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• Dig Deep Podcast With Vishal Mishra
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Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:29 – Ethar and his work
06:20 – What is helical economy
09:50 – Local circularity
19:47 – Is recycling monetarily beneficial?
20:43 – Ethar early life experiences
24:50 – Ineffectiveness of activism groups
28:55 – Mistakes by UK councils
34:00 – What can UK councils recycle?
39:01 – Precious Plastic and Brothers Make
41:10 – How can large businesses recycle better?
43:40 – Plan of action for young entrepreneurs
49:40 – Why was Ethar scared?
52:18 – Is ignorance really a bliss?
54:50 – Outro
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In this episode, I chat with Ethar Alali, CEO and founder of ReallyRecycle.com, about the importance of local circularity and how his early experiences led to the creation of Automedi and ReallyRecycle. Ethar explains the common mistakes councils make with recycling and highlights everyday plastics—like certain packaging and mixed materials—that often get overlooked.
We dive into how Automedi’s ‘Nano’ machines transform these plastics into useful products, especially care equipment for the health industry. Ethar also challenges the idea that recycling isn’t financially rewarding for businesses, sharing real incentives and giving shout-outs to others doing great work in the field.
For global companies in pharma or hospitality, Ethar offers three ways to partner with ReallyRecycle.com, including on-site recycling solutions and community projects. He also shares why he calls himself an “Involuntary Activist” and stresses the urgent need for everyone to take sustainability seriously, reminding us that our future depends on it.
Subscribe for more such conversations.
Follow Ethar Alali Here:
Tiktok: / @circularityboss
LinkedIn: Ethar Alali
/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethar-alali/
—————
About Vishal Mishra
Vishal Mishra is an Entrepreneur that explains his expertise in Business, Strategy and Relationship Building. He has extensive experience working with global corporates as well as small and medium size businesses.
To Know More,
Follow Vishal Mishra On ⤵︎
Instagram @vishalmishra__
LinkedIn – Vishal Mishra
/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalmishra-vm/
• • •
#Podcast #DigDeep #VishalMishra #UK #council #recycle #waste #circulareconomy #etharalali #ukgovernment
You know how sustainability is one of those
things where if not enough people care about it, we might not really really have a world to live
in, right? And your work majorly is a lot in sustainability, recycling, um circular economy
and all of that. Would you uh want to tell us what you’re doing with all the work that you’re
doing whether be it automedy or really recycle? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a long story
and as you say sustainability is really really kind of all encompassed. It’s
like an all or nothing thing really. Um so what we at to really recycle understood is
that it’s a big big problem. It’s not just about like waste or solar or EVs or whatever. Yeah,
it’s about literally almost everything about the way we exist in our society today. That’s what
sustainability is about. We’re talking about lowering poverty. We’re talking about creating
basic equity between people in different parts of the world for their healthare. But the question is
where do you actually start with all this because it’s such a big problem and you’re at risk of
boiling the ocean. So we thought well what is the sort of smallest thing that we can do that
helps us turn some of the these economies kind of 90 degrees? How do we make it better for
people and planet? So what we decided to do at Really Recycle is we decided to tackle
the problem of unrecyclable plastic waste. And the reason why is because typically that’s
the stuff that contaminates the oceans. It’s the stuff that contaminates even waste streams.
But often people don’t know what to do with it. So what councils and businesses do is
they try to split it out into things they can recycle and things they can’t recycle,
but never really make it clear um what is the recyclable bit and what’s the unrecycled
bit. So in some cases you’ll get places which can recycle the bottle tops of drinks bottles
and stuff like that when other parts of the UK might not be able to do that and other parts
of the world not will have different rules in their own right. There’s just no consistency.
But every time you try to solve one of those problems you find a different thing that causes
an issue. So for example solving plastic film, right? Another big issue with that is that you
might get packaging like sandwich packs that combine film and cardboard. So how should you
recycle that? Is it cardboard or is it plastic? So, this creates loads of little problems because
they give people almost too much choice in terms of what bins to put it in. So, we thought
was we thought, well, listen, you know what? We’re going to take all this stuff
and just deal with it ourselves. So, what we decided to do is have one bin. Yeah.
No more, no less. In that one bin, people put their cardboard, their plastics, we’ll take it,
we’ll recycle it. But not just recycle it. We know that even downstream recycling can’t take
all this other stuff necessarily. Manufacturers can’t use all the types of plastic. So what we
do is we decide to manufacture it ourselves. So we take like waste whatever it is right
we’ll often grind it down create a filament out of it and use those bits of filament
those coils of filament if you like to to 3D print products and that’s what’s different
because manufacturing is subject to injection mold or so injection molding in manufacturing
is often subject to really tight tolerances and are really sensitive to contamination.
So, we thought we’d solve that problem by ensuring that we built a system that was a
lot less um sensitive to waste contamination, whether that’s through other plastics or even
things like food. And the thing that we settled on was actually 3D printing because we could tune
every part of that. So much so that we can even now use some of the contamination as an additive
to make the plastics that we get stronger, right? which is absolutely offthe-wall because
when we show people what we regard as a kind of almost cheese-based plastic, it’s not really.
It’s actually milk bottles that have got all the milk that’s gone a bit off, right?
Yeah. We’ll grind it, process it into a filament. And people were gobsmacked about the
fact that it’s actually stronger because we left the moldy milk in it, right? And it’s the most
bonkers thing in the world. But we’ve done this through kind of a lot of trial and error, but also
a lot of experimentation and mathematical theory, if you like, to understand how these materials
actually behave. Because when you create it for 3D printing, you have a number of different
things that make things easier for you. And it’s there’s a whole load of science behind it.
Basically, what it means is that we can at the right kind of temperature and pressures and
extrusions, you can mix a number of different plastics together and some additives together to
actually make it stronger overall than you would get out of those individual items, the plastics by
themselves. And it’s it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise because things like like um fiberglass
are often added to plastics or carbon fiber added to plastics to make them stronger. So we’re just
doing something very similar just trying to use natural things as well. You see what I mean?
So it’s a very different sort of approach. That’s fantastic. I mean you know one of
the major aims of this podcast as well is for somebody who doesn’t
really come from this area and who doesn’t have domain expertise
doesn’t know much should be able to like you know get value learn about all of this.
There’s a few things that I was aware of. Yeah. Linear economy. Yeah. Where you extract
use and dispose. Yeah. Second was the circular where reuse, recycle, we keep the res uh
resources in a closed loop. Yep. Ideally. Yeah. Yeah. Ideally, yes. Now, the third thing that I
actually learned while researching about you was helical economy,
right? Yeah. Yeah. Would you be
able to tell us a little bit? Totally. So, you you really nicely summarized what
the difference between the circular and the linear economies are. And ideally circular economy should
be closed loop because that reduces the most amount of emissions. But what it is often naive
to is the fact that a lot of the I’ll call it transportation is still maintained in conventional
circular economies. So if you’ve got a product that you buy from thou and this manufactured
thousands of miles away, you’ll ship it to the UK, you might use it once and then you’ll throw it
away and that might even get exported somewhere else, right? Possibly even thousands more miles.
And almost half the emissions that are embodied in individual products come from transportation.
Right? So actually if you can reduce transportation all the better. But the the other
factor is that not everything comes from the the same thousands of miles away. That’s a different
part of the world that we get stuff from. So one example which we use a lot is medical plastics.
By the nature of how medical plastics plastic products are certified, they have to almost always
come from Europe, right? because that’s the only place you can get um compliance medical products,
whether that’s the packaging or the devices themselves. And when the plastic is recycled, the
remanufactured standards are so difficult that you may as well just use virgin plastic anyway. So,
you know, medicine and healthcare are notorious for throwing away actually perfectly good stuff
because there is this precautionary principle. You have to keep the patient safe and it’s, you
know, not an unreasonable thing to to do. But this doesn’t mean that the level of waste is extremely
high. Now in a normal circular economy because you can’t turn it into the same medical device again
or or medical packaging again, you have to throw it away, right? But this stuff actually still has
value. When you recycle a medicine pot in the UK, for example, even if you recycle it twice,
it’s still higher quality than the plastic that you get to make things like coat hooks or
whatever else. So our approach was, you know, why are you throwing this stuff away? Let’s use it
for a different sector for two main reasons. First of all, even when you recycle it twice, you get a
better quality of plastic and a stronger product than if you used virgin plastic from thousands of
miles away and it only came from Europe. That’s the first thing. The second thing is of course
you’re now not sending it anywhere, right? We’re now reusing that um uh plastic in other sectors.
So a helical economy understands that actually the most sustainable approach might not be a pure
circular economy. we have to choose to be able to go into adjacent economies or even economies or
sectors elsewhere. And what this allows us to do is to move one step away from say health care each
time. And that’s what the health economy does. It does a circle but if it can’t go back into the
same cycle, it goes into the next adjacent sector. So healthcare into laboratories or healthcare into
hospital maintenance. See what I mean? So that then gives us the opportunity to reduce emissions
and also increase the quality of the plastics of those products at exactly the same time. So it’s
it’s not automatic that circular economies will always generate the most sustainable outcome.
If you really want to reduce emissions, you have to think beyond the circle
in that third dimension if you like. You talk a lot about you know
like circular local circularity. Y
that’s what I uh researched around like in your company and all
of that. I mean you guys do talk a lot about that. Can you tell what is actually local circularity?
Yeah, exactly. or or what we call circular microeconomies. Absolutely. Again, so
in the case of Stockport, for example, we have a mill or we’re part of the mill and
in that mill we process all the waste for the tenants and indeed the local economy elsewhere.
So we capture it, we process it and then make product off the back of that and that goes
to the same people that gave us the waste in the first place. Right? So that removes all the
transportation or at least all the longdistance transportation. Now we do everything in the first
and final mile as a result. And this has several huge benefits. First of all, we don’t have to run
a single really large factory and a single really large material recovery facility because um it’s
now decentralized. Also, the spaces are small. So you don’t have to heat a bigger a bigger space
than than we we do in each case. Um, also by doing it that way you remove almost all the freight and
logistics of transporting this stuff around apart from the the bits in the last mile which usually
the shortest and most environmentally friendly. So much so that we can even uh take advantage of
these localized clusters each one that does all three bits by ensuring that we can capture waste
locally send it to that particular cluster hub and then go on to the next area pick up some
more waste send it to the next cluster hub in the sequence. What we’re doing is taking waste
manufacturing and supply and trying to create webcale stuff out of that. Right? That means
localized smaller circular microeconomies that work together as virtual factories, as virtual
material recovery faces. And if one happens to go down, doesn’t matter. There’s maybe 30 more in
a city that will help you do it. You know, I mean, so that ensures that you never have a blockage
anywhere. You can deal with plastics in ways that you couldn’t do at scale. You don’t get situations
where extremely long conveyor belts get tangled up with soft plastic and bin bags in those poses
because to us it doesn’t matter. That stuff can be dealt with even manually if we had to. Although
we of course have automated processes to deal with. So by doing it that way you reduce energy
requirements. You massively reduce emissions and you create localized economies that even can
employ local people to deal with the waste in a way that makes it much more productive for
them. Because the amount of value you get out of something as a product is much more than you get
something sorry much more than you get from the the plastic as waste. See what I mean? So if if
for example you take a ton of waste you can only ever make 300 from it that’s wasteful. You got
to do a lot of stuff which is why these material coveries are so so large. But if you can suddenly
turn a kilogram, sorry, a ton of waste into 76,000 pounds worth of value, then actually you can
take the waste for free, right? And that’s really what we’re trying to create is nurturing these
economies locally that they use that waste plastic as a way to create jobs, employment, purpose,
lowers poverty, and even opens up opportunities in parts of the world that can’t currently
get normal factories or normal waste recovery facilities. So we can see that the the purpose
of these small scale circular microeconomies working in parallel as a decentralized and
distributed uh sort of system is is much wider and much more important than just waste. It’s
actually a whole economy in a box basically. If we’re able to turn that trash into something
that is that valuable that you know like in uh just the conventional setting
Yeah. Yeah. I would think that okay something is trash now we might be able to extract
20% more of it 30% in value or something however if we’re drastically actually getting an output
which is much more than what that trash or even that product was
right then I mean that changes the whole ball game
altogether totally and it changes the ball game even in the conventional sense because it’s
it’s well known that in places like the UK which have a fairly advanced waste recycling sector
if you like typically you’ll lose about 10% of the profit because of contamination right
just having us in the system acting between the normal well let’s waste generators
i.e. the consumers or the businesses. Mhm.
And the waste recyclers not only helps us make money out of the middle of it and
helps communities by proxy. It also releases the 10% of contaminated plastics from the system which
allows the waste recycles in the conventional sense to make 10% more themselves just by us
being around. See what I mean? It’s kind of what is called autopiosis. It’s a it’s the ability
of other existing organisms or systems to benefit from the existence of what would normally be be
what would normally be considered a competitor. Right. And this is it’s about changing the the the
mindset the paradigm altogether. For sure. Yeah. I would just like to touch up on one of the
things you know around how we’re able to extract a lot more value from the trash as well.
Yeah. And how there’s a general assumption that recycling cannot be beneficial financially. Do
you basically is this true? Is this are there any monetary incentives to be doing this other than
of course I mean it’s a good thing to do do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well to be fair I mean I don’t know how many people in
the world have kind of well as let’s just say the the there’s a graveyard of good intentions around
the world. You know I mean lots of people want to do the right thing. Um but as you say, you can’t
live on thin air, right? At the end of the day, there has to be an incentive there for businesses
to change, but also a monetary reward for people to doing the right thing. And the short answer
is yes, there absolutely is. The problem is you cannot ever do it with the current conventional
linear economy or the first generation circular economies because transportation will eat most
of that, right? You’ll get situations where the waste that you recycle can’t be used elsewhere,
right? So yes, you’ll sell it maybe to a to a manufacturer. The manufacturer will try and use
it and they’ll throw 70% of that away again, right? So they’re not getting the value that they
paid for it. They made a loss actually. So they’re annoyed. You’ve then thrown this waste away a
second time which gets processed a second time and they’ll be sold maybe to a different manufacturer.
Hopefully they will also say, “No, I can’t use any of that.” They’ll throw most of all of that away.
So you can see that the system is almost geared to making losses all the time, which is ridiculous,
right? And what they end up doing, they end up burning it anyway or trying to export it elsewhere
basically by trying to capture the carbon credits uh of another country and then giving them our
waste of return which is a bit of a a carbon tax avoidance thing I have to say but you know we are
where we are. Um but that’s the first generation economy. None of it works right? None of it works
as it is intended to work. So what can you do to actually generate value from it? Well, the
first thing is to acknowledge that when you try to recycle plastics, you’re recycling them into
another supply chain, right? And what are called vendors take that plastic and then try to sell
it to the manufacturers. And what you’re hoping for is that someone will then buy it and be able
to use it. But in reality, almost none of it is used. In reality, it’s all gets destroyed as part
of innovation or at least half it does. And then we might export a larger percentage of the other
half and hope for the best, but doesn’t happen. So what we acknowledged was that all these
different economic increments add to the price that someone ultimately pays for the end product
but doesn’t consolidate in any one operator. So we thought well if we’re doing the whole closed
loop ourselves all that extra economic value is now not being distributed amongst all these other
actors. They’re staying within our own walls. Right? So that’s how we’re able to generate like
76,000 or even up to $100,000 of value from waste, but as the end product that people will actually
buy. Better still, because we use 3D printing, there are certain things you can do with that
technology that you simply cannot do with injection molding. For example, you can’t create
a product that comes off the bed ready to be used at all. You can’t uh remove plastics from an inner
part of a design because when you injection mold, you have to fill the mold, right? While you can
remove it from 3D printing. So that means you get a lot more out of a ton of plastics doing 3D
printing than you would do from injection molding. So by combining those together, you get a really
massive uptick in the amount of value you get out of those plastic because you’re selling the end
product at the end of the day. Whether you sell to the wholesale market or direct to consumer,
you’re keeping all that economic value yourself. And that means once each in our case when each
cluster becomes self- sustaining, we can almost take waste for free, right? And even if even
while we’re in that journey, we’re able to make money on both sides because we’re being paid to
take the waste and we’re getting paid to provide goods and products. So that and because it’s often
more expensive to do it that way conventionally, but that it means that we’re able to subsidize one
side or the other because we can use some of the waste cash that we get paid to take to uh take the
waste or collect the waste from. Uh so that money that we get paid from the clients to take away
the waste subsidizes the cost of producing the product and vice versa. And eventually when the
cost of producing the product is outweighed by the value we get from that product, we can then
start thinking about taking waste for free. And that radically changes the way that economy can
work because not only can they start taking away waste for free, which would normally cost £300,
but when you’re making £100,000 pounds out of it, it doesn’t really matter. You can take that away
for free and you can even pay people to bring the waste to you. Right? So, one of the things we’re
launching soon is our forward and reverse vending system, right? So, it’s a dual use vending machine
that basically captures waste on one end and you can identify the type of plastic by scanning the
barcode of the product and it allows you to get a product that you might have bought online or even
from the system right in front of you as well. So, that means that same machine provides the
product and takes it back, right? and takes any other plastic bag. And eventually once that’s
bedded into most areas and there’s enough revenue coming from the purchase of the products, that
machine will be instructed to pay you to bring plastic to it as a consumer, right? So now, not
only are you having to deal with which bin you have to throw away with your account because
they don’t know, right? Um you can recycle the stuff it can’t normally take and you get
paid to do it. which is a monetary incentive to do it. But that of course depends on whether
each individual district will act in the best instance of the plant and we’re hoping that this
carrot will give them an opportunity to do that. Wonderful. And it’s a winwin incentive to
literally take this cash and deposit that as well. Right. Absolutely. Exactly right.
Exactly right. So um you know one thing I believe in is a lot of what we do in like in our
life is about the experiences that we’ve had like you know like while growing up and all of that.
So in your journey towards like you know all of this like sustainability recycling and all of that
what do you really think like you know maybe as a kid or during your childhood what are those
experiences that really led you to this man there’s a story and a half I’m going to be
that old guy at the bar telling war stories till the end of my days I’m telling you right
so but I mean in fairness it’s a really good question because I think if I have to
look back at my life and say okay which bits are the things that influenced me today
um it’s a really weird one because you wouldn’t assume that my life would be one of the ones that
would have ended up in a sustainability position. But that said, there were little pockets of
inspiration cuz I remember times when I was about 10 years old, I was doing bird watching.
I was I was also a programmer. Even back then, sort of 9 years old, I started to program
my BBC master compact one. And um one of the programs I’ I’d uh helped input into this
system, but I didn’t write it myself. This one um was a bird watching program. big boy bird.
Why don’t you sit there? You kind of, you know, with your binoculars and try to look out into the
into the world and hope for the best and see if you can find the particular bird that everybody
else has been looking for for the last three weeks. And you’ll mark it down. Great. Um, but
during that time, I was also a bit of a young activist. I was very interested in climate change.
It was global warming at the time. I was worried about things like acid rain. And as a kid that
kind of blended all these three things together, I was constantly complaining my parents about
it. But this is bad for the P, you know, which is fine. But then as you kind of go up, I kind
of started to try and engage with ecoactivists at the work at the time. And honestly, some of them
were absolutely awful. Um, there was a kind of an almost eco-fascist vibe in the in the groups I
finally found myself in, which is a bit terrible. Um, because you know, you’d think that people who
are ecoactivists should be receptive to the needs of certain communities around the world. There’d
be some of the people that you would hope would support ethnic minorities, but it this seemed that
this particular group just wasn’t interested. So, I fell out of favor. I just thought, forget
it. No way. So of course as you do you kind of grew up that kept with the program I mean
did all of that for years kind of worked for I got my first job uh with the university when
I was 14 years old um but I was still at school studying at the same time doing my A levels end
up doing my degree whilst I was at university I obviously had this job as a proper programmer
um so I did my junior years whilst I was there um and then I went into the world of work as you
do and you think to yourself this this hobby that I’d had for by this point sort of 13 years or
so. Um and I worked as a proper programmer and I worked went to the world of work postgraduation.
I thought to myself, okay, well this is actually worse than I thought it would ever be as far as
the workplace is concerned. Why not? Um because you think and this is always what they tell
you never try and turn your hobby into your job because you’ll become disillusioned with it over
time. Um it doesn’t trust me it didn’t require that much time but um I still at it. Um I excelled
really quickly on in that space. case. I mean, there were times where I thought, well, I might
I’ll be an architect maybe by the time I’m 35 years old. But no, they’d given me responsibility
for 400 million pound systems when I was 23 years old in the city of London. Um, and that meant
that, okay, well, I’ve achieved that now. What do I do with myself? Right. So, so, so by the
time I was 25 years, I started contracting. Um, then I did that for, yeah, a decade and a half.
Um, but at the same time, I started to look at all these different organizations that I joined. I’d
become a trustee in a couple of charities as well. did that for many many years in parallel with uh
the day job and I think a lot of that has been uh fed or influenced by these historical
things that I’ve had um you know kind of engaged with or experience I’ve had and a lot of
them naturally would do because a lot of people deliver who they are today but on the platform
of who they were as a child even or yesterday. So, and it’s it’s not a bad question at all
because it kind of does make you wonder where those influences have have come from. And I think
that it’s it’s it’s um there’s always going to be a mishmash, but actually there’s inspiration
pretty much everywhere. And the question is how do we make sure that we we capture that? Do
you know why I asked you that question? There was one more point which you had mentioned
that you’re a involuntary activist. Absolutely. Yes. Right.
Yeah. So where does that take? Yeah. Inspiration for me.
Exactly. Well, you know what the reason why I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why. Cuz honestly,
I’ve I’ve joined multiple different activist groups as a voluntary activist, as a kind of
very intentional uh process. And I tell you, there is a common theme across most of them. Lots
of people love the community that activism gives you. That’s brilliant, right? A lot of people
get a lot of enrichment from that. And honestly, because you’re almost prefiltering the rest of
the population by the people you’ve got there, you can develop some of the best friendships
in those spaces, right? because you already know that the people share the same values as
you. Brilliant. But at the same time, a lot of activism groups, I’m going to get so much hate
for this by the way, but a lot of activism groups um are all about the community and not about the
solutions, not about actually delivering the aims of the organization. And I do wonder whether
that is partly because they know that they would have to disband if they actually succeeded
in their mission. So when I talk about being an involuntary activist, I usually end up joining
things when the proverbial has hit the fan and nobody’s able to solve anything. Right? So I mean
you’ll see this all the time actually when there are occasions because we there’s problems even
with the existing activist networks with they’re struggling to recruit certain demographies of
people. They’re struggling to keep people in their uh groups once those other people have become
disillusioned. But they don’t themselves want to do anything to change that. And it’s typical that
they lose the very best data people. They lose the very best scientists. They lose the very best um
facilitators because of the fact that they don’t appreciate those people being there. And the most
obvious place that you should or the obvious way you should appreciate what they do is listen to
them and act on those recommendations. Activism doesn’t do that very strangely. They are brilliant
for protest. They’re brilliant for community. They can support each other really well as long as that
doesn’t mean engaging with the existing systems that they have to change. So I I have a particular
view on XR and just oporeal and I know that their methods are important to create the dialogue but
what comes after that and I feel that all the time as an act as an in as a as an individual I find
myself becoming that bridge between the activism and what needs to change. For example, the way we
do procurement has to change in the UK and it has to become much more effective. And I know there’s
a new procurement tag but I don’t know many other people that are actually reading the procurement
tag. That’s what I’m doing this afternoon. And I’m reading that damn procurement act just to
understand what the differences are between the old procurement regulations and this new body of
statute. And we need to learn to exploit those to make an effective advocacy and activist network.
But unfortunately very few activist networks are willing to do that level of work. And that is
a problem because if we don’t hold government to account, and I mean that by taking them to
court, by shaping the legislation, by shaping the way they buy, all we’re doing is allowing them
to precipitate the wrong solutions. And worse, you’re allowing the climate denialists, the
people who don’t care about human rights to influence that body of statute more than you do.
singing and dancing in front of Parliament or in front of the Tory party conference is all very
well but that doesn’t drive change at all and this is what worries me because too many activists
have run down that line. Um so you can see why I think there’s a a a kind of position where these
involuntary activists the ones who are more silent perhaps than the others should take a stand. we
are able to make those changes without permission, right? So why aren’t we? So that’s what I see
myself doing. I end up dropping into these spaces when all the other kind of things
have failed. I have to clean up the mess. I don’t want to, but if I don’t, somebody else
won’t. Nobody else will. Since we’re talking about the procurement act, the what the government
is doing, their involvement into different things, let’s take this towards the councils. Yeah.
Let’s talk about what are the mistakes that they are doing in and
specifically to you know recycling. Yeah. Yeah.
And waste collection and all of that. Man listen you as you as the question what
mistakes are they doing? I I the list will be shorter if you were to ask me what are they doing
right. Right. That’s the problem. Right. This is the actual massive issue because the reality is
council around the UK are massive problem. Um I I mean I’m going to get a lot of hate for this
but the reality is that they can’t work together because they are only taking responsibility
for their geography. In order to get them to work together they have to set up things like
regional mayors like the GMCA has right. Um and that’s a problem because of course if you
can’t work together then what they’ve done is created another layer of bureaucracy just to make
them work together which is obviously a waste of taxpayers money. So the the council do many things
wrong. First of all they don’t have a consistency in the colors of bins that they have right they
don’t have consistency in the waste uh recyclers that they procure the people they choose. So what
you’ll get is you’ll get situations where one race recycler who also owns the material recovery
facility uh in the north of England will capture all the waste from all those other councils,
take it to the recovery facility, then take it to their own incineration plant, make money
from the electricity and then give the money from the electricity primarily back to the place which
hosts that incineration plant, not the place where the waste was collected from. Right? So they’ll
pay him eight nominal amount in rebate but broadly the people that get the most out of it are the
not the same people that pro provided the waste. Right? So what the council are doing by procuring
these services is they’re forcing money to go out of their rem regions. Another thing they also do
wrong is that they misrepresent what recycling is. All right. So recycling as the industry
understands it is take waste, separate it, put it into bales that se of separated stuff and that’s
it. That’s recycling. That means the waste doesn’t go to landfill and it doesn’t get what’s called
co-mingled, right? You’ve been able to separate it. The co-mingle stuff still gets incinerated
anyway. So then you ask the question, what happens to this stuff, right? Does it actually become
another product? Right? And the answer is mostly no, right? So if that’s the case, then what are
you really doing? Right? All that happens that you send you sell it to a manufacturer who can’t use
it. That manufacturer then gives it back to you. You end up shipping it somewhere else and you’re
making money in uh it’s old road basically. You’re making money more than more than once on on on
transferring that waste around, but ultimately it will end up in landfill or incineration anyway.
So all you’ve done is kick the can down the road and emit more transporting it, right, to
places which you can’t use it at anyway, right? So that’s a mistake. But because councils
don’t learn about the overall cycle of where that stuff goes and there’s no traceability on some
of it as well, they don’t choose the best people to do the waste recycling. And another thing they
also do is they sign very long contracts. I mean, we’ve got Sheffield City Council, right? Um
they signed, I believe, a 35year deal from 2001 to 2036 with their waste recycling. So
they can’t really change that contract now, right? So what they’re hoping for is that the the
central government changes the law and as a result that forces a change with the contract because you
can’t have a civil contract go against uh what is basically criminal law. So as a result of it um
if they can change the statute that allows them to maybe change the contract but you can see
that puts them on the back foot. It puts them you know kind of in on the defensive because now
Sheffield cannot become more sustainable because they have to honor the contract they have at the
moment. And this is an ongoing issue for for many councils who sign very long deals and the climate
cannot wait for that. We can’t wait till 2036 until you start changing. I mean, how long’s that
going to take? Right? So, this it’s a mess. Um, and there’s also, oh, this I could go on about
this forever. There’s just so much stuff. So, the way it’s done in the UK is just not coherent.
It’s not cohesive in the sense and it also wastes a huge amount of of money in the process, which
councils really could do a lot more with. And because they don’t get the cash back, either in
the form of cash of decent rebate or in the form of products that they themselves can use, then
they’re still spending the money that they would spend elsewhere. They’re making no savings out of
doing this. I mean, classic examples, we turn like plastic trash into like paper clips and all sorts
of stationary. And that means that the councils don’t have to buy this stuff anymore. They get
it for free, right, from the rubbish that they collect. Well, why not, right? I mean, if they’re
going through thousands, well, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pounds worth
of stationary that they could substitute from the waste anyway, why aren’t they why aren’t they
giving to schools that could could, you know, get all this um teaching equipment for nothing?
It’s it just seems a really really really weird way to run a set of organizations, especially
given that they don’t want to change. So, it’s an ongoing bug bear of mine, sadly. But yeah,
councils, you know what? You know what I mean? One of your taglines that I read was recycling the
plastics that your council won’t. That’s right. Yeah. Can you list a few things like like you know
when I first read that I was like okay what are those things? Because I’ve been a very diligent
citizen trying to you know like putting all of the uh plastics dividing it by class and all
of that. So as a citizen I would actually like to know that what are those things that
my guy you’re you’re in for a treat here. So, I haven’t got a list that can be gone through
in an hour, right? This is what I’m saying. It’s such a really long list because the problem
with it is the council can really only recycle a couple of things, right? Anything that’s shaped by
like a bottle, right? That’s plastic. That’s one thing. So, like a plastic bottle for a drink, yes,
they can recycle that. Um, a plastic milk bottle, they can recycle that. That’s it. Literally,
that’s it. Every other plastic that you have been putting in your bin has done two things.
First of all, it has contaminated not just your bin but also the back of the entire truck
that that bin goes into, right? Um and secondly, uh you have also uh let’s say in our case wasted
plastic that could be recycled through other means like ours. So it’s a real problem because people
have been really really diligent in recycling plastic. They’ve been washing things out, leaving
them to dry, putting them in the bins that they think that they it should go in. But in the
reality, none of that is actually happening. So much so that there are certain parts of the
UK naming no names where they at a pinch will get another recycler to come along to collect some
of the uh waste that is too much for the existing recyclers to deal with. And all of that will go
into one bin truck, right? And then be taken away, never to be seen again, because we incinerate
all of it at the same time. So that that includes the recycling you put together. So it’s a really
really bad situation because the communication has been poor. Right now in our case we will take all
the yogurt pots which you can’t recycle. All the um coffee cup lits which you can’t recycle.
Sandwich uh boxes the cardboard ones which have um plastic linings on some of them. We will take
that which they can’t recycle. We will take your chairs. We will take your cupboards. We will take
your handles. We will take your broken toys. We will take your polyyrene. We will take your wraps.
All of those we will take and can recycle and turn into other products. Ideally working up the waste
hierarchy. That means making products which are single use or even multi-use but have broken into
reusable products. Right? That means you don’t have to buy those products elsewhere anymore. And
you can find them on Amazon if you’re up for it. Shameless plug there. Um but what this um means
is that we help we are the wish cyclist dream as we call So all the people that have been told
you can recycle this stuff but you can’t recycle this stuff can actually recycle it via us instead
right because we are the ones that can absolutely do that job definitely and we’ll make it into
products nearest to you right so it becomes a local economy in its own right so we’re using that
as a lever see what I mean but this is an ongoing issue with most councils around the UK because
they some of them will will you know be completely flammixed or banjacked by the fact that they’ve
now got tethered lids on the plastic bottles right so so as a Those lids are HDPE, right? The
same stuff your milk bottle is made out of, right? But they can’t recycle it in the same process
that takes the milk bowl. Um, and it’s not the same product, not the same material as your bottle
itself. So that means you’ve got a PET bottle with an HDP lid, but that HDP lid can’t be recycled
through the HDP process that takes the milk balls. So as a result, what do you do with it? You can’t
take it off. The whole purpose of the EU doing that was to ensure that it doesn’t leave litter,
and it does get recycled. But the UK doesn’t uniformly recycle bottles on or bottles off. So it
creates massive problems for some councils around the UK. So you can see that there’s an ongoing
issue by the confusion that the councils cause themselves and indeed the way statute interacts
with it. But again this doesn’t matter to all of us. This is all like well whatever you
know we’ll recycle everything anyway. So yeah just go like why? I mean that’s
the one word that I have like why yeah exactly and what’s worse is the councils I
think also partly delude themselves. If you look at all the council executive meetings and you can
go online and find them from your local council and you just find the ones related to waste, every
one of them will say we have recycled 90 98% of our waste. No, you haven’t. Because the reason
why is because you know that incineration I talked about it gets rebranded as thermal recycling. Can
you believe it? Thermal recycling. What on earth is that? But what that basically means they burn
it and yeah, we recycle the energy that went into making it in the first place. No, no, that No, no,
no. That’s not recycling, is it? Right. That is burning it for energy and you’re emitting stuff
while you do that. So, and you’re losing that material. So, it’s not good resource management,
but it’s a way to appease the political classes if you like by just calling it recycling when it’s
not. It’s zero waste landfill. Sure, but you burnt it instead or you exported this elsewhere to
a part of the world that can’t process it. So, you know, it’s it’s what worries me is a lot of it
is bordering on Ford really. But that’s where we are. That’s how it’s evolved over the years. So,
so you know we’ve discussed about the councils, the government, the thing that you are doing.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any other like players in the market
who would just like to give a shout out to like somebody who’s doing well in this space? I’ll
give a shout out to two more organizations in particular. So, one of them is Precious Plastic.
They do something very similar to us, but they do it using higher energy machines. They don’t
do 3D 3D printing with it. They set up a lot of um open-source infrastructure. you can get hold
of if you if you can build it yourself. You know, you can buy them in their bazaar as well, but
generally it’s quite expensive. So, I want to give a shout out to them because globally they’re
doing some really good work, especially trying to rebalance some of the inequity around plastics
in the developing world in the global south. So, that’s one group. Another one I want to give
a shout out to is um Brothers Make. Now, they’re an interesting pair because they a pair
of brothers, funny enough. um and they capture uh typically milk bottle tops but also some other
types of plastic and they will make end products out of recycled products out of that they um sell
online. Both of those have YouTube channels that you can go and give a shout out to because or
take a look at because they even kind of work in the open if you like. So they develop in the open
and that’s always really really good. They’re not in the space that we’re in because we’re in
a a kind of similar well or similar purpose, but what we do is very different because we’re
trying to replace especially some of the lower run manufacturing process which is usually quite
expensive when you try to do it as a as a as a um a an individual entrepreneur and we we are
the people that close that gap but we do so in a sustainable way. So whilst we do play in a similar
space that’s only because we’re doing the entirety of the system ourselves. they have particular um
smaller scale versions of what it is we do. Um but it also doesn’t work in a a kind of collective
way like our system does. But I want to give those two a shout out anyway because of the fact that
they are I think um changing the conversation and showing what can be done in a very educational
inspirational way. Um we were discussing around you know how the stuff that council won’t but
you at autom recycle those things. Yeah. If just in three clear ways you could tell for example
if a global corporate is watching this. Yeah. What are the three ways that
they can basically work with you? Oh it’s that easy. Um the well the first
a global corporates in particular are in a really good position to recycle all that stuff.
So the way we always recommend engaging us is first of all get in touch but get to our website.
um fill in the contact form or just contact us at [email protected]. What we’ll then do is get in
touch with you and the process usually follows three key uh steps. The first one is we’ll do
a waste characterization exercise not just to understand what your waste is but also how much
value you could actually get from it as a pro as product not as a rebate. Right? And usually
people are gobsmacked to find out how much the money they can make from that waste. The second
step of course is to then uh install one of our facilities on site. Uh that would then give them
three vending machines by default and the recycle hub. They can obviously um get more of them if
they wanted to. Um and what they will then also do is to choose a set of products that they want
to start with. But what we always encourage them to do is to ask their employees what else they
will need. And you will get some really weird requests and that’s okay because because of the
way 3D printing works, you can make anything. You can even fold bigger things into the volume
of the 3D print build uh space. So that means that the the kind of the limitations that would
normally exist for manufacturing don’t exist with us. So when we say ask them what they want,
I mean ask them what they want. We’ll often go around with the machines and show people how it
works and they go, “Can I make a thing?” We’ll go, “Yes.” They go, “Oh my god, I’ve always wanted one
of these and this is this is exactly what we want. That’s the reaction you want from all of them.”
Um, we obviously then go on site and then we will um help them keep refining the offer so that they
can start looking at ways of substituting their existing commodity products and lowest products
especially with the functional stuff that’s made through our system. So that’s one key way. We
will work with people on a consultancy basis and we will work people with people on a a
product purchase basis. I you will buy the end products of our other operations. Um which
is also another way forward and that’s usually the simplest way. Go on to our Amazon store or our
website and buy a wholesale units or whatever it is that you need. So those are the three main ways
that we see. Fantastic. Assuming I’m a 25 27 year old budding entrepreneur who’s very passionate
about you know environment and sustainability. I might not have the domain
expertise in the field yet but I’m actually looking
to make a business in this. Yeah. With the right in intentions of course.
Yeah. What is in your opinion maybe something that is going to boom in the future or something
that you see a scope and burning entrepreneur can go into and especially I mean if you could
just and give a clear action plan as well maybe not a lot of steps but I mean I understand
you can’t give a full business plan to me in no not at all yeah exactly the next few minutes
looking for a new job yeah exactly well the reality is that is that this area whether we
like it or not has to happen. Um I would also say um don’t be afraid of not focusing on the
communication for a while. Right? The reason why is because a lot of people communicate about
sustainability but that stuff actually isn’t the thing that moves the needle. Actually doing the
thing moves the needle. Um so if I was to give you kind of like um a view as to what I think
the future will look like and then we talk the solutions around that that might be sort of
productive. So the first thing I see is a lot more use of solar and um hybrid technology in that
space. Um so that and I mean that in the context of wind and solar but the reason why that’s
important is because that now opens the door to communities around the world who can’t currently
have factories right and there’s a lot of subsaharan Africa for example that wants to have a
factory in every town. They even have a policy. A lot of people have been elected on that principle.
But the reality is that in order to put a factory somewhere, conventional factory, you have to have
two other things. You have to have roads in and out of that factory and you have to have energy
in and out of that factory. Um neither of those two will run themselves through the process of
creating a high energy facility, energy generation facility or roads if they can’t see something
going in or out, right? because they won’t build the roads until they see the factory. The factory
won’t be able to exist until they have the energy. The energy won’t um install until they see the
factory. So the whole thing becomes a cyclical problem. That is intractable. That is the thing
that holds back a lot of those economies from becoming like western economies or more advanced
in a lot of cases. Never mind all the geopolitical uh forces that also keep them there. So one thing
that we see is that a lot of those communities are now starting to understand the value of
decentralization and smaller scale stuff. So using methods like ours implanting micro facilities
in those spaces that are that powered entirely through solar panels suddenly opens up the door
for them to demonstrate that they now do deserve roads and high energy facilities and a factory
because they’ve proven it at a smaller scale. It gives that bridge but it also provides supplies
for those parts of the world that are basically stuck without them. I mean taking health care 51%
of the world’s population have no access to basic health care products basic ones right so that’s
a huge untapped market effectively of 4 billion people that we have screwed over in the west
because we have not treated them with equity right um the the whole ecosystem of circular helical
sustainable economies including the second degree entrepreneurial benefits of will be worth $36
trillion, right? More than 1 and a half times the value of US GDP in a year, right? It’s not a small
thing. So the opportunities there can be get deep into the hard tech aspects of it. forget about
the hard tech aspects of it and just become an entrepreneur for any form of product that you want
to create and use platforms like really recycle to do it. So we become your factory. You just white
label those goods and that you want anyway and sell them. But also you immediately get access to
a freightless supply chain which is what we are. So I could make a product here in Manchester as we
film this today and it be available in Peterbr the same day. Not just Peterbr but Arizona, Taiwan and
other developed or even developing nations. Right? That means you can go from idea to products
globally available in one single day. Right? That is a massive departure from where industry
is at the moment. Right? So the future is around localized circular economy, localized
remanufacture. And as long as the entrepreneurs who want to enter this space have an understanding
of that, they automatically understand how to make it effective for their own communities to benefit
not just their profit margin, but also the people around them and the planet as a whole. You see
what I mean? So, as a result of that, the focus I would say is get up to speed on sustainability,
get up to speed on understanding what decentralization can give you from a resilience
and climate benefit. Um, and also think about the lynch points or link points into the existing
economy, right? So for example, wholesale markets, direct to consumer, businesses that need waste
collection, all of those are link points into that circular economy that you will create because
circular economies have the benefit that you as an entrepreneur can create value anywhere in that
circle. I think it’s just a matter of choosing how you wish to rotate it. Fantastic. There’s one
thing that I see around myself and my peers and that is what I feel as well that our generation
is more climate conscious what we are purchasing not just from the climate perspective but just
socially environmentally like all of that right I’m assuming at that time around you not a
lot of people would be scared as how we are no that’s right yeah
so why were you then it’s a damn Good question. And I as short as
I don’t actually know. I don’t I couldn’t tell you why I was scared about it. It was just
important for me for some unknown reason. But then so were a lot of other things. So a lot of
social equity problems were important for me. I remember being a child and watching this thing
called Teleathon, which is a 24-hour TV show, right? That they would do for charity every
year. I used to cry when it ended, right, as a 10year-old, right? Because it was such an
important thing. Um I used to, you know, I used to kind of be very very into kind of social causes
and in a way still am. But um I couldn’t actually tell you. It just felt like there was I don’t know
whether it’s an empathy thing or what. You know, people would accuse me of of lacking empathy, but
actually people who know me really really well understand what my dynamic is and why I do that.
But it’s a really good question. I couldn’t name it, but at the time it just felt like pain,
right? That seeing another uh child, another person suffer for unnecessarily for something
they didn’t do. And that extended to the climate. Um, obviously as a child who um comes from an
Arabic background, an Iraqi one specifically, we were very aware of things like Saddam Hussein’s
rule and what he used to do to some of his own citizens. And that stuck with me as well. So,
it’s a really weird mishmash of experiences of kind of disadvantage or persecution. And as
I got to be kind of 9 years old and understand that the planet is in a way a kind of living
system, we can persecute it as humans, right? So if we can persecute the planet like we
can persecute humans and why is that fair? So I think maybe that’s where some of that kind
of ethos came from. But what surprised me was as you say even in the eco space people didn’t
understand that. They didn’t understand that at all. And even by that point scientists like James
Lovelock had come up with the Gaia hypothesis and that was proven. And all of this stuff was kind
of demonstrating that the earth is an ecosystem. It’s as as alive as we are. Animals are sentient.
But despite that, even the activist space kept getting it wrong as I saw it. Um, so I couldn’t
tell you. I couldn’t tell you because as you say, my friends would didn’t care. My parents didn’t
care. Family didn’t care. Um, they would do it because I would shout about something and
I was just doing to chop me up. But really, I couldn’t I couldn’t pin exactly what it was that
kept me going in that time. But I think it was that kind of that pain of seeing another another
pain. I feel like that’s probably what it was. how we say sometimes that ignorance is
bliss, right? And you being in this space, you’re not really ignoring any of this, right?
So, how is that? I mean, is does it get scary for you? Does it
does it take you there? Yeah, scary is an interesting word. I mean, I made
peace with the fact that listen, as you get older, you make peace with the fact that you’re going
to die one day, right? My knees keep reminding me that every single week, right? But so so for
me I know that there’s everyone’s got limited time regardless. So in terms of scared that’s
an interesting way of presenting it. Um for me the fear is not so much on a personal level. It’s
the fact that in my mind I’m seeing yet another slow motion car crash happening where society is
not going to move fast enough. The activists are going to concentrate on the wrong stuff. Nobody’s
going to be focusing on the right stuff and in the end we will sleepwalk into an absolute calamity
in some form. Whether that is another world war uh genocide of people which is already happening
whether it is the climate catastrophe taking out and wiping out potentially anywhere up
to three billion people or a mixture of all of them. That’s the calamity. That’s
where we have failed to solve the problem. Right. And I don’t like slow motion car crashes
because you live with that vision for quite a some time until the crash happens. Uh and even for some
time afterwards. And that’s, you know, it would be nice to be able to just kind of settle down,
forget about this, go to go kind of swimming every other day or skiing every other month. Um that
would be amazing. But that’s just not seemingly how I’ve evolved my life. So I don’t know how
I that would call it scared. It’s just somewhat cynical, dare I say, because this the the issue
is that I’ve seen this happen before and we are usually very bad at stopping ourselves
from allowing it to happen as a human race. So there is this question as to whether I sit
down and try to convince a person in front of me that climate change needs to be solved or I get
my boots on, roll up my sleeves and fix it myself. That’s the way I’ve gone with it.
You chose the ladder. I chose the ladder. What a mistake that’s
going to turn out to be. But let’s see. I mean, I’m glad we have enough people like you
and so many more. I mean who who are working on this.
Yeah. But that was actually my last question.
Is there any any other last thoughts that you would
want to leave us with? Yeah.
For this time I can see that there’s so much that we can you can see from my face. I have
lots of thoughts. You see probably my if anyone post my LinkedIn or anything like that I’ve got
lots of thoughts. You’re welcome to the thoughts are free. Um but I think for me no the the the the
reality is that we are going to be facing some of the most difficult decades that I think humanity
has ever faced. Right? Even at a time where people talk about World War II being one of the most
difficult time it was. But you didn’t have climate change in right. We are now in a situation where
we have screwed up so many parts of civilization that even the break it up and rebuild it better
idea may not last because there might not be anything to build back with. So when I say that
people need to get serious, I mean dancing is very nice. I mean speeches are amazing but what comes
after? How do you actually action the change? And I don’t mean action by creating a a a cardboard
plaque and just running around with it. That that’s fine. Use that for the poses. But but then
after that, what happens next? What are the people going to be doing to actively force that change?
And honestly, you don’t need government to do it. You never need government to do it. The problem
with it is we rely on government to do it because we are conditioned to rely on government to do
waste collection or recycling. But in reality, you don’t need any of that. Actually, you
can set the systems up yourself. So do it. I think that’s it. Perfect.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for today. And
I mean, I had a great time. I learned so much. And I’m sure everybody
who listen to this will learn how I learned this during this
time right now. Totally. So yeah, thank you so much and
yeah, so glad to have you today. No, pleasure, man. And obviously if
anybody doesn’t like what they heard, you know where to find me. Cheers,
boss. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.