{"id":16727,"title":"Our TEDx Talk on sustainability: Dear Mr Bin Man","description":"We got asked if we'd talk at a TEDx event on the Isle of Wight. There's a lot of cool people on the Island trying to do genuinely progressive stuff.  We were really happy to contribute and do a little bit to share our story with the Island, the internet and the world. From starting out trying to build something sustainable and more recently trying to scale it, seasoned with a few things we've learned along the way, ere's Mart's talk in full. It's called, Dear Mr. Bin Man.","content":"<p>Recently one of the Rapa founders got asked to speak at a TEDx event on the Isle of Wight. There's a lot of cool people on the Island trying to do genuinely progressive stuff. We have some of the World's most advanced wind-turbine engineering, a think tank that started and leads the #circulareconomy conversation, an arts &amp; cultural revival in Ventnor, and miles of beautiful coastline and countryside to do it all in. We were happy to be invited to share our story with the Island, the internet and the world. From starting out trying to build something sustainable and more recently trying to scale it, seasoned with a few things we've learned along the way, here's our TEDx talk. It's called, Dear Mr. Bin Man.<\/p><div data-youtube-video=\"\"><iframe class=\"youtube\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" allowfullscreen=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/heIXdS7Gs7c\"><\/iframe><\/div><h3><strong>\"Can one person re\u2013design The Economy \u2026 and make sustainability a reality?\"<\/strong><\/h3><p><\/p><p>It sounds a little too bigtime doesn't it, even for a Ted talk. So I\u2019m going to start with something we can all relate to and have in common, because we were all kids once. and when I was 5 my mum taught me about how Bins work.\u00a0 At that age everything in the world feels like a big game and putting stuff in the bin is one of the grown up rules you've got to learn and follow.<\/p><p>This is how it works \u2013 we take all the stuff and the packaging that we buy, make, eat produce use and put it in a plastic bag and then a lorry comes round and each house throws their bag into the lorry, then it drives round and over the hill where nobody can see... and when nobody is looking... they reverse and dump it into a field. And then we run away\u2026.<strong> <\/strong>That\u2019s what we do.\u00a0<\/p><p>So I started crying. Then I decided to do something about it.\u00a0 So I took out my pencil case and wrote a letter to the person responsible - the bin man.\u00a0\u00a0 Here it is<\/p><p><img src=\"https:\/\/images.teemill.com\/i8iuwuvp8itbrhhksy8vpjkyl0ncjyamsvh3q6kpdov0eird.jpeg.jpg?w=1140&amp;h=auto\" alt=\"\" title=\"90919780\" \/><br \/>It says <em>\u201cdear bin man. I am five years old. I am very worried about lots of rubbish? Will there be enough room for me in the world when I am a grandad?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><p>They actually replied and said <em>\"don't worry about it, by the time you\u2019re a grown up this will be a non issue \u2026 we are working on this thing called recycling\" -<\/em> So I did exactly what they said and followed the recycling instructions on the packaging for my entire life.<\/p><p>Later when I was a student I got to go visit a landfill and as we came over the top of the hill, I saw the lorry -\u00a0 reversing into a field - dumping the bags of trash on the floor. I realised <em>it had been \u2026<\/em> every day, every year, everywhere\u2026 ever since I wrote my letter.\u00a0<\/p><p>I actually feel sorry for the person who had to write the letter back because, obviously, they\u2019re doing their best but clearly out of their depth and drowning in a sea of everyone elses trash. Here\u2019s just a snapshot of what they're up against, something simple like clothes - we are all wearing them.<\/p><p><\/p><ul><li><p><strong>60% of clothing is made from plastic<\/strong><\/p><\/li><li><p><strong>99% ends up in landfill or incineration<\/strong><\/p><\/li><li><p><strong>That\u2019s 40 tonnes burned or buried every second<\/strong><\/p><\/li><\/ul><p><\/p><p>Seeing what that looked like in real life made me realise, whatever I was going to do with my life, I didn\u2019t want to be a part of that.\u00a0<\/p><p>When it comes to sustainability, I think like a lot of young people my brother Rob and I <u>look at that<\/u> and <strong><em>actually want to do something<\/em><\/strong> about it. And we get told constantly, don't we, as consumers:<em> Educate yourself, make better choices, change what you buy. Do your bit.<\/em><\/p><p>But when we tried to do our bit, and we looked for those products made from natural materials, renewable energy, <em>\u00a0that didn't eventually enter landfill<\/em>\u2026 it\u2019s like there\u2019s nothing there.\u00a0 Actually, the more we looked, the more we learned that in the economy, almost everything is designed in the exact same way. It\u2019s like a giant conveyor belt, on one end resources are extracted from the environment then turned into products designed to be thrown away at the other end of the conveyor belt, at the dump. So if you are only given one option, linear consumption and waste, how can a choice with one option be a choice?\u00a0<\/p><p>Rob &amp; I decided that if we couldn\u2019t find the products we wanted to see in the world, the only choice was to create them ourselves.<\/p><p>Now, maybe we were just naive, but we thought it would be pretty easy. T-shirts for a start are pretty simple and we were trying to do a really good thing here right and if you\u2019re good you get rewarded - that\u2019s what they say. When we took our first positive steps in that direction, it felt like the system itself gave us a hard-core smackdown. I want everyone to think about this for a second:\u00a0<\/p><p><em>The more we tried to use clean materials, the more we tried to use renewable energy, the more expensive it got - we were punished with cost. But if we chose polluting materials and use fossil fuels, that was - and still is - rewarded with lower prices.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><blockquote><p><em>Stopping pollution is punished. Pollution, is rewarded... are we all cool with that?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><p><em>At this point were just two teenagers in a garden shed, not politicians who can make changes top down, so we <\/em>just tried to figure out what was going on and see what could be changed, bottom up. That\u2019s how we ended up in places like this. In a factory.<\/p><p><img src=\"https:\/\/images.teemill.com\/ivw13t9lcshldlrcouhzvwwj9tvwsfewx0hqm4ts5tjcp3dg.png.jpg?w=1140&amp;h=auto\" alt=\"\" title=\"95754557\" \/><br \/>I like to share this photo because it is what sustainability looks like in real life. It\u2019s not about taking photos of people showing how things are made, it\u2019s about talking to people <em>to<\/em><strong><em> change <\/em><\/strong>how things are made.\u00a0 When we went and worked in these places, we saw the same thing everywhere - <em><u>waste.<\/u><\/em><\/p><p>I don\u2019t just mean the waste material on the floor, the wasted energy, the wasted time. I mean in the actual business model itself. In clothing, nearly 40% of clothing production gets made, then it ends up in landfill without ever really being used. And it turns out, it\u2019s because clothes are produced speculatively.\u00a0<\/p><p>If you manufacture stuff before it\u2019s been ordered, you have to guess how much you need, and guessing guaranteeing wastefulness <em>by design. Then when you scale up overproduction to mass production <\/em>it leads to massive amounts of waste.<\/p><blockquote><p>This was our question at that point: Why people don't factories just make what people need, when they need it?<\/p><\/blockquote><p>It turns out there\u2019s an understandable set of reasons why people don\u2019t. To make that work in t-shirts for example you need to print things one at a time in real time in the seconds after they\u2019re ordered and the speed and scale that would mean hundreds of people doing thousands of processes and making millions of tiny decisions constantly at the speed of light round the clock. Basically human minds cannot process that much information. But computer can. When we made that connection, we acted on it.<\/p><p>We started looking at digitally printing t shirts like we do with paper because you can connect a digital printer to a computer, a computer to the internet and on the internet you can learn to code and run code to automate those zillions of little processes and potentially solve this problem.\u00a0 Then we discovered a derelict supermarket - So we borrowed some money and bought it... and <em>started building our own factory.<\/em><\/p><p>Here\u2019s a look inside. The t-shirt coming off the line is being produced in the seconds <em><u>after<\/u><\/em> it was sold.<\/p><p><img src=\"https:\/\/images.teemill.com\/yfwcgq9cxrorard4vjit0e36o6blnonxqzrrzbhl6d3z8pup.png.jpg?w=1140&amp;h=auto\" alt=\"\" title=\"90920320\" \/><br \/>I said earlier how mass overproduction produces a LOT of waste, <strong><em>Not <\/em><\/strong>doing that saves a<strong><u> lot<\/u><\/strong> of money. It saves us enough money to pay for organic materials \u2026\u00a0 AND renewable energy\u00a0 AND plastic free packaging,\u00a0 AND lower prices for the customer.<\/p><p>Progress.<\/p><blockquote><p>This is our recipe for progress: Design out waste from the model itself, using tech if that\u2019s what it takes, then reinvest the savings to make progress on sustainability.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>Everywhere there is waste, there is opportunity. <em>So, looking for the biggest opportunities, where is the biggest pile of waste in the World?\u00a0<\/em><\/p><p>Back to the landfill. After about 10 seconds in a landfill you can\u2019t help realise that the word Waste itself is part of the problem. You can tell if you say what you see. Aluminium, paper, Polyethylene, steel, copper, card - perhaps we call it trash so we can treat it that way, but these are materials, and materials are worth something.\u00a0<\/p><p>It\u2019s surprising to me how producers have not acted on this connection earlier. Isn't it weird how say\u2026 a drinks company goes out to buy polyethylene and to make bottles for thirsty people\u00a0 \u2026 but gives those people no option but to throw that material the bin \u2026\u00a0 forcing themselves - as a producer - to go spend their own money to replace the material that they already had to begin with?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><blockquote><p>A linear model<em> actively destroys value with each transaction and <\/em>from what I know about business, that\u2019s not a smart way to play the game.\u00a0 It trashes our environment too, by the way, but; stupid games win stupid prizes.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>We don't want to play the game that way so instead we made a choice to design every product we ever made from the start to come back to us in the end. The idea was to make new products from the worn out material we recover.<\/p><p>We developed tech to make that easy. Check out this label inside. You just scan it with your phone when it\u2019s time, and activate the freepost returns process. It\u2019 snot just free, we pay people store credit for doing that too valuable is valuable to us so we can afford to pay for it.<\/p><p><img src=\"https:\/\/images.teemill.com\/yh73zkqpzxr1f7jckc1yeaycjwpkjrjko2bpieabq2vtcrv7.jpeg.jpg?w=1140&amp;h=auto\" alt=\"\" title=\"95754584\" \/><br \/><img src=\"https:\/\/images.teemill.com\/822qz7ccectehjzprans24agoykudxw9uvrdjiufwkbfdk9q.png.jpg?w=1140&amp;h=auto\" alt=\"\" title=\"95754700\" \/><br \/><\/p><p>Then material started\u00a0 flowing - not landfill - but back\u00a0 to us, then back around to be remade, and resold. That\u2019s what the power of Design means to me. It\u2019s not just about designing different products, but designing different outcomes.\u00a0<\/p><p>But things dont just design themselves, people do it. And designers tend to be inspired by things they see, so I want to show you something.<\/p><p>Because the whole time I have been talking about waste, you\u2019ve been looking at it. <em>But not in landfill. I\u2019m wearing it<\/em>.\u00a0 This shirt used to be a shirt, and will be remade back into a shirt when it\u2019s worn out. This is what circularity looks like. And if I can ask you a question now:<\/p><blockquote><p>Is it really such a big change to get used to?\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote><p>I don\u2019t think I look weird wearing it. But for this to be the solution, it needs to become at least as big as the problem otherwise it won\u2019t work. We needed to scale this idea from one brand to many.\u00a0The fastest way to do that was to package up all this tech and give it away for free on the internet. Our platform lets anyone design and sell their own products connected to our infrastructure and go circular on day one. Anyone can. Even you. <em>Even our competitors<\/em>.<\/p><p>If you\u2019re unhappy with the way the clothing industry works, you can use it and change it. And after a few years something like 10\u2019000 brands and businesses are now using <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.teemill.com\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><u>Teemill<\/u><\/a>. What matters is they are using a more sustainable means of production. \u00a0 So while people say competition is a solution for everything in reality we all got further, faster with co-operation.<\/p><p>I think we\u2019re all guilty sometimes of thinking of The Economy as a rigid rule set that is imposed upon us. And we talk about the rules like we\u2019re just players.\u00a0<\/p><p><em>But who makes these rules? <\/em>And you know what. I think it\u2019s a bit\u00a0 like that realisation when we grow up and think that adults are in charge, then you become an adult\u2026 and realise no one person is in charge.\u00a0<\/p><p>The Economy is not a thing that happens to us, it <em>is<\/em> <em>us<\/em>: It\u2019s just a word for the\u00a0 playground where our ideas and actions evolve, and anyone can create and contribute.\u00a0 We need to remember and be encouraged that if we have questions, it's ok to actually put forward the answer too. And by the way it\u2019s meant to be fun. If parts of it are not, why not reimagine not just new products but new business models - the place where products come from.\u00a0<\/p><p>Now I\u2019m not saying that won't upset a few people if we bust out of here and come up with a new idea about what business as usual might look like what I am saying is that there is no rule that says we can\u2019t.<\/p><blockquote><p>Because if the economy is a big game made up by adults, <em>and we\u2019re the adults now,<\/em> any of us can choose the rules, move pieces around, and change the game.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>Now I\u2019m a grown up, when I see something I think should change in our economy, I know what to do. Take out my pencil case and start writing. Not a letter.<em>\u2026.A plan.<\/em><\/p><h3>Share these ideas<\/h3><ul><li><p>One of the fastest and easiest ways to help the idea of circularity spread further is to share this video. It might just inspire a young person somewhere who goes on to build more of the kind of change we need to see in the world. All that, in one click. #DearMrBinMan<\/p><\/li><li><p>Share <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/rapanuiclothing.com\/blog\/dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/rapanuiclothing.com\/blog\/dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk\/<\/a><\/p><p><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><\/p><\/li><\/ul>","urlTitle":"dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk","url":"\/blog\/dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk\/","editListUrl":"\/my-blogs","editUrl":"\/my-blogs\/edit\/dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk\/","fullUrl":"https:\/\/rapanuiclothing.com\/blog\/dear-mr-bin-man-ted-talk\/","featured":false,"published":true,"showOnSitemap":true,"hidden":false,"visibility":null,"createdAt":1645621656,"updatedAt":1741857081,"publishedAt":1741857080,"lastReadAt":null,"division":{"id":14,"name":"Rapanui"},"tags":[],"metaImage":{"original":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/bnw3mbufloax3py3tdihfdjthsjzvcd7bwkqlnlsejz7xckm.jpeg?z=1.9&fx=0.48274993704357&fy=0.37647947620247","thumbnail":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/bnw3mbufloax3py3tdihfdjthsjzvcd7bwkqlnlsejz7xckm.jpeg.jpg?w=1140&h=855&z=1.9&fx=0.48274993704357&fy=0.37647947620247","banner":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/bnw3mbufloax3py3tdihfdjthsjzvcd7bwkqlnlsejz7xckm.jpeg.jpg?w=1920&h=1440&z=1.9&fx=0.48274993704357&fy=0.37647947620247"},"metaTitle":"Our TEDx Talk on sustainability","metaDescription":"View our TEDx Talk on sustainability where one of our founders talks about how we're making the fashion sustainable. 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