 Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first issue briefing of day three of the annual meeting for what I can refer to 2016. We're pivoting away from our subjects of yesterday. We covered the Jasmine Revolution five years on. We covered political Islam, the gender gap. We're taking an environmental slant this morning for our first one. It's an important time to be thinking about in the aftermath of important talks in Paris and a renewed focus this year on climate change adaptation mitigation. The subject, in particular, is a study that has been announced and released this week called Rethinking Plastics and the New Plastics Economy. Now, the forum, with an eye for public relations, had a rather glaring title, More Plastics Than Fish in the Ocean in 2015, but of course it's a much more complex story than that. So, without further ado, I'll keep my remarks to a minimum and we'll go straight down. I just will, however, introduce my panel first. We have Ellen MacArthur, founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in the United Kingdom. Dominic Waray, my colleague at the War Document Forum, head of public-private partnership. Jean-Ély, we short-starred chief executive officer of Suez based in France. Now, Ellen, it was two years ago. I'm going to start with you first. Two years ago in our old press conference room that you announced, the start of Project Mainstream, so I'm very keen to hear about what you've been doing since then and what the key findings of the New Plastics Economy report are. First of all, I should go back to Mainstream. We created Project Mainstream because the forum and the foundation had been doing work around the subject of a circular economy, which is fundamentally a different economic model whereby products, components and materials are kept at the highest value in utility at all times. In order to achieve that, there are certain things that companies can do such as changing business models, changing design, but there are also things that one company cannot solve. If you want to create a continuous flow of plastics throughout the world so those plastics can be valorised, the biggest plastics producer in the world could not do that because they're not party to the whole value chain. They don't reprocess, they don't collect. There are many different territories in the world. So we came to the New Plastics Economy report through Mainstream, through the realisation that WEF has a phenomenal convening power. We had the ability through WEF and Mainstream to get all of the players in the value chain together to have the dialogue and have the debate around how we can build a New Plastics Economy and how we can fix the systemic leakage which we have with plastics. What are the key findings of this report? The key findings of this report are obviously the stats around what's leaking out of the system. We discovered that when you look at plastics as a whole, which is 300 million tonnes a year, 78 million tonnes of that is plastic packaging. Of that, only 14% is recovered recycling globally. Only 10% is recycled and because of the constitution of plastic and the cross-contamination, only 5% of the value of that plastic is actually recovered. So we lose vast amounts of plastic. We landfill 40%. We incinerate over 14%. If you think about plastic, every single piece of plastic that's been made over the last 70 years since we started using it at speed, every single piece exists unless we've incinerated it. That means that the 32% leakage we have out of the system every year ends up in the environment, ends up in rivers, ends up in the sea, which is how we came to the stats around the amount of plastic in the sea. It's not just big bottles and things that we're used to seeing in the images. It's microplastics, tiny beads of plastics you can barely see with a human eye. It's a very complex situation, it's a complex problem, but the solution to that has to be multi-stakeholder. Let's talk a little bit about those opportunities. We're here as a platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration. Specifically, what opportunities have you identified for dealing with this problem that we're looking for? Well, after two years of working and bringing together 40 organisations and working with 180 different people, we've put together five recommendations. The first is dialogue. So bringing together the parties who can actually fix this, agreeing on a way forward, a dialogue on which covers design, what needs to be done. Dialogue is the first, bringing the right people around the table. We need a protocol, a plastic protocol, looking at designs for plastics in the future so more value can be recovered and fed back into the economy because we're losing between 80 and 120 billion a year of the plastic by value itself. We also need a dialogue with policymakers, which is absolutely vital to help to stimulate some of the changes in all territories of the world. We need innovation moonshots, so new plastic designs. At the moment, we design a piece of plastic to cover a chicken for maybe a week. That's the design brief. Not, we need something to cover the chicken, but also to fit within a system. A plastic is not designed to fit within a system. It's designed to do a job, in some cases, for an hour or two hours if it's in the case of plastic packaging, which is a vast amount of plastic produced each year. Finally, the fifth recommendation is one of continuing with the stats and the numbers because we found that there are very few studies on the global flows of plastic that exist. In fact, we couldn't find any, so this report has been very important for that and continuing that is equally important. John Lewis, listen to you. You're head of a multi-billion dollar business. You'll know firsthand how difficult it is engineering the entire business model to supporting a disruptive change such as the circular economy. But what does it mean to you in real terms? First of all, you're right. If we speak about the circular economy, we mean for us a change in business model. Just give me a very simple example. As it was mentioned by Ellen before, the historical business was to collect and to dump the waste. But today we collect, of course, but we sort and we produce secondary raw materials. So the offer of secondary raw materials is growing. Of course, plastic is a large part of that. But what I would like to say, it's good to imagine that we can produce secondary raw materials. It's fine to strengthen the offer of secondary raw materials and especially of plastic. The question mark after that is, are we going to get a demand for this kind of plastic? And I think it is a crucial point if we want the circular economy to really work on. We know that recycled plastic consumes far less energy than to produce new plastic with virgin materials. In terms of energy, we are talking about 80, 90% less recycling plastic than producing new plastics. The question is when the oil is at $30 barrel. How can you make this new economy compatible or economically compatible with the old one, which is using virgin materials extracted from our planet? And I think this is where we have to speak about externalities. How shall we give a price to those externalities if we want the circular economy to work properly? And in my view, we could talk about the circular economy package recently issued by the commissions. Clearly they are talking about more push measures but not enough about pull measures and it's clearly a problem between the offer and the demand of this kind of product. This is something we have to work in a lot if we want tomorrow to enter in which I believe it's a necessity, the circular economy, because it will consume far less energy, which means it will produce far less CO2 emissions. Second, because as it was mentioned also by Ellen and we have some reports on that, the leakage of plastic is a real danger. What Ellen didn't say is that today we are producing worldwide 300 something million, but if we continue like that by 2050 we will produce more than 1 billion tons of plastic, of which if we continue as we are, a vast majority, 30%, will continue to leak especially in the ocean. And this is something which in my view is absolutely not possible. So we speak about in Paris a lot about COP21 and about energy, about trying to reduce the temperature gap, etc. But at the end of the day, beside that, the water issue, the ocean issues are clearly a major issue for this century and for this world if we want to continue to grow on, I should say, a reasonable way of living for the whole population. Give us an idea of the scale of your ambition, the pace at which you want to adjust your business to this more sustainable model. Can't be done overnight. I describe quite well the situations. We have the technology, not all, but a large part of the necessary technology is on the table. We have the financial means to invest. The question is, I am not going to invest if what I am going to produce doesn't find any people to be used. So the demand side is very important. So what we are discussing with many people including the industry, but including also the policy makers, we want to see how they help us to manage this circular economy that everybody is talking about. But now we have to see really starting because I think the real point, how do we start and how do we manage to make sure that all those plastic production we are talking about will be really used. Let me give you just an example because it's a very interesting one. All the people, industry using plastic and large majority of them, they will ask you white plastic, transparent plastic for what, then for colouring it. So at the end of the day of the process of recycling, I got a lot of coloured plastic, blue, green as you know, red, etc. For a demand which is only, mainly white plastic, this is a gap that has to be filled because we will not be able to produce easily white plastic. It's a question of technology, it's a question of cost, etc. So it's typically a practical question that has to be solved if we want to enter in a circular economy for plastic. Alan, we're all now as a global population used to recycling and supportive of recycling but it seems that we need to go a step further from what John Lewis is saying. Well I think the stats in the report were certainly personally quite astounding. In the western world we're used to relatively high recycling figures but when you look at the global stats it's incredibly low and 10% is incredibly low. Which forces the question that different countries have different collection systems is number one. In many countries there actually isn't a collection system which is why virtually everything ends up leaking out of the system. So the value is lost and part of the reason the value is lost is that plastic is made in a way that it cannot be valorised easily. As John Lewis said, the recycle plastic is significantly, it's worth less and it's more expensive to produce than the original plastic. But part of the reason for that is the additives that sit within it and the way that that plastic is made which is why if we can create a plastic protocol through the new plastics economy work that we're going to do then you can perhaps change the constitution of the plastic to enable it to be recovered to a higher value in all territories. Because no one designed, as I said, the chicken packet for a system and plastics are made in one country and sold in another and they drift in ocean currents to another. So they go all over the world and there's no system within which they're designed to fit. So that system is imperative in order for that value to be valorised. Dominic, what role can the foreign players, a convener of stakeholders, help meet these goals? Thanks, Ollie. Just to congratulate my two panellists here on the foresight to drive the questions and seek answers to these systemic challenges. A good way of looking at it in terms of what the forum can do but more importantly what is going on. I like to think of 40, 40, 40. 40, 40, 40. So we have a very profligate economy. The IEA, the International Energy Association told us that back in 2010 we will need 40% more installed energy capacity by 2030 than 2010. We're on our way to be building that. That's an enormous growth in energy and most of that, at that time, was seen to be fossil based energy. Two, food. We've talked a little bit about chicken and packaging. 40% are thereabouts according to the FAO and other experts in the space. 40% of all food produced is wasted. 40%. Whether at the kind of growth, transportation, but a lot is wasted in the household and at the end of the line. 40%. Three, by 2030 it's estimated that there'll be a gap between the water that we will need to power our economy, to fuel our economy under business as usual measures. There'll be a gap of 40% between what is safely available and what we're going to need. 40, 40, 40. Food, energy, water. These are systemic problems, which, if we just don't address them, will get to a stage where we'll have crisis and crunch point and crisis and crunch point. We can see that starting to happen in the water space. You can see that in terms of how difficult it is to continue to increase production of food without looking at kind of waste in the supply chain. The systemic problems, as Ellen was remarking, require multiple people along a value chain to come together and say, what is it that I'm doing in this bit? What is it that I think we need from this person and that person to absolutely change the system? The plastics issue here is a really good example of something you take for granted. You just get into the issue and you realise how almost ridiculous the situation is. How ridiculous it is that there might be demand for blue, red, green plastic when user can see the kind of broad problem that you have to deal with and the potential economic benefits of fixing this. You and the analysis that Ellen MacArthur Foundation have undertaken can completely see how ridiculous it is that so much of this plastic is just wasted, literally is dumped, is leaked, is a technical phrase. We don't really think about that, we just think of it as plastic. The fact that plastic doesn't go away, that the only way it can go away is to be incinerated. And already as a legacy, we have 150 million tonnes of plastic in the ocean and the biologists and the best brains on fish reckon as about 760, 765 million tonnes of fish. That's not good, but there's no one person of value chain who can change that. So the platforms and experience an appetite for the forum to take on some of these global challenges and bring together people along a value chain. Not necessarily just campaigning NGOs although they are important, but people from the world of finance who kind of put their money into companies like Suez. People from the world of analytics who can get under the skin of the statistics. People from the actuaries who have the accounting systems. People from the project developers, from the cutting edge technologies, all of these people trying to fix the problem. That's kind of the role that the forum can play. You'll notice it doesn't say world plastics forum or world fish forum or world global problems forum. And that's because economics, I would posit, is at the heart of all of these issues. If we can get economic incentive right, if we can get the price corrections correct, if we can encourage policy makers, decision makers, business leaders and others to get that economic incentive correct, we can solve these problems. But it does take a lot of work. It seems like it's in a juncture to see if there are any questions. If you wouldn't mind just waiting for a microphone so that our audience online can hear. I come from the financial service industry and I have seen significant change occurring there over the last 10 years. One way how change has occurred is by naming and shaming and by putting a lot of pressure on all parts in that also relatively complex industry to change partly the regulatory bodies, global ones, have contributed by changing the regulatory scheme by issuing huge fines. But I saw that that was actually quite effective. So a question I would have is, as you're trying to address these very complex issues with long value chains, a lot of different players involved, partly private, partly public, is this sort of naming and shaming, ranking different companies on how well they're doing, ranking different countries frankly on how well they're doing and implementing stuff. Is that part of the thought process and if so, how far evolved is it? A very valid question. As an organisation in the forum we measure and rank countries in terms of their ability to address issues such as inclusive growth and gender, long term economic competitiveness. Eleanor, are we missing a trick by not taking this direct and frankly quite effective approach? I think it's a very interesting question and there's no question that regulation is an important part of this. I think this is a high volume, low value material which goes all over the world. So one of the five recommendations of the report is to have an engagement with policy makers and work out how we can best achieve this. But I'd like to come back to Dominic's point on economics. The foundation has been working for five and a half years on the idea of a circular economy and when we brought the idea to the forum for the first time in January 2012, the first thing we did was we produced an economic report with analysis by McKinsey to look into the economic opportunity of this model. We're talking here about a high volume, low value material. The circular economy is all materials. It's all products, components, it's buildings, it's everything being kept at their highest value and utility at all times. But it's very much driven by economics. So there are regulations that will help this to happen. That first report, though it wasn't an FMCG report, that first report showed that there was a US$630 billion economic opportunity to be had, and the first 350 could be achieved without any regulation whatsoever. This one's harder. It's part of FMCG, 3.2 trillion market, and we currently only recover 18% of that. That's not just plastics, that's all FMCG. But there's a massive economic opportunity to recover the other over 80% of FMCG. It's 3.2 trillion. We lose vast volumes and value of materials every single year. So we've taken plastics because economically it is a harder one. There are more things that have to change to realise that value. As Jean-Louis said, it's a colour of plastic. It's the demand. It's the quality of the plastic. And it needs all those actors in the value chain. You can become circular as a business in some ways on your own, but this one you can't. This one is a systemic challenge. And as Dominic said, it needs a systemic approach. It needs everyone to come together to realise it. I think there's a push and a pull, but we have to create the pull also. Let's take one more question from the gentleman in the front row, and then we'll go to you, sir. Maybe because we're running out of time. We'll cover both questions. Can you just pass the microphone after yours and we'll get it over to the man in the back. So something totally different I do. Seth Berkley, I do vaccines in developing countries, but I'm a passionate seller and you've talked about fixing this problem going forward and making solutions for it. What about the stuff that's in the ocean now and what can be done about that? What do you know? Let's see what this gentleman... Hi, congrats for the panel. We're talking about plastics, but there are several types of plastics, and you cannot definitely put all of them together. And I'm remembering a Nature magazine document that was talking about the alternative of mentioning at least four of the seven types of plastics as hazardous waste material. How do you see that possible? I've heard people saying that maybe some types of plastic may be considered as tobacco. That type of industry. How do you feel like that? So quick fixes and labelling. John Lee, do you want to talk about the plastics, because you work... I'm happy too, but... I am not sure we can say the plastic is like tobacco now. I think today it has been probably true in the past where some plastic has some leakage, in bottles, plastic bottles. But frankly speaking today, I do not believe that drinking water from a plastic bottle is the most dangerous thing that you can do in your daily life. So no, I do not see the danger of plastic like that. I see the danger in what we have been saying before and to the question of the oceans. I just would like to, before giving the floor to Ellen, I will just give you a figure. We produce in the developed countries 200,000 microfibers per person and per day, of which 90 to 95% is stopped by the waste treatment plant that we have here in Europe. Which means that roughly 10% still go to the river, which means still go to the ocean. So if we do not stop the users of plastic at the true beginning, which means using less recycling more, the problem of plastic in the oceans will continue to be one of the, in my view, most dangerous and difficult problems to be solved in the future. I'll pick up on the quick fixes oceans. There are lots of organisations working on cleaning up the oceans and they're doing phenomenal work. That's not where we sit. What we're trying to do is go to the beginning of the chain and work out how we stop it going there. But is it possible to get it out now? There are people who are out there with ships taking samples, working out how they can valorise what's there, but there's a problem because what's there is mixed product, it's got additives in and it actually is incredibly expensive to remove. So there are challenges there, but there's more going in every year and that's going faster and faster. Our role here is to go to the beginning of the chain and try and work out how we can stop that happening in the future. Let's pick up on the regulation piece, if I may, because it's a very important one, because you have this conundrum about big government, no government, market signals, and how does all that fit together? Analog, supply chains in another area, half of the world's tropical deforestation is driven by just the unsustainable sourcing of four commodities, beef, soy, paper and pulp and palm oil. So if you have sustainable sourcing in those four commodity chains, half the world's tropical deforestation is resolved according to the forestry specialists. It's about 8-9% of greenhouse gas emissions. The big breakthrough there has not been legislation, has been information. There's a fascinating piece of technology called Global Forest Watch, which from satellite data can show you exactly who's burning what in terms of unsustainable forestry sourcing, whether it's a plantation owner or a government or a smallholder. The explosion of change as a result of information technology, you can see what's going on, has changed the mindset completely. It's like a disinfectant. In this domain area, you can imagine the same sort of technology to see where the plastic is leaking from, which countries, which bays, and I can guarantee that that would change the game quite considerably. Let's just take one very quick question, we are running over. I was just wondering, isn't the fact that it's a high volume, low value material also the big problem, that because it doesn't really carry its own costs, it should be, if you consider the externalities, now it should cost something else. There should be another cost to it. That's one of the things that we raised within the report. The externalities of plastic packaging are 40 billion, and that exceeds the profit pool of the plastic packaging economy. So there are some big questions. Many of that isn't being paid, but actually some of it really is. I've had conversations here, for example, the city of Jakarta spends vast amounts of money unblocking its sewage system because it's clogged with plastic. So, you know, there are externalities that really are being paid, not by the plastic producers or the manufacturers, but actually just by the regions because the system is fundamentally broken. And it's fixing this. It's because we have something that has no collection system and cannot be valorised. There's something about 300 million euros a year that Europe is spending cleaning up its beaches because of the plastics that are arriving. So the point is very well made, but then the flip side of it is true as well, is that so who carries the cost? And is it then technical kind of solution which is being explored here about how do you make the system work so that actually this never gets to that point and it's continually kind of looped around versus a kind of burden of cost on somebody. So it's a very interesting conundrum. It's not necessarily just an economic price. Quick, quick addition. I think to also answer that, the speed of increase of plastic use is incredible to Jean-Louis Point. When I was looking at the graph that we put in the report on the stats, when my dad was born, he's just over 70, we didn't have plastic packaging really, or plastics. By the time I was born it was 40 million tonnes and now it's 300 million tonnes. That's in less than 40 years. It's staggering. Those costs will increase, those problems will get worse unless we're able to fix the system, which means the plastic must be valorised, which means we need to look at an approach whereby we can pick materials that can be recovered and cycled to the highest level. Now we're running over time but we do think slightly differently here in the issue briefing so I'm going to persevere. Let's want to develop ourselves a question not about quick fixes but about easy wins. What we're talking about is very, very difficult long-term challenges, but what can we realistically expect to see in the next 12 months in terms of progress? John Lewis perhaps, you could start with that question. 12 months is short. We are talking about 300 million plastic. If you look around you, I'm sure that you have a plastic piece of something with you. I think this is a piece of plastic. This is a piece of plastic. You can see that all of them are different kinds of plastic. This kind of plastic is not the same as this one. It's not the same colour. It's not the same quality. If we want to change, we need, in my view, the first real point is to put together policymakers, industry, customers in order to really find solutions which are at the same time rational and possible. If we want to go too fast, I think it would be very difficult because you will have some blockage in the society. For example, we speak about externalities. I frankly believe that one of the major issues for us is certainly to put a price to carbon one way or another. But don't forget that at the end of the day, it is a customer which is going to pay the price of the externalities. This is a complex issue. But we have to start. We have to discuss with policymakers. We have to discuss with large producers. We have to discuss with customers. One of the interests of the forum and of the discussion we have in mainstream is the fact that we try to bring together all those players in order to find reasonable solutions. Now, yes, we need to go fast. We have to change. And in my view, especially in Europe, the commission with this new circular economy package has a clear and very important role to play. Push measure, yes, but pull measure are also necessary. Offer demand. I think in 12 months quite a lot can be done. We're at stage now of awareness. Before you perhaps came to Davos, you have a new plastics economy. I guarantee you this time in 12 months there will be a lot of people realising that we have a problem with plastics. The first step for an alcoholic is to realise they've got a problem. For the system, it's got to realise it's got a problem before you can start to tackle the solution. People now talk about water, water for energy, water for food. Eight years ago, we didn't really think like that. So you can start to adjust that this report contains the fixers. First step, 12 months from now this will be embedded in the kind of psyche that plastics is not a benign thing that we do have a problem in our system. I would pick up on Jean-Louis' point that a year is not a long time but if I reflect back on the last 12 months of putting the report together and the fact that in order to solve the problem you have to realise you have one people are not running away from this issue. We're working with scientists but we're also working with retailers, with producers, with huge producers of plastic globally. They're absolutely not running away from this. Everybody knows there's a problem. There really is a problem. This is about trying to put people together to try and find solutions. There are five recommendations. They're not going to happen overnight. But we have to look at this systemically. I would say that what's been fantastic over the last 12 months is the stakeholders who are already engaged are fully looking at this systemically and working at how we can fix this in a big way. We'd love to hold you to account and bring you back next year to see how things go. Fantastic. Do it. The first session opened up for AM17. Thank you all very much for this issue briefing. It's now closed. Thank you.