 Good afternoon, and I'm delighted to welcome you to today's event which is part of the environmental resilience lecture series co-organized by ourselves at the IIEA and the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. On behalf of the IIEA, I'd like to thank the EPA for their sponsorship and collaboration on this initiative. Over the last 12 months, the lecture series has explored a diverse range of topics such as the circular economy, environmental governance, the bioeconomy, water quality, climate finance, and today, zero waste design. We're really honored to be joined this afternoon by Claire Mifflin, who is development lead of the Zero Waste Design Guidelines for New York City and the founder of the Center for Zero Waste Design. In her address in a few moments, Claire will outline how waste is in fact a design flaw and argue that sustainable, prosperous and livable cities of the future will need to become zero waste. And the title of Claire's address is just that designing for zero waste strategies for New York City, and I know that will gain from the perspective of Irish cities will look forward to gaining a huge amount of insight from Claire's talk. Claire Mifflin is an architect, a systems thinker with over 20 years of experience designing buildings to the highest environmental standards. She is certified as a biomimicry professional architect, passive house designer and lead professional that's LWD as well as LEAD I'm sure but we know we know what we're talking about. Ms Mifflin led the development of the Zero Waste Design Guidelines for New York City through a multidisciplinary collaborative process. These guidelines serve as a resource and an inspiration for architects and developers to help cities reach their zero waste goal, and they're being disseminated and implemented through the Center for Zero Waste Design. Since 2017, Claire Mifflin has served as co-chair of the American Institute of Architecture, New York Committee on the Environment. She's going to speak to us today for about 20 minutes or so, and after the presentation, we're going to go to you for the live Q&A, you are audience and important, most important part of the presentation this afternoon. You're going to be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you're well familiar at this stage and you'll see it there on your screen. As we always say at this stage, feel free to pop in your question when it occurs to you throughout the session, rather than waiting until the end because there's always the risk of getting all the questions together and you have to cope with them as we get up to the last five or 10 minutes. So if it occurs to you, that big insight or question, just pop it on the Q&A and we'll try to get to it. If you wouldn't mind identifying yourself, give your name and any affiliation that you may have when asking the question. Both the presentation and the Q&A today are on the record. So just to bear that in mind, and if you're minded to do so, feel free to join the discussion on Twitter and in that context you can use hashtag EPA underscore IIEA, that's hashtag EPA underscore IIEA. But before we come to the presentation, it's my honor to turn to Sharon Finnegan. Sharon Finnegan, as you know, is Director of Environmental Sustainability at the Environment Protection Agency. And Sharon, thank you for joining us. I know you're just going to get the ball rolling with some introductory remarks. The floor is yours. Many thanks Alex and good afternoon everybody. It's an absolute pleasure to be with you for this IIEA lecture. I suppose the EPA is really thrilled to partner with the IIEA and this lecture series and I'm really looking forward to hearing this afternoon from Claire about her experiences in New York. And what I wanted to do maybe was before you settle in to listen to Claire's story and the progress made in New York. I want to invite you to invite you to think about the current situation with regard to generation of waste in Ireland, and how we dispose and handle of waste here in this country. So just some some interesting statistics to begin with. In Ireland over 13 million tons of waste are generated per year in our homes and our workplaces and throughout our using our leisure activities. The latest national waste statistics indicate that waste generation is an increasing in many waste streams, including household and commercial waste, construction and demolition waste, hazardous waste, waste electrical and electronic equipment and end of life vehicles. Ireland is now generating more than one million tons of packaging each year, and the recycling rate of packaging is decreasing as more goes for energy recovery. Single use items like pasta cups and single use tissue paper are an increasing feature in our household and commercial curbside bins, landfill and waste energy recovery in Ireland is at capacity, and the country is highly dependent on export markets to residual recyclable and hazardous waste. I will draw a number of conclusions from these facts that I've just outlined. Number one, our current model of consumption is built on convenience through short lived or single use products and disposable packaging is not sustainable and that is something we need to change. The link between economic growth and consumption levels and waste generation has not been broken. And we have also reached a plateau in relation to waste management. Before you kind of despair about all of that, I will say that the zero waste movement and the circular economy have a critical role to play in countering these trends and supporting the achievement of climate targets at national and global levels. We have been working in the area of waste prevention through the National Waste Prevention Programme for many years. Our existing work in this area includes Ireland's well regarded food waste prevention campaign, the smart farming initiative, and development of national guidance on priority topics like construction waste management and green public procurement. The EPA also supports Circulara, which is an innovative and networking platform, which was established last year with 26 leading manufacturers to bring circularity into Ireland's world class manufacturing sector. The latest national waste policy document, a waste action plan for circular economy, which was published in September 2020, seeks to shift the focus away from waste disposal and treatment to ensure that materials and products remain in productive use for longer. This approach prevents waste and supports reuse through a policy framework that discourages resources and being wasted and rewards circularity. It also draws attention to the role of design and waste prevention through the delivery of products that are more amenable to recycling or reuse. We are now developing a new national circular economy programme, which will incorporate the national waste prevention programme to be the driving force for Ireland's move to a circular economy by businesses, households and the public sector. This programme will be launched in the coming weeks and will support the wider government circular economy strategy and translate national circular ambitions into life. Claire, our speaker today is therefore coming to us at a very significant time in Ireland's waste management policy timeline. And I'm really looking forward to hearing today of the experience of her experience of addressing similar challenges and opportunities in New York and learning how these can be overcome. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over the floor to Claire in a bright sunny New York City this morning over to you, Claire. Thank you so much, Sharon. That was a great introduction and so in line with our thinking here at the Centre for Zero Waste Design. I am going to start by sharing my screen here and just letting people know that the Zero Waste Design Guidelines were really developed to answer the question what can architects and urban designers do to help cities reach zero waste. They were developed in New York City, but the best practice strategies within them are adaptable for cities globally. And it's really because architects aim to design beautiful objects, buildings, but they don't often consider the ugly system impacts from making and using the building, such as consuming resources and generating waste. Similarly, city governments don't often count the full system impacts, such as the emissions generated during the production of things consumed in the city. And for a consumption based city like New York City that can actually double or triple our greenhouse gas emissions. These I've kind of highlighted in red here are ones that when we design a city for zero waste in the circular economy we need to think about. So how can we use design to change the system. We can be inspired by the mushroom, which works with other decomposers to turn waste into soil for renewal and regrowth. So as I said I'm a bio mimicry professional so I love to look at natural systems and see how they can inspire us and when I look at mature ecosystems that regenerate all the resources there's three characteristics that really develop. These are the feedback loops niche specialization and collaboration and looking at how we can design cities to encourage those characteristics will help us to get circular. So, looking into the zero waste design guidelines these are downloadable from their race design.org and I'm just going to give you a little brief overview. So the strategies for building design look at how we can plan for the movement of waste through the building, how we can separate waste. Better, how we can reduce the amount of consumption through reuse, and how we can reduce the volume of waste to reduce the impact on public space. One of the things is estimating how much waste your building will produce some what things you can do to reduce that for an existing building you could do an audit but for a new building there were no tools for architects. So we developed online waste calculated tool so that buildings could be designed with adequate adequate space. Planning is really straightforward but it's amazing how seldom architects think it through fully and it really is. If you don't design for the things to stay separated and to be moved and have room to be stored. Then, even if you separate your recycling the bin it's not going to stay separated until it's collected. So it requires clear visual cues consistent throughout the building. And a really great case study for these examples is Etsy headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. And they have no bins at the desk, only central waste stations shown here in red. And here you see one trash is actually this little hole on the left because they actually accept pretty much most of the materials that are allowed in the facility. And they display right here here's our feedback loop. This is the diversion rate they achieved last week and the reason they know that is because the housekeeping staff when they put the bag in the hamper there's a scale in it, and a tablet and they just tap metal plastic glass and then you know that that's what it is and the software determines the diversion rate. So they have, they also reduce the waste through the use of reusable dishware on packaged snacks. They have coffee and kombucha on tap. Even if you want to go out and get a coffee you can take a ceramic mug with a lid and they've arranged discounts at local cafes. They host clothing swaps and even employee engagement waste audits to see how well they're doing. And they really took it the whole way with design and they are certified through their waste facility, and it ties into them their mission. And those are part of the reducing material consumption strategies and here in New York City floor area is so expensive that in this building in the Hurst Tower, this conveyor takes reusable dishes down three stories to the seller to be washed because the floor area as much cheaper as possible. So it's just an example of how you need to design buildings for this at the beginning. There's also many strategies to reduce the volume of waste whether that's a carp or baler or equipment that can squeeze out the water of food waste and start to process it. There's also infographics like this that bring all the best practice strategies together for a certain type of building so your architects designing a restaurant. They look at this infographic and they can see all the best practice strategies that they can implement for a space like that. And also we have circular building materials. And one of the most important things here is just to build less. We need to build fewer buildings we need to repurpose existing buildings and if we do design a new building, we have to make sure that it can be designed for flexibility this shows different layouts and user for space, so that we build less and use less materials. And then there are a lot of other strategies like making sure the building can be disassembled to be refurbished. And then I did the guidelines through exhibitions, education events, referencing them and standards like lead, adapting them to other cities and have started a nonprofit center for zero race design to continue the work. One of our first projects, the center has worked on is actually the ocean exploding city, which is a design for a new city, which aims to have a positive impact on its surroundings being zero energy, harvesting its own water, growing its food and treating its own waste as much as it can. So we did the zero waste and circular economy strategy. And one of the first things is looking at how we can reduce the amount of consumption to start with, on what we have to have within the city so we actually have collection systems for reusable materials, recycling some things that have to be returned to the mainland, laundry and food waste here and bulk goods would come from the mainland some foods grown there but bulk goods coming from the mainland and locally grown food are all packaged in reusable containers. Food waste would be weighed before disposal, leading restaurants to order more accurately and can reduce waste by over 35%. When it's being stored and carted in bins where it could produce odors and attract vermin it's moved with a small pneumatic tube directly to a small anaerobic digestia, which creates heat and power, and the power goes into the electricity grid and the heat warms the water to wash the reusable packaging and dishware. Food waste from homes landscaping and farming goes to the community compost gardens to make soil and grow food in the community gardens. These have no need for garbage trucks bulky or fragile items can be transported by cargo bike and anything else spent batteries worn clothes or broken toys, get put in a reasonable reusable bag with an ID tag to identify the material and source and they're conveyed to the sorting center by pneumatic tube. The dual materials are needed, like water or electricity and sorted to facilitate repair reuse or refabrication with data over time strategies can be tweaked to reduce waste further and apply this evidence based solutions to other cities. Libraries will welcome circular economy businesses and help develop community collectives for fixing and repair libraries won't just be for books, but anything from a drill to a guitar consumer goods, such as a computer or a child's high chair will be leased rather than owned and returned to the store when maintenance or an upgrade is needed. The interim buildings will all be designed for disassembly so at the end of life, they can be repurposed into something new. So this was really a way of creating from scratch and ideal circular scenario. The city is actually we're just about to start a prototype of one module in Busan, South Korea, which I'm really excited about. But looking at the flows in the city, you see that it's a lot of circular flows of reusable packaging food, food to be composted and some of these circular flows are at the scale of one individual module. Some are at the city scale, and some things have to be returned to the mainland. So how do we take a city that's designed for circularity like this one and apply it to a city like New York City which was designed for linear flows. One thing we we notice if we look at the zoning of New York City is that manufacturing shown here in purple is all on the outskirts for shipping access and to reduce the impacts to residential areas. We do live near these polluting industries and suffer from the traffic and industrial pollution, and other people suffer from being alongside landfills New York's waste actually goes to landfills as far away as Virginia. So the serious environmental justice issues from the way we deal with our waste currently. So our advocacy campaign put waste to work for vibrant streetscapes green jobs and healthy neighborhoods. We have a new mayoral administration coming into the city next year. And we're trying to convince them that we need to change the way that waste is managed and produced in New York City. The first strategies we're sharing are those for circulating strategies that will help facilitate reuse repair refabrication and composting. And these don't fall into current zoning categories, a community compost facility is very different from a waste transfer station. So these rezoning Boston has rezoned for urban agriculture and the US composting council has given suggestions for how cities can zone for composting and so we will need to look at that in the city. And we can also design new buildings to provide facilities for material movement. This one was in Paris and is a case study in the guidelines. It could be work furniture, but could also be providing facilities for fixing loaning and things like that. Like participatory city did in London with empty storefronts where people could drop in and suggest ideas, many of which were about reuse recycling and making. Or could be a tool library for example there's a load of empty storefronts in New York City at the moment. So many are well designed waste bins so many are so badly designed with missions match science and visual cues, and they lead to people being really confused about how to separate waste and lead to a lot of contamination. But even with a well designed way station the current system is really difficult. For example, say this is a food hall. These are the items you have. What goes where it is so complicated, you have to decide is that plastic or is it compostable plastic. You have to separate the sleeve the cup and the lid of your reusable I mean of your disposable coffee cup. And say this is a food hall which stipulates or college campus which says no everything has to be compostable. The separation is a little easier then. But it's expensive for the vendors and only industrial compost facilities can process most compostables. So many municipal programs don't take them so it's still single use disposable. So say instead you control for reusable like San Francisco airports new terminal is going to try and do this and only have reusable. And in that case, it's really easy to separate everything all you've got is a reusable items or the food waste. And this great report by upstream reuse wins really calculates all the environmental benefits and the benefits for businesses in terms of saving money, but you have to design your facility to enable it. The impacts benefits to our public space is huge because we're just drowning in reuse in single use disposables. But we might need to figure out how to design return systems into bins and streets so that as convenient as throwing away trash, but we're not quite there yet. And that's all about containing waste, because in New York City, we still use bags, and they just aren't room for them as the city gets denser, especially in neighborhoods like this in the financial district, whether narrow streets with tall buildings, narrow sidewalks, and the truck may take half an hour to lift this block traffic as it does. And bag systems are bad for public space and the workers that are hauling them. And as we are looking at we imagining streets for covert without door dining and makes it even worse. Share collection is the solution for many neighborhoods, whether those shared bins are in the street and above ground or submerged within the sidewalk. And after we recommended them in the guidelines the departments of sanitation and transportation have started this clean curbs pilot program for shared collection within the street. But they really need to ramp it up and do something citywide like they did in Paris where they piloted these recycling bins in the street because in Paris they collect trash and food scraps from buildings and they've moved recycling into the street. They've always had bottle banks and it really makes some sense for them to do that but they piloted these ones shown in the middle 40 of them and then they procured a thousand of these stations which you now see throughout the city. Because New York City building codes really prioritized trash. So the code was updated so now you have to have recycling alongside your trash shoot. But if we're going to collect organics everywhere that that requires an awful lot of work for people in the building to bring it down into the basement and then to put it in bags on the street. So it would be much more convenient if we did what South Korea did, and it shut down all the stopped allowing press shoots and new buildings and encouraged existing ones to shut them down. So instead they have large central waste rooms, which allows for many way streams and gives oversight for volume based charging like a pay as you throw system. So it's kind of the same on a neighborhood scale we don't want to have seven bins outside every house. We need to consolidate the drop offs for multiple streams in central locations. And lastly, we tackle compost and regeneration of soils. How can you make sure all city soils and regenerate it with compost and consider it part of maintaining green spaces. So New York City compost project, as it is now takes drop offs from farmers markets and drop off points. It mixes it with leaves and landscape waste from from city green spaces and there are these five composting sites and the compost is used for street trees and urban farms and given back to community groups. I don't know if it's a huge. But it's only a small fraction one or two percent of the organic waste in the city. And even though many are in parks, they typically don't compost that parks waste and don't have that compost used within the park. So the parks department actually didn't renew many of the leases for the community compost facilities thinking that composting doesn't belong in parks. I think it should be considered part of maintaining the park and adding to its resilience as compost can hold six times its weight in water. And we have a lot of flooding events here in New York City. So really we need to consider circular bio cycles at multiple scales. We're not going to compost all of the organic waste in New York City, but we could regenerate all of the soils. And we take other organic waste back into the region to nourish agricultural soils and stop the use of fossil fuel based fertilizer which is often from liquid natural gas and just recently has increased multiple times in price so it makes sense financially too. There are different options from the the current brown bin system the city has which was partially suspended in covid but it's handheld brown bins. So it makes sense for smaller, less dense neighborhoods but a large building would have to have, you know, 37 of these little bins set out. So this doesn't make sense. So this project we're looking at here in the Bronx which has 700 affordable housing units and a food incubator to, to help start up food businesses. We actually have designed for them an in vessel composter that will be run by the horticultural staff to maintain the soils on the site. So we now have this bio digester, which I think the companies, the company is out of Ireland harp, actually, which adds microbes and dehydrates the food waste, and so it can be used as a fertilizer and could be returned to the regional farm system. And there's no park here on the waterfront in Brooklyn is another example, a successful example of this in practice, what will cultural staff manage it, and they use it to maintain the park's green spaces. They take food waste from the community and combine it with their leaves and yard waste. So this is what do we want our cities to be like this is actually a block away from where I live these mini storage buildings unoccupied buildings full of unused things drowning and trash and litter. Or do we want circular cities with low impact transportation and reimagine streets green roofs healthy street trees is up to us to design the city we want. This is the last slide of our put waste to work campaign the benefits are huge and over a large variety of New York City's goals, whether that's zero waste our greenhouse gas reductions vision zero stopping about treat the street safety healthy neighborhoods air quality repair creates over 200 times as many jobs as landfills and remanufacturing when almost 30 times as many jobs. So this is what we have to do. And I'm going to leave it here from my presentation today. Thank you. This is Claire and fascinating, really fascinating. And I like the line at the end, this is what we have to do. And one can only agree but I suppose being realistic, we also have to understand and I'm sure you do in the New York situation. There's all the obstacles along the way that that policymakers and planners and everybody needs to start addressing in order to we get to the to get to that incredibly visionary set of ideas that you've just been telling us about. And so there's so much that maybe we could we could explore and even issues of scale, and I love this idea that, you know, build less. So a few things come out of what you say just build less build fewer building. And at the moment, like in common, many other cities. I think there's there's, I mean, there's a huge amount of commercial property construction happening in Dublin at the moment, even in the teeth of the pandemic. So there's obviously finance has decided or, you know, there's there's there's a priority there that we're going to need more commercial properties but other commentators are saying that in time perhaps, perhaps quite soon. Many of those buildings will may have to transition to and it wouldn't be a bad thing to residential. So existing commercial properties may may may transition to residential in the post pandemic world and which we hope it'll be post at some point. And perhaps then maybe we'll need fewer new commercial building so I'm just wondering even just about the transition between, you know, commercial buildings to buildings that could in the future be used as residential does that. How does that feature in your in your thinking in terms of this overall idea this overall project. I mean that is not in the put waste to work advocacy but it's definitely in the zero waste design guidelines because it's really looking at designing for flexibility in terms of future use. So it's probably easier normally to go from commercial to residential but residential buildings generally have lower floor to floor heights so increasing them means you could go from residential to commercial if that's the way something needs to go. So something that Paris has thought about a lot this reversible building design they talk about, making sure that our buildings can be used in different ways in the future. And even, even now actually there's one example that the school construction authority in New York now doesn't have new schools build auditoriums because those are not used very often. They have auditoriums which is like a gym that, and then they have these beaches that can come in and use the space as an auditorium, or else you could have an auditorium but have it near the entrance so local theater groups could use it in the evening just making sure every space you design is used a lot. And yeah that's something I've thought about a lot because you hear all these statistics the world's going to have double the built area by 2050 and you think, Why, when I'm going to have double the population. So why just bill blacks. Interesting, and I'm wondering then how when you reflect because you've spoken a lot about design and that's, that's really where this comes back to as you said, waste as a design flaw. The level of thinking and you have touched on it that we need in the planning system and you showed some slides there in respect of New York, and where the industry is and where, you know, where residential is where other components of the, of the built environment are. So how do you start to fit all of these ideas into the planning code. How do you, how do you do that. I mean, is it, do we need to change the planning codes that's happening in some areas, do the planners have to be brought on board in a very significant way here. Definitely I mean designing for circular material loops. You kind of have to involve so many agencies, which is why we're really pushing in New York City for it not to be something that just falls on the Department of Sanitation, but comes from the mayor's office who can coordinate the city planning, do t and yeah zoning is one thing. And those two small examples I showed like Boston has done this rezoning to promote urban agriculture, we can do the same to promote composting because yes you don't want a large compost facility that smelly right by your hands, but you can do small integrated compost facilities into parks that are nothing like a waste transfer station and we don't really have a zoning category for them. So, moving our zoning categories into the modern day we still have things like tanneries and waste. You know, these kind of things that nobody's doing in the city anymore in the zoning code and it really has to be modernized. And then you can do things to promote facilities like we just had a grant looking at Hong Kong and Singapore and other high density cities we're just actually about to release our report on that in the next few days. So they subsidize eco industrial facilities say an eco park where food waste is turned into animal feed but it's like a subsidized space for that kind of thing because those kind of facilities often don't make enough money to pay commercial rates in the city of New York so finding subsidizing space for circularity within the city is also important. And what kind of responses or attitudes do you get from will say city planners in New York to these to these ideas and this kind of vision I mean is there is there a receptiveness and openness to these ideas there. Definitely. I just presented the advocacy campaign to city planning and 15 of them signed on to talk about it. In a way I'm kind of glad we have bags on the sidewalk in New York City because we can't ignore the problem, and it's in your face and the rats are getting worse and council members are more up in arms that we've got to do something about it. So, yes, I think city planning is definitely a great way in for New York City. It also just occurs to me also in respect of the, you know your presentation that and this is not to take from it on the country, I think it's, it's, it shows, you know, the great value of it that you, I think what you're talking about. It's certainly anyway to be the gold standard of what could be achieved if I can put it that way and I don't want that to be taken as it's certainly not a criticism but it's, you know, it's in a sense it's, it's, it's a vision to be attained. And it's how things could best be done. How does that fit with public opinion, where people are in their lives where you know what people's possibilities are their income their, their level of perhaps education about what's possible to change. You know, I mean that's a huge question I know but it's, it's, don't we have to meet people where they are, and people have different levels of income different levels of appreciation of the problem, getting it into the public discourse or getting it into the whole political frame and you've got a new mayor coming on board and so on. So how does it play at that level I wonder in New York. I mean, I think it's make it if it's designed right, it's not more difficult for your average person at the moment the system is not great for anybody, the walking past the trash having the rats having the litter. As I showed that confusing separation of recyclable materials is difficult it's confusing it's hard to do well. I kind of like to look at a passive house, which I know is a movement that's that's really jumped in New York City, many of the new affordable houses a passive house and I know it's a big movement in Ireland to to design buildings for passive house, like in the green housing movement we used to get, we used to add more complexity would add radiant floors multiple systems, all these complexities and it would like raise the cost and raise the cost. But then when you got to passive house level of insulation suddenly you really didn't need your expensive fancy heating system, you could just have a really simple system. So we kind of need to do the same with waste like we're adding more and more confusing compostable materials, different multiple multiple streams to separate into and if we just went to reusable. It would be so much simpler and lower cost for everybody so that's what I'm kind of trying to convince people and I think the way to convince people is definitely through pilots and you have controlled spaces like a university campus schools where you pilot these reusable models and you can see how simple it is and then people get convinced. And I also think community composting is a great way to convince people because it's so tangible you can see the food waste going to make soil to grow more food is so much easier for people to understand than reducing your energy for example. So from that point or closely linked to it Nora Owen asks whether she's wondering like what incentives stroke sanctions are in place to encourage citizens and what what costs are involved, you know, for citizens as a general proposition. And she asks as a kind of a subsidiary question, do people dump hazardous waste hidden in normal rubbish. Is that is that a risk or is that a phenomenon that you've come to features. And there aren't a lot of incentives or penalties for doing the wrong thing with waste and that's what I was trying to get to with feedback loops, I mean, New York City has said it wants to look at introducing a pay or save as you throw a program where like in South Korea and I believe in Dublin as well you pay more for for trash than recycling or food waste and when you do to a system like that there are always worries that yes you might hide the wrong thing to have lower cost. But that's why I was pushing the idea that if you don't throw away your waste in lots of little hidden spots but it's more central than there's there's possibility for more oversight of this kind of thing. And actually I was looking at a report the other day in in South Korea about hazardous medical waste and whether people were were disposing of it illegally and they were talking a lot about as well the increase in data and working for their waste has made it much easier to find those things but I think those things are always a worry but generally they're not half as bad as people fear. Sure. Paul leech says floating cities have many attractions and he points to the Maldives. He says intellectually they are elegant as defining a useful putative system boundary, but there's the risk of storm and and they can significantly or severely damage them and destroy them at least pose a huge risk. And so he that's a statement but it poses a question. I don't know what do you think about that. Yes, definitely that's an issue I mean this idea of the floating city from Oceanic City is one that is very close to shore. I think even it could be within say a harbor in a protected space so the tsunami would not be a big deal but they would definitely considering that when they were looking for locations to put the floating city to have it in a sheltered location. But yes. John Frane who's a researcher at the IEA asks how can a move towards zero waste in developing countries happen how can that be brought about and that my way my prioritized industrial expansion over the environment. I understand that question right it might perhaps might be suggesting the other way around multi environment. And but anyway, how to balance the two things expansion industrial expansion and the necessity to to to maintain the environment. In developing countries like there is with energy and other systems as the opportunity to to leap frog and not go through the, the stage that we have in the developed world of these systems, full of recycling and single use tools, because if you don't have that, it's much easier to go straight to to reusable systems and I would say that's what needs to be done in developing countries and in developing countries you often have a really strong informal waste sector with a lot of labor sorting through things this was big even in Singapore the informal Karen gong men were collecting 20 times as much as the actual municipal recycling system so so making sure that you work with those informal waste sectors as well can make a big difference. Interestingly, Warren feeling works for the regional waste management office at the national waste plan project says come back to again to the residential waste says that in Ireland our collection of waste and apartments and multi story dwellings are not performing well for a number of reasons such as lack of space lack of incentives for residents poor management companies etc. From your experience and your knowledge what are the key system changes to implement that would improve the performance of waste management at these kinds of locations. Yeah, that's the case in in in the Americas to in Toronto and places you know they do pretty well in the single family homes but the multi families are more difficult. And actually Toronto is an interesting example because they have. They have anaerobic digestion for organic waste and they accept almost everything even diapers, because they can separate out the plant,verted their trash shoot to organics shoot, and they've actually decreased their trash like 10 fold. Making throwing organic waste more convenient than trash but that's kind of a little bit of a special case and only works for buildings that have really invested residents like a cooperative. And what I've seen more frequently is this idea of what they did in South Korea where they shut down the shoots and the refuse rooms on every floor and have a central waste location in South Korea it's actually often outside and it's often man so there's someone there telling you what if you're doing something wrong. And I think in multi families. That is really the answer to to centralize it where wherever you can, or to develop other ways for giving feedback and making sure people are doing the right thing. The Irish plan commits to having food waste by 2030. Do you think that level of target is feasible and, you know, by extension, what progress has New York made in reaching its own food waste targets, so just to concentrate on food waste. I mean food waste is hugely important it has the biggest greenhouse gas emissions. It's very feasible I mean New York City doesn't have that I know a separate food waste reduction target goal, but well maybe it does not that I'm aware of. And food waste can be done hugely at an individual building level so why couldn't it be done at the city level we've seen many buildings, managed to reduce their food waste by by 50% by tracking it, primarily, if you track it you know what you're wasting you can reduce that. And then as a city level that all these little businesses that have popped up, which is my example of collaborative relationships where there's one where you can just volunteer a few hours a week, rescuing leftover cuisine and you take food from a day, a corporate lunch that didn't happen down to your local local church and individuals are doing that moving of the food, or the too good to go boxes that you can buy a surplus food at the end of day. I think it's definitely the amount of food waste is staggering. I think there are more and more systems to reduce that actually New York State has just done a law that is similar to Paris that grocery stores now have to have a relationship to donate food before they throw it away. No question. I mean, that's that's certainly a factor here and I think there are initiatives, really good initiatives with companies, you know, being set up to pursue them. I guess again is the question of scaling them and making making sure that they're vital business propositions as well for people who have ideas in that in that area and I know the EPA has taken a close interest in that as well and and there are more and more such initiatives coming coming down. And Andrew Gilmore from the Institute here asked a question that occurred to me earlier also and I'm sure it's occurred to a lot of us we see the post, see the covert impact, and the impact of the pandemic and we touched on it earlier in terms of buildings and and and commercial versus residential impact the pandemic is going to have on cities generally. And Andrew asks a insightful question. How has the covert pandemic and the increased use of single use items impacted the trajectory of the zero waste agenda. Is that a worry set, is it a possible setback? I mean, I mean definitely, especially for those bring your own systems like bring your own cup bring your own bowl can no longer do that because of health concerns in fact you actually were never allowed in New York City to bring your own bowl to be in that situation. I think it just means that we have the design systems that are sanitized and and the larger systems whether that's their companies like Redish in New York City that want to deliver reusable dishware to restaurants and then they will pick it up and do the sanitizing so they will do a service just like you have a laundry service, or you could do it within the restaurants as well using their own sanitary service but I think it just points to the fact that we have to design. I mean there's nothing more. There's no reason a disposable cup is more sanitary than a reusable one that has been washed properly. It's just a case of changing the systems and sure masks and gloves are really problematic but we have to change our procedures to make sure they are both hygienic and zero waste. Sure, can I just come back to something we were discussing earlier on the planning the relationship with the planning system. I'm thinking about our planning system here and the regime of granting planning permission with conditions attached so which I'm sure is there's a similar system elsewhere including in New York. Have you thought and explored much the idea of specifying actual conditions in planning. So actual conditions that are associated with the kind of vision that you're you're telling us about today, putting them into the conditions of planning. Yeah, definitely in New York City we have this process called the, the secret process if you take city land or, or if you're building more than as a right by zoning in large plots of lands large developments like that peninsula one I showed you would have to go through that kind of special environmental review process and I think that is a perfect place to put in requirements that people do better in terms of designing for zero waste. Yeah, I think that is a perfect opportunity to ask for more and ask for buildings to be designed for reuse rather than single use. Well, the bigger picture. And so we've just come out of Glasgow and come out of that. It's not finished Glasgow didn't finish anything it just one hopes moved things along a bit and was disappointing in some respects and promising perhaps in others. That's a debate for another day but it does an obvious link between what we're talking about today and the climate agenda. Do you want to say anything about that. I mean, is there something at least at the very minimum, it must be an area that citizens can see a real tangible set of things that they can do to make a contribution to what requires to happen. And that's not to take from the fact that all of the changes needed. It has to be at scale and as governments that have to act and you know it has to happen at the level of states but this this does take us back to what individuals can do. So is that is that an obvious link with the climate agenda. Definitely. I mean, I think that point you say what individuals and more community groups can do is a real opportunity. There's these pop up fix it repairs that you get in New York City or these lending libraries by nothing groups sharing. I mean those are real tangible things that people can do that give them hope and connect them to other people in a way that recycling just doesn't do it and it shouldn't because it's not. It's not is only a stepping stone to one or two more uses before a material is downcycled rather than reuse which can have thousands so I think definitely it provides opportunities for communities to make a difference locally. I also kind of touched on it on one of the earlier slides about cities greenhouse gas accounting and the fact that like in New York City waste is only 4% of our emissions as calculated because it's only the methane given off in the landfill. But if we half our food waste by you know the greenhouse gas emissions system wide are huge from that but we're not counting them in our city accounting so I think that would make it clearer to cities that we need to get to to zero waste and reduce waste and also it would it would show the individual that what they're doing is making more of a difference to climate. My extension isn't there. I mean how cities approach the climate imperative the climate agenda is affected by things like transport as well I mean since I'm where I'm sitting in the suburb of Dublin and looking out to the front of my house and at least to possibly three trucks past on the street where I live since we started at just under an hour ago. So they're all plowing through the suburbs of the cities. They're big trucks. I mean they're big. You don't want to fear cyclists you're not going to mess with them. I mean there and there's a lot of them and they're in competition with with one another, which is another whole area of debate here so doesn't it affect the things like that as well in terms of transportation of rubbish as we call it you call it. Yes, yes it does but actually New York City that's within the transportation. Yes, part of the pie so it's not if you allocated it differently consumption and waste would be a huge part of the pie is just the way you've categorized it. But yes, I think that's a huge thing it's not just the trash trucks it's the delivery trucks to and actually I've been working with a group at the AIA that are looking at the real impacts of e commerce on our streets and you know all those deliveries to every single building and how you can consolidate them in delivery hubs and I've been kind of the waste person they're saying is no since it's no longer deliveries in waste out if in a circular city. We need to make sure that if we have a delivery hub there's space to take back reusable packaging and things that need to be systems for repair or loaning so it's not this linear system but we're as we're developing new infrastructure for new deliveries we're making sure that it can incorporate circular economy ways of service rather than buying and throwing away. Look, thank you so much. This has been really fascinating really thought provoking actually I think for us here in Dublin I say Dublin because we're in Dublin but we have other cities to addressing these issues and I know doing so in a in a thoughtful and in an innovative fashion I think we're all going to be greatly assisted and policymakers and people on this call will be hugely stimulated and assisted by the, you know, the experience that you have in New York and by the presentation that you've that you've given us today. I just spotted one other question, just even as I was speaking and I'm going to, I'm going to hazard asking it to you without having read it first. It's also from Paul Leach in light of your experience pragmatically of our political and administrative inertia. I was assuming that it's the same kind of thing over there as we have here. Do you believe our societies are capable of the necessary changes in time for our species survival. Thanks very much for that was your second question you got it again for your final word. That's a good last question and I did actually just want to. I forgot to mention in the last one about you talking about your, your, your trucks competing for business in ways that's a huge issue with the commercial waste in New York City and we've just implemented commercial waste zoning so only two or three companies will be able to serve each zone to reduce the truck miles, which is something you might find interesting. But on that last thing, I mean, I am, I believe people want change and want to do enough to continue, continue this planet, humans and nature working together and I never. I don't really dwell on those questions, can we do enough in time I just think if we convince people that not only is it right for the planet, it's right for the businesses. It's right for people in terms of environmental justice and not harming people with pollution and consumption. Why wouldn't we do it why wouldn't we try our hardest to do it I can't think of any reason. I mean garbage is just so disgusting, but fixing composting reusing all these things make you feel good so I'm putting all my effort into convincing people that this is a better way to live without diesel trucks with bikes and green streets and farms and and as architects and designers that's what we want to do we want to design better cities better spaces better buildings where people have a better better life and the planet has a chance at a better life for all species. Well it's the strength of the sheer logic of what you've described and the hope that the logic will win through. And I think that's that's really come across from what you've what you've been saying today, and the practicality of many of the measures as well I think that's just also important that it's, you know, it's not pie in the sky these are achievable practical pragmatic solutions to real human and social and community kind of you know questions and imperative so thank you so much for sharing your thoughts in the presentation first of all and also in your response to the questions that are members and colleagues and attendees have asked today. Thank you so much Claire for being with us. Thanks again to the EPA for their collaboration with today and with the series generally. Thank you for your attendance, our audience and we look forward to seeing you all again before too long. Thank you and good afternoon. Thank you. That was great, great moderation and thanks to the IEA for giving me this opportunity, a great conversation. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. Thank you.