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Faking It - Information Integrity, AI and the Law
Deep fakes and AI generated and propagated misinformation and disinformation are proliferating online.
Monday, 25 November
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
UTS Great Hall
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More episodes are coming soon.
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UTS Global Game Changers – The Big Carbon Rethink
Hello! To everyone in Australia and around the world. I welcome you to the University of Technology, Sydney. Tonight's event is the Global Game Changers, the Big Carbon Rethink. It's dedicated to tackling major world challenges. I'd like to begin... Do we still have the music on? Is that just my imagination?
Can we funk it down a little bit? It's just, you know. Let's take the funk. There you go.
I'd like to begin proceedings with an acknowledgment of the ancient land upon which we stand. It's tradition in Australia to pay respect to the land and the people who have lived here for thousands of years. At the beginning of any important gathering today in the UTS Great Hall, we have a packed auditorium. And with us online from around the world, we have about 1,000 viewers. I haven't checked that in the last 2 min, so don't quote me on that. It hasn't gone through the proper academic review process. But around that, so this welcome extends to you all.
I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and pay my respects to elders, both past and present.
I'm Craig Reucassel, your host, for the evening. I'm probably here because I've made a few documentaries about waste and climate change over the years.
The order of proceedings this evening will be a setting of the scene, followed by a broad discussion of challenges, and how people on this stage are overcoming them, and there will be a Q&A from the audience here today as well. So if you have your questions, put them in your pocket, keep them for the end, and we'll try and come to you.
The setting of the scene will be done by Dr. Alex Thompson, marine ecologist, Science and Technology Australia's Superstar of STEM, leading science communicator in the UTS Faculty of Science.
Following the overview, Alex will join the panel made up of Dr. Gunter Beitinger, industrial engineering and project leader at multinational technology company Siemens, striving towards net-zero with SVP Manufacturing Factory Digitisation and Decarbonisation Platform Seagreen from Germany, also the Director of Estanium.
Amy Low, the director of Brand and Marketing for iconic Australian surfwear company Piping Hot, seeking to deliver sustainable and affordable material and product production for clothing, swimwear, footwear, and accessories from Australia. Dr. Julia Reisser, co-founder of innovative climate, positive Australian company ULU, leading production of a natural material derived from oceans able to replace plastics at scale from Western Australia.
And Professor Peter Ralph, leading international researcher in the fields of algae biosystems and biotechnology, seagrasses, and the adaptation of aquatic plants to warming and acidifying oceans, and Executive Director of the UTS Climate Change Cluster in the Faculty of Science from Sydney.
As we face many challenges of climate change, this session looks at the opportunities for the future.
We imagine a world where buildings, clothes, homewares, office supplies, playgrounds, and electronic equipment—all the products we want to interact with—become carbon sinks, thereby actively reducing atmospheric carbon emissions.
Can we get to a place where products that we use, or wear are not only decarbonising the atmosphere but also ensuring that the carbon remains out of the atmosphere? Can our products go from being part of the problem to part of the solution to set the scene. We welcome Dr. Alex. Thompson.
Thank you. Beautiful. Okay, so I have a little bit of a tricky job tonight. So I'm here to provide a little bit of a glossary or a bingo sheet of terms that we're going to be using tonight. And hopefully, I'll do this justice. So please please bear with me.So, firstly, we're going to talk a little bit about a dirty word, and that is carbon. So we know carbon has a bit of a bad rap. It is, in fact, the stuff that makes up dirt, but it's also the building block of our planet and a compound of absolute opportunity. So I want to start by taking a bit of a step back and understanding our planet's relationship with carbon. So carbon emissions are the leading cause of climate change, where the carbon comes from is as diverse as the forms that it comes in. So what we refer to as carbon emissions is a pretty lazy way of describing a whole bunch of processes and a whole bunch of compounds, 2 of which are carbon dioxide. Your little Mickey mouse character up there, and methane. I don't really know what that looks like, but it's the other thing that's up there.
So that is, these gases contribute to our planet's greenhouse effect or ability to trap heat just like a greenhouse. So carbon emitted from our planet does so in a lot of different ways. You probably heard about the industries that are most responsible for carbon emissions, but the bulk of carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuel sources.
So fossil fuels when extracted from our planet and used to make things like fuel, synthetic fibre, plastics, all sorts of things contribute to the way that our planet functions.
So over time these emissions have led to our planet getting a bit of a thicker blanket of gases trapped in its atmosphere, and like anyone that is trapped under a pretty thick blanket. What starts as being pretty nice and cosy soon gets pretty uncomfortable.
So we're going to leave carbon for a second, and I'm going to talk about an organism called algae.
Algae is a living thing. I'm not going to call it a plant. That's a whole other topic which a lot of people here could talk for a very long time about, but it's made up of you guessed it carbon. So algae appears on our earth in two main forms: microalgae, single-cell, tiny little organisms that a lot of people try and get out of their swimming pool, and the larger form of macroalgae or seaweeds.
Our planet has a really long history with algae.
In fact, the reason that our planet even has an atmosphere to begin with is because algae's ancestors worked out a little process called photosynthesis and gave us an atmosphere.
Which is actually the same way that it captures carbon today. So algae captures carbon dioxide via photosynthesis and holds its carbon within its body. In turn it produces oxygen—somewhere between half and two thirds of the planet's oxygen comes from algae. I'm not going to get into that debate either.
And it also produces some pretty important other compounds, as well.
Such as protein, fats or oils, and carbohydrates. So algae is kind of like a scientist's dream, being able to capture carbon and then turn it into these really awesome organic building blocks is a really cool process, and then allows us to then turn them into, well, basically anything.
So these building blocks allow us to turn it into super exciting things, whereas before that carbon would have existed in our atmosphere. We're now able to form all sorts of different things.
Such as animal feeds, plastics, fertilizers. Really, the possibility is endless. All by implementing a nature-based solution that captures carbon, transforming it into useful compounds and in the process helping us to mitigate climate change.
Now, algae is just one solution in our climate change toolbox, but it is a really really exciting one.
So I'm going to leave algae to the side for a second, and I'm going to talk a little bit about how we understand how to track where some of this carbon might come from on our planet, how much carbon is in the products that we use. What is the carbon emission history of the products that we use? And how much do we know about the products' carbon lifecycle, where it ends up. And what exactly is a lower carbon product.
This space is incredibly exciting because it allows for significant innovation when it comes to product development.
I am no expert on scope emissions.
But as a bit of a brief explainer, because these are things we're going to be talking about tonight, there are three main types of carbon emissions that most organizations will track or account for. You have scope one emissions, which is essentially the stuff that comes out of the factory, or things like company vehicles.
Scope 2 covers things like electricity, heating, and cooling.
And scope 3 is a bit of a mixed bag because it encompasses a very wide range of emissions, both upstream and downstream activities of a business. So this can include anything from business travel, employee commuting time all the way through to how products are transported and distributed both to a factory, but also once it's done in the factory, and then also how that product has an end of life.
What we can also kind of look at when we look at the different emissions of a product is what happens when a product might be shipped overseas. So what happens when people account for that carbon? And where does that carbon actually end up in an instance, say, we ship a product from Australia to Europe.
How do we understand how that carbon is counted? So in Europe, there's a scheme called CBAM, something called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which allows for a price of that carbon to be counted into products.
However, how scope 3 forms a part of that cost is a little bit tricky and something we're going to talk a little bit about today, too.
So ultimately, products that are derived from carbon capture, or that store carbon within them are therefore intrinsically kind of better for the environment and also better for industry.
So there it is, magic stuff called carbon. In the right place, it can work wonders. Give us a toolbox for new innovation.
And with nature-based solutions like algae, it can be transformed into a wide range of exciting products.
If we track it, we can better manage where it ends up and come up with better solutions for managing it.
And if we can do all these things, well, that's kind of what we're aiming for, right?
So I'm going to hand back to Craig now, and hopefully, some exciting discussion.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Alex Thompson. There, just while Alex comes back to his seat. Peter, let's just quickly address what's behind you. This is an algae bioreactor.
Is this how we're going to grow our algae? We can't use the oceans. I don't know what's going on there. Absolutely. This is exactly what we have back in the labs. And this is what industry has. So it's not a green lava lamp. It is actually the way that we grow the algae.
So it's a great prop for everyone. So this is what industry will look like in the future. Is algae going to grow throughout this? Like, if we keep talking longer, will we see the algae grow? No, if we go over next to it and we breathe into it, it will grow faster. So our CO2 needs to go in there, so the better your questions, the better the algae that comes out of the end. Okay, this is the pressure.
Alright. Now Alex has done a great job of explaining the science there and using algae and carbon.
But I want to start at a different level. Over the years, I've seen many great stories about scientific breakthroughs, and, you know, we've got these amazing solutions and that kind of stuff.
And then, years later, I don't necessarily see these things come into play.
And so I want to start with that question of how we get it so that we're actually making things like algae get into reality. And I think one of the reasons this hasn't happened over the years is that part of the problem is that companies don't necessarily know, firstly, the carbon footprint of their products. That's part of it. They don't know. They're like mystified by this, and the second part of it is, there's not enough incentive for companies to actually be experimenting with new things like algae.
So they have to actually be able to count what's in it. And there has to be some kind of pressure to change that.
And so, as we discussed, CBAM, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, is a good example of this. So, for instance, if we send some steel from Australia to Europe, and we've created it using green hydrogen that's been made from, you know, renewable energy, it's going to have a lower carbon footprint. It's going to get less of a charge on it than if we've created the same bit of steel with using oil and gas to send it over.
That's the kind of theory there. But how do we actually measure this? In the first place, we want companies to be able to measure that. So I'm going to go first to Gunter here.
We want companies to be reducing the carbon footprint of their products. But how do companies actually know the actual product carbon footprint? Gunter? You're trying to answer this at a stadium, talk us through this.
No, okay, yeah, thank you, Craig. I mean, that's definitely one of the major challenges we need and be trying to tackle. Gathering accurate and comprehensive supply chain emissions data is definitely one of the biggest challenges in carbon management. And, as you said, policies like CBEM, but there are also other digital partnerships now are putting a lot of pressure on companies to implement, yeah, these solutions and scalable solutions.
What is the situation at the moment? But also, I must say there is already great progress on the situation. There's a lot of attention on the topic. The broader carbon footprint usually includes two things: the company's manufacturing emissions and the emissions from the upstream supply chain as we just saw it. So scope 1, 2, and also 3.
And the complication here is, of course, getting a baseline to get started. Companies need and have to understand why they need to create a PCF, and it's basically useful if they are embedded in a holistic strategy. But nevertheless, the companies need to go into their bill of material and into their main production process steps and start to determine this broader carbon footprint for each component and production step.
To do this, you can start to rely on average emissions. So these average emissions you get from data pools. Companies are out there. They are providing average data. And then you are using the rule of 3. So how much material is in my product. And then you go into the database and you look up. What is the emissions? The average emission on 1 kg, and then you calculate it.
What is then the impact on your product? And then the company only needs to sum up the average emissions across the components and the activities. This is quite a generic average emission data, and we call it secondary data.
But now, if you really would like to show impact, you need to go to real data, primary data. As you just explained, you would like to know, when you ship maybe products over to another place, how much emissions are really generated. So these are the true emissions. The difference between secondary and primary data can be huge, and we have seen differences up to 100%, also depends on the methodology you're using. And this is another challenge—deciding which methodology you're applying.
So it is essential, then, to maximize the share of such primary data. And, of course, you need to be able to get this primary data and to prove the declared product carbon footprint. And of course, you have two sources for the input materials: you can reach out to your suppliers and ask them, “Tell me what emissions you have generated while producing your component you're sending to me,” and the other source is your own factory. You have to go into smart metering, install measurement systems, and extract the concrete data you are generating for your product. So both are a challenge. First of all, do you have the installed technology to measure and then also to distribute it on your product? And the other one is, are your suppliers willing to give you the information you're asking for, and can you rely on this data? These are the challenges.
So, as far as I understand, a lot of the time I would look at the impact of a product using a life cycle analysis. But as you're saying, that's a kind of average thing there, and it doesn't necessarily assess if your company has gone and gone that extra 10 miles down the road and is far ahead of your competitors. You need to go into what you're doing and look at the actual data to prove you're doing it better than others. Have you got an example of any industries, perhaps in Europe, that have actually started this process and have started to actually assess their actual footprint? Who is doing this?
Excellent question. So who is doing this? First of all, the chemical industry. The chemical industry globally is working together with Together for Sustainability, which is a chemical association. They are really going into real data. The chemical industry, of course, has a huge portion of these emissions. They are going into it. Then also the automotive industry. Here we see it, of course, if you are putting products on the market, like electric vehicles, and you're promoting them and saying you are climate neutral by using these when you are judged with renewable energies, you would like to prove that the product also has a lower carbon impact, because the battery production compared to combustion engines has a much higher impact on emissions. So you need to bring them down also into the car. Then we see the steel industry, especially in Europe. There are two things: the pressure from the government and society, but also high energy prices.
Yeah, absolutely, Amy. I want to come to you and piping hot clothes, because at the moment Cbam applies to things like cement and steel and fertiliser, and, as far as I can remember, you don't make piping hot clothes out of those things. So
you're driving. What is driving your journey at piping hot to try and come up with alternatives. You know. Why. Why are you looking to make more sustainable clothing, or reduce the carbon footprint or reduce the plastic in your clothing.
It really comes from that deep connection that ocean has, or that piping hot has with the ocean. And then, seeing the degradation of the ocean and
feeling like we need to play a role in creating solutions to protect oceans in the future. So our ambitions in this area emerged from a pretty sincere purpose to
protect oceans and then to
help families save money effectively, to be able to provide sustainable software for families.
And did you then have to go on a similar journey that we've been talking about here, of going well, hang on a second. We better assess
our product lines and our suppliers and our, you know, all of these different scopes. Scope 1, 2, and 3. Did you go through all these processes? Yeah, absolutely. I mean. Gunter talked about a holistic strategy, and we've really applied a holistic strategy. We had to define
what we wanted to achieve with our products and what we meant by protecting oceans and helping families save money. We really focused on the product impact using that industry data because that's the best that was available to us at this time.
and we started with recycled polyester in 2018. That was a kind of really interesting experience for us to be able to actually go to our supply chain and say what would happen if we were to replace virgin polyester with recycled polyester? How do we make this work. And how do we deliver this to our existing customers, who are all across Australia buying our product through target
in that decision? Initially, it was about
really focusing on ocean pollution. But as we started to develop the same strategy across all of our material portfolio, we expanded that to a low impact material strategy which was looking at measurements of water, energy, and waste which are all relevant to what you know. The ocean impact of our clothes and emissions is really
key part of that mix because you can. You know, just recently there's some pretty devastating statistics about the impact of rising temperatures on
the Great Barrier Reef and many other areas. So
in learning that our decision to move to recycled polyester not only
started to take that step away from relying on fossil fuels and virgin fossil fuels, but also cut our emissions.
We were kind of ready to make that apply to all of our different products, because recycled polyesters are fascinating thing in a way, because it.
you know, from an ocean perspective, it doesn't solve one of the problems you would have had, which is microplastics like, if you know, if I wear my
board shorts made out of a fossil fuel plastic, and it has microplastics come off. If I use a recycled thing. It's going to have the same problem. But you're right by changing to recycled polyester. You're going to reduce the carbon footprint substantially, you're going to start solving part of the circular economy and those kind of things. So you realise that you was kind of
it was a difficult journey in a sense. Did you kind of did you find that? Did you kind of bump into things and go? Oh, no, this is solving half of our problems, but not the others. Yeah, absolutely. It's all fraught with danger. And then you speak to different scientists who have different views. You know, Gunter spoke about the data. There can be parts where you think you're thinking about. You know what you can impact from the design perspective.
And at the same time a lot of the end of life
impact of our clothes is out of our control in terms of how often are people wearing our clothes, and what are they doing with it? And how are they washing it? And and all of that? So we really focus on the bits that we can control? And our approach is really progress over perfection if we can. You know, we started with one fiber we've moved to, you know, more sustainable cotton
we now kind of had this ambitious step to commit to research with the University of Technology, Sydney and Peter's team to be able to develop
an alternative to polyester. So we can move away from recycled polyester altogether and solve that problem that you're so that's the kind of journey as you go. You know, virgin virgin polyester made from fossil fuels, recycled polyester, made from fossil fuels. Now the next step is going. Can we make this from algae or other bio products? That's where you are at the moment. How? How far along that journey are you? What what secrets can you tell us? It's okay. We'll keep it quiet amongst Ush. Everyone.
Look, I'd I'd love to be able to talk about this more. But I'm kind of under wraps on that. I've got nothing to say, absolutely nothing to say, Amy's the boss. But you have made some, for instance, footwear from bioplastics. And that kind of stuff. Did that utilise algae or other bioplastics at this point. Yeah, absolutely. So at all, piping hot shoes have 5% of algae in their soles.
And the 5% sounds like a very small amount. However, we've got 25% of recycled content in there and then. The remaining part is really so that we can meet the safety standards for footwear. You probably haven't thought about that as a characteristic, but for the polymer to be able to perform to the needs of, you know, going to the beach and everywhere else that you might need to go with the shoes we need to mix. 5% is kind of the amount that we can commit to at this point. The thing that was really exciting about that of adding that 5% of algae into our shoes is actually that impact because the algae is actually retrieved from polluted waters.
And so it has already cleaned water and air, and then is an alternative to the virgin plastic that we would otherwise put in that portion of the shoe. So it kind of again progress over perfection. Just put it in there, be able to tell that story, but also for us, it's that measurable impact because we're measuring less water, less energy, less waste for each of our products so overall by having every single piping hot product is made from those low impact materials. That means we've got a substantive reduction in water energy and waste compared to the conventional materials that we were making every single product out of 5 years ago.Yeah. And again, it comes back to what you're measuring. You manage. And you get to step forward that way, Julie, I'll come to you. Can you talk us through what Ulu is, and where does it fit into this, you know? Are you part of the potential solution for these kind of companies.
Yeah, so thank you very much for inviting us to present here. So we'll do in a nutshell. What we're doing is we're cooking seaweed. And then that seaweed soup we feed into a bacteria that gets fed with our product. The name of our product is PHAs, so PHAs are natural materials. They mimic plastic very well.But they are made with natural resources, and at the end of the life you can choose between reusing, recycling and most importantly, home compost. So it gives you the optionality at the end of its life.
Yeah, we are very excited about bringing this upstream solution into the mix and hopefully help build a bioeconomy with this progressive seaweed derived materials. Do you call Phi? Do you call? Is it a bioplastic. Would you call it that? Or do you try and distinguish it from a bioplastic? Yeah. So that again depends. Which scientist you? You ask him. I'm actually part of an oceanographer by background, and I fall in love with this material, and then decided that the best way to that to reality is through to a for profit. But I come from.
Yeah, from their research side. And one side Giga have is with this non-for-profit called Go, Pha, and what we're trying to convince the policymakers is that PHA belongs on the same class as like, let's say, silk and cardboard and natural materials, because plastics or bioplastics. They are what we call synthetics. So they are human made. We invented a new polymer that nature didn't know.And therefore it's hard to put in a bio recycling environment. And these PHAs, they are created by bacteria. Cellulose is going to be the tree. And what's special about those natural materials is that nature produce them so nature can biodegrade more easily. So, in my opinion, answering your question, I would say, PHA is not a plastic, but it depends who you ask. But but you're actually seeking to replace plastics, aren't you? So what you're creating a kind of feedstock?
What can you make out of that?So yeah, what's special about PHAs is that, despite it being a natural material, it mimics plastic so well that when you touch and feel that you believe it's plastic. So what is special about this natural material is that it repels water. So it's waterproof. It's windproof.
And you can melt and remelt. So you can actually recycle, just just like plastic. So in theory, we can go into any anywhere where plastic goes, we can go with PHA. Technically, of course, production cost has to go down for us to be able to to do that. I'm glad you brought up cost. That's the next question I'm going to get to just quickly, because you just said it repels water. This is one of the things that I have constantly struggled with in the kind of war and waste documentaries is because people go hey, you know, we're replacing plastic with a bioplastic. And then actually, legislation nowadays tends to ban bioplastics. The same way it bans plastics, because, for instance, you're an ocean background.If you say, if I make a plastic that can repel water and is as strong as plastic, and I make it out of algae. If I drop it back in the ocean it still won't break down in the ocean, it will remain. It will create the same problem that a fossil fuel plastic will, won't it?
So, Phas, this class of material is going to behave a little bit like cellulose. It has a biodegradability profile very similar to wood. Let's say so. Here we have, like a little wax comb. So on this surfing team made with Phas. So if you touch it. It feels like plastic. Of course, if you lost that at sea, it's going to take a while, just like if it was made of wood.
But yeah, if it releases microplastics which have a much wider surface area for those microbes to attack the material, it's going to biodegrade eventually. So it's technically what we call marine biodegradable. You can go. There's a Tuv certification in Europe that you can actually call it marine biodegradable, just like wood is.
But that doesn't mean that you can be throwing wood or Phas in the ocean. Expect it to disappear in 2 days. It depends on the material type. It depends on the shape of your object, and it also depends the environment where the object is. So let's say, a home compost.
Much more bacteria in there to consume that, Pha. The ocean is cold and much less microbe. So it takes. It takes a while. We'll come back to the waste side of it later on, Peter, when you're talking about
Making something that looks like plastic or works like plastic. And you say, but we've changed the process we're using. We're using algae. Now.
What are the benefits from a carbon perspective, from a climate change perspective there.
That goes exactly back to what Estanium is doing. So if we can find replacement components to go into producing. You know the plastic housing on my phone. If we can take out half of the fossil carbon and replace it with a biogenic carbon. Then it's going to halve its product carbon footprint that's going to then store the carbon in our useful devices. So I think what
Estanium is doing and what I think a lot of the bioeconomy is going to be doing is looking for ways that we can find
Drop in technology that can go into making products that we, the community needs to buy every year we need to. I don't want to be throwing my phone out or throwing my plastic casing out all the time. But this is a way we can store atmospheric carbon by
Using existing supply chains and just substituting a bio
Raw material and taking out the fossil. One
Is algae, though better than some
Biomaterials, because so, for instance.
I've read life cycle assessments of a lot of bioplastics nowadays are based on corn. Right? Yep.
And if you actually look at lifecycle and you go. What we did is we cut down a forest, and we planted lots of corn, and then we dug up the corn, and then we used that to make this plastic, and you look at it, and you look at it and go
Hang on a second. This is worse than a fossil fuel. Sometimes that happens at times.
Does algae overcome some of those problems because of where it can be grown, whether it be in your lava lamp, in your office, or in the ocean, or wherever it is, does it overcome some of those problems, because not all by products are the same absolutely. And this is where the food versus fuel debate comes in. We cannot be growing algae in land that should be arable. We need to be growing food
In those lands. Algae grows in saline water. Algae grows in wastewater algae grows in brine water. Algae grows in the ocean, so places that we're not currently using. We can grow the biomass. And I think that's really important. Some of our partners are using wastewater from aquaculture
That is doing a service to making sure that the water that leaves that farm doesn't pollute the rivers. But it's also making a product that we can use. So understanding where algae doesn't compete with
Land production, that's what we want to use. So that's 1 of the benefits there, Alex, we heard Amy talking about. You know the challenge of making this new product that's also affordable
When you are dealing with companies to try and get a product here. You're trying to smash these amazing things of science that we've created here. But you've also got this criteria of.
But it has to be affordable. And you know we've got to be able to sell us in target, and that how much does that constrain the kind of
Big sky thinking of scientists. And how much is that? The exciting part of the challenge?
Yeah, it can definitely form part of the challenge. But I guess the exciting part is that
I think when I started this job, I thought, you know. Oh, my gosh, it's going to be huge multinationals coming to us. They want to change the planet. They've got all the money. They're going to do all these amazing things. It's not. It's small businesses, it's startups. It's people that are more agile that are taking this risk upon themselves and investing in research and going. Yeah, we know this is going to be expensive, potentially in the short term. But this isn't a short-term problem, and we can't come up with short-term solutions.
So it's really interesting to see that it's smaller companies and people that are entrepreneurial, that are jumping in on this.
And that's, I think, the most exciting part. And you know, as Amy said, it's that kind of incremental change. You know, it's that continually reiterating and going. Okay, we're going to get you a product that is 40% algae. And it's going to be expensive. But then we think we can get up to 50%, and we might get it cheaper. And guess what? There's a new farm down the road that has this seaweed as waste. So we think we can then go cheaper. And I think that's the thing right is, we're so used to stuff happening so quickly.
But all this research stuff takes a long time. And it's taken us a long time to have this problem on our planet. So you know, it is going to take us a little bit of time to come up with those solutions that are going to get us over that next step. But I think that's the most exciting part is it's these smaller people who are going. Yeah, I want to start tackling this. I'm going to take this risk upon myself. I'm going to put my business on the line, and I want to come up with a solution.
Can I just put an extra point to where Alex was going. It's the Smalls, the SMEs that are going to take on the risk. But we've also got to have leadership from entire industries. And I think that's where Estonian fits in, where you've got the car industry. You've got the chemical industry, you know, we would love to have the construction industry, to have entire industries thinking about these problems. That takes leadership. And it's not coming from the SMEs and the small guys. We've got to have both ends of the market, both ends of industry solving these problems. And I think that's a key part, and I'll come back to the stadium in 2 seconds. I just want to quickly to wrap up that point. There.
What's what I find fascinating about piping hot, in a way is that you know we're not talking about the Byron Bay Boutique, where you pay you know, an extra 50 bucks, because it's organic, and it's got a low carbon footprint. It's got this kind of thing you're selling on target. You don't have a green premium of this kind of thing. That's that's a much bigger challenge, in a way. But what I love about that challenge is, it's also about getting it to a much bigger audience, which is what we have to do. I kind of, I'm you know, I'm not interested in selling green products to greenies. I'm interested in selling green products to everyone. So how much harder has that made it? I'll start with you, Alex, and then come to you, Amy.
Where do I start? Okay, how? How has that made it harder? I think the whole thing is, you know. This stuff needs to be accessible. So it needs to come from a lot of different people, a lot of different businesses. And honestly, it needs to happen over and over and over and over again. You know, it's not just about one product being more accessible to people that's more climate, friendly or captures more carbon. It's like, when people start to realise this is happening with all the different products that we consume on a daily basis. Then I think it starts to become a bigger solution altogether. It's not just these incremental tiny things in one particular industry. So I think. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. And people I don't think charging a green payment on things. I mean, I have all sorts of thoughts on that.
But it can kind of also come with its own issues right? Like, if you're charging more because a product is more sustainable, you're automatically pricing out a whole bunch of people that maybe do want to make a change, but aren't able to access it in the same sorts of ways, which is kind of wrong. And yeah, yes, look, don't get me started. Every tax should be done in a way so that the most environmentally friendly option is the cheapest option. It just doesn't happen right now. Why doesn't yeah. Why doesn't that happen? We might get to that later on. So yeah, Amy, how do? How do you juggle this kind of balance of going? We have to be affordable, but we're trying to do the right thing. It's it's difficult.
Yeah, look, when we started on this journey, we transformed every aspect of our business and our operations. So you know, we directed our funds in a different way. We're buying in a different way. We're speaking to our suppliers in a different way. And it is a really beneficial relationship for us to have distribution through Target, because it does enable us to be able to deliver across the country. And we're not fighting to win over lots of small retailers like independent surf stores to say, Buy these products, you know, and then they feel like it's a risk. We've been in partnership with Target since the 1990s, and at the same time we are under no illusions that I would say more than 80% of the customers who buy our product from Target have no idea that we're actually doing anything in relation to sustainability, because when you shop in that kind of store, you have no one to tell you that because of greenwashing concerns and all those things, we have the opportunity for us to communicate what we're doing to our customers at the point of purchase is a swing tag on the side of a product.
And that the wording on that is so carefully guarded and checked because we have to have all of the background to say. How confident are we that that product contains. Algae contains recycled content that we are, you know. Recently we had to prove that actually, we are actually doing anything for clean oceans. I say all of that because the challenge remains in a difficult retail economic environment that the product still needs to look good. Fit, well, perform with quality, compete with everything else on the floor. And so it's absolutely a challenge. Huge barriers. There, Gupta, I want to come back to you and talk about a stadium, and also you work with Siemens and Sea Green. Do you notice on an international level when you're dealing with countries that have. You know, positive climate policies and CBAM, and that the companies that come from that background are coming to you and saying, How do we solve this problem? We need the data, and that whereas countries that may be well and truly behind. And I potentially throw Australia into that mix are much less likely to be approaching you, and realising that this is the next step they have to be doing.
So you're asking if if we can see a differentiation, how how companies are acting on that when we're approaching. So, yeah. Do you see that European companies that have grown up with carbon taxes and with CBAM coming in that are much more proactive in looking into their product carbon footprint than our countries from world. Perhaps you know America or Australia, for instance.
I think it's more on a company level, I mean, when you look at the top 500 companies, all of them normally have already a sustainable pledge out there, and they are, of course, depending that they are delivering on this pledge. Because they are on the international stock market. So there are different reasons. So first of all, of course, they are measured by their impact and sustainability impact. And if you have a pledge out. Of course you have to to. First of all, you have to set a target that is very important, and this target must be publicly, of course. Published, and then you have to to take actions accordingly to the target. And you need to allow that you have that you are going to be measured on these targets. And then, of course, you have to prove that you are getting the impacts by by these measurements. So yes, of course, we see this. And when we are looking into the Siemens.
We, we are have actively, of course, supplier development programs, and also our politics in place where we actively asking our suppliers what they are doing to going into direction of net zero, and how they are reducing and how they are contributing to reduce the carbon emissions. And that is a part of the supplier evaluation. And then there is a regular. Of course we check this regularly with our suppliers, and if we see, of course, then we are also supporting them by making more impact in reducing their carbon emissions. So and as also we see them, that our customers are asking us this. So yes, there is a huge tendency of the industry in this direction. It comes with the upcoming regulations, and also not only to to this, let's say. Pledge what what they have given out and the stock market. And but it's there's also pressure from from regulations. And there is, of course, from society. A lot of, let's say, awareness and and companies needs to react accordingly. And last, but not least, also, the financial market are more and more supporting sustainable companies with lower credits and financing programs. So there we see a lot of reasons and activities in this area.
And I like that answer because it shows that there are so many different pressures. It's coming from the community. It's coming from people who purchase things. It's coming from the financial community, it's coming from policy. It comes from so many different aspects. And I think whenever I get asked, what's the most important thing. It's like, well, kind of everything. Let's just look at everything. Talking about that, Alex. You worked on developing the Australian algae industry white paper.
What are the main changes in policy or incentives or financial incentives that you need to see algae become the thing?
So I guess to give a bit of context. So the global algae industry, people may be surprised to know that in Europe and America, the algae industry is actually quite big. They are probably 10 years ahead of us in terms of the number of farms, the policy that supports it, the financing that supports it, the types of products you get on shelves like if you go into any of those like super expensive supermarkets in the US. Probably seen them all on, you know, your Instagram and that sort of thing. So many of those products have algae stuff in it, and they charge through the roof for it. So it's a really big industry. When we look at Australia, the question I get asked whenever we go overseas is:
Why don't you guys have more companies? Because you have the land. You have the species. You have such a collection of researchers that occur in Australia like there is a really big cluster of these people in Australia, yet the number of businesses we can kind of count on a couple of hands, which is pretty wild. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. So when I started right?
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, let's ask one of those businesses. Now, I mean, Julia, what are the you know? Obviously, people are going. Why don't you have more of these companies in Australia? Do you find it hard to compete with others overseas doing this like? Is Ulu trying to compete with others overseas? Or have you got a unique product? You think? Here.
I mean, we take it a different approach with like we're competing with fossil plastic, which is a massive market. And what we see is that by getting together we're stronger, because it's very often that you go to a large brand. Be it a car manufacturer, or furniture or packaging, and maybe single use packaging? Not so much. But you're like, have you heard about Phas? Have you heard about how we grow seaweed, and that there is some seaweed for us to start in Southeast Asia, and there is a lot around educating the market, and I think that we get a great culture with the vast majority of the seaweed businesses. And we try to kind of collaborate and work on different because we're basically inventing a supply chain from scratch. And there is so much that needs to be done that's not going to be one single win. You know it's all the way from cultivating that seaweed. Getting the sugars and the protein separated in the right way. Then producing those raw materials, turning them into pellets, be it aqua feed pellets or plastic pellets, and then making them into products, is such a massive problem that
I like to be optimistic as well. When I started to work on the plastic pollution and climate change, space back in well, climate change was 2002, and then plastic. In 2009.
We were so behind, on where we're at at least the conscience is there. And people are aware of those problems. And I think we just need to accelerate that change. So I think from my perspective, I'm thankful where we're at. Of course, we need to keep going and accelerating that. But overall. I think we're in a good trajectory. And I think this audience is a good example. Yeah. And also, when you talked about Alex, you mentioned Australia being a good place for this, Peter?
What are the advantages? What are the natural advantages we have in Australia? You know what gives us a competitive advantage? Why are we in a good position for biomanufacturing here?
So I think what's going to happen is we need to be aware, as Julia mentioned, supply chains and biomanufacturing. To keep the carbon costs down, we need to grow the biomass. Whether or not it's trees, seaweeds, microalgae. We need to grow them close to the production facility. And I think that's what the change in biomanufacturing is going to be is that we're going to have supply chain production very close. And so that means we're not going to grow the algae here in Australia, ship it to China or to Europe to produce. And I think that's why we shouldn't see Australia as being behind. But we should be part of the international market, and we've just got to find out which of the markets we're going to be working in because we're not. The technology that we've got is appropriate across the globe. But you're going to grow your biomass next to where you do the production. You are not going to be shipping seaweed or algal biomass across the globe. I mean that always. It always does my head in. Actually, when you kind of look at a bioplasting, it's like what we ship this from some cornfield in America. It's like I always go. That seems insane. But anyway, I'm glad we're going to grow it here. Now let's go to the end of life of these types of products now.
And, Gunther, I want to start with you when you're assessing the actual product carbon footprint of a product.
Do you assess the end of life, the disposal of it? Or are you just looking at it up to the point of leaving the factory and going out to be sold?
At the A, for when when we are from the stanium Association point of view, we are looking from a cradle to grave so completely, of course. So it is important that we are tracking. I say, always we are tracking the carbon along the complete life, and looking forward that they are also. Then
Taking out of the atmosphere and stored when we are looking on the available solutions, what we have at the moment. And here it is at the moment most seen that the products are going from
From the let's say, from the the start of the production till the point where they are delivered to the user. So there are just a few products on the market which really are, where you're tracking over the whole life cycle of their impact by a company.
So we are from a stadium, looking from cradle to grave, and solutions are there just from till to only upstream, not downstream. Let's say, what is the problem here?
If you really would like to track and trace carbon emissions, you need to verify them. So you need to verify the data you are collecting. So when you, when somebody gives you an information, then, normally, you can trust this information, which is, let's say.
Only possible. If you have a close relation with them, or you are allowed to look into their processes to get proof of it.
But in normal business relations you are not allowed to look into the processes, because normally you get access to confidential information.
So when you are then getting information, you need the approved or verifiable credentials.
And then when it goes to multiple uses, then downstream. Then, of course, you have the problem, who is the consumer behavior? And so on. So that's still a problem, which is, it's difficult to solve. So but for industrial part, yes, we have a complete solution in place where we get the proof of each production step, and it's verified without disclosing the confidential information
And the aim. We are aiming, of course, to close this loop completely and get the track.
But there are also some examples out there which are trying to close this loop. We are working on a holistic carbon ecosystem with governments in Mexico where we are really trying to close this loop. But here you need systemic level collaboration. You need to really work together
With the governments and and with the industry. And of course, with academia.
Yeah, absolutely. And, Amy, I guess that the consumer point goes to what you were mentioning right at the beginning was like, Hey, we're trying to do all these good things and change the place. But we can't actually track every person that buys our board shorts and go. So just email us back. Did you wear it a hundred times, or did you wear it 3 times and throw it out or chuck it in the ocean? You know it's hard for you to follow that kind of whole process, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So. I think we have the kind of 2 approaches. One is that in that period of design we think about what the end of life will be in the generalised, you know. Is it biodegradable? Will it, you know, live forever like a you know, a plastic.
Where what's the trajectory? If you, if you look at cradle to grave, however, when we measure our product impact, which is something that we do so that we can more closely assess and then communicate to our customers what we're doing in terms of our environmental steps.
We look at the cradle to store because that is, we feel much more confident about that accuracy, and we can control that part. Once it goes out there. We just want to be able to on our side, know that. Yes, we've considered what the very end of life will be, whether or not someone wears a garment several times. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to track that. The reason I ask that. And I'm interested in it. But, Peter, I'll come to you on this. Let's look at this comb I've been given that's been made of a natural product, and I'll come to you on this, Julie, obviously as well. In Australia. At the moment, a recent study showed that most bioplastics that are used end up in landfill in Australian landfills.
When a bioplastic breaks down, it breaks down anaerobically. So it breaks down without oxygen, which, like food and other organic processes, leads to methane. So do we need to be changing if we're going to be changing our system to be, you know, changing to bioproducts like this? Do we need to be changing our whole end of life process as well. Because at the moment. If I chuck that into landfill, it's going to have a negative impact, isn't it? Absolutely so? What we've got to start valuing is the carbon, the carbon that's in that comb. We need to put a value on it so that it's not disposed of. I'm going to take the example, a little bit bigger than the comb. I'm going to imagine this carpet on the floor. Or imagine wall panellings or ceiling panellings. Imagine the construction industry which is the largest emitter of Co. 2.
Imagine if the construction industry valued its carbon and it stuck carbon into these floor panels, and we sold that carbon as a carbon offset, and the building valued that carbon said, Okay, for the next 10 years I'm going to recognise the value of that. And when I do rip it up, and if I do put it in landfill, I'm going to lose my carbon credits for it. So I think there is a strategy that governments around the world can start valuing carbon in products bigger than a comb. But certainly the same concept. Yeah. But it's interesting.
But Julia, like it's an interesting balance for you, right? Because you can. Probably right now you can probably sell to the public a lot easier if you say we've created this product out of algae and unlike plastic that stays in landfill for a thousand years. This breaks down in the environment right? That'll sell a lot better. I know this, everyone always comes up to me. Oh, I love this because it doesn't. The worst thing about plastic is, it doesn't break down in landfill. And I say to them ironically, that's the best part of plastic. It doesn't break down in landfill. So it's actually a carbon store. It's a fossil fuel that's been dug up and put back in landfill, and will stay there for a thousand years ironically. The only good thing about plastic. So you have a challenge, in a sense, because to the public you can probably go. I'll make this breakdown product. But if we did kind of track it, if you said actually, I can make this comb, or whatever you're making. I could make this as long lasting as normal fossil fuel plastics. But I'll make it out of algae, and I will store that carbon for a thousand years. That's another way you can go. That's that's a kind of challenge for you at the moment, and we don't really have the. You know what needs to change for you to make those different decisions.
Yeah, it's and I think it's like, in terms of, we made 2 design decisions from Start. One is upstream related to upstream, which is using seaweed rather than fossil fuels or land crops as the input, material. And the other one was Phas, as the material that we're going to make that we're going to produce with that series. And that's really thinking about that end of life. And and I think you know people say, Oh, but if the waxcomb is not made of plastic, it's not going to last a lot, or if your textile, which this one is also made of seaweed with the same material as that one, if it's made like that, my T-shirt is not going to last, and you can ask your grandmother things used to last longer before the plastic come in.
And we had much more homecompost as well and better ways to deal with it. So I think that it, for me at least, is their realization that there is no such a thing as things lasting forever. You know it's good to get the carbon make something but the carpet or this textile of their waxcomb. At some point we need to find a solution for that. And I think for those working on the material space. It's very important to give the optionality of either going to recycling or going to compost now. Us alone. We're not going to solve the problem like, for instance, Ulu does not want to go to single-use packaging, yet people say, why not work on single use in packaging. That's where they need Phas.
The issue there is that we need 1st to scale composting. So not only home composting, but also community composting where the Phas and the food waste can go into, because otherwise you have the seaweed grabbing the Co. 2 becoming a product. And then that product ends up on the landfill, where that carbon is released as methane, and the methane is more powerful as a gas than the carbon so overall. We do not want either your food or your biological materials to end up on the landfill, so we need to make landfill something of the past. But the interesting thing about what I think Peter was talking about earlier. Where you talk about this becoming a carbon store. Is this the next step? Because if we take it in to our product. We store it for 20 years. We put it into compost. Essentially what you get. There is a biogenic process which is neutral. So it doesn't create any more carbon dioxide. It just releases it through the, you know, in a perfect composting situation. It releases it. But, Peter, you're talking about the next step which is going? No, no, no, we're not releasing, we're storing it.
Do you think that's do you think we're actually able to do that like? What? What products can we really? And how long do you have to store it for? Like, if I'm going to say my roofing panel is made out of algae. How long do I have to prove that that's stored for 100 years? A 1,000 years do I have to prove that my great grandson will have this roofing panel? No, no, so so that there's options. So there's another plastic that this one is seaweed based, and that one is permanent plastic. So if that's put into landfill, it stays there, and it doesn't break down quickly.
There's a lot of options for us to use landfills that don't make methane as vaults, so that if things don't break down we can store that carbon, and it's out of the atmosphere. It's not functional. It's not useful, but at least it's stored out of the atmosphere. I think a lot of the plastics we need to be using is ones that can be repurposed. So you take this plastic. You use it for 10 years as a chair, you chip it, and you remould it into a tabletop, and you use it for another 10 years, but if it does break down, you're going to have that as methane, as Julia said. And so this is one of the challenges is, where do you store the carbon.
And the more carbon is stored in commodities that we need every day, the better we're going to fix the planet. So this is where carbon is now seen as a good guy. If we can stick it into products, permanent products. And Alex, as I said, you've done the white paper on this.
Is this something that is government thinking about this? Is there kind of conversations happening about this stuff, or are we like, how far ahead are we looking here? Yeah. So I think there's conversations happening around particular circularity, right? I think everyone in the last couple of years has become very familiar with the term like circular economy. I feel like a few years ago, maybe Pre Covid. We didn't even know that that was a thing, but I think circularity is certainly a thing that's becoming more prevalent. And how can we start to introduce biological processes as a part of that circular process.
I think, in terms of using some of our like, what we call nature-based solutions, which is, you know, can we implement something like algae that helps us to treat wastewater, and then also turn that into a product that stores carbon. It's becoming, I think, more at the front of people's minds, and we're starting to see it more and more pop up in government policy in places like the US. This has been happening for a really long time, and they put, I'm not joking, billions of dollars behind implementing these solutions at scale.
So we have a blueprint, for how countries can take this and scale it and implement these solutions and start to make massive changes. So I think it's happening. But I think one of the things that we were talking about beforehand was, you know, we talk a lot about solutions. I think that's one of the big things that a lot of these people on the panel have in common is we talk about solutions right? But you can talk about solutions till the cows come home. If people don't know that there's a problem, then they're not going to start investing in the solution. So I think it's almost like, sometimes we have to take a step back and start talking a little bit more about the problem, and why there are certain things that are solutions, and why Australia might be perfectly positioned to innovate in these solutions. Then it starts to become more of a thing that we can start to see happen and change and make a difference.
Well, I personally find algae, and I've learned a lot about algae tonight, and I find it fascinating, and I'll be watching algae for a great deal for the rest of the future. Now let's go to the audience here, and...
My God! Like algae, it has grown while we've been having this conversation. It's massive. So put your hand up. If you have a question and we'll try and get a microphone to you, all right. So...
We've got a question over here. We'll go over this side.
Hello.
Is algae related to wastewater treatment plants in any way?
As in used in wastewater treatment plants.
Yeah, it is. There's a couple of places in Australia, where they're using algae to polish the last stage of wastewater treatment. So suck up those last bits of nutrients before it goes into rivers and is re-released as like safe water, and I think in the States it's been used for a very, very long time, and then they take that algae and turn it into things like printer ink on Patagonia swing tags. So you're saying that the saying you can't polish a turd is wrong, thanks to algae.
Yes, this is amazing. We're going to have to change sayings as well. This is what about polish? A turd, unless it's with algae. Yeah, there you go. There's a t-shirt for your scientists. Quick! Hands up!
Do you want to grab it, sir? Do you want to take it up to the second row there, so we'll go there next. No, no. Are you okay?
Yes, I'm wearing an a made of nylon flowers.
And I want to know whether I could make these out of algae rather than nylon.
You've got the ream in front of you. Yeah. Okay, well, that's that's a cellulose-based product that's come from seaweeds. So yes, we could, we could make it. Julia's got a swatch of fabric. So yes, absolutely in a heartbeat.
And this is it, the bioplastics can generally make the same things, and they can look the same way and replace it. And that's their power.
But it's also the difficulty, for you know, a system going forward. We've got to be able to distinguish between them. You know...
I got a question up here. Yes, sir.
Madam, I can't even see you, but I have no idea who you are. I'm an old fogey born in the 1940s. Everything was made to last, or it came out of nature. So it didn't cause the problems that we have these days. I've been looking at waste issues for since 1993,
And to me, it seems that we need to put a value on products when we buy them.
I would like to know what you think about it.
If we buy products, that there's a carbon price as a deposit, and it needs to be a meaningful deposit, and when the thing cannot be repaired we return it. We get our deposit back.
Just like with bottles.
But industry must take it back. Industry must be responsible for their waste. It is not our waste.
I mean, I think it's called extended producer responsibility. Yes.
Look, where are we moving? There has been an you know, kind of...
And look into extended producer responsibility in Australia. It's done at a very limited level. Is that from anyone on the panel? Is that an important part of making a step forward is bringing in this extended producer responsibility where companies have to take back their products and deal with it at the end of life.
Absolutely. There was a perfect point taken by sorry the the person I didn't remember the name.
Yes.
When we are looking and when we are thinking through the circularity approach? No. So when we are going through the air, zero so refuse completely. No, maybe in here. So also refusing is the first step. No, don't do it, don't build it, don't buy it. And then you go over, then rethink, and then you're coming to the repair, refurbish reuse, and then recycle.
When we think it through, then at the end, we must admit that it leads to new business models and the new business model is that we are not. And and this is just hypothetical, that we at the end, we are not selling products. The industry is not selling products, they are leasing them, or they are, so they stay the owner, and with the responsibility, of course, when it goes through the old R. 9 topics that the industry at the end needs to take the product back, or at least to be responsible for the materials used after at least this life of this product. And I totally agree to this. What we just said.
Yes, it certainly. It enforces. Oh, sorry going to go.
And I, I would like just to name that we are that the industry goes into this direction. And I, I would like to give you 2 examples, the automotive industry goes into this direction.
So when I look on the project, Catina X, it's it's, of course, that's a more and a European project. But here the complete cycle needs to be applied. So the circularity cycle. So the automotive industry is getting to be responsible for taking back their product, and also from the industry I just bring this. This is our product. We are laser printing on QR code on it.
And with this QR code, we have a digital twin of the product which allows us to identify our products during their lifecycle. When the customer scans them, they receive recommendations based on the product's health situation—whether it should be repaired, refurbished, or recycled, and where to do so. We are actively pursuing this direction and taking actions accordingly.
That would make it a lot easier if it was a QR code on things, so we could figure out what to do with it. That's great. Let's move on to another question from the audience. We've got one here in the blue.
I thank you very much for this evening, and I really applaud all of you working on solutions at the production end. The real issue, though, is what we do with it at the waste end. The segregation seems to be the issue. All of the products you're discussing will get mixed in with plastics and metals and end up in landfill.
I’ve spent a lot of time visiting waste transfer stations and landfills, and even staff at those places cannot recognize the different products, so everything just gets pushed into a big hole. Isn’t that where the challenge lies? Doesn’t this really affect the viability of your products if there isn’t a meaningful process at the end?
Yes, that's a very good question, and I take it personally because I'm an ocean scientist. I started by looking at wildlife and finding so much plastic. Then I looked into waste management in places like Indonesia and saw children surrounded by plastic.
You realize that addressing the problem upstream is crucial. For instance, with a container for cosmetics, if it's made of black plastic, it might be compostable or recyclable in certain ways, but not easily. If it ends up in landfill, it’s problematic. We need to change the materials and address recycling issues. Bioplastics could disrupt plastic recycling or contaminate compost, adding to the problem. Food waste is massive, with methane release contributing to the issue.
Making the feedstock easier to process—whether at home, business, or government level—is vital. Extended producer responsibility means companies need to take back products and manage their end-of-life. If everything gets mixed together, it becomes an absolute nightmare. So, addressing this issue involves improving upstream solutions and making end-of-life processes more effective.
Hi! My name is John Phipps. I have a question for Peter Ralph about the potential for algae to be used as a feedstock for biochar or hydrochar, and whether that process can be carbon negative.
Yes, absolutely. There are many opportunities with biochar using algae, specifically seaweed. However, biochar is often seen as a last step in the process. It’s a low-value product compared to high-value products made from algae. But biochar is important for carbon storage, increasing soil carbon, and is definitely a part of future solutions.
I want to hear more about how the leasing model of the economy with plastic recycling will work. Can I lease some piping hot pants?
Not at the moment, but the fashion industry is exploring leasing and renting clothes. People might be more comfortable leasing higher-cost items rather than swimwear, for instance. The leasing model tends to work better for higher-cost or occasional items.
There are also take-back schemes and new technologies for recycling textiles. For example, removing polyester from T-shirts and hoodies can help apply circular design principles. Recycling textiles to textiles is challenging due to the volume needed and sourcing issues. Technologies like Samsara Eco in Australia are recycling nylon to nylon, which is promising.
If people knew their track pants were made from fossil fuels, would they choose something without polyester? I’ve always hoped so. We once did a stunt showing people that their clothing was made from oil, and they were mystified.
They were doubly mystified by it. So no, I think most people it's like people are coming to terms with this. Now, when you talk about polyesters and this kind of stuff. People do not know the next process. I mean, people in this room probably do. But it's not the major thing. So that's part of the education process that has to go on as well. Yeah.We'll go to the audience. We've probably got time for one to two more questions. Yes, so you've got the mic there. Yes, yeah. Hi, a question about scalability. So we're at around 50 gigatons per year of emissions in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Even by mid-century, the net in net zero is perhaps 10 billion tons a year of drawdown that we need to do so. How well can these algae-based solutions scale, because it feels like an awful lot of plastic combs.
I don't think we're solely relying on the plastic combs. I mean, that's doing about 10 billion gigatons. No, I'm kidding. Well, I think there's three parts to that one. Do we have a choice? No, we have to do something.
Two, I don't think algae is the only solution to all of this. There are a lot of other solutions out there, but I think it has a really important part to play. And three, yeah, they're totally scalable. Like when we think about it's not just. And this is why it's so exciting. Right? It's not just about plastic combs. It's about new fabrics. It's about new sources of food. It's about new animal feed. It's about aviation fuel, you know. These are all industries that are huge in terms of their emissions and are going to have to find a solution really, really quickly, and it might not be about completely substituting out every single carbon-emitting product that they're using. It's that kind of step change thing. But you know, I think when we look at it, they are scalable. It's going to take a lot of other solutions packed in there as well. But we also don't have the choice. You know. There's no looking back now, the only way to go is mitigation, and when this is such a great option, particularly when it targets so many different industries, it's completely viable.
Can I ask a question on the kind of financial model? Because when you start saying we can store carbon here, some people, some environmental people, will start getting suspicious because they're like, you know. Obviously the question of storing carbon has been, hey, we're going to build a gas plant in Western Australia. We're going to store carbon through this mechanism. It hasn't worked, or whatever. But you know, sometimes it's seen as the people who are the fossil fuel polluters are using it as an excuse for continuing their business model.
How do we ensure that the storage of carbon in algae is done by subtracting something from the atmosphere that doesn't need to be done or is not linked to just continuing the business model of carbon polluters?
I'll take that bullet. I do apologise last minute bullet. So so this CCS carbon capture and storage we've got to move to carbon capture and use. And that's what we've been talking about. Today it's all about how to use the carbon as opposed to store it.
The other thing is the elephant in the room. Alex touched on it, and this comes back to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We've got to start thinking about fuels so sustainable aviation fuel. The US is looking at 3 billion tons of biomass they need to find by 2030. So this is a whole raft of biomass, algae and seaweed is in that puzzle.
And this is not taking the carbon out of the atmosphere. But it's replacement. So we're going to create sustainable aviation fuels, using biogenic sources, not fossil sources. That carbon is going to come out of the atmosphere, go into a sustainable aviation fuel, get used and go back in. But that's going to at least stop us taking the original fuel from the ground. So I think at scale, we can address some of these big problems and start mitigating the issue with warming the planet.
That's good. I don't know about you, but I feel more positive after this conversation. There are many more questions here. Unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap now, but our panelists, apart from Gunter, will be outside afterwards, as you can ask some questions there. I'd like to thank. Please put your hands together for our panelists, Gunter, Peter, Ralph, Amy Lowe, Julia Heisner, and Alex Thompson.
Thank you so much. There'll be drinks in the foyer if you're online, drinks in the foyer are not guaranteed. But you will, if you're in the room they are. So thanks for coming along to what was a fascinating conversation. Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Craig, and from UTS, thank you to all of you for coming tonight. We really appreciate your support, and I also wanted to thank the team that brought us together. So Jo and her team so have a great evening and thank you very much.
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Hi everybody and welcome to everyone, not just here in Australia but everyone who's Zooming in from around the world. We have just shy of 2,000 people in the room with us virtually and physically for this event this evening, which is pretty great. So, we are literally touching all points of the compass, which is fantastic. We're in the centre of something significant here. This is the first event of a major international speaker series, The UTS Global Game Changers series, that is being hosted here at UTS. The whole idea of the series is to tackle the issues that matter most today, and you can imagine, across the campus, there are lots of different opinions about what matters most today, from sciences to engineering and all the rest. But tonight, we're talking about green infrastructure. I'll get to that in just a second.
The first thing I would like to do, the way I would like to start proceedings here, is with an Acknowledgement of Country and to acknowledge the ancient land upon which we are standing. I always find this is a really serious thing. I mean, as an architect or someone who's studied architecture, I think a lot about place and where we are and how important context is. So, when I do these Acknowledgements of Country, it always makes me stop just for a second to think, "Yeah, this place has been around for a while. I'm only a newcomer here, and there are people who have a lot of knowledge about where we are." So, it's a customary thing here in Australia to pay respects to the land and to the people who have lived here for thousands of years at the beginning of any important gathering, and this is most certainly an important gathering.
As I said before, we have all of us in the auditorium here in the UTS Great Hall, and we have everyone with us online. For those of us who are here in person and for the many hundreds of viewers watching internationally, the Welcome to Country or the Acknowledgement of Country extends to everybody. Welcome to everybody. So, in honour of this great land and its ancient traditions and people, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and to pay my respects to the Elders, both past and present. It's one of those things that's taken us a long time to listen to that knowledge and that wisdom, but we are listening and we are learning, which is wonderful.
Right, so we're here to talk about green cities. Green cities, and I hear you say, "What is that?" I'll get to that in just a moment. The first thing I want to do is introduce these lovely people who are up here on stage with me, and our best friend Remy, who's over there. He normally lives in Nairobi, but he's currently in Frankfurt doing important UN business. I'll get to Remy in a second. First, I want to introduce Rob Stokes, who's here on stage. Rob, welcome! Round of applause for Rob. You know the name, you know the man. He's a leading Australian spokesman on city planning and the importance of net-zero cities. Former New South Wales Minister for Planning and Public Spaces—boy, that was a job! Life after that, hey? It's good, huh? Yeah, it's a lot more comfortable now. It was a lot of fun. Passionate about beauty in people, nature, and urban spaces. I'm now thinking of Rob as our poet in politics. Welcome, Rob.
Right here on this end of the seats is Jua Cilliers. She is a global leader in urban planning and green infrastructure solutions. She is also the Professor of Urban Planning and Head of the School of the Built Environment here at UTS. She runs the school, which is why she's so busy, and she's known—this is a funny story behind this one—as a defender of the future. Just sit with that for a second. This is what a defender of the future looks like, everyone. I think we're in good hands, don't you think? Yes.
Germain Briand is here with us, also sitting in the centre. Woohoo! He's an innovative entrepreneur and he connects nature to city environments. He's the owner and director of the Urban Canopy Australia, and he's on a mission to reconnect people with nature. He's the entrepreneur bridge builder whose whole job is to give us the pathway back to nature, which I think is a great job to have. Thank you for joining us.
And zooming in with us on the big screen here is this very impressive-looking gentleman who's six foot tall, and we're only seeing him from the shoulders up, Remy Sietchiping. He is an international strategist on urban planning and geographic information systems. He's a community educator and he is also the Chief of Policy at UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in Africa. Remy, welcome to you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Alright, so what is green infrastructure? I'm going to take a little second here to set the scene, and then my learned colleagues here are going to take the conversation away. My whole job is just to keep them talking, but I think they're going to do a great job of that on their own. What I want to do first is ask you to close your eyes just for a second. Close your eyes. Now, imagine the perfect city street in your mind's eye. The perfect city street. Give yourself a second to form that image. What's going on in that mind? What are you seeing now? I bet the first thing you're seeing—you can open your eyes now—I bet the first thing you're seeing are the people around you. Yeah, give me a quick show of hands if I'm right. Yeah, the people, that's the first thing you notice. Okay, a couple of people. That's the first thing I think of, and I polled everyone in my family about that, and they all said, "Yeah, the people." What's the second thing you saw? I bet there were trees on the street. Yeah, who had trees? Oh, okay, that's better. That's feeling a lot better. So, isn't that interesting that the perfect city includes—well, okay, let's put trees at the top of the pile. Trees are one of those things that are the first thing you think of when you think of a city. Now, think of downtown Sydney or downtown any city, for that matter, and think of how many trees you can count, again in that mind's eye of yours. Not as many as you'd like, right? Am I right?
So, with that thought in mind, that perfect idea in mind, urban—and now I'm reading this, so excuse me for reading—green infrastructure refers to all of the vegetation that provides environmental, economic, and social benefits such as clean air and water, climate regulation, food provision, erosion control, and places for recreation. Green infrastructure includes urban parks and reserves, wetlands and stream corridors, street trees and roadside verges, gardens, vegetable patches, bikeways, pedestrian trails, wall and rooftop gardens, orchards, farms, cemeteries, and derelict land. That's a lot, don't you think? These aren't my words; this is coming from the CSIRO. So, this is the definition that we as a research community would probably defer to as what is green infrastructure. But I think you can see from just that that it is very encompassing. It includes a lot, and as you can imagine, that idea of green cities with all of those different components requires enormous expertise across a broad wave of not just the university campus but across all of our disciplines, ranging from planning, landscape architecture, architecture, horticulture, ecology—what else have we got? Psychology, engineering, and policy, and that's just for starters. Basically, as we know, cities are big, complex animals and they're very hard to tame. They're very hard to direct. They're very hard to kind of point in a direction that we know is better because cities kind of have a mind of their own because there are a lot of people involved.
So, with that kind of situation in front of us, let me tell you a little bit about why some of the green benefits—or the benefits, sorry, of green infrastructure—are there to sort of not so much tame the city but to orient it in a better direction for our future. Some of those benefits include things like—I'm just thinking, actually, before I give you that, I'm thinking I'm about to list a few things for you but really these aren’t nice-to-have things; these are really need-to-have things in our future cities. So, this kind of list of want-to-haves is actually—no, these are the must-do things for our cities going into the future. So, with that in mind: sustainability. Green infrastructure gives us cooler streets, management of heat island effects, flood and stormwater management, cleaner waterways and air, drought tolerance, and lower building and energy needs. And that's just sustainability for a starter. Public health: better air quality, better water quality, cooler and calmer streets and neighbourhoods. Social benefits that bring us outside, that reconnect us to nature—that one's going to Germain—allow humans to use the city again. That perfect city we're all imagining? That's the one where we're all outside. We're all outside on the street, probably in some Parisian café, sitting on a street corner having a cup of coffee. But we're outside, we're with other people, and we're enjoying the ambience of being there. And biophilia—if you haven't heard that expression, it’s basically that feeling you get of wellness and goodness when you are with greenery, when you are with nature.
There's a science behind this, and I'm not going to go into it now, but basically, you know that when you look at a tree, you feel better. The other day, I heard a stat that if you spend 7 seconds, I think it was, looking at the ocean, you start to feel better. Just 7 seconds of watching the waves will actually physiologically calm you down and make you start to feel better in your whole body, physically and emotionally. So, that's biophilia—that's our connection with nature. So, that's just another one of those benefits.
Costs—now this is the one where everyone goes, "Oh yeah, but that's going to cost a fortune. Why would we do that? Just way too expensive." Not true at all. Think about it like this: you spend a lot of money, billions of dollars, putting in freeways and what do you get for that? You get people in cars moving from A to B and back again. Now, think about putting in something like a stream that deals with stormwater, cleans the stormwater, gives people a place to walk, somewhere for my dog to go for a walk. All these benefits of health and things that I've just mentioned—these are all the add-ons that these infrastructures give you. So, you pay for one and you get ten. So, the cost-benefit analysis, the research is still really being done, but all the indicators are that you're getting such better bang for your buck in green infrastructure rather than the kinds of grey infrastructure that we're used to talking about when we talk about the city. So keep that in mind. I also heard somewhere that a treed street in a Sydney suburb will put $50,000 on the sale price of a property on that street. Something like that. Yeah, now I've got your attention, haven't I?
So, with that in mind, the last thing I want to mention too is aesthetics. Now, I'm a professor of architecture, so I dig aesthetics. I think they're important. I think how beautiful things look is an important thing for us to think about. When we talk about aesthetics in terms of green infrastructure, it's back to that vision of the city that you first started with. Yeah, the one that's in your mind. You go, "Yeah, of course it's a beautiful place. You don't want to go and hang out in an ugly place. You want to go hang out somewhere that makes you feel good and visually that entices you to some kind of ownership almost. You want to feel connected to something that has that beauty for it." Now, you define beauty in your own way, but that idea of beauty and aesthetics is a part of the green infrastructure, and that's why we think of green trees and such when we think of a beautiful city.
Alright, now this is an intensely local and global phenomenon. 68% of the global population are expected to live in urban areas by 2050, according to the UN. And in Australia, for those international people who are zooming in, it might surprise you to learn that here in Australia, 73% of us already live in the major cities across Australia. So this is a big issue, and it's one that will have effects whatever we end up doing. It will have effects at a very large—dare I say—planetary scale. So these moves we're making now are not insignificant. They are really big issues. So, with that, that's enough from Anthony. With that, now I want to sort of take the conversation to the esteemed panel that we're here to talk with today. And Jua, you get the first question. Given all those wonderful benefits that green infrastructure seems to obviously provide us, why is it taking us so long to implement green infrastructure in our cities?
A really great question, Anthony. I think that is what all of us are shouting: why are we not doing this? I think three reasons from my side. The first one is, it's really inconvenient, right? We've been used to business as usual, and we know how to plan cities and we know how to build the buildings, and now you're asking us to do it differently. Really, it's really inconvenient, yeah? So we tend to just go with business as usual, right? So there's a part of that, right? We are challenging how we think about cities and nature and how we plan everything from the start to the end. The second thing for me is, it's a lack of leadership—policies, legislation, things enforcing this but also people standing up and saying, "Hey, we should be doing this," right? It's not a nice-to-have; it's a necessity, as you said. So 0.3% of urban infrastructure budgets goes to green infrastructure or nature. Just say that again. How much? 0.3%. Remy, you can check me if I'm quoting incorrectly. 0.3% of all urban infrastructure budgets goes to greening or green or nature-based solutions, which is ridiculous. So we need collective leadership to say this should change, right? So this, for me, is the second thing. And then the third thing is really those benefits that you called out. I really think we don't understand the value of nature and what it means for us as individuals and for our cities. I think we almost take it for granted, but we've never lived in an urbanised world that it is today, and we are seeing we are losing greenery across all our cities. So we're going to lose these great benefits; we are going to lose the medicine that you explained, right? And so, in a way, it's really to realise it's not a luxury; it's a necessity. And I had to throw in there, maybe it's because we haven't had it on Grand Designs yet. That's maybe why we still aren't pushing the buttons. So, there's a teaching component here because the knowledge about the benefits is not being communicated, so that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, there's a leadership issue. Actually, that makes me think then, Rob, do you, you know, you've got a fabulous career and a deep knowledge of politics. In your mind, is this green infrastructure question a technical question or is it a cultural question?
It's entirely cultural. When you started with that beautiful acknowledgment of country, part of acknowledgment is acknowledging that we have imported ontologies, ways of knowing, laws, cultures from the other side of the world, and just imagined that we can somehow translate them into an entirely different context and completely ignored the people who had lived here continuously since the dreaming. And so we instinctively, at some level, are scared of nature. A more recent British visitor to Australia, Bill Bryson, the travel writer, said that about Australia—everything's trying to kill you. And there's a sort of sense that, "Oh, we've got to control our gardens or our environment because it will make it safer that way." I mean, of the top four selling plants in Australian nurseries, you've got a type of ornamental privet, you've got English box, you've got Leylandii greens, otherwise known as spiked trees because they're there to block out the neighbours, and there's one native that makes the list. It's a lilly pilly, it's called "No More Neighbours." And so our entire, you know, the way we think about nature is how to exclude others and how to make it neat and tidy and ornamental so it doesn't get in the way. Nature's messy and we want to make sense and control of our lives and, you know, that's a great thing about a lawnmower. It's your little bit of, you know, exerting control over nature. I mean the nature strip, there's nothing natural about it; it's a b lawn. So it's entirely... and I was fascinated during my time in politics. I remember once actually I got given... I went to speak at something and I got a lift and they'd given me a little tree as a gift. It was lovely and I got in the lift in Parliament and there were a bunch of parliamentarians there, probably a little bit more right-wing, and they said to me, "Hey Stoky, what do you got there?" and I said, "Oh, it's a... it's a... it's a little tree. It's a baby tree." "What are you going to do with it?" and I was kind of getting a bit intimidated at this point and I said, "I'm going to plant it." They said, "Why would you do that? And it'll... it'll get stuck in your drains and then you'll be sorry." And like, "But it's just a little baby tree." Anyway, but there's that mentality, there's something scary or that needs to be controlled, and it comes from this colonial, colonial settler mindset that's still very much there.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do you think then about Jua's point about leadership though? Do you agree with Jua?
Entirely. There's leadership. What's that old saying in, you know, the series Yes Minister? You know, "Well, that was courageous." There's doing courageous things that are career limiting, and the clever things are the incremental change that no one... that you can get away with. COVID was an amazing time to do things that you could get away with because we trialled, for example, you know, like bike lanes. I was amazed. You try and put a motorway in Sydney and, you know, there's a little bit of resistance but most people go, "Oh yeah, we need to get where we're going faster." Try to build a bike lane, everyone goes absolutely bananas. But in COVID we were able to just put them in and say, "Oh, well, they're temporary," and then just left them there.
Can I chip in? Leadership... well, I call it leadership because there's good examples globally where we do get this right, right? And so there are some world cities that do get it right, or individuals.
So it's not like we're... everybody's lost, but it's a leadership and it's standing up for it and pushing through with it."
"That is a perfect segue to Remy. You with us?"
"Remy?"
"Yes, I am. I hope you can hear me."
"Oh, that's great. Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. I want to throw that question then to you and ask, you know, this idea of green infrastructure from your perspective, you know, as the UN. You are our UN representative here. Do you think of it as a global issue or a local issue?"
"Well, thanks a lot. I believe that global is also local. Everything that happens globally affects things locally and vice versa. So within the... I can hear some echoes but I hope it's okay. Within the framework under which we are operating, the social sustainable development goals, if you look through, many of them actually touch on infrastructure, on the environment, on, you know, resilience. All the topics that we're going to cover here. So it's an issue of global relevance. If you take one dimension, which is climate change, that we are all familiar with, we know that we are witnessing how it manifests itself, and this was not... this was... we still had some deniers around but 30-40 years ago that was not the issue. So sometimes push comes to shove and then you have to reckon with it. But I just want to take us a little bit back. I don't know, you might have read the great book by Jared... The Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In that book, for those who have not read, you will understand that we are... many of the societies actually had neglected the value, the benefits of nature, and turned into consumerism rather than living with that nature in a more, you know, symbiotic manner. And that had come at a cost, and we today we are also facing similar situations. And I know that we already mentioned the importance when we culturally, I think Rob had clearly indicated, it's mainly cultural. I agree because nature-based solutions are not easily, you know, reflected. People cannot relate easily and Prof had mentioned, but the element of beauty, aesthetic, that you Anthony, you mentioned is also relative, it's subjective, but still we have some common thread that we can look at. We don't know if green is actually a good sign for everybody. In some cultures, green is not good. In some cultures, it's not good but in others it's actually a sign of aesthetic, reconnecting with your place and nature. But I just want to also add the element of heritage. Nature is heritage because that's why we talk about tangible and intangible heritage. And until we bring all these things together in terms of nature as part of our common heritage, then we continue struggling. One example, just to illustrate the point, is the during the COVID-19. It must still be fresh in our mind. Green space was or parks were the most sought-after spaces because this was one of the unique environments where we can practice more social distancing while enjoying nature. Those who were suffering from COVID were, you know, encouraged to have some... Elements of sunlight, green spaces, and clean air – all these things are important. But globally, one of the unintended consequences of COVID was that the untouched nature, the, you know, the hardly less impacted environment actually grew. It was a positive thing for nature globally. Some plants and areas recovered, just to say that nature is there, and we have to nurture it. We have to do our best to live with that and keep nature as one of our best friends. If you were to be the champions and be the city, the champion of the future, as Professor just said and who she is, so let me stop here just to say that this conversation is very important and globally very relevant. I'm not going to let you off the hook just yet because what you're saying is, yes, it's everyone's problem. It's a global problem. Global solutions. It is a common humanity, a common humanity that we're talking about here. We all fell back in love with our local parks when COVID came along, no matter where you were on the planet. But the other side to your answer there was to let us in on the idea, and this is the challenge, I suppose, that it's a different conversation in different cultures and it has to be. So the common ground we're looking for, maybe that just doesn't exist. No, it does. It does actually. Just give you an example. Who would not like to have some form of green, some, some, I don't know, plants? We, I think Rob had mentioned some energy efficiency, managing your waste differently, or managing your water differently, having a bit of a veggie garden, got something that you have grown and you could actually eat or enjoy and see that grow. So that type of habit exists everywhere, so there are some commonalities in actually taking action. Locally, of course, if you live in an ecologically unique space, it could be a desert or another environment that might be different, but it must still have native plants and a native environment. Because greening is not only about having plants, you know, you can still create the ambiance.
I saw a business, we have Germain here, he can pick some of these ideas where they were actually trying to create, you know, we know the digital twins and try to create environments that mimic nature just to keep our mind and culture closer to nature. It might be artificial; we are quite familiar these days with artificial plants or artificial things. But just bringing that type of element of nature back into our living environment, even artificially, is a step towards that. So I believe that ecologically they might adapt, but they might still be very, very relevant. Nature exists everywhere regardless; culture varies, always, always important. I'm going to say from policy then to product Germain, this is you now because you're the innovator and the bridge builder, right? You're the one who's responsible for, in some way, landing these grandiose ideas literally in the city. So where do you see the problems and where do you see the opportunities? Yeah, thanks. I couldn't help myself so much when you were talking there. I think the problem starts here.
There's that great quote from that American anthropologist called Gregory Bateson that says most of the problems we see in the world today come from the difference between the way people think and the way nature works. Nature works in ecosystems; we work in silos. Nature brings so many benefits to our cities, which is great, but in the way we currently work, it is also an issue because different people are responsible for different outcomes in our cities. Yet, when you're talking about a solution that is all-encompassing, you end up with a problem because who's going to look after that? Oh no, it's your thing. Well no, I thought it was your thing. No, we're not going to do that, it's too complicated because it's holistic. Because it's going to mean the landscape architect is going to talk to the architects, it's going to need to talk to the planners, it's going to need to talk to the bicycle people and everybody in between. You've got social groups or ethnic groups in Australia, you know, huge diversity in our cities. Some ethnic groups don't like nature so much. There's even people, if ever you guys have heard that word, it's called dendrophobia. Dendrophobia means fear of trees. Some people are scared of trees; they run in the other direction. That exists. Rob just told us they get in your drains, right? So we've got to be aware of moral types of fear. But the point is, nature is complex and it works in ecosystems.
We work in silos, and for as long as we're not going to learn to do that, and that's so pertinent in the context of local and state government, where I see it in my work every day when I try to talk about bringing nature. The people who work in the sustainability department don't talk to the urban planner, don't talk to the placemakers, don't talk to the landscape architects. They're all doing their things in their own corners, and so that's not going to work. So until that happens... now to your point about being cultural, for sure. But this dates way back, you know, the colonials, the British coming. That's Newtonian science that makes the world easier to understand for us humans; we make it more simple, we put it into boxes. And even in academia, in academia you've got different faculties and a PhD is so narrowly focused on one point, where it could so much benefit from being in partnership with other parts of the university. When this type of thinking starts being applied at university... I'm so glad he's saying this because I'll have a moment to market the green infrastructure lab that's very transdisciplinary. That's right, but no, I'm talking to you because I know you understand. I know he, the Vice Chancellor, is listening, just so you know. Of course, that's right. We both know. But the risk with this as well... and I'm talking about university models in general, obviously not pointing fingers... but the risk with that as well is, the more complex the more knowledge we get, the even more focused on little things, and the more likely we are to miss the bigger picture because our knowledge is getting more and more granular. So it's a real challenge. We need to embrace complexity.
Alright, but let's get to the part where you've got all green lights and all those planners and policymakers, and everyone's green lights intended... you like that? I just worked that one in there. What is it exactly that you are putting into our cities? I mean, from a product point of view, what is this infrastructure that we're literally talking about? Yes, we're talking about trees, but you know, we're talking about businesses and we're talking about a whole kind of raft of perhaps a new industry that's emerging to do this sort of work. What exactly does that mean to you?
Well, there's new challenges now with climate change. We've got a challenge of how our city is warming up. This didn't exist before. Oh, okay, so you know, when cities were designed, nature was a nice ornamental thing we just put there because it looked nice and we know that people like nature. You know, we'll touch on biophilia, but this was the sole purpose of nature. Now we're like, oh, that actually is the best air conditioner and it's natural, and it has so many other benefits. Yet, our cities were not designed to plant more trees. You know, our cities were designed with a lot of hard infrastructure and the challenge is when you're talking to engineers, we say that tree there doesn't behave like a brick wall, does it? Oh yeah, not too hard, you know, that grows and it grows this way and that way, and how do we deal with that? Too hard.
And so the key is to try to find solutions that bring nature into the city in a predictable way. So it's about finding the best of both worlds, yeah? Okay, right, in trying to bring nature in so it ticks most of those boxes that a tree would. Maybe not all, but it's easier to implement because it ticks the boxes of the people who design our cities. Alright, but at this point we started, I mean, I started off my bit up there at the beginning all positive. Yeah, green cities, that's a beautiful future. Who doesn't want that, right? I want to walk near a waterway with my dog, and now at this point you're all agreeing that this is too big a holistic problem for anyone to solve and it's kind of... I'm starting to get depressed. Is this, should I be feeling this way? I mean, give me some hope here.
No, there's so much that has already happened. The question is, can it happen quickly enough? Right, you look for example, some people might be you know, in this audience might be old enough to remember when you could... I came when you could grow up on Sydney's Northern Beaches. I remember when you could actually smell the sewage coming out of North Head. It was just this, you know, and the water was filthy, and we solved that problem. I remember I used to surf at Queenscliff and I remember that exactly what you're saying, and with certain winds you just wouldn't go. There you'd get an ear infection, it just wasn't worth it. And although it would get you out of school, but, but, but, but, and equally, like, like petrol in our cars, you know, that, that was genuinely, I remember the, the smoke haze that was every day over Sydney. So, on some things, you know, we, we've demonstrated capacity to solve these problems if we act collectively. The problem is the things that are in everyone's interest collectively are often not in everyone's interests individually. And so, there'll always be particular stakeholders who will have a reason why, oh, that doesn't suit me. And so, it's so easy to, to, to stop change. And you do need a certain level of courage to continue. And sometimes you'll, you'll go, you know, two steps forward and one step back, but at least that's one step forward. And then you just got to keep, keep going. I mean, we, I remember when I was in government, we had an abortive attempt with a thing called the design and, and place State Environmental Planning Policy, which was basically we wanted to start the design principle. Like, our cities actually, when you look at it respectfully, aren't designed by architects. Architects come in right at the end. They're actually designed by land surveyors who have no design training whatsoever. And we just said, well, why don't we start with country? Because we'd listened to some Aboriginal planners who had told us there's incredible things, there's incredible knowledge that no one's actually bothered to ask many Aboriginal Elders about land, about song lines, about, about the country itself. And to start with an understanding of that knowledge, well, why wouldn't we? But that, that particular reform proved too difficult to get over the across the line, but there are some elements of that that, that did happen. And inevitably, it set a course that ultimately those changes will come to pass. But what one thing that we tried to do was ensure that in new subdivisions in Western Sydney, for example, where we know that a non-reflective roof will actually increase internal temperatures by about 10° in summer, like 10°. And so, in other words, it'll require really expensive mechanical ventilation to deal with that problem in households struggling with cost of living. So, if you just made the roofs a light colour, you would save a huge amount of energy. But the property developer stakeholders were, oh, no, we couldn't possibly do that because people don't want light coloured roofs. I'm like, well, that's just silly. But nevertheless, that change wasn't made.
Back to the cultural question, it's a cultural thing. In Victoria, they've done it, so we can do it. Yeah, well, that's, I was going to come back to you because at this point you said leadership before, and I'm wondering in your mind then what unlocks us from this, I'm going to call it an impasse, but Rob's given me hope. So, what unlocks us from this moment where it's too big a problem, I can't do anything? What do you think? What is the research actually telling us?
So, I think this, like, the, the amount of people signing up for these events tells you that people realise this is what we should be doing. We see interest from our PhD students coming in, saying, I want to do research in urban, sustainable urban development, green infrastructure, because the younger generation knows this is where it's going, this is what we should be doing. So, there's a big push coming. But I think collectively you have a stronger voice if we can all be saying the same stories, that leadership voice gets stronger. The research, I mean, you called out the benefits, I've got, I think, one of our science friends is here and he often says the research shows it's too good to be true. Like, if you know how good nature is, you would not believe it. Yeah, like, it's too good to be true. But we've, we've neglected that, so we need to be saying these stories more, piloting things, showing, and then pushing collectively for the policies and for the leadership to, to make the right decisions to do this. If we don't do it now, fast forward 10 years from here, nobody of us would want, want to live in Sydney or any city for that matter. Yeah, so there is a, a question of pace. We need to pick up the pace. We've got to find the structure to allow us to do that. That's what I'm sort of picking up from the conversation.
Remy, I'm going to come to you. You're checking your emails. No, Remy, oh, you're making notes. Sorry. There you go. I, I knew you were. So, we're sort of talking about this from a, from, I guess, a culture meets politics and leadership point of view. From the UN's point of view, what is, what would you say was the biggest priority in the green infrastructure space? Just give me one that is probably top of the pile for the priorities from the UN's perspective.
Well, from, from us, I think the word has been said, what we call nature-based solutions. So, whatever solutions we are bringing in cities, if they are nature-driven, nature-oriented, for instance, let's say we are, we are bringing some, because I would like to bring these elements of green, grey, and blue infrastructure, when you have this blend all the time, because when you look at the grey infrastructure, usually the, the green element is very, very sometimes insignificant. So, if you say in a tender in a city or something like that, that any infrastructure in a city should have at least 30%, at least 30%, because, you know, we use that in many of our standards and guidelines, of green, that would actually set up what we discussed earlier in terms of policy, regulations, and enforceable, because you have a threshold and that can be measured. The same way when you talk about, we mentioned the managing drainage or stormwater, because if permeable space, you know, pathways, or, you know, all these spaces had to be made more, create spaces for blending the blue and then the green, it's important. So, for us, nature-based solutions are key. And it's also one of the tools that you use for climate management. I'm saying management because we can talk about resilience, adaptation, and other measures. So, nature is really important. And as I mentioned earlier, when you look at the sustainable development goals, they have been prioritized. They are all over those 17 goals. So, it's very clear that for us there's no just one but several entry points that we use to actually bring that element of planet, people, and places together. And I have other Ps that I will be, you know, coming, you know, adding to these Ps to, to demonstrate how, what Germain was talking about, the ecosystem that we are working with. But don’t be depressed, there are many, many good examples out there.
There are many possible solutions. There are many things we can do in our own capacity. Doesn't matter who you are, at city level, at, in our homes, you know, in our global engagement when we have a voice like this one, you can carry. So, there are so many things. I know we're going to get there, but let's not get depressed, let's get excited rather that there is a consciousness. Yeah, that is around. Applause for that. I think that's worth it. And can I just point out, Remy, that you are here wearing the SDG goals pin and Rob, which has all the colours there for the goals. So, I'm going to change the tone a little bit here for a second, because we've talked about policy, we've talked about some of the hurdles.
I want to kind of just flip the script a bit, and one thing that you said, Rob, when we were speaking at some point earlier, you brought in the idea of beauty. Now, here's the poet-politician moment for you, okay? I'm setting you up here. I really want to understand why and how we should talk about beauty in this context. It's not something we tend to talk about. But it was only post-politics that I sort of reflected on the things that mattered to me, and I realised I care about beautiful things. I love trees. It's just something when I see a tree knocked over, I just don't like that, and I imagine that's something that many people identify with. But I think it's funny with beauty. It's very hard to measure; you know it when you see it. And I think it's harder to tell what it is than it is to say what it isn't. Beauty in architecture can be monumental, martial, magisterial, or modern. One of my favourite bits of architecture in the city is the mort. It can be quite morbid, but what they share is something that is organic. It is something that's warm, or there's fenestration, or there's something tangible or tactile. The opposite of that, inhuman or nonhuman, is very hard to be beautiful. And so I think there's something in that. Remember, it is one of those things we can measure everything except the things that matter.
There's a fellow called William Morris who was an architect and an interior designer in Britain. He was the sort of parent of the arts and craft style. He once said, "If you're looking for a golden rule, this is it: when you're acquiring anything, ask yourself, is it useful, and do you consider it beautiful?" If we're asking that question in modern Australia, the questions are probably, is it big, and is it cheap? And I'm as guilty as anyone. When my wife sends me to Aldi to get some milk, I'll come back with an air compressor, not because I need a compressor. I wouldn't know how to use it, and I don't know what I'd use it for anyway, but gosh, it was a good deal. So, we're all infected a bit by this materialism, seeing preciousness not in the beauty or the utility of things, but in the materialistic value.
Beauty is still something that's innate to us and drives us. Interestingly, you look at environments that attract people, and they're beautiful places. The secret of placemaking seems to me to be creating something beautiful, and people will be attracted to it. That's the secret sauce. If you can find that kind of beauty that you're describing, people will love it, come to it, and feel responsible for it, which breeds sustainability and longevity. When we think about spending money at the front of a project on something which might make it more attractive, both metaphorically and literally, there's a long sort of ripple effect that includes ownership and long-term engagement. The poet John Ruskin once said that to be beautiful, something has to be true. This idea of authenticity is crucial. There's beauty in something that is not pretending to be something other than what it is. That humanity and the ideas of something organic hold beauty because it seems to be living in some sense. Let's throw to Jermaine. I know you're going to answer the organic question and tell us how gorgeous it is. In one of our previous conversations, you brought up the idea of love. I signed up for this panel thinking it's all about sustainability and infrastructure.
Now we've got this whole sort of poetry coming out of the panel here, which I'm really enjoying. But love, what do you mean? How does that figure? Dostoyevsky said beauty will save the world. In Sydney, there's a beautiful example of that called the Sydney Opera House. It cost seven times the intended budget but has now paid for itself many times over. If you put beauty, authenticity, and natural design into something, that's what you get. Now talking about love, because it's just you and me here, go for it. I must say you look very nice tonight. Thank you, you look lovely too. Okay, so this is the essence of why I do what I do. It is my belief that we see so much destruction out there of nature, which is really destruction of ourselves, because we don't love nature enough, and arguably we don't love ourselves enough either. So, there's two big problems here. But hang on, hang on, what does the audience think about that? Do we love ourselves enough? Do we love nature enough? In your minds, you're asking the question, which is the obvious follow-on: how can I find a way to love nature more and therefore love myself more? Is this the kind of logic we're talking about? Is this where we're going? Yeah, yeah. I'm just smiling because you know the job. There's that growing conversation about the fact that we humans are too many on this planet and we're cancerous. That's bad. I mean, there's no sports team that has won any type of tournament by starting by saying, we're a bunch of losers. It doesn't work this way, right?
So, now back to love. Why we see so much destruction of nature in the world is because we don't love it enough. We don't love it enough because we don't value it enough, because we don't understand it enough, because we don't experience it enough, and therefore we are disconnected from that web of life. Why do we do all the crazy things that we do for our families? Because all those boxes are ticked. Now, the rest of the living world is just extended family, just a few more generations ago. So that's why I bring nature into the city, because I want people to experience nature more where they are. Not everybody is attuned to going outdoors and reconnecting. That's important. Can I throw to Remy at this point? I love where this is going. Remy, with your UN and community hat on, can you think of an example of the kind of thing that Germain's talking about, where a commitment to something at a community level has led to something beautiful? Yeah, well, there are several around us.
I think this issue of experiencing and maybe appreciating what is there and doing a bit more of that in several places might be one way. But if you just look at Botanic Gardens, for instance, you have a few in some cities, but you need more, you know, in a city like Sydney. I don't know if there's a plan to create more Botanic Gardens as the city grows, or you know, at that level. So these are some of the places where we can reconnect and people who visit. And we do that in schools. We take kids to Botanic Gardens, to the zoo, to these places to get them to reconnect because they start appreciating. So the idea here is to get the younger generation, the most younger ones, to get interested because they are the future. So that would be my suggestion: how do we get the kids to start learning the importance of green in the environment where they will be living, where they live, so that it becomes part of their habit, their behavior to break out that the issue we started with, the culture, so that we don't discover we don't try to unlearn and relearn later so that it becomes part of our behavior that this is just normal, we have to be able to bring nature anytime, every time, all the time.
Perfect. I mean, I think I was going to ask all of you. I'm going to ask all of you just, we're starting to run out of time. Actually, I know we're only really getting going, but that sounds to me like a perfect, the question was what's the one thing you would ask the audience to leave the room and do today or tomorrow to bring on the green infrastructure Revolution that we're talking about. So I'm hearing from Remy that I'm pointing down here to the monitor that Greening School Playgrounds and places like that for our Juniors is the right place to start. Let education start to play that role from a very young age.
Yeah, so the conversation starts early, yes. Start schools at home, getting them involved, appreciating the plants, especially native plants, the ones that and also the ones that have benefits like the ones that absorb more CO2, for instance, these are the things that we should be aware of and be able to plant them because we know that type of benefit. The ones that bring some elements of health that have medicinal values, that have some fruits or some element, all those things we have that element of culture awareness and knowing and earlier enough the better. Getting your hands in the dirt. Rob, what's your one suggestion for people, the one thing that you would like people to do when they leave the room tonight, the literally first thing comes to my head: go for a walk or you get a Mobility Scooter, just go and just go and have a have a bit of a walk. 88% of our health budget, which is about 30% of the overall budget, is spent treating non-communicable diseases, of which the biggest single one is type two diabetes. There are more than 2 and a half million Australians with that condition, and for most people, it's preventable if we just had environments where it was easier for people to just be a bit more active.
I'd like to bounce off what you were saying, Remy. I think everyone in this room, and I think everyone at some stage in their life – for most of us, I think it was when we were kids – we've experienced the wonder and awe of nature. It's like, "Wow!" To tie back to what you were saying, it's beautiful and transcends our rational mind, connecting directly to our hearts. To me, this is why urban greening is so important: it allows people to experience that fundamental shift we need to operate as a species and live in harmony on this planet. We often talk about needing to save the planet, but the planet doesn't need to be saved – it needs to be loved.
I love this question because I once made my students do this. So, here's a challenge to everybody: if you leave here, please go hug a tree. Love the tree, hug the tree, and even better, take a selfie while you hug the tree. Post it and tag us. If people ask you why, you can explain why nature is so valuable and important, why this tree is keeping us all alive, and help spread the message. Be a leader in that way.
We've got time for just maybe two, possibly three, questions from our beautiful audience here. We've got some roaming mics – one there and one over there. Oh my goodness, hands are shooting up all over the place. Let's go to this person here with the beautiful headscarf on. If I could just ask you to keep the question brief.
I loved what you said, Remy, and I agree with you. Community gardens in suburbs for children, herbs, and fruit trees are great. Also, when children see the Balmoral trees being poisoned, they should get a bit more punishment than they do.
Great comment. Let's go. You had your hand up very quickly there in the second row, with the dark black shirt. Here comes a microphone.
Designing cities around water – twice the amount of rain falls on Sydney than we actually draw out of Warragamba. If we didn't have Warragamba and needed to drink our own rain, what would that look like? What does a city look like that's designed around water?
I'll start. We had to look at this question while considering the new city around the new Western Sydney airport and how to deal with water flow around South Creek, which is that big corridor. The best advice was to re-establish a chain of ponds, recognizing what was there before and seeking to recreate that. We also need to start properly recycling water rather than just generating it. We're going to have to get used to the idea that yes, we're going to drink our pee – we do it every day anyway, because ultimately, we've got the same amount of water in this biosphere as we've always had. It's all recycled. Piping sewer and wastewater from far western Sydney out to the ocean is just a silly idea now.
Does anyone else want to tackle that question? Jay?
Yes, I was going to answer from a theoretical perspective. It doesn't work ideally. A city should operate in the same way an ecosystem works, dealing with the amount of rain that falls there and not trying to do things beyond what sunlight and rain afford. A city in itself isn't a sustainable model, but there are ways to make it better. It's hard, but there are plenty of good initiatives to try to make buildings water-positive, for example. It's a tough task, but doable in bits.
Right, so it's a double-edged answer: it's really hard, but we can do parts of it. Let's go to the back of the room, the gentleman with his hand up and the puffy vest.
I have a housing question. Urban sprawl in Western Sydney isn't sustainable or desirable in combating the housing crisis, with low canopy cover, dark roofs, and car dependency. The state government is moving towards more infill development and increasing density, as we've seen with the new TODP. Greening cities isn't a new concept; we have Canberra from the Garden City movement of the 20th century. One downfall of it is its lack of density, seen as undesirable. How do we manage density in green cities?
First, is green infrastructure a new idea? Short answer: no.
Everyone shaking their heads, so no, it's not a new idea. The Garden City movement was one of the early examples. The Griffins did it in Castlecrag, wanting everyone to live in the bush. The mid-century moderns on the lower North Shore did the nuts-and-berries architecture, living with the bush without digging it up. We do have precedents, but clearly, we haven't been listening to them. The second part of the question is the density question. How do we reconcile green with density? These are both necessary.
I'll take a shot. Super high density is never ultimately sustainable due to too many challenges and too much energy use over time. Strata titling works well with a 1960s-style six-pack of six apartments, but once you have 500 or 1,000 apartments, it becomes a new form of governance entirely. I worry about what will happen in 50 years when some of these super-dense places need to be rebuilt. Of course, we've got a housing crisis and need a supply-side solution, but we can't ignore demand. We're not looking at the tax incentives that turn housing into a commodity. We need to stop incentivizing people who already have houses to buy more until everyone who wants a house has one. Then we can incentivize buying more houses.
Green infrastructure is a network, an interconnected system. Like how we plan freeways and highways, green should be throughout cities. The denser we go, the more we need green infrastructure to sustain human life. It's not just about housing; it's about rethinking the entire process from materials, construction, architecture, and planning.
Round of applause for that. Remy, what do you think about reconciling density with green infrastructure?
It's not one or the other; they can be done together. There's no fixed threshold for density; it's context-specific. For us, city or urban development should follow principles like compactness, connectivity, and integration. Cities should be compact, connected through green or blue infrastructure, and integrated. Singapore is a great example – highly dense yet highly green. So, they are not in competition; it's doable.
On the housing question, of course, affordability is a perennial issue in Australia. We need to make housing greener, considering elements like the roof that Rob mentioned. Greening has a cost, but the cost-benefit is in favor of nature.
Great, that last bit was for the accountants in the room. Cost-benefit analysis looks really good. Everyone else is saying we can do it together. Density and green don't have to fight each other. They are a companion piece. They work in harmony if we're clever about bringing those things together at the outset. That's what I'm summarizing here. From an innovation perspective, there are plenty of solutions out there that add a lot of nature to the city without impacting housing or density. There are plenty of opportunities to make it happen if we allow it to happen.
When I talk about sustainability to students, I often say the science was in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. The science of sustainability was in the technology and engineering of sustainability – that was in the '90s and 2000s. So that leaves us back to the very beginning with the issue about sustainability that we haven't solved yet, which is the cultural side. And that's exactly where the panel went this evening. When you all opened up to that question, we had love, poetry, and all those very human responses. Rather than a technical conversation, we've ended up with a very human conversation, and that seems to be where the problems lie, but also where the opportunities are.
With that, we're going to draw this evening's proceedings to a close. I hope you leave the room thinking about your next action. Hopefully, outside at the bar, you can have a conversation with like-minded people, and maybe something will spark out of that. Wouldn't that be amazing? We'll be at the bar later on, so come and tap us on the shoulder if you want to chat. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. [Applause]
I would like to invite you up to the podium to say some thank yous. Then you can go, I will sit down. Thank you, Anthony. I've got the wonderful task of thanking some incredible people. This event has been in the making for quite some time. A lot of hours went into it. When we started, we asked the panel members to share something about themselves. Remember those questions? Something about yourself, your perspectives, how you think about things. We said it would be confidential, but I'm going to blabber it all out now. I fed this information to ChatGPT, like any responsible academic would, and asked ChatGPT to summarize the superpowers of our panelists.
So, a huge thank you and appreciation to our panelists for sharing their superpowers.
Firstly, Rob, our Harmony Hero, who works his magic to create amazing cities where everything and everyone fits together perfectly. That can be a new LinkedIn status. Germain, our Nature Ninja, who brings nature back to the city, making urban life fresh and exciting. Remy, our Global City Wizard, who transforms cities all over the world, making them better places for everyone. Thanks, Remy. And our host, Anthony, the Design Guru, who puts the grand into architecture, turning his passion into wonderful city-changing designs. Thank you very much. A small gift for all of you. [Applause]
Remy, watch out for a package coming your way soon. Everybody is curious to know what's in your bags. It's really special, designed by students from the Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building. I believe Rob has a matching gift on. A huge thank you to Jo Bosben, Dena Fam, and the incredible UTS team running at the back, who are keeping this event live and covering it globally. It's an honor to be part of this Global Game Changer series, and a salute to UTS management for investing in these conversations and global engagements. This is wonderful.
To our audience, our enablers of the visions we shared tonight, thank you for turning up and engaging with 1,700 registrations. It gives us confidence that this is an important topic, and we need to take it forward. Green infrastructure matters. A special shout-out to our UTS friends in China, who gathered a crowd to watch the live stream. Thank you.
In closing, I learned something from one of my students that turned out to be my favorite quote: "You should never underestimate the power of a small change." I challenge you all tonight to be part of this change, part of the Green Revolution. Every small act by every one of us can have a huge collective impact. Never underestimate the power of a small change. To bring it back to Anthony's first question, "Why are we not already greening our cities?" This is a call to all of you as well. Let's do better, and let's do it together. Thank you, UTS, thank you to the panel and our host, and thank you to the audience. Let the Green Revolution begin. Thank you.
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