{"id":20173,"title":"There's no word for waste in nature","description":"We meet with marine biologist Theo Vickers to learn about the importance of Seagrass and circularity in nature.","content":"

Just 20m offshore a beach on the East of the Isle of Wight, marine biologist Theo Vickers is in an ocean full of life. He glides through the crystal clear water, over the Seagrass meadows, documenting the creatures that make this environment their home.<\/strong><\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s incredible out there today. There were a couple of crabs fighting. People don\u2019t realise what we\u2019ve got around our coast. There are these tiny sea slugs, these beautiful vibrant slugs called \u2018nudibranchs\u2019. Around the Isle of Wight we've got Thresher Sharks, Stingrays, Minke Whales. Around Britain we\u2019ve got kelp forests that look like the Caribbean or the Great Barrier Reef.\u201d<\/p>

Under the morning sun, a group of walkers make their way along the shoreline, likely unaware of the underwater world teeming with life just metres from where they are standing.\u00a0<\/p>

\"\"Preparing to document life in the Seagrass meadows<\/em><\/p>

On land, we engage with wildlife on a daily basis, in our gardens, in the woods. The marine biosphere is different for humans. The surface of the water acts as a kind of lid, a barrier, separating us from the underwater world. Most people don\u2019t get to see sea life, creating a \u201cdisconnect\u201d as Theo puts it.<\/p>

The popularity of tree planting in the age of climate crisis shows what happens when people can see and understand: they act. Just beneath the surface there\u2019s the tree of the sea, a superhero of the marine ecosystem: Seagrass.<\/p>

\"\"Seagrass meadows around the Isle of Wight. Credit: <\/em>Theo Vickers<\/em><\/a><\/p>

\"\"Snake Pipefish amongst the Seagrass meadows. Credit: <\/em>Theo Vickers<\/em><\/a>
<\/em>
Seagrass is the forest of the ocean, the mangroves of temperate zones. They are a huge carbon sink and a habitat of critical importance to the health of the entire marine ecosystem. It\u2019s thought that the Solent has the best Seagrass meadows in Europe. Yet since the 1930\u2019s, we\u2019ve lost around 95% of Seagrass, mostly because of human activity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cSeagrass acts as a massive carbon store, removing CO2 from the atmosphere\u201d, Theo explains, \u201cit's vitally important for global carbon cycling and boosting biodiversity. Here in the seagrass meadow you have quite rare species now, Seahorses, Stalk Jellyfish. It's a nursery ground for lots of Pelagic fish, big schools of juvenile Pollock, Catshark, Stingrays.\u201d<\/p>

If the Seagrass fails, it would have a knock on effect not only for marine life, coastal life and the stability of our climate. The marine environment shows us the importance of a healthy connected system in balance. Nature left alone will live in balance, but it can be thrown off balance by humans, and these imbalances can cascade like dominoes.\u00a0<\/p>

\"\"
Gliding over the dark patches of Seagrass<\/em><\/p>

\u201cEverything's completely interconnected,\u201d Theo says, \u201cthe ocean is the biggest recycler on Earth. It draws down carbon from the atmosphere, then it pumps oxygen back out, supporting life in the process. The ocean is critical in the natural cyclical process, regulating the climate, balancing our biological activity.\u201d<\/p>

While we know the world we built is somehow out of balance with nature, it\u2019s not immediately obvious how to fix it. It is becoming more obvious that nature provides us with answers. For designers, this is an already established field called biomimicry. The idea is to find the solution in nature which has spent billions of years perfecting all sorts of issues from structures to aerodynamics.\u00a0<\/p>

Chatting with Theo, it\u2019s clear the same idea could be used at a systemic level. If we want to make our whole system, the economy, and all the stuff in it more balanced, we should turn to nature.<\/p>

In nature, there\u2019s no such thing as waste. By-products from one process are food for the next.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>

\u201cThere's so many examples to take from nature. One of them is the ability to repurpose everything. A dolphin will die off the coast of the Isle of Wight, it will sink to the seafloor, and within a couple of days, all of its carcass will have been reused and distributed out through the environment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\"\"
Theo wears the Seagrass green <\/em>Recycled Cotton T-Shirt<\/u><\/em><\/a><\/p>

The word waste is part of the problem. These are materials that are worth something and seeing waste as a resource leads to solutions. In our world, each year 350,000 tonnes of clothing goes into landfill.<\/p>

By designing products from the start to come back and be remade, the linear conveyor belt of waste is transformed into a process where instead of creating waste, we make new products from it - ending landfill for good.<\/p><\/blockquote>

It\u2019s a simple concept, taken from nature.\u00a0<\/p>

We put things in our bin and don\u2019t see or experience where that stuff goes when it\u2019s taken away. If we lifted the lid on our economy, or looked beneath the surface - what would we see?\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m trying to reconnect people with nature, because seeing it leads to an understanding. The more we reuse and repurpose materials, the better protected this place is. For decades, the ocean has been treated like a waste dump, out of sight, out of mind where we can put anything into the sea we want to. The ocean is the last frontier on earth. You've got species out there beyond our wildest imaginations that we haven't even seen yet or documented. I think we can learn that by repurposing, and reusing things, we can not only protect what we have, but it can grow and thrive.\u201d<\/p>

Learn more about how we're making circularity real with <\/strong>Remill<\/strong><\/a><\/p>

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