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0:03
So welcome to the first in a new series called the circular table talks. They're brought to you by the we don't have time organization, the world's largest social network for climate action, and a new partner to we didn't have time Ragn-Sells, a pioneering waste management company.
1:21
Before we start the show, just a little bit of housekeeping, mainly for our viewers, why don't you try and download the We Don't Have Time app. This will give you more interactivity during the show, allow you all to engage with the wider we don't have time network, and generally have a more exciting experience. So go to WeDontHaveTime.org, and maybe watch the short video just to see how you do it. Hi, I'm Ingmar Rentzhog. I'm the founder of we don't have time, we are a
1:51
social network platform and a revenue platform for the climate. And what you can do on our platform is you can give reviews to leaders, corporate leaders, political leaders, about what they do good or bad for the climate. So if you see something that you don't like, you could give him a climate warning and we will send this climate warning to the leader, have them to answer it, have them to change and put pressure on that issue. But you can also send climate love, if you see
2:27
something that someone that are doing something great for the climate, and to encourage that and to share that to the world so more people will look up to that action and do the same. And I think love is actually something that could work very, very well. In order to solve the climate crisis, we can't just focus on the problem. We must also focus on the good action, what's actually out there that are working for solutions and how this works I can just show you a little bit examples here.
3:04
Here's a climate love from a company called Houdini, that actually have given a climate love to an NGO called ecocide law of alliance, because they want business leaders to be involved to make ecocide laws so that it will be criminal to
3:22
destroy nature. And this is something driven by a company on our platform. So this is the upside done the company are giving love to the nonprofit. But we have also a lot of private individuals on our platform. This is a climate love, from our user Mohamad to an organization called Rubicon because what Rubicon is a company that actually has a solution to the waste problem using artificial intelligence. And that is something that needs to be implemented on scale in
3:57
many, many cities. So if you look into the We Don't Have Time platform, you could give the climate love wherever you see someone doing something great for the climate, and you will be inspired of so many other people around the world acting and working for shapes.
4:20
Today, we're gonna talk about the circular economy. What is the circular economy? What can it do for society in terms of dealing with these really big challenges we're facing from climate change the loss of species to things like increasing shortages of natural resources and pollution of wastewater? We're going to deal with probably one of the more difficult nuts in this particular field, which is the issue of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Can a
4:53
circular economy transform this from what you might call a villain into perhaps a mini hero? Could we see
5:43
I really look forward to the first in this series of six roundtable talks where we were focusing on the price of carbon and how important it is to create circular flows. Carbon Dioxide challenge for us, well we talked about the importance of of becoming climate positive, it means that we have decided that we will introduce solutions that will make sure that we can recirculate as much elements as possible at the same time as we can reduce our own emissions and even use carbon dioxide as an
7:21
input to save the carbon dioxide will become a possibility for us. And I hope that after the first show, you will also be able to see that the carbon dioxide problem is a possibility, , det var mif you understand the business dynamics that are now evolving around the world. Ragn-Sells we have, of course a very ambitious target for 2030 to become climate positive, we have also 10 sub goals, I would like to highlight three of them. The first one that we in 2030 had the ambition
7:53
to become fully collaborative. And that is a key point when we're going to create circular flows, we need to be able to collaborate with society and collaborate with business partners. Secondly, of course, the reduction of carbon emissions, we need to do our best with our, you know, our production as well as in with our partners. But Thirdly, the most important how can we create circular partnerships? So this in a nutshell, are are the most important parts that we have
8:23
around the next 10 years. And we' invite you tha see this, would you like to partner up with us. I'm the co host today's session, and I will also be online. So if you want to chat with me, ask questions, do it directly, and I will be online supporting you. So with that I hand over to you, Nick.
8:47
Thanks very much indeed, Pär. So our first keynote speaker is Laxmi Adriana Haigh. She's an expert at the Amsterdam based circular economy, an organization I didn't actually know about before, but I since delved into them, and they're doing some really exciting work. And Laxmi is also a lead contributor to their very authoritative and really quite fascinating circularity gap report. 2021. So Laxmi, over to you, you have the floor.
9:18
Thank you, Nick, indeed, I'm Laxmi Haigh, and I'm going to talk to you about the circular economy. And I'm going to start with quite a high level description, setting the scene of how circular world is now. And also some key highlights and circularity gap report 2021 and 2020, actually. So to set the scene, let's go back to 1900. In 1900, the global population, they used 7 billion, 7 billion tons of resources to fuel venues to weave their clothes, build their houses, fuel their travel,
9:49
get from A to B, fill their bellies with food, everything 7 billion tons. Now, really quite, quite a fast, fast forward back to 2020. In 2020, we use 100 billion tons of resources to fuel our needs. Now, of course, population has grown, but really overconsumption is a problem. And also our way the consumption or consumption patterns have changed. In 1900, maybe in growing food, we would eat more locally. But now we grow food all over the world. We eat food from all over the world, maybe
10:22
bananas from Mexico, maybe we buy local bread, but the milk powder in it is from spain. Everything is very globalized, and value chains are very crossed over. So aside from overconsumption and differing and inefficient consumption patterns, we report on one quite worrying trend in our circularity gap report. And in our 2020 report, we found that of the 100 billion tonnes consumed in 2020, over 90% was wasted. So we see that I mean, incinerated landfills in the
10:52
oceans dispersed into the atmosphere as emissions wasted, and that they said the economy is what we call the circularity gap. So on the flip side, what we also found was that 8.6% of the 100 billion tons, went back into our economy with reuse, the value was retained, and it continued to add value to how we live. And that is how so to the world is now. So you can see that is quite a small number. So take from the earth, make some resources make into products that we use to fulfill our
11:23
lifestyles, and then waste. So that is what we call the linear economy. And the linear economy is dangerous. And quite a few levels, were already battling some of the negative impacts of how we've been living, from warming temperatures, to resource scarcity across countries and also very unequal access to resources across the world. So in some countries, we have immense food insecurity, others we have of consumption, obesity, quite clearly that this is a system that we could do
11:52
with updating. So at circular economy where I work, that's exactly what we're doing. We're trying to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. And we do that by working with businesses, cities and nations. So multiple levels really trying to engage everyone trying to get the world more circular. So what exactly is a circular economy? Well, in a fully fledged and functioning search economy, we wouldn't need 100 billion tons of materials to satisfy our needs and once. And
12:21
that's because a circular economy at its core does more with less, so less input, better output. So putting it simply asserts economy designs that waste and pollution, it keeps materials and products in use for longer, and it regenerates natural systems. And if it's all managed well, it can also really boost our capabilities to ensure a more equal distribution of resources around the world, therefore, ideally, getting rid of some of our embedded inequalities.
12:52
But, yeah, so but this sounds like maybe quite a grand, quite a grand vision. So in practice, what does it actually means to be circular? Well, I'm going to give some examples that are quite everyday to us. So number one, shelter, housing, in a linear economy, is quite common to extract, build, demolish, extract, build demolish in the circular economy, would really try to prioritize lengthening the lifetime of our building. So first of all, what stock do we already have, let's make the
13:22
most of it. That could include repair, renovation, refurbishment, but when it comes to building something new, can we use construction, waste and other projects, or if we have to use something new, let's design in such a way that it's really optimized for disassembly effort for recycling, another everyday item, our phone, for example, or a tablet, we've all kind of got used to this idea that after two or three years, maybe it's time to get a new one because they stopped working for a while. But
13:49
that is made, that's a concept created by the market, of course, planned obsolescence. In a circular economy, this would not at all be the way that things would go. If anything, these will be the electronics will be built to be extremely durable. And if they have to be repaired, they've been designed in a way that it's very easy for us to do. So it's really, really important. And another aspect to kind of circular economy practice would be food systems. So now often how we grow our
14:16
crops, how we're getting our food for the world, is poisoning our soils, in many cases and how we feed our livestock, for example, is the first thing parts of the Amazon. And a lot of the more regenerative agriculture practices are really rooted in the circular economy. So if you were to imagine a circular world, like what if every country kind of implements the strategies I'm talking about, and I'm only talking about a very small example of the rich, strategies the
14:40
circular economy has to offer. Well, our circularity gap report 2021 launched in January this year actually did did do this. So we took 21 core circle economy strategies with a bunch of interventions also under them, and we apply it to our current world, our economy as it is today. So that's the 8.6% circular economy. We've found in doing this circularity actually increased from 8.6% to 17%. Now, that might not sound like a massive increase, but the impact of that increase is quite
15:10
astonishing. So an 8.4% increase in circularity would result in resource extraction use falling by 28%. And greenhouse gas emissions falling by 39%. And with that, with that greenhouse gas emission reduction, we will be able to keep rising temperatures to well below two degrees. So that's it, initial goal of the Paris Agreement, of course. And that's what And that brings me to the topic of our conversation today, which is carbon. And it's definitely an idea that I'm gaining in
15:41
prominence in the mainstream thinking is the link between circular economy and climate mitigation and keeping global temperatures under safe level 1.5 ideally, and our report found that 70% of greenhouse gas emissions are actually tied up in the resource cycle. So the common approach to keeping temperatures low, which focus on energy efficiency, and renewable energy is actually not broad enough and is missing out massive trick, which is how we use our resources, we have to be
16:09
more efficient, then we have to work number one, reduce the amount we use. And that's why the circular economy is, is so rich, and so full of potential. So ultimately, to round off, because I think I'm about on my time, if the world would would would become just 17% circular, we could safeguard our very finite resources, we can reach the goal of the Paris Agreement andnd we can also offer many other co benefits to the world from ideally, less inequalities, greater biodiversity, cleaner
16:40
air, there's so many I could mention, but I can't mention all today. Thank you.
16:54
That when we have our debate, we can we can dive a bit deeper. Let me turn to our next keynote speaker, which is Per Klevnäs of the material economics organization, which specializes in sustainability and resource strategies. Per is a Swedish economist, and an international expert on how one might say resurrecting and bringing new life to waste materials can be a key to a climate secure, sustainable global economy. He's also a contributor to something called the new climate economy,
17:26
which found in 2018 that if we were more smart about climate change, and managing resources, that we could perhaps see a $26 trillion benefit to the global economy by 2030. So Per you have the floor.
17:44
Thank you very much, Nick, and very much enjoyed being here today. So I'm Per I'm from material economics, we're consultancy we work., part of our work is that we work with companies who are looking to change, they're looking to become more circular, they're looking to cut the greenhouse gas emissions. And they're finding strategies for doing that. And the other part of what we do is when we think we have something to say, we write the occasional report based on the
18:06
research that we do, and the circular economy, and its connection to greenhouse gases has been one big part of that. Now, I'll talk a little bit now principally about some findings that we had in a report called completing the picture. And it's very similar in fact, in its messages, even if it attacks it from a slightly different angle, do what Laxmi just talked about, from the circularity gap report, it finds that if we are wanting to keep within our carbon budgets, and we want to reduce
18:32
emissions to the international agreement levels, we have to make the economy more circular. So the reason for this to be very concrete is that energy in energy systems and what we normally talk about energy efficiency, and renewable energy is only a part of our greenhouse gas emissions. So as much as 45%, of greenhouse gas emissions globally, are either bound up with how we produce and use materials, the plastics, the aluminium, the steel, the cement, and concrete and so on.
18:58
Or it's tied up with our food system and the land use and boathouse. So how we make things and how we use things and how we reuse or not these things. And our food is as much as 45% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And how then can a circular economy help, you may ask. And we typically divided this into three or four categories. The first, which is perhaps the most well known is that, if you recycle material, the carbon footprint is much, much lower. So it is only 5% of the energy
19:26
to remelt aluminium versus making new. It's a similar reduction to steel and you can achieve similar things with plastics. So by taking materials that were already produced and giving them new life, we can reduce greenhouse gases a lot. The second thing which is less obvious to many is that wherever you look in the economy, you look in the built environment, you looked in cars, you look in appliances, you look in all the places we use materials, you will find that the materials
19:50
efficiency, the amount of materials that we use, and put to productive use per for a given product is often much higher than it needs to be. Now if we're talking about energy efficiency, this will be uncontroversial everyone agrees that we could make do with less energy and still get the same amount of lighting, the same amount of transportation, same amount of thermal comfort or what have you. But the materials is much less appreciated that there are these big, big
20:12
opportunities staring us in the face. So if you're sitting in a building today listening to this, with a steel, steel structure, chances are that there's actually something like 50% more steel than is needed structure to keep it up. for good reason, there are costs associated with doing it differently. But nonetheless, it points to these big opportunities that are all around us in our everyday items and using less materials. So that's materials efficiency, less materials for product.
20:36
The third category is perhaps less obvious, but it is about using things more intensively and using them for longer. So when we demolish a building something like 70% of the emissions in a building sit in the structural elements, the steel and the concrete, and so on, they really make up the sort of invisible structural parts of the building. But when we demolish, it's not because that's unsound. It's because we need a new life for that building. So if we can repurpose
20:57
if we can renovate, and extend the lifetime, we can reduce the footprint enormously. And same thing goes for the sharing economy, whether that's vehicles, whether the other things, there's immense opportunities in simply having less materials, but getting the same societal good out of it. And then the final one, you can use materials, and you can use natural systems to store carbon. The most obvious one perhaps, is plastics, which everyone knows about from the leakage to the
21:19
ocean, and so on, let's all appreciate that plastics are literally built out of carbon. We put as much carbon into plastics every year, as we put into airplanes in a normal non pandemic years to fly them all around the world. And what this means is that that cycle of carbon in society becomes very, very important. And there are other examples you can store carbon in wood in construction in buildings, or you can mineralize it and put it to good use as drying cells is proposed
21:45
to do. But this agenda of carbon sequestration in materials, whether it's petrochemicals or buildings of wood, and otherwise, is it's a fourth level to how this circular economy a different way of using and reusing materials can contribute to the climate agenda. So we looked at this. And we also we looked at across all our major value chains, all our major materials, the plastic, cement, aluminum and steel, and we looked across buildings, we looked across
22:10
automotive, we looked across appliances, and packaging, and then natural systems of food, and found that the reductions in greenhouse gases that we could achieve are between 40 and 50% by 2050, now 40-50% reductions on the demand side, as opposed to on the supply side, we will need clean ways to make steel, we will need clean mix to make chemicals, and so on. But we all have so much to gain by also looking at the way that we use them and reuse them in a circular economy. I want to make
22:37
one last comment and that is this is often highly cost efficient. It's very difficult to change the whole global production operations for our industries or for or for that results in the big emissions. And we're trying to address here. So by looking simultaneously at the way we use it, we can actually do this often at lower cost. Thank you
23:01
in the in the debate coming up. Now let me turn to our next keynote speaker, which is Chris Bolesta, he's a Polish economist. And he's currently the policy lead in the European Commission's Directorate General for energy on this area of carbon capture, use and storage. Chris, you have the floor, give us a give us a perspective into this, what's going on in Europe.
23:27
Thank you, Nick. And thanks for for giving me the opportunity to explain why CCUS technologies are important for the European Commission. And what we actually do to support them. As you are aware, the European Union objective to become Climate Neutral by 2050. And this is well in line with the Paris Agreement objectives and it's just doing our share to contribute to the fight to the global fight with with climate change. And well there are emissions that that are very,
24:08
very difficult to to remove from the system. And this is this is why the CCUS technologies are so important. You have so called hard to evade sectors. This is cement. This is steel and chemical production. This is where you can apply CCUS to remove carbon and do it in a cost efficient way. Our modeling in the European Commission consistently shows that only with the use of CCUS this will be done on time and on the budget if you let me call it that.
24:47
Well,
24:49
in some of our scenarios, we see that up to 600 million tonnes of co2 is stored well captured by 2050 annually and 50% more or less is, is stored permanently on the ground but 50% gets stored in products and this is what I already mentioned. And what is more interesting is that the if you if you capture co2 from biogenic sources, like for example, sustainable biomass and put it either in product, so permanently put it on the ground, you actually create negative emissions. And this is
25:35
this is really interesting and it will speed up our our decarbonisation efforts. What we do in the commission to support development of CCUS technologies, there is three types of actions we are actually doing. One is enabling legislation enabling regulations two is designing incentives, and three, providing direct support to projects. And in terms of regulation, the key key element key piece is already in place. It's called the CCUS directive. It provides you a framework for
26:14
transport and storage of co2, it's a foundation of a market of a CCUS value chain. Another piece that I think will be equally important is the certification of carbon removals. This is what I already mentioned. It, it concerns the negative emissions, it will give the business something to rely on as an incentive to invest in in carbon removals. And talking about incentives. Here is also a key element is in place. It's called the emission trading system. It provides a carbon
26:52
price and carbon price we know is the best tool and push as well for for business to actually invest in CCUS technologies. We provide also direct support. direct support is provided by through through many mechanisms already in place. We support research and development through our horizon Europe funds. If there are more mature projects, they could they could apply to Innovation Fund. If you building A CO2 transport infrastructure, then you can use you can use already different
27:32
mechanisms, trans-european energy networks. But all this is dwarfed by the huge massive recovery package we just put in in place. It's a EU budget booster consisting of 750 billion euro that will be spent on mature projects in the coming years around the EU. And it's it's very important that 37% of that amount will have to be spent on climate related projects. So that also includes CCUS projects. And we already see that around Europe, many countries who were previously
28:15
skeptical on CCUS are now putting together projects and proposing them and wanting to spend money on these projects countries like Croatia, Greece, Sweden and Belgium. And I think that this is a great momentum for CCUS, the combination of money, new targets, and enabling regulation. So I think that this this well, this gives me hope that we will meet our climate neutrality targets because CCUS technology is essential in in doing that on time and on budget.
28:55
Thanks, Chris. That's, that's really fascinating to to hear about this. And to know that actually, there is some movement here and maybe something good that's come out of this frightful experience with COVID-19. So we're going to turn to a key issue here in terms of whether this this is going to fly forever, or for over a long time anyway. And that is the issue of a carbon price and carbon markets. very delighted to have Darragh Conway with us who's an Irish lawyer and the
29:28
climate policy expert with with over 10 years experience specializing currently in carbon pricing policy with the Amsterdam based climate focus organization. Darragh, I know you've been working closely with the World Bank on their, their 2021 edition of the annual stage and trends of carbon pricing. And I wonder if you could give us a glimpse into that and perhaps maybe touch on what cop 26 the UN Climate Conference needs to do in November with this with this beast Thank you.
30:02
Thanks, Nick, and of course, very happy to do so. So I'd like to begin by just recalling the scale of the challenge we face in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement to get into that zero by the middle of the century, which is what the scientists tell us is needed in order to keep global temperatures to well below two degrees, ideally, to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And it's really a complete restructuring of our economies, we need to change not just the way we produce
30:30
electricity and the way we get from A to B, but how we build our cities, how we produce our goods, and of course, how we manage our natural resources. So this requires radical shift in investment in planning. And even in the very way we think carbon pricing, which is essentially making polluters pay for the greenhouse gases that they release into the atmosphere. It's a simple concept. And it can help galvanize this shift, and it can do so in a number of different ways.
31:00
Now, in the short term, what carbon pricing can do is it can incentivize a relatively simple operational shift. And an example here is take a power plant that currently runs on coal, and switching it to run on natural gas. This is something that can be done, it's relatively straightforward, the technology is there. Of course, it's not incredibly cheap, but with a relatively low to medium carbon price. Even in the short term, you can incentivize the operator power plant to make
31:28
that shift from coal to gas. And interesting to take the example of the UK where there's been a carbon price floor for quite some years, and it hasn't been particularly high, it's been usually around 18 pounds, 18 British pounds. And that's already credited with essentially pushing coal out of the electricity grid today, 2021. There's next to no coal in the UK electricity grid. And that's largely due to other policies to carbon pricing has played a key role there. Now.
31:58
This is great, all good so far, right. But these kind of short term shifts, they touch the relatively low hanging fruit, and they'll only get us so far. To get to net zero, we need to completely redirect investment flows away from high carbon technologies, and towards low carbon technologies. We also need to catalyze innovation on a scale that has never before been seen. A carbon pricing can also play a role here, but there's a higher bar for that to work. So investments in energy,
32:31
industrial waste management infrastructure, they require massive capital. And they have time funds, these investments have time spans of decades. So investors need to know that carbon prices will be high enough over the course of the coming decades, in order to justify making these enormous investments to take CCUS, which we just heard about carbon capture, utilization and storage. Now, the cost of capturing and storing a tonne of carbon can vary from a low point
33:04
of about 45 US dollars per tonne, in the case of retrofitting coal plants, to up to 400 US dollars per tonne for direct air capture. Now you'll see different figures out there but but I think that's about the range, up to 400 US dollars a tonne. There are only a handful of countries are currently pricing carbon at anywhere near these levels, the highest carbon price in the world is around 130, 140 US dollars a tonne in Sweden, but most carbon prices are much much lower than around
33:34
the range of $5 to $10 per tonne. In the state and trends report this year, we calculated only 3.76% of global emissions are covered by a carbon price that's over $40 a tonne. But only 3.76% of emissions are covered by carbon price. That even comes close to what is needed to incentivize the very, very lower range of of CCUS technology. That's not even taken into account that governments are still subsidizing fossil fuels around the world to the tune of about
34:08
$475 billion per year. But there's another thing that's missing. And that's that long term clarity of how carbon prices will develop. So remember those these investments have scales of decades, and the investors need that long term certainty. So give you an example. Again, taking CCUS the recent Alberta carbon trunkline project in Canada that had a total cost of $1.2 billion. That'll give you a sense of how much investment is needed for these big innovative projects.
34:40
Now only a handful of countries have said long term carbon pricing pathways and those countries that have done so they're generally only doing it up until 2030. So not even really long term. We're talking more medium term. Now. is carbon pricing effective? Well, a recent meta study they looked at 19 different studies that have been done over the course of the last 10 years, and what they found is that, yes, carbon pricing has been effective us catalyzing some of these short
35:08
term production shifts, like going from coal to gas. But it has very, very limited impact on these low uninspiring low and zero carbon investment in catalyzing innovation. So these real transformational changes that we need to get to a zero carbon society. And the reason that they've been relatively ineffective in this is that mostly they've had quite low prices, they've also had a lot of exemptions. And in the case of emission trading schemes, we've also seen heavy over
35:36
allocation of emissions allowances. Now there are some encouraging signs. So I've just heard from the European Union. And after decades of stagnation in the carbon market, the prices really are soaring there. And they're coming up to a level where they're certainly incentivizing power plant operators to switch from coal to gas, and then may start incentivizing more innovation soon, if investors can really get that certainty that the carbon prices will stay high.
36:01
And I think we're getting there because the EU is really linking it to the European Green Deal, linking it to the 2050 targets. So I think we're finally getting somewhere here in Europe over in New Zealand, they're also setting their emissions cap for the coming years to align with their 2050 netzero goal. So they're aligning the short term policy with the long term planning. And that's really, really important for investors, we're also seeing greater prices are going up in countries like
36:25
Germany and Canada and Ireland, we're also seeing greater and greater ambition, leading to governments adopting things called carbon border adjustments, which is something that governments adopt to try and address a problem that's called leakage or this, this sense that if we adopt a carbon price here, maybe other countries that don't adopt a carbon price are going to get all our business. And so countries like the EU and Canada, are looking into
36:50
basically putting a tariff at the border. So if you're coming from a country that doesn't have a carbon price in place, or a similar policy, you'll have to pay a tariff that is linked to the carbon that is embedded in those goods. And that's helping to drive other countries to consider, okay, well, maybe we need to adopt more carbon prices now. So we don't have to pay the EU carbon border adjustment. So there's quite a few promising signs at the same. And these recent developments do give us
37:17
reason for hope. But we're still quite a ways from where we need to be that we really want to catalyze the innovation, and the investment at the scale that we need. We need a lot more countries committing to ambitious carbon pricing trajectories for the coming decades. And we need to see them doing it soon.
37:34
Good, that was a very fascinating insight. And I think hope the viewers have followed the circular economy story through this, this narrative that we have here to the essence now of this issue of a carbon price, carbon capture and storage and the and how we might use CO2 in a more interesting way than just letting it go into the atmosphere. And now we will turn to our last keynote speaker who's Anders Kihl, who's head of research and development at Ragn-Sells. Now Ragn-Sells is
38:05
involved in a very fascinating project, which is very emblematic of what the circular economy could look like, in the country of Estonia, where they're set to transform 600 million tonnes of basically ash mountains, the result of the burning of oil shale in that country for heating and power. And they are going to try and harvest some really interesting products, further industrial processes, while at the same time using captured CO2 to power these processes, and avoiding
38:39
emissions elsewhere. By not having to use natural resources and incinerate those to create their products that they're trying to trying to, to, to capture out of the the the the the ash. So Anders, give us a glimpse into this project. It can be a bit complicated on the surface, but actually it's really quite straightforward and fascinating. So over to you, Anders.
39:05
Thank you. Short introduction, my name is Anders Kihl work as head of strategy and R&D within Ragn-Sells. We are as Pär Larshans said waste management company operating in the linear economy. In 2015, there was a agreement on global Sustainable Development Goals and when you analyze theese, you realize that what the world needs going forward is not more waste management. It's more or better resource management. And our role as a company is shifting towards more detoxifying and
39:47
more producing resources. So we are on a journey as a company in a transition. The world is also in a transition phase, leaving the fossil era, we need to build new infrastructure we need to build new energy systems, etc, all of that will require massive resources. We had Laxmi telling us about the 100 billion tonnes
40:22
currently taken out from from the crust and we need to do that in order to enable the transition. But when you look at it, at any resource, you could look at, whether it be copper or sand for glass manufacturing, biomass, whatever you look at, you see that all grades are falling, ores are becoming more thin, more contaminated and more far away. First, it requires more energy per unit to extract things. And that happens at the same time that we really need more resources to make the
41:07
transition. So, the challenges for for mankind is enormous going forward are the challenges are the planetary boundaries where we have sort of big problems in our flows of nitrogen and phosphorus and in biodiversity, and as previously mentioned, here, there is a connection between the carbon and the climate issue and the resources and the production a lot of the and this connection is very strong in a report from the UN Global resource outlook 2019. And he concluded that
41:51
roughly half of the climate issue is related to extraction and transformation of virgin resources. And that also accounts for about 90% of the water challenge and 90% of the challenges related to buy diversity, this means that circular economy meaning producing goods and service in another way that we do today is a vital going forward. So, we as a company, we really realized we we have to spend business development efforts to to respond to this. So we set up
42:33
three criterias in order to rule for ourselves Okay, what is a good solution then. And the first criteria here is the solution should for real, reduce the use of virgin resources, because if you do that, you will automatically impact the others. A lot of different issues. And secondly, the solutions should decontaminate whatever things brought back to society. We have and there are major reasons for that. One of them is that currently at least in Sweden, we are having a lot of contaminated
43:21
land that needs to be remediated. And a lot of that is the result of previous generations recycling operation using waste for backfilling using inappropriate waste for backfilling, thereby causing a problem solving problem one generation passing it on to the next generation. And that is our third principle, not pushing that into the future. And our view is that some materials, it might actually be wise to store them
44:03
rather than to process them right away. Partly unless you were talking about the, the the opportunities of store carbon in plastics for instance store and you could store materials and use them as a sink. Based on this principle, we have developed a number of projects. One big one is opening next year in Stockholm as processing of fly ash from waste to energy, where we produce thoughts otherwise produced by virgin resources using waste as an input. And then we have another
44:45
one and that's the Estonian project where there are actually large mountains of ash the result of 50 years old, the energy system in Estonia is based on burning oil shale to get electricity and heat. And luckily enough, they have stored these ash and launch hills. And we have developed a process where we can use that ash, add carbon dioxide and produce a mineral called PCC. And this mineral PCC is produced and used today. But you use a virgin limestone as a starting point.
45:33
So this is a good example how you could solve a lot of issues really addressing the core problem, the root problem, which is extraction, transformation of virgin resources. So we will see a short movie, soon explaining the project more in detail. But the point is that by having another mindset, you could actually develop new processes, new things that is in line with what the world would need going forward. So Anders, just briefly on that just coming back, you're, you're
46:20
getting cO2, you're captured somewhere else, as part of the process. And then you're also reducing cO2, because the processes you use don't involve burning limestone, incineration which releases CO2. So there's two ways in which the CO2 is reduced yell. Exactly. So this limestone was burned long ago. So and it hasn't possibility to absorb carbon dioxide. And we really need to take away CO2 from the atmosphere. This is a challenge. I don't know how many of you realize the the scale, but but
47:10
our global plan is go from where we are now to zero emissions by mid century, and then go negative emissions at the end of the century on a scale. So we will need all opportunities to sort of take away CO2 from the atmosphere and reduce reduce reduce. And in this case, we can do that in quite large scale due to the fact that we have massive amounts of ash concentrating, so they are sort of manmade deposits.
47:52
Good and thank you very much for insights into that. And we're now going to have a short two minute film that actually shows exactly what this project is doing here is all about and I hope that the guests and the viewers enjoy it.
50:12
Now, the Estonia project is one example of this rather increasingly and fascinating era of carbon capture, use and storage, it is happening and growing around the world, not least in the European Union with the support of the Commission. But there are other examples too. And we just wanted to give one more to to you, the viewers and to those who are engaged on the show. And this is one, which is, in a sense, looking at how you can use captured CO2 in a way to dye materials and dye
50:47
other substances, and basically do it without the need for water, which is the normally normal way of dyeing things. Today, we have on the show, Olaf Lohle and Olaf is a seasoned entrepreneur, and a co founder of a company called CleanDye that is doing just that. They're not only reducing emissions to the atmosphere, but actually pollution to drinking water. So another example of circularity in operation. And I've just give us a glimpse into this tell us what this project is all about
51:20
and how it's working. Well, Nick, thank you very much for the introduction. Let me shortly introduce CleanDye to the viewers. CleanDye is the world's first water and process chemical free textile dyeing factory factory. In our process, we use CO2 instead of water to dye our fabrics. This way, we solve three problems. First of all, we do not use water anymore. Secondly, we do not use need to use any process chemistry to dissolve the dyes in water. And
51:54
thirdly, the CO2 we use is waste from other industries, which is captured and reused in our system even we're also able to recycle this year to again and again to give you an idea of the problem of dyeing textiles or the treatment of textiles 1.5 trillion litres of water are being used by the fashion industry only each year 20% of industrial water pollution comes from textile treatment, and the dyeing of textiles and also 200,000 tons of dyes are lost to effluence around the globe, each
52:39
year. Probably many of you have seen pictures of what the textile dyeing industry can do to the environment. And this is why cleanDye decided that we need to make a change. And we are not talking about minor changes like cutting down our water usage, which is common use in the industry. We really needed to invent reinvent the way we dyed textiles completely. This is the only way we can really make a difference. CleanDye is using a technology and it's it's using this
53:15
technology developed and produced by a Dutch company called Geico, this technology dyes fabrics by using CO2 instead of water and in this way you eliminate the use of water completely and also do not have any wastewater anymore. So to make the difference clear, and I repeat myself a little bit, but it's important zero water is using the dye process zero process chemicals are used to waste. So no you know wastewater is coming from the dyeing process. We use 50% less dyes,
53:53
we are more energy efficient as the conventional dye industry. And again, we use recaptured carbon dioxide and are also able to recycle this again and again within our system. So, what happens so Geico has been in contact with several large brands and many large textile producers over the last decade, and they were able to sell around 15 machines they're losing, which is not even making a small dent in the enormous world of textiles. The textile industry produces each year,
54:25
over 100 million tons of fiber. So you can imagine that the amount of pollution it creates. This was the reason for us to start up CleanDye. Just because the base this was going nothing would really change in the foreseeable future and this to our opinion just not acceptable, because we really need to change the system. Another step we also take in regards with the circular economy is to use as much recycled polyester as possible. This even makes us become more circular The reason
55:01
why this technology was not adopted by the large players in the beginning of the last decades, is due to the fact that, that the brands and retailers in the past are afraid of change, especially in a traditional market as a textile industry. Yeah, that's, again, the reason why we did it ourselves. We founded CleanDye in 2018, opening up our factory in Vietnam, by 2019. We are now bringing our products products to mass market with large retail customers, companies like from
55:30
Germany and the Kelton from France. The factory is running at full capacity two years after opening, even with the pandemic in place. Yeah. So yes, we think we are the proof that sustainability and commercial success can go hand in hand. Even in a competitive market, like the apparel industry. Our Vietnam factory is also acting as a showcase to the world that this technology is the future for textile dyeing. And if anyone who likes to follow us and work with our technology,
56:00
please do contact us at Clean ye. We are planning to open up ore factories around the globe nd bring this technology to cale within the coming years. ell, thank you very much. That's great overlap, because there's a very concrete example as well of how CO2 is being used to avoid other environmental problems. And I think that that's, that's, that's absolutely brilliant. Stay with us for the panel show. Olaf. So my co-host, Pär Larshans is not to be in the panel discussion,
56:33
but he will be there listening to the debate and will join in, as in when he feels that there's a moment to do that. But we're gonna now have the panel discussion with all our guest speakers. And I want to kind of pick up I suppose on, firstly, one thing, which I think is very important, because, you know, I've been a journalist, I've been working for the United Nations on climate change and many other things. And in the past, whenever the issue of carbon capture and storage came
57:05
out, there was always, despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying was something that was important, you would get a lot of environmentalists who were very, very hesitant. In fact, some were very outspoken that this was the wrong way forward simply on the grounds that they felt it was a get out of jail cart for the fossil fuel industry, when they should be decarbonizing their business models. I wonder if we could just deal with this elephant in the room, get it out
57:35
of the way, whether anybody in the panel would like to address this, this challenge that's always been there with carbon capture and storage and use in the sense from some of the green groups. Thank you. Who would like to take that?
57:48
I'm happy to comment on that. Okay, thanks. Yeah. And so I've worked in the energy space on precisely these issues since the early 2000s. And you're quite right, the early debates on CCS were What an odd one of the scientific community being quite clear that this was a viable option to reduce CO2 emissions, but a lot of unease. And and of course, the fear, it was pretty simple. The fear was that one would say, let's not do anything now, let's put in CCS in the future. And by doing that, let's
58:17
invest less than the alternatives to CCS. And in the power system. that played out very acrimoniously. In particular, CCS and coal fired power played out that way. I think we have moved beyond that. When I look at most of the environmental NGOs, they are pretty clear also that the areas that Chris mentioned, where we don't have other options, such as cement, or lime production, where CO2 is an integral part of the chemical process of producing something that we will
58:44
absolutely need to use CCS. And I think that the key thing now is to to place CCU the utilization of CO2 on a simple and found footing and make us make it possible for us to collect a sense around it, because like CCS, there are good and bad uses, obviously, to you. And let others on the panel come in on this as well. But of course, if you use CO2, and then immediately burn it again, you may have gained very little, whereas if you use CO2 and you store it for a long time, you've
59:15
achieved something quite different. And so so I think that the concern is to show that, for example, in plastics, mechanical recycling, plastics, and chemical recycling of plastics, which can be a form of CCU made from CO2, can coexist can be part of the same system. And that's what we need to take the conversation.
59:34
Yeah, is it because Is it because we get a little bit trapped by in this whole world of silver bullets, we always say, here's the miracle solution to everything, and everybody goes down that path. I mean, hydrogen was once you know, kind of everybody talks about hydrogen being to save us all. And then eventually sort of questions get asked down the road by the scientists, which then feeds into the environmental community, and then there's a backlash and that
1:00:00
thing gets shut down again, until it pops up again later. And we've just lost a few years of opportunity. I mean, it's not something that we all have to deal with with circularity, with carbon capture and storage that it is part of a whole ecosystem of things that we need to do in our economies to get from A to the very important B, which is a sustainable future.
1:00:23
I think it'd be. And yes, I guess. Yeah, I think in the long term scale up viability that there's of course, a question for new technology. And I think, also from a service economy perspective, and thinking about living within planetary boundaries, we really do need some kind of transformation in how we are doing things. And I think kind of what you said, it says, get out of jail free card, or some people can see it that way. Or thatit is a ticket to can continue business as usual.
1:00:51
So now I've seen kind of the US kind of expressing a lot of interest in the area. I just wonder, okay, well, is it? Will they introduce a lot of this technology, but continue everything else? The way that they are still going? And that, then that's a tricky thing, and something that I hope, will not be the reality? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:12
I agree with that. I think you have, you know, things, technologies like renewable energy needed to happen at scale to be viable, right. So the reason that renewable energy is so competitive now, is because the cost of solar and the cost of wind has come down because it's been mass produced. Now, if we put all our eggs in the CCS baskets 10 years ago, then that wouldn't have happened. Because we got Well, now we can continue to burn coal, burn gas, and we'll just capture the carbon.
1:01:38
Now, we didn't do that. And we put a lot of eggs in the middle of energy baskets, and a few eggs in the CCS basket. And renewable energy has flourished. But of course, you know, renewable energy will not solve it solve the energy emissions, it doesn't solve the industrial emissions, as you just mentioned, so we need to have it's an all of the above solution. Okay, now, we do need to have a bit more focus, and CCS
1:02:03
may I make a comment. Also, it all depends on how you do it. There are good and bad in all this. But for me, it's clear that if we are going to make negative emissions last part of this century, we need a lot of different solutions, there are no single one, the scale of what we need to do to meet our carbon budgets to take out emissions to take out to have negative impact. It's so massive, and if you take the piece of C product that we will produce in Estonia, we bring it to the form of
1:02:50
carbonates that's one of the largest deposits of carbon on there, there are different deposits, you can store carbon in, in terms of oil, in natural gas, in peat in biomass, but also for mineral and as long as you keep that mineral below 800 degrees, it will be stable. So if you take this, put it into PVC, turn it into a pipe and do mechanically recycle that pipe
1:03:23
then the condensate there. Whereas if you take this PVC pipe water use and incinerated when you release the carbon. So it depends. But it's absolutely possible to have good CCU
1:03:41
cases
1:03:43
and we will need that.
1:03:45
Anybody else want to come on this or shall I fire off another question? You find you find my elephant in the room? Yeah. Because I think he can be that massive elephant and I was born when we were designing the first eco gas demonstration. And I think
1:04:07
already you know with 20% greenhouse gas emission to target you have a certain sort of pocket Okay, well with 20%
1:04:19
renewables and energy efficiency, why do we need to keep the coal and gas and and that was probably fine. But now we have the neutrality of nothing.
1:04:34
Because now we need everything we can get. If if any particular technology that
1:04:42
prominent in modeling fail, that we have problems and CCS proceeds here was always there. not that important. 20%
1:04:54
massively important these without CCS
1:05:05
So, I mean, obviously, this whole thing is predicated to a certain extent, as Darragh kind of outlined on this price on carbon. And we know that in the European Union, the price is going up, which is super for the first time in a long time. Um, and you mentioned, obviously, the the issue of border tariffs might be some way of stopping leakage, etc. But, I mean, one of the last unfinished businesses of the Paris Climate Agreement, apart from By the way, climate education for young
1:05:34
people, but that's another matter is, is this issue of, can the world set, create a global mechanism, a global guideline system, or global market, rules based game for actually handling this topic? And thus, you know, maybe seeing the price go up? And I think you mentioned Darragh, maybe also making sure that the price is stable when it goes up, right, which is another important thing. I mean, how much do people believe that the finishing off of the rules and the ground rules for a global
1:06:09
carbon market is very important in November, in Glasgow, under the UK and the Italian presidencies?
1:06:19
I can I can take a first goes out if you like, Nick, I think it's important that you have to, of course, you have to distinguish a couple of types of carbon pricing, right, so we have carbon taxes and emission trading systems around the world, such as the EU ETS, and such as carbon taxes, and, you know, anywhere from Sweden to Colombia, Chile and Singapore. And that's not really reliant on on Paris, right? This, this all happens outside of the framework of the Paris Agreement. And it's
1:06:44
going well, like I said, it's not going as well as it should be. But that's not dependent on Paris. Now, the carbon markets under Article six of the Paris agreement, which says, you know, because well, countries can trade their their emissions clauses, if you like, on their Paris, their their targets under nationally determined contributions. And there's also something which could be called a sustainable development mechanism, which is similar to the clean development mechanism
1:07:10
that we have already. Now the rules for those of as you mentioned, have not been completed. And countries have been trying to do this for several years. Now, whether it will happen in in COP26 is really anybody's guess it depends on how optimistic you are. countries have tried several times, there are still a number of fundamental questions that countries cannot agree on. And their questions around double counting the questions around, you know, will there be
1:07:37
a share of proceeds that countries have to pay when they participate in these mechanisms that will go towards adaptation? And these are pretty fundamental questions. And there's really big gaps between the countries positions that countries have just gotten together for online talks over the last few weeks. There's I think there's more understanding coming from those countries. But you know, there's no certainty that we'll we'll get anything at COP26. So all we can do is say Fingers crossed.
1:08:04
Personally, what I think is that, yes, it will be great to get us, and if we can get these markets going, it can, it can really help a lot, a lot more finance starts to slow. But I think there's a lot we can do on carbon pricing without article six.
1:08:19
What does... I mean, I was mentioning here that in Sweden, there is a carbon price of 140, or something. So how if you get a carbon price of 140, in Sweden, and within stone, you've got a different carbon price, does that affect the dynamics of this project? Or is just the me just being confused? I mean, does it matter? Is it important? You mean for the ROI shale hash project? Yeah. Well, the the product PCC is produced somewhere in Europe. And it's,
1:08:58
you have the ETS system. So the producers are within the HS system. And they have the same price for carbon. So just because they're in the same system, so And currently, the price for carbon is high enough, so does not reflect it complicated. Because the ETS system does not cover all the emissions. It covers roughly 50% or so. All right, and then you have other emissions, which is not covered by the ETS system, though. Personally, I think the the trading system is great, but
1:09:47
it's also a complicated issue. June to understand since it does not cover everything would be far more easy if we have Okay, let's have one system on a large market and everyone wouldn't The price this is not the case. Yeah. What about Olaf? I mean, but your business you're you're getting your CO2 from a fermentation process in Asia. Is that right? Yeah, you have to bring bring it from Asia to the Netherlands? No, no. factory is located in Vietnam. So that's
1:10:21
where Okay, so that that makes it Yeah. Okay. And what are you dependent on a price on carbon? Is there a price that works for you? I mean, would there be more factories like yours in the world that the price of carbon was 100 or less?
1:10:39
Is the price of carbon for us, It's of course, important that we are using it. So resonant, low carbon dioxide price would be great. Okay, if the price down, and we were using it?
1:10:55
Yeah, that would be great. Of course, we have to we, we buy the carbon dioxide from companies. We're cleaning as for the from where it comes from Saudi Arabia, and they're catching it from cassava fermentation factories. And they're using it and cleaning it out. And then we buy it from those companies.
1:11:17
Just to clarify, you're talking about buying physical carbon, right, as opposed to when we talk about price on? chips? Yeah, of course. It's different. Yeah, I understand. That's it's How do I explain that to the audience? What is different about the there's a physical carbon, which all of his talking about that you use, and that's, that's, that's a tangible product that you can touch. And when we talk about our price on carbon, we're talking about the price, you have to pay to emit a ton of
1:11:45
carbon into the atmosphere. Exactly right. Think about it as right permit or a license or energy in whatever way you want to think about. But it's an intangible thing, you're throwing this gas up into the air, and you have to pay for the right to do that.
1:11:58
Yours out, or in our case, we're not throwing it in the air, we're taking it out. And we're using it and we keeping it there.
1:12:04
Right, right, right. Well, what what happens to the bigger picture? So for net negative emissions, we'd have to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere wouldn't be there's the biomass is one way of doing it. And then there's all these machines like the these ones in Switzerland that go whizzing round. Is this all Really? Is this science fiction? Or do you think it's actually doable to actually capture carbon from the air through a through a machine process? Or is there another way
1:12:34
of doing this? And where does the price of carbon come in on this? I mean, you mentioned 400, makes air capture possible Darragh do we need to do that? Is that the price we want? What other other alternatives? Other ways of doing it? The biomass story is one story. I mean, trees are quite useful as well. So
1:12:56
they're sort of the two things to get around to capture carbon from the atmosphere. Really, one is a plant that does it refer to synthesis. And you can then say, well, we'll we can, we can turn that into biomass that we burn, and then story use the carbon. And we've had, of course, there's also nature based solutions, where you affect a permanent change in the amount of carbon stored in soils, and vegetation. And that I forget that it's very easily easily forgotten. Most assessments is
1:13:22
that that's not enough. It's very difficult to do that at scale. We need complimentary solutions. And, and the modeling community has been very keen on bioenergy with the CCS as it's called, which which grows very large looms very large in these scenarios. The problem there, of course, is that extracting biomass at scale, has its own consequences, and has its own limitations as well. enter direct air capture, which is saying, let's not have a plant, let's have a machine that sets
1:13:48
the carbon out of the air. There's a big challenges with this, you're trying to hunt one molecule down among 2500 others requires energy, and, and so on. But it there's no question that it can be done. It has already been done at pilot scales. And they're quite optimistic assessments about how low you can get the cost of doing that. That's, of course, where we diverge. But if there's anything that we've learned from the last couple of decades on green technologies is not to
1:14:13
underestimate the innovation force that can come if there's a true genuine expectation of the future that this is an essential part of the future energy and material system. And so then then you ask yourself, does that open new possibilities and new better does it some some modeling recently, that showed up within not unreasonable cost of direct capture and hydrogen which you mentioned, you might it might be cheaper, for example, to make aviation fuel from CO2 from the atmosphere,
1:14:40
and hydrogen from water using renewable energy than it might be to do to make it from biomass even if we don't account for the potential external effects of violence. Now, there are lots of ifs and buts here, but we should definitely not discount that. And I don't think that we should just say carbon prices will do all of this. We also need to have innovation support, we need to create Lead markets, we need to drive the innovation system
1:15:02
much faster than we've done at any previous point in the energy system. And carbon prices carbon prices would be immensely foolish, of course. But we shouldn't say a saying that. That's all. That's all we need. There are the things we need to, especially if you get back to the question of circular economy, which is replete with information failures and complex contracts and value chains and varying grade inertia and business models. Little bit like energy efficiency, you need lots
1:15:28
of things to grease the wheels. And we don't primarily use carbon prices range due process grade energy efficiency, we use lots of tools, as we look at the need to look at the whole menu.
1:15:42
I mean, you raise a very good point there because people have very short memories, don't they? I mean, when I was a journalist on the Times newspaper in London, covering renewable energies in the 1990s, people were laughing at, you know, solar power being $50, a unit of electricity and people laughing, what they call winter windmills, right? Because the people patronized wind power is being windmills because it was also expensive. And now we know in most cases, it's being auctioned
1:16:12
off cheaper than coal. So people forget that within a relatively short space of time due to all kinds of policy actions, and probably the expectation of a universal agreement like Paris, which capsule emerging like Mirage, and then disappearing off the face of the earth and things like Copenhagen in 2009. But everyone kind of thought it was coming back that all these pressures and forces were at work. Although interesting enough, it seems that nobody's ever really fully cracked what
1:16:40
the IMF has wanted, which is to get rid of fossil fuel subsidies, which would also change the game, as well as a carbon price quite quickly. Yeah. We're about to get some other errors we should be looking at people mentioned, you mentioned hydrogen many, many times. I mean, we know in Sweden that the government's working with Vattenfall and others to create green steel using I think hydrogen as the fuel. Is that taking off? is that happening? Is that something that is part
1:17:14
of the CCU story? Or is it actually a separate story altogether? I think the the steelmaking using hydrogen, it's, it's another way where you have no emissions. It's an it's an alternative pathway compared to a loss furnace operating on co ironore. Or you use hydrogen to reduce take away the oxygen in the in the ironore.
1:17:51
Right. So it's not a CCU type thing they
1:17:56
economy in interesting ways, though. I mean, one is of course that any pushes into hydrogen will help produce hydrogen costs and reload hydrogen costs is, I think, an absolutely essential part of the CCU story because it is by combining carbon with hydrogen, that carbon dioxide can become useful to us, again, in energy and many sort of chemical applications. And then there's also mineral applications. Now, but the other one is less obvious. And that is that once you switch this
1:18:24
fundamental steelmaking technology over, you have something called an electric arc furnace, which is a way of melting steam. And that is the same technology used to melt steel, scrap recycled steel. So suddenly, you see an integration of what used to be very separate making new steel making virgin steel from war. And we use them very separately recycling the steel, suddenly the tubes merge into one. And you start seeing sort of combination of circular flows and new flows and new
1:18:50
technologies in a very interesting way I think in in Europe. But it's not, it's not the CCU technology.
1:18:58
And we cannot forget also, PCs has a role. Isn't it of course, we would have been hiding from the off in order to get to the schedule and in order to treat cost. At the beginning, we will, we will do it. Hydrogen produced with fossil fuels up to that as well.
1:19:36
Has anybody done any calculations on on the economic benefits of a greater ambition on carbon capture storage and uses I mean, as the new economy ever looked at this, there are various ways to look at this right. And one one is a simple observation that whenever people run climate scenarios if they try to looking for a way forward that has said least possible cost very often CCS and maybe CCU are part of that potential future, I wouldn't give too much, you know, give
1:20:11
this too much attention. We've been wrong about lots of things in all sorts of models for many, many years now. But as Chris mentioned, the end instead of having the full menu available, and this is one of many, really does help in in, in keeping costs down if that's what one is focusing on. But But I think the new the the, indeed, the more, the more interesting part of the story, perhaps, as far as I can see, it is that we can't just
1:20:41
talk about, you know, keeping costs down, we also have to talk about the full range of benefits that we might see. And, and he and if he is not connecting and and saying Well, now we can avoid, you know, extracting huge amounts of biomass and taking pressures of food and feed them and other natural systems, you know, that then the benefits start to modify very quickly. And I think one of their you mentioned the new climate economy project. One of the core messages from that was that by
1:21:08
looking at the full benefits of the measures we take to reduce climate impact. So we know for our discussion that will circular economy, economics are very different than if you look at things just from one angle. And that I think, is very relevant link. And so natural systems is one that I would mention.
1:21:26
Maybe maybe work with dwelling, because we got about eight minutes to go really to the end of our discussion. So if there's any bright things that people want to say, we're happy to hear them, but I was just thinking about coming back to our colleague here from from the circular economy. I mean, the circular economy has been talked about for many, many years. I mean, many, many years, some people have just discovered it and think it's a brand new shiny thing. But you know, like
1:21:54
everything, it's been around as a concept for a very long time. And it's had different names as well, the Chinese called it the ecological civilization is that all kinds of different names.
1:22:06
What I don't, I can see that the world is moving in certain areas, you know, renewable energy is doubling every four years, according to Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute, and, and, you know, we're seeing electrification of transportation, it's all great stuff. But your numbers that you released in the circularity gap report are a bit terrifying, really, things we've held this concept around for so long? Why, why Why are governments not getting this? Is this because,
1:22:33
again, we've got the problem that the climate people are over here. And then you've got a commissioner, who's that very nice Commissioner, from what it is Estonia or somewhere else was always very keen on the circular economy. Is it because they're not talking to each other? Because when you look at the National, nationally determined contributions, the climate action plans of nations for the Paris Agreement, it seems very silent on the natural resource story. And and I find that
1:23:03
really a bit shocking, actually. What do you think, last year?
1:23:11
Yeah. Yeah, I think what we've definitely seen it gone from kind of being perceived as more of a nice topic to something has to be quite mainstream effects, especially in the past five years, it's really taken off. There's still I say, taken off it actually still we have a Yeah, so metric of 8.6%, which is really low. So there is something going on there. I think it's really a mixture of different things. I think, for a long time, the circular economy, which now might be a shiny thing
1:23:34
to some people, people saw, it thought it saw that it had quite a narrow focus on resources only. So I think people didn't always understand that the breadth of the circular economy, and that it's not only about recycling and waste management, and I think a lot of people held that kind of idea for a very long time. And even now, I've seen that in the plastic packaging industry, the word circular packaging coming all the time, just because it's recyclable. But actually, it's a
1:23:59
lot more than that. So I think one is kind of knowledge, getting people to understand how it can tap into many different parts of our kind of climate emergency. And in actually implementing surplus strategies like on like right now, problems with our company, few nations and countries having a lot is actually with data. So there's a lot of data out there, but not always the right kind of data for them to actually start their server journeys, or number one to know where to start. So I
1:24:27
think you really need people who can kind of figure it out and translate that data as well. There's also a call for more data. So massive topic data for good but yeah, we have so much data for profit out there, but we need more data for our regenerative economy.
1:24:43
And more examples, I think coming forward and things like what I would love to doing with his company, which is is is a kind of living example of a I mean, they take capturing CO2 that reducing no polluted water coming out the other end from the dyeing of fabrics, materials, whatever And and and then also reusing a significant slice overlap of the CO2 you've already been using to run the process. I mean, people need to know these living examples out there that it's not
1:25:11
hypothetical. But it's actually there are real case studies that you can bring forward to inspire people to even bigger and better things. Yeah, I think on that note, so let's jump in. And well, on that note about how many amazing case studies that are out there and things on the ground going on, we feel all over the world. But unless it's kind of like the political will to really push for the seven community agenda, we see that it doesn't get as
1:25:38
far. So the Netherlands, maybe I'm biased because I live and work here. But it's, it's really quite a front runner in the circular economy. But it also is not coincidence that the government has a goal of full circularity by 2050. So you have that working in tandem with a very strong Kind of, yeah,
1:25:56
organize a collection of organizations on the ground, also working towards it in a place like your back where you're just working doing a secretary to get report, you have that strong will from organizations on the ground, but it's not yet reflected in the government. So kind of need that to work together. Olaf or Anders, one of you wanted to wanted to come in here, if I can. So
1:26:20
when you look into the details, the barriers, the obstacles towards circular economy, one is the pricing, current pricing or virgin resources does not reflect this cost, the scarcity or the external cost. And then you have the regulation. And that is a can of worms, really, there are a lot of detailed a number of rules, regulations, mindsets. That one, each of them separate, you could you could fix. But basically, you need to do a lot of fixes to actually get to a circular economy. So
1:27:11
it's it's not a quick fix, even though we realize, okay, we need to do this. But for some materials, we don't have, it's not a free choice. We cannot choose a way, phosphorus, we need it. So when the virgin resources are gone, we need to circulate. So but in order to do that, there are so many detailed regulations on on transfer between countries, what you call things, what is allowed. And it's because existing regulations, they are based on supporting a linear economy, not
1:27:53
supporting a circular economy. So for instance, criterias are based on origin. Where does this material come from? It comes from its waste based, okay, then you're not allowed to use it.
1:28:07
That is the case. So there are a lot of things there, making it complicated, cumbersome, time consuming to actually do this. And it needs a lot of political will to go ahead. If you wanted you might get the final word Well, story is of course, in for example, in our case, we're using a carbon dioxide we're using also polyester, which is a plastic, and we try to use as much as possible. recycled polyester, which is now being recycled mainly from PET. We
1:28:43
love to go to the direction that companies start designing the clothes in 100% polyester base so that in the end, our moonshot is that next to our factory, there's a there's a factory was recycling polyester. So we can make yarn a bit and start weaving and making garments and dyeing it with CO2. And then for us in our part of the business, we are we are fully circular. And that's Yeah, it's a moonshot, but it's possible and technologies are already there. And that's where we need to go.
1:29:17
Well, that's actually I can see Graham Aid smiling on the screen there because we're going to talk to him about this. This concept of industrial symbiosis coming up soon, so that is probably one of the best segues that I could ever imagine, out of this debate into close the necks of the show, but her co host. Is there anything there that you wanted? Just to comment on before we we come to the close of our show? Was there anything that we missed out on you felt or we didn't touch or
1:29:50
I think that you would really mention one very important thing, Nicholas and that is that how can we make circularity as a part of the and the seats that now From the time of contributions at the laptop conference in Madrid, I had opportunity to represent business on a global level, in an in, in a discussion with the ordinations I had one minute and all the thing I stress was the importance that the nation nations need to within circular ambitions in their in the seats
1:30:19
necessary. So please see when anyone listening here, how can we make it happen? Yeah, yeah, well, maybe we need to go in force to Glasgow, assuming that that COP is actually going to take place. I was in London last week and talk to some of the COP 2016. And there seems to be very differing views about whether COP26 is going to happen. And if it does, how it will happen, or if it will be just suspended again for another rainy days, so. But
1:30:49
whatever happens, yeah, I think we need to really push on circular economy. And we need I think, perhaps to also think about this issue with the pricing because it strikes me that we're still not pricing in the externalities of the way we're running down on natural resources, the wider impacts of that on the economy, people's health, blardy blardy blar. And whether we need a new indicator of wealth beyond GDP that goes beyond the primitive GDP, that one's popped up many times in
1:31:16
the past, and it'll pop up again. But Fingers crossed, maybe one day, we'll get that too. So listen, thank you very much to everybody that's been on this. This early part of the show, guest speakers, keynotes, and thank you to the panel on this section here. And you can stay on for the rest of the show, or you can do something else. But we've got another section coming up right now. Okay, so I now I want to spotlight the Ragnar Sellberg Foundation, that since 1991, has
1:31:55
been promoting the circular economy through research development, dissemination of knowledge and waste, and through financial contributions. We're going to have a short video here, introducing the Ragnar Sellberg Foundation. And so I hope we can all pay attention. Watch it. It's very interesting indeed.
1:33:08
Now, let me turn to my co host here. Pär, Pär, can you briefly tell us who set up the foundation and and what inspired this change of direction?
1:33:20
Yes, Nick, Ragnar Sellberg he was one of the last century's most respected entrepreneurs in Sweden, he was active from the 1930s all the way to 1985 when he very sadly passed away in a car car accident. And when I asked the older generation that work in internal at Ragn-Sells or when I talked to his business associates, externally, they describe him as a man that really was dedicated to doing business. At the same time, he was very innovative, he really liked to invent things. And he
1:33:53
was were, well, we were ahead of his time. But at the same time, he was an environmentalist, meaning show that he really wanted to keep take care of for the environment. And when I started to work at Ragn-Sells, I, I thought I was coming to waste management company. But when open door to door, I did find different people working with different projects that was based on that more society societal challenge, and we need to solve it. So one example is the phosphorus solution that
1:34:25
we're now putting on the market that was almost totally unknown. So so and we will see other examples coming forward. And I see it in the company edition. And you can see it you can read by itself, but it says that the Ragn-Sells we should be the living proof that caring for the earth and business goes hand in hand. And this is blindness in a nutshell.
1:34:53
Super, super Pär and it sounds he sounds like a wonderful man and and the foundation is obviously doing great work. In support of his vision and the vision of the company itself right now, we're gonna now go over to Dr. Graham Aid. Dr. Granham Aid specializes in industrial symbiosis that's described on Wikipedia. And I'm gonna have to read this as how a network of diverse organizations can foster eco innovation, and long term cultural change, creating shared mutually
1:35:28
profitable transactions, and improve business and technical processes. Sounds very complex. But we've got the right man here, because Graham is also Chair of a section of the International Society for industrial ecology. gram, tell us a little bit about what industrial symbiosis is, how does it fit into the circular economy, dealing with climate change, and improving our environment, and tackling the waste problem in the 21st century over to your grant.
1:35:57
Alright, thanks a lot for that introduction Nicholas. It definitely is a mouthful, that that definition there. I have to say when it's been a pleasure listening to all the discussions today, and as you ask there, Nicholas, I'd like to give a really quick rundown on what I did in my research at the Foundation, and a little bit of the insight and some of the findings that I had in that research. So I had the pleasure of working with the foundation as an industrial PhD. And when I
1:36:28
went in, we went in with the mindset of what kind of novel roles can the waste management sector develop, to really help facilitate the circular economy and meet our sustainability goals. So what Pär Larhans has mentioned in the beginning as well as Anders, I believe that traditional waste management can only get us so far, we're still also working very much within a linear logic. So some of the first findings were Yeah, there are some technologies that we can do. There are things like,
1:36:58
collecting critical materials and warehousing them so that when they're needed, we can use them. But really what really locked my interest was looking at industrial symbiosis, or what I would call collaborative ecosystem innovation, looking at innovation across sectors in new value chains, maybe with industries that aren't used to working together. And there's great examples out there. Maybe we can get into those if we have time, but for example, one of the best known as Kalundborg.
1:37:28
But I would also say Western Cape industrial symbiosis in South Africa, where they've looked at everything from water, to egg whites, to textiles, to minerals, but also looking at things like sharing information, sharing competence, sharing space. So it's not only resources, but coming from the perspective that I come from, I'm very interested in resources you could say. And the interesting thing is, when you look at waste, it really is natural capital, that's kind of
1:38:01
landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it fills the wrong function. And we have some really good examples today. For CO2 for oil shale ash, if you look at the ash, for example, it's sitting there in piles, we have a resource and it's contributing to negative environmental effects. But if we can take that, and we can take another resource, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we can put those together to waste what we put them into a new function and a new place to fulfill
1:38:31
something positive for society. So really, it's like how, how do we remove the waste thinking and think about our natural capital and how we get it into the right places to fulfill positive things towards our goals as a society. One more thing on on the findings that I had from my research is, and Anders touched on this as well, there there, there's a whole list of barriers to, to industrial symbiosis. It's a lot of a lot similar to
1:39:03
the barriers that you would see with any type of innovation that you have coming to market. Something in particular, for industrial symbiosis, though, is that you really have to, when you're working in new value chains, you have to work with trust, how do we work with new partnerships? How do we work with new collaborators? This is not a normal market transaction, we have to trust each other. But then another big one that always comes up is economy. are the resources valued enough? Are we
1:39:31
able to and that you had this discussion earlier? Is the price of CO2 high enough that we can actually do this? So I think it's nice that we have the discussions earlier talking about carbon pricing or other ways that we can we can make industrial symbiosis or circular economy initiatives more viable, bring that profit and planet and people a little bit closer together. You know.
1:39:59
I did I mean, it's kind of logical in the sense that that you would kind of CO exist different ways streams emerging from different, you know, factories together, it's a little bit like, you know, as people have often commented a bit like nature, isn't it, you know, nature doesn't waste anything, nature reuses ways to create something new and things like that. So I can understand the logic of Co locating a whole myriad of different processes together to, you know, achieve a
1:40:23
kind of more circular structure. But I was just wanting in the world of globalization, with with all this just in time and stuff flying around all over the world from one place where we heard about no powder coming from Spain, and God she knows, knows, well, our latest pair of trainers came from does that work for her against industrial symbiosis. Both
1:40:52
industrial symbiosis A lot of people think about low local, originally industrial, industrial, eco industrial parks and such, but also there's the global economy. And I think you can have symbiosis and globally declared economy, of course you need globally. One of the barriers we're running up against is that in the primary economy, you have large stockpiles of resources to be able to pull out exactly when you need them. So that's, that's difficult if you have very
1:41:20
spread out resources in different places around the world around the country. But a good thing that you have with industrial symbiosis is that you also have a lot of these resources close by often. So you're less dependent on global security issues, for example.
1:41:40
Good point, very good point. Oh, Graham, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse into that work, which is supported by the foundation. And it is very interesting, and who knows how the world will develop over the coming years and decades. And it could well be that this is increasingly a solution if there's a lot more local production coming back from different parts of the world as well. Let me now turn to Dr. Richard Nasilele Mutafela, fellow Zambian national, so
1:42:11
fantastic if somebody from Africa on the show and materials development, a development engineer with the dragon cells group who also was supported in some of his work through the foundation. And Richard, you worked on bringing materials back in use from waste from the crystal glass industry in in Sweden, while also kind of detoxifying the areas where this this waste crystal glass walls. Can you tell us a little bit about your circularity work? What What were the benefits of
1:42:45
this to to Sweden, for example, but and is there a global story here as well? Could what you've learned there be taken, you know, beyond Sweden, over to to you, Richard, thanks a lot. I have been working in the Ragn-Sells as it has been mentioned. And I was privileged to be sponsored by the Ragn-Sells foundation for my PhD. And in my PhD we we tried to look at how we can be practical in a circular economy solutions, and Nicholas not so long ago, you mentioned that we
1:43:22
need practical examples. And I think my PhD is one of those practical examples. So a brief background I can get give to the listeners is that in the southeastern part of Sweden, we have a region that is known as the glasriket, or the kingdom of Grystal, which is very famous for centuries over crystal glass production. And when we talk about crystal glass, in this particular case, we're talking about full lead crystal. And just also another hint to our viewers, it's when we talk about
1:43:54
crystal glass or just glass itself. And the very structure of glass is composed of metal oxides, different ones. And in this background that I'm giving you, we find that in the olden days, when they use these metal oxides, they didn't manage the West very well, they just dumped them in the vicinity of the of the factories. And now we have a very big problem in this region. We have over 40 contaminated sites. And we took very serious contamination with them, for example, in a few sites about
1:44:26
over 3000 tonnes of lead, which needed to be taken care of now that the traditional approach has been that these materials excavated and then landfilled as elsewhere as a way of pollution prevention, or pollution abatement if you like. But when we come into this PhD, their focus with Ragn-Sells has been that and we don't have the luxury of losing these resources. Of course they are pollutants they are hazardous. But then what could we do in order for us in a circular
1:44:57
economy fashion, what could we do to get out valuable out of this, and make no mistake. Usually when you look at the landfill mining or dump mining, there are a lot of uncertainties For example, we don't know the quantity of the waste that we're going to have, we don't know the quality, we don't have viable processing technologies. So what we started with was to characterize the waste in the different sites. In this way, we are trying to understand that the characteristics of our waste
1:45:25
so that we can have a good planning of the remediation and resource recovery technologies that we're going to use. And ultimately, after characterization, we came up with very good information. And then the problem that you agree with me is for glass, a waste that is dumped when you want to excavate it. And then you want to extract the heavy metals, for example, out of it in a circular economy fashion, that the glass is mixed with soil. So what we did, instead, we came up with
1:45:57
one methodology that is based on a geophysical mapping. So what we do is that we go to your site, and then we we scan the site without opening it up. And then we are able to understand the exact location of the glass in the in the data such that the moment we're doing the excavation, we can carefully excavate. And then we present these materials for the metal extraction process, which is our next process. And ultimately, we also find that once we excavate these, by the way, it's usually
1:46:27
a very efficient process, because we have over 95%, that's content. So then we avoid a mix of soil and all these materials, and then we only remember the glass that we want to work with. And then the next step is that now we want to get the especially the leaded glass. So what we do is that we put it in a sorting machine that has got Xsara f best sensors. And these are able to concentrate if you like the glass, that is that is full of lead that want to work with. And ultimately, what we
1:47:02
have worked with in the PhD is using different methods to check out these heavy metals. Of course, they're the one that we've worked with is the reduction Melting where we use energy to take out these metals, but we understand as a foundation also as rRagn-Sells that this is quite energy intensive. So at the same time, we've also been looking at other alternatives where we could use less energy intensive methods, for example, using
1:47:29
chelating agents that could extract extract out this lead from these materials. Well, then what we have learned so far, or the contribution that we have made is that we have, we have achieved the conduct contamination of the materials on one side. And then like I mentioned, instead of taking these materials when they're excavated to controlled landfills, what we do is instead is that we look for opportunities in this. So we've been able to get secondary
1:47:59
resources, for example, secondary lead, in this case, which we can use, for example, in radio, radiation shielding, we can use it in some soda, we can use it, for example, in pigments, we could use it in so many different uses. So the idea is that when you look at the traditional mining of lead or any other metals, there is a lot of climate change impacts that are associated with that. So whatever little amount that we could contribute to the circular economy by taking out these
1:48:30
materials, and re injecting them into the circular economy, that is something that we've been working with.
1:48:39
rigid and just briefly, I mean, I mean, Sweden has not been the only country that's made crystal glass. There must be others, other other places in the world where there are, you know, these toxic sites have a legacy of a crystal glass production business that could benefit from your research and what you've done and achieved Exactly. I can mention of Italy, they're battling with the same there is India, we have Russia and a lot more. And thanks for that
1:49:06
question, Nick. I want to put it on a larger perspective. But it's not only this crystal glass, the solution that we're talking about, an example I can give is in the US, and about 7.6 million tonnes of municipal solid waste glass was like filled in the year 2018. So what we are doing is not only are we focusing on this crystal glass, but also other glass materials, how do we bring them back to life and avoid going in the route that is to environmental taxing if I may put it that way?
1:49:40
Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's fascinating. And I think sometimes, you know, people don't know in the past, that something they discarded would end up being a toxic time bomb, you know, I mean, you know, years and years ago in Britain, again, when I was a journalist, there, I had to report on a landfill in in in a in southern Wales in the west part of Britain, that has become a nuclear waste toxic side officially. Because all those little trim telephones that used
1:50:09
to exist with a bit of radiation in the lighting system on the panels of the phones, those are all being canceled and they'd all gone to one landfill site. Individually, they were not hazardous. But collectively, there was suddenly a ticking time bomb for the local authorities down there. So it's it's, it's fascinating what you're doing will appear I think we're getting to the end of our show. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Graham, for talking about the work that was inspired by by
1:50:39
the foundation. But I wonder whether you know, you could step in here really, in a sense and give us your perspective on how this circular Table Talk series has gone the first show a proper carbon price a key to higher climate action? Yeah, give us your perspective at the close. Thank you, Nick. This was the first in a series of six. And it started with a with a telephone call for me to Ingmar. And I said that we have Foundation, and we would like to broadcast our idea of the
1:51:14
future. So one day, every year, we share knowledge because we believe that the more we share knowledge, the more we will also get new partners, and we have new ideas. And he said that Well, why don't you just do it once we can do a partnership. So in the end of this will be a series of six and we will do other things, we will have a very big show on the 23rd of September together with Ericsson where we really will highlight the importance of circularity and carbon as well. But I'd like
1:51:43
to summarize this day that is very interesting to hear people from around the world to be honest, that really says that the price of carbon are important. And the price of carbon as I interpret it is that this will lead to develop new business models. And that new innovations will be able to be be seen on the market, we need to understand we need to do it in large scale because otherwise it will be too cost inefficient ineffective. And and if I got to pick one thing from the from the
1:52:15
round table, I'd like to talk stress the importance of carbon capture utilization and storage. 600 million tons, we need to have at least the 2050 both divided 50% in storage and 50% in huge use. And I think that is something that we need to understand the project in Estonia will to 2070 be able to contribute and listen here, almost 400 million tonnes. So there is another room for 100 million tonnes if someone wants, just kidding, I believe we can do even more. And and I think
1:52:52
that that the global community has the possibility here to step in, and that investors and then and the political society and understand that here. Now what's happening, please make sure that we can create circular flows enabled circularity don't have a region to determine if you can use something, let's have quality as a criteria, also in Europe.
1:53:19
So thanks for very much indeed for that summing up. And thanks to all our guests and of course to you, the audience. If you want to watch the show again, then please go to WeDontHaveTime org. And why not sign up and oin the largest and growing soci l climate platform in the worl . And please check out our webs te on a regular basis and our ocial media because, as Pär ightly pointed out, this is ju t the first of the series of ci cular table talks in partn rship with Ragn-Sells. The nex
1:53:48
episode is scheduled for the first of September in terms o its broadcast. And that's oing to look at the innovat on and the management of waste ater wastewater that's c ming from our cities and comi g off our land. Can this actu lly help if it's properly treat d in a circular way to act ally fight climate change and ring wider economic and enviro mental benefits? The answe has to be yes. And and some o the benefits of course o industries like agriculture co
1:54:17
ld be potentially a very arge. So again, thanks very uch. Thanks to my co host Pär a d have a lovely day.
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