Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast, interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. In this episode, I spoke with Paul Foulkes-Arellano, a circular economy expert based in London. Paul worked for decades in the packaging industry for major brands and so knows firsthand the uphill battle that we have ahead of us to achieve circularity in our economy. Unfortunately, he also has lots of ideas about how to do it. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here, Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:14

You worked for global brands for the past 30 years and these days I don't know exactly how many years you've been independent, but you're using that experience to help companies become more sustainable. So that means you've basically had a front row seat to see how the topic of sustainability for brands has gained momentum or presumably, in a lot of cases, not so much. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen in this regard over the past few decades?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 1:41

Yeah, there's a good question, and I've been independent coming on for years. I began in the 80s, so for a lot of people this is before they were born. When we began, we didn't have words like sustainability. The circular economy hadn't been defined or even thought about. We talked about green stuff. So things were because of the German Green Party.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 2:07

If you did anything that was kind of environmental, you referred to it as green packaging or green technology. Everything was green. It's the only word we had and anything was good, and we had a much smaller population 40 years ago. We didn't have so much rubbish. People lived in a different way anyway. We didn't have enough money to over consume. People generally and this is a stat, not a feeling had a lot less money. There was a lot less disposable income. We didn't have that kind of desire to lead a luxury lifestyle that's been kind of created by Instagram and other social media. So everything could be polluting because there wasn't that much of it. So it didn't really matter if plastics weren't being recycled or we had lead in our gasoline, which actually was a bad thing, but it didn't seem so bad. Not that many people died, but over the years, definitely as populations have absolutely boomed. I was basically flying back and forth to Mexico in the 80s my wife in Mexican. This population was 80 million. It's now 120 million or more, potentially a lot more 50% increase in 40 years, just for one country, and other countries have done similar things. So things have really changed.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 3:38

I mean, the time we were looking to Germany I think everybody in the world was going gosh, germany is doing things, they have laws. There was something called the Tupper Decree which came into, I think about 91, which really laid out what German brands and German retailers had to do in terms of the environment and that was a massive kind of wake up call to the whole of manufacturing industry. But at the time we didn't talk about fossil fuels. We didn't really care. One was decommissioning nuclear because it was considered scary and dangerous. Little did we know how dangerous fossil fuels were.

Ryan Grant Little: 4:23

Right, speaking of Germany going the opposite way with that now and bringing back brown coal plants online and decommissioning some of the safest nuclear plants in the world. Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 4:36

Things have changed tremendously and brands, I think, got into sustainability. Probably sort of in the first decade of this century was starting to think about it, but really in the last decade so 2010 to 2020, was when brands really began to think about sustainability and there was so much. When I became, when I kind of began to talk about sustainability and particularly circular economy, I had so many requests for work. That's when I took the leap to become independent, so that was back in 2019. I decided that this is going to be my life's work. I spent 35 years in packaging design, brand design and I went no more creating. I want to create less, not create more.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:30

So, in terms like you mentioned, circular economy this is a term I started seeing quite a bit in the 2010s as well. Some accelerators around this, especially in things like fashion. I worked with some. Yeah, some of these accelerators did some coaching for circular companies and your consulting practice is called Circuthon Consulting. So I guess that's pretty much at the heart of what you're doing and, I don't know, I mean you'll have a very good take on this, I think. But my experience is that circularity is a term that people really feel intuitively like they understand, but when you look at kind of the technical aspects of it or the life cycle analysis or full life cycles of products, it's more complicated than people tend to think. Is that a fair assessment?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 6:14

Yeah, I mean, it is very complicated and I'll explain to you why. The company is called Circuton. So yeah, sort of 2017, 2018, there was this massive boom in design sprints, people saying in a day, we can create a brand new product and it will be the best product ever, and then order a design sprint. And I thought, well, that's the opposite of what I believe. I believe, if you want to create something that fits in with the environment, it's not a sprint by any way, and it's not just about design, it's about the whole system. It's about the whole ecosystem, the whole supply chain.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 6:54

So I was in contact with some good friends of mine, a design team down in Argentina called TreeDomage, and they were talking about what they were calling their processes and I thought, hang on, I need to think of a term to call my new business. And I thought, first of all, it's going to be circular, it's not going to be designed so they're circular. And actually it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. It's going to take years and years to go from a kind of polluting linear system to a circular loop. So I thought circuit and thawne are circuit on, and that's how the third thing came along. And the funny thing is lots of different people in lots of languages are like I see the good on or sick. They're like it kind of works in other languages as well. It still makes sense. I didn't even have time or sort of patience to check the different versions of it. I remember friends in Mexico and across Latin America I do have a lot of friends there sort of just immediately adopting it as a oh yes, it could just like a word.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:04

It's like half Latin, half Greek. I mean it's perfect.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 8:08

It just seemed to work and it has made my job a bit easier, because people only come to me for circular projects. They don't really come for anything which isn't circular. They don't come and say, hey, could you talk to us about energy? Or could you talk to us about this? And now circularity and the most bizarre thing is a lot of my clients are circular economy managers, so there's a new function within lots of big corporates.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 8:33

I think this is the biggest change in the last 40 years is that you begun by just having marketing people working on this, so it was all about the comms. Then you have sustainability managers who, to be honest, often are still comms people. They're just glorified comms people. Sorry, sustainability managers, but many of you are ex-journalists and your job is to defend the polluter rather than do anything about it. But then when you get someone who's a circular economy manager, their job is to close the loop. Their job is to really stop producing waste. They're not communications people. They tend to be a lot more science based. They tend to be from supply chain or from industrial design and their job is to really make big differences, not just to sit there. In the sum up, some incredibly strong people, strong willed and strong minded people who work as circular economy managers. They're not there to defend the status quo.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:28

And so what kind of help do they need right now? What challenges are they facing and where do they pull someone like you into help with?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 10:35

I think what they need is proof and I would say my number one job with my clients is providing statistics, charts, numbers that prove that things exist. So many businesses believe that they are white as white, that they don't do anything wrong and that pollution is something that others do, and what you have to show them is that that's not the case and that comes from verify statistics, citations, reports, multiple reports. So I'm a bit like a detective. To begin with, I'm finding all the bad stuff that an industry or a business is doing and putting that into numbers, turning it into slides so that the C-suite can see that and agree that they're bad. But, more importantly, that happens for a month or two.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 11:28

Then you spend literally months and years working out the solutions. So a lot of early work is about helping people understand and finding those proof points, but then… contacting suppliers really against more detective work. You're trying to find something which doesn't exist. It may mean finding a coating in Miami and combining it with a feedstock in Bulgaria. Or it may mean finding a logistics supplier who's got a new AI that reduces waste in returns by 23 percent and bringing those people together.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:14

That's the more advanced stuff, but what you're talking about right now is a lot of it is just identifying what needs to be measured and creating the baseline on the principle of you can't control what you don't measure.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 12:25

Absolutely. I also bring in carbon accountants and people with really good metrics into projects, because once my work is done and often I say to clients my work is done, you have been trained, you know where to go but you need people month by month. You need to go to the dentist every six months, you can't just not stop going. It will all fall apart. I try to make sure that they've got B Corp trainers, they've got carbon accountants all lined up so that if I'm no longer around then they've got everything that they need. That's a major part of the work. It's finding the right suppliers. One of the things I hear most from non-clients is the supply chain doesn't exist. I'm like, well, you think that, but then you have to pay somebody to tell you they're not going to just appear on your doorstep ready-made.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 13:35

Circularity is quite complex. You need to pull lots of stuff together, to be honest. You need lots of points of view. You need the point of view of somebody like myself, but also someone expert in biodiversity. Often energy is a major thing and there are people who are really smart about mixed alternative energy systems and you bring all of those people in. Yeah, circularity is about forming a massive team generally. Luckily, what I see happening now is those teams continue to work together on different things. They're like, oh, I have a client and they're stuck on this and they bring in different bits of the ecosystem. Then when I need stuff, I'm like, hey, ecosystem, I need this. I'm like, yeah, talk to Jane, talk to Stephen, talk to Stefan, talk to Naomi, it's all building, but it's early days still.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:31

It's not. You call in the circularity cavalry. Basically, what kind of industries are you working with and where do you see the biggest opportunities? I know that a couple like fashion and footwear, food and Bev packaging. These are some of the areas where circularity seems to be a hot topic.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 14:49

It is. It's easy to work in those industries. I'm not having to teach people about circularity, why Legislation is in place. So we have the circular economy action plan version 2.0 last year, in 2022, which I wrote about extensively and made slides about and shared them, because people are probably not. To be honest, most businesses have probably never read the circular economy action plan. It's a massive piece. In the same sense, they've never read any legislation. Like you know, you're in business. I never read any legislation when I worked as a consultant with industrial design agencies or on branding. But it's super important and it's sitting there and it's driving what they need to do and, to be honest, most businesses are pretty ignorant on what it actually means. But, yeah, food and drink, absolutely, why they're clients.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 15:47

The supermarkets are hot on circularity. The supermarkets, the retailers, in fact, all the retailers. They'd be retailing electronics, or food and drink, or fashion or footwear, or you know home goods or you know construction materials. All retailers have got targets. A lot of that revolves around waste reduction, which is kind of part and parcel of circularity and circularity itself. So those industries have to do it, otherwise they lose their listings and, to be honest, if there's one thing that a brand doesn't want it's to lose its listing. Therefore, it will do everything it can to survive, and that really has spurred on a lot of this interest and kind of concern, I would say, about circularity, because circularity isn't exactly going forwards. The circularity gap from 2023 said it's going backwards, which is weird considering all the time and money being spent on it.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:51

Retailers, especially supermarkets, have a really outsize influence that they could play. I think some of them are stepping up, but if they start talking to their food suppliers and to different brands and tell them what they want, they're the aggregate customer basically for these brands. I'm glad you mentioned that. I know you talk about helping companies achieving circularity through education, compliance strategy and legislation. As you just talked about, Legislation, I think is something we need to be talking about more in general, because it's about setting the level playing field. We can't always expect companies to run out ahead of the pack and try to be leaders on some of these sustainability issues. It has to be a level playing field and that comes through legislation. I wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are in the works both in the UK or more globally and that you think are going to be influential now and in the future.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 17:46

Yeah, it's a really good question when you put it that way. Locally and globally. Because of modern media, legislation moves more quickly across the planet. I don't think people understand, unless they are monitoring things, what is going on anywhere. The EU is pretty much the center of circular legislation. There are updates on different industries on a regular baseline. Every month. There's an update to the packaging waste directive or there's an update to the electronic waste legislation.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 18:27

People in Australia, asia, africa, the Americas are monitoring this, people whose job it is to look at legislation. Then local legislators if they're going to write something, they use the internet to look at what's happening in Europe or happening in North America. They copy and paste, translate it a bit, jig it around. That's a quick way of writing legislation. To be honest, that's how it works. You would think you maybe wouldn't think looking at politicians, but you might think that they would debate stuff and draft and whatever. That's not how legislation works. Basically, researchers will look around, look at what's feasible and then start to write stuff. What happens sometimes is a young researcher gets a bit overzealous in a country like Colombia and starts to ban all plastics stuff that we don't know how to replace yet.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:30

In Kenya, for example, a few years ago, with plastic bags.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 19:35

Yeah, but what's crazy is that it's all a bit of a mishmash the way that this disseminates across the world. Some countries that are not ready have got very strict legislation. Other countries that could be doing much more have got USA, principally Canada, secondly have got very lax legislation. Of course, it comes state by state. You can look at the New York Fashion Act or you can look at certain green legislation and marine legislation in California. It's world-class, it's the head of the world. Go to Texas and, yeah, the environmental legislation on fire. Ditto Florida, which didn't used to be like that. Florida was not like that 30, 40 years ago. There is a lot of ripple happening, but the way that legislators work is they say show me the alternative, show me what the alternative is there and we can ban what's wrong. But until the alternative is there, we can't ban it. That's the job of the innovators, that's the job of people who work in climate tech is to show the solutions so that legislation can come into place, level up, as you say, and make things happen.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:58

I'm just imagining someone sitting at a computer and copying and pasting some Dutch legislation, translating it, telling chat GPT to make it applicable for Canada or Colombia or whatever, and then not debating it and then getting voted out or something.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 21:15

Yeah, I think that's what's happening. I literally believe that's what happens. I started using Bard, which is Google's, a few months ago because I don't need it. I can use my own brain, but it's so fast at helping me get to stuff and, bizarrely, even though it's owned by Google, you find stuff that you can't find on Google. It kind of digs deeper. So I think this is what will be happening and eventually there'll be no humans involved. It will just be computers looking at databases of stuff and writing legislation for humans to maybe review if they've got time as they're being showered to their next meeting.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:56

That might actually be better, based on the past six or seven years. Do legislators talk to you? Do they reach out to you? Do they ask for advice? Is there a firewall, or are they out there seeing this stuff firsthand and learning from the field?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 22:12

I would say the legislators themselves are not. It's their researchers that are scanning and looking. But also they pick up most of what they know from the media. So a few weeks ago I was talking to BBC Radio about some new legislation, giving them a background so they could phrase their questions for a minister who was coming onto a show. So it wasn't great PR for me because I wasn't mentioned, but I heard my questions being phrased to minister and she got a lot of stuff wrong. She confused one material with another. She didn't understand her own legislation, which I had just read. It was a lot of criticism and her department actually protested that the questions have been hard.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 23:03

So I then got a call from the radio producers to say can you just take me through what she got so wrong? So I went through it. I said you need to interview this guy. He is the head of sustainability at the biggest waste processor in the UK and again it's about proof points. It's about stats. He will answer any question. Your presenter has, with absolute certainty, stats up to date because that's his job. And the following week they interviewed him. He explained why she got everything so wrong. She's the minister for waste management and she didn't understand it and he basically proved that everything she said was completely wrong. So, ultimately, the way to politicians is through the media, because the only thing that they really care about is the media, because media means votes. So if you want to get through to a politician, you help them understand what might get them votes that's what they're interested in or you donate big lumps of money.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:17

Can I just say that I'm not entirely surprised that someone in Rishi Sunak's cabinet got some environmental stats wrong. Sorry to our Tory listeners in the UK right now.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 24:28

Probably to be looking at her oil shares and how.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:32

Yeah, they've been doing good work for increasing oil company prices. But talk about some of the campaigns that you've been working on, because one that stood out to me is this very lofty goal, which I love. I was blown away by this number to stop the 25 billion with a B pairs of shoes that are going to landfill each year. That's a staggering number. That's like three pairs of shoes for every person on earth, and I'm imagining it's not equally spread out. This is a question of median and not mean, but if you could talk about that or some of the other campaigns, where do these come from? Who are you working with? What's exciting right now in these campaigns?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 25:07

Yeah, I mean, the circular footwear initiative is the first big campaign I ever did, which was basically instigated by a guy called Ruf Barua, who is an environmentalist who's currently working on hydrogen powered submarines. He's kind of moved on from the days that he used to sort of say to me, you should campaign against this. But we were looking at a lot of the misinformation from sneaker brands talking about wow, look at us, we're making a shoe for emotion plastic Now the world is saved, only to find the ocean plastic came from water bottles collected from hotels, like it was never in the ocean. If you tried to use stuff in the ocean, it would be contaminated with toxics and algae and barnacles and all kinds of horrible stuff that you can't use in manufacturing. This was nice, clean plastic. Plus, it was plastic. It was literally polymers which produce more microplastics and leach into the soils.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 26:11

So because of that I was like and obviously understanding circularity, I started to google circular footwear. Is there any circular footwear? This was back in 2019. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Not a single reference on the whole of the internet to circular footwear, apart from one. There was somebody in the Netherlands doing working boots like these steel capped, steel toe. You know working boots. That was a circular business and I was like, wow, there's one business making a few thousand pairs and we're talking 25 billion pairs and, as you say, I've never done that math before, but you're right, it's three per person and you're absolutely right. The West or the G7 countries, the global North, are buying 20 pairs a year. Many consumers, which is a phenomenal. How I mean literally how how do you get through that many pairs? And often it can be sneakers, it can be running shoes get replaced, which I understand. You replace running shoes because you couldn't re-solve them beforehand.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 27:28

But overall, I said, well, how many shoes are being recycled? So I found the first ever recyclers of shoes. I found them in North America, again through Googling, and they were doing a few thousand pairs a month out of 25 billion. That was the sum total that were being recycled. Others were being re-sold, as in vendors were selling them again rather than having souls put on. But we're talking less than 1%. So we're talking, you know, 99% going to landfill, probably 99.9%. So I thought this is ridiculous.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 28:10

Look at where we are in packaging, because my background is mainly packaging. You know, we recycle 90% of aluminium in some countries, 100% of aluminium in some countries. We recycle glass, we recycle paper at these really high rates of 80% to 90% for glass, steel, aluminium, paper. You know, again it just comes back. What can we do?

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 28:34

So it's about education, because people I would say less than 0,000.1% of people know that there's 25 billion pairs of shoes and that they're not recycled. Because in England, for example, when you have old shoes, people bring round plastic bags and say please, donate to charity. You put your old shoes in a bag, you leave it on the curbside and someone collects it. You're like, wow, some kid is going to re-wear my shoes Pretty unlikely, you know. It just doesn't work like that.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 29:06

So began to sort of put out calls on LinkedIn and through other social media and people started to arrive. You know I'm setting up a circular footwear brand, launching next year, and young designers started to get in contact. And then my first real project I think the important bit is doing real work. It's not about just campaigning Came when I got a WhatsApp from another campaigner called Arizona Muse she doesn't remember sending me the WhatsApp, but she definitely did and she said I know a footwear designer who wants to stop doing what they're doing. They've been completely disillusioned and they want to recreate the whole world of footwear from scratch in a completely circular system.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 29:54

Can you meet him? So that was three years ago. The project is nearly at fruition, should be live probably spring 2024. And it's a complete re-image of the whole of the footwear business in a completely circular, non-toxic way which basically rebuilds the environment, not destroys it. But that will have taken three and a half years from initial conversation to launch. But that is a proof point. You have to do it. You can't just say there is a solution. You have to do it. And, to be honest, the client is the biggest thinker I ever met and I said that's impossible. I was the one going. I don't think we can do that. He didn't care. He's like well, I'm not compromising on anything, it's 100% or nothing. And that is the attitude you have to take to go circular.

Ryan Grant Little: 30:52

I don't think I've had 20 pairs of shoes in my lifetime.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 30:55

I mean, I keep mine and what I learned in 2020 was how to clean my own shoes. Yeah, when online bought a kit from Timberland that has like a little rubber to rub dirty marks off and a little kind of file to file things and I managed to revive some shoes I kept. I wouldn't throw them away, but I managed to revive three pairs of shoes. One of them is now my favorite pair again and they are 25 years old and look absolutely pristine.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:27

Ralph Nader back in the 1960s the independent presidential candidate and consumer advocate, ralph Nader, who would be, I guess, in his 80s now in 1960 or so, bought like five pairs of shoes and just use them and resold them and repair them for the rest of his life. I mean, you can do that. I've resold, soled a number of pairs of shoes and yeah, but that's shocking, this 25 billion pairs. But so this program will come out at the end or sometime in 2024 and people who are listening, who want to learn more about that, should probably follow you. They can join you in with the other 30,000 followers or so on LinkedIn, which is an astronomical number. You're like a total social media influencer as well. I mean, it's kind of crazy, it kind of took off.

Paul Foulkes-Arellano: 32:14

I think the more kind of optimistic you are about the future, the more followers you get. If you write something negative, you'll get a lot of impressions but not necessarily likes. What I've realized is that I have to talk about the positives. Yes, I do talk a lot about the negatives and call people out a lot. But if you talk about the positives and give people hope, they prefer that because nobody wants to do nothing, I don't think that's a good thing. Nobody wants to do nothing. I don't think anybody. Even the worst polluters, are like I would do something different, but I don't know how.

Ryan Grant Little: 32:54

Yeah, except Shell. But so give people actionable hope, basically right, so something that you give them an idea of what the world could look like. But you also have to give them sort of a call to action as to what they can do to participate and help. Absolutely, Paul, thanks a lot. It's been great talking to you. My pleasure, it's been great. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, Ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.