Our world is undergoing profound change.
Science and technology are transforming our lives
with dizzying speed.
Astonishing innovations are ushering in
a new era of opportunity.
The high tech revolution is fueling creativity
around the globe, inspiring visionary solutions.
So open your eyes and get ready for an amazing journey
to 2050, to dream the future.
(light music)
(upbeat music)
We love to throw things away.
Food, broken appliances, old clothes.
Each year all the human beings on Earth
produce 15 billion tons of waste when you include
household waste, agricultural waste, building,
civil engineering and industrial waste.
That represents two tons per inhabitant per year.
Half of global waste is produced
by the richest countries.
We produce, consume and dispose.
150 million tons of plastic floats in our seas.
And gigantic dumps pollute even the most remote spots.
Not to mention, toxic nuclear waste.
(dramatic music)
Only a radical change can avoid the darkest outcome.
Hold on.
I think what's been happening with waste and trash
in the world is that people have just gotten used to it.
What if we started by changing the scenario?
By minimizing our own waste.
A movement is already up and running.
One of the things that amazes me is how easy it has been
to change the world.
I'm not talking about individual actions,
I'm talking about the global revolution.
By 2050, will this revolution have succeeded?
For the dream to become reality, engineers and designers
are inventing ways for us to produce
and consume differently.
Our mission for many ways is to have product
and engineering solution with 100% trash,
post consumer trash.
My dream for 2050 would really be that we just don't
have the concept to waste anymore.
We get rid of the word out of our vocabulary.
My dream for 2050 would be
for objects to grow in my garden and in other's gardens.
The model I'm working on can revolutionize
that food system and really create a food system
that has zero waste and zero hunger.
These dreamers are walking in the footsteps
of those who have sought to manage our waste.
In the beginning our garbage decomposed naturally,
but when we started to make tools,
we began to accumulate waste.
When we settled down, villages formed
and we invented public landfills.
Between 6,000 and 3,000 BC the global population doubled
and the quantity of waste quadrupled.
In first century Rome fragments of broken packing material
were transformed into a small mountain.
The Gauls, already great wine lovers, recycled this debris
as construction materials.
But the model of a clean, orderly city did not spread.
In the middle ages, roads were filled with garbage.
In Paris Filippo Gust paved the streets
and installed gutters,
but contaminated rivers and soil led to epidemics.
It wasn't until the 19th century with Pastore's work
on microorganisms that war was declared on waste.
The first big incinerators were built in England.
The prefect of Paris imposed the use of special containers
for household garbage.
The industrial revolution generated a whole new wave
of filth, extracting one ton of coal,
produced seven tons of mining waste,
oil and petrol chemicals invaded our daily lives.
The 20th century saw the mass production of
non-degradable sometimes deadly waste.
In the 1970s recycling became a solution.
In Denmark, the first eco-industrial park
transformed waste into resources.
In the digital era, a circular economy serving
sustainable development has gained momentum.
The chain is no longer linear, it becomes circular.
Once you've changed that way of looking at what you have
and you change how that can then flow through the economy
rather than falling out of the end,
that's when we start to see the real changes.
Our garbage cans are overflowing.
Waste is ignored, it's resources left untapped.
Electronic waste contains gold, silver and copper.
We are exhausting raw materials
and driving their prices ever higher.
Ideally, a future planetary
human society should not have to
draw on non-renewable resources,
but would reuse most of it's waste if not all of it,
to replace these non-renewable resources.
Current landfills could very well become future mines.
In 2050 will we recycle everything?
A generation of designers and manufacturers
is already heading down that road.
Metals, plastics and construction materials are increasingly
recovered and transformed.
In Taiwan, visionary engineer and architect Arthur Huang
wants to build everything, absolutely everything,
out of plastic waste.
He uses only non-toxic plastics and makes sure that
his buildings don't generate any extra pollution.
From housing to transport to furniture, his dream
relies on improving the quality of recycled materials.
He's devising products that perform better and pollute less.
The name Miniwiz come from it is wise to minimize.
We believe in order for us to minimize carbon footprint,
our mission for Miniwiz is to have products and engineering
solution with 100% trash, post consumer trash.
My name is Arthur Huang, I'm and architect and an engineer.
When I started the company with my colleagues 15 years ago,
I was very angry at the current state of consumerism.
We are constantly producing new products
and we are just constantly consuming packaging
without consideration of where all that material goes.
So we say, supposedly we are all gifted with creativities,
engineering skills, and we should do something about that.
(upbeat music)
When recycled post consumer material is being recycled
it's being cleaned, it's being chopped, the actual material
become weak, structurally become weak.
So as a engineer with our different engineer here
like mechanical engineer, we can find a way to reinforce
these material through mechanical format.
Because if you do it through chemical format
you don't get much carbon saving,
because you're actually adding more chemical
into the recycling process.
So we have to think mechanically.
So one of our first interesting patten is the
poly brick interlocking sheer joint system.
Poly brick is a way of making air brick.
Okay, we pump air into the manufacturing process
which is blow molding, very similar to the same way
we make a piece of bottle, a water bottle.
But we made it into structural format, okay?
So the individual bottles, they actually lock into
each other and basically pushing in and pushing up
at the same time, for a three dimensional structure.
And this allows us to construct with no adhesive,
but very strong, to create a very strong wall.
(light music)
Using these poly bricks,
Huang built an 80 foot tall building near Taipei,
capable of withstanding typhoons and earthquakes.
It contains one and a half million plastic bottles.
We specialized in architecture product at first,
the reason is because it's one of the biggest
consumption of material.
If you have a small material engineering work,
you need to be able to scale into enough size
for the production to even begin.
So architecture is a great venue for that.
Another technique is equally respectful
of the environment.
The second level what we did is polyber.
Polyber is basically we try to take low grade like
every day consumption like plastic bags, detergent bottles,
these little cups, plastic cups that you see everywhere,
and also some of E waste which is like from PCs and ABS.
You take these material because the polymer is broken,
we use a fiber to connect the polymers.
The polyber is using a lot of organic fiber
for example rice, husk, wheat husk, to bridge the gap
between the molecules to, allows it to be lighter
and somewhat strong like the virgin material.
(gentle music)
To push innovation even further,
Huang made a material as light as carbon fiber.
I mean this is kinda funny, we're using a airplane
as a way to test the material.
It's carbon fiber like, it's almost like 60% the strength
of carbon fiber, it's made from 100% polyester.
It's single material, it's formable, so it's like a
smart fiber basically, you can program the fabric
into hard and soft at the same time.
Wow, well that's pretty cool.
Because it hardened the fabric completely.
Look, this is so hard.
And this part can be, still be like sweater.
So we basically bought a old, very innovative plane
in the 1970s, we're replacing the wing with this
carbon fiber like material.
So post consumer recycle piece of bottle
turned into airplane wing and has the same strength
of a airplane.
If we can make this work and turn that into a upcycle
high end product at the highest level,
have the highest design standards, highest safety standard
like airplanes, like buildings,
then it proves to any industry leaders or it proves to
designers, prove to engineers, prove to different
manufacturers, that this is possible,
and this is the only way to move forward.
Right?
Otherwise there's no point to do all this innovations.
My dream for the future is by 2050,
trash becomes such a cool word, you know?
If you don't use trash to build or to,
your next house, if you don't use trash to build
your next jackets, to make your next furniture,
you are very uncool.
In the end it all hinges on the meaning
of the word waste, and maybe that meaning will change
in the future.
We could think of waste as a material we can
do nothing with, disregard it and dangerous.
But on the contrary all waste that can be recovered
and recycled should become a noble material.
In 2050 we will all sort through
all of our waste.
Sorting at the source is a vital stage
of recycling, it's the prerequisite
for quality recycling in fact.
To make this first step effective,
the centers that recover garbage must be ultra efficient.
The clean up, the more specific the flow
of materials, the better we can recycle it.
Artificial intelligence could then
play a major role, thanks to robotics wizard Tuomas Lukka.
In Helsinki he founded the company ZenRobotics
and developed the first robot capable
of sorting waste with precision.
Our robotic system is part of the waste
recycling chain, our robots are installed along a conveyor
belt and they pick out parts that can be recycled.
My name's Tuomas Lukka and I am responsible
for these sorting robots.
I became interested in robots while still in school.
During manual skills classes I tried to build
an automated hand, my friends and I thought
the next revolution would be in the field of robotics.
We then created ZenRobotics and our goal was simple,
let's do something cool with robots.
Traditionally sorting waste is done either by humans
or with simple machines that perform only one task.
These methods are problematic.
Humans should not work in this kind of environment.
We solved this problem using artificial intelligence.
We teach the robot to catch new objects by demonstration.
By saying for instance I'll put yellow bricks
on the conveyor belt, observe them for awhile,
then you put other objects on there,
other waste not for recycling in this particular case.
When these elements are shown to the robot,
it thinks for a moment, it will then distinguish
between each element.
We can then tell it when you find bricks,
throw them in this bin.
The robot can also sort objects according to quality.
Often we don't want all wood to go in the same bin
as there are several types of wood.
There are beautiful planks, painted wood, old wood
or pressure treated lumber, and it's important to be able to
sort them to then be able to recycle them appropriately.
So unlike traditional systems that recognize objects
by a single observed criterion, this one works like humans
by examining all the criteria and then trying to
determine what it's about.
Armed with AI the robot achieves 99%
sorting precision, it can sort 4,000 objects
and lift 80 tons of waste per hour.
I think that quite soon robots will be able
to dismantle everything that factories produce
and return materials to a new production cycle.
Will it be by sending in small robots like WALL-E
or more traditional methods, I don't know.
But I'm sure robots have a part to play in this process.
It's a job for robots.
Will we see as in the movie WALL-E,
robots that can extract complex objects without damage?
Some of our waste is particularly difficult
to recycle, that's the case with electronic equipment
where it's very hard to separate raw materials
present in the waste.
So we can imagine in the near future technologies with,
why not the use of robots, that can learn to separate
the wheat from the chaff,
in these extremely complex products.
In 2050 these new resources
will have real market value.
We'll have a virtuous economy where some people's waste
becomes other people's resources.
My dream is that we will have recycling centers
all around the countries, and we will be able to recycle
everything, absolutely everything.
And things that we can't recycle will be banned.
You won't be able to manufacture something that can not
be broken back down again, that will be illegal.
What if in 2050 we were no longer
polluting the planet?
If recycling is essential we must first use raw materials
that are environmentally friendly.
No more toxic materials that threaten our ecosystems.
Made from algae, mushrooms or fibers, natural materials
will dominate our every day life.
We will produce more and more of this type
of material, biosourced materials.
It's a fairly barbaric word to refer to living matter,
things that are all around us.
One advantage of biosourced materials is being able to
return them to ecosystems without harming these ecosystems.
(light music)
Daniel and Markus Freitag dream of our clothes
returning to the ground.
Based in Zurich, the brothers have been recycling waste
for more than 20 years.
Renowned for making bags from old truck tarps,
they have set their sights much higher.
After years of research they have designed a line of clothes
called F-ABRIC that are 100% compostable.
We think that products after use
should disappear from the planet much like they appeared.
This idea of a biological life cycle is at the heart
of this line of clothing.
F-ABRIC was born of a personal need.
We'd been looking for functional but economical clothing
for our employees and ourselves but hadn't found any.
That was our starting point.
We were frustrated because we could see that clothes
made with synthetic fibers from the other end of the world
didn't suite our identity or philosophy.
And I think that's what drove us
to make the first Freitag trouser.
To find the materials needed to make
compostable clothes, we had to go back in time.
We looked for what existed before when they were no
synthetics or cottons in Europe to see what fibers
clothes and fabrics were made of.
And we came up with hemp, linen and a more modern
but established fiber, modal, which comes from beech wood.
We've revived them in their purest form.
And from these fibers we have started to weave fabrics.
Do you want to bring some mod to Zurich?
Yes.
We drew a circle around Zurich where we live
and said that a 2,500 kilometer radius should be
reasonable for making clothes.
It depends on the clothes but for trousers for example
which are the flagship products in the collection,
we source the linen and the hemp in France,
they are woven in Italy,
and we make them in Poland in Szczecin.
That still involves a small European tour,
but for an item of clothing
that's still a reasonable distance.
We realized the textile chain
is extremely complex, there are lots of sub-contractors.
So we kept a little journal with a diagram
showing all the ingredients contained in jeans.
Even in just one thread there are lots of components
and necessary stages.
And checking there are no toxic substances that aren't
biodegradable is very costly.
We always do everything to make it happen.
We have enough guarantees to say okay,
I can bury my jeans here, they're compostable
and won't pollute the environment.
My shirt button is compostable, made of walnut,
and hence biodegradable.
(light music)
When was it buried?
Six weeks ago, maybe seven.
In ideal conditions a decomposition process
lasts four to six weeks.
This t-shirt is decomposing and becoming compost.
The clothes are very robust, it's just the compost
conditions that permit it to decompose.
In compost you need a combination of humidity,
small organisms, it's a several stage process
with interacting organisms, it's really the whole ecosystem.
All our components are 100% biodegradable
except the jean's button.
It can be unscrewed so the owner of the jeans
can give it a second life.
That means when the jeans are worn out and thrown
in the compost, this button can be unscrewed and reused
on another garment in our collection.
(upbeat music)
I think that in the future it would be
wise for clothes, all clothes, to be entirely recyclable
and ideally, biodegradable.
As they wear the textiles mingle with nature
and the atmosphere.
It's more natural for it to have a biological life cycle.
My dream for the future is that
the whole of the industry all over the world should work
according to the principle of circularity with simple
materials, biological cycles.
I believe a waste free future is possible if everyone
thinks and acts the same as way we do at Freitag.
Biological cycles allow Guillian Graves
to devise the objects of the future.
In Paris this designer sees in the living world,
a way to revolutionize manufacturing.
He uses yeast and bacteria to grow new materials.
For me, observing nature means
looking at shapes, structures, mechanisms and strategies
that have been developed by organisms large and small.
When you look at a tree for example or a leaf,
you realize it's a self assembled solar panel whose
raw materials have only traveled a few meters
around the roots of a tree for example.
I'm Guillian Graves, I'm a bio-designer.
I draw inspiration from the living
to design objects for tomorrow.
Initially I was interested in kombucha, a fermented tea,
the first traces of which were found in Mongolia
around 2,000 years ago.
People would put a green tea leaf in water
with a little sugar, to that they added a small amount
of cellulose that contained the bacteria and yeast
to ferment the liquid.
What we observed and found interesting is that
during the process, which can take a long time
weeks for example, we observed a membrane gradually forming
layer by layer on the surface of the liquid.
Then we thought it'd be interesting to change register.
To go from drink to materials.
And use the liquid not as a drink but use the surface
material left by these microorganisms to produce
new materials more sustainably.
We began with simple experiments, I and my seller,
my colleagues and their seller in their garage, et cetera.
We thought okay, we'll test various things.
So we devised around 50 recipes with various organic
ingredients and a few selected additives.
For example aloe vera if you want to
play with the material's elasticity,
crushed oyster shell if you want to
add mineral properties,
or copper if you wanted conductive material.
We saw that we could shape the material.
Various techniques would produce various shapes,
either during cultivation or during drying.
The idea being that as the bacteria makes this matter
on the surface, we could integrate it into molds.
Molds to make different shapes, different types of objects.
He imagines a future where this process
will grow single piece objects.
Today we can produce the raw material,
but not grow the entire object.
But tomorrow we can easily imagine growing a chair
or architecture from these microorganisms.
Using living organisms opens the door
to a revolutionary idea.
Creating entirely degradable products that we cultivate
from the ground up.
In 2050 we'll throw away nothing.
Everything will be done to limit waste,
starting with our food stuffs.
Globally we waste around 1.3 billion tons of food
every single year.
Just take the waste of the United States of America
in people's homes and at retail level,
at the end of the supply chain.
There's nearly enough there to feed all of the world's
hungry people twice, and end hunger.
What we can hope for is that consumer
mind sets will have evolved, from fridge to super market,
we'll promote eco-friendly products.
Changing consumer habits is the challenge faced
by Evan Lutz in Baltimore.
In the U.S. 20% of agriculture
is tossed due to imperfections.
He invented a system that gets these fruits
and vegetables to our plates.
The model that I'm working on connects farmers
closer to consumers so that there's a lot more local
aspect to the food system.
And make sure that there's no food going to waste,
in that food system.
My name's Evan Lutz, I'm the co-founder of Hungry Harvest
and we are a produce delivery company.
And our mission is to fight food waste and fight hunger.
I graduated The University of Maryland in 2014
and during my senior year I started working for an
organization called Food Recovery Network.
We got approached by a supplier of surplus
or ugly fruits and vegetables.
They told us about this problem of all these
fruit and vegetables that are going to waste,
and how perfectly edible they are
and how perfectly fresh they are.
And so I thought why not sell this?
This produce should absolutely be sold,
it's perfectly edible, it's perfectly fresh.
But our perception in a grocery store,
we want everything to be perfect.
When in fact perfection in produce doesn't necessarily
mean it tastes good.
We should be judging produce on taste not how it looks.
Our idea is to buy ugly fruits and vegetables
that would normally get thrown away, recover them
from going to waste, box them up into really nice
right boxes and deliver it right to consumer's home.
Fruits and vegetables go to waste for a few main reasons.
One is aesthetic imperfections.
Apples might too small or too big
or tomatoes might be the wrong shade of red
or mangoes might be green instead of yellow.
For example we had cabbage last week that had soil on it
so who would think that cabbage grows in soil?
A buyer rejected it because it still had some soil on it.
And that's considered an ugly or aesthetic imperfection.
The other reason why produce goes to waste
is logistical inefficiencies.
So grocery stores can actually reject truck loads
of produce for almost any reason.
If a pallet is tipped over inside the truck when they
receive it or if a pallet is damaged or if they just
haven't sold enough of that product in the week before,
they can reject a truck load.
That truck load usually has to go to a landfill
to dump it out, because they need to get back
to their warehouse with an empty haul.
(light music)
Probably have 50 farmers in our network.
And we also have packing houses and wholesalers
which also have lots and lots of produce
that's going to waste.
In our philosophy it doesn't matter where it was grown,
how it was grown, how it was packaged,
if it's about to go to waste we're gonna recover it.
We also get people that write in to us and say
hey, I have this excess this is about to go to waste,
and we recover all of that.
It is a challenge to really grow apples.
They might not be the prettiest apples.
You can definitely keep the insects off,
some of the diseases off, but just the humidity
and apples sometimes really don't go together.
When you have pine trees or some other trees like that
which harbor that rust, which really doesn't affect
the pine trees that much, you have it in your apples
and you know, it's a problem.
So consequently a lot of these apples would have to,
you know if I were a commercial producer,
yeah these would have to be discarded.
Yeah, like this guy.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Being a fruit producer in general in the mid Atlantic region
here where the humidity is high, it's a challenge.
Farmers are generally very, very receptive to our ideas
because they've never really gotten a return on their
surplus or excess inventory before.
And we offer them an avenue so that they can get a return
on their surplus and seconds product.
I wanted to make a site where people would go online
and we can deliver to them, no matter where they live.
And so we've purposely positioned ourselves
as a discounted produce delivery service,
because we believe that every person has the right
to eat healthy and get produce delivered to their door.
So we deliver to almost a hundred miles around,
in a radius around where our distribution hub is,
in the middle of Maryland.
Hey.
Hi.
Here's your Hungry Harvest box.
Awesome, thank you.
Thank you, have a great day.
You too.
So we deliver about like 3,000 boxes and we recover
about 50,000 pounds of produce every single week.
For every box we deliver we also donate one to three
pounds of produce to people in need.
I think food is at the very fabric,
at the very foundation of our society.
People bond over food.
And meanwhile we've got all this food going to waste
and it just doesn't make sense to me.
It's something that I had to stand up for,
and act on this, on solving this problem.
Good morning.
Thank you.
Good morning, how are you?
Good, thank you so much.
35 years we're gonna have another billion people
on the planet, and how are we gonna feed
eight billion people on the planet
when almost half of what we grow is going to waste?
It's just not gonna be a sustainable solution.
It's a lot of fun.
The model I'm working on can revolutionize
that food system and really create a food system
that has zero waste and zero hunger.
That's my dream for the future.
I do believe that a food system that helps to remedy
the world's environmental problems and avoid producing
waste, using waste as a resource, is a reality.
And I say that because those farms that do that
already exist, they always have existed.
At the moment the battle is between that kind of farming
and the multi-culture supermarket driven kind of farming
that we're all being sold into.
We need to shift towards that, in fact ancient system,
with modern technologies and modern lifestyles.
It really is possible, and that's what I dream of.
If food waste ends, what will happen
to every day products?
By 2050 we might be living in a world
with no more disposable items or single use objects.
We'd no longer waste that material.
If we can send men to the moon or do fantastic things
we can surely manage to revive deposit systems for example,
to ensure the reuse of bottles, et cetera.
It's social and logistical innovation,
not technological innovation.
But it's well within our reach.
Imagine if our possessions were built to last.
No more junk washing machines, electronics that die young
or cars headed for the scrap pile.
(car crushing)
If we can dream up objects that self repair,
by 2050 another reality will prevail.
We'll live in a world without planned obsolescence.
In an ideal future
it would be important to design products that could be
easily repaired by the end user, by the consumer.
Our devices will be designed to be
modular and connected.
Manufacturers will be notified of any failure
so they can provide maintenance.
(upbeat music)
This is the future that Rich Gilbert
is bringing to life in London.
He first tested his deprogrammed obsolescence
on a new kind of toaster.
We've seen that sold electrical products in the household
typically never end up in recycling.
That small things that fail in the house
like an electric toothbrush or kettle
or even destroyed cameras
and so on, they put them on the side for awhile
not sure what to do with them, and then they end up in,
just in the household bin.
I'm Rich Gilbert, I set up The Agency of Design.
We're a small studio focused on creating new products
and services for a circular economy.
So we designed three toasters, the Realist,
the Pragmatist and the Optimist.
The Optimist was really our kind of vision
for how you could make the most out of those materials.
So we'd seen that metal goes through a siting process
really well, so we tried to design an all aluminum toaster
knowing that it'd be kind of a heavy,
almost industrial object.
You wouldn't want to throw this in the bin.
The Pragmatist was designed to be a kind of example
of how a consumer could have a close sort of relationship
with a manufacturer, so it was a modular product.
If one of the slots in the toaster broke
you take that slot out and you can post it back to a
manufacturer because we made it thin enough
to go through a letter box.
The Realist was really our take on,
what do we about a four pound 99 toaster
that you can go and buy in a supermarket?
So we tried to design the cheapest possible disassembly
fixing, so we made a small expandable fixing
that goes in where the snap fits are in the product.
When you put that product in a vacuum chamber
all the joints expand and the parts pop apart
so you can then non-destructively take those materials
and get a higher quality output from them.
Gilbert then tackled an object
central to every day life, the light bulb.
He invented repairable, connected light bulbs
that are virtually indestructible.
When we looked at the recycling rates of consumer
light bulbs, they're incredibly low.
It's just 1% of what gets sold into the market
actually goes into our recycling system.
So that means these really intelligent pieces
of technology, you know 99% of them end up in landfill.
Get inside of that, cause I think that's probably
like plastic metal sandwich.
It is kind of disgusting as a product.
Can't believe they do this.
How would you recycle this?
No idea.
When the bulb fails, most of these bits are actually...
Still okay?
They're not failed, not everything's broken.
Yeah it's just such a huge amount of complexity
that basically gets lost.
So we tried to find a way not just like increasing
a small amount from 1%, we want to find a radical way
of capturing all of that material.
So we focused on a service model where we thought
we can capture 100% of the product that's coming back to us.
That means we never lose that material.
To do that we've designed it to disassemble
from one fixing so we can access those parts very quickly.
And we've made a modular construction where the LEDs
are separated from the power supply.
We can replace components on the power supply
and keep many of the components running for multiple
life cycles, and we can reassemble that into
a fully functioning bulb and send it out for use again.
For a consumer it's very simple.
You download our app, you go through the subscription
setup process and choose your light bulbs.
You sign up and a set of light bulbs arrive the next day.
So inside our light bulb we've got
blue tooth mesh technology.
So each of our light bulbs talks to each other
and then the mesh can talk to your phone
or talk to a router to send information back to us.
So that means we know as soon as a light bulb breaks.
Or we can look at how they're performing
and work out when to upgrade your light bulbs.
So we can preemptively replace bulbs that we think
are going to fail sometime soon.
So we're really tryin' to switch to a model of performance.
You're buying lights, you're not buying light bulbs,
you're not buying technology.
If anything goes wrong, it's someone else's problem.
Imagine that that's a kind of a square lid
with a slot in it.
Oh okay, so I was imagining...
My dream as a designer would be that we're not asked
to consider sustainability as an add on
or as a thing that happens as well as the kind of,
functional desirable parts of design.
It's just part design as a process, as a way of thinking
and that's inherent in every brief
that you tackle as a designer.
Could be lighting, it could be a table,
it could be carpeting, it could be your iPhone,
it could be anything, it could just be the way
that we approach design and how that design
fits into the economy in a systemic way.
By not buying objects themselves
but only their use, will we achieve a world without waste?
There will be still be waste in the future.
But the future we can and I believe must dream of
is a future where the only remaining waste
can be turned into resources.
By wasting nothing,
designing biomaterials and building objects
to last indefinitely,
in 2050 zero waste will be more than a concept.
It will be a way of life.
(dramatic music)