A Well-Rounded Conversation with Google About the Circular Economy
Currently we have a linear economy – products are created, used and then thrown away. In a circular economy there is no waste – after they are used, products are recycled and/or reused.
This week our guest is Mike Werner, Lead for Circular Economy at Google. Mike tells us about Google’s sustainability goals.
Here are some of the questions Peter and Jackie ask Mike: Google sells hardware – Nest thermostats, cell phones and so on – what happens to these products when they are no longer useable? How does Google use digital products to help consumers make more sustainable choices? Why did Google commission papers on plastic waste? Are you optimistic that plastic waste can be reduced?
Content referenced in this podcast:
- Learn more about Google’s Sustainability Goals
- “Closing the Plastics Circularity Gap” with contributions from AFARA consulting (recently acquired by EY Canada) and Google
Please review our disclaimer at: https://www.arcenergyinstitute.com/disclaimer/
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The concept of a circular economy has been around for a long time. It was first described in the 1960’s by author and economist Kenneth E. Boulding, who expressed a need for society to be in a “cyclical” system of production. The term “circular economy” first appeared in 1988 in a book by Allan Kneese “The Economics of Natural Resources.”
The idea is a model of production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, and recycling existing materials and products. Jackie and Peter’s guest this week, Mike Werner, Google’s Lead for Circular Economy, explains it this way “The circular economy is the opposite of a linear economy. The dominant economic model today is focused on taking resources, making them into a product of some kind and wasting them, disposing of them. We often call that linear system the take-make-waste economic model. And the circular economy focuses on keeping those resources in use forever.”
“It’s an economic system that aims to decouple growth from the consumption and disposal of finite resources. And some of the key actions are focused on maximizing the reuse of resources where systems are created to enable products and materials to flow back into the economy with minimal loss.”
A circular economy prevents things from going to landfill and finds a way for them to be useful again.
Google, of course, is a global technology company. It’s also the world’s largest owner, operator and developer of commercial real estate. It has over 20 data centres, offices and operations in more than 150 cities and 60 countries.
Google has a significant footprint. It also has a commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030 – across scopes one, two, and three. Aggressive.
“A significant portion of that effort is focused on energy reductions, powering our company with 24 by 7 carbon free energy and working into the supply chain to source and procure low carbon materials. We obviously want to reduce the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we emit and then use carbon removal technologies to make up the difference in the balance.”
Google is in a unique position. There are its efforts to reduce the impacts of a large footprint, but it’s also in a position of influence to billions of people around the world. “To empower everyone with technology, we’ve committed to helping one billion people make more sustainable choices by the end of this year through our core products, and some of those examples include eco-friendly routing and Google maps. That ensures that you’re taking the most fuel-efficient route. For example, Google Maps will default to the route with the lowest carbon footprint when it is approximately the same estimated time of arrival as the fastest route.”
Throughout the conversation in this episode Mike talks with Peter and Jackie about how Google uses digital products to help consumers make more sustainable choices, why Google commissioned papers on plastic waste, circular goals for Google in respect of its data centres, as well as sustainable design on some of its new buildings.
Episode 170 transcript
Speaker 1:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast, I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian, welcome. It’s a beautiful fall out here in Calgary and everybody’s getting out and about. I wanted to talk today about recycling, I think it’s kind of embedded in our culture here now, don’t you think, Jackie?
Jackie Forrest:
In Calgary for some time, we’ve been recycling and today I have three bins; I have a green, black and blue bin. The green one, I think it’s probably been around for several years now, but it’s amazing to me how much that has reduced the garbage and it feels really good that you know that is going into composting and isn’t going into the landfill, but it’s a huge amount of volume in our home and of course, the blue is the recycling. At the end of the day, now that we have the green and the blue, there’s actually very little going to that black bin, which is the stuff that ends up in the landfill.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, it’s really good, even in now food fairs and places like that, actually it’s getting to be almost a bit of a mental exercise in figuring out what goes into what bin; there’s organics and plastics and regular paper, I don’t know but it’s all good. I think I see people making the effort to do it properly. Of course, there’s some sloppiness and the bins get mixed up here and there, but by and large, I’d say it’s much more of a recycling culture. When, I travel at other places, it’s not nearly as much, so hopefully it’s catching on.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and with that, corporations are also taking on sustainability in a new way. Of course, greenhouse gas emissions have been a big part, some corporations are looking much broader at things like recycling and waste. We want to hear about that more today, we’re very happy to have our special guests from Google, who is leading the charge in their commitments to reduce their overall environmental footprint. Welcome, Mike Werner, lead for Circular Economy at Google.
Mike Werner:
Thank you so much for having me here today.
Peter Tertzakian:
Welcome, Mike. It’s really great to have you from Silicon Valley, right?
Mike Werner:
That’s right. Been out here since 2014 and it is a very different place than it was those eight years ago.
Peter Tertzakian:
Give us a little thumbnail of your background on how you got to be lead for the Circular Economy at Google.
Mike Werner:
I traced this awkward, strange arc through sustainability. I’m actually a chemist by training and many years ago, I became a teacher, a chemistry teacher. Both of my parents were officers in the Navy. Once they left the Navy, my father became a professor in the Connecticut State University system, teaching communication and leadership and my mother, a middle school math teacher. I had an option to head down a pathway of environmental policy at a PhD program in Indiana Bloomington, which I deferred because I couldn’t afford the first couple of years of the master’s program. Became a teacher; befriended a famous biologist, Dr. Tom Lovejoy, who sadly passed away in December, who’s the father of the modern biodiversity movement, he coined the term biodiversity. He introduced me to Bill McDonough, author of the book, Cradle to Cradle, Remaking the Way We Make Things, a book that I read in 2002 and was the reason I became a chemist.
Mike Werner:
He was a hero of mine and I ended up working for him for four years, doing everything related to the cradle-to-cradle ecosystem, thinking about how resources are flowing through a biological or a technical cycle and so I’ve got a smattering of experiences. I was brought out to Silicon Valley in 2014 with Apple to lead their green chemistry, restricted substances, and full material disclosure teams. I also, in that time, led biocompatibility and built a biocompatibility team for Apple Watch, came over to Google in 2017, led the consumer hardware’s product, sustainability and environmental compliance effort, before joining our chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt as Google’s first lead for circular economy in 2019.
Jackie Forrest:
Wow. you’ve got lots of background for this conversation, for sure. Well, maybe we can start with, you’re obviously immersed in this and for a long time before it became a common term, things like circular economy. But for a lot of our listeners, this may still be quite new. Can you just explain what is a circular economy and then within your role when you lead the Circular Economy at Google, what does that mean?
Mike Werner:
The circular economy is the opposite of a linear economy. The dominant economic model, today, is focused on taking resources, making them into a product of some kind and wasting them, disposing of them. We often call that linear system: the take, make, waste economic model. The circular economy focuses on keeping those resources in use forever. It’s an economic system that aims to decouple growth from the consumption and disposal of finite resources. The key actions are focused on maximizing the reuse of resources where systems are created to enable products and materials to flow back into the economy with minimal loss. So, your comments at the top, talking about recycling, that is one of the keyways of a circular economy.
Jackie Forrest:
So, stopping things from going in the landfill and finding a way to have them be a useful product to get.
Mike Werner:
That’s correct.
Peter Tertzakian:
Google creates a lot of hardware, the phones to the Nest Thermostats and all sorts of things. So obviously that’s part of it. Give us a sense of all the different things that a corporation like Google would span in trying to get into the circular economy.
Mike Werner:
Google’s a global technology company that has a pretty significant footprint and most people think of it as a search engine, but in fact, we are one of the world’s largest owners, operators, and developers of commercial real estate. We have office and office operations in more than 150 cities and 60 countries. We have got more than 23 data centers that every Google digital product is run on. We have a large food program for all of the Googlers around the world and obviously resources. Our company is dependent on the physical world and physical resources to be able to connect everybody together.
Jackie Forrest:
Let’s talk about some of your ambitions. I think the greenhouse gas emissions are one ambition that maybe people know about, maybe we’ll start there. What is your commitment to reducing your greenhouse gas emissions amongst all those entities that you just talked about, for Scope one, two and maybe even talk about the emissions from your supply chain, which is called Scope three?
Mike Werner:
Google has set a goal to achieve net zero carbon emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. That includes Scopes one, two, and three. We’re focused on a lot of efforts across our company to reduce the majority of our emissions before 2030, versus our 2019 baseline. We plan to invest in nature based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize the remaining emissions. This is scope of our current commitment on Scopes one, two and three emissions.
Jackie Forrest:
That’s quite aggressive. A lot of companies are talking about achieving that, especially on Scope three, like 2050, or well into the future.
Peter Tertzakian:
How much of that would be true physical net zero mitigation versus, say, buying carbon credits on the markets?
Mike Werner:
A significant portion of that effort is focused on energy reductions, powering our company with 24 by 7 carbon free energy and working into the supply chain to source and procure low carbon materials. We obviously want to reduce the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we emit and then use carbon removal technologies to make up the difference in the balance.
Peter Tertzakian:
There are these articles that say every time you click on a browser or Google Maps or whatever, it creates a chain reaction of events across the servers around the world. Then somebody has added these up and says, it’s so many watt hours of electricity and then converts that into emissions. Do you do all those calculations? Give us a sense of what happens every time somebody clicks something in Google Maps?
Mike Werner:
Well, yes. I don’t personally do those calculations, but we’ve got an amazing team that is looking at every electron that is used to run the company and think about how do we convert that to a renewable electron in some way, shape, or form? One of our commitments was to power our company 24 by 7, 365 days a week on carbon free energy by 2030 and that’s for all of our data centers in campuses. That means that by the end of the decade, we’re aiming to deliver every search, every email, every YouTube video, every click without emitting carbon and we’ve got incredible progress along the way. In 2021, we achieve 66% carbon free energy on an hourly basis across our data centers and five of our data centers, including those in Denmark and Finland, are at or near 90% carbon free energy. Hopefully that gives you a sense of the ambition that we have.
Jackie Forrest:
You talked about within your own entity you are making change, but Google’s kind of in a unique position because you also influence a lot of people, whether it’s through the search engine or when people put into the map where they want to go. Talk a little bit about your initiatives around trying to present more environmentally friendly options to consumers.
Mike Werner:
Google’s one of those unique companies that touches billions of people all over the world every day. To empower everyone with technology, we’ve committed to helping one billion people make more sustainable choices by the end of this year, through our core products. Some of those examples that we’ve done so far include eco-friendly routing in Google Maps and that ensures that you’re taking the most fuel-efficient route. For example, Google Maps will default to the route with the lowest carbon footprint when it is approximately the same estimated time of arrival as the fastest route.
Peter Tertzakian:
We’ve actually seen that on my Google Maps now as a feature. It’s really cool. Let’s talk about the hardware side, again, sort of the batteries that are used, the minerals. I get a lot of questions from people saying, oh, well, lithium-ion batteries, they’re not recycling them, et cetera, et cetera. What is the state of recycle of not only battery minerals, but all the other circuit board parts and things?
Mike Werner:
Batteries is a really interesting topic, a focus of the clean energy transition to be able to store energy, provide sustainable mobility, it certainly is used to power our consumer electronic devices. As technology company that designs and builds electronic products, we need access to minerals in batteries like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. The current state of electronics recycling today is usually focused on shredding, segregating, dismantling, segregating, and oftentimes shredding electronic components, which then go down to a series of downstream suppliers that smelt and recover various minerals, and then bring them back into the economy for new technology products.
Jackie Forrest:
So that happens today, like when my cell phone is done being used, all the different components, are they going to get recycled, or does it generally go into the landfill?
Mike Werner:
Generally, does not go in the landfill. Just last week I was touring an e-waste recycler here in California, your mobile phone, it was interesting to see their process. They’ve got a large vice, like a bench vice, they snap the phone in half and then pry out or pull out the lithium-ion battery. That’s important, because it cannot go into the shredder. If it does, it will cause a fire, that fire can completely burn down the building and the operation. From there, the aluminum housing, for example, the circuit board and the remaining non-flammable components will go through a shredder and separate and segregated it into different sizes, different particle sizes. Then depending on the metal composition, for example, the gold composition; there are various suppliers that will take those materials, process them, smelt them and recover the precious metals.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, you’re a chemist. I’d like to get your thoughts on something that’s been, I’m sensing, in the news more often and that is these forever chemicals. The chemicals that are very difficult to decompose in nature and sort of seem somewhat ubiquitous from the clothes we wear to, all sorts of other products. What is the state of the art in terms of forever chemicals and what’s Google’s position or what are you doing about it?
Mike Werner:
These forever chemicals, I believe what you’re referring to, are typically called PFAS, P-F-A-S, or Polyfluoroalkyl substances. These are molecules, for your audience, that are a long chain of fluorinated molecules that are very persistent and stable in the environment, oftentimes bio-accumulate into fat tissue in living systems. Every scientific studies have discovered that these chemicals inhabit every corner of the planet, as they have flown around on dust and water systems and has been distributed even up into the Arctic. What we have noticed is increasing global regulation to remove and eliminate these kinds of substances from devices, from consumer products, because of their long-term health impacts. Without going into some of the further details of the various types of molecules within this broad category, the general trend across industry is to reduce the use of them.
Jackie Forrest:
Let’s talk a little bit about your greenhouse gas emission goals. Can you tell us specifically, when you think about your data centers or office locations; give us some examples of some circular goals that Google has and what you’re doing to make that happen?
Mike Werner:
In our data centers, for example, we’ve got a zero waste to landfill goal. That’s looking at operational waste and achieving measuring to the UL standard, UL2799, which refers to zero waste to landfill certification. We also have a really robust program around remarketing and recycling of components. 32.6 million data center server components have been resold onto the secondary market since 2015. These are things like: memory, resistors, it might be hard drives and tapes and various pieces of equipment that come out of our data center because they no longer have a useful life in our data center, but they are valuable on the secondary market to other customers. We also refurbish a lot of components and meet internal demand for some of these components. About 23%, almost a quarter, of server upgrades actually came from refurbished inventory annually. Those are some examples of what we’re doing in working on in our data centers. In our offices there are three big areas: food, plastic waste, building and construction.
Mike Werner:
We recently announced a goal of sending zero food waste to landfills and cutting food waste in half for each Google employee by 2025. At peak in 2019, Google was serving over 300,000 meals every day, that’s a lot of food that is flowing through our ecosystem. When it comes to plastic waste, we’ve been working to reduce single use plastics and other plastic ways through a series of interventions including procurement, operational changes and design, workplace design. That includes eliminating things like single use plastics wherever possible and making reusable drinking options available across our offices. Then, there’s the whole world of building and construction, which, most people don’t really get a whole lot of data and insight around, but it is actually building and construction waste in the United States is twice the volume of municipal solid waste. Every building that’s built, every home that goes through construction; all of those materials go to a debris landfill for building and construction materials. We’ve been promoting circularity through a number of practices: including procuring, salvage and reuse resources on our construction projects. Designing our facilities to enable zero waste operations and setting a whole bunch of ambitious waste diversion targets to keep material out of landfills. I could share more detail about that, but I’m really proud of what the team has been able to accomplish.
Jackie Forrest:
There is a really great section on your website, I’ll put a link in the show notes to your sustainability efforts. One interesting thing is you showed, I think it’s a new building you have in California that you’ve built that was really talking about reusing materials, but also low energy footprint and things like that that people can learn about.
Mike Werner:
Yes, those are Bay View and Charleston East campuses. They are phenomenal buildings. Last week I spent the day in our Bay View campus, and it is just totally impressive with what has been accomplished in that building in terms of sustainable design. Charleston East uses a lot of mass timber to replace concrete, so a lower carbon design, but both buildings integrate Dragonscale solar and geothermal to get us closer to carbon free energy by 2030, as well as salvaged materials. Things like carpeting, flooring, tiles that are used as back splashes; various different attributes around the building have been salvaged and recycled. It’s a really impressive design.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. Some of these buildings that are being built are now all made out of wood instead of steel and concrete and high-rise buildings and so on, that’s a whole separate subject. But let’s move on to plastics, because plastics and the recycling of plastics is becoming an increasingly hot topic. Of course, the banning of single use plastics upcoming here in Canada. Talk about what Google’s doing in plastics. There’s a report, I know you’ve actually commissioned a number of reports on plastic waste, the most recent, which was titled Closing the Plastics Circularity Gap.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, that was done by AFARA Consulting, which has now changed names because it’s part of UI Canada. But, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, let’s put a link to that. But if you can talk about how plastics are being recycled at Google and what the state of the art is there.
Mike Werner:
Yeah. Plastic is an amazing resource, an amazing material that has incredible properties to be able to ship durable, low cost, affordable goods around the world. And so plastic for us is used in a number of places: consumer hardware devices, our data center equipment, building construction and food. We’re constantly finding ways of supporting the reuse recycling of those resources as well as the reduction of virgin resources and increasing the use of recycled materials.
Jackie Forrest:
So, the paper actually was much broader, it really was not about Google as much as the global context. It talked about how much plastic is used today and how much is recycled. Could you just tell us a little bit about that. I mean, it’s very little.
Mike Werner:
The impetus for that paper, I think it’s interesting to share the story arc. In 2019, we wrote a paper; I wrote a paper with some colleagues here at Google called The Role of Safe Chemistry and Healthy Materials in Unlocking the Circular Economy, this was building on a lot of work, existing work over the last 15 years or so of selecting inherently lower hazard ingredients for materials, to ensure a safe and healthy workplace. You might think about indoor air quality issues, we talked about PFAS as an example of molecules, these forever molecules. And so, we’ve invested a lot in how do you select safer molecules and materials? One of the insights here was that all of these materials that we had spent money on to optimize and pay premiums for were going into the traditional mechanical recycling system, getting co-mingled with all kinds of materials that were never designed for human and environmental health.
Mike Werner:
All of that work was for naught, what we said was we actually needed innovation in recycling. We needed better ways of recycling materials to realize a true, safe and circular economy, so that we were not detoxifying the planet and just cramming garbage into another product and putting that back out into the world. We sponsored the creation of a report published by Closed Loop Partners called Accelerating Circular Supply Chains for Plastics. That’s where we laser focused in on so-called chemical recycling technologies. It was the first landscape assessment on chemical recycling technologies. The first of its kind to understand what are these technologies; how do you classify them, who are they around the world, what are some of the technology barriers? What we recognized was that even if we capitalized the 80 some on technologies that we had identified in that report, we would not achieve a circular economy for plastics.
Mike Werner:
All of that work, all the innovation, the innovation exists out there, but we didn’t know what were some of the other systemic issues that also simultaneously needed to be addressed to close the plastic circularity gap? To close this gap between what’s actually recycled and what’s actually produced, that’s the report that we published with AFARA. Jackie, as you noticed, now part of UI, and that was really about defining the strategic and economic low risk and no risk interventions to creating the circular supply chains for plastics, using technologies that could support the safe and circular economy, by breaking up apart molecular bonds of flame retardants and other things, so that they could come back into the economy as new materials.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. Well, it’s been, I think 55 years since 1967 with the movie The Graduate, where the fellow says that there’s a great future in plastics and that was sort of the kickoff point, I would say, of the plastics real entry into the market in a major, major way. The predecessor to that was Bakelite, I think, anyway, so here we are 55 years later, and I think we’re on the verge of a plastics revolution of recycling. But, what fraction of the world’s plastic is recycled versus … what are we calling it, virgin plastic or new plastic?
Mike Werner:
Only about seven to 9% of plastic is recycled and that depends by country and region. But, the data that we have compiled and published in this report, I believe indicates about 7% of global plastic that has been produced globally is recycled.
Peter Tertzakian:
And are there targets out there in terms of what we’re trying to achieve by a certain time, like net zero plastic type thing?
Mike Werner:
Different countries have different targets. The European Union is setting a target to increase recycled content in products and to slow the amount of material going to landfill. In the United States. The US EPA had announced the National Recycling Strategy recently, that’s focused on a 50 by 30 target, so 50% recycling across all materials coming through the municipal stream by 2030. There are different pieces of the strategy that EPA is working to implement to help achieve that. It’s going to take global investment and a global effort to really be able to increase meaningfully 7% anywhere north of 50%.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, one of the things I learned in the paper was that the recycling; one of the barriers is that recycled plastic has less utility. It’s not as strong, there’s limited applications for it unless you do something different. But today, the stuff that is economic is not as useful as the virgin plastic. So, you would outline different technologies that are coming out that will enable, I think you were kind of getting to that, we can get the recycled plastic that it’s the same quality of product, but the economics are a real barrier too. Is it going to take policies so that people are forced to use the more expensive plastic? Or is it consumers that are going to demand products with recycled plastic even if they cost more? How are we going to get over that economic barrier?
Mike Werner:
I think it’s a really good question, I actually think that we have to step back and understand why we are in the state that we’re in. Why is it that we use more virgin plastic than recycled? Why is it that things aren’t recycled more often? The existing economic model is linear, it is far easier to dispose of everything in our lives through our waste management companies more often than to recycle. Recycling, is particularly for consumers, is an in elastic market. That is that the pricing signals that occur out there for, let’s say recycled PET, don’t trickle down into the consumer, don’t engage the consumer. If the price of recycled PET goes up 30%, that does not create a 30% increase in the available rPET supply, because consumers are in this middle. Additionally, the marginal cost for producing waste is zero.
Mike Werner:
For every amount of incremental waste that I generate, I’m not really paying a whole lot in many regions around the world that may be funded by taxpayer dollars, so there’s not necessarily an incentive to reduce your amount of waste and support recycled value chains. Then virgin plastics value chains are reliable, cheap, low CapEx, low technology risk, running on fully depreciated assets and the material’s super high quality and high performing. There are a lot of headwinds to circular supply chains, that have to systematically get addressed. I think that’s really important for us as a place to start.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, that kind of makes me think that we need policy to force this requirement. Would you agree with that? Canada has the ban on plastics, is that the way to go?
Mike Werner:
I think that policy is absolutely essential. I think I prefer incentives over bans to drive change, but I think we’re seeing that some bans may be needed in certain sectors to avoid destruction. I think when we look at the Montreal protocol and how it drove the effective change of stopping the destruction of the ozone layer with Chlorofluorocarbon emissions, I’m sure, there will be similar sensible interventions needed to avoid the continued rampant and unmitigated destruction caused by plastic pollution. I also believe that it’s important for governments to set universal rules, support new technologies and provide incentives for where we need to go. All things need to be on the table in terms of tackling plastic pollution. You’re right, Jackie, policy and government action is essential.
Peter Tertzakian:
Nothing in the world comes for free ecologically; I think you would agree, to get off plastics this puts increased pressure on say, the forestry industry to come up with sort of, I’ll call it fiber-based substitutes for a lot of things, packaging or whatever. How is all that calculated and netted out? Because as I said, nothing comes for free, it’s like chopping trees down to make more cardboard of which it just seems like there’s just a monumental amount with now the door-to-door shipping,
Mike Werner:
This reminds me of a question that I get asked a lot, which is, Mike, what’s the most sustainable product? And the answer always is, it depends. It depends on what you value. Do you value low-carbon design; safe molecules; recyclable; high recycled content; how it was produced, what’s the water footprint? You can’t optimize across all of these things. There’s a lot of challenge with new materials and new technologies. I don’t think that shifting everything from a plastic over to a forestry or paper-based product is the solution. Paper value chains have their own issues, arguably we need to be re-foresting the planet to support our low-carbon future. I think really at the crux of this is a recognition that we have failed utterly as a species of managing resources in the world. Carbon is a great example where it has unmitigated pollution into the atmosphere as it’s causing a global existential threat to people, planet and the economy.
Mike Werner:
The same is true for the other physical resources, solid resources in our lives that we need to be doing more to managing and bringing back into the economy, as opposed to thinking that we can ad infinitum, bury them in holes in the ground and losing them to human utility forever. I think that there’s a lot that has to happen to achieve the kinds of systems change, as opposed to getting mired into the of the do I swap this material with that material, and think that that’s going to solve the global waste issue that we have today?
Peter Tertzakian:
Optimization of resources is I think, paramount, but more importantly, trying to figure out how to use less. I still cringe at the amount of packaging for buying something as simple as, I don’t know, a stapler or something. It just comes packaged to death. It’s less than it used to be,but figuring out how to use less is just seems to be common sensical.
Mike Werner:
I agree. De-materialization is a really, really important strategy. Both for the circular economy and strain on ecosystems, but also for a low carbon transition and a net zero transition. We’ve got to figure out how to use less stuff, decouple our growth from the consumption and disposal of resources, no matter what type of product it is.
Peter Tertzakia
Yeah.
Jackie Forrest:
Peter, you said it’s better than it used to be. I think it’s worse because people are buying more online and every time, I get something delivered online, it comes in a box and then another box, and then there’s like plastic around it. I feel like there’s more materials now when you buy things than less, but hey, there’s so much to talk about, Mike, we’re kind of running out of time here. I want to leave you with one final question. What would you want people to know about the circular economy today and your expectations of how this may play out?
Mike Werner:
If there’s one thing that I would love for your audience to walk away with, it’s a recognition in my belief that it’s critical for everyone to understand that in order for life to exist on this planet there are three magic ingredients. We have a free form of energy. We need an open metabolism of molecules and materials that operate for the benefit of all organisms on the earth, replication and growth. We have to focus on achieving both a low carbon economy, powered economy, that energy piece and a circular economy together addressing that open metabolism. It is not an either or. Thankfully, we have a near infinite free form of energy. The sun, it’s 93 million miles away, it’s pollution free, it’s wireless and we have to do everything possible to harness the power of the sun to transform our economy into a low carbon economy.
Mike Werner:
But that’s not all. We need a circular economy that supports this second principle of life. We have to ensure that molecules and materials are flowing back into nature as healthy biological materials and technical materials and that we all have a role to play to achieve the kind of future that we want. We’re going to be doing our part every day with the use of our tools and technology to support people on the transition to a circular economy. I would encourage them to check out sustainability.google for more information and I hope they’ll also listen to your podcast and share it with everyone.
Peter Tertzakian:
Thanks Mike, that Mike Werner, lead for Circular Economy at Google. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the exciting leadership position that Google’s taking in the circular economy. I certainly learned a lot. Thanks again.
Mike Werner:
Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it.
Jackie Forrest:
Thanks, Mike. Thanks to our listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
Speaker 2:
For more ideas and insights, visit arcenergyinstitute.com.