and it's based on three principles the first principle is elimination eliminate waste and pollution rather than treating the symptoms of pollution and finding ways to deal with waste once it's generated why not stop it being created in the first place if we take the lead from biological systems there's no waste in nature only secondary resource okay so when a bird dies and falls to the ground it doesn't become another bird but the biological material permeates into the soil which feeds the soil life which in turn sustains the growth and the stability of that ecosystem and the circle of life continued you're starting to see businesses adopt this methodology redesigning and disrupting their own production and business models looking at how they create their products without waste reducing pollution but making sure it's not created in the first place or if it is created how do they valorize it how do they sell it how do they take it to be the source material of another product because it doesn't make economic sense to throw things away especially if you have to pay for more raw material to make that product in the first place the second principle is about circulation keeping products and materials in use at their highest possible value let's again revisit that example of a car and that huge amount of underutilization imagine rather than selling one car to one person we sold one car to 20 people now of course there's a huge amount of convenience, legality, insurance, contractual obligation that go in with that but as we see the uberization of the world around us and we see the use of technology in smart devices being able to access assets in a different way things like zip car uber and Lyft and very many others if you unlock the right business model you can then resell that asset many times over extrapolate that even further in a fairly abstract way what if you no longer sold cars but you sold mobility the ability to get from A to B and actually as we see the progression of EV what if those cars were no longer cars but were in fact mobile batteries for storing renewable energy with Tesla you can already use your your your vehicle the power in your vehicle to power your homes if you have the right setup so when we think about how we access those materials how we valorize them and keep them in circulation at their highest possible values we start to unlock new models to generate value and growth finally the third principle is about regeneration regenerating natural systems regenerating natural capital general thinking is that we have between 55 56 years of top soil remaining that's the proportion of the soil where we grow our food and crops this is continually being degraded due to the current expansive use of industrial agricultural techniques increased use of phosphates fertilizers and pesticides interestingly we were able to capture all of the nutrients that we currently produce from food animal and human waste in our current economic global system we would have almost three times the amount we require in order to fertilize the current global food crops finally this is all about design about 80 to 90 percent of all of the challenges we see in the world are design challenges let's for a moment return to the idea of lighting and the Phoebus cartel again similar to the conversation we mentioned just now around utilization of vehicles and go back to lights what about rather than selling light bulbs you sold illumination the ability to light a space rather than physical light bulbs fixtures fittings about five years ago what was then philips lighting and is now lux did exactly that they were approached by shiphold airport in the netherlands who said to them look we don't want to buy bulbs maintenance contracts wiring we want to buy illumination for the airport so at the time philips lighting then sat down and they designed an effective and efficient lighting system for that space utilizing the latest technology that they had to make sure that those those bulbs and those materials stayed in use as long as possible and required the least amount of maintenance also designing new components that could be disassembled and that material recaptured that into the system of production because with that model philips owns all of the infrastructure so it's within their interest to keep it in service as long as possible that's a stark contrast to the Phoebus cartel designing light bulbs to philip and this change is one example of a system that operates entirely differently today's linear economy and there are so many more this is ulu this is a product by a company called knopla not pla and they've been working over the last four to five years about utilizing steve as an alternative to plastic packaging an alternative to single-use plastics ulu is a seaweed alternative to sachets which is entirely consumable for humans it also breaks down naturally within the environment within two weeks they've been going from strength to strength over the last couple of years and in the 2019 london marathon worked very closely with lucasate to replace water bottles during the london marathon now one event substituted out 30 000 bottles um the water for the participants as a result of that lucasate now use this technology in all of their sporting events globally they've also done some really really exciting work with just eat with glen livid and most recently with a luxury watch designer around slightly harder-formed plastics all made out of seaweed second example i want to talk about is appeal appeal based in in california we talked before about food waste and how third of food is wasted before it reaches our plate appeal have this lovely story about they don't see an apple what they see is a million years of evolution how nature has managed to create a skin to protect the flesh on the inside of that fruit and how could they take that technology when we look at packaging for food and they've developed a biobanine substrate which can be sprayed directly onto food that can keep it fresh for an additional two weeks compared to not putting it in packaging working app source with farmers in places like south america to put this this compound onto the onto the fruits and vegetables to keep them on the shelves longer to keep them fresh along there to minimize food waste we've all seen that conversation about why do my bananas come in a plastic bag and depending on who you ask it's either because it reduces food waste because they they stay on the shelf longer or actually it protects that food and keeps in the best possible form for the consumer to purchase but by looking at this in an innovative and different way by using new developing technologies we can find new solutions to deliver the same characteristics without having to encapsulate fruit in plastic and then finally I want to discuss Stephen this is Stephen at Bluebell Farms. Stephen is a monocrop farmer in Suffolk. He had a real problem on his farm that due to the flat topography of Suffolk and the high winds he was losing between seven to ten percent of topsoil every year due to erosion which was having an impact on yield and his ability to maintain his crop and he had to continually replenish his land either artificially or by bringing in soil to ensure there was sufficient topsoil to grow the next year's crops. Stephen was an agronomist by background and trade so he started planting apple trees around the outside of his fields. The idea behind that was that the root structure of those trees would then lock in some of the integrity of that topsoil reducing the erosion but the unintended consequences he got with that that rather than being a monoculture farmer he now had a secondary crop a secondary crop that he could sell because every year he would grow apples and he could sell those and make a second revenue stream. He could also then employ people in the local economy to come and pick those apples and also by leaving the hedgerows and leaving the the grass to grow beneath the apple trees it encouraged an increased level of biodiversity so whilst Stephen was trying to solve a problem of soil erosion what he actually got was additional income local economy jobs and an increase in biodiversity all by taking a slightly disruptive and innovative approach to how he farmed in a more regenerative way but one of the challenges we see today when we think about all of those metatopics that we face is is how do you link them together we spoke at the top of the conversation about circular economy donor economics biomimicry low carbon economy climate change biodiversity collapse how do all these things interact surely the circular economy as we've just been discussing is just about materials in the economy how does it help answer the question around carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalent global warming gases when we think about the challenge we have to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century that translates into a global carbon budget the amount of carbon that we're able to use as a species to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming now a lot of the conversation you've had in COP 27 last week is about decarbonizing energy shifting the transition towards renewable energy weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels and other non-renewable fuel sources and of course when we think about that carbon budget 55 percent of that is based in the transition to renewable energy or in energy efficiency everything from changing the types of bulbs and fittings we use in our homes to the way we light and heat our office and communal spaces all the way through to new technology around generation of clean energy but that's only 55 percent just over half the remaining 45 percent of that carbon budget will come from the way we produce goods and manage our land these emissions this 45 percent cannot be tackled through a transition to renewable energy and that 45 percent consists of the production of materials such as cement steel plastics aluminium the production of food the challenges we see around deforestation waste management incineration landfill and treatment agricultural forestry and other land use it also entails decoupling economic activity and the consumption of finite resources and designing out waste of the system as we talked about in the first of the three principles of the circular economy we also want to be moving from value extraction to value creation and in doing so we can reduce the production and release of CO2 if products stay in the economy stay in circulation stay in secondary tertiary markets we don't need to produce new products we don't need to use fresh finite materials therefore we won't release new carbon sources that carbon that's already embodied and embedded within those products will stay in those products in addition then as well underpinned by the transition to renewable energy the circular economy model can build economic natural and sexual capital it's now more relevant than ever that we try and find a new economic model as an instrument to decouple economic growth and resource use and environmental impact and it opens up the way for a more resilient economy it not only addresses the linear aspects of our current economy but importantly represents a systemic shift that can build that long-term resilience can generate business and growth opportunities and can provide environmental and social benefits the vision of a circular economy then is a vision of a future that works within the limits of our planet globally we've started this journey we see more and more examples of new innovative ways to redesign value and growth within our businesses and with our society but every journey always starts with the first step and that first step is sometimes the most difficult thanks very much for listening brilliant that's great thank you very much James a very thought-provoking presentation and yes one that obviously has resonance for us all okay so we're now going to head into the Q&A session we've already got some questions to get us underway which we'll get to in a second but please do continue to post your questions for James and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 10 minutes or so and just a reminder for those watching via Facebook or YouTube today that if you want to take part in future Q&A's you'll need to register for the webinars through the CIM events page or social posts and watch via the link in your booking confirmation email also if you want to comment on the socials event today's webinar then you can use the hashtag CIM events okay so let's head into the Q&A. First question James is given the limited nature of sustainable raw materials in the Caribbean marketers are limited in offering green strategies how can regional marketers overcome this challenge? Wow not not pulling any punches then for the first question. I think one of the challenges when you think about some of these topics some of these concepts is it's very easy to talk about a future theoretical perfect version of what we of what we want to achieve the future state of what we want to achieve but if you consider that our current economic model took about two to three hundred years to create we're not going to shift away overnight this is going to take time there are going to be compromises that doesn't mean you don't keep an eye on that future ideal but there are some interesting steps along the way you sometimes hear that perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good and it shouldn't right this is about a transition it's about realigning and realising where we see growth and opportunity and when we think about island nations when we think about those that don't have limit I don't have access to certain global commodities or global materials what are the new models that we need to generate locally sometimes that's that's easy to do and sometimes it's impossible to do so I think that's a very verbose way of saying it's it's a complicated answer to that particular question and it probably steps beyond my area of expertise but I think if you're thinking about specific geographies it's about potentially helping folks to understand at that local level what they can do and the role they can play and then using that that marketing superpower to inform people about the choices they make in their own lives and the the consumptive habits that they have okay great thanks James equally punchy question next define global why should countries who have contributed the least to the damage suffer or be included in it what benefits are there for them this is this is a brilliant question and it's super timely right we've all seen the conversations this this last week or so at COP 27 thinking you know folks talking about reparation and that you know most of the industrialised and developed nations have got us into this problem over the last couple of hundred years and now we're saying to those developing nations that are now ready to emerge into the global economy that you can't have the same choices and the same opportunities that we have because if you do then you're going to make the problem worse it's it's a dialogue which I think still we still need to work out but when we think about equity and access we have to give those countries a chance to grow and and develop their own economies and those of us in the west and those of us in developed nations need to accept that we're going to have to take most if not all of the burden when we think about reparations when we think about sacrifices and reduction in choice when we think about degrowth but it's a very emotive topic an extremely emotive topic and I think that conversation will rattle on for it for a little while yet before we see a unity around what we do as a species ultimately we've got to think about this in a slightly a slightly different way there is no business on a dead planet so arguing in the short term about opportunity versus the extreme of 25% of global GDP being at risk in the next 10 years if we don't get this right means that affects everyone so I think we do need to come to a point as a species to understand this isn't about what I have and you don't but actually if we don't get this right we all lose and that's where we need to get to in order to have some honest conversations about what we do in the future okay great thanks James James do you think that the current state of the global economy is an opportunity or a threat to the circular you know the ambition to create a circular economy that's a really great question I'm going to try and be careful with my answer we are despite everything we see right now right despite the conflicts the war in Ukraine coming off the back of COVID-19 the issues we see around drought in Somalia flooding in Pakistan despite all of these things we are fast heading towards 100 trillion dollar global economy which is just ridiculous eye-watering amounts of money so there's something fundamentally wrong when our measure of success is growth at any cost growth in a way that doesn't value the materials that enter the economy but actually the product that leaves it so when we think about the circular economy as a concept and is one of many concepts it doesn't answer all of the questions moreover what it does is provide a framework for us to have a better conversation about what the future can look like the current capitalist economic model is broken and we need something different unfortunately though we've not all realized that we can't continue to grow infinitely on a finite planet and expect that everything's going to be fine so I think there's a long way to go and for me the framework of a circular economy approaching a problem through a circular lens gives you an opportunity to potentially look at new opportunities for growth and innovation rather than saying that it's that and only that it was a really interesting conversation at this year's Ellen MacArthur Foundation Summit back in June between circular economy, donut economics and biomimicry three very different approaches to the global challenges we face but with a unifying message between them that's saying by only by looking at this problem in a different way by only leveraging some of the technological advances that we've seen over the last 50 to 100 years will we truly be able to design something different and the good news is with digitization and technological revolution that we've seen over the last couple of decades as soon as we recognize where that new economic model is we'll get there much faster than the previous two to three hundred years that has built this economy. Okay great um specific question now about a business I'm part of my company's ESG team. Our company already has a lot of sustainable products but also has ambitious growth targets which rely on consumption it would mean a temporary slowdown in growth to further implement a circular economy. Tips please to some of the big ask or reduce growth to ask these sweet. Another great question um I want to start with the provocation in that is a sustainable or a circular product in a non sustainable system or a non-circular system truly sustainable it's probably not it's better than what you had before but if the system doesn't allow that product to circulate as materials to be captured are you just doing less bad than doing better but to answer your question specifically for me this is all about education and understanding and allowing people to understand when we think about the complexity of systems change the role that they play and how that shows up within your business we haven't talked much about social today but one of the things that I find myself talking to organizations about is around future risk future economic risk. What the last couple of years with COVID has shown us is that our global supply chains are incredibly efficient in most places in most examples they're one brick thick we saw that with you know the COVID shutdown in China with Apple having to send people physically to China to a COVID hotspot to get product out of China to satisfy their market demands we saw the the ship that got stranded in the Suez Canal that had a 12 to 18 month cascade on materials and products on our shelves our supply chains are incredibly efficient but not very resilient if you think about where products start their life where our supply chains start they're typically where our clothes are stitched our food is grown our rare earth metals are taken out of the ground those starting points in the supply chain typically sit in communities that sit on or below the poverty line and those are the communities least able to deal with climatic effects and climate change will be hit first and will be hit hardest so if you're a business thinking about what is my greatest risk or amongst the risks in the next 10 to 15 years one of my greatest risks surely you've got to be looking at the integrity of the starting point of your supply chains there's been some super high profile events recently where large brands who've talked about their human rights credentials within their supply chain have been found out to be wanting when external organizations have dug into the way people are treated and paid within the starting point of their supply chain so if you're a business thinking about your future risk why would you not consider the integrity of those communities in your supply chain why would you not put the direct economic investment into those communities to create an indirect de-risking to your future economic model the only way you get people there because that's really nebulous right the only people where you get people there is allowing them to understand what circular economy sustainability esg means for their business and how it's going to show up because it's not just going to show up in recycled content in your product it's going to show up in the way that you're able to access materials it's going to show up in the way that your your shareholders demand to see advancements in your net zero strategy it's going to show up in the ways that you attract and retain talent so for me it's about education of actually how all of these problems are interconnected and getting you aboard and your senior exec team to see where that might not manifest today but it's going to manifest in the next three five ten years and certainly policy is going to be the big lever that gets you to those places for the quickest okay thank you James um we just got time for one more question which is very specific about fashion industry it's what are the aspects that need to be improved for the sustainable development of the fashion industry in the future it's a really prickly one and you will get you ask a hundred people you probably have different a hundred different perspectives the fashion industry is hugely fragmented all the way along the supply chain we're just talking there about you know some large brands being hauled over the coals recently because of human rights abuses within their supply chain because they've gone to someone and said tell me there are no human rights abuses in your in your supply chain they've gone of course there aren't here's our credentials here's our certification they go brilliant fine you can have the contract but then what happens slightly further down the supply chain is that provider will then subcontract to someone else he will subcontract to someone else and there's no traceability or transparency within that perspective of the supply chain first and foremost no one is innocent within the fashion industry and the problem is so massive and it's based on the story that we've all been told that actually old needs to be replaced by new your wardrobe needs to have not four seasons but nine or twelve seasons each year we see brands like boohoo and misguided who in last year's black friday sale allowed customers to only pay for the postage and packaging gave a hundred percent of a hundred percent discount on the product that they bought now no matter how far you drill down giving away free clothes and just asking people to pay postage and packaging is indicative of a broken system if i as a supply or as a as a as a as a platform can sell things to you at that cheaper price there has to be something fundamentally wrong with my supply chain the true value the economic value of that material is not being passed through the supply chain to the consumer and we need to look at that we need to look at our behaviors around clothing how do we buy less but better how do we look at rental options with certain elements now rental doesn't work in every scenario but there are lots of brands in in asia people like y-closet and other that sell encapsulated wardrobes you're seeing a huge amount of gen z and beyond who are actually upcycling and recycling somewhere north of 75 percent of their wardrobes because that mentality is baked in so from the fashion industry perspective i think there's some really amazing ambition there's some really interesting disruptive business models print on demand made on demand but we're a long way from finding a sustainable solution if it's easy to buy a t-shirt or a basic range for less than five pounds of garment we're never going to unpick some of the huge waste elements that exist and the exploitation elements that exist within that industry so amazing subject area james i'm sure you could go on for days talking about this but um we have actually to draw a halt there so thank you very much for answering those questions james do you think you can just move the slides on a couple yeah so that's you just go a couple more so unfortunately that's it for the q and a for our webinar today i would like to thank james again for the fantastic presentation and we do hope you've enjoyed the session i found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey about today's webinar and we'd love to hear your feedback it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts on the session and what you would like to see from our marketing club series in the future we'll be back with our next marketing club webinar about the metaverse on wednesday the 8th of february again at our new time of 1 p.m you'll find further details listed on the events and marketing club pages of our website but you'll also be able to register for the session so that just leaves me to say a final thank you for joining us today and we hope that you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again very soon thanks again james thank you